
* A Project Gutenberg Canada Ebook *

This ebook is made available at no cost and with very few
restrictions. These restrictions apply only if (1) you make
a change in the ebook (other than alteration for different
display devices), or (2) you are making commercial use of
the ebook. If either of these conditions applies, please
check gutenberg.ca/links/licence.html before proceeding.

This work is in the Canadian public domain, but may be
under copyright in some countries. If you live outside Canada,
check your country's copyright laws. IF THE BOOK IS UNDER
COPYRIGHT IN YOUR COUNTRY, DO NOT DOWNLOAD
OR REDISTRIBUTE THIS FILE.

Title: Charles I and Cromwell. An Essay.
Author: Young, George Malcolm (1882-1959)
Date of first publication: 1950 [second edition];
   1935 [first edition]
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954
Date first posted: 6 September 2011
Date last updated: 6 September 2011
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #848

This ebook was produced by:
Barbara Watson, Ross Cooling, Mark Akrigg
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net






  CHARLES I AND CROMWELL




  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

    *    *    *    *    *

  _Uniform with this volume_

  GIBBON
  DAYLIGHT AND CHAMPAIGN
  TODAY AND YESTERDAY
  LAST ESSAYS

    *    *    *    *    *

  STANLEY BALDWIN: A BIOGRAPHY
  (_Rupert Hart-Davis_)

    *    *    *    *    *

  VICTORIAN ENGLAND: PORTRAIT OF AN AGE
  (_Oxford University Press_)

    *    *    *    *    *

  THE GOVERNMENT OF BRITAIN
  (_Collins_)




  CHARLES I AND CROMWELL
  _AN ESSAY_

  BY
  G. M. YOUNG



  RUPERT HART-DAVIS: LONDON




  _First published_ 1935
  _This edition published_ 1950
  _Reprinted_ 1954



  Printed in Great Britain by Richard Clay and Company, Ltd., Bungay,
  Suffolk.




  INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW EDITION


I had hoped at one time to write a companion piece to _Charles I and
Cromwell_, which was to have been called _Charles I and Pym_. Every
great institution, it has been said, follows the direction imparted to
it by one hand, and it seemed to me that in creating for himself the
part of Leader, Pym set Parliament on a course which without him it
might never have taken. No doubt we can see foreshadowings of the part
in earlier Parliaments, but it is not till 1640 that we are aware of a
conscious need consciously met.

    Among the Athenians there was a man who had lately come into the
    front rank. His name was Themistocles.

So quietly, and one might say, so innocently, does Herodotus bring his
greatest character on to the stage. With hardly more noise does Pym make
his entrance in the page of Clarendon.

    While men gazed upon each other looking who should begin (much
    the greatest part having never before sat in Parliament), Mr.
    Pym, a man of good reputation, but much better known afterwards,
    who had been as long in those assemblies as any man then living,
    brake the ice.

It is April 1640, and of the members there assembled in Westminster, not
one, we may be sure, in his angriest fancy, had for a moment dreamed
that the debate then opened might issue in war. Yet war came. On August
22, 1642, the King raised his standard at Nottingham. What had happened
in the meantime?

Or, to put it another way--what had those who drew the sword really in
mind? A question to which both sides, with equal assurance and for the
most part with equal sincerity, would have given the same reply. They
were in arms to maintain the Fundamental Laws of England against a
usurped and arbitrary power. And, pressed to say what those fundamental
laws were, neither party could have given an answer which to us would
seem historically valid. There were no Fundamental Laws--only such
general ideas of government as might be collected from Plantagenet
statutes and Tudor practice: case law, we might say, in abundance, but
no jurisprudence.

Take, for instance, Ship money, which was in the minds of everybody who
came up to Westminster that April. What fundamental law did that levy
violate? Suppose a pinnace had come flying into Plymouth harbour with
the tidings

  Spanish ships of war at sea
  We have sighted fifty-three,

then, beyond a doubt, the danger to the realm would have authorized the
King in Council to call on the seaports for men and shipping, or money
if no ships were to be had. And the inland shires and boroughs? Not so
clear, though some black-letter sage could have pointed out that in
Domesday Book, Malmesbury was charged with 20 shillings to feed the
King's sailors, and Malmesbury is far enough inland. But suppose the
message was: 'there is much activity in the Spanish dockyards and talk
of a descent on Ireland next summer.' Then, the danger not being
imminent, the King must lay the matter before his other Council, namely
Parliament, and ask the Commons to sustain, by means of a subsidy, his
endeavours to keep the realm in safety.

That, I think, is sound law. But in the operation it supposes that the
two parties, the King-in-Council and the King-in-Parliament, are in
harmony, each respecting the rights of the other, and each acknowledging
its own limitations. Parliament cannot set fleets and armies in
motion--only the King can do that. And rightly, because only the
King--that is the Privy Council--knows enough to give the necessary
orders. On the other side, the King cannot pay the shipwrights and
sailors out of his personal income. He must ask Parliament to find the
wherewithal: rightly again, because only Parliament knows where the
money is and how it can best be collected. All that had been settled, or
seemed to have been settled, in the Middle Ages--_de tallagio non
concedendo_ and the rest--when wool was the chief jewel of the kingdom,
and only the wool-merchants knew how to discount a bill on Florence or
Bruges, and who, in the long run, would have to pay the tax. When
judgment was given for the Crown in the case of Hampden, it was plain
that the harmony was lost; and that the country was both angry and
alarmed. If Ship money, why not Army money? If a shilling on my field,
why not a pound? And that was what Strafford never understood.

Elizabeth, in like circumstances, would have staged one of her motherly
appearances--you know how careful I am in the management of the revenue
and that I would not ask for a subsidy unless the country really needed
it. I am most truly grateful to you for calling my attention to certain
abuses which have crept in, and the offenders shall be smartly punished.
As for Ship money, I see you don't like it, and we won't talk of rights.
So come to the Palace and kiss my hand, and then go back to the country
and take care of my poor people. But you will vote that subsidy, won't
you?

But that was not Charles's way. He would go on arguing when there was no
more to be said: and he would sell what he ought to have given. So this
April. The Exchequer calculated that twelve subsidies, spread over three
years, would see the country through its difficulties, without recourse
to Ship money. The figure, at first hearing, was formidable: on
reflection it seemed no great matter. But, beyond all question, the
Commons had the right to debate the amount and the mode of assessment
and collection: and it must have been fairly clear to any man of sense,
that once launched on this discussion the Commons would certainly raise
the question of Ship money, which was still being capriciously
collected, and sulkily paid. And Charles thrust it into the faces of the
Commons. He insisted that he had a right to Ship money. True, he
offered to sell it--the price being that the Commons should pass his
subsidies without debate. And as there was no likelihood of the Commons
coming into this bargain, Parliament was dissolved. _And men had much of
the misery in view that shortly came to pass._ The dissolution of that
Parliament was in fact the first blow struck in the Civil War.

    *    *    *    *    *

The members went home to their shires, gloomy and anxious. But there is
one group we should like to follow, to Broughton near Banbury, where
Lord Saye and Sele kept such state as his narrow means allowed: a man of
whom it might be said that he would hold a more conspicuous place in
history if he had not had the misfortune to be a peer. Not that he
regarded it as a misfortune, because he seems to have believed in peers
as Saint Simon believed in dukes, or Sir Vavasour Firebrace in baronets.
Indeed if he had had his way, New England would have started life under
a government of Lords selected by himself. Disappointed there, he set
himself to develop Old Providence Island, under a less aristocratic
regime, with a Board of Governors which included among other Puritan
notables John Pym, Treasurer to the Company. Their offices were in
Gray's Inn Lane, and there, so the Oxford gossip ran, the notions
canvassed at Broughton were put into Parliamentary shape.

'Don't allow any private gatherings before Parliament or during
Parliament. That is where the mischief is hatched.' Strafford knew what
it was to be a leader without a party, and therefore what a leader with
a party might do. And it is in those private meetings that parties take
shape, that men get to know each others' leanings and aptitudes, and so
discover what support they can rely on when the time for action comes.
Gossip apart, we might be certain that in that summer of 1640 someone
was at work to make sure that when Parliament met (as meet it must quite
soon) the parts would be assigned, the procedure agreed, the objective
fixed, the approaches planned. The proof is in the sequel. The members
who came up in November, to take their seats in what was to be known as
the Long Parliament, found a party there, and, if not yet a leader, a
group, exercising, though not in office, the Parliamentary functions of
a Government--to frame a programme, and get it through.

It is one of the commonest experiences in history that a problem which
to one generation is insoluble, to the next is perfectly simple. Ideas
have to be invented no less than machines. We, with the advantage of a
backward view, can see that, the problem being how to keep Council and
Parliament in harmony, the solution is that the Councillors, the
Ministers of the Crown, should, in effect, be appointed by the party
which has the majority in the House of Commons; and right from the
beginning of the Long Parliament we are conscious that crude projections
of this solution are in the air. Rather more than projections, because
at one moment it seems as if, those Councillors being removed who did
not enjoy the confidence of Parliament--Laud and Strafford in the Tower,
Finch and Noy in exile--a group who did would succeed to their places
and authority, with the Earl of Bedford Lord Treasurer, Pym Chancellor
of the Exchequer and Leader of the Commons. One of the most curious
speculations in our history is--how would things have gone if that grave
and upright peer had lived? He was in the prime of life, and in every
way a sound man: a Churchman who was liked by the Nonconformists, a Peer
who was trusted by the Commons, a man of affairs, a patron of the arts,
with an excellent Parliamentary record. He was admitted to the Privy
Council on February 3, 1641, but he would not assume office until he had
worked out his plans for restoring the national finances. Early in May
he was taken suddenly ill. From Bedford House he could hear the roar of
the London mob calling for blood, and he died on the morning of that
Sunday which Charles was to remember on the scaffold, the Sunday when he
consented to Strafford's death.

    *    *    *    *    *

Such a call means that fear is at work in the multitude, and Pym, with
his Army plots and Popish plots, was a master of alarms. Of what, then,
were men most afraid in those months? I think the answer is two-fold.
First, there was the fear that the King might use force against
Parliament: Parliament which was the only defence against arbitrary
inroads on the rights of property. Here the country gentlemen and their
yeomen, the merchants of London and Bristol and their 'prentices, are at
one--another foreshadowing, because from here we can see in the distance
the alliance of the Whig party and the City. Triennial Parliaments,
abolition of Ship money, of Star Chamber and High Commission, all the
popular legislation of those early months when the Long Parliament was
still a united body, meant nothing so long as the King had an army and
was prepared to use it.

The other was the fear of Rome, of Jesuits, of the northward surge of
the Counter-Reformation. And the two things are so intricately connected
that no one clue will serve us in the labyrinth of controversy: we have
constantly to be dropping one and groping for another. But if there is a
point where, so to say, they can be knotted together it is--Episcopacy.

Where would a wise man have taken his stand in that debate? It is
extraordinarily difficult to think one's way into a world where, for
instance, a man (and one of the most brilliant men of his generation,
young Vane) might abstain from the Communion for two years because he
could not get a clergyman to administer it to him standing: while the
Dean of Worcester could be charged with Popish leanings because he made
the choirboys come in two by two instead of rushing into the chancel in
a bunch. With Popish leanings--as who might say--with bourgeois
ideology. Indeed, if we made a spectrum of opinion--Rome, the Arminian
Anglican, the Calvinist Anglican, the Presbyterian, and the Anabaptist,
we might match it with another more familiar--the Fascist, the
Conservative, the Liberal, the Socialist, and the Communist. It is not a
comparison to be forced, but it is one usefully to be kept in mind.

In matters of religion Pym was Elizabethan. He upheld the penal
legislation against Catholics on Elizabethan grounds. They were not to
be punished for believing as they did, but they were to be prevented
from doing the things to which their beliefs inclined
them--assassination plots, gunpowder treason, Irish rebellions. And he
would, I think, have concurred in Hooker's defence of the Establishment.
Our order, the episcopal order, Hooker maintained, is certainly very
ancient, and there is nothing in it contrary to natural reason or the
revealed will of God. Also it is the legal order, and it perfectly fits
the social and political structure of the realm. You aver that your
order, the presbyterian order, was instituted by Christ. But you have
failed to prove it, and in practice you will find that it does not fit
our national fabric. I have nothing to say against Geneva or Scotland.
But Scotland and Geneva are not England. 'By the goodness of Almighty
God, and his servant Elizabeth, we are.'

    *    *    *    *    *

Unluckily, the new Anglicanism, traditional, sacramental, ritualist,
fitted the Stuart conception of monarchy all too well. This is where our
clues approach each other. The _Jus Divinum_ claimed for the Bishops was
only too like the Reserve of Power, the prerogative claimed for the
King. When Parliament was not sitting, neither was controllable. When it
was, the Bishops, Crown nominees, might on a division sway the balance
in the Lords. And yet if there was a Fundamental Law in England, it was
that the church is governed by Bishops and that all Bishops are Lords of
Parliament. It was possible to suppose, or at least to imagine, that
there had been a Plantagenet Constitution under which Parliament met
regularly to redress grievances, impeach ministers, make laws and vote
supplies: and that this present Parliament was only exercising a
long-intermitted authority: that it was engaged upon a conservative
reformation, bringing the pristine beauty of the old constitution into
light, its wisdom into operation. All that we might have heard a hundred
times from all quarters of the House. But it was impossible to pretend
that removing Bishops from their House--still more abolishing the
Episcopal order--was anything but a revolution. If the Bishops, why not
the Barons, one member asked, and if the Barons, why not all the others?
Here is the crack which will widen till it splits the Commons, leaving
Pym the leader not of the House, but of the Puritan Party. Materially,
the story is immensely complicated by the affairs of Scotland and the
affairs of Ireland, by the Covenant on one side and the Catholic
rebellion on the other. But the formal truth emerging is that there is
no room in the same constitution for a Sovereign choosing his own
Council and a Leader commanding a majority in the House of Commons.

And that majority was visibly shrinking, was losing its popularity and
its prestige. After all, someone must govern the country, someone must
give orders, someone must raise money to meet the expenditure of the
state. Certainly there is danger from Rome--look at Ireland. But there
is danger from Geneva too--look at Scotland. That the Bishops have
behaved very foolishly, we all admit. But will Presbyteries be any
wiser, any less troublesome? Will extempore prayer, and sermons three
hours long, do more for the spiritual welfare of the people than the
ancient liturgy, Sunday by Sunday repeated in the cherished form? And
will the rights of property be any more secure if taxes are to be
levied by Parliamentary ordinance? The King may use force against the
Houses. Suppose Pym and his waning party use force against the
King--against his friends, against the Church? And there is a force
willing enough to be employed, and paid, in such a cause--the Scottish
Army. Treason no doubt it would be to use them--in Strafford's case the
Judges had advised that to quarter troops on the King's subjects, if
unwilling, would be tantamount to levying war on the King's Majesty, and
the Scottish army was as much a foreign force as those Danes and
Frenchmen whom the Queen was supposed to be enlisting. The tide was
turning, Charles had only to wait, and in the meantime form such a
Council as Parliament must respect; not (Hyde and Falkland would have
advised) a showy Council of great Lords, selected for their conformity
with the King's notions, with an Inner Cabinet doing all the work, but a
real representative Council where divers views could be debated.

All which seems, in retrospect, quite possible, and, though in a
different form from what we actually achieved, would have realized the
harmony between Council and Parliament which all sober minds desired to
see. That such a settlement would have been welcomed by the country the
voting on the Grand Remonstrance shows: a majority of no more than
eleven made it in substance a vote of No Confidence in Pym. The reformed
constitution would have been, in fact, the Elizabethan constitution
brought up to date, by a limitation of the prerogative on one side, and
an abatement on the other of the Puritan demands in matters of religion.
Things were as hopeful in December 1641 as they were in the summer of
1647. But both times the fair prospect ended in storm, and disaster for
the King: and both times for the same reason. All he had to do was to
show that he could be trusted. And he made it plain that he could not.
Any student in the Temple could have told him that the King cannot
arrest for treason, or indeed for anything else. Any man who knew his
London could have told him that if he did lodge the Five Members in the
Tower, they would be delivered by the Train bands supported by an
uproarious force of shopboys. If he had asked the Five, or Six with Lord
Kimbolton, to dinner, shown them his pictures, and treated them to a
consort of chamber music, they might have acknowledged on the way back
to their lodgings that the King had won the game. Unless . . . And the
attempt on the Five Members was so perfectly calculated to ruin the King
and rescue the party, that it is impossible to keep out of one's mind
the suspicion that it was a laid and baited trap. Did Pym and his
fellows really mean to impeach the Queen? I doubt it. But that someone
whispered to Charles that they meant to impeach the Queen is not beyond
reckoning. Lady Carlisle was certainly at Court that day, and Lady
Carlisle was Pym's dear friend. King Pym had won. After that there was
nothing for King Charles but abject surrender--or war.

  G. M. Y.

1950.




  PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION


I wrote this essay partly to lay a ghost in my own mind, and partly as
an exercise in form. With the departure of the King from Oxford in 1646,
we enter a labyrinth from which, three years later, we emerge on to the
scaffold at Whitehall, and when we endeavour to recount our steps and
recall the turnings, we are constantly baffled by some interruption of
the clue, to extricate which is my one object in this book.

In this perplexing story there are two decisive moments between which, I
think, a very close psychological nexus must have existed, even if it
can no longer be with any certainty traced. One is the collapse of the
Hampton Court negotiations in 1647. The other is Ireton's violent
revulsion from the King. The Trial follows logically--not inevitably,
because Cromwell and even Fairfax might have intervened to prevent
it--from Pride's Purge, and Pride's Purge from Ireton's manifesto, the
Remonstrance of the Army. But this carries us no farther than October
1648, and, still moving backwards, we can say that to October 1647
almost anything might have happened. Political bets were sometimes made
in Presbyterian London, and a sportsman might safely have laid, any time
in those twelve months, a hundred to one against the King's execution,
and ten to one against even his deposition. When we go behind September
1647, the odds lengthen out of all calculation. The King personally, the
Monarchy politically, were as safe in the summer of 1647 as Queen
Victoria and her Monarchy in the summer of 1847. All the signs pointed
to a brilliant and popular restoration of the King.

Yet, as we know, the prospect was dashed. Between July and October
something happened. Carlyle's treatment of the period is perfunctory.
Gardiner had the advantage of knowing the Clarke papers, but he was at
the disadvantage, perhaps unperceived by himself, of always picturing
Cromwell as a Good Man, like Mr. Gladstone, and Charles as a Bad Man,
like Mr. Disraeli. Mid-Victorian Liberalism is not a satisfactory
instrument by which to measure the convulsions of the seventeenth
century, and the French publicist who wrote in 1911 of Mr. Lloyd
George, _type du Puritanisme anglais_, flashed a signal which lets much
light into dark corners. The shifting of the political centre of gravity
in the nineteenth century from the upper to the middle classes, and from
the middle classes to the working classes, offers an instructive analogy
to the much swifter process of the Civil War, if for the three classes
we substitute the Crown, the Presbyterian gentry, and the Saints. In its
turn, the rise of the Saints, the Independents of the Army, was leading
in 1646 and 1647, as post-Gladstonian Liberalism did lead, to democracy,
and the apprehension, at least, of subversion 'not of _the_ Government
but of government'. Manhood Suffrage and the March on London sounded as
ominous in 1647 as the Unauthorized Programme in 1885 and the General
Strike in 1926. In those critical months, between July and October, the
line of development became clear, and Cromwell, whose profound anxiety
is manifest in the reports of the Putney debates, set himself to arrest
the Liberalism of the Independents at the point where it was just about
to turn into the Democracy of the Levellers, to keep it satisfied, and
to take the edge off its more dangerous appetites.

Did this necessarily involve the sacrifice of the Monarchy or the King?
Cromwell, it is plain, did not think so: as late as October 1648 he was
prepared for a Restoration. Ireton's mind was swifter, and it was
spurred by the exasperation of the honest man who is conscious of his
own sincerity and has been deceived, of the intellectual man whose plans
have been spoilt, and who will not acknowledge to himself that the fault
was in the plans. His device for restoring the Monarchy in 1647 is a
masterpiece of political construction, but without any political appeal
for either of the parties to whom it was addressed. It would have made
Charles a powerful sovereign of a new kind, and Parliament not only the
most august but the most efficient Council in Christendom. Charles had
no idea of being a new sort of King, and Parliament had to go through a
long process of tuition and experience before it learnt to govern. The
Remonstrance of 1648 was the fruit of Ireton's bitter resentment when
the Heads of Proposals were set aside by Parliament, and the vindictive
rage that followed the discovery that the King had never taken the
Proposals, or their author, seriously. He saw red and went red.

It is only by fixing our minds on the fact that in July 1647 the Army
leaders, Parliament and the City of London, all desired the restoration
of the King on terms, and that nine tenths of the good people of England
desired it too, that we can estimate the force and the peculiar
character of the King's resistance on one side, and, on the other, of
the Anabaptist resolution which Cromwell and Ireton made their own. The
King did not want terms, and the Anabaptists did not want a King. I use
the word Anabaptist as a contemporary would have used it, to cover the
whole of that mingled, explosive mass, which, always running no doubt in
secret veins under the compact surface of medieval society, gathered and
swelled upwards through the fissures made by the great convulsion of the
sixteenth century. To a foreign observer, Cromwell is a simpler figure
than he is to us: he is the last and greatest of the Anabaptists, and
the execution of King Charles in 1649 is the culmination and termination
of a train of explosions first fired by John of Leyden in 1533. After
that there was nothing for it but to go back and start all over again,
and we had to go back farther than we need have gone. The Restoration of
1660 was, broadly speaking, a Clarendon restoration, which had to be
undone and redone in 1688. The frustrated Restoration of 1647, an Ireton
restoration, would have jumped the interim. And, in history, as
Cromwell once pointed out, you can't jump.

At least Charles could not, and it is the King's character, his
intellectual make-up much more than his moral disposition, that brings
the threads together. If he could have made the deeper part of his mind
move, and kept the surface part quiet, all would have been well. But his
intellect was all eddy and no tide. In many ways his dealings with
Parliament and the Army remind me of his grandmother's dealings with
Elizabeth, just as Cromwell's dizzying changes of front, and the
nerve-storms which accompany them, often recall the great Queen whose
subject he was proud to have been born, whose true successor he felt,
and showed, himself to be. For what is Cromwell, once released from the
servitudes, falsities and austerities of party, but a rustic Tudor
gentleman, born out of due time, of the stock of Hunsdon and Henry
Sidney, rejoicing in hawk and hound, pictures and music, Scotland
subjugated, Ireland prostrate, and England, the awe of the Western
world, adorned and defended with stout yeomen, honourable magistrates,
learned ministers, flourishing universities, invincible fleets? Aubrey
once went to see the great man dine in state at Hampton Court. He was
seated between a Presbyterian and a Catholic Lord, Fitzwilliam of
Lifford, who founded the fortunes of his family by marrying a City
widow, and Arundell of Wardour, who bred the hounds from which the Quorn
pack is descended. Fitzwilliam had been turned out of Parliament by the
soldiers: Arundell had destroyed his own castle that it might not be a
fortress for rebels. But all that was long ago. The Lord Protector
spoke. 'I have been in all the counties of England,' he said, 'and I
think the husbandry of Devonshire is the best.'

In Charles, as before in Mary and again in his son James, we are aware
of the same professional detachment from the feelings and interests of
their subjects, the same gap between the serene central conviction of
their royalty and the surface workings, which in James are mostly
temper, in Mary mostly conspiracies to murder. Of Charles, his
nineteenth-century historian has observed that he was always looking
back to the Monarchy of Elizabeth instead of forward to the Monarchy of
Victoria. Really, the poor gentleman was not called upon to attempt any
such extravagant feat of imagination. He was only asked to do what
Elizabeth had done, when she recalled the Monopolies, to realize that
the other side were serious and must be taken seriously. On the evening
of the first day in Westminster Hall the King asked one of his gentlemen
who the judges were. Members of Parliament, he was told, officers, City
men. 'I looked at them carefully,' the King replied, 'but there were not
above eight whose faces I knew.' There was one he knew very well, the
dark, sunken-eyed face of the man who would have made him once more a
great king. But there is no reason to suppose that Charles ever
regretted that he had declined the offer, or even realized that it had
been made. 'A subject and a sovereign are clean different things.'[1]

[Footnote 1: Henry Beauclerk and his officials were a far abler team
than Charles and his Ministers, but they turned the screw too tight, and
the result was the anarchy under Stephen. If Cromwell had died in 1648
and left things to Fairfax, the parallel would have been very close.
Henry II and Charles II succeeded because the old opposition, baronial
or presbyterian, was willing to make the new Government work. In bad
hands, James or John, the compromise breaks down--hence 1688 and 1215.
The sequence: compression--fracture along the line of
weakness--anarchy--reconstruction, seems to be one of the major rhythms
of history. The world as a whole is now [1935] passing through the phase
of compression in the shape of demagogic Csarism. Oswald Spengler, who
prophesied it in 1920, observed at the same time: 'Foreigners think
Parliamentarismus a form of government. It is nothing of the kind. It is
an English game, like cricket, which only English people can play.'
_Esto perpetua._]




  I


On a spring morning of 1646, old Sir Jacob Astley, marching from
Worcestershire to Oxford, was brought to battle at Stow-on-the-Wold. A
few hours later he was sitting on a drum, talking cheerily to the
victors. 'Well, boys,' he said, 'you have done your work and may go home
and play--unless you will fall out with one another.' The Civil War was
over, but the real difficulties were just beginning.

They were not insuperable. There was a universal desire for peace and
little desire for vengeance. Nothing had been done on either side that
could not be forgiven. The war had been fought for the most part with
mutual chivalry and good feeling, often with exemplary politeness, and
there cannot, I feel sure, be any other instance in history of the
victors in a four years' conflict applying to the Courts for an
injunction to stop the vanquished from making unkind remarks about them.
Mrs. Carter said that the Parliamentary garrison of Warminster had been
stealing linen. The garrison, deeply hurt by a charge which, 'we
conceive, refflecks not so much uppon us as uppon the High Court of
Parliament', could only petition the Justices of the Peace to do
something about it, in the intervals of reducing redundant alehouses,
abating unlawful weirs, and reproving Miss Gibbs for sticking a pin in
Miss Courtley, in time of Divine Service, in Imber Parish Church.

This is not the atmosphere in which revolutions are conceived. It had
indeed passed through some minds that the best course would be to depose
King Charles, and start afresh with one of his sons--the little Duke of
Gloucester for choice--and a trusty peer as Regent. But even this seemed
more drastic a measure than circumstances warranted. Hopelessly beaten
in the field, the King had recovered the initiative in Council. It was
his move.

The chief pieces on the other side of the board were: the City of
London, rich, well-armed, and devoted to the Parliament; the Lords and
Commons at Westminster (thirty peers still sat there); their army under
Fairfax and Cromwell; and the Scots. A Tudor would have seen in an
instant the weak place in this combination. Elizabeth--if we can
imagine Elizabeth ever getting herself into such a tangle--would have
ridden straight for the Army, played a dazzling succession of parts,
from the Puritan maiden in distress to the Queen among her loving
people, flirted with the inarticulate Fairfax, made audacious jokes
about our Brethren in Christ and their precious Covenant, and in a few
weeks would have had Lords, Commons and City weeping at her feet, and
the Scots flying for their lives.

But the note--'a King, and a King of England, too'--which Elizabeth and
her father knew so well how to strike, was not within the Stuart
compass. The egoism of the race, which brought Mary to Fotheringay and
was to send James II to St. Germain, had been qualified in James I by an
earthy, vulgar shrewdness. He was not a good King, but he was a very
clever, amusing Scotsman. Charles was neither vulgar, nor earthy, nor
amusing, nor clever, and in both his kingdoms he was always something of
an alien. A solitary child, short, bandy, with a slight stammer, he had
formed himself by reading and exercise--by conscious admiration of his
brilliant Elizabethan brother, and conscious reaction, perhaps, from his
drunken mother and exuberant father--into the grave, dignified,
self-controlled young King of 1625. To the end of his life his health
and dignity never failed him, his self-control rarely. Two people only
ever got past these outworks and lodged themselves in his affections. To
Buckingham he yielded as a repressed self-centred boy will often yield
to an elder, radiant with adventure, success and irresponsibility. To
Mary, when Buckingham had gone, he gave his heart. And Mary (he would
never call her Henrietta), of all those who came near him, was perhaps
the one least able to understand or reach the central nerve of his
intricate and contradictory conscience, his devotion to the Church of
England.

He was not only a King, he was an Anglican King. Every man who fought on
his side was fighting for the Elizabethan Settlement, for a Catholic
hierarchy dependent on the Crown, and a theology and liturgy to which,
read together, no man from the day of their formulation to this has ever
been able to attach a convincing label. Protestant is the best, because
it means least.[2] But a true instinct on both sides made the Prayer
Book the test. The Church of England is the church which uses the Prayer
Book, and Elizabeth never meant it to bear any other mark. All through
the bad years, with _Eikon Basilike_ and Martin Parker's songs, it was
the Prayer Book that kept up the morale of the subjugated Royalists.
'The people dote on it', one observer wrote in 1659; when Ussher died,
the Lord Protector gave him such a funeral as befitted a Prince of the
Church, and the Anglican service was read over the grave; and Lady Mary
Cromwell herself--or so it was said--having been married with such
ceremonies as pious Independents allowed, insisted on being privately
remarried by Prayer Book rites.

In his refusal to abandon the Church of Elizabeth, therefore, Charles
was at one with his people and with the future: in 1660 the King, the
Bishops, and the Prayer Book all came back together, and Presbytery,
after imparting to the sister kingdom the blessings of the Westminster
Confession and the Larger and Shorter Catechisms, faded into
Unitarianism. To account for its success in Scotland and its complete
failure in England it is not necessary to sound the imaginary depths of
national psychology. In England there was historically no need for it,
spiritually no room for it. Scotland, after its brief Renaissance glow,
shattered by disaster in the field and the turbulence of long
minorities, was remade by its ministers, the bearers of a new revelation
which imported a new social order. In England there was nothing to
re-make. Here, the transition from the Middle Ages had been conducted by
a strong crown operating on a compact and law-abiding society, and after
a few violent lurches to left and right the Church was steadied down
into the official channel, with scientific articles, a traditional
liturgy, and a hierarchy which might with equal truth be regarded as an
inheritance from Apostolic times or a branch of the Civil Service. For
the multitude, whose religion is a matter of use and wont, the
Elizabethan Church was enough. It was enough for those whose religion
was also a matter of order, authority, and history. But it was not
stimulating to the inert; it was not satisfying to the impatient; and in
an age profoundly, often hysterically, preoccupied with the Unseen, with
ghosts and devils and the fires of hell, it furnished no equivalent for
the Catholic discipline of devotion and observance, or the Puritan
discipline of prayer and preaching, the one to protect, the other to
fortify the soul, in its warfare with the powers of darkness. The one
bad mistake Elizabeth ever made was in not providing the Church with
preachers. The craving, active or passive, for sermons must be taken as
a psychological datum of the age, and as there were few parsons
competent to preach the true Church doctrine, the flock turned gladly to
those who preached something different, not because it was different,
but because it was preached.

But Presbytery was, in England, only an alternative form of Church
government. It was not, like Anabaptism and Independency, a new source
of spiritual power to the believer, and it was quite as hard as
Episcopacy, perhaps rather harder, on the unauthorized expounder, on the
man with a private revelation, on the tinker, tailor, ploughboy, sailor,
convinced of sin and yearning to impart the story of his redemption.
Even as an alternative, it was handicapped by the historic appeal of the
Elizabethan Church, and its perfect adaptation to the social structure
of the country. If the Borough had been dominant over the Manor,
Presbytery might have won. But the day of the great towns was far ahead
and, when it came, Evangelicalism, Anglican or Methodist, was in
occupation of the ground.

In the nature of things, therefore, Presbytery could be no more than an
episode in our history, a swerve which sooner or later was bound to
rejoin the main-road of an Established episcopal church surrounded by
tolerated sects. Yet good reasons can be given why this swerve should
have set in when it did. In Elizabethan days, Presbytery--against
Prelacy--was the creed of the young, the ardent, the self-sufficient. In
James's time, when England had been hardened by war and the Jesuits into
a vigilant anti-Papalism, Presbytery was the most emphatic repudiation
of Rome, from which the Anglican system was a reluctant, uncompleted
departure, retaining, too, far more than the independent clergyman or
layman cared for of the coercive power of the old Catholic Church. The
bishop, with the Crown and the Court of High Commission behind him,
could make things very uncomfortable for a non-conforming parson and for
laymen who declined the ministrations of a more orthodox pastor.
Technically, he could still condemn a heretic to the stake, and require
the sheriff to execute the sentence. Actually, the power was never
exercised after 1614; but it may be questioned whether the occasional
burning of some outrageous heretic would not have done the Church less
harm than the perpetual worrying of peaceful congregations and earnest
ministers over the minuti of ceremony and doctrine; and an active
archdeacon, exercising a kind of petty police jurisdiction over Drunks,
Incontinents and Irregular Churchgoers, could be as vexatious to the
easy-living layman as the Bishop's Court to the independent-minded
minister.

In theology, the two sides were wheeling into reverse positions: the
Anglicanism of 1640 was a much more modern creed than its Puritan
alternative; but there was no statesmanship to make the appeal of the
Church effective. The bishops were the trouble. Materially, as a
logician would have put it, they were usually right: formally, they were
nearly always wrong. Mr. Sherfield ought not to have poked an
unauthorized stick through the stained glass window in St. Edmund's,
Salisbury. But it was monstrous to fine him 500 for doing it. The
churchwardens ought not to have provided vintage wine for masters and
mistresses, and _vin ordinaire_ for servants, at the Holy Communion. But
Laud gained no more goodwill by docking the middle classes of their
privileges than by rebuking the upper classes for their adulteries. To
pull down the tabernacles where Dutch navvies in the fens met to sing
Dutch hymns was simply foolish; and if the people of Lancashire wanted
to spend their Sundays like circumcised Jews, the only sensible course
was to leave them alone until they were tired of it. Nor, while loyal
churchmen were mourning over the unwisdom of their rulers, could it
escape the calculations of City men and their friends in Parliament
that, as the Tudor nobility had been financed by the plunder of the
monasteries, so a new aristocracy might be raised on the proceeds of the
Bishops' Lands. In a sense, perhaps the deepest sense of all, the Civil
War was, like the unlucky Scottish campaign of 1639, _Bellum
Episcopale_.

Now it was over, and the victors were under contract to replace the
episcopal by the presbyterian system throughout the land--which did not,
in fact, in the least desire it. This was the price of Scottish
assistance in the dark days of 1643 when Hampden had fallen, the
Fairfaxes had been defeated in the north, and the King's army of the
west was forging along, by Bath and Devizes, to join hands with the
Royalists of Kent and encircle London from the south. But there was an
immense difference between the political state-regulated Presbytery of
English politicians and the militant dogma in defence of which the
Scots had risen against the King. They had asked for an undertaking that
the Church of England should be reformed according to the example of the
Best Reformed Churches, meaning particularly their own; and the English
negotiators, by introducing a pious and subtle reference to God's Holy
Word as well, had left themselves free to remodel the Church very much
as they liked.

The bishops were removed; the Prayer Book was more or less effectively
superseded by the Directory for Public Worship; the churchwardens
dutifully spent ninepence on 'a Parliamentary ordinance for the
establishment of a Presbytryall Government': as they might have bought a
new shovel or bell-rope, and there left it. And where it did establish
itself--among the middle classes of the City, for example--it was
subject to legal restrictions of the kind most abhorrent to the
Presbyterian conscience. To the pure Genevan model two things are
essential: the free election of elders, and the uncontrolled right of
the ministers and elders to exclude any member of the congregation from
communion. In Presbyterian London, the elections were regulated by a
Parliamentary Board, and the aggrieved communicant was given an appeal
to Parliament itself. The Best Reformed Churches would not have
recognized themselves. In a society so coherent and socially so mature
as that of England there was no standing-ground for a new theocracy with
ten thousand church courts thrust in upon the ancient, popular, and
efficient machinery of Petty Sessions and Quarter Sessions. Elizabeth
had settled that.[3]

Yet to an observer from outside, Presbytery in 1646 must have seemed
very formidable. It had, apart from the Scots, an army of its own, the
City militia, and those who had been at Newbury could tell how London
shopboys fight. It had the wealth of the City, the prestige of
Parliament on its side. The Queen was baffled. If Paris was worth a
mass, surely London was worth the letters C.R. at the top of the
Covenant. Her father would not have hesitated. Nor would her son. Why
should her husband? Henry of Navarre and Charles II were very astute
men: they would have taken the Covenant, if it suited them, as often as
they were asked, because they would have seen that, in England, there
was nothing in it. Charles I, for good and evil, had not that kind of
mind; he could realize as clearly as any Revolution Whig that there
might be two Established Churches in one island; and if he refused to
take the Covenant it was simply because he thought that Presbytery, an
unfortunate necessity in Scotland, was in England not only impolitic but
wrong.

    Note. It is perhaps worth recalling here that _The Whole Duty of
    Man_, which, for its vitality and diffusion, must be called our
    most successful attempt at an Ethical Code, was the product of a
    group of sequestered Anglican ministers, living in retirement
    under the Commonwealth.

[Footnote 2: The modern objection to this word is a fad, which only
shows that the party in the Church who persist in it do not know their
own history. In seventeenth-century English, _Protestant_ is currently
used in distinction not only to Papist, but to Puritan, Presbyterian,
and Sectarian. This use lingered in some parts of England down to the
nineteenth century, and is still, I believe, to be found in Ireland.]

[Footnote 3: Butler has put in the mouth of the Independent, Ralpho, the
fundamental English objection to Presbytery.

  Presbytery does but translate
  The Papacy to a free state:
  A Commonwealth of Popery:
  Where every village is a See
  As well as Rome, and must maintain
  A Tithe-Pig Metropolitan:
  Where every Presbyter and Deacon
  Commands the keys for cheese and bacon,
  And every hamlet's governd
  By His Holiness, the Church's Head.]




  II


As soon as the news of Astley's defeat reached him, the King wrote to
Parliament proposing to return to London. Simultaneously, he wrote to
the Scottish Commissioners, offering, if Parliament declined to receive
him, to join the Scottish army at Newark. Parliament did decline, and
the negotiations with the Scots went busily forward through the hands of
a young French diplomat. Really, there was no ground on which the two
could meet: vague phrases about his Majesty's just rights, and his
Majesty's desire to be instructed in the Presbyterian government, meant
nothing: and if Charles thought that he, or his agents, had committed
the Scottish leaders to anything, he was mistaken. The Scots, in fact,
were beginning to open their mouths rather wide. The King was slipping
into their hands: Parliament was bound by the Solemn League and
Covenant. They published their plans for the settlement of the Kingdom.
Parliament replied with some asperity that any settling would be done
by King, Lords, and Commons: in accordance, of course, with the Covenant
(and God's Holy Word), but any doubt arising as to the interpretation of
the Covenant (and the same Holy Word) would be determined, in the usual
way, by Parliament and the Courts of Law. That their meaning might be
perfectly clear, the Commons ordered the Scottish proposals to be
publicly burnt.

It was hardly possible to send up a plainer signal to the King that
definite proposals on his side would be welcome. The attitude of the
Army was even more encouraging. Apart from isolated country houses, only
two places still held out for the King, but the generous treatment of
Exeter, when it surrendered, was an indication of what he might expect
when Oxford opened her gates: there would be no trouble about the
Covenant from Fairfax and Cromwell. Everything, in fact, was being done
to make it easy for him to capitulate. He might still have joined the
Queen in France: it was one of the many projects that flashed through
his busy, impatient mind, and perhaps his wisest course would have been
to retire from the scene until the Scots and the English, the Army and
the City, the Presbyterians and the Independents, had argued one
another to a standstill, and then return bringing peace in his hands. He
preferred to go to Newark, and in the dark of an April night he rode
over Magdalen Bridge on the long journey that ended at Whitehall.

He had persuaded himself that the Scots were not really so keenly set on
Presbytery as they made out. It was the kind of mistake he was always
making--the old Stuart mistake: his grandmother never quite believed
that Englishmen might object to having their Queen murdered for her
benefit. When he found that his countrymen were every whit as obstinate
as he was, he propounded a compromise--legal establishment of
Presbytery, toleration for Anglicans, and a joint heresy-hunt against
everyone else. But the Scots, who had the gravest misgivings about
English Presbytery in its purest form, were not at all disposed to
countenance an Anglo-Presbyterian church, which would have lasted until
the next Parliament abolished it. In June they delivered their
ultimatum. It was what everyone except their unfortunate king might have
expected: Covenant or nothing.

Now was the moment for Parliament to strike in with an offer which the
King could at least consider. But though Parliament wanted peace they
did not know how to make peace, and the nineteen propositions which
arrived from Westminster at the end of July were no more conciliatory
than the Scottish ultimatum. First came the Covenant, to be taken by the
King and all his subjects. Then the 'utter abolishing and taking away'
of the Anglican hierarchy (including the choirboys). Then the
transference of fleet and militia, for the space of twenty years, from
the Crown to Parliament. Finally, a long and complicated series of
Branches and Qualifications involved the whole of the Royalist
aristocracy and gentry in penalties varying from one third to two thirds
of their estates. Parliament, in fact, believed that, the Scots having
declined to support him further, they had the King at their mercy. He
had only to abandon his Crown, his Church, and his friends, and he
might, for what it was worth, be King of England still.

The terms were so exorbitant that the King was bound to refuse: so
ungenerous that he would assuredly earn the goodwill of all reasonable
men by refusing. The King of England--a prisoner in a foreign camp,
forbidden to have his own chaplains, reduced to reading the Prayer Book
alone in his bedroom--was becoming that dangerously attractive figure,
the Injured Man; and it was against that background, in those weary,
wasted months at Newcastle that the lineaments of the Royal Martyr first
took shape. He answered with dignity that he could not accept the
Propositions until he understood their exact import, and to understand
them he must receive explanations. He proposed, therefore, to come to
London and there treat with Parliament in person. But a royal journey to
London in the cause of peace would have ended in a triumphal progress.
His offer was not even acknowledged, and for half a year he was left in
the Scottish camp weaving fresh combinations--his favourite, to which he
clung obstinately till the end, was the establishment of Presbytery for
three years, and an agreed settlement to follow--while the vital
combination was being arranged over his head. On January 30th 1647, the
Scottish army handed him over to the Parliamentary Commissioners, took
their money, and marched away. For one happy fortnight the King was on
the road again, through cheering crowds and clashing bells, from
Newcastle to Holdenby House in Northamptonshire.




  III


Everybody wanted peace--peace with guarantees, if possible, but in any
case peace. But in one part of the Kingdom there was no peace, and no
likelihood of peace, unless Ireland was allowed to go her way as an
independent Catholic state. And the only alternative was a fierce war,
and a reconquest from sea to sea.

On the day that Oxford surrendered, the main army of the
Parliament--Fairfax being General, and Cromwell Lieutenant-General with
command of the horse--numbered some 21,000 men. Of these, 12,600 were
intended for Ireland, leaving 8400 to be disposed at home. The idea was
to disband the foot, keep 2800 horse embodied and bring their number up
to 6600 by voluntary enlistment. Provided therefore that the men were
prepared to go to Ireland, the problem of demobilization had been neatly
solved. The home cavalry would absorb all the men who wanted to stay
with the colours: the rest would go back to their shops and farms.

The neatness of the solution was, however, marred by two practical
considerations. Before they went home, the men wanted their arrears.
Before they went to Ireland they wanted to be sure that they would be
properly paid and fed when they got there. And there were
rumours--well-grounded rumours--that Parliament meant to remove Fairfax
and Cromwell, and appoint their pet general, Skippon, to the Irish
command. For some time past good Presbyterians, Scots and English, had
been disquieted at the way the soldiers were talking in billets. The
army chaplains had gone back to their parishes; the prayers were now led
and the sermons preached by gifted majors and corporals with a message;
and the message was usually based on the pamphlets of John Lilburne.

Why has London, so rich in memorials of the deservedly forgotten, raised
no monument to the irrepressible cheek of this great-hearted, explosive,
and scurrilous Cockney? A list of the people he quarrelled with might
adorn the base and furnish a complete _Who's Who_ of Puritan England.
His family, we read, came from Thickley Puncherdon: it is the sort of
place they would come from. John, after serving his time with a London
clothier, started his career of universal opposition at the age of
twenty-two by helping to print and circulate unlicensed books. He was
whipped from the Fleet to Palace Yard, and in the pillory contrived to
distribute pamphlets among the crowd. At all times pamphlets sprang from
him like sparks from the anvil. At twenty-seven he had the singular
distinction of being the subject of debate in both Houses on the same
day, the Commons voting that the treatment he had received was bloody,
and the Lords calling him to the bar for disrespectful language used of
the King. In the war he was always being shot, plundered, and taken
prisoner, and he had more than the usual difficulty in collecting his
pay. Once he was sentenced to be hanged. In the intervals he wrote
pamphlets.

The return of peace opened a magnificent field for his favourite
activity. He went for the House of Commons (three pamphlets), the House
of Lords (eight pamphlets), the Lord Mayor, and the King. The Commons
sent him to prison for three months: the Lords for seven years. He
appealed to the Army, and the Army put the release of Lieutenant-Colonel
Lilburne in their list of demands to be made to Parliament. He was not
released, but it made no difference. Pamphlets spouted from the Tower
and were absorbed with open ears by the soldiers: 'Jonah's Cry from the
Whale's Belly', 'The Just Man in Bonds', 'The Pearl in the Dunghill'. He
was a great journalist, and he had two ideas. One was John Lilburne; the
other was Fair Play; and Fair Play, in the tangible form of so many
pounds, shillings, and pence, was what the Army wanted. But when once
the question is raised: 'Is Authority playing fair?' it is not far to
the more dangerous question: 'How did it come to be Authority?'

No one can read the political literature of these years without being
constantly struck by the similarity of Puritan and early nineteenth
century thought, and even expression. We shall notice hereafter a most
engaging resemblance between the remarks of Lord President Bradshaw and
Mr. Honeythunder on the subject of murder. The Lilburne tradition,
idealist and equalitarian, runs underground in the eighteenth century,
and rises to the surface in the Revolutionary years, with Godwin and
Shelley, Cartwright and Place, Carlile and Hone. But there is a parallel
tradition, religious and authoritarian, which also rises with the
increasing wealth of the commercial classes, and is the principal
affluent in the great stream of Respectability, and we may understand
what Parliament, what Ireton, what Cromwell felt about Lilburne by
recalling what the Whigs of 1830 thought of the Benthamites, what
Macaulay in 1840 thought of the Chartists, what John Bright thought of
Trade Unions.

Lilburne stands for the Radical refusal to acknowledge on the grounds of
tradition, habit or even convenience, any obstruction to the free flow
of natural justice, or the free exercise of natural rights, and this is
the note which, in divers settings, sounds in the Agreement of the
People, in the American Declaration of Independence, in Mill _On
Government_, in _Prometheus Unbound_, in the People's Charter. In
political terms, it meant, in the seventeenth century, a Sovereign
Representative elected by universal suffrage to deal with everything not
excluded as a natural right. To Lilburne and his readers there were five
such rights: freedom of worship, no conscription, amnesty for the past,
no exemptions from the law, 'and as the laws ought to be equal, so they
must be good.' Who was to decide whether the laws were good or bad,
needed not to be set forth. Where John was affected, it would be John.

Thus in the spring of 1647 the victorious Parliament found itself
confronted with a Third Party, an Armed Opinion. Cromwell tried to
reassure them. 'In the presence of Almighty God', he said, 'before Whom
I stand, I know this Army will disband and lay down their arms at your
door, whenever you command them'. In private he was cursing Parliament
as lustily as any Suffolk yeoman with 48 weeks' pay due to him and his
farm going to rack and ruin. But after the death of Pym in 1643 there
was no one who could steer or manage the House of Commons. The majority
was Presbyterian, and therefore without the sense of public support
behind it. Of the three best heads for civil affairs in the House of
Commons, Selden had no special Parliamentary gifts. He was an expert,
with the arrogance of his tribe, and their untimely generosity of
communication. His immense knowledge was at everyone's disposal, most
readily perhaps at moments when they could have done without it. From
his _Table Talk_, which seems to be a fair mirror of his spoken manner,
we can infer how disconcerting his interventions must have been. Once
the House was debating whether Ussher of Armagh should be invited to
serve on the Westminster Conference. Selden rose. 'Mr. Speaker,' he
asked, 'might we not at the same time consider whether Mr. Inigo Jones
is qualified to be a member of the Mouse-Trap Makers' Company?' After
this, we may understand why Cromwell, in one of his tantrums, proposed
that he should be expelled the House. His religion was so simple that
many people supposed he had none. His political convictions--and he had
suffered for them--centred in a profound reverence for the common law.
But he was an ageing man, and though every now and then he gleams in the
murk like a ray of serene wisdom, it was only a gleam, and it threw no
light on the dim and dangerous way his fellows had to tread.

Vane, the younger Vane in whom contemporaries discerned the successor of
Pym, was a puzzle to his own age, and he has remained a puzzle ever
since. His religion--for in those years it is always with a man's
religion that we must begin--seems to have been a kind of mystical
anti-clericalism. Perhaps it was this that attracted Milton, who seems
to have regarded him for a while as the man who had finally succeeded in
putting organized religion in its proper place--in Milton's view, a very
humble place--in the State. Vane was the champion of religious
toleration, and Charles at Oxford had hopes of gaining his support in
resistance to the Covenant. Vane could not forgo his position and
advantage, as leader of the House of Commons, and he declined. Yet he
held it by a precarious tenure in face of the Presbyterian majority, and
at this moment, in the spring of 1647, he was moving away from
Parliament towards the Army, just as the Army was moving towards the
King. He was not a straightforward man: Cromwell, when they quarrelled,
told him that he lacked common honesty. There have been better judges of
honesty than Cromwell. Rather he seems to be an outstanding example of a
type of character not uncommon in Puritan England: very great abilities
and a fervent zeal for the public good, clouded and perverted by
self-intoxication with a religion of pure emotion. Cromwell was of the
same type, and for years Brother Fountain and Brother Heron lived in
gushing intimacy. But Cromwell was built on a larger scale in all
directions, and his emotion, like his religion, served rather than
controlled his purposes. What he needed was not a Brother Seeker but a
clear intelligence at his side to show him where he was going and how to
get there.

He found it in Ireton. When Ireton was gone, Cromwell floundered,
floundered like Leviathan indeed,

              which God of all his works
  Created hugest that swim the Ocean stream,

and if his heavings and lashings kept Britain quiet and Europe agitated
for the best part of ten years, in the long run they made no difference
to Europe, and did no good to England, except so far as they destroyed
once for all the fancy that Englishmen could be governed by a minority
of saints or soldiers. 'What more do you want?' he once asked the
Republican Ludlow. 'What we fought for,' was the reply: 'the right to
govern ourselves.' And there were many who believed that, if only Ireton
had lived, they might have won it.

By birth a gentleman, by education an Oxford man, Ireton had joined the
Parliamentary army at the beginning of the war as a Captain of Horse.
Eleven years younger than Cromwell, he became his closest friend, and
just before the surrender of Oxford he married Cromwell's daughter,
Bridget.[4] Of Cromwell's fury and geniality, his sudden expansions of
mind, his unforeseen subtlety and unexpected tenderness, Ireton had
nothing. His soldiership and his courage were both suspected, and he
could neither cant nor gush. With men in numbers he could do little. In
small conferences, his promptness and lucidity made him
irresistible--and exasperating. His insatiable industry was known to
the world: to his friends, his signal virtue was his disinterestedness:
even enemies acknowledged his entire sincerity.

This is something to hold on to in the manoeuvres and recriminations of
the next few months. The first indication that the Army might resist the
Plan of Demobilization was an Officers' Petition, respectful but firm.
Before disbanding, they wanted, for themselves and their men, arrears of
pay, indemnity for acts done in the war, guarantee against future
conscription, and compensation for disabled men, widows and children. It
can hardly be doubted that the Petition was drawn by Ireton: no one else
could say so much in so few words: and it contains one parenthesis which
gives the key to his whole behaviour at this juncture.

    First [the Petition runs], whereas the necessity of the War has
    put us upon many actions which the Law would not warrant (nor we
    have acted in time of settled peace):

    We humbly desire that before our disbanding a full and
    sufficient provision may be made by Ordinance of Parliament (_to
    which the Royal Assent may be desired_) for our indemnity and
    security in all such cases.

That is the note of the sound constitutionalist, determined to get back
as soon as possible into the ancient, known and well-tried ways.
Without the Royal Assent, an Ordinance of Parliament was only a form of
words. It would not protect Captain Brown from an action for breaking
into a Royalist's hen-run, or Ensign Green for smacking a Royalist's
face. A disbanded Army without an Act of Indemnity might spend its
remaining years in perpetual appearances at Quarter Sessions or Assizes
to explain about Mrs. Carter's linen. And only the King could pass such
an Act.

Parliament replied to the Petition by a threat to prosecute the
promoters. The agitation was spreading. A suspicion ran through
Parliament that Cromwell was at the bottom of it all and that his
emphatic declaration 'in the presence of Almighty God' was a device to
put Parliament off the scent till he and Ireton had completed their
plans. It may have been his misfortune, but few colleagues ever trusted
Cromwell. One member demanded his immediate arrest: another challenged
Ireton to come over to Lambeth and fight. There was equally wild talk in
the Army. They would raise the country against the war taxes, which (a
suspicious circumstance) were still being collected though the war was
over and the troops not paid. They would march on London, and they
would take the King with them.

Many eyes were turning to Holdenby. Messages, secret, and hotly
disavowed when the secret leaked out, were carried across country from
the regiments to the Royal captive. To one of them there came a truly
Royal answer. 'We will not', the King said, 'engage our people in
another war. Too much blood hath been shed already. The Lord be merciful
to my distracted Kingdom when He accounts with them for rebellion and
blood.' 'But,' he added, 'let the Army know that we highly respect their
expressions, and when we shall, by the blessing of God, be restored to
our throne in peace, we shall auspiciously look upon their loyal
affections towards us.' The one cry that would rally the country was:
Not another war. Whoever said it first and showed that he meant it would
be the real victor. But there would be no mercy for the man who said it
and went back on his word.

At this point--we are now in April 1647--a new figure appears from
behind the scenes: Trooper Edward Sexby, four years' service, first in
Cromwell's regiment, now in Fairfax's. As the remaining eleven years of
his life gave him sufficient opportunity to prove, he was a clever,
violent, unprincipled man, and we know enough of his disreputable career
(he plotted to murder Cromwell, and died mad in the Tower) to be sure
that whereever he was, things would be stirring. But the remarkable
experiment in government which was now to be set on foot, though it
centred round him and bears many traces of his bustling and fertile
mind, was directed by a brain of far finer calibre.

Ireton had made up his mind that the way to peace lay through the
restoration of the King. He believed in the Old Constitution, 'its
reason, prudence and justice', as fervently as Burke. He was a Member of
Parliament, but he had not sat long and he was not popular. Cromwell was
an old Parliamentary hand, and he had--like so many men of his age, men
of the late-Elizabethan vintage--an instinct of reverence for
Parliament, very like the Royalist's sentiment for the Crown, or the
Anglican's for the Church. He had known it in its great days, in '28 and
'41 when it had not yet degenerated into the leaderless, cantankerous
assembly which continued to sit in St. Stephen's with no visible
intention of ever doing anything but sit there and distribute jobs among
its friends. But still it was Parliament: even in its decay, it stood
for the Cause,[5] for order and liberty . . . for justice?--hardly; for
peace?--perhaps. To Ireton's quicker and bleaker mind it was fast
becoming a public nuisance. It was driving the Army to mutiny, and if
once the Army got out of hand no man could foresee the end--London
sacked, Ireland lost, a Scottish Army in Yorkshire, a French Army in
Kent, and Charles the absolute King of a vassalized England. And if by a
miracle the Army did consent to disband, what would happen to Ireton and
Cromwell?

At all costs, therefore, the Army must be kept together and under
control. And here Trooper Sexby was invaluable. He was just the man to
get committees started and keep them going, hire printing-presses, draft
manifestoes, and arrange for their circulation. The eight
horse-regiments came into the scheme at once: the foot soon followed. By
the middle of May the Army had its own Parliament in two chambers. The
officers formed the Upper House: the Lower was composed of members
elected by the committees of each regiment. Discipline was preserved:
the soldiers only addressed their officers, the officers in their
representations confined themselves strictly to military grievances.
Even when it met for political discussion the Army was still an army.
The danger--for a moment it had been a very real danger--of military
anarchy had been averted. The danger of a military despotism was by so
much the nearer.

Cromwell's report to Parliament on the new situation was in guarded, and
indeed contradictory, language. He was sure--though the customary
reference to Almighty God was this time omitted--that the Army would
disband. At least most of them would: there were still some discontented
spirits. As for getting them to go to Ireland, it was not to be thought
of in their present temper. This we are not bound to take quite
literally. They would not go with Skippon. It might be different if they
were asked to go with Fairfax and Cromwell. Parliament seems to have
thought that these rather dubious assurances were good enough to go on,
and ordered the demobilization to start on June 1st--without visible
security for the arrears of pay.

Did Cromwell really suppose the Army would disband? It is incredible.
Had he any plan in mind if they refused? He was in London: Ireton at
G.H.Q., Bury St. Edmunds. On May 25th, Sexby 'rid hard' to London and
got there by four in the afternoon. He waited to see what the House
would do, and when the vote for immediate demobilization was taken he
went off to consult with ----. Here, unluckily, he fails us, because the
names are in cipher, '59' and '89'. They were evidently persons of some
authority, because Sexby tells his comrades that they are to do exactly
as '59' and '89' advise--remove Skippon from the Army, call on Fairfax
to stand by them, and, above all, prevent the disbandment of Fairfax's
regiment. Riding all night Sexby's messenger could have been at Bury on
the 26th, a Wednesday. The official copies of the votes reached Fairfax
on Thursday. His plans were already made--or, more likely, made for him.
The situation was well in hand. A council of officers was summoned for
Saturday morning, and to prevent mischief Skippon was politely invited
to be present. Effectively he was under arrest, and the Council
proceeded without him. By a majority of eighty-six to three the officers
found that the votes of the House were 'dangerous and unsatisfactory'.
The Army was in revolt. It is plain that in this combination the
decisive word was spoken in London: Sexby was sent for instructions. And
who could have given them but Cromwell himself?

The results of the Council must have reached London on Saturday or
Sunday. On Monday evening there was a meeting at Cromwell's house in
Drury Lane to settle the next move. Again, Ireton was ready. He had sent
Cornet Joyce to London with instructions, for Cromwell to confirm if he
saw fit. Cromwell did see fit. Riding swiftly by Oxford, to make sure
that the guns there were in safe hands, and picking up detachments as he
rode, by Tuesday evening Joyce was at Holdenby. The King had been
playing bowls that afternoon at Althorp, when Joyce's advance guard was
sighted making its way along the lanes. After a brief consultation, it
was decided that the King, and the Parliamentary Commissioners, who
always attended him, should return at once. The guards were doubled, and
the evening passed in peace. In the night the Colonel commanding made
his escape. Early on Wednesday morning Joyce entered the house, the
garrison and the invaders shaking hands as they met at the door. Sexby
had done his work neatly.

Joyce's orders were to secure the person of the King. He therefore made
no attempt to interview Charles himself, but waited on the
Commissioners. He had come, he said, referring to a written paper no
doubt prepared at Bury St. Edmunds, to arrest Colonel Graves, who was
wanted for a plot to convey the King to London without the authority of
Parliament. The soldiers, satisfied that a conspiracy existed to raise a
new army and put the King at its head, were determined to prevent the
renewal of the war and the ruin of the kingdom. With which he took his
leave, and sat down to write his report and ask for further
instructions. Holdenby, one of the most magnificent of Tudor palaces,
the work of Elizabeth's Hatton, was so vast that all this coming and
going caused little disturbance to the Royal household. Towards evening
Joyce began to feel his responsibility. It occurred to him that Graves
perhaps had not fled but was in the neighbourhood arranging a rescue.
Late that night he put the Commissioners under guard and made his way up
the backstairs to the room of the King's gentlemen. He was sorry, he
said, to disturb His Majesty, but he must speak to him at once. Maxwell
and his colleagues were arguing with him through the bolted door when
the King's silver bell rang. He had heard the altercation and wanted to
know what it was all about. Maxwell explained, and the King sent the
persistent Cornet the reply that he would see him in the morning.

As soon as early prayers were over he sent for Joyce. After some
conversation, he consented to leave Holdenby on conditions to which the
Cornet readily agreed. They went out into the great court together.
Joyce waved to his troopers to come nearer. 'I have promised,' he said,
'three things in your name. You will do no harm to his Majesty's person:
you will force him to nothing against his conscience: you will allow his
servants to accompany him. Do you all promise?' 'All!' thundered the
five hundred Buffcoats. 'And now, Mr. Joyce,' said the King, 'tell me
where your commission is? Have you anything in writing from Sir Thomas
Fairfax?' Joyce hesitated, and Charles persisted. 'Pray deal ingenuously
with me. Where is your commission?' Joyce had an inspiration. 'Here,' he
said, pointing to the troopers. The King ran his eye along the ranks,
and turned to the Cornet with the smile which so often served him well.
'Indeed, it is one that I can read without spelling: as handsome and
proper a company of gentlemen as I have seen this many a day.'

The Commissioners and Household were nervous and puzzled. The King was
laughing merrily. 'Where next, Mr Joyce?' The Cornet proposed Oxford:
the King thought it was unhealthy. Joyce--apparently by a natural
association of ideas--offered Cambridge. The King wished to see Fairfax,
but he preferred Newmarket. All was promptitude and courtesy in those
loyal ranks, and at eleven that night Joyce was scribbling a hurried
note to the nearest regiment. 'The King is at Huntingdon. Will be at
Newmarket to-morrow. Persuade all the friends you can to come and meet
him.' The King had come back, and was to have a royal welcome. The next
night he was at Childerley, and there he spent three days. The
University flocked out with loyal addresses, and in the wake of the
University came Fairfax, Ireton, and Cromwell.

He had had a narrow escape. The news that Joyce was at Holdenby reached
London on Thursday. It was a declaration of war, and few could doubt
that Cromwell was behind it. He was much nearer the scaffold that night
in Drury Lane than Charles at Holdenby. There was nothing for it but
flight. On Saturday he was with the Army, and on Monday, for the first
time, he and the King stood face to face, both in high spirits, each in
the mood to see the best in the other. For the kingdom it was a day of
hope. For Ireton a day of triumph. And though history and even gossip
are silent, I cannot but suspect that the triumph was not unshared. If
any woman in England was confident of her ability to adorn a peerage it
was Cromwell's daughter, Ireton's wife.

[Footnote 4: From this marriage Gardiner the historian was descended.]

[Footnote 5: The history of this word in the sense _Temperance Cause_,
_Good Old Cause_, etc, deserves to be traced in detail. From _case of
one party in a lawsuit_ it seems to have developed simultaneously in
France and England: whether independently, I do not know. The new sense
was certainly established in England as early as 1580.]




  IV


The object of the forward party in Parliament, as conceived by Pym and
transmitted to his feebler successors, was to reduce the Monarchy to a
Dogeship. The Venetian Constitution, against which Disraeli was to
inveigh in the nineteenth century, was already an ideal of the
seventeenth, and requests had gone to Venice for a more exact account of
its working. Between Venice and England there was indeed a difference:
the Grand Council had the experience and the lustre of four hundred
glorious years: Parliament had no experience of Government, and what
lustre it had acquired in 1641 was rapidly fading.

On the other hand, the monarchy though it kept much of its imaginative
appeal had ceased to be indispensable. Alternative forms of government
could at least be canvassed. We are passing through one of those
periods--very like our own--of intense but superficial activity when
ideas are generated so much faster than they can be set to work that
they tend to neutralize each other in a voluble and sterile dialectic.
Everything was in the melting-pot of speculation. London alone (it was
said) professed twenty-nine religions, a modest figure to us but
terrible to those who believed in one revelation and one Church order.
Politically, every system had its advocate. But all systems, which had
any practical sense in them, swung about two points, classic,
senatorial, Republicanism, or Kingship by Contract. If for any reason
Kingship by Contract broke down, Republicanism was the only alternative.

But in the summer of 1647 it was only a speculative alternative. Pious
majors might hold forth about Ehud and Eglon, Saul and Samuel, Ahab and
Jehu; political corporals demonstrate that before the Conquest all power
lay in the people, and that somehow or other the people had got done out
of their rights, but no one of any consequence seriously thought of
deposing the King, far less of slaying him. Even in reducing the
Monarchy to a Dogeship, the Presbyterians were overshooting the mark.
The real solution was to restate the medieval doctrine of contract in
modern terms. There was no time to lose. Radicalism--academic,
demagogic, and revivalist all at once--was coming up in flood, and with
Radicalism was coming something which contemporaries called Anabaptism
and derived from Munster, and we in like circumstances might call
Bolshevism and derive from Moscow. And this Radicalism was becoming the
creed of the Army, or of as much of the Army (perhaps not a very
formidable proportion) as wanted anything except to be paid and sent
home.

All that June the Army chiefs were in daily touch with the King, first
at Newmarket, then at his hunting lodge at Royston, then at Hatfield. No
possible courtesy was omitted that could conciliate his goodwill or
exalt his dignity. Royalist officers were allowed to come and pay their
respects, and Radicals growled to see as much kneeling and bowing and
kissing of hands as if Hatfield was Whitehall. And not Royalist officers
only: Parliamentary officers and their wives thronged the lawns and the
presence chamber. The King was carefully guarded, but the Commander was
enjoined to keep the sentries well out of sight and to interfere in no
way with his comfort or devotions. He had asked that his chaplains might
join him. Fairfax forgot to answer the letter, but he sent the
chaplains. The Household, standing respectfully apart, while the King
paced briskly up and down the privy garden with the generals, wondered,
hopefully, what they were all laughing about. The King, Cromwell said
enthusiastically after one of these interviews, was the most upright and
conscientious man in the three kingdoms. By the beginning of July, the
talk was of peace in a fortnight.

Ireton had undertaken to draft a permanent plan of settlement, the Heads
of Proposals, which would serve also as a manifesto from the Army to the
nation. Coming from such a source, it was not likely to be wholly
acceptable to the Radicals. But the Radicals in politics were also, in
the main, anti-Presbyterian in religion, and the Radicals in
religion--the Sectaries or Independents--were, in the main,
anti-Parliament in politics. The Army had not laid aside its hostility
to Westminster: it was still unpaid and it suspected Parliament of a
design to call back the Scots, raise the City of London, and effect a
restoration in which there would be no room for Radicals or Sectaries.
The soldiers, and many of their officers, wanted to march on London and
settle with their paymasters there. Even Ireton's capacity for work must
have been taxed to get his Proposals ready, while he was arguing every
day with the King and his agents and struggling, in concert with
Cromwell, to keep the Army in hand.

The crisis came in a long and stormy meeting of officers and men at
Reading on July 16th. Hour after hour, the two fought to prevent any
irrevocable step being taken before the Proposals had been published.
'Suppose you march on London,' Ireton asked, 'and transfer all power
from Parliament to the Army, what have you gained? Are we any nearer to
a settlement, to peace? Before we ruin our good name by disputes among
ourselves, let us show the country what we mean to do with power when we
get it. A plan has been drawn up to that end: it is open to discussion
still: it may require to be amended...' Here Cromwell took up the
running. Surely, he urged, if that was so, the right course was to
consider the Proposals first. Then they could resume their discussion of
the March on London--a matter on which, really and truly, he was not
convinced. He must have time to consider his position: a sub-committee
perhaps--and an adjournment till six o'clock. He was fighting for time
and even one day saved was something.

The Proposals which Ireton produced that afternoon were intended as a
compromise between the extreme claims on both sides, but with a leaning
to the left. The bishops were to be abolished and their lands sold--so
much for the Presbyterians and the City. But the Covenant was made
optional--so much for the Anglicans and Independents. By a curious
adumbration of the Parliament Act of 1911, a bill passed in two
successive Parliaments might become law, without the Royal Assent, and
the militia was transferred for ten years--so much for the Commons. But
the present Parliament was to be dissolved at an early date, and no
further diminution of the Royal Power was to be proposed, though the
Royal authority was to be exercised through a reformed Privy Council,
which Ireton called a Council of State and which in substance--being
jointly dependent on the Crown and Parliament--would have been a
Cabinet.

When the debate was resumed at six o'clock, Cromwell was in a position
to declare himself. The Proposals had been well received by the
officers, and they were the main business. The negotiations between the
Army and Parliament were of secondary importance. He was definitely
against the March on London. But he agreed that they might properly
present their demands with a time limit attached. If Parliament refused
to accept them--well, they might have to march after all.

They did. But it was not to coerce but to rescue Parliament. In those
strange years, London had come to feel itself a power in the land, and
to behave with the prompt and organized turbulence of a Greek or Italian
city state. Then too, as now, it was the refuge of all who had only
their wits to live by, and it was crowded with disbanded Royalists and
deserting soldiers from the army of Fairfax. The 'dmarche with a time
limit', on which the Reading convention had decided, stipulated that the
City militia should cease to act as a separate force. Lords and Commons
agreed. A vast mob swarmed through the City gates, along the Strand to
Westminster, and Lords and Commons rescinded their votes. The two
Speakers and a crowd of Members fled to Fairfax. For a moment it seemed
as if London would go to war with the Army, a situation which cut short
all debating, and which no man could deal with more efficiently than
Fairfax. In the debate at Reading it does not seem that he opened his
mouth. But he could take London. Indeed, he is the only soldier since
the Conqueror who ever has taken it. His left wing, sweeping through the
Middlesex villages, reached Tilbury. His right was ordered to secure
Gravesend. They got as far as Deptford: it was not necessary to go
farther. Southwark--really we might be reading of ancient Athens or
medieval Florence--made a separate peace, and London yielded.

Time was slipping past. The Heads of Proposals had been in the King's
hands for a fortnight. Hard-bitten Radical officers like Rainborough
were growing furious at the facility with which Ireton adopted the Royal
amendments and turned them pat into new articles while the rest were
puzzling out their meaning. The King objected to the loss of the Royal
veto: it was put back. He refused to agree to the abolition of bishops
or the confiscation of their lands. Ireton promptly substituted a plan
by which the bishops kept their spiritual functions--and their
lands--and lost only their coercive jurisdiction. The Proposals thus
revised were published on August 2nd, just before London surrendered. In
spite of accidents, Cromwell had carried his time-table through: before
seizing power the Army had told the nation what they meant to do with
it.

Regarded as terms offered to a beaten enemy, the revised Proposals are
astonishing. They show how anxious, over-anxious in fact, the Army
leaders were to secure the King's name. It did them no good with the
Army, and it gave the King a false idea of his own importance. They were
the production of a convinced Monarchist, who saw none the less that the
Crown must be brought up to date--the one thing unhappily that Charles
could never grasp. The Church was left undisturbed, and the only
material restraint on the royal authority--the transference of the
militia for ten years--had already been offered by the King himself at
Newcastle. The heavy fines imposed in the Newcastle Propositions on the
Royalist gentry were cut down, and a general offer was included that any
Royalist who would join the Army in preventing a new war--in other
words, would stand in against the City, the Presbyterians, and the
Scots--might compound for five per cent of his estate. One of Ireton's
supporters wrote, after the debate at Reading: 'When the Army were in
their greatest glory, and the enemy under their foot, yet we were ever
humane and Christian to them, and now being so near to a reconciliation,
we should not show any aversion or indisposition.' There were those who
thought that Cromwell had no very great 'aversion or indisposition' to
an earldom. Some one objected that Parliament was not likely to ratify
such terms. 'Then,' snapped Ireton, 'we will purge and purge them till
they do. Join the Cavaliers? I would join the French and the Spaniards
to get the King's business settled.'

Ireton's critic proved right. The Army entered London on August 6th, and
for the next fortnight the Generals were engaged on the first purge,
getting the leading Presbyterians to vacate their seats. Then, with a
majority of their own, as they believed, in both Houses, they returned
to their conferences with the King. Their headquarters were at Putney:
the King was now at Hampton Court. Charles was a skilful as well as a
stubborn debater, and another fortnight passed before he was satisfied.
About September 8th Cromwell and Ireton, in a garden house at Putney,
received his final reply. Tactically, it was thought by them desirable
that the initiative should seem to remain with Parliament, and the
negotiation was therefore formally reopened by sending the Newcastle
Propositions once more to the King. Ireton explained privately that he
need not pay any attention to them: Cromwell afterwards averred, more
subtly, that it was a device to discredit the Presbyterians and clear
the ground. As revised by the two, the King's reply was in these terms:

    His Majesty conceives [the Propositions of Parliament] as being
    destructive to the main principal interests of the Army, and of
    all those whose affections concur with them; and His Majesty
    having seen the Proposals of the Army . . . believes his Two
    Houses will think with him that they much more conduce to the
    satisfaction of all interests and may be a fitter foundation for
    a lasting peace than the Propositions [now tendered by
    Parliament]. He therefore propounds (as the best way in his
    judgement in order to peace) that his Two Houses would instantly
    take into consideration those Proposals.

The King's letter reached Westminster on September 9th. On the 21st
Parliament decided to stand by the Newcastle Propositions. Ireton's
Proposals, Cromwell's promises, were scattered to the winds.

Our judgment on the situation must depend on the view we take of the
chief actors. Cromwell had nothing to gain by disappointing the King.
The Proposals gave him everything he really cared for, religious freedom
for the Sectarians, a representative working House of Commons, and
peace. Against the ill-will of the Radicals, which he had certainly
incurred, he could set his popularity with the average trooper; as the
author of peace he would have held, at the lowest, such a position in
the country as Monck held after the Restoration; and, if he still needed
action, Ireland awaited his sword. There is a story which can be neither
proved nor disproved, but which seems on the face of it not unlikely,
that the King's offer included more than an Earldom. What shape would
the Irish Question have taken in the next three hundred years if
Ireland, reconquered and settled by the New Model Army, had become a
principality under the House of Cromwell?[6]

But to assume his sincerity is to convict him of a political mistake so
gross, that, with a man of Cromwell's capacity, it cast a backward doubt
on the assumption. He ought to have secured his House of Commons first.
Having once accepted the King's reply, he made himself responsible for
its acceptance by the House, and the Vote of September 21st was, in
modern terms, a vote of no confidence in Lieutenant-General Cromwell,
Member for Cambridge. Awkward for the Member, and dangerous for the
Lieutenant-General; but far more awkward and dangerous, if they had
known it, for the House of Commons. They had thrown over their best
officers, imperilled the discipline of the Army, and released the King
from all obligations. His moral position was unassailable, if he could
hold it. Beaten in a fair fight, he had accepted fair terms. In
disavowing the officers, Parliament showed that they did not want fair
terms. What they did want--apart from the Bishops' lands--is not so
clear. What they got, and in no short time, was a military democracy,
which if it made no more of the King than they did, made equally little
of the House of Commons.

[Footnote 6: A later proposal--to make Ireland a National Home for the
Jews--is fraught with even more entertaining possibilities.]




  V


We are approaching a decisive turn in the King's fortunes, and it is
time to examine somewhat more closely the King's own attitude. Charles
was the martyr to an ecclesiastical theory and the victim of a political
theory, both of which he had, as it were, incorporated into his own
personality. He never felt the least temptation, for the sake of a quiet
life as a beloved and harmless sovereign, to surrender either the rights
of the Church or the rights of the Crown; in which, as he saw them, the
rights of his Christian people were involved. He believed, and many
thousands of his most intelligent subjects believed with him, that the
confiscation of Church lands was a sin against God, and that the
cessation of episcopal orders involved an interruption of the
sacraments, the channels of grace. No man can fairly be asked to involve
himself, and those who trust him, in what he believes to be the most
fearful of all calamities, simply because others happen to believe
otherwise: and Charles had given the best pledges of his conviction by
the purity of his life in prosperity and the constancy of his profession
in captivity and defeat. All this, men who like Vane, Cromwell and
Ireton were at once religious and intelligent, could thoroughly
understand and appreciate. Here there was no difficulty.

It is less easy, with his record from 1625 to 1640 before us, to
sympathize with his assurance that politically he was, in asserting his
own prerogatives as King, defending the liberties of his people. Yet
time and the process of events had drawn him, 'really and truly' as
Cromwell might have said, into this position. Experience had convinced
his people that those liberties depended on two things, the free
functioning of the ordinary Courts of Law, and regular meetings of
Parliament. On these they had insisted in 1641, and these they had won.
But by 1647 their property was at the mercy of tribunals unknown to the
law, which were expelling gentlemen from their lands, clergymen from
their livings, harrying even yeomen, who had put on a buff coat or lent
the King a horse, for delinquency-fines which to a poor man meant ruin
and a life as a day-labourer. And Parliament, protected by Statute
against dissolution, had ceased to represent anything but itself. A
third of the Commons had joined the King; their places had been filled
by coupon, and few of the recruiters had any reason to expect that if
once they left Westminster the freeholders and burgesses would ever send
them back there. If, that September, Fairfax had expelled the House of
Commons and issued new writs in the King's name, steeples would have
rocked and bonfires blazed from one end of England to the other, as they
did thirteen years later when Monck at last opened his mouth and
declared for a free Parliament.

Fairfax was not the man to do it unprompted. But it seems at first sight
strange that neither Cromwell nor Ireton should ever--so far as we
know--have discovered what seems the obvious solution of the difficulty
in which they had involved themselves. The King had accepted their
terms: Parliament had rejected them. A new Parliament, summoned, on what
would now have been the Royal programme, to pass the Act of Indemnity,
settle the Church, pay the Army, and re-conquer Ireland; Cromwell Lord
Lieutenant--or something more; Ireton Lord Chancellor with a free field
in which to exercise his skill in drafting redistribution bills, tithe
bills, judicature bills, and all the other practical reforms his heart
was set on--if we could re-arrange history to our liking, the last
twenty years of Charles's reign might have been our golden age. But we
should have to re-make Charles first, and by now Ireton had seen it.[7]

There was in any case one initial obstacle to be overcome, the
Independents of the Army. Cromwell had strained his credit and
reputation to bring the negotiations with the King to a successful
conclusion, and he had naturally suffered the consequences. He was
losing his hold on his own people. Personally sympathetic to the common
man, and always attracted by odd types, Cromwell had no illusions about
the collective wisdom either of the common or the odd. His definition of
democracy as the creed of all Bad men and all Poor men, expresses with
unusual pungency what seems to have been one of his deepest convictions.
But he could humour them--and Ireton could not--because he could not
only speak their language but think their thoughts. That misty sphere of
the mind where feelings are just condensing into ideas with the help of
catchwords was Cromwell's brooding-place, and it is the sphere in which
most men, and all crowds, do what thinking they are capable of. He knew
exactly what the Army was thinking about him now: he knew that if
authority were once lost, there would be a universal dissolution of
order. And, for the moment, authority meant Parliament. 'It's like
holding on to a hare when you're swimming across the Thames,' he once
said, 'but we have nothing else to hold on to.' He could not transfer
the Army bodily from Parliament to King, even in defence of the Heads of
Proposals. They were after all a Programme for Generals, for men who
would be the peers and baronets of the restored monarchy. The soldiers
were conning a much more drastic paper: so were many of the officers. It
was laid before Fairfax on October 18th. It demanded a second purging,
followed by an early dissolution of Parliament, and it said nothing
about the King. Repudiated by the Houses, Ireton's Proposals were
disavowed by the Army.

There is some slight ground for thinking, what in view of the
antecedents of the two men is probable, that Ireton still wanted to
press on negotiations with the King, Cromwell to conciliate the House of
Commons. On October 6th the officers agreed to stand by the Proposals as
being 'more honourable and satisfactory' to the King. But they were not
unanimous, and they were losing heart. The Royal Household, anxiously
observing every change, felt the air about them growing chilly. Cromwell
no longer rode over from Putney. The guards were doubled: the soldiers
omitted to salute the King's staff. Cromwell indeed had other things to
think about. The Presbyterians had always been his enemies, and now even
his own regiment was turning on him. That earldom was receding into the
distance, and unless he could recover the Army, even a quiet life in
Huntingdon might be too much to expect.

And the Army--or at least Sexby and his friends who had organized those
Committees which Ireton had managed so dexterously to his own ends--was
getting very angry indeed. Fairfax had told the men on October 18th that
he sympathized with them, and that their views ought to be considered by
the officers. Fairfax always had so much difficulty in saying anything
that he usually found it simplest to agree with everybody. A general
council--officers and men--was summoned for the 28th, and if any
Royalist had been present he would have learnt in the first ten minutes
what a frail fabric all these negotiations with the King had turned out
to be. Even in the fragmentary state in which it has come down to us,
Sexby's speech has the true ring of that rough eloquence which, on the
eve of battle, had so often given the Puritan soldier the assurance of
victory.

    We have been by Providence put upon strange things, which the
    ancientest of us here doth scarce remember. While the Army acted
    to these ends, Providence hath been with us: and yet we have
    found little fruit of our endeavours, and all of us, I think,
    great and small, officers and soldiers, may say:

    'What confidence is this wherein thou hast trusted? Thou
    trustest upon the staff of this bruised reed, even upon Egypt,
    on which if a man lean, it will go into his hand and pierce it.
    So is Pharaoh, King of Egypt, unto all that trust in him.'

    We sought to satisfy all men, and it was well. But in going
    about to do it, we have dissatisfied all men. We have laboured
    to please a King, and unless we cut our own throats, I think we
    shall never please him. We have gone about to support a House of
    rotten studds, a House of Commons and its company of rotten
    members.

    And one thing I must say to General Cromwell and General Ireton
    themselves. Your credit and reputation hath been much blasted
    upon two accounts--your dealings with the King, your plan of
    settlement which was to satisfy everybody and has satisfied
    nobody, and your dealings with Parliament. The authority of
    Parliament is a thing which most here would give their lives
    for, but the Parliament to which we would loyally subject
    ourselves has still to be called. In my conscience I think these
    things are the causes of all the reproach that has been cast on
    you. Consider what we soldiers have to propose, and if you find
    it reasonable, join with us. So may the Kingdom have peace: so
    may your fellow-soldiers be quieted in spirit. These things I
    have represented as my thought. I desire your pardon.

The proposals of Sexby and his colleagues, based on Lilburne's teaching,
and entitled, somewhat ambitiously, The Agreement of the People, bore
out the promises of Sexby's opening speech and the warning Cromwell had
given the House of Commons a month earlier. 'Remember,' he said, 'that
there is a Royalist party in the Army, and a strong one. Efforts are
being made to form a Presbyterian party. But there is a third party
little dreamt of whose aim is to have no power but the sword.' The
Agreement of the People was the manifesto of this party, Lilburnian
democracy in its simplest form, armed and ready for war. Its immediate
sting lay in its conclusion:

    These things we declare to be our native rights, and therefore
    are agreed and resolved to maintain them with our utmost
    possibilities, against all opposition whatsoever: who having
    long expected, and dearly earned the establishment of those
    certain rules of government, are yet made to depend for the
    settlement of our peace and freedom upon him that intended our
    bondage and brought a cruel war upon us.

Look forward fifteen months, from the Council-room at Putney to the High
Court of Justice in Westminster Hall:

    Charles Stuart, out of a wicked design to erect and uphold in
    himself an unlimited power to rule according to his own will,
    and to overthrow the rights and liberties of the people, hath
    traitorously and maliciously levied war against the present
    Parliament and the people therein represented.

The sense is the same: the charge against the King was implicit in the
Agreement of the People: and the ultimate ground of his execution is the
picture, which gradually formed itself in the soldiers' minds, of
Charles Stuart, the Man of Blood. Was it a true picture? In a sense it
was, a sense which Charles himself would never have admitted, or indeed
understood. Here lay the second obstacle to the splendid peace which
Ireton and Cromwell had imagined to themselves. The Army might be
managed, Parliament brought to reason. The rock on which all
combinations split was the King's devotion, as sincere and disinterested
as his devotion to the Church, to his own conception of Kingship, a
conception of almost metaphysical purity which no surface calculations
of advantage could touch. Hard-hearted, Cromwell once called him.
Cromwell always thought emotionally, and hard-minded would perhaps be a
better word. It is the quality that runs through the race: hard as a
diamond, Mary said of herself; as hard as marble, Churchill said of
James. Herein is the explanation of that duplicity which from his own
time till now has been the standing charge against him. His purpose was
pure. 'I should never make a lawyer,' he once said, 'because I could not
defend a bad case or yield in a good one.' He asked nothing more than to
be the King which God had ordained him, for the sake of his people, to
be, and he would accept nothing less. 'He had no hungry appetite to prey
upon his subjects though he had a greatness of mind not to live
precariously by them'. But if we had put all that to Colonel Goffe and
Colonel Rainborough, and Buffe Coate, and the Bedfordshire Man, who met
that day at Putney, and if they had asked, 'Do you mean that, whatever
promises he makes now, he will break through them as soon as he gets a
chance, and is he going to let the Scots loose on us?' we could not have
answered this rough and ready reading of the King's mind with a
confident 'No'. One of his most faithful friends had come from France to
Hampton Court to see him. 'I really do believe,' the King said brightly,
'we shall soon have another war.' The first war could be forgiven. But
not another war. And Charles would have fought as long as he could
persuade or hire anyone to fight for him--Scots, Irish, Danes, or
Frenchmen--if only at the end he might be King again. This was the side
of him that the Queen understood, and there is always this to be
reckoned with in Charles--a desire to show her that he really was the
man she wanted him to be. He had brain enough for the part for which
history had cast him, the steadfast, wary guardian of tradition in a
feverish and changing world. But he had not brain enough for the part in
which inheritance and marriage had involved him. The difference between
firmness and obstinacy, ingenuity and shiftiness is not, on the surface,
very great. But it was just enough to make Charles an almost impossible
king in 1647, quite impossible if he thought himself a match for the
subtlest will and the most resolute intelligence in England.

[Footnote 7: Cromwell, unlike Napoleon, had no head for legislation,
and, except for the Redistribution Bill, suggested by Ireton and admired
by Clarendon, the legislation of the Commonwealth is insignificant.
Nothing shows the quality of Ireton's mind so clearly as his programme
of reforms requiring to be undertaken, which would have kept Parliament
busy and out of mischief for a generation.]




  VI


The Council of Officers was held on October 6th, and adjourned till the
14th. The Case of the Army was in draft on the 9th and laid before
Fairfax on the 18th. The adjourned meeting of October 14th never took
place. On the 20th, Cromwell appeared at Westminster. For what he said,
and he spoke for three hours, we are dependent on a brief note by an
Italian correspondent whose sympathies were evidently on the other, the
Presbyterian, side. 'Speaking with as much eloquence as hypocrisy, he
endeavoured to convince the House that neither he nor Fairfax nor any of
the Army leaders had the least share in the designs of the regiments,
but that from the beginning of the war their purpose and interest was no
other than to serve the King and establish the Crown in its authority.
All through he spoke of the King in the highest terms, and ended by
saying that he must be restored as soon as possible.' If this is
compared with his three-party speech a month before, it will not
necessarily appear so hypocritical as our Italian reporter imagined. If
Cromwell had reason to fear the storm that was rising in the Army, so
had Parliament, and so had every member of the possessing classes
throughout the country. Behind the Agreement of the People was the
menace of Democracy. On the 28th Sexby made the speech we have read, and
on the 29th, after a morning spent in prayer, the two sides, Grandees
and Levellers, met in a grapple on the question of Manhood Suffrage. The
Revolution had burst its banks.[8]

But in this sequence we must interpolate another date. On October 11th,
the Scottish Commissioners in London were joined by two colleagues,
Loudoun and Lanark, bringing the latest news from Edinburgh. The Scots
were not happy over the part they had played at Newcastle in January,
and the English situation had developed on lines which made the
establishment of Presbytery seem more remote than ever. The combination
which the Army always feared--London, Westminster, and Scotland--had for
the moment been averted by the reduction of the City and the purging of
the House of Commons. But it might always revive, and events had shown
that the purging had not been so effective after all. If Colonel
Rainborough and Colonel Goffe did not realize it, there were clearer
eyes in the Army Council who saw well enough that all this debating on
Manhood Suffrage might be terminated by a Royalist rising with a
Scottish army in support. And they knew also that if England were polled
that autumn, without any coercion from the Army, it would vote for a new
Parliament, the disbandment of all Armies, an Act of Oblivion, and a
restoration of the King on any terms or none at all. The government of
Charles, in the secular sphere, had been technically incorrect rather
than personally oppressive, and now as one bad harvest followed another,
rents fell and fell, and taxes rose and rose, people were beginning to
look back with fondness on the happy thirties. In the ecclesiastical
department it had been vexatious--but hardly more so than this new
Presbytery. Nobody, except a few fanatics who knew the history of Israel
better than the history of England, really believed that Charles was a
'tyrant, traitor, and murtherer': he was so obviously nothing of the
kind. But he was an exasperatingly difficult person to negotiate with,
and for the moment he had won. Ireton and Cromwell were so deeply
committed to the King that it would have been an immense relief to both
of them to learn that he had passed away. The King had come between them
and Parliament, between them and the Army. They were isolated and they
were bound. If he lived, the only thing that could release them and
restore their authority with the Army was that he should contract some
new engagement, or run away.

One of Cromwell's favourite officers--a Royalist whom he won by calling
on him suddenly and offering him a command--once asked him outright:
'General, why did you drop the King?' And this is the story Cromwell
told. A secret message came from the King's bedchamber that the King's
decision was taken and their doom was sealed. What it was they might
learn by going to the 'Blue Boar' in Holborn and waiting till ten
o'clock, when a man would come in with a saddle on his head. They would
find a letter sewed up in the skirt. In troopers' coats, Ireton and
Cromwell rode to the 'Blue Boar', called for beer, and sat drinking
till the man with the saddle arrived. They searched the saddle and found
the letter. If Bolingbroke is to be believed, the Earl of Oxford--a
great collector of manuscripts--had had the letter in his hands.
Unluckily, as the owner refused his price of 500, it is not in the
Harleian Collection. It was a letter to the Queen, and in it Charles
said, in answer to some protest of hers, that he knew perfectly well
what he was about in his negotiations with the Army, Cromwell's Garter
and the Viceroyalty of Ireland. 'He should know in time how to deal with
the rogues, who instead of a silken garter should be fitted with a
hempen cord'. This is not quite how Cromwell told the tale to his young
friend; one can imagine he did not care to dwell, in 1649, on the
day-dreams of 1647. But the two accounts join perfectly. How was the
King to provide Cromwell or anyone else with a hempen cord? By joining
the Scots: this was the decision that was to seal their doom. 'And
then,' said Cromwell, 'we resolved his ruin.'[9]

The Scots--or at least the party which happened for the nonce to be
uppermost in the politics of that fractious country--had learnt wisdom
by experience. In England the Covenant was a hopeless business and they
were ready to drop it, or make it optional as Ireton had proposed. As a
matter of fact Charles had been won over already to a compromise which
bears the name of Ussher and which really does seem to be the closest
approximation possible to the polity, not indeed of the Apostles about
which we know nothing, but certainly of the Third, perhaps of the Second
Century.[10] The Covenant thus out of the way, there was little left for
the King and the Scots to differ about. The Scots were not much
interested in English politics. The only danger to themselves lay in the
English Army. But, rightly divining that England was royalist at heart,
seeing that if the Army was at odds with Parliament the Army chiefs were
also losing their hold on their men, they naturally calculated that a
nation so divided would collapse at the first impact of an invasion, led
in the name of the King by the heir to the Throne.

Nor can the King be blamed for accepting an overture which, almost by a
miracle, promised to save his Church. He had no intention of making a
bad use of the victory which patience had brought within his reach. What
use he would have made of it is another question, on which no doubt
Cromwell and Ireton had their private misgivings: a restoration on the
Scots' terms involved them both in personal danger. Charles was not a
generous man, and by failing to carry through the Heads of Proposals
they had discharged him from all personal obligations to themselves. It
is true that by his negotiations with the Scots he was releasing them
from all personal obligation to him. But--in spite of intercepted
letters in saddle-skirts--they had nothing to act on. Even if Charles
had assured his wife that he meant to hang Cromwell when he saw a
chance, the letter could not be with any advantage made public. The Just
Man would have burst all Bonds in triumph over the Grandees, the
Radicals would have exulted; and a great part of England would have
said, Quite right too. Indeed, the general tenor of the King's dealings
with the Scots was no secret--in passing, one must admire, or wonder at,
the strange kind of nerve which the King must have possessed to sit in
Hampton Court, with the profound frivolity of a solemn man, almost
openly weaving plots for the destruction of the Army whose prisoner he
was. There were mutterings at Putney that if Parliament and the Scots
thought they could restore the King over the head of the Army they might
find themselves without a King to restore. Cromwell warned the Commander
at Hampton Court to be on his guard: 'If any such thing should be done,
it would be accounted a horrid act'. It would certainly have been a very
convenient one. But Cromwell was too late--perhaps he meant to be. The
King had fled. There was a weak spot in that armour of placid,
unimaginative courage with which he faced the world: he was afraid of
assassination--it is the only trace in him of his father's physical
timidity--and some one had touched it.

The world said it was Cromwell.

      And Hampton shows what part
      He had of wiser art;
  Where, twining subtle fears with hope,
  He wove a net of such a scope
      That Charles himself might chase
      To Caresbrooke's narrow case.

Indeed it may have been. The officer commanding at Hampton Court was
Cromwell's cousin, Colonel Whalley, and some time on November 11th he
received a warning letter to be delivered to the King. 'My brother,'
the unknown correspondent wrote, 'was at a meeting last night, with
eight or nine agitators, who, in debate of the obstacle which did most
hinder the speedy effecting of their designs, did conclude it was your
Majesty, and as long as your Majesty doth live, it will be so. And,
therefore, resolved for the good of the Kingdom, to take your life
away.' Now, we know that on November 11th these views were openly
expressed in a meeting at Putney. It is highly probable that the
agitators had a preliminary meeting on November 10th to settle the line
they were to take, and if Cromwell knew of it--as he almost certainly
would--nothing was easier than to arrange for a private account--a
distorted account, because the agitators were not thinking of
assassination, but open trial--to be conveyed to the King.

That night the King retired to his room early, as usual on a Thursday,
to write letters for the foreign mail. Swiftly changing his clothes, he
slipped out into the park, crossed the river at Thames Ditton and rode
away. He left behind a letter of thanks to Colonel Whalley, assuring him
that he had not been frightened away by any warnings of intended
assassination, but was tired of being kept prisoner. To the House of
Lords he wrote, with his usual dignity, explaining his action and his
proposals for a settlement:

    I appeal to all indifferent men to judge, if I have not just
    cause to free myself from the hands of those who change their
    principles with their condition, and who are not ashamed openly
    to intend the destruction of the nobility, by taking away their
    negative voice; and with whom the Levellers' doctrine is rather
    countenanced than punished? Nor would I have this my retirement
    misinterpreted: for I shall earnestly and uncessantly endeavour
    the settling of a safe and well-grounded Peace, wherever I am or
    shall be, and that (as much as may be) without the effusion of
    more Christian blood: for which how many times have I desired,
    pressed to be heard, and yet no ear given to me? And can any
    reasonable man think, that (according to the ordinary course of
    affairs) there can be a settled peace without it, or that God
    will bless those who refuse to hear their own King? Surely, no.

'Those who change their principles with their condition.' If Cromwell
had seen through Charles, it is plain from these words that Charles,
assisted no doubt by the Scottish Commissioners, had seen through
Cromwell. To regain the Army, he had had to make a quick shuffle to the
left. But he could now declare his position with a clear conscience. The
flight of the King released him from an entanglement. He discovered
that his eyes had been dazzled by the glories of this world: he was
resolved to humble himself and desire the prayers of the saints, that
God would be pleased to forgive his self-seeking. The wandering sheep
signalized his return to the fold by a sudden outburst of energy. A
regiment appeared on parade with mutinous tickets in their hats,
England's Freedom: Soldiers' Rights. It reads like an advance puff of
Lilburne's next pamphlet. Cromwell rode at them with his sword drawn,
seized the leaders, and had one tried by drumhead court-martial and shot
then and there. The regiments quietly subscribed an Engagement to be
obedient to their General and officers, and to leave politics to the
General Council of the Army--that military Parliament which Ireton had
organized in May. But the Lower House--the Soldiers' Deputies, as in
another and fiercer revolution they would have been called--were
shouldered aside. The control of Army politics was henceforth in the
hands of the officers, and in the officers' programme one demand stood
prominent: 'That a period be set to this present Parliament.' The
pattern of the future is beginning to emerge. The Agreement of the
People issues in the death of the King: the Engagement of November 15th
will lead us step by step to that April morning in 1653, and the Member
for Cambridge, in the centre of the picture, bellowing 'Drunkard',
'Whoremonger', 'Take away that Bauble!' So seen the trial and execution
of Charles appears as an incident in a conflict, the nature of which we,
perhaps, are better able than the nineteenth century to conceive, the
struggle between a drilled, determined, and self-conscious minority, and
the loose, slow, compromising organ which every Parliament is bound to
be.

[Footnote 8: Anyone who doubts the magnitude, not of the danger, but of
the alarm, should consider Ireton's language as recorded in many places
in the Clarke Papers, Vol. I. It is the language of a man who sees ahead
of him the entire subversion of the social order he believes in. And
Clarendon does not conceal his belief that Cromwell's 'rough, brisk'
dealing with the Levellers had averted a great disaster.]

[Footnote 9: The evidence for this story is quite good enough to make
it, in its general sense, admissible; but the details, and the date, are
doubtful.]

[Footnote 10: The plan provided each bishop with a standing council of
presbyters without whose consent he could perform no act of jurisdiction
or ordination.]




  VII


On November 14th 1647, the unhappiest man in England was Colonel
Hammond, Commandant of Carisbrooke Castle. He had been miserable among
all the quarrels at Putney: he did not like Republicans, or common
soldiers mixing themselves in politics. Indeed, the position of a
gentleman in the Army of the Parliament, heartily convinced that he was
on the right side and that it was being very rapidly turned into the
wrong side, must have been distressing. He had applied for this quiet,
distant, uncontentious post, and got it, and now the King had arrived to
make it, beyond all question, the most difficult post in England. The
King had been told that Hammond was that sort of man, and he had seen
him at Hampton Court. That is why he went to Carisbrooke.

The King's nerves had been shaken, and when once he had made the effort
to get away from Hampton Court, he was at a loss. Effort was in fact
becoming difficult for him altogether, and the companions of his flight
were not very helpful. They began by losing their way, which mattered
the less as they really do not seem to have known where they were
going.[11] Presumably to the Isle of Wight--but they had made no
arrangements either for getting there or for getting away again.
Possibly to France--but they had omitted to charter a ship, and by the
time they were near the coast all the outports were closed. The King
stayed all day at Lord Southampton's house at Titchfield, while two of
them went ahead to see what Hammond would do. They met him on his
morning ride round the Castle. He nearly fell off his horse. He could
only moan, 'If he is in the Island I am ruined. If he isn't, keep him
away.' They persuaded him to come across and see the King, and that
evening the King crossed back with him. The care-worn Hammond was a good
soldier, and he knew the rules. He could make no promises, and so he
made none. But he could behave like a gentleman, and he did.

In the unceasing criss-cross of these months, we have to stop every now
and then to take our bearings afresh. Down to September at least, there
is an _entente_ of King and officers against Parliament, soldiers
growling in the background, and Scots hovering hopefully in the wings.
With the King's flight the characters re-group themselves: it is now the
King and the Scots against Parliament and Army. Not that Parliament is
solid by any means: there is a strong Presbyterian section which is in
the nature of things pro-Scot, pro-King, and anti-Army, and this section
has the City of London with it. But in the Commons the attendance is so
slack, and the whipping so perfunctory, that Parliament may decide
almost anything one day and almost anything else the next. The Lords had
ceased to count. Still, on the whole we must think, in November and
December 1647, Army and Parliament as reconciled, and on the last night
of the year their reunion was celebrated by a dinner party at Windsor
where everybody swore to live and die with, and for, everybody else. It
must have been, as one of the guests said, 'very sweet and comfortable'.
Prohibition was not part of the Puritan creed.

Meanwhile the King was living in unwonted freedom and comfort.
Carisbrooke had been hastily furnished by stripping Cranborne Lodge.
His books were sent after him, and Hammond began to arrange the
parade-ground as a bowling green, with a garden house where he could
read and write when the fine weather came. To ride about the Isle of
Wight all the morning, hunting or looking at the ships: to work at his
papers all the afternoon; a game of bowls, a good dinner and an evening
over the fire, writing mottoes on the fly-leaves of his favourite books:
to be greeted with loyal cheers whenever he went out and devoted
courtesy when he came back--if Charles could have pictured himself as a
public man in retirement, he might have thought that life had treated
him very fairly. But it never occurred to him that a King could retire.
He had recovered his liberty--his moral liberty by the breakdown of
Ireton's projects, his bodily liberty by withdrawing to the Isle of
Wight. Actually, Hammond had a closer hold on him than he knew and, just
before Christmas, Cromwell, who seems to have had a great liking for the
scrupulous Colonel--they were a sort of cousins, as Hammond had married
Hampden's daughter--paid a flying visit to the Island to stiffen his
principles.

The King had made his offer--Ussher's Plan for the Church, no
confiscation of Church lands; general toleration for all but Papists and
open anti-Christians; the militia and Privy Council to be regulated and
appointed by Parliament for his life; the Army to be paid, and a general
Act of Oblivion passed. The offer was so reasonable, the sacrifices made
by the Crown were so large, that no one, unless he was infected with an
incurable distrust of the King, could hesitate to open negotiations on
the new basis. Someone remarked to Ireton that it looked as if King and
Parliament would settle at last. 'I hope they will,' he said, moodily,
'and on such terms that we can fight them both with a clear conscience.'

With this enigmatic remark we pick up our clue again. Ireton had divined
that the real conflict would be Army against Parliament, and he was in a
mood to welcome it. He had reason to be aggrieved with Parliament, which
had torn through all his fine-spun projects. Possibly, like Cromwell,
though he would not have put it in Cromwell's chapel-going style, he was
uncomfortable about the part for which he had cast himself in the bright
days at Hampton Court. And he had realized that the Army could only be
kept together on a left-wing programme. He was neither a republican nor
a democrat. His convictions were monarchic, his temperament was
aristocratic. But a left-wing programme was beginning to mean a
Republic.

We seem to have forgotten all about the disbandment of the Army, which
only six months before had set the country a-quiver with excitement and
apprehension. It was still unpaid. With the ascendancy the Army leaders
had acquired by the reduction of London, it would not have been
difficult to require Parliament to pay the men and send them home. But
they could not be sent home. The combination--London, Westminster,
Scotland--would then have been unopposed, and this time the King would
be at the head of it. Again and again he had pressed for a Personal
Treaty: he knew well enough that once in London with the train-bands
round him he was impregnable. Next to London, his most hopeful place was
Scotland--if he could get there. If he could not, the Scots might come
to England. Therefore the Army could not disband. Therefore, if the Army
wanted the King's head, they must have it. A serious conclusion for a
Conservative statesman to arrive at, but practical logic demanded it. No
doubt the Army might conceivably be managed: the execution of the King
was not yet inevitable: it was only a possibility that had to be faced.
If there was another war, it would have to be faced very soon. No one
could contemplate without dismay the picture of fresh armies marching
and counter-marching over England, fresh sacks and sieges, fresh war
taxation, if it was all to end in fresh negotiations for the settlement
of a country which by then would be a desolate appendage of the Kingdom
of Scotland.

The negotiations with the Scots, as we have seen, were in train while
the King was at Hampton Court. They were continued at Carisbrooke,
parallel with the English negotiations--the response to the King's offer
of November 17th. Parliament had not budged from its position when it
tendered the Newcastle Propositions--Dogeship or nothing. Militia in
perpetuity, proscription of the Prayer Book, abolition of the hierarchy,
sale of Church lands, they were all still on the programme. The fruits
of the reconciliation of Parliament and the Army were now seen. The
King, very naturally, turned to the Generals for support. Fairfax
declined to intervene between King and Parliament. Only one resource was
left him, and on December 26th he signed the Engagement with the Scots.
Two days later he refused the propositions of Parliament. The cry of
relief is audible in Cromwell's letter to Hammond, informing him that
the House had voted for No More Addresses to the King, and that the
Committee of Both Kingdoms was dissolved.

    Blessed be God! I can write and thou receive freely. Dear Robin,
    this business hath been, I trust, a mighty providence to this
    poor Kingdom and to us all. The House of Commons is very
    sensible of the King's dealings--and of Our Brethren's!--in this
    late transaction. You should do well, if you have anything that
    may discover juggling, to search it out, and let me know it. It
    may be of admirable use at this time, because we shall, I hope,
    instantly go upon business in relation to them, tending to
    prevent danger.

And it ends with something like a chuckle. Parliament had been persuaded
to think that the Isle of Wight was exposed to a French attack and ought
to be reinforced--how very convenient that the King should be there just
now.

In effect, and almost without restriction, the Scots had undertaken to
replace the King on the throne by arms. When they had done their work,
the Scottish army was to return home, and the English forces were to be
disbanded. England, naturally, was to pay, and His Majesty's Blessed
Restoration was to be commemorated by a grand uprooting of Baptists and
Congregationalists, and a handsome distribution of Court and diplomatic
appointments to subjects of the King's 'ancient and native Kingdom'. It
is very difficult to believe that either party to this wonderful compact
took, it seriously. Presumably both reckoned that with a country so
divided as England, where the King's name could still sometimes set
Parliamentary regiments cheering on parade, the threat of armed
intervention would be enough and that the practical difficulties of
beating Fairfax in the field and collecting the war indemnity would not
have to be faced.

All over England and Wales that winter the King's friends were on the
alert. So, it is true, was the intelligence service on the other side,
always one of the most efficient branches of the Parliamentary
administration. The worry seems to have got on the unfortunate Colonel's
nerves and to have impaired his manners. It would not have required much
boldness or organization to have contrived the King's escape so long as
the whole Island was open to him, and Hammond decided to remove some of
his staff and confine him to the castle. The King lost his temper and
berated Hammond soundly. 'You are an equivocating gentleman. You use me
neither like a gentleman nor a Christian.' The distracted Colonel
exploded. 'I'll speak to you,' he said, 'when you are in a better
temper.' 'I have not slept well to-night,' the King explained mildly. 'I
have used you very civilly, Sir.' 'Then why don't you now?' 'Sir, you
are too high,' 'That,' replied the little King, apparently thinking that
a mild joke would ease the situation, 'must be my shoemaker's fault. All
my shoes are made to the same last.' But Hammond sulked. 'Shall I have
liberty to go about to take the air?' 'No; I cannot grant it.' His
chance had passed. One of his pages, Henry Firebrace, went on working
out a plot for his escape. It broke down. It all turned on the King
being able to get through a particular window. Firebrace was sure he
could not. The King was sure he could. He tried, and Firebrace was
right. Charles was not an easy man to work for.

This was on March 20th. On March 23rd, evidently by pre-arrangement, the
Captain of Pembroke Castle rose for the King. He was followed, in
Ireland, by Lord Inchiquin, who closed a succession of savage victories
over the Catholic rebels by suddenly changing sides. The next thing
would be an Irish army landing in Chester and the Welsh ports. The two
gates of the Kingdom, Berwick and Carlisle, were seized by Royalist
commanders. London was distracted. The Spanish Ambassador took a simple
delight in bonfires and Catherine wheels, and Parliament had to request
him to desist from his exciting hobby. One mob went forth to attack the
troops at Whitehall, very nearly captured Cromwell and Ireton, and was
scattered by a cavalry charge along the Strand. Another seized Newgate
and Ludgate, chased the Lord Mayor into the Tower, and was broken up by
infantry and cavalry at Leadenhall. The Home Counties, from Norfolk
round to Sussex, even the old Puritan counties, Essex and Suffolk, were
stirring for the King. On May 3rd the Scottish ultimatum arrived in
London, demanding the immediate disbandment of the English Army. With
the Scots mustering for war, the Royalists gathering in every English
shire, it was useless either to arraign the King for the past or to make
plans for the future. The only thing to do was to keep him safe and wait
on events.

A strange quietism, the passivity of exhaustion, was gaining even on the
Army:

    Some of us judging it a duty to lay down our arms, to quit our
    stations and put ourselves into the capacities of private men.
    Some also even encouraged themselves and us to such a thing, by
    urging for such as practice the example of our Lord Jesus: who
    when He had borne an eminent testimony to the pleasure of His
    Father in an active way, sealed it at last by His sufferings:
    which was presented to us as our pattern for imitation.

The religious mind, especially when its chief nourishment is the
rhetoric of prayers and preaching, loves to dramatize its movements.
There is very little reason to suppose that if Captain Allen and his
fellow-mourners had laid down their arms and returned to the station of
private men they would have had to suffer anything more serious than the
pain of hearing the Prayer Book read in their parish churches, and, no
doubt, of disgorging some of the estates they had annexed. Their
superior officers might indeed have found it convenient to retire to
Holland. Cromwell seems to have been less anxious about his spiritual
than his financial future: he was agreeably surprised 'as things stand'
by the handsome portion which Mr. Mayor offered with his daughter's hand
for Richard Cromwell, and a sharp attack, perhaps of influenza, produced
very serious reflections. Parliament had assigned him an estate of 1680
a year in land, at the expense of the Marquess of Worcester. He now
made over 1000 a year to the State for the service of Ireland. If he
remained in the Army he lost little, because his pay as
Lieutenant-General was 1100 a year--and much easier to collect than
Lord Worcester's rents. If the King came back, there would be no rents
and no pay either.

But Fairfax had his army thoroughly in hand, and the promptness of his
dispositions suggests that as a commander he has been unfairly
over-shadowed by the splendour of Cromwell's victories in the field. The
pious _dfaitisme_ to which Captain Allen bears witness vanished as soon
as the Army was at bay. The story has often been told how the officers
met in prayer at Windsor to brace themselves against the coming storm:
how the Lieutenant-General pressed very earnestly on all then present a
thorough consideration of their actions as an Army, and their ways
particularly as private Christians: how Major Goffe preached from
Proverbs i, 23.

    Turn you at my reproof: behold, I will pour out my spirit unto
    you, I will make known my words unto you.

And how 'hardly able to speak a word to each other for weeping', they
were led and helped to a clear agreement

    that it was the duty of our day, with the forces we had, to go
    out and fight against those potent enemies, which in all places
    appeared against us, with an humble confidence, in the name of
    the Lord only, that we should destroy them.

Detaching Cromwell for the Welsh front, Fairfax prepared to march to
Berwick. He got as far as Hounslow. Kent had risen, and the fleet in the
Downs had declared for the King. The Prince of Wales, in slippers and a
very dirty shirt, landed at Sandwich. He was the right height but the
wrong colour, and he proved to be an imaginative lad who admitted under
examination that, as everyone said he was the Prince, he decided to say
so too. He got away with 100 and three bunches of asparagus from a
loyal lady, an afternoon's duck-shooting with admirers from the Fleet,
and a wigging from the House of Lords. In twelve days Fairfax had
recovered Kent, only to find that he was now wanted in Essex, and from
the middle of June to the end of August the Army that should have been
defending the North was pinned down at Colchester. In the West, Cromwell
found the Welsh garrisons tougher than he had expected. The only force
available to meet the invasion was Lambert's few regiments in the
Pennines, with two roads to watch, and a hostile Scarborough and
Pontefract in their rear. The Scots crossed the Border on July 8th.
Pembroke surrendered on July 11th. There was just time for Cromwell to
pick up the guns which were coming round to Hull by sea, and to reach
Lambert before the Scottish army got past him into Cheshire. But it was
enough. The marching powers of that Army seem to have been poor. By
August 17th they had only got as far as Preston. Three days later, with
half of them prisoners and the rest scattered in flight, Cromwell sat
down to draw the moral, 'Take courage', he wrote to the Speaker, 'to do
the work of the Lord, in fulfilling the end of your magistracy, in
seeking the peace and welfare of the land: that all that will live
peaceably may have countenance from you, and they that will not leave
troubling the land may speedily be destroyed out of the land.' Whether
this ominous phrase included the king was, in Cromwell's mind, an open
question. But it was a question which Ireton and Harrison had already
answered for themselves.

[Footnote 11: On the way, a pamphlet which the King had borrowed from
Thomason the bookseller was dropped in the mud. The King gave his
gentlemen the strictest injunction to see that it was returned. The
pamphlet, and Thomason's grateful acknowledgment of the King's honesty
as a book-borrower, still survive.]




  VIII


To classical Republicans, nurtured on Livy and Plutarch, an occasional
act of tyrannicide, the Brutus and Cassius business, is a kind of
professional gesture intended to show that they are true to their
principles. Republicanism of that austere and academic type is rather
the creed of the aristocrat than of the people, of a Sydney or a Ludlow,
than of Hunckes or Jubbes. To become popular it must be alloyed with
some more massive emotion, which in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries was supplied by religion, and in its turn the emotion must be
justified by a theory. Cardinal Manning once observed that there was
only a plank between the Presbyterians and the Jesuits. In the
seventeenth century the two classics of regicide were the books,
respectively, of the Scottish Presbyterian, Buchanan, and the Spanish
Jesuit, Mariana. They were constantly coupled together, and though
naturally they start from different premises, they arrive at the same
conclusion. The King is king by contract. If he violates the terms of
his contract he may be removed or slain.

The ordinary Puritan officer had probably never heard of Buchanan or
Mariana.[12] But their ideas were in the air, and he had direct access
to the Sacred Book on which they drew. The old Testament bears hard on
kings, and one text, improved by a marginal reading from the Genevan
version, seems to have sounded in the ears of the fanatic Harrison and
his like with baleful reiteration. 'Come out, come out, thou Man of
Blood. The Lord hath returned upon thee all the blood of the house of
Saul in whose stead thou hast reigned. Thou art taken in thy mischief
because thou art a Man of Blood.' It was at Putney in 1647 that these
murmurings had first become audible.

    What [asked Captain Bishop] is the reason that we are distracted
    in Council, and that we cannot as formerly preserve this Kingdom
    from that dying Condition in which it is? After many enquiries
    in my spirit I find this answer, and the answer which is given
    to many Christians besides amongst us. I say: a compliance to
    preserve that Man of Blood and those principles of tyranny which
    God from Heaven by His many mercies hath manifestly declared
    against, and which I am confident may be our destruction.

Mr. Wildman followed on: 'I am clearly of opinion that it is not of God
to decline the doings of justice where there is no way left of doing
mercy. I much agree that it is very questionable whether there be a way
left for mercy upon that Person.' On November 11th, the day of the
King's flight, Harrison insisted on having the question debated without
disguise. Cromwell took him on his own ground. 'He put several cases in
which murder was not to be punished. Stated the case of David upon
Joab's killing of Abner, that he spared him upon two prudential grounds:
firstly, he would not spill more blood; secondly, the sons of Zeruiah
were too hard for him.' Ireton as usual took the Constitutional point.
The King might be a man of blood, but as the law had provided no means
of trying a King, to execute him would in its turn be murder. Cromwell
urged the argument which was rarely out of his mouth in those days--we
have heard it before when the march on London was debating: 'We can only
do it if it becomes our absolute and indisputable duty to do it; in the
present circumstances it is not.' Fairfax for once broke silence with
the most sensible observation of the day. To kill the King merely meant
transferring all rights of the Crown to his successor: the main question
was to determine what the rights of the Crown were. And Commissary
Cowling summed up. 'What we have been fighting against is the exorbitant
powers of the King, not his person. Bring them within the law, and leave
him alone.' All the struggles of the next twelve months are there in
embryo, and the process of the drama is that Ireton rationalized the
prophesyings of Harrison into a policy and confronted Cromwell with an
accomplished idea. Fairfax went with the stream as long as he could, and
then stood apart and waited for 1660.

Colchester surrendered on August 27th. By an ominous departure from the
chivalry of the last war, the Royalist commanders were shot. We are
entering on that phase through which all revolutions seem predestined to
pass, when the thirst for blood swallows every other appetite, when the
simplicity of a violent solution seizes on minds exhausted by the
turmoil of patternless events. It is most formidable when it seizes the
intellectual man, and it had now seized Ireton. Contemporaries called
him the Cassius of the Revolution: perhaps there was a touch of
Robespierre in him too. He had, it was said, a conscientious objection
to engaging in the duels which his insolence provoked, and he died
calling out 'I will have more blood'. Neither story need be true, but we
can divine the sort of man he must have been to have such stories told
about him.

Once more the war was over, and once more the difficulties were
beginning all over again. With Cromwell's victory at Preston peace was
assured, and Parliament seized the occasion, with the main body of the
Army far away, to reopen negotiations with their prisoner. The City was
clamorous for a settlement and Fairfax approved. In all these
negotiations we feel like a ship caught in a whirlpool. We are going
round and round a point which, without some violent, extraordinary
effort, we shall never pass. Everything is superficial: nothing really
goes home. Presbytery for three years, militia for ten years, optional
Covenants, Acts of Oblivion, they all mean nothing. And on the other
side, Ehud and Eglon and the Man of Blood do not mean very much either.
That way there is no future. There was too much monarchy in the English
fabric for a Dogeship to be workable. No one, except a few rarefied
intellectuals like Milton, could conceive an impersonal government. But
there had been experiences which made it equally impossible for anyone,
with perhaps as many exceptions on the other side, to think of England
as a pure monarchy, with subordinate and revocable powers delegated to
Parliament. Unluckily, Charles was one of the exceptions.

A House of Commons which had told Elizabeth that she was 'admitted Queen
of England and therein trusted with a limited power to govern by, and
according to, the laws of the land' would have withered under the blast
of Royal anger. But there was no need to say it, so long as both parties
behaved as if it were so. Doubtless as the pressure of foreign danger
relaxed and the new gentry began to feel the Abbey lands firm under
their feet, this happy reciprocity was certain to develop points of
tension. The important thing, for the Crown, was that no one should be
provoked into theorizing about them. There are things, as St. Augustine
said of Time, which are all right till you begin talking; monarchy is
one, and James was always talking. 'I do wish,' one of his courtiers
said, 'that His Majesty was not always pointing out the analogy between
himself and God,' which, incidentally, Elizabeth had taken for granted.
One can imagine a wise King taking over the Tudor constitution,
modifying it gradually in the direction that Tudor precedent indicated
by calling his Parliament into regular and willing, not forced and
spasmodic, co-operation, and so evolving a new type of sovereignty, as
solid and popular as that of 1660, but without the virus of party in its
tissues. Hyde believed it could be done: Ireton very nearly did it. In
1641, even in 1647, it was still not impossible--in the abstract. But
with Charles, a man of deep convictions and no instincts, with a very
active brain and no real intellectual power, it had become impossible.
From every negotiation, from every undertaking, he sinks back to his
centre, the unlimited, indispensable kingship, from which he starts up
on some new negotiation towards some incompatible undertaking. This is
the midpoint of the whirlpool, which only a desperate pilot could force
the vessel past.

[Footnote 12: But that 'the Army are Jesuited' was a common saying in
London that autumn.]




  IX


On September 18th negotiations were opened at Newport. Cromwell that day
was near Berwick, preparing to invade Scotland, and thoughtfully
promising the Scots to make the invasion as inexpensive to that kingdom
as possible. Fairfax was at St. Albans, with Ireton sulking and
resigning, and writing long letters on the situation to his
father-in-law. Fairfax wanted the new Treaty to succeed. Ireton and the
Republicans did not.

The King had removed from Carisbrooke a few days before to the house of
Mr. Hopkins, a gentleman of Newport. What with the King's household,
headed by four peers and two bishops, the fifteen Parliamentary
commissioners and their attendant divines and servants, the little town
was crowded. They met in the Town Hall, the King sitting in a chair of
state, the Commissioners at a long table below. The King's advisers
stood behind him, they were not permitted to join in the discussion. So
the Treaty opened, and the first words showed that Parliament was quite
as immovable as the King. The propositions tendered at Newport were
those tendered a year before at Hampton Court. It would be a waste of
time to follow the details: both parties had lost all hold on reality:
they were in perpetual check to each other. But the King, in thinking
that, if he could hold out long enough or if he could escape, he might
still recover his Crown, was nearer the truth than Parliament in
supposing that a vote of the two Houses would be enough to impose the
Covenant on an army of victorious sectaries.

Perhaps it is time to look at this memorable instrument more closely. An
English Covenanter undertakes first, as we have seen, to endeavour the
reformation of the Church according to the Word of God and the example
of the Best Reformed Churches; second, to extirpate popery, prelacy,
heresy, superstition, schism, profaneness, and whatsoever shall be found
contrary to sound doctrine and the power of godliness; third, to
preserve the rights of Parliament, the liberties of the Kingdom, and to
defend the King's person and authority; fourth, to discover and punish
all incendiaries, malignants and evil instruments in Church and State;
fifth, to maintain peace with Scotland; sixth, to pursue this Covenant
jealously and neither to quit it for the contrary part, nor give himself
over to a detestable indifference or neutrality.

It will, of course, be seen that Article II is equally repugnant to
Churchmen, to Congregationalists, and to Baptists, since, if the
Presbyterian is right, all the others must be heretics and therefore
liable to the vague but alarming process known as extirpation.
Parliament had in fact, on one of its happy-go-lucky days, already voted
that anyone who got the doctrine of Baptismal Regeneration wrong should
be imprisoned for life, and on that mysterious topic it might safely be
assumed that all the views that could be held were held, and that all
but one were profane or superstitious in the eyes of those who held the
other. Indeed, the term malignant in Article IV had come to have in
Presbyterian circles a very odd association. Colonel Petit of Snow Hill
found that his instructions required him to fight against 'all
malignants, sectaries, and godly persons'. It was not a slip of Alderman
Gibb's tongue; godly, on both sides, had become a party term,
exchangeable with sectary. The reunion of the Anglican and Presbyterian
wings was in train.

In reiterating their demands for the Covenant, therefore, Parliament
were beating the air to their own undoing. The singular thing is that
they should have persisted so long and stubbornly. The truth is, that it
had become a party obsession, like Free Imports with old Liberals.
Anti-prelacy was the only rag left of the flag unfurled in 1640. The
great Reform Party split--very much as the Reform Cabinet of 1831
split--on the Church question. Hyde and Falkland went right, Pym went
left; and what was left of Pym's crew clung to the last plank still
afloat of Pym's platform. If that went under, there was nothing left for
them to do. They just had a majority in Parliament, and they knew better
than to dissolve.

Early in October, Cromwell entered Edinburgh. The Commission of Kirk
appointed three members to wait on him, Mr. Blair, Mr. Guthrie and Mr.
Dickson. Blair was an old acquaintance, familiar with Cromwell's
religious views. They proceeded in the approved manner of a deputation
taking the measure of a candidate.

'What,' they asked, 'is your opinion of monarchical government?'

'I am for monarchical government, and that in the person of this King
and his posterity.'

'What is your opinion anent the Toleration?'

'I am altogether against toleration.'

'What is your opinion anent the government of the Kirk?'

'Oh, now, Mr. Blair, you article me too severely: you must pardon me
that I give you not a present answer to this; I must have time to
deliberate.'

The deputation retired. Mr. Dickson, rubbing his elbow, said: 'I am very
glad to hear this man speak as he does.' Mr. Blair replied: 'And do you
believe him? If you knew him as well as I do you would not believe one
word he says. He is an egregious dissembler and a great liar. Away with
him! He is a Greeting Devil.'

The evidence for this story,[13] so important for the attitude of
Cromwell at this time and his character at all times, is unimpeachable.
However we interpret it, the story is a strange one, but not
inexplicable if we recall the dates. Cromwell must have known of the
opening stages of the Newport negotiations. To declare against This King
just then was equally to declare against Parliament and, in Edinburgh,
he could not have known how far forward the Army of the South had been
brought, whether in fact Fairfax or Ireton was in control. But on the
whole, from a distance, it must have looked as if things were moving
towards a Restoration, and indeed, if Charles could have brought himself
to close promptly at Newport, he might have been back in London in time
to welcome the victor from the North, Oliver Earl of Essex, Malleus
Scotorum.

    Dios! que buen vassallo se hobiesse buen senore!

But, all the while, the call for justice on the Man of Blood was growing
louder, and, in the Newport Treaty, Parliament seemed to be sheltering
the great delinquent. If only we had some of those long letters which
Ireton sat up at night writing--a habit over which his father-in-law
could be waggishly reproachful--we should be able to trace far better
than we now can the closing of the threads. Indirectly, we can see his
line of reasoning, because he wrote to Hammond, Hammond sought counsel
from Cromwell, and Cromwell, who was marching slowly South, replied in a
letter which is preserved.

Ireton--so I read him in Cromwell's interpretation--admitted that the
Republicans of the Army were a minority party. Were they justified in
employing their armed strength to coerce the majority? Here we may
revert to the Ireton of 1647 and his emphatic demand that the Army
programme should be published before the Army marched on London. He was
in the same position now, and he had more time to play with because
nothing could be done till the Army of the North returned, and Cromwell
was deliberately not hurrying. He began, I think, to work at it soon
after the fall of Colchester, with one eye fixed on Newport and the
proceedings of Parliament with the King. Most men's minds move in a
pattern, and Ireton could not help remembering how Parliament had
treated his last attempt to provide the country with a constitution.
This time, however, he had force behind him.

But could force properly be applied to Parliament? This was the
agitating question that he had planted in Hammond's mind--and in the
mind of that good House of Commons man, his father-in-law. With the
question he had provided means for arriving at an answer.

'First: _Salus populi; summa lex._ Is this a sound position? Second (and
this argument has two branches): (_a_) Is not Parliament by conduct
involved in certain understandings with the Army, and therefore bound to
consult the Army in any negotiations for a settlement? (_b_) Are these
particular negotiations at Newport likely to result in _Salus populi_,
as the Army if so consulted would define it? Third: Is not the Army,
being assembled on stated grounds to secure certain ends, an
equiponderant authority to obtain those ends?'

The argument is close-woven, but the practical conclusion is obvious. If
the Newport Treaty is not likely to have results which the Army can
approve, the Army may properly set Parliament aside.

But is there any prospect of success? There are two elements of weakness
in our position. One is indifference. A party in the Army are for
non-intervention because they do not see any balance of advantage on
either side. If the King comes back on Newport terms they will be,
personally, no worse off. And this party is strongly influenced by fear
of social subversion: they are disquieted by the alliance of Republicans
and Anabaptists: their position is that any government is better than
none, and the best government is that under which property is safest.
Really, Anabaptism is not dangerous, their alarms are groundless. On the
other side, an increasing number of the officers are in favour of
action, especially in the Army of the North, where they are practically
unanimous.

These are only arguments in favour of doing something, and as Ireton had
said a year ago: before you decide to do something, you must know what
you are going to do. To translate the terms of Revolution into terms of
peaceful politics, you may turn the Government out, but are you prepared
to take office? Have you a programme? We are back in the Reading
position, only this time it is Army against King (and the Presbyterians
in Parliament) instead of Army against Presbyterians and the City. The
programme must therefore be one which will unite Army and Radicals
against Presbyterians and King. It must provide for the King's trial,
for the payment of the Army arrears, for the exclusion of Presbyterians
from Parliament. Beyond that lies the constitution of the
future--biennial Parliaments and a limited monarchy, or presidency,
without a negative voice. But this part of the Programme was never
completed. Things were beginning to move with a rush, and always towards
the left. We approach the darkest turn in the labyrinth and, as usual,
our best course is to stop and reckon up the dates.[14]

The Newport negotiations ended on October 21st when the King made a
final offer of Ussher's Plan for the Church. On the 27th the House of
Commons rejected it. A fortnight later, on November 10th at St. Albans,
Ireton laid before the officers the proposal on which the Republicans
were now agreed, that the King should be brought to trial. Fairfax and
his officers emphatically declined to follow him. Instead, they took out
of their pigeon-hole the old Heads of Proposals and sent them to the
King. With them went an urgent letter to Hammond to redouble his
vigilance and not let That Person escape. Charles replied, neither
accepting nor rejecting, but proposing to come to London, and consider
them, in consultation with Parliament, there.

The most remarkable fact in this sequence is the side-step of the
officers between November 10th and November 20th. It is clear that
Fairfax had asserted himself--a feat calculated to take anybody by
surprise--and insisted on the old compromise, the Heads of Proposals,
being tried once more. One can follow his line of reasoning because he
was in the position of Cromwell a month earlier. The Republican
alternative was directed as much against Parliament as against the King.
It was revolutionary in a sense for which Fairfax was not prepared. It
is clear, too, that in taking this line he had the bulk of his officers
behind him.

Everybody who was still capable of thinking at all knew that the Trial
of the King, however it was dressed up, could be nothing but a drumhead
court-martial. Parliament was against it: the City was against it: the
country overwhelmingly against it. And it was very doubtful how much of
the Army when it came to the point would really be for it. The Army of
the South was devoted to Fairfax. The Army of the North was a doubtful
factor. Its commander, as we have seen, had argued himself into the
position that it might have to act if the Newport terms proved
unsatisfactory. If the Newport terms proved to be after all the old
Heads of Proposals, Cromwell was well able to discover for himself that
Providence had meant them all along, and Ireton might well believe that
Providence, by a miracle, had brought victory within his grasp. If the
miracle did not happen, if Pharaoh's heart continued stubborn, then the
intention of Providence was equally clear. And, in profane language,
the odds were ten to one against a miracle. Charles would not accept the
proffered terms. But he was quite ready to start an argument about them.
It was his last, and irreparable, mistake, and Ireton swooped.

The King's reply reached Fairfax at St. Albans on November 18th or 19th.
Cromwell, in camp near Pontefract, was advised of the latest turn, and
on the 20th he wrote to Fairfax in language of menacing significance:

    My Lord:

    I find in the Officers of the Regiments a very great sense of
    the sufferings of this poor Kingdom; and in them all a very
    great zeal to have impartial justice done upon Offenders. And I
    must confess, I do in all, from my heart, concur with them.

The Council of Officers decided to proceed at once in the sense of the
Remonstrance. Colonel Ewer was sent to replace the scrupulous Hammond
and to secure the King's person. Ewer was a brute who had done well out
of the war: I can hardly suppose that he was Fairfax's choice for a
mission requiring judgment as well as firmness: it looks as if Fairfax
was quailing before his terrible subordinates. In fact Ewer's mission
very nearly resulted in the King's escape. He took no troops with him,
and Hammond refused to surrender his charge. The two returned to Windsor
together, and for some days the Island was in the charge of three
Deputy-Governors, none of whom knew quite what he was expected to do. On
the 29th Colonel Cobbett arrived from Windsor.

It was a wet and stormy day, with a high sea running in the Solent. As
one boatload after another of drenched troopers was put ashore and
hurried inland, the rumours and excitement multiplied. By the evening it
was known in the town that the King was to be removed. One of the
soldiers whispered it to one of the servants, and the King summoned the
Duke of Richmond and the Earl of Lindsay to consider what should be
done. With them came one of Hammond's officers, Colonel Cooke, with whom
the King had made friends at Carisbrooke. It was decided that Cooke
should find the Deputy-Governor, Rolfe, and ask him whether the rumours
were true. 'Not that I know of,' was Rolfe's reply. But he added with
some emphasis, 'You may assure the King from me that he may rest quietly
this night. On my life he shall have no disturbance this night.' 'But is
there,' Cooke asked, 'really any such design at all?' Rolfe hesitated.
'I cannot,' he finally said, 'know what is being done at Headquarters,
but so far I have received no such orders.' 'But you will give me
notice? You will not take the King by surprise?' 'Of course,' Rolfe
answered, 'that is but a respect due to the King.'

'He was fearless, but in his later years not enterprising'. Charles had
never been a man of action; he was nearing fifty, and his last eight
years had been a time of continuous and exhausting strain. In the
darkness and confusion it would not have been difficult to make a dash
for freedom. But the nervous impetuosity of his earlier years had
subsided into that languor of mind which finds it easier to talk of
reasons for doing nothing than to think of what to do. He now sent Cooke
back to ask if it was true that fresh troops were arriving in the
Island. Rolfe, who seems to have been a punctiliously truthful man,
replied that reliefs were on their way--he was not sure if they had
landed.

Meanwhile news came that two thousand foot were at Carisbrooke. Cooke
offered to ride over and see. The King objected that the weather was too
bad to go out in, and it took some argument to persuade him that a
young officer might ride a mile and back on a wet night without mortal
injury to his constitution. At Carisbrooke Cooke found a number of
officers, whom he recognized, in the Governor's parlour, but what they
were there for he could not learn. It was nearly midnight when he
returned to Newport, to find the guards doubled, and soldiers, with
matches burning, posted at the King's bedroom door. Once more Cooke went
out into the storm to expostulate with Rolfe, and by his orders the
sentinels were removed to a less suffocating distance.

Cooke's energy had succeeded in establishing the fact that something was
on foot, and the King settled down to debate the situation all over
again. It is clear that no thought of personal danger had entered his
mind: that the Army was acting in force seems even to have encouraged
him against his one fear, assassination. 'They must preserve me,' he
repeated, 'for their own sakes. No party can hope to win without me.'
Escape was so difficult too, perhaps impossible, and if it failed, he
would only have exasperated the Army for nothing. The Lords argued in
vain. Lindsay had no illusions about the Indispensable King, and
Richmond was sure that escape was still possible. 'How did you get
out?' he asked Cooke. 'I have got the password,' he answered, 'and I
could get you out too if you like to try.' The Duke slipped on an
officer's coat, and the two walked past the sentinels, out of the house
and back again.

But the King could not be persuaded. 'Listen, Sir,' Cooke pleaded, 'I
know the Army mean to seize and remove Your Majesty. It is a dark night
made for our business. I can take you past the sentries. I have horses
at hand and a boat at Cowes. You have only to say the word and it can be
done. Now, Sir, what do you mean to do?' The King was silent. Then,
firmly: 'They have promised me, and I have promised them, and I will not
break first.' 'But it was Parliament, Sir, you gave your promise to, and
the Army have already violated the pledges you received from Parliament
in return.' 'No,' said the King, 'I will do nothing that looks like
breaking my word. And now, good night. I must get as much rest as I
can.' Once more the three turned over among themselves the chances of
escape. The Duke went in with their conclusion. It was no good. 'The
King was resolved to go to bed.' For eight years Charles had been
haunted by a memory. He had promised to save Strafford and he had been
persuaded out of his word. He remembered it on the scaffold, and he
remembered it now. The next day, he was taken across the Solent, from
Yarmouth, to the gloomy discomfort of Hurst Castle.

[Footnote 13: It will be found in the Continuation of Blair's
Autobiography by his son-in-law, Row (Wodrow Society, 1848).]

[Footnote 14: I think it is plain, comparing the Ireton of the Putney
debate with the Ireton of the Remonstrance, that he was mentally
exhausted in the autumn of '48, and living on his nerves. The
Remonstrance is a singularly flat, unconvincing manifesto.]




  X


Who, at this point in the development of the story, was really in
control? Not Cromwell, who was tarrying in the Midlands on his return
from Scotland. Not Fairfax, or things would have taken a very different
turn. Rather, the decisive factor was the alliance in the Army Council,
a most unnatural alliance, of Ireton with Harrison. Whether this strange
creature was originally a butcher's boy or a lawyer's clerk we are not
now in a position to determine. He may have been both. He was
thirty-five at the outbreak of the war and, with other lawyers, enlisted
in Essex's troop of Guards. He won, and seems to have deserved, very
rapid promotion, being a prompt, skilful, and most energetic commander.
His whole life seems to have been passed in a condition of sustained
religious excitement, 'of such vivacity, hilarity and alacrity as
another man hath when he hath drunken a cup too much', a man of visions
and outpourings, 'an honest man who, from the impatience of his spirit,
will not wait on the Lord's leisure,' 'a gallant, heavenly man, but most
high-flown.' A creature of action, emotion and rhetoric, without, so far
as one can discover, a single idea in his head which bore any relation
to the state of England in 1648, from the beginning he had been the
leader, the mouthpiece, the hero of the Party of Blood, and he is the
only English politician whose resurrection has been expected by his
party.

Always sudden and dramatic in his movements, he bore down on Hurst
Castle in the night. The King, startled by the lowering of the
drawbridge, the tramp of horsemen and then silence, sent Herbert early
in the morning to find out who had arrived. Herbert was struck by the
King's visible alarm when he heard that it was Harrison. 'That is the
man that meant to kill me,' he explained. 'I was warned of it before,
and this is a fit place. Don't let me be surprised.' Herbert was able to
assure him that Harrison had only come to arrange for his removal to
Windsor. Two days later the King left Hurst Castle under a cavalry
escort, by Ringwood, Winchester, and Alton. Near Farnham a second troop
joined company, at their head a splendid figure in velvet and scarlet
who saluted like a born Cavalier. It was Harrison. At Farnham Castle
the King was to dine and sleep. He was chatting before dinner with the
lady of the house when he noticed the General at the far end of the
room. He beckoned to him and drew him apart. For half an hour the two
stood talking in a window. The King taxed him with his reported
intentions. Harrison protested, 'It is not true, Sir. What I did say, I
will say again. The Law is equally bound to great and small, and justice
has no respect of persons.' The King's relief was visible when he sat
down to dinner. By the Law, he was safe, and he still had reason to
hope. The removal from Hurst Castle to Windsor was in itself
encouraging. He was served in state: the royal dishes were tasted before
him in the ancient form: the wine was offered on bended knee. He seemed
happier, Herbert thought, than he had been since he left Hampton Court.

But there was no longer any Law in England. Too late the House of
Commons realized whither all these moves of the Army, Engagements,
Remonstrances, Agreements, and what not, were tending. They ought to
have brought the King to London while the Army was before Colchester or
in the North. Leaving him in the Isle of Wight, they had left him for
the soldiers to dispose of. They might disavow the Army and vote that
the Newport offer was 'a ground for the course to proceed upon'. The
Council of Officers responded with a declaration that Parliament had
forfeited its trust. On December 6th the House was to meet early. Before
dawn the doors were occupied by soldiers. In the lobby stood Colonel
Pride with a list of the members; Lord Grey of Groby, a simple young man
always eager to be helpful, was at his side to identify them as they
arrived. Nearly a hundred and fifty were turned back or arrested. Of the
others, the great number absented themselves. The Greeting Devil entered
London that evening. The Long Parliament had shrunk to an unauthorized
assembly, meeting by permission of the soldiers to do what the soldiers
told them, and what the soldiers would do depended on how Cromwell
handled the situation which Ireton and Harrison had made for him.

By the death of the King, the allegiance of his subjects would be, in
law and in feeling, transferred to his son, who would at once become
King of Scotland too. War with Scotland was therefore almost inevitable.
The Queen was a French princess: the Stadholder of Holland was the
King's son-in-law. The Old Enemies, and the New Enemy whose triumphant
advance in all the seas the City was watching with jealous eyes, might
all be down on us at once. On the other hand, the execution of the King
would be an extreme concession to the Wild Men, the Levellers, and
Anabaptists, whose theories had given Ireton and Cromwell so many
anxious days at Putney a year before. Only on those theories could it be
even plausibly justified or distinguished from simple assassination. To
profess even to try the King was to make a mockery of the law, to put
the trial on the footing not of law but of some mysterious Natural Right
inherent in the people of England, and then to maintain that the people
were represented by one particular group in the House of Commons, was to
make an equal mockery of justice and truth.

It was impossible to kill the King without abolishing the Monarchy. And
then? As the future proved, there was no then. There was war with
Scotland and Holland: there was a Parliament of Saints, which found its
job above its capacity and faded away, a new House of Lords that
everybody laughed at, a foreign policy as spirited as Chatham's, and as
immoral as Frederick's, and then a Restoration. Historically, the
Commonwealth is so much time wasted. Its only consequence was the
reaction it inspired, and the party divisions it consolidated. And
yet--what was to be done with the King? So long as he regarded himself
as Indispensable, nothing.[15] His death was the passionate solution of
a problem which had become logically insoluble, which his own bearing
had made insoluble. Simple deposition was more dangerous than death.
Legally he would still have been King of Scots, in fact he would still
have been King of nine Englishmen out of ten, the centre of continual
plots against the security of any government that followed him. Nor
would deposition have satisfied the wrath of the Saints.

'The Presbyterians brought the King to the block and the Independents
cut off his head.' In other words, a Constitutional opposition to
particular modes of Government developed under the stress of resistance
into a revolutionary assault upon the essential character of that
Government. So far the formula which governs the American, the French,
and the Russian revolutions is equally applicable to the destruction of
the English monarchy in 1649. If George III had been snapped up by an
American privateer and carried to Philadelphia, plenty of Bradshaws and
Iretons on the other side would have been prepared to arraign him as a
'tyrant, traitor and murtherer', and it was through the American
Revolution that the Puritan Revolution, a purely insular transaction,
was generalized, as it were, into a universal experience.

This explains the revulsion of the nineteenth century from the canonical
view of the Revolution set forth in Clarendon. For the preliminaries,
the setting of the pieces in 1641, Clarendon is indispensable, and I
know no other historian, when once the ear is attuned to the stubborn
magnificence of his style, with the same capacity to set his reader
thinking as the men of his own age thought. His intense intellectual
apprehension of persons, causes and situations, communicates itself to
us as we read, until the voice of Clarendon sounds like the voice of
history pronouncing doom. The great and lasting merit of Hallam was to
demonstrate that it was the voice of an advocate and not a judge and,
though it was written a hundred years ago, there is still no better way
of adjusting one's mind to the issues of the seventeenth century than to
read again Hallam's chapter on the Outbreak of the Civil War.

For the period covered by this essay Clarendon, writing in exile and
often ill-informed, has no longer the authority of a direct observer.
Hallam owns himself at a loss to interpret the events of 1647. The clue
had not been found. Macaulay, who brought to the subject a practical
experience of political transactions, divined the truth that the secret
lay in Cromwell's relations with his party, and that they were to be
judged by the laws which in all ages regulate the relations of parties
and their leaders. It was not the whole truth, but none the less the
three or four paragraphs which were all he could give to the subject are
a remarkably correct evaluation of the factors which we now know from
the Clarke Papers to have been operating at the time of the Hampton
Court negotiations.

In the meanwhile Carlyle had exploded into the field, bringing with him
the interpretation of Cromwell as a universal, almost a cosmic, figure
or symbol, and by his magical gift of evoking past times and places,
his demonic power of flashing characters on the screen, to be caught for
a moment and never forgotten, he created a new tradition, a canonical
view to replace that of Clarendon. But Carlyle graded the importance of
things by their personal interest to himself: to all that is not odd or
violent or dramatic in history he was indifferent. I suppose I am one of
many who felt when young after reading the sunrise of Dunbar that there
was nothing left for words to do. A maturer judgment inclines me to
agree with an observation of the late Charles Ricketts. _Cromwell_ had
been one of his favourite books. But he could not read it in the war.
'It is so dreadfully like the Kaiser.'

Carlyle's _Cromwell_ had been before the world fifteen years when
Gardiner's first two volumes appeared. No one can speak without respect
of the heroic and ill-rewarded labours of a life spent, as Thucydides
might have said, in the pursuit of everything which passes for truth,
and Gardiner's industry, his accuracy, his learning were such that every
future interpretation of the period must be in the main a
reinterpretation of his material. But he was dominated, not by Carlyle
indeed but by the atmosphere which Carlyle had created, an atmosphere
which--very much like that which the hurricane passage of Byron had
diffused a generation before--had a peculiar influence upon safe-living
Victorian Liberals, bearing witness from the security of their pulpit,
their desk, or their counting-house, against the shortcomings of the
gentry and the Church, lashing themselves to ideal stakes, and glowing
in the flames of property bonfires.

As Grote's _History of Greece_ is a monument to Philosophic Radicalism,
so Gardiner's _History_ is a monument to the Nonconformist Conscience.
What Csar was to Mommsen, Cromwell was to Gardiner: the exemplar of an
ideal polity, the pledge of its final triumph; and 'the greatest because
the most representative Englishman' was one who, in a volcanic hour of
anger, disappointment, ambition, impatience, and perhaps despair, flung
himself against the English tradition at the point where it has always
been strongest and most sensitive, its respect for law, and so condemned
his party to an age-long exclusion, hardening and narrowing, from the
national life which, wisely led, it might have permanently enriched.

Crabbe, who knew it well, has painted the Independent character, as it
survived, secluded and remote, among the leading families of our
provincial towns:

  Grave Jonas Kindred, Sybil Kindred's sire,
  Was six feet high, and looked six inches higher;
  Erect, morose, determined, solemn, slow,
  Who knew the man, could never cease to know;
  Himself he viewed with undisguised respect,
  And never pardoned freedom or neglect.
  Peace in the sober house of Jonas dwelt,
  Where each his duty and his station felt:
  Yet not that peace some favoured mortals find,
  In equal views and harmony of mind;
  Not the soft peace that blesses those who love,
  Where all with one consent in union move;
  But it was that which one superior will
  Commands, by making all inferiors still;
  Who bids all murmurs, all objections cease,
  And with imperious voice, announces--Peace!

But this is Puritanism astringent, shut off, sectarian; and what
transformations it underwent when in the nineteenth century its bearers
rose in influence and wealth we all know. What would have been the
future of Puritanism dominant, diffusive, mellow? One may think,
remembering how much in the English character was ready to welcome it,
remembering Sidney and Spenser and Falkland, Hopton and the
Standard-Bearer, Bemerton and Little Gidding, that it might have worked
with the silent pervasive power of Evangelicalism in a later age,
bracing and humanizing as it moved. But in that December it made its
fatal step aside, and took the indelible print of hypocrisy and
self-will. It gained ten years of domination and lost its own soul. In
defying the law which guarded both Parliament and King, it defied the
'ancient and inbred integrity and piety, good sense and good humour' of
the people of England. To no man were they dearer than to Cromwell, and
yet it was Cromwell, caught in a whirlwind which he had lost the will to
control, that spoke the fateful word. 'Is it possible to fall from
grace?' he asked when he was dying. 'No,' they assured him, 'it is not
possible.' History may not feel so certain.

[Footnote 15: There is indeed an alternative, which seems to have been
canvassed in the summer of 1647, and which combines political efficacy
with constitutional propriety. It may be admitted (_a_) that Parliament
can depose a king; (_b_) that Parliament had no jurisdiction over the
King of Scots (whether of Ireland, quaere). The solution was to arraign
the King in Parliament for misfeasance, bind him over by statute to be
of good behaviour and then reinstate him. A capably-led Parliament might
have done it.]




  XI


The King reached Windsor on December 23rd. That evening the Speaker told
a friend that they were going to make a last attempt. What form exactly
it took we do not know. But it failed. It was bound to fail. All that
was best and worst in Charles, his unimaginative egoism on one side, his
profound conception of his duty on the other, now joined to keep him
fixed and steady. He could not see himself as any other kind of King
than the one he always had been, the King with the last word in the
government. And he could not in conscience acknowledge the meeting at
Westminster as Parliament. The _coup d'tat_ of December 6th had placed
him in an inexpugnable position, as the guardian of the fundamental laws
of the land. If the Commons were not safe in their House, what labouring
man in England was safe in his cottage? Whether he had in secret counted
the cost we cannot tell. He had a strange hopefulness in the darkest
hours. But nothing now could have made him deviate from his path. He
was, if need be, ready to die, believing--and history need not question
his faith--that he would die for the rights, for the laws and liberties,
of his people: a King and--at last--a King of England too.

To take him out into the Castle Yard and shoot him, as Lisle and Lucas
had been shot at Colchester, would have been the simplest and most
honourable course. Any form of trial was bound to be a portentous farce:
every step towards the settled end revealed the hollowness of the ground
on which the soldiers were proceeding. No English lawyer of repute would
have anything to do with it, and the case was got up by an obliging
Dutchman, Isaac Dorislaus. The Lords would not pass the necessary
Ordinance. Out of 135 judges named by the House of Commons, 50 declined
to act. That the Rump should have chosen to simulate the forms of a
trial rather than of an attainder was a concession to the dramatic
emotion. Lesser offenders had been tried. The greatest of all must be
tried.

The preliminaries of the Trial read like the minutes of a Pageant
Committee. On January 9th, Edward Dendy, Sergeant-at-Arms, rode into
Westminster Hall, with six trumpets and his mace, and there to the
sound of martial music declared that the Court would open on the 10th.
In the afternoon he repeated the performance at the Exchange and in
Cheapside. On the 12th, Bradshaw took his seat as President, and the
Court ordered that in spite of his coy protests he should be addressed
as Lord President. The sitting on the 17th was devoted to providing for
the security of the Court, stopping up passages, patrolling the leads
and disposing of the troops on guard. Sword and mace were to be carried
before the Lord President: twenty gentlemen were to attend him. It may
have been at this stage that the Lord President laid in the tin hat
which is still preserved at Oxford. A Committee is to consider what
habits the officers of This Court shall wear: they are to consult the
Heralds. It would be dreadful to discover that you had murdered your
Sovereign in the wrong-coloured breeches.

We may call up the picture of Stuart Westminster best, if we think of
ourselves in Old Palace Yard looking past the east end of the Abbey.
There a narrow lane began, running, not straight, to a point about as
far as the statue of Peel. Everything on our right is buildings,
clustered in irregular courts, like those at St. James's, round the
Hall. Making our way among them towards the river we should find houses,
with gardens and orchards, with water-steps leading down to an open
foreshore. In one of these, Cotton House, the home of the great
Cottonian collection, the King was lodged on January 20th. He had been
brought from Windsor to St. James's the day before. His state had been
cut down, but his guardians, Colonel Whichcott at Windsor and Colonel
Tomlinson at St. James's, were humane and well-bred men, and they saw
that his personal comfort was maintained.

Sixty-seven members of the High Court sat, with Bradshaw, on benches
placed across the end of the Hall and hung with scarlet. The roll was
called, 'Thomas, Lord Fairfax.' 'Not here, and never will be. He has too
much sense.' It was Lady Fairfax in the gallery. The Lord President's
chair was of crimson velvet. Facing him sat the King, his servants close
to him on the left, the guards drawn up in hollow square, left, right,
and behind him. The spectators sat in galleries on either side, or stood
at the lower end of the Hall. Silence having been proclaimed, the Lord
President required the prisoner to hear the charge.

If--passing over the fatal objection that no court could try the King,
and that this court could try no man--we examine the charge as a
political document, as it might be a vote of censure, we find that it
contains three statements of fact and one of intention. The facts are:
First, that the King was a trustee for the good and benefit of the
people; second, that at various times and places between 1642 and 1644
he had engaged in acts of war against Parliament; third, that he had
renewed, or caused to be renewed, the war in 1648. The intention alleged
was to erect an unlimited power in himself, and to destroy the
opportunities of redress for misgovernment furnished by regular and
frequent meetings of Parliament. To which, if the King had condescended
to plead, he had a conclusive answer. The intention could not possibly
be elicited from anything that had happened in the period covered by the
facts. By giving his assent to the Triennial Bill in 1641, he had put it
out of his power to interfere with regular and frequent meetings of
Parliament, and the only answer to a charge so drawn was the
contemptuous laugh with which the King received the conclusion that

    Charles Stuart was a tyrant, traitor and murtherer, and a public
    and implacable enemy, to the Commonwealth of England.

Bradshaw called on the prisoner to reply. As the King stood up, the
surge of spectators forward from the doors of the hall drowned his first
words. It was noticed, and it is perhaps not without significance, that
the King's stammer left him when he confronted his judges. The
restlessness of mind which was the source of so many errors, the cause
of so many failures, had subsided into an entire serenity, into the
simple apprehension of one simple idea. He challenged the competence of
the Court. Like his son James, he had a trick of repeating his
sentences. 'I would know,' he said, 'by what authority, I mean lawful
authority, there are many unlawful authorities in the world, highwaymen
and pickpockets: I would know by what authority, by what lawful
authority, I was brought here. When I know a lawful authority I will
answer.' And this was all the three days' proceedings in Westminster
Hall came to--the King asserting that the sixty gentlemen on scarlet
benches were not a court, Bradshaw replying that they were. And as they
obviously were not, no more need be said.

Every effort had been made to secure for the Court names of repute in
the country. Some of the best blood in the English counties was to be
found in the roll of Members of Parliament nominated to sit--Fenwick of
Northumberland, Brereton of Cheshire, Danvers of Wiltshire, Corbet of
the Marches, Masham of Essex, Temple of Stowe--a hundred in all.
Sidney's nephew was among them, and Wentworth's grandson and Burleigh's
great-grandson. On a large view we might think of the High Commission as
the sons of the Tudor gentry sitting in judgment on the heir of Tudor
sovereignty, and preparing the way for the Whig aristocracy of the
eighteenth century, and, so regarded, the charge, with its emphasis on
the personal government of the 'thirties, while it remains untenable at
law, becomes historically convincing. In calling a new aristocracy into
existence the Tudors had created a power in equipoise to the Crown, a
power deeply bedded in the land, in the indestructible fabric of the
counties, with Parliament for its organ. Down to 1641 it was, to all
intents and purposes, solid. Then it split into the party which held
that enough had been done and the party of further advance. It always
does--it always will. Graham and Stanley stop: Russell goes on, calls in
O'Connell, and upsets the coach, and so the King, or the Conservatives,
come back again. But in 1660 the King could not go behind 1641: in 1840
the Conservatives could not go behind 1831. The flood goes down, the
stream flows on in the new channels which its violence has opened.

    Whosoever shall by God's blessing be able to preserve his
    conscience and his courage very few years, will find himself
    wished for again in his country, and may see good days
    again.[16]

What came back in 1660 was not only the Monarchy as an institution but
the Image of the King. The Monarchy had to be resettled. The Image
persisted. Parliament and the soldiers had set Charles in a light which
made all flaws in the King invisible and revealed only the lineaments of
the martyr.

After the fruitless altercation with Bradshaw he was removed to St.
James's. He spent Sunday in devotion and in preparing a statement to
read on the second day. The judges prayed, fasted, and heard three
sermons in Whitehall. London was strangely, mournfully quiet. The
ministers of the City churches met to draw up a reasoned declaration
against the trial. The Scottish Commissioners had already lodged a
protest against the proceedings taken against their King. It was
whispered that Fairfax meant to declare for the King, that he would
appeal to the Army, that he was under arrest at his house in Lincoln's
Inn Fields. But whether it was the sight of the soldiers, the solemn
pageantry of Westminster Hall, or the sudden and incredible march of
events, London was overawed. Perhaps of her half-million souls there was
not one in ten but would have heard with joy, or at least relief, that
the King had been rescued. But no one stirred.

  So much one man can do
  That does both act and know.

Throughout these days Cromwell seems to have been in a state of
hysterical exaltation, breaking out in laughter and horseplay and shouts
of rage. It is indeed clear that only some demonic determination could
have driven the Court through to its pre-appointed conclusion. On
Monday, the King delivered as much as he was allowed of the demurrer
which he had prepared on Sunday. Bradshaw stopped him: 'Sir, you may not
discuss the authority of the Court. You are to answer the charge.'

    'By your favour, Sir: I do not know the forms of law. I am not a
    lawyer. But I know as much law as any gentleman in England
    and--by your favour, Sir--I know that I am pleading for the
    liberties of the people of England more than any of you. Any man
    brought before a court may demur against the proceedings. And if
    Power without Law may make Law, I do not know a subject in
    England who can be sure of his life or anything he can call his
    own.'

Monson, Pelham, Harington, Lascelles, Mauleverer, Grey--did not these
words sound ominous to gentlemen who knew as much law as the King, who
had seen their neighbours' parks and warrens sold, their timber felled,
and the Saints battening on the proceeds? The King left the Hall that
day to a loud murmur of 'God save the King'. At St. James's he talked
freely to his staff. 'It is not a Court,' he said, 'and I believe the
greater part of the judges agree with me.' The Court, in fact, was
beginning to waver: he felt it in the air. But he was warned that
evening--perhaps through Temple, who sent information to the Royal
chaplains--that his death was intended, and he met the Court on Tuesday,
his face grey and set after two sleepless nights, with the confidence of
a man who has no more to lose. Once again he was summoned to answer.

    'For the charge [he said] I value it not a rush. It is the
    liberties of the People of England that I stand for. For me to
    acknowledge a new court that I have never heard of before, I
    that am your King, that should be an example to all the people
    of England, to uphold justice, and to maintain the laws, indeed
    I know not how to do it.'

According to programme, the King was to have been sentenced on Friday
and executed on Saturday. But it was necessary to secure a respectable
attendance at the final sitting, and on Tuesday it seemed doubtful
whether the waverers would come in. Cromwell strove hard to secure the
adherence of Fairfax, but though he would not act against his old
colleagues, he would not act with them. All Wednesday and Thursday were
spent in hearing evidence that there had been a civil war, that the King
had taken part in it, that various battles had occurred. One of the
witnesses took the opportunity to air a grievance of his own: he was a
barber by profession and a very gallant barber, because at Edgehill he
had captured the Royal Standard. Then another man came along and took it
away from him and was made a Colonel. The Court meanwhile had

    Resolved upon the whole matter:

    that this Court will proceed to sentence of Condemnation against
    Charles Stuart, King of England.

    Resolved: that the condemnation of the King shall be for a
    tyrant, traitor and murtherer:

    that the condemnation of the King shall be likewise for being a
    public enemy to the Commonwealth of England:

    that this condemnation _shall extend to death_.

    The Court being then moved _concerning the deposition and
    deprivation of the King_, before and in order to that part of
    the Sentence which concerned his execution, thought fit to defer
    the consideration thereof to some other time.

These are not the words or forms of English law. As Sarpi said of the
dagger which struck him down in Venice, _Agnosco stylum Curi Roman_.
In 1613 Suarez, at Coimbra, had produced a Defence of the Catholic Faith
against the Errors of the Anglican Sect. The manuscript was sent to Rome
for approval and there, to Suarez's great annoyance, the following
passage was interpolated.

    Dicendum est, _post sententiam condemnatoriam regis de regni
    privatione_, latam per legitmam potestatem . . . posse quidem
    eum qui sententiam tulerit, vel cui ipse commiserit, regem
    privare regno, etiam illum interficiendo, si aliter non
    potuerit, _vel si justa sententia ad hanc etiam poenam
    extendatur_.

By adopting the Roman doctrine, procedure and phraseology, Dorislaus no
doubt hoped to give the proceedings, as it were, an international
validity, to show that the game had been played according to some kind
of rules.[17]

This was on Thursday, and the death warrant was prepared that night. But
it was determined--of the debates inside the High Commission we know
nothing, but there is evidence that they were long and anxious--that the
King should be brought into Court once more on Saturday. A man may be
ready to die and yet prefer to live. There was still one chance, one
step the King might take without swerving from his course. He had
challenged the Court. Suppose he challenged the body which had appointed
it, stood up as the guardian of the Constitution in King, Lords, and
Commons? It seems--though the clouds hangs very thick over those two
days--that in some way his intention was imparted to those among his
judges who might be thought to be his friends, so that they might be
ready. On Saturday afternoon he was brought for the last time into the
Hall. As Bradshaw opened his mouth, the King broke in with an eager
earnestness:

'I desire a word: to be heard a little: I hope I shall give no occasion
to interrupt.'

'You must hear the Court first,' Bradshaw answered.

'If it please you, Sir: I desire to be heard: I do not mean to
interrupt: only a word. A sudden judgment----'

Again Bradshaw tried to quell his prisoner; again the King broke in:

'Sir, what I have to say bears on what I believe the Court is going to
say. Therefore--Sir, a hasty judgment is not so soon recalled.'

'You shall be heard before judgment: in the meantime you may forbear.'

'I shall be heard before judgment be given?'

'You shall.'

At last the Lord President got under way.

'Gentlemen,' he said, 'it is well known to all or most of you here
present that the prisoner at the bar hath been several times convented
and brought before the Court to make answer to a charge of treason and
other high crimes exhibited against him in the name of the people of
England----'

'Not a half, nor a quarter of them,' rang out from the gallery. 'Oliver
Cromwell is a traitor.'

In the confusion Axtell, second in command of the regiment, Hewson's,
on duty, was heard shouting, 'Take those masks off. Come down, or I'll
fetch you. Shoot the drabs if they say another word'. The
Serjeant-at-Arms bustled to the spot, but the malignants had slipped out
through a private door.

Bradshaw resumed once more. The Court, he said, had considered the
charge: the notoriety of the facts alleged: the contumacy of the
prisoner in refusing to answer, which in law amounted to confession.
Nevertheless, if the King desired to offer anything in his own defence,
the Court was still prepared to hear him.

The King rose. 'If', he said, 'I had a respect to my life more than to
the peace of the Kingdom and the liberty of the subject, I must have
made a particular defence for myself, for by that at least I might have
delayed an ugly sentence which I believe will pass upon me.' He desired
to be heard by the Lords and Commons in the Painted Chamber. . . .

While he was speaking a whispered altercation broke out on the scarlet
benches. 'I must do it.' Cromwell was seen to turn round on the
interrupter. 'Can't you be quiet?' 'No, I can't.' Downes stood up. 'I am
not satisfied to give my consent to the sentence. I desire the Court may
adjourn to hear my reasons.' Bradshaw was at a loss: the contingency
had not been provided for, and his language sounds as if he intended to
overrule both the King and Downes, but was forced by the feeling on the
benches to grant an adjournment.

The sixty-seven filed into the Court of Wards. There an angry debate
sprang up. Downes pleaded that the King's request should be referred to
Parliament. Cromwell declaimed against the business of the day being
interrupted by one 'peevish, tenacious' man. The allies on whom Downes
had counted were silent. Bullied, scolded, and alone, poor Downes's
stock of courage was soon exhausted, and he retired sobbing from the
scene. So at least he told the story after the Restoration. The facts
may have been as he alleged. But at the time he passed for a toady of
Cromwell's: he recovered his spirits sufficiently to sign the
death-warrant: he was provided with a comfortable job under the
Commonwealth. I cannot avoid the suspicion that the scene may have been
arranged by Cromwell to test the strength of the Opposition before the
final stage was reached.

The Court returned. Bradshaw acquainted the King with their decision and
proceeded. He spoke at great length, and what he said came to this. He
re-stated, as the prime issue, the case against the King as it stood in
1640--the intermission of Parliaments, proving the King's misfeasance in
an office of trust. Herein lay the gravamen of those two counts, tyranny
and treason.

And now the Lord President was running under full sail:

    'Murder,' he boomed, 'is a hainous and crying sin. Sir, I will
    presume that you are so well read in Scripture as to know what
    God himself hath said concerning the shedding of man's blood.
    Sir, we know no dispensation in that Commandment "Thou shalt do
    no murder." God's law forbids it. Man's law forbids it, and the
    People, by their Representatives, having power in their hands,
    had there been but one act of wilful murder by you committed,
    had power to punish you for it.'[18]

Which in law was nonsense, and in fact irrelevant. The People, by their
representatives, had already determined to negotiate with the King on
Newport terms. That was why the Commons were turned out of their house
on December 6th.

The King grew restless under this infliction, and as Bradshaw
approached, by way of Nebuchadnezzar and Uriah the Hittite, to his
conclusion, he broke in once more, in a last pitiful effort to avert the
inevitable.

'I desire one word before you give sentence. I desire you to hear me
concerning these great imputations you have laid on me.'

Humanity and dignity seem struggling in the Lord President's answer.

'Truly, Sir, I would not willingly interrupt you in any thing you have
to say that is proper for us to admit of. But, Sir, you have not owned
us as a Court. You look on us as a Sort of People met together!'

The Act was read, the proceedings recited, sentence given. As the guard
closed in, the King's voice was heard for the last time calling through
the tumult:

'Expect what justice other people will have.'

    Note.--The contemporary accounts of the Trial (of all degrees of
    value) will be found printed in Mr. Muddiman's _Trial of Charles
    I_, a collection of great interest, especially on the anecdotal
    and journalistic side. Of the king's last hours the story is
    told in Mr. Beresford's _Gossip of the XVII and XVIII Century_,
    so well that it need never be told again.

[Footnote 16: Hyde to Nicholas: November 15th, 1646.]

[Footnote 17: The interpolated passage is in Suarez, Lib. VI, cap. 4.
18. That it was interpolated is known from his English secretary John
Saltkell, who told the story to Bishop King of Chichester: his statement
will be found in the appendix to Walton's Life of Hooker. Dorislaus was
executed (it seems the right word) by Scottish royalists in Holland a
few months later.]

[Footnote 18: 'Murder' proceeded Mr. Honeythunder. 'Bloodshed! Abel!
Cain! I hold no terms with Cain. I repudiate with a shudder the red hand
when it is offered to me. The Commandments say no murder. _No_ murder,
Sir!'

'And they also say, you shall bear no false witness,' observed Mr.
Crisparkle.]




  XII


Charles had less than three days to live. The events of those days are
more minutely recorded than any passage of our older history. But none
the less a certain mystery hangs over them. The death-warrant, as we
have seen, was made out to take effect on Saturday. It was engrossed on
Friday when the first signatures--Bradshaw, Grey, Cromwell, and so
forth, not more than twenty-eight in all--were appended: and it was
directed to three officers who were named. Two refused to act. To
prepare a new warrant was hazardous because of the twenty-eight some
might have refused to sign again. The parchment was therefore scraped,
and new dates and names inserted. But the waverers were overawed, and
hardly by threats, certainly not by violence, but by bluster and a
fierce determination not very different from either, twenty-one
signatures more were extracted, and the warrant was issued on Monday to
Colonel Huncks, and as substitutes for the recalcitrant pair, Colonel
Hacker and Lieutenant-Colonel Phayre. A Committee, of which Harrison and
Ireton were members, had recommended the open street before Whitehall as
a fit place. It was to be a public act, and grave difficulties might
have arisen with the City had Tower Hill been chosen. To superintend the
operations better, Ireton and Harrison took rooms in the Palace.

The King spent Saturday night at Whitehall. On Sunday, Juxon, Bishop of
London, came to him. Several London ministers made a respectful tender
of their services. The King courteously declined them, and he sent
messages to his brother-in-law and other friends that henceforth he
would receive no one but his children. At sunset he was removed to St.
James's. Late at night, he sent Herbert into Westminster to recover from
a lady who had it in charge a casket containing his Court jewels. Early
on Monday he burnt his papers and ciphers. The two children were brought
from Sion House: Elizabeth was fourteen, the Duke of Gloucester eight.
The King bade her read Hooker, and Lancelot Andrewes and Laud's book to
ground her against Popery, and to forgive his enemies, but never trust
them. 'He bid me tell my Mother that his thoughts had never strayed
from her, and that his love should be the same to the last. He desired
me not to grieve for him, because he should die a martyr, and that he
doubted not but the Lord would settle his throne upon his son, and that
we should be all happier than we could have expected to have been if he
had lived.' To the little boy he spoke more simply. 'They are going to
cut off my head,' he said, 'and some of them may want to make you King.
But you must not be a King so long as Charles and James live.' The child
spoke up boldly. 'I will be torn in pieces first.' Then the King divided
his jewels between them. Herbert, going out into the Park, met a
kinsman, George Herbert's brother, Henry. He sent a message that the
King should find much comfort in the second chapter of Ecclesiasticus.[19]

    For gold is tried in the fire, and acceptable men in the furnace
    of adversity.

    They that fear the Lord will prepare their hearts, and humble
    their souls in his sight:

    Saying: We will fall into the hands of the Lord, and not into
    the hands of men: for as His Majesty is, so is His Mercy.

Juxon stayed with him all that day.

Tuesday was bitterly cold. The King had slept soundly. Herbert, lying
on a pallet by his side, had a vivid dream of Laud coming into the room
and talking to the King. 'The King was pensive, the Archbishop gave a
sigh.' He told his dream to the King as he was dressing him. 'It is
remarkable,' he said, 'and indeed had he been living, though I loved him
well, I might have said something to him that might have made him sigh.'
Surely the thought must often have passed through his mind, faithful as
he was to his Church, that the Churchmen had been his worst enemies, and
of all Churchmen, Laud.

'Herbert,' he said, 'this is my second marriage day. I would be as trim
to-day as may be, for before night I hope to be espoused to my blessed
Jesus.' He had been crowned in white. Now he put on a waistcoat of
garter blue, and a shirt more than ordinary, that he might not shiver
and be thought to be afraid. 'I would have no such imputation. I fear
not death. I bless my God I am prepared.'

Juxon came with the dawn. The King gave Herbert the few gifts he had to
distribute--a ring dial for the Duke of York, the three books he had
charged the Princess Elizabeth to read, some other books, a gold watch.
His George, the Bishop promised to carry to the Prince of Wales. Then he
retired to prayer for an hour. After prayer, he called Herbert in, and
Juxon read Mattins and administered the Sacrament. The gospel for that
day is the Trial of Jesus in St. Matthew. 'My Lord,' the King asked,
'did you choose that Scripture?' 'No, Sir,' was the reply, 'it is so
appointed by our Church.'

It was now about ten o'clock. Hacker knocked gently at the door, and
then again a little louder. It was opened, and he entered to summon the
King. After a little while, the King went out through the garden into
the Park. Musqueteers on either side, halberdiers close in, drums
beating, he walked briskly to Whitehall, sometimes talking to Tomlinson,
now and then calling, 'March apace.' At Whitehall he was led to an inner
room on the river side. He would not dine, but at the Bishop's
persuasion he ate a piece of bread and drank a glass of wine. Eleven
years later Huncks told a strange guardroom story of the scene at
Whitehall when the King arrived. Harrison and Ireton were lying in bed
together. Cromwell was in the room with the three officers and Axtell.
He ordered Huncks to draw up the warrant for the executioners. Huncks
refused and there were words. Cromwell stepped to a side table and wrote
the order, passing it to Hacker to sign. It is certain that Harrison,
Ireton, and Cromwell were at Whitehall early that morning, and that
Fairfax joined them later. Where was he in the interim? One can only
guess, and my guess would be that he was moving, anxiously, restlessly,
and uselessly, backwards and forwards, hoping for something to happen
and ready to take advantage of it if it did, and it seems most likely
that the King was brought early to Whitehall where the soldiers were
under Cromwell's eye, to avert the possibility of a rescue, and that
Fairfax was invited, nominally to give his reasons for deferring the
execution, actually to keep him from going to St. James's.

The generals kept in the background. The figure never absent from a
public occasion, trivial or tragic, the self-important fat man going in
and out and giving orders, was provided by Hugh Peters. He had been
preaching furiously all these days, and would have preached the King's
funeral sermon, had he been allowed, to his face. A fantastic idea had
got about that the King, as he had refused to acknowledge the court,
would resist the executioner, and workmen were set to hammer staples in
the scaffold and fix ropes and pulleys to hold him down. The block was a
billet six inches high. The executioners wore vizors, wigs, and false
beards.[20] The scaffold was railed and hung with black, the floor being
well above the heads of the crowd: access from the Banqueting Hall was
provided by breaking down the wall under the second window from Charing
Cross.

At about half-past one the King was summoned for the last time. He came
down the Banqueting Hall under guard, the spectators lining his passage,
some sorrowful, all silent. He stepped out under a brilliantly clear
sky, looking over the street and the old Tiltyard into the Park. For an
instant he was startled by the low block, but at the sight of the
staples and pulleys he smiled. There was a broad space, occupied by
soldiers, round the scaffold: his words would not have reached the
multitude who stood in the street or filled the windows. Taking a slip
of paper from his pocket he addressed himself to Colonel Tomlinson, the
Bishop and the others, some twelve in all, who stood on the scaffold.
The space was small: a tall soldier could read the King's notes over his
shoulder. He could not, he said, hold himself guilty of the war: on
that, the dates of the various Commissions and Declarations were enough
to clear him. But he had done wrong in consenting to Strafford's death,
and for that he was now to suffer. For the future, for the peace of the
Kingdom--here he turned to the note-takers: 'I hope there is some one
here that will carry my words further'--they must give God his due, the
King his due, and the People their due. For God, he advised a national
synod for the settlement of religion. For the King--some one moving
shifted the axe, and the King broke off, 'Hurt not the axe, that may
hurt me'--for the King, the laws would instruct them: he would say no
more in his own behalf. For the People, he wished a free election of
members to represent them in Parliament. But he did not believe their
happiness lay in sharing government: a subject and a sovereign are clean
different things. If he had consented to an arbitrary government, and to
have all laws changed by the sword, he needed not to have suffered. 'And
so I die a martyr for my people, and I pray that God will not lay it to
their charge.'

Herbert had shrunk from the last scene, and Juxon helped the King to
make ready. With the executioner's aid, his hair was turned up under a
white satin nightcap. The King took off his cloak, giving his George to
the Bishop with the word, 'Remember.' He next removed his doublet,
showing the blue waistcoat, and then put on his cloak again. As he lay
down his hair fell loose and the executioner replaced it. It was
striking two. The multitude in the street saw only the upward and
downward sweep of the axe and then, the head shown in silence. At the
word of command two companies of horse moved up and down the street to
scatter the crowd, while those who were nearest clambered up the
scaffold to buy relics or trophies from the guards. The body was hastily
coffined and borne through the Hall to an inner room. Returning to the
Hall, Herbert met Fairfax. 'How is the King?' Fairfax asked. He had been
detained, it would seem, in conversation until all was over. Then
Cromwell appeared, and said they should have orders for the funeral of
the King. He was buried at Windsor, the snow falling on the velvet pall
as the coffin was carried from St. George's Hall to the Chapel.

[Footnote 19: The King's Bible, given to Juxon and preserved in his
family, is now at Chastleton House in Oxfordshire.]

[Footnote 20: An interesting Shakespearian allusion (hitherto, I
believe, unnoticed), probably the first quotation from Shakespeare in
any newspaper, will be found in the _Perfect Weekly Account_ for January
31st, which refers to the executioners as _the deputies of that grim
serjeant, Death_.]


  =Transcriber's Notes:=
  hyphenation, spelling and grammar have been preserved as in the original
  Page xviii, not a showy Council ==> a showy Council
  Page 37, and doctine; and ==> and doctrine; and
  Page 77, settled." ==> settled.'
  Page 87, King of Eypt ==> King of Egypt
  Page 114, rated Hammond soundly ==> berated Hammond soundly
  Page 156, his unimaginative egosim ==> his unimaginative egoism




[End of Charles I and Cromwell, by G. M. Young]
