CHAP. VII JUDGMENTS ON KING'S DEATH 249

first it had been My head or thy head, and Charles had lost. "In my opinion," said Alfieri in the fanciful dedication of his play of Agis to Charles, one can in no way make a tragedy of your tragical death, for the cause of it was not sublime."

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BOOK IV

(1649-53)

CHAPTER I

THE COMMONWEALTH

THE death of the king made nothing easier, and changed nothing for the better; it removed no old difficulties, and it added new. Cromwell and his allies must have expected as much, and they confronted the task with all the vigilance and energy of men unalterably convinced of the goodness of their cause, confidently following the pillar of cloud by day, the pillar of fire by night. Their goal was the establishment of a central authority; the unification of the kingdoms; the substitution of a nation for a dynasty as the mainspring of power and the standard of public aims; a settlement of religion; the assertion of maritime strength; the protection and expansion of national commerce. Long, tortuous, and rough must be the road. A small knot of less than a hundred commoners represented all that was left of parliament, and we have a test of the condition to which it was reduced in the fact that during the three months after Pride's Purge, the thirteen divisions that took place represented an average attendance of less than sixty. They resolved that the House of Peers was useless and dangerous and ought to be abolished. They resolved a couple of days later that experience had shown the office of a king, and to have the

1

power of the office in any single person, to be unnecessary, burdensome, and dangerous, and therefore that this also ought to be abolished. In March these resolutions were turned into what were called acts of parliament. A Council of State was created to which the executive power was entrusted. It consisted of forty-one persons and was to last a year, three-fourths of its members being at the same time members of parliament. Provision was made for the administration of justice as far as possible by the existing judges, and without change in legal principles or judicial procedure. On May 19 a final act was passed proclaiming England to be a free Commonwealth, to be governed by the representatives of the people in parliament without king or House of Lords. Writs were to run in the name of the Keepers of the Liberties of England. The date was marked as the First Year of Freedom, by God's blessing restored.

We can hardly suppose that Cromwell was under any illusion that constitutional resolutions on paper could transmute a revolutionary group, installed by military force and by that force subsisting, into a chosen body of representatives of the people administering a free commonwealth. He had striven to come to terms with the king in 1647, and had been reluctantly forced into giving him up in 1648. He was now accepting a form of government resting upon the same theoretical propositions that he had stoutly combated in the camp debates two years before, and subject to the same ascendancy of the soldier of which he had then so clearly seen all the fatal mischief. But Cromwell was of the active, not the reflective temper. What he saw was that the new government had from the first to fight for its life. All the old elements of antagonism remained. The royalists, outraged in their deepest feelings by the death of their lawful king, had instantly transferred their allegiance with height

CHAP. I

COMMONWEALTH FACTIONS

253

ened fervour to his lawful successor. The presbyterians who were also royalist were exasperated both by the failure of their religious schemes, and by the sting of political and party defeat. The peers, though only a few score in number yet powerful by territorial influence, were cut to the quick by the suppression of their legislative place. The episcopal clergy, from the highest ranks in the hierarchy to the lowest, suffered with natural resentment the deprivation of their spiritual authority and their temporal revenues. It was calculated that the friends of the policy of intolerance were no less than five-sevenths of the people of the country. Yet the independents, though so inferior in numbers, were more important than either presbyterians or episcopalians, for the reason that their power was concentrated in an omnipotent army. The movement named generically after them comprised a hundred heterogeneous shades, from the grand humanism of Milton, down to the fancies of whimsical mystics who held that it was sin to wear garments, and believed that heaven is only six miles off. The old quarrel about church polity was almost overwhelmed by turbid tides of theological enthusiasm. This enthusiasm developed strange theocracies, nihilisms, anarchies, and it soon became one of the most pressing tasks of the new republic, as afterwards of Cromwell himself, to grapple with the political danger that overflowed from the heavings of spiritual confusion. A royalist of the time thus describes the position :-" The Independents possess all the forts, towns, navy and treasure; the Presbyterians yet hold a silent power by means of the divines, and the interest of some nobility and gentry, especially in London and the great towns. His Majesty's party in England is so poor, so disjointed, so severely watched by both factions, that it is impossible for them to do anything on their own score."

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