CHAP. II

PARLIAMENT DISSOLVED

349

militia, how could he do the good he ought, or hinder parliament from making themselves perpetual, or imposing what religion they pleased upon men's conscience? But all this is the principle of pure absolutism.

In other words, Cromwell did not in his heart believe that any parliament was to be trusted. He may have been right, but then this meant a deadlock, and what way could be devised out of it? The representatives were assuredly not to blame for doing their best to convert government by the sword into that parliamentary government which was the very object of the civil war, and which was still both the professed and the real object of Cromwell himself. What he did was to dissolve them at the first hour at which the Instrument gave him the right (January 1655).

A remarkable passage occurs in one of the letters of Henry Cromwell to Thurloe two years later (March 4, 1657), which sheds a flood of light on this side of the Protectorate from its beginning to the end. The case could not be more wisely propounded. "I wish his Highness would consider how casual [incalculable] the motions of a parliament are, and how many of them are called before one be found to answer the ends thereof; and that it is the natural genius of such great assemblies to be various, inconsistent, and for the most part froward with their superiors; and therefore that he would not wholly reject so much of what they offer as is necessary to the public welfare. And the Lord give him to see how much safer it is to rely upon persons of estate, interest, integrity, and wisdom, than upon such as have so amply discovered their envy and ambition, and whose faculty it is by continuing of confusion to support themselves." How much safer, that is to say, to rely upon a parliament with all its slovenly, slow, and froward ways, than upon a close junto of military

grandees with a standing army at their back. This is what the nation also thought, and burned into its memory for a century to come. Here we have the master-key to Cromwell's failure as constructive statesman.

CHAPTER III

THE MILITARY DICTATORSHIP

WITH the dismissal of the first parliament a new era began. For twenty months the Protectorate was a system of despotic rule, as undisguised as that of Tudor or Stuart. Yet it was not the dictatorship of Elizabeth, for Cromwell shared authority both in name and fact with the Council, that is, with the leaders of the army. What were the working relations between Oliver and the eighteen men who composed his Council of State, and to what extent his policy was inspired or modified by them, we cannot confidently describe. That he had not autocratic power, the episode of the kingship in 1657 will show us. That his hand was forced on critical occasions, we know.

The latter half of 1654 has sometimes been called the grand epoch of Oliver's government. Ireland and Scotland were in good order; he had a surplus in the chest; the army and navy seemed loyal; his star was rising high among the European constellations. But below the surface lurked a thousand perils, and the difficulties of government were enormous. So hard must it inevitably be to carry on conservative policy without a conservative base of operations at any point of the compass. Oliver had reproached his parliament with making themselves a shade under which weeds and nettles, briars and thorns, had thriven. They were like a man, he told them, who should protest about his liberty of

walking abroad, or his right to take a journey, when all the time his house was in a blaze. The conspiracies against public order and the foundations of it were manifold. A serious plot for the Protector's assassination had been brought to light in the summer of 1654, and Gerard and Vowel, two of the conspirators, had been put to death for it. They were to fall upon him as he took his customary ride out from Whitehall to Hampton Court on a Saturday afternoon. The king across the water was aware of Gerard's design, and encouraged him in it in spite of some of his advisers who thought assassination impolitic. It was still a device in the manners of the age, and Oliver's share in the execution of the king was taken, in many minds to whom it might otherwise have been repugnant, in his case to justify sinister retaliation.

The schisms created in the republican camp by the dispersion of the old parliament and the erection of the Protectorate, naturally kindled new hopes in the breasts of the royalists. Charles, with the sanguine credulity common to pretenders, encouraged them. If those, he told them, who wished the same thing only knew each other's mind, the work would be done without any difficulty. The only condition needed was a handsome appearance of a rising in one place, and then the rest would assuredly not sit still. All through the last six months of 1654 the royalists were actively at work, under the direction of leaders at home in communication with Charles abroad. With the new year, their hopes began to fade. The division common to all conspiracies broke out between the bold men and the prudent men. The royalist council in England, known as the Sealed Knot, told the king in February that things were quite unripe that no rising in the army was to be looked for, and this had been the mainstay of their hopes; that the fleet was for the usurper; that insurrec

CHAP. III

ABORTIVE RISINGS

353

tion would be their own destruction, and the consolidation of their foes. The fighting section on the other hand were equally ready to charge the Sealed Knot with being cold and backward. They pressed the point that Cromwell had full knowledge of the plot and of the men engaged in it, and that it would be harder for him to crush them now than later. Time would enable him to compose quarrels in his army, as he had so often composed them before. In the end the king put himself in the hands of the forward men, the conspiracy was pushed on, and at length in March the smouldering fire broke into a flickering and feeble flame. This is not the only time that an abortive and insignificant rising has proved to be the end of a widespread and dangerous combination. In Ireland we have not seldom seen the same, just as in the converse way formidable risings have followed what looked like insignificant conspiracies.

The Yorkshire royalists met on the historic ground of Marston Moor, and reckoned on surprising York with four thousand men when the time came, a hundred made their appearance, and in despair they flung away their arms and dispersed. In Northumberland the cavaliers were to seize Newcastle and Tynemouth, but here too less than a hundred of them ventured to the field. At Rufford in Sherwood Forest there was to have been a gathering of several hundreds, involving gentlemen of consequence; but on the appointed day, though horses and arms were ready, the country would not stir. At midnight the handful cried in a fright that they were betrayed, and made off as fast as they could. Designs were planned in Staffordshire, Cheshire, Shropshire, but they came to nothing, and not a blow was struck. Every county in England, said Thurloe, instead of rising for them would have risen against them. The Protector, he declared, if there had been any need,