From 1654 to 1658, the fundamental question of English politics was, whether Cromwell would succeed in securing the assent of the nation to the authority which the army had conferred upon him. Foreigners saw the situation clearly. After the famous Swedish chancellor, Oxenstiern, had heard Whitelocke’s account of the foundation of the Protectorate, he told him there was but one thing remaining for the Protector to do and that was “to get him a back and breast of steel.” “What do you mean?” asked Whitelocke. “I mean,” replied the Chancellor, “the confirmation of his being Protector by your Parliament, which will be his best and greatest strength.” Cromwell himself was not content to remain the nominee of the soldiers, and wished to govern by consent and not by force. But two great obstacles stood always in his way. One was the rooted aversion of Englishmen to the rule of the sword, which was the origin of his power. The other was the traditions of the House of Commons. In January, 1649, it had claimed to be the supreme power in the state in the right of the sovereign 410people it represented, and that claim, once made, could never be forgotten. To one section of the Republicans, the only legitimate Government was the expelled Long Parliament, granted by statute the right never to be dissolved but by its own consent. To another section, any elected Parliament was as all-powerful as the people from which its rights were derived. To admit the right of any external power to limit the authority of Parliament, seemed to both a betrayal of the liberty of the nation.
The first Parliament elected under the provisions of the Instrument of Government met in September, 1654. The majority of its members were Presbyterians or moderate Independents, for the extreme men of the Little Parliament had been rejected at the polls. It soon became evident that while the House was prepared to accept Cromwell as head of the state, it was not willing to accept the constitution which the officers had devised. Instead of contenting itself with the functions of a legislature, it claimed to be a constituent assembly. The Protector might exercise the executive power, provided the representatives of the people settled the terms upon which he held it. “The government,” ran the formula adopted, “should be in the Parliament and a single person limited or restrained as the Parliament should think fit.” The co-ordinate and independent power which the Instrument of Government gave the Protector was thus called in question, and Parliament once more laid claim to sovereignty.
Cromwell thought it necessary to intervene to 411maintain his own authority and that of the constitution. He offered a compromise. Parliament might revise the constitution if its essentials were left untouched. “Circumstantials” they might alter; “fundamentals” they must accept. Those fundamentals he summed up in four principles: government by a single person and Parliament; the division of the control of the military forces between Parliament and the Protector; limitation of the length of time which a Parliament might sit; and, finally, liberty of conscience. As for himself, Cromwell asserted that his title to rule had been ratified by the nation. The army, the City, most of the boroughs and counties of England had by their addresses signified their approval. The judges by taking out new commissions had accepted his authority. The sheriffs by proceeding to elections in accordance with his writs, and the members themselves chosen in those elections, had thereby owned it too. Either directly or indirectly therefore his power was founded on the acceptance and consent of the people. For the good of these nations and their posterity he would maintain the present settlement against all opposition. “The wilful throwing away of this Government, so owned by God, so approved by men,—I can sooner be willing to be rolled into my grave and buried with infamy, than I can give my consent unto.”
About a hundred members were excluded from the House for refusing to sign an engagement to be faithful to the Commonwealth and the Protector, and not to alter the government as settled in a 412single person and Parliament. The rest, accepting the Protector’s invitation, proceeded to revise the constitution. Many days they spent in these debates, wasting much time in futile disputes about words, but making some judicious amendments. They made the office of Protector elective, and the Council more dependent upon Parliament. On the other hand, they restricted the Protector’s veto over legislation, and sought to limit the toleration granted by the constitution. A list of damnable heresies was to be drawn up, and twenty articles of faith were to be enumerated, which no man was to be permitted to controvert. At this both the army and the Protector took alarm, and Cromwell was petitioned by the officers to intervene. In the end, it was agreed that the question of heresy should be left to the joint decision of Protector and Parliament, but another question remained behind, on which no compromise was possible. By the “Instrument,” the Protector was empowered to maintain a standing army of thirty thousand men, but at the close of 1654, the forces actually on foot in the three nations amounted to fifty-seven thousand. The annual expenditure of the state had risen to ￡2,670,000, while the revenue amounted only to two millions and a quarter. Parliament was eager to reduce taxation, and above all to reduce the cost of the army, which amounted to ￡1,560,000 per annum. It demanded the reduction of the army to the legal maximum, voted after much discussion a revenue of one million three hundred thousand pounds, which it held to be sufficient to maintain an army of thirty thousand, 413and promised to provide money to pay off the twenty-seven thousand men to be disbanded. At the same time, it insisted that the control of the military forces of the nation should belong to Parliament, not to the Protector. On this question Oliver could not yield. In his opinion and in the opinion of his Council, thirty thousand men were not sufficient to keep the three nations in peace.
The royalist rising in Scotland was only just put down, and Ireland, though subdued, was seething with discontent. In England, preparations for an insurrection were in progress, encouraged by the disputes between Parliament and the Protector. “Dissettlement and division, discontent and dissatisfaction,” he said, “together with real dangers to the whole, have been more multiplied within these five months of your sitting than in some years before. Foundations have been laid for the future renewing of the troubles of these nations by all the enemies of them abroad and at home.”
The Cavaliers, said Cromwell, had been for some time furnishing themselves with arms; “nothing doubting but that they should have a day for it, and verily believing that whatsoever their former disappointments were, they should have more done for them by and from our divisions than they were able to do for themselves.” The Levellers were working in concert with the Cavaliers, “endeavouring to put us into blood and confusion, more desperate and dangerous confusion than England ever yet saw.” Republicans of position were joining with the Levellers to create discontent and mutiny amongst the 414soldiers, and the delay to vote money for the payment of the army and the insufficiency of the sum yet voted had furthered these designs. The army in Scotland was thirty weeks behindhand with its pay, and in danger of being reduced to take free quarters. A plot had been discovered to seize Monk, make someone else general, and march the army into England to overthrow the Government. Under such conditions, it was impossible for the Protector to consent to so great a reduction of the army, or to give up the control of it. “If,” said he, “the power of the militia should be yielded up at such a time as this, when there is as much need of it to keep this cause, as there was to get it, what would become of us all?” Nor was it possible for him at any time to surrender the control of the army if the balance of the constitution was to be preserved. Unless that control were equally shared between the Protector and Parliament, said Cromwell, it would put an end to the Protector’s power “for doing the good he ought, or hindering Parliament from perpetuating themselves, from imposing what religion they please on the consciences of men, or what government they please upon the nation.” If this fundamental principle were abandoned, all the others would be endangered. “Therefore,” he concluded, “I think it my duty to tell you that it is not for the profit of these nations, nor for common and public good, for you to continue here any longer.”
The plots of which Cromwell had spoken were widespread and dangerous, but the vigilance of the Government nipped them in the bud. Major-General 415Overton, whom the Scottish mutineers had pitched upon as their leader, was imprisoned first in the Tower and then in Jersey. Major-General Harrison, whom the Fifth Monarchy men in England relied upon to head them, was sent to Carisbrooke Castle. Major Wildman, the chief of the Levellers, was arrested in the act of dictating a “Declaration of the free and well affected people of England now in arms against the tyrant, Oliver Cromwell.” The seizure of many royalist agents paralysed the plots of the Cavaliers. Their rising had been fixed to take place on February 13th, but it was adjourned for three weeks, and when March came, though there were gatherings in half a dozen places, so few obeyed the signal that the conspirators generally dispersed, and went home again. The only actual outbreak took place at Salisbury, where Colonel Penruddock and Sir Joseph Wagstaff got together three or four hundred men, and proclaimed Charles II. Then they made for Cornwall, where royalist feeling was still strong, but they were overtaken and routed by Cromwell’s soldiers at South Molton in Devonshire. Penruddock and a few others were executed, and some scores of their followers were transported to the West Indies to work in the sugar plantations.
As soon as the insurrection was over, Cromwell, to show his desire to diminish the burdens of the nation, and his wish to meet as far as possible the reasonable demands of the late Parliament, took in hand the reduction of the army. During the summer and autumn of 1655, ten or twelve thousand men were disbanded, and the pay of those maintained 416in the service was diminished. Then followed an extension of military rule which brought more odium upon the Protector than any other act of his Government. England was divided into twelve districts, and over each was set an officer with the local rank of major-general, and the special duty of maintaining the order of his district. He was charged to put in force an elaborate system of police regulations meant to prevent conspiracies against the Government, and to see to the execution of all laws relating to public morals. He had command of the local militia, and of a troop of horse raised in every county to supplement it.
This “standing militia of horse” as it was termed, consisted of about six thousand men, paid a small sum as a retaining fee, and liable to be called out at a day’s notice. The eighty thousand pounds a year required to maintain them was to be procured by a tax of ten per cent. on the income of the royalist gentry, the assessment and collection of which were entrusted to the major-generals assisted by local commissioners.
As a measure of police the institution was a great success, but politically it was a great mistake. It was a reversal of the policy which Cromwell had hitherto followed. By the amnesty he had carried in 1652, and by the repeal of the compulsory engagement to be faithful to the Commonwealth, Cromwell had sought to induce the Royalists to forget their defeat and to become good citizens. In the declaration now published, to justify his proceedings for securing the peace of the nation, he adopted the view 417that the Royalists were irreconcilable. They had laboured, he complained, to keep themselves distinct and separate from the well-affected, “as if they would avoid the very beginning of union.” They bred their children under the ejected clergy, and confined their marriages within their own party, “as if they meant to entail their quarrel and prevent the means to reconcile posterity.” People might say it was unjust to punish all the Royalists for the fault of a few, but “the whole party generally were involved in this business,” either directly or indirectly. Therefore, “if there were need of greater forces to carry on the work, it was a most righteous thing to put the charge on that party which was the cause of it.”
The defence convinced only the supporters of the Government. To the rest of England, the arbitrary and inquisitorial proceedings of the major-generals were sufficient to condemn the institution. It was evident that the military party amongst the Protector’s advisers had obtained the upper hand of the lawyers and civilians. The Protectorate, which had hitherto striven to seem a moderate and constitutional government, stood revealed as a military despotism.
Meanwhile a legal opposition more dangerous than royalist plots threatened the Protector’s authority. The lawyers began to call in question the validity of his ordinances, and the judges to manifest scruples about enforcing them. Whitelocke and Widdrington, two of the Commissioners of the Great Seal, resigned their posts because of scruples about executing the ordinance for the reform of Chancery. Judges Newdigate 418and Thorpe declined to act on the commission appointed for the trial of the insurgents in the north. A merchant named Cony refused to pay customs duties not imposed by act of Parliament, and his counsel, Serjeant Twysden, asserted that their levy by Cromwell’s ordinance was contrary to Magna Carta, Chief-Justice Rolle, before whom the case came, resigned his place to avoid determining the question.
Cromwell met this opposition by arresting those who refused to pay taxes, sending Cony’s lawyers to the Tower, and replacing the doubters by more compliant judges. Cony, intimidated or cajoled, withdrew his plea, and the lawyers apologised and submitted. Necessity was the Protector’s only excuse for these despotic acts. “The people,” he had asserted when he dissolved Parliament, “will prefer their safety to their passions, and their real security to forms, when necessity calls for supplies.” Convinced that the maintenance of his Government was for the good of the people, he was resolved to maintain it by force, and did not shrink from the avowal. “’Tis against the will of the nation: there will be nine in ten against you,” Calamy is reported to have told Cromwell, when he assumed his protectorship. “Very well,” said Cromwell, “but what if I should disarm the nine, and put a sword in the tenth man’s hands. Would not that do the business?”
Nevertheless, neither the argument from necessity nor the appeal to force could persuade the Republican leaders to recognise the authority of the Government. Men like Vane and Ludlow steadily refused even an engagement not to act against it.
419“Why will you not own this Government to be a legal government?” said Lambert to Ludlow. “Because,” replied Ludlow, “it seems to me to be in substance a re-establishment of that which we all engaged against, and had with a great expense of blood and treasure abolished.” “What is it you would have?” asked the Protector himself. “That which we fought for,” said Ludlow, “that the nation might be governed by its own consent.” “I am as much for government by consent as any man,” answered Cromwell, “but where shall we find that consent?”
That was the difficulty. Ludlow said that the consent required was that of “those of all sorts who had acted with fidelity and affection to the public.” Vane in his Healing Question said that a convention representing “the whole body of adherents to this cause” was the only body that had a right to determine the government of the nation. Both were blind to the fact that the divisions of the Puritan party had made agreement impossible, and that government by consent would necessarily bring about the restoration of the Stuarts.
In the summer of 1656, the Protector summoned a second Parliament, although according to the terms of the “Instrument” he need not have done so till 1657. He needed money to carry on the war with Spain, and the major-generals told him that they could secure the election of members favourable to the Government. When the elections came, the major-generals had an unpleasant surprise. Everywhere the arbitrary measures of the last eighteen months had 420aroused general discontent. “No courtiers, nor swordsmen,” was the popular cry, and in the counties, where the electorate was too large to be overawed, a large number of opposition candidates were returned. When Parliament met, the Protector’s Council assumed the right to decide on the qualifications of the persons elected, and excluded a hundred members as disaffected to the Government.
Those excluded protested, but their protest was unheeded; those allowed to sit submitted with hardly a murmur. They were in general moderate Presbyterians or Independents, willing to support any Government which promised tranquillity to a nation weary of political strife. Their willingness to accept Cromwell as Protector was shown by an act annulling the title of the Stuarts to the throne, and by another making it high treason to plot for the overthrow of his Government. The capture of the Spanish treasure ships by Stayner, which happened just about the opening of the session, gave Cromwell’s foreign policy the prestige of success, and the House responded to his appeal for supplies by approving the Spanish war and voting ￡400,000 for its expenses.
On other questions, it soon appeared how little even adherents of the Protectorate sympathised with the Protector’s hostility to religious persecution, and how much they resented the arbitrary proceedings of the major-generals. In the case of James Naylor the House assumed judicial power, and many members were eager to punish his blasphemies with death. Cromwell’s intervention was repulsed and Naylor was sentenced to be branded, scourged, and 421imprisoned at pleasure. Still more bitter was the str............