BOOK I

(1599-1642)

PROLOGUE

THE figure of Cromwell has emerged from the floating mists of time in many varied semblances, from blood-stained and hypocritical usurper up to transcendental hero and the liberator of mankind. The contradictions of his career all come over again in the fluctuations of his fame. He put a king to death, but then he broke up a parliament. He led the way in the violent suppression of bishops, he trampled on the demands of presbytery, and set up a state system of his own; yet he is the idol

voluntary congregations and the free churches. He had little comprehension of that government by discussion which is now counted the secret of liberty. No man that ever lived was less of a pattern for working those constitutional charters that are the favourite guarantees of public rights in our century. His rule was the rule of the sword. Yet his name stands first, half warrior, half saint, in the calendar of English-speaking democracy.

A foreign student has said that the effect a written history is capable of producing is nowhere seen more strongly than in Clarendon's story of the Rebellion. The view of the event and of the most conspicuous actors was for many generations fixed by that famous work. Not always accurate in every detail, and hardly pretending to be impartial, yet it presented the great drama with a living vigour, a breadth, a grave ethical air, that made a profound

and lasting impression. To Clarendon Cromwell was a rebel and a tyrant, the creature of personal ambition, using religion for a mask of selfish and perfidious designs. For several generations the lineaments of Oliver thus portrayed were undisturbed in the mind of Europe. After the conservative of the seventeenth century came the greater conservative of the eighteenth. Burke, who died almost exactly two centuries after Cromwell was born, saw in him one of the great bad men of the old stamp, like Medici at Florence, like Petrucci at Siena, who exercised the power of the State by force of character and by personal authority. Cromwell's virtues, says Burke, were at least some correctives of his crimes. His government was military and despotic, yet it was regular; it was rigid, yet it was no savage tyranny. Ambition suspended, but did not wholly suppress, the sentiment of religion and the love of an honourable name. Such was Burke's modification of the dark colours of Clarendon. As time went on, opinion slowly widened. By the end of the first quarter of last century reformers like Godwin, though they could not forgive Cromwell's violence and what they thought his apostasy from old principles and old allies, and though they had no sympathy with the biblical religion that was the mainspring of his life, yet were inclined to place him among the few excellent pioneers that have swayed a sceptre, and they almost brought themselves to adopt the glowing panegyrics of Milton.

The genius and diligence of Carlyle, aided by Macaulay's firm and manly stroke, have finally shaken down the Clarendonian tradition. The reaction has now gone far. Cromwell, we are told by one of the most brilliant of living political critics, was about the greatest human force ever directed to a moral purpose, and in that sense about the greatest man that ever trod the scene of history. Another powerful writer of a different school holds

BOOK I

PROLOGUE

3

that Oliver stands out among the very few men in all history who, after overthrowing an ancient system of government, have proved themselves with an even greater success to be constructive and conservative statesmen. Then comes the honoured historian who has devoted the labours of a life to this intricate and difficult period, and his verdict is the other way. Oliver's negative work endured, says Gardiner, while his constructive work vanished, and his attempts to substitute for military rule a better and a surer order were no more than "a tragedy, a glorious tragedy." As for those impatient and importunate deifications of Force, Strength, Violence, Will, which only show how easily hero-worship may glide into effrontery, of them I need say nothing. History, after all, is something besides praise and blame. To seek measure, equity, and balance, is not necessarily the sign of a callous heart and a mean understanding. For the thirst after broad classifications works havoc with truth; and to insist upon long series of unqualified clenchers in history and biography only ends in confusing questions that are separate, in distorting perspective, in exaggerating proportions, and in falsifying the past for the sake of some spurious edification of the present.

Of the Historic Sense it has been truly said that its rise indicates a revolution as great as any produced by the modern discoveries of physical science. It is not, for instance, easy for us who are vain of living in an age of reason, to enter into the mind of a mystic of the seventeenth century. Yet by virtue of that sense even those who have moved furthest away in belief and faith from the books and the symbols that lighted the inmost soul of Oliver, should still be able to do justice to his free and spacious genius, his high heart, his singleness of mind. On the political side it is the same. It may be that "a man's noblest mistake is to be before his time." Yet historic sense forbids us to judge