When the Parliament received the news of Worcester, they voted Cromwell four thousand pounds a year, gave him Hampton Court for a residence, and sent a deputation to present their thanks. On September 12th, he made a triumphal entry into London. Hugh Peters, the army chaplain, professed to perceive a secret exultation in his bearing, and whispered to a friend that Cromwell would yet make himself king. But Whitelocke recorded that “he carried himself with great affability, and in his discourses about Worcester would seldom mention anything of himself, but mentioned others only, and gave, as was due, the glory of the action to God.” From his despatch, it was evident that Cromwell regarded the “crowning mercy” of Worcester not only as the consummation of the work of war, but as a call to take in hand and accomplish the tasks of peace. It should provoke the Parliament, he told the Speaker,

“to do the will of Him who has done His will for it 301and for the nation—whose good pleasure it is to establish the nation and the change of government, by making the people so willing to the defence thereof, and so signally blessing the endeavours of your servants in this late great work.”

For in spite of its victories the government of the Commonwealth was essentially a provisional government, and acquiesced in, rather than accepted by, the nation. Even its adherents felt that something more permanent and more constitutional must be established in its place, now that the Civil War was over. In a conference between officers and members of Parliament, which Cromwell brought about soon after his return to London, this feeling plainly appeared. The lawyers were all for some monarchical form of government. Some suggested that the late King’s third son, the Duke of Gloucester, now twelve years old, should be made king. The soldiers would not hear of anything that smacked of monarchy. “Why,” asked Desborough, “may not this as well as other nations be governed in the way of a republic?” Cromwell said little, and seemed more anxious to learn what others thought, than to express his own views. He agreed with the lawyers that “a settlement of somewhat with monarchical power in it” would be most effectual. He knew that a strong executive power was needed either for the tasks of peace or war, but doubted whether a return to the Stuart line was possible. He agreed with the soldiers that a new Parliament was an immediate necessity, but, as in 1649, he held that it would be more honourable and more expedient to induce the Long 302Parliament to dissolve itself. Publicly and privately he used all his influence to persuade the House to do so. “I pressed the Parliament,” he says, “as a member to period themselves, once and again and again, and ten, nay, twenty times over.” But, in spite of “a long speech made by his Excellency,” it was only by two votes that the House resolved to fix a date for its dissolution, and then the date named was three years distant (November 3, 1654). Cromwell was obliged to resign himself to the delay, and do what he could for the settlement of the nation through the instrumentality of the existing Parliament. The task which was now before him was more difficult than fighting the Irish or the Scots; more was expected of him, and his power was less.

“Great things,” said a letter to Cromwell, “God has done by you in war, and good things men expect from you in peace: to break in pieces the oppressor, to ease the oppressed of their burdens, to release the prisoners out of bonds, and to relieve poor families with bread.”

For some months after Worcester, petitions were often addressed directly to the General and the Army instead of to the Parliament. But all power was in the hands of the Parliament, and as dangers grew more remote, this body grew less amenable to the influence of the man who had saved it. Of the sixty or seventy members who habitually took part in its proceedings, the ablest were also members of the Council of State, absorbed in the daily business of administration, and with little energy left 303for the consideration of far-reaching legislative plans. Of the rest, many were engrossed by local affairs, others occupied with their farms and their merchandise, many building up fortunes by speculating in confiscated lands. Some few were notoriously corrupt, but partisanship and favouritism were more general evils than corruption. Vane complained to Cromwell that some of his colleagues were so obstructive, that “without continual contestation they will not suffer to be done things that are so plain that they ought to do themselves.” “How hard and difficult a matter it was,” said Cromwell himself, “to get anything carried without making parties, without practices indeed unworthy of a Parliament.”

Yet difficult though it was, Cromwell and the officers succeeded in inspiring the Parliament with some portion of their own energy. Politically, the most pressing measure was the grant of an amnesty to the conquered Royalists. So long as they were liable to punishment and confiscation for acts done during the last ten years, the wounds of the Civil War could never be healed. In February, 1652, Cromwell at last persuaded Parliament to pass an act of pardon for all treasons committed before the battle of Worcester, but it was unhappily clogged with exceptions and restrictions which robbed it of much of its efficacy. More than once during the divisions on the bill, Cromwell was teller against these restrictions, and bigoted republicans afterwards thought he did so from sinister motives. He contrived that delinquents should escape due punishment, 304wrote Ludlow, “that so he might fortify himself by the addition of new friends for the carrying on his designs.” To Cromwell it seemed an act of political expediency. It was necessary, he held, to be just to Royalists as well as Puritans, to unbelievers as well as believers; perhaps even more necessary.

“The right spirit,” he added, “was such a spirit as Moses had and Paul had—which was not a spirit for believers only, but for the whole people.”

Next in importance to a general amnesty came the Reform of the Law—a phrase which, in the minds of those who used it, meant not simply legal changes, but social reforms in general. There was much need of both. The Civil War had ruined its thousands; society was disorganised by its consequences: the relations of landlord and tenant, of debtor and creditor, were complicated by unforeseen calamities; the prisons of London were crammed with poor debtors, and the country swarmed with beggars. For the lawyers it was the best possible of worlds, and they were never more prosperous or more unpopular.

“We cannot mention the Reformation of the Law,” said Cromwell to Ludlow in 1650, “but the lawyers cry out we mean to destroy property, whereas the law as it is now constituted serves only to maintain the lawyers, and to encourage the rich to oppress the poor.” “Relieve the oppressed,” he urged Parliament in his Dunbar despatch; “reform the abuses of all professions, and if there be any one that makes many poor to make a few rich, that suits not a Commonwealth.”

305Parliament had done something already to meet these complaints. In November, 1650, it had passed an act ordering that all legal proceedings and documents should be henceforth in English, besides an earlier act for the relief of poor prisoners. Now it boldly appointed twenty-one commissioners, chosen outside its own body, with Matthew Hale at their head, “to consider the inconveniencies of the Law—and the speediest way to remedy the same,” and to report their proposals to a Committee of the House itself (January 17, 1652). The commissioners fell roundly to work, and presented in the next few months drafts of many good bills, some of which became law during the Protectorate, and others in the present century. They even took in hand the task of codification, and drew up “a system of the Law” for the consideration of Parliament.

During this same period the reorganisation of the Church was also attempted. The Long Parliament had passed acts for the augmentation of livings, for the punishment of blasphemy, and for the propagation of the Gospel in Wales and Ireland. But it had abolished Episcopacy without replacing it by any other system of Church government, and it had ejected royalist clergymen without providing any machinery for the appointment of fit successors. In London, in Lancashire, and in a few other districts, there were voluntary associations of ministers on the Presbyterian model, but throughout the greater part of England, the Presbyterian organisation decreed in 1648 had never been actually established. The Church was a chaos of isolated congregations, 306in which a man made himself a minister as he chose, and got himself a living as he could. The reduction of this chaos to order seemed so difficult a problem, and beset with so many controversial questions, that Parliament hesitated to undertake it.

John Owen, once Cromwell’s chaplain in Ireland, took the duty on himself, and on February 10, 1652, he and fourteen other ministers presented to Parliament a comprehensive scheme for the settlement of the Church. The House answered by referring it to a committee appointed to consider the better propagation of the Gospel, of which committee Cromwell was the most important member. Owen’s scheme, like the Agreement of the People, proposed the continuance of a national Church with tolerated dissenting bodies existing by its side. The Church was to be controlled by two sets of commissioners, partly lay and partly clerical: local commissioners, who were to determine the fitness of all candidates seeking to be admitted as preachers; itinerant commissioners, who were to move from place to place ejecting unfit ministers and schoolmasters. On the limits of the toleration to be granted to dissenters, the committee was split into two sections. The scheme proposed that the opponents of the essential principles of the Christian religion should not be suffered to promulgate their views. When pressed to define what these principles were, Owen and his friends produced a list of fifteen fundamentals, the denial of which was to disqualify men from freedom to propagate their opinions. Cromwell thought these limitations too restrictive, and wished for a more liberal definition of Christianity. “I had rather,” he emphatically declared, “that Mahometanism were permitted amongst us, than that one of God’s children should be persecuted.” It was in consequence of these debates that Milton, in May, 1652, addressed to Cromwell the sonnet in which he adjured him to remember that “peace hath victories no less renowned than war.”

REV. JOHN OWEN, D.D.

(From a painting, possibly by Robert Walker, in the National Portrait Gallery.)
307“New foes arise
Threatening to bind our souls with secular chains;
Help us to save free conscience from the paw
Of hireling wolves whose gospel is their maw.”

But Milton did not share Cromwell’s belief in the necessity of an Established Church, and it was Vane, not Cromwell, whom he praised as the statesman who knew the true bounds of either sword, and had learnt what severed the spiritual from the civil power. By the time the sonnet to Vane was written, ecclesiastical controversies had fallen into the background; the short period of peace and reform was over; Cromwell and Vane alike were forced to turn their attention to the problems of foreign policy and the tasks of war.

When Cromwell left England in the summer of 1649, all the world seemed hostile to the Republic. Worcester made Great Britain once more a power in Europe, and foreign States began to seek the friendship of the Republic, or at least to fear its enmity.

This great change was chiefly due to Cromwell’s victories. “Truth is,” wrote Bradshaw to Cromwell after Dunbar, “God’s blessing upon the wise 308and faithful conduct of affairs where you are gives life and repute to all other attempts and actions upon the Commonwealth’s behalf.” Much, too, was due to the successes of Blake. By the spring of 1652, the navy had swept royalist privateers from the British seas and the Mediterranean, and reduced, one after another, all the colonies or dependencies which refused to submit to the Republic. Rupert’s fleet, blockaded in Kinsale by Blake from May to November, 1649, could do nothing to help Ormond in capturing Dublin and Londonderry, or to hinder Cromwell’s progress in Ireland. When Rupert escaped he made his way to Lisbon, and under the protection of the King of Portugal refitted his ships and captured English merchantmen. In March, 1650, Blake appeared off the mouth of the Tagus, and kept Rupert’s ships cooped up there for the next six months. At last, in October, 1650, during Blake’s absence, Rupert put to sea, and entering the Mediterranean began to plunder and burn English merchantmen. Blake captured or destroyed most of his ships off Malaga and Cartagena, and with the two which were left him Rupert took refuge in Toulon. Next came the turn of the islands, which were the headquarters of the royalist privateers. In May, 1651, Sir John Grenville surrendered the Scilly Islands to Blake, just in time to prevent their falling into the hands of a Dutch fleet sent to punish Grenville’s attacks on Dutch commerce. The Isle of Man fell in October. In December, Blake captured Jersey and Guernsey, where Sir George Carteret had carried on the business of piracy 309on a larger and still more lucrative scale than Grenville. Finally, in January, 1652, Sir George Ayscue’s fleet reduced Barbadoes and the West Indian islands, while in March, Virginia and Maryland gave in their submission. Lords of all the territories the Stuarts had ruled, and with a stronger army and fleet than they had ever possessed, the republican leaders were free to intervene in European politics.

The Thirty Years’ War had ended with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. France and Spain were still fighting, but with no great vigour, the one distracted by the civil wars of the Fronde, the other weak from misgovernment and the decay of its trade. Each wanted the help of England, but while Spain had recognised the Republic in December, 1650, France still delayed, and while Spain had allowed Blake to victual his fleet in Spanish ports, France gave shelter to Rupert’s ships in its harbours, and allowed him to sell his prizes there. Not only French privateers but French men-of-war attacked English commerce in the Levant; and in France Charles gathered around him the exiled Royalists, and plotted against the peace of the Republic. At the moment, even religious as well as political motives favoured an alliance with Spain. In the Spanish dominions, there were no Protestants left to be persecuted, but the Huguenots of Southern France, relying upon the tradition of English policy which had existed since the Reformation, still looked to their co-religionists in England for support. The wars of the Fronde supplied a second motive for intervention, and to support the last defenders of 310political freedom in France against the encroachments of a centralising monarchy was a cause which naturally appealed to enthusiastic republicans. When Condé and the Frondeurs of Guienne applied to England and Spain for help against Mazarin, Spain responded at once, and a strong party in the English Council of State was ready to return a favourable answer. Whether the Spanish or the French party in that body would gain the upper hand depended largely on the decision of Cromwell. Ever since Worcester, and indeed earlier, foreign diplomatists had turned their attention to the General, reported his casual utterance, and striven to divine his intentions.

People who believed that the Republic would seek to propagate republican institutions abroad regarded Cromwell as the destined instrument of that policy. “If he were ten years younger,” Cromwell was rumoured to have said, “there was not a king in Europe he would not make to tremble,” and that as he had better motives than the late King of Sweden he believed himself capable of doing more for the good of nations than the other did for his own ambition. Marvell hailed him on his return from Ireland as a deliverer,—one whose future conquests should mark a new era in the history of all oppressed nations.
“A C?sar he ere long to Gaul,
To Italy a Hannibal,
And to all states not free
Shall climacteric be.”

311Cromwell’s acts, however, showed no trace of the revolutionary zeal attributed to him. He revealed himself at his first appearance in foreign politics as a keen and realistic statesman, more anxious to extend his country’s trade and his country’s territory than to spread republican principles in foreign parts. The only sentimental consideration which seemed to move him was sympathy for oppressed Protestants. He refused the proposals which Condé’s agents made to him immediately after Worcester, but he did not hesitate to send one emissary to Paris to negotiate with De Retz, and another to ascertain the real condition of the south of France. The question how to improve the position of the Huguenots was the one which interested him most, and it soon appeared evident that to effect this by an understanding with the French Government would be easier than to attempt armed intervention in their favour. From the beginning, therefore, Cromwell showed a preference for the French rather than the Spanish alliance. In the spring of 1652, he and two other members of the Council of State opened a secret negotiation with Mazarin for the cession of Dunkirk. Its garrison was hard pressed by the Spaniards, and the opinion was that the French Government, being unable to relieve it, would rather see it in English than Spanish hands. In April, five thousand English soldiers were collected at Dover, to be embarked for Dunkirk at a moment’s notice. But Mazarin refused to pay the price demanded for the English alliance, and while he hesitated and haggled, the partisans of a Spanish 312alliance gained the upper hand in the English Council and the negotiation was broken off. As France continued its refusal to recognise the Republic unconditionally, it became necessary to use force. In September, 1652, Blake swooped down on a French fleet sent to revictual Dunkirk, took seven ships, and destroyed or drove ashore the rest, with the result that the besieged fortress surrendered to the Spaniards the next day. At last, in December, 1652, an ambassador arrived in London announcing, in the name of Louis XIV., that the union which should exist between neighbouring states was not regulated by their form of government, and formally recognising the Commonwealth.

BUST OF CROMWELL.

ATTRIBUTED TO BERNINI.

(In the Palace of Westminster, 1899.)

Ere this took place, England had become involved in a war with Holland. The two Protestant Republics seemed created by nature for allies. England had helped the Dutch to establish their freedom, and Holland had ever been the chosen refuge of Puritan fugitives. But ever since 1642, dynastic and commercial causes had driven the two states farther apart. The marriage of William II. with Mary, daughter of Charles I., had secured the support of the Stadtholder to Charles I............