For the next eleven years Charles ruled without a Parliament. “Remember,” he had warned the Commons in 1626, “that Parliaments are altogether in my power for their calling, sitting and dissolution; therefore as I find the fruits of them good or evil, they are to continue, or not to be.” He now announced that their fruits were evil, and that henceforth it would be accounted presumption for anyone to prescribe to him a time for the calling of another. Henceforth he would govern by the authority which God had put into his hands, and so order the state that his people should confess that they lived more happily and freely than any subjects in the Christian world.
Taxation without parliamentary grant became thereafter the regular practice. Tonnage and poundage were levied from the merchants as if the right had never been disputed, and new impositions on trade were added to the old. Obsolete laws were 20revived and rigorously executed. In 1630, the law which required every person possessing an estate worth ￡40 a year to take up the honour of knighthood was put in force, and fines to the amount of ￡170,000 were levied on those who had omitted to comply with it. In 1634, the ancient forest laws were revived. Lands were now declared to be part of the royal forests which for three hundred years had been outside their boundaries, and landowners were heavily fined for encroachments.
The knighthood fines affected all the gentry and all men in easy circumstances; the extension of the forests threatened chiefly the nobility and persons of quality; the revival of the monopolies aggrieved all classes alike. The King, it was calculated, got ￡38,000 a year from the wine monopolists, the patentees received from the vintners ￡90,000, and the vintners raised the price of wine to the consumers so that the nation paid ￡360,000. And besides the wine monopoly there were monopolies of soap, of iron, of tobacco, of salt, of gunpowder, and of many other commodities.
On the one hand, the King’s financial measures discontented the nation, and on the other they failed to meet the wants of the Government. In 1635, the ordinary revenue of the Crown was about ￡600,000, and the King’s debts were about ￡1,200,000. When the safety of the seas and the exigencies of foreign policy required a fleet, it became necessary to resort to direct taxation, and Ship-money was invented. In 1634, it was levied on the maritime counties only, and brought in ￡100,000; in 1635, it was extended 21to the inland counties, and produced twice that amount.
It was useless to appeal to the law courts for protection or redress. The judges, removable at the King’s pleasure, declined to arbitrate between King and people, and preferred to regard themselves as the servants of the Crown. When called upon to decide on the lawfulness of Ship-money, their decision was avowedly dictated by political rather than legal considerations. One judge declared that the law was the King’s old and trusty servant, that it was not true that lex was rex, but common and most true that rex was lex. Another asserted that no acts of Parliament could take away the King’s right to command the persons and the money of his subjects, if he thought a sufficient necessity existed. It was well said that the reasons alleged by the judges were such as every man could swear were not law, and that their logic left no man anything which he might call his own. To enforce his will, the King had at his disposal, besides the ordinary courts of law, the exceptional courts which the Tudors had created. Their jurisdiction was enlarged at the King’s pleasure. In 1632, the powers of the Council of the North were increased. The Privy Council assumed legislative power by its proclamations, “enjoining this to the people that was not enjoined by law, and prohibiting that which was not prohibited by law.” The Star Chamber enforced the proclamations by fine and imprisonment, and punished opponents or critics with inordinate severity.[1] The 22fate of Prynne, Burton, and Bastwick showed that no profession could exempt its members from barbarous and ignominious penalties.[2] The fate of Eliot and his friends proved that the privileges of Parliament were no protection against the King’s vindictiveness.[3] There were Privy Councillors who “would ordinarily laugh when the word liberty of the subject was named,” and to wise men it seemed that the very foundations of right were in danger of destruction.
If Englishmen wished to know what the aim of the King’s ministers was they had only to look across St. George’s Channel. “The King,” wrote Wentworth from Ireland in 1638, “is as absolute here as any prince in the world can be.”[4] Parliaments still existed, but the Lord Deputy managed them as he chose, and, as Pym said, Parliaments without parliamentary liberties were but plausible 23ways to servitude. Juries existed, but when they gave verdicts against the Crown they were fined for their contumacy. The highest officials and the richest noblemen felt the weight of Wentworth’s hand, and submitted to do his bidding. Trade increased, order reigned where it had never reigned before, and the poor lived freer from the oppressions of the great than the poor in Ireland had ever dreamt of doing. But not a vestige of self-government remained save a few idle forms; the government was a machine in which all motion, all force, came from the royal authority. The people had nothing to do but to obey the King. “Let them,” said Wentworth, “attend upon his will, with confidence in his justice, belief in his wisdom, and assurance in his parental affections,” instead of feeding themselves “with the vain flatteries of imaginary liberty.”
Amongst Englishmen the King’s use of his absolute power did not foster this blind faith in his superior wisdom.
A vigorous foreign policy directed towards national ends might have reconciled some of his subjects to the substitution of personal rule for self-government. But Charles had no European policy. When he dissolved his third Parliament he was at war with France and Spain, and want of money obliged him to make peace as soon as possible. In European politics, his only object was to procure the restoration of the Palatinate to his sister and her children. For this he offered his alliance simultaneously to Gustavus Adolphus and to Ferdinand II. For this he negotiated with France and Spain as he 24negotiated a few years later with Presbyterians and Independents. His policy was a series of intrigues which failed, and a succession of bargains in which he asked much, offered little, and got nothing. As it was purely dynastic in its aim, and at once unprincipled and unsuccessful, it left him with no ally in Europe.
One result it had, attributed by panegyrists to his wisdom, and held by courtiers a compensation for the loss of freedom—England kept out of war. “It enjoyed,” says Clarendon, “the greatest calm and the fullest measure of felicity that any people for so long a time together had been blessed with, to the wonder and envy of all the parts of Christendom.” The Thirty Years’ War was turning fruitful Germany into a wilderness, and its cities into heaps of ruins. All other countries were impoverished or devastated by war, but England was, as it were, “the garden of Christendom” and “the Exchange of Europe.” “Here,” sang a poet, “white peace, the beautifullest of things, had fixed her everlasting nest.” Never had the English Court been gayer, more brilliant, more luxurious; never were masques and banquets more frequent than during the crisis of Protestantism in Germany.
“Let the German drum bellow for freedom,” wrote the poet of the Court, “its noise
“Disturbs not us, nor should divert our joys.”
Puritans felt that these German drums were a call to England to be up and doing. With anxious or exultant eyes, they followed each turn of fate 25in the death-struggle of Catholicism and Protestantism. It cheered Eliot’s prison in the Tower to think of the progress of “the work abroad.” When Tilly fled before Gustavus at the Breitenfeld, Eliot cried that now “Fortune and Hope were met.” When Gustavus fell at Lützen, every Puritan’s heart sank within him. “Never,” wrote D’Ewes, “did one person’s death bring so much sorrow to all true Protestant hearts—not our godly Edward’s, the Sixth of that name, nor our late and heroic Prince Henry’s—as did the King of Sweden’s at this present.”
It seemed to Puritans as if the same struggle between Protestantism and Catholicism was beginning even now in England. While the foreign policy of Charles seemed to them a cowardly desertion of Protestantism, his ecclesiastical policy seemed an insidious attack upon it, and under Laud’s influence the ecclesiastical policy of Charles was as uniform and consistent as his European policy was feeble and irresolute.[5] To himself, Laud appeared an eminently conservative reformer who sought to enforce only the discipline of the Church and the ecclesiastical laws of the State. His object was to bring the Church back to its true historical position as a branch of the great Catholic Church, and to purge it of the Calvinistic taint it had contracted since the Reformation. Not averse to a certain freedom of speculation amongst learned men, he 26sought to silence controversial preaching, and was intolerant of diversity in the forms of worship. Unity of belief was essential to the existence of a National Church, and the way to it lay through uniformity, “for unity cannot long continue in the Church when uniformity is shut out at the church door.” “Decency and an orderly settlement of the external worship of God in the Church” was his own definition of the ends for which he laboured.
To the Puritans, Laud appeared an innovator and a revolutionary. Over half the country the observances he sought to enforce had fallen into disuse for years. Each restoration of an authorised form, every revival of ancient usage, brought the Church nearer to Roman practice, and in their opinion nearer to Roman doctrine. A bow was not an expression of reverence, but a confession of idolatry; a surplice, not a few yards of white linen, but a rag of Rome. Laud’s attempts to silence their preachers aggravated their suspicion of his motives and confirmed them in the theory that he was a papist in disguise.
Much of the hostility which Laud brought upon himself was due to the means which he employed. The King’s authority as supreme governor of the Church was the instrument by which the State could be used to carry out the views of a clerical reformer, and he had no scruples about using it. Laud’s reliance on personal government in matters ecclesiastical allied him naturally with its supporters in things secular. Absolutism was with Strafford a political creed, with Laud an ecclesiastical necessity. 27Each needed the same tool: one to realise his dream of a well governed commonwealth, the other to shape a Church that had grown half Calvinistic into conformity with the Anglican ideal. Each had the same violent zeal. “Laud,” says James I., “hath a restless spirit, and cannot see when things are well, but loves to bring matters to a pitch of reformation floating in his own brain.” Strafford described himself as one “ever desiring the best things, never satisfied I had done enough, but did always desire to do better.”
Laud and Strafford were alike in their impatience of opposition, whether it rose from indolence, corruption, or conscience; whether it pleaded legal technicalities or constitutional rights. Arbitrary though the government of Charles was, it was not vigorous enough to satisfy these two eager spirits. But Strafford’s power to give his views effect was bounded by the Irish Sea, and outside the ecclesiastical sphere Laud’s was hampered by conflicting influences. The correspondence of the Archbishop and the Lord Deputy is full of complaints of the remissness of the King’s other ministers, and of sighs for the adoption of a system of “Thorough.”
Opponents of Ship-money and Puritans in general must be put down with a strong hand. “The very genius of that people,” wrote Strafford, “leads them always to oppose, as well civilly as ecclesiastically, all that ever authority ordains for them, but in good truth were they rightly served they should be whipped home into their right wits.” “It might be done,” answered Laud, “if the rod were rightly 28used, but as it is used it smarts not.” Thus they took sweet counsel together, never dreaming of “that two-handed engine at the door” which waited to strike them both.
During these eleven years of arbitrary government, Cromwell’s life was obscure, if not wholly uneventful. It was a period of unconscious preparation for his future action, a quiet seed-time which bore fruit hereafter. When the “great, warm, ruffling Parliament” of 1628 ended, Cromwell returned to his little estate at Huntingdon and busied himself with his farming. In May, 1631, he sold his property at Huntingdon for ￡1800, and rented some grazing lands at St. Ives, about five miles eastward, and farther down the Ouse. In 1636, Sir Thomas Steward of Ely, the brother of Cromwell’s mother, died, and Oliver, whom his uncle had made his heir, succeeded Sir Thomas as farmer of the Cathedral tithes. He removed to Ely, where he lived in “the glebe house” near St. Mary’s Church, which continued to be the residence of his wife and children till 1647. His family now numbered four sons, Robert, Oliver, Richard, and Henry; and two daughters, Bridget and Elizabeth, all born at Huntingdon. Two more daughters, Frances and Mary, were born in 1637 and 1638. The house he occupied is still standing; in 1845 it was an alehouse.
“By no means a sumptuous mansion,” says Carlyle, “but may have conveniently held a man of three or four hundred a year, with his family, in those simple times. Some quaint air of gentility still looks through its ragged dilapidations. It is of two stories, more properly of one and a half; has many windows, irregular chimneys, and gables.”
CROMWELL’S HOUSE, ELY.
(From a photograph.)
29Some writers, more especially poets, have spoken of these years of Cromwell’s life as a time given up entirely to domesticity and agriculture. Marvell praises the Protector for an early abstention from public affairs which was by no means voluntary:
“For neither didst thou from the first apply
Thy sober spirit unto things too high;
But in thine own fields exercisedst long
A healthful mind within a body strong.”
Elsewhere he pictures the ascent of the future general of the Republic:
“From his private gardens, where
He lived reservèd and austere,
As if his highest plot
To plant the bergamot.”
Yet even to these private gardens and sequestered fields the echo of the German drums must have penetrated, and the Thirty Years’ War must have stirred Cromwell as it stirred D’Ewes and Eliot. His later life suffices to prove it. In 1647, when the English Civil War seemed over, Cromwell thought of taking service in Germany himself. When he became Protector, his European policy was inspired by the passions of the Thirty Years’ War. Its memories governed his attitude towards Austria and Sweden; he thought that Leopold I. would be a second Ferdinand II., and dreamt of finding a new Gustavus in Charles X. But to the Puritan farmer, prescient of a 30future struggle, the war was not merely a spectacle but a military education. Some of the best accounts of the battles and the mode of fighting of Gustavus were published in England, and between 1630 and 1640 few books were more popular than The Swedish Intelligencer and The Swedish Soldier. It cannot be doubted that Cromwell read these narratives, and absorbed from them that knowledge of military principles and military tactics which supplied for him the place of personal experience.
“I find him,” says a modern military writer, “at the very first entrance into the war acting on principles which past experience had established, following closely upon just that stage which the art of war had reached under Gustavus, using the very same moral stimulus which Gustavus had made so effective, using the very words on one occasion which Gustavus used on another, and indicating in various ways that he had most carefully studied the past, though he had not had the opportunity of doing any peace parade work.”
Cromwell watched the growth of arbitrary government in England with a still keener interest. In 1630, he was one of the many gentlemen prosecuted for omitting to go through the ceremony of knighthood, and finally had to pay ten pounds for his neglect. Presumably he also paid Ship-money, for there is no mention of his opposition to it amongst the State papers. If he refused to pay, the sheriff doubtless distrained upon his goods for the required amount, and there the matter ended. On another question Cromwell came into conflict with the local 31authorities, and was brought into collision with the King’s Council. Up to 1630, Huntingdon had been an ancient prescriptive corporation, governed by two bailiffs and a common council of twenty-four inhabitants who were elected yearly. On July 15, 1630, the town obtained a new charter from Charles I. “To prevent popular tumult,” the old common council was dissolved, and the government of the town vested in twelve aldermen elected for life, with a mayor, chosen annually out of the twelve, and a recorder. An oligarchy replaced a democracy. The chief agent of this change seems to have been Mr. Robert Barnard, a barrister who lived at Huntingdon, had lately bought an estate at Brampton hard by, and afterwards became Recorder of the town. The old common council had consented to the change in the government of Huntingdon, but when the terms of the new charter were examined a widespread discontent was aroused. Complaints were heard that it gave the mayor and aldermen power to deprive the burgesses of their rights in the common lands, and to levy exorbitant fines on burgesses who refused municipal office. Cromwell had assented to the change, and in the new charter he was appointed one of the three justices of the peace for the borough. But he thought these complaints well founded, and made himself the spokesman of the popular dissatisfaction. Perhaps Cromwell felt that he had been overreached by Barnard, whom in a later letter he significantly warns against too much subtlety. In his anger he made “disgraceful and unseemly speeches” to the new mayor and Barnard, 32and the corporation complained to the Privy Council. On November 2, 1630, the council committed Cromwell and one of his associates to custody. The case was heard on December 1st and referred to the arbitration of the Earl of Manchester, who, in his report, blamed Cromwell’s conduct, but ordered the charter to be amended in three points to meet his objections. The rights of the poorer burgesses were secured by an order that “the number of men’s cattle of all sorts which they now keep, according to order and usage, upon their commons, shall not be abridged or altered.” As to the personal question Manchester’s report was:
“For the words spoken of Mr. Mayor and Mr. Barnard by Mr. Cromwell, as they were ill, so they are acknowledged to be spoken in heat and passion and desired to be forgotten; and I found Mr. Cromwell very willing to hold friendship with Mr. Barnard, who with a good will remitting all the unkind passages past, entertained the same. So I left all parties reconciled.”
This quarrel was doubtless one of the reasons why Cromwell left Huntingdon. At St. Ives and Ely, he showed the same zeal to defend the rights of his poorer neighbours. In 1634, a company was incorporated for the drainage of the fens round Ely, which were known as the Great Level. The “Adventurers,” who were headed by the Earl of Bedford, were to be paid by a share of the lands they rescued from the water, and in 1637 the work was declared completed, and the reward claimed. By these drainage works the commoners lost the rights of pasturage and fishing they had previously enjoyed, and 33Cromwell made himself the champion of their interests against the “Adventurers.”
“It was commonly reported,” says a complaint, “by the commoners in Ely Fens and the Fens adjoining, that Mr. Cromwell of Ely had undertaken, they paying him a groat for every cow they had upon the commons, to hold the drainers in suit of law for five years, and that in the meantime they should enjoy every foot of their commons.”
In 1638, the King intervened, declared the work of drainage incomplete, and undertook to complete it himself, announcing that the inhabitants of the district were to continue in possession of their lands and commons till the work was really finished. Nothing else is known of Cromwell’s part in these disputes except a vague story told in the Memoirs of Sir Philip Warwick, that “the vulgar” grew clamorous against the scheme, and that Mr. Cromwell appeared as the head of their faction. Warwick, writing long after the events he referred to, assumed as a matter of course that Cromwell opposed the King, and the mistake found easy credence.
Some years later, Cromwell came forward in the same way to defend the rights of his old neighbours at St. Ives. The waste lands at Somersham near St. Ives had been enclosed without the consent of the commoners and sold to the Earl of Manchester. When the Long Parliament met, the aggrieved commoners petitioned the House of Commons for redress. The Lords intervened with an order in 34favour of Manchester. The commoners replied by proceeding “in a riotous and warlike manner” to break down the hedges and retake possession. Then the Lords sent the trained bands to reinstate Manchester, and Manchester issued sixty writs against the commoners. Without seeking to justify the violence of the commoners, Cromwell got the House of Commons to appoint a committee to consider the rights of the case. Hyde, its chairman, was greatly scandalised by the vehemence with which Cromwell advocated the rights of the commoners before it. Cromwell “ordered the witnesses and petitioners in the method of their proceeding, and enlarged upon what they said with great passion.” He reproached the chairman for partiality, used offensive language to the son of the noble earl who claimed the land, and “his whole carriage was so tempestuous, and his behaviour so insolent,” that the chairman threatened to report him to the House.
This persistent championship of the rights of peasants and small freeholders was the basis of Cromwell’s influence in the eastern counties. Common rights were something concrete and tangible, which appealed to many who were not Puritans, and came home to men to whom parliamentary privileges were remote abstractions. Every village Hampden looked to Cromwell as a leader, and was ready to follow him. In 1643, a royalist newspaper nicknamed him “The Lord of the Fens,” but his popularity with the fenmen began long before the military exploits which gained him the title.
In a more limited sphere Cromwell was well 35known as a zealous Puritan, but his opposition to Laud’s ecclesiastical policy did not bring him into any general notoriety. Williams, Bishop of Lincoln, was Cromwell’s kinsman, and lived during these years at Buckden near Huntingdon. He was wont to relate afterwards that his relative was in those days “a common spokesman for sectaries, and maintained their part with great stubbornness.” A part of Laud’s policy to which Cromwell was particularly hostile was the suppression of lectureships. The Puritans in the towns, discontented with the negligence of the established clergy in preaching, or with their doctrine, clubbed together to support lecturers, that is, clergymen whose sole business was preaching. Most corporations maintained a lecturer, and in 1625 a small society was formed for buying up impropriated tithes, and using the proceeds for the payment of lecturers. Laud sought to suppress these lectureships, and in 1633 the Star Chamber dissolved the Feoffees of Impropriations, and gave their patronage to the King.
At St. Ives or somewhere else in Huntingdonshire, there was a lectureship which Cromwell was anxious to keep up. It had been founded by some London citizens, and in 1636 was in danger of coming to an end through the stoppage of their subscriptions. Cromwell’s first letter is an appeal to a forgetful subscriber, worded with singular care and tact. “Not the least of the good works of your fellow citizens,” he begins,
“is that they have provided for the feeding of souls. Building of hospitals provides for men’s bodies; to 36build material temples is judged a work of piety, but they that procure spiritual food, they that build up spiritual temples, they are the men truly charitable, truly pious. Such a work as this was your erecting the lecture.”
He goes on to say that the lecturer is a good and able man, and has done good work; help him therefore to carry it on.
“Surely, it were a piteous thing to see a lecture fall in the hands of so many able and godly men, as I am persuaded the founders of this are; in these times, wherein we see they are suppressed, with too much haste and violence by the enemies of God his Truth.... To withdraw the pay is to let fall the lecture; for who goeth to warfare at his own cost. I beseech you therefore ... let the good man have his pay. The souls of God’s children will bless you for it and so shall I.”
The changes which Laud introduced in the externals of worship were as abhorrent to Cromwell as the suppression of Puritan preaching. “There were designs,” said Cromwell, looking back on Laud’s policy in 1658,
“to innovate upon us in matters of religion, and so to innovate as to eat out the core and power and heart and life of all religion, by bringing on us a company of poisonous popish ceremonies, and imposing them upon those that were accounted the Puritans of the nation and professors of religion among us, driving them to seek their bread in a howling wilderness. As was instanced to our friends who were forced to fly to Holland, New England, almost anywhither, to find liberty for their consciences.”
ST. IVES AND THE RIVER OUSE, AND MEDI?VAL CHAPEL ON THE BRIDGE.
(From Pike’s “Oliver Cromwell.”)
37A persistent tradition asserts that Cromwell himself thought of emigrating to New England, and there are many grounds for accepting it as true.
If he ever entertained such a design, it was probably between 1631 and 1636. When he left Huntingdon in May, 1631, he converted all his landed property into money, as a man intending to emigrate would naturally do. The cattle he bought and the lands he hired could be disposed of at short notice. The time at which this took place renders it more significant, for in 1630 and 1631 the Puritan exodus was at its height, and most of the New England colonists came from East Anglia. In March, 1632, the Earl of Warwick granted the old Connecticut patent to Lord Say and his associates, amongst whom was John Hampden. Nothing can be more probable than that Cromwell should have thought of settling in a colony of which his cousin was one of the patentees.
If Cromwell wished to emigrate, what was it that prevented him? The eighteenth century story that he was on board one of the ships stopped by order of council in May, 1638, is demonstrably false, for on the petition of the passengers they were allowed to continue their voyage. The contemporary story supplies a much more credible explanation. It is that a kinsman died leaving him a considerable fortune, and this kinsman is identified with Sir Thomas Steward, whose death took place in January, 1636. A story which fits in so well with ascertained facts, and 38is intrinsically so probable, should not be lightly put aside as a fiction.
There is another fact in Cromwell’s history during this period of which one of his letters gives us evidence. If he had ever written an account of his own early life, little conflicts with local authorities or any alterations in his worldly fortunes would have seemed to us of less moment than the change which took place within him. Before 1628 he had become a professor of religion, and in all externals a Puritan, but by 1638 a formal acceptance of the Calvinistic creed had become the perfect faith which casts out all fears and doubts. His conversion had been followed by a time of depression and mental conflict which lasted for many years. Other Puritans passed through the same struggle. Bunyan relates how he “fell to some outward reformation in his life,” and his neighbours thought him to be “a very godly man, a new religious man, and did marvel to see such a great and famous alteration.” And yet for a long time afterwards he was “in a forlorn and sad condition,” afflicted and disquieted by doubts. “How can you tell if you have faith?” said the inner voices. “How can you tell if you are elected? How if the day of grace be past and gone?” “My thoughts,” he says, “were like masterless hell-hounds; my soul, like a broken vessel, driven as with the winds, and tossed sometimes headlong into despair.”
By some such “obstinate questionings” Cromwell, too, was haunted and tormented. An unsympathetic physician who knew him at Huntingdon described him as splenetic and full of fancies; another whom 39he consulted at London wrote him down as “valde melancholicus.” A mind diseased and a soul at war with itself were beyond their art. This internal conflict was at its height between 1628 and 1636. A friend who knew Cromwell then, wrote, many years afterwards, the following account of it:
“This great man is risen from a very low and afflicted condition; one that hath suffered very great troubles of soul, lying a long time under sore terrors and temptations, and at the same time in a very low condition for outward things: in this school of afflictions he was kept, till he had learned the lesson of the Cross, till his will was broken into submission to the will of God.” Religion was thus “laid into his soul with the hammer and fire”; it did not “come in only by light into his understanding.”
In 1638, at the request of his cousin, Mrs. St. John, Cromwell confided to her the story of this crisis in his life.
“You know,” he said, “what my manner of life hath been. Oh, I lived in and loved darkness, and hated light; I was a chief, the chief of sinners. This is true, I hated godliness, yet God had mercy on me.” Even now the struggle was not ended. “I live in Meshec, which they say signifies Prolonging; in Kedar, which signifies Blackness: yet the Lord forsaketh me not. Though He do prolong, yet He will I trust bring me to His tabernacle, to His resting-place. My soul is with the Congregation of the First-born, my body rests in hope.... He giveth me to see light in His light.”
It would be wrong to take these self-accusings as 40a confirmation of the charges which royalist writers brought against Cromwell’s early life. They refer to spiritual rather than moral failings, perhaps to the love of the world and its vanities against which he so often warns his children. They denote a change of feeling rather than a change of conduct, a rise from coldness to enthusiasm, from dejection to exaltation.
Full of thankfulness for this deliverance, Cromwell longed to testify to his faith. “If here I may honour my God, either by doing or suffering, I shall be most glad. Truly no poor creature hath more cause to put himself forth in the cause of his God than I have. I have had plentiful wages beforehand, and I am sure I shall never earn the least mite.” The time for doing was near at hand, for when he wrote the resistance of the Scots had begun. The friend quoted before points out how strangely the turning-point in Cromwell’s spiritual life coincided with the turning-point in the history of his cause. “The time of his extreme suffering was when this cause of religion in which we are now engaged was at its lowest ebb.” When the cause began to prosper, “he came forth into comfort of spirit and enlargement of estate.” And so “he suffered and rose with the cause, as if he had one life with it.”
The year 1638 was the turning-point in the history of English Puritanism. When it began, the King’s power seemed as firmly established as his heart could desire. The decision of the judges that Ship-money was lawful gave absolute monarchy a legal basis, and a vantage-ground for any future demands. The arguments which proved that the King had a right to 41levy taxes at will for the support of a navy, justified him, if he chose, in raising money for the maintenance of an army. Thus royalty, in Strafford’s phrase, was “for ever vindicated from the conditions and restraints of subjects.” “All our liberties,” wrote a Puritan lawyer, “were now at one dash utterly ruined.”
There had been rumours in 1637 of some tumults in Scotland. “Horrible ado against the bishops for seeking to bring in amongst them our service book,” wrote Strafford’s news-purveyor to the Lord Deputy, but neither thought it of much significance. At the end of March, 1638, the Scots took the Covenant, and the little cloud in the north became a threatening tempest. If Hampden and his friends could have read Laud’s letters to Strafford, they would have laughed for joy. In May, the Archbishop was thoroughly uneasy about “the Scotch business.” “If God bless it with a good end, it is more than I can hope for. The truth is that snowball hath been suffered to gather too long.” Ten days after the decision against Hampden, he was thoroughly alarmed. “It is not the Scottish business alone that I look upon, but the whole frame of things at home and abroad, with vast expenses out of little treasure, and my misgiving soul is deeply apprehensive of no small evils coming on.... I can see no cure without a miracle.”
Charles was resolved to suppress the resistance of the Scots by arms. “So long as this Covenant is in force,” he said, “I have no more power in Scotland than a Duke of Venice, which I will rather die than suffer.” He sent the Marquis of Hamilton to 42negotiate with the Scots, “to win time that they may not commit public follies until I be ready to suppress them.” But negotiations and intrigues failed to break their union, and in May, 1639, Charles gathered twenty thousand men and marched to the border to begin the work of suppression. Alexander Leslie, a soldier of Gustavus, with an equal force of Scots, barred his entrance to Scotland. Leslie’s army was well disciplined, well paid, and well fed; his men “lusty and full of courage, great cheerfulness in the faces of all.” The King’s troops were ill-armed and ill-provided, and with no heart in their cause. The English nobility were as half-hearted as the troops, and the King had emptied his treasury to raise this army.
There was nothing left but to make peace, and on June 24, 1639, the Treaty of Berwick was signed. If the war had been a farce, the treaty was high comedy. Everything was forgiven, almost anything was promised. The King himself played the leading part in the negotiations with the Scots, who found him “one of the most just, reasonable, sweet persons they had ever seen.” “His Majesty,” wrote a Scot, “was ever the better loved of all that heard him, and he likewise was the more enamoured of us.”
The Scots returned home full of loyalty, with permission to settle their ecclesiastical affairs in their own General Assembly, and their civil affairs in their own Parliament. Charles went back to London, and plotted to nullify his concessions. He refused either to rescind the acts establishing Episcopacy, or 43to confirm the acts of the Scottish Parliament, and summoned Strafford from Ireland to whip the Scots into their right minds. Strafford had ready both his plan of campaign and his policy. The English navy was to blockade the Scottish ports and destroy their trade. The Irish army was to threaten a landing in West Scotland, or to be transported to Cumberland. The English army was to invade Scotland and from a fortified camp at Leith keep Edinburgh and the Lowlands in awe, till the English Prayer-book was accepted and the bishops restored to their authority; “nay, perchance till I had conformed that kingdom in all, as well for the temporal as ecclesiastical affairs, wholly to the government and laws of England; and Scotland was governed by the King and council of England.” Strafford’s first step on reaching England was to procure the summoning of a Parliament. No Englishman, he thought, could refuse to give his money to the King in such an extremity, against so foul a rebellion. If any man resisted, he should be “laid by the heels,” till he learnt to obey and not to dispute. But he repudiated the suggestion that the King had lost the affections of his people. In April, the Parliament met; its members were described as sober and dispassionate men of whom very few brought ill purposes with them. Amongst them was Cromwell, whose opposition to the “Adventurers” for the drainage of the fens had gained him a seat for the borough of Cambridge. All these sober and dispassionate men united in demanding the restoration of Parliament to its proper place in the 44constitution. Pym enumerated all the grievances in Church and State, and asserted that their source was the intermission of parliaments, for Parliament was the soul of the body politic. The Commons answered the King’s demand for money by saying that “till the liberties of the House and the kingdom were cleared they knew not whether they had anything to give, or no.” Charles tried to bargain with them, and offered to abolish Ship-money if they gave him ￡840,000 in return. They demanded not only the abolition of Ship-money but the abolition of the new military charges which the King had imposed on the counties for the support of their train-bands. Hearing that they meant to invite the Lords to make a joint protest against the intended war with the Scots, Charles cut short their project by a sudden dissolution (May 5, 1640). At this stroke moderate men were filled with melancholy, but the faces of the opposition leaders showed “a marvellous serenity.” The cloudy countenance of Cromwell’s cousin, St. John, was lit with an unusual light. “All was well,” he said; “things must be worse before they could be better, and this Parliament would never have done what was necessary to be done.”
With or without Parliament’s aid, Charles was resolved to force the Scots to submission. Some of his council, knowing the emptiness of the exchequer, urged him to stand on the defensive.
“No defensive war,” cried Strafford; “go on vigorously or let them alone. The King is loose and absolved from all rules of government. In an extreme necessity 45you may do all that your power admits. Parliament refusing, you are acquitted towards God and man. You have an army in Ireland you may employ here to reduce this kingdom. One summer well employed will do it.”
At every step, however, the old difficulties gathered round the King’s path. London refused a loan; France and Spain would lend nothing; even the Pope was applied to for men and money, but in vain. Not a tenth of the Ship-money imposed was paid, and Coat- and Conduct-money were universally refused. In his desperation, Charles thought of debasing the coinage and seizing the bullion which the Spanish Government had sent to England to be coined. The military outlook was equally depressing, for the army was smaller and worse than the army of 1639. The general of the cavalry at Newcastle described his task as teaching cart-horses military evolutions, and men fit for Bedlam and Bridewell to keep the ten commandments. The commander of the infantry in Yorkshire answered, that his mutinous train-bands were the arch-knaves of the country. Of this army, on August 18th, Strafford, half dead but indomitable, was appointed commander-in-chief.
Only a touch was needed to make the fabric of absolutism collapse. As the commander-in-chief was struggling towards his army in a litter, Leslie crossed the Tweed with twenty-five thousand Scots. On August 28th, he forced the passage of the Tyne at Newburn, driving before him the three thousand foot and fifteen hundred horse who strove to defend it. Newcastle was evacuated; Northumberland and 46Durham fell into Leslie’s power; Strafford met his beaten troops streaming back into Yorkshire with the Scots close on their heels. “Never came any man to so lost a business,” cried the unhappy statesman. It was not only that the army was untrained, necessitous, and cowardly, but the whole country was apathetic or hostile. “An universal affright in all, a general disaffection to the King’s service, none sensible of his dishonour.” With desperate energy Strafford laboured to reorganise his shattered forces, and to keep the Scots out of Yorkshire. At his breath the dying loyalty of the country flashed up into a momentary blaze. It seemed as if the Scottish invasion might revive the forgotten hostility of the two nations.
Vain labours and vainer hopes. Twelve peers presented a petition demanding peace and a Parliament, and another to the same purpose came in from the City of London. Charles called a Council of Peers to patch up a truce with the Scots, and announced to them the summons of a Parliament for November 3rd. Absolutism had had its day.