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CHAP. II

BATTLE OF MARSTON MOOR

129

prince hath not four thousand left. Give glory, all the glory to God."

Without dwelling on the question how much the stubborn valour of the Scots under Baillie and Lumsden against the royalist assaults on the centre had to do with the triumphant result, still to describe a force nearly one-third as large as his own and charging side by side with himself, as a few Scots in our rear, must be set down as strangely loose. For if one thing is more clear than another amid the obscurities of Marston, it is that Leslie's flank attack on Rupert while the Ironsides were falling back was the key to the decisive events that followed. The only plea to be made is that Oliver was not writing an official despatch, but a hurried private letter announcing to a kinsman the calamitous loss of a gallant son upon the battlefield, in which fulness of detail was not to be looked for. When all justice has been done to the valour of the Scots, glory enough was left for Cromwell; and so, when the party dispute was over, the public opinion of the time pronounced.

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CHAPTER III

THE WESTMINSTER ASSEMBLY AND THE CONFLICT OF IDEALS

I

WITH the march of these events a march of ideas proceeded, of no less interest for mankind. The same commotion that was fast breaking up the foundation of the throne, had already shaken down the church. To glance at this process is no irrelevant excursion, but takes us to the heart of the contention, and to a central epoch in the growth of the career of Cromwell. The only great protestant council ever assembled on English soil has, for various reasons, lain mostly in the dim background of our history. Yet it is no unimportant chapter in the eternal controversy between spiritual power and temporal, no transitory bubble in the troubled surges of the Reformation. Dead are most of its topics, or else in the ceaseless transmigration of men's ideas as the ages pass, its enigmas are now propounded in many altered shapes. Still, as we eye these phantoms of old debate, and note the faded, crumbling vesture in which once vivid forms of human thought were clad, we stand closer to the inner mind of the serious men and women of that

1 Since this chapter was first printed, Dr. William Shaw has published his History of the English Church during the Civil Wars and under the Commonwealth, a work of importance in its elucidation of the controversies of the Westminster Assembly, and otherwise. The "Minutes" of the Assembly were published in 1874.

CHAP. III

RELIGIOUS FERMENT

131

time than when we ponder political discussions either of soldiers or of parliament. The slow fluctuations of the war from Edgehill to Marston left room for strange expansions in the sphere of religion, quite as important as the fortune of battle itself. In a puritan age citizenship in the secular state fills a smaller space in the imaginations of men than the mystic fellowship of the civitas Dei, the city of God; hence the passionate concern in many a problem that for us is either settled or indifferent. Nor should we forget what is a main element in the natural history of intolerance, that in such times error ranks as sin and even the most monstrous shape of sin.

The aggressions of the Commons upon the old church order had begun, as we saw (pp. 82, 85), by a demand for the ejectment of the bishops from the Lords. The Lords resisted so drastic a change in the composition of their own body (1641). The tide rose, passion became more intense, judgment waxed more uncompromising, and at the instigation of Cromwell and Vane resolute proposals were made in the Commons for the abolition of the episcopal office and the transfer to lay commissions, instituted and controlled by parliament, of episcopal functions of jurisdiction and ordination. On what scheme the church should be reconstructed neither Cromwell nor parliament had considered, any more than they considered in later years what was to follow a fallen monarchy. In the Grand Remonstrance of the winter of 1641, the Commons desired a general synod of the most grave, pious, learned, and judicious divines of this island, to consider all things necessary for the peace and good government of the church. It was not until the summer of 1643 that this synod was at last after half a dozen efforts actually appointed by parliament.

The flames of fanaticism were blazing with a fierceness not congenial to the English temper, and

such as has hardly possessed Englishmen before or since. Puritanism showed itself to have a most unlovely side. It was not merely that controversy was rough and coarse, though it was not much less coarse in puritan pulpits than it had been on the lips of German friars or Jesuit polemists in earlier stages. In Burton's famous sermon for which he suffered punishment so barbarous, he calls the bishops Jesuitical polypragmatics, anti-christian mushrooms, factors for anti-Christ, dumb dogs, ravening wolves, robbers of souls, miscreants. Even the august genius of Milton could not resist the virulent contagion of the time. As difficulties multiplied, coarseness grew into ferocity. A preacher before the House of Commons so early as 1641 cried out to them: "What soldier's heart would not start deliberately to come into a subdued city and take the little ones upon the spear's point, to take them by the heels and beat out their brains against the wall? What inhumanity and barbarousness would this be thought? Yet if this work be to revenge God's church against Babylon, he is a blessed man that takes and dashes the little ones against the stones." The fiery rage of the old Red Dragon of Rome itself, or the wild battlecries of Islam, were hardly less appalling than these dark transports of puritan imagination. Even prayers were often more like imprecation than intercession. When Montrose lay under sentence of death, he declined the offer of the presbyterian ministers to pray with him, for he knew that the address to Heaven would be: "Lord, vouchsafe yet to touch the obdurate heart of this proud, incorrigible sinner, this wicked, perjured, traitorous, and profane person, who refuses to hearken to the voice of thy kirk.' It was a day of wrath, and the gospel of charity was for the moment sealed.

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The ferment was tremendous. Milton, in wellknown words, shows us how London of that time

CHAP. III THE ASSEMBLY OF DIVINES

133

(1644), the city of refuge encompassed with God's protection, was not busier as a shop of war with hammers and anvils fashioning out the instruments of armed justice, than it was with pens and heads sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, and revolving new ideas. Another observer of a different spirit tells how hardly a day passed (1646) without the brewing or broaching of some new opinion. People are said to esteem an opinion a mere diurnal-after a day or two scarce worth the keeping. "If any man have lost his religion, let him repair to London, and I'll warrant him he shall find it. I had almost said, too, and if any man has a religion, let him come but hither now, and he shall go near to lose it." Well might the zealots of uniformity tremble. Louder and more incessant, says Baxter, than disputes about infant baptism or antinomianism, waxed their call for liberty of conscience, that every man might preach and do in matters of religion what he pleased. All these disputes, and the matters of them, found a focus in the Westminster Assembly of Divines.

It was nominally composed of one hundred and fifty members, including not only Anglicans, but Anglican bishops, and comprehending, besides divines, ten lay peers and twice as many members of the other House. Eight Scottish commissioners were included. The Anglicans never came, or else they immediately fell off; the laymen, with the notable exception of Selden, took but a secondary part; and it became essentially a body of divines, usually some sixty of them in attendance. The field appointed for their toil was indeed enormous. It was nothing less than the reorganisation of the spiritual power, subject to the shifting exigencies of the temporal, with divers patterns to choose from in the reformed churches out of England. Faith, worship, discipline, government, were all comprehended in their vast operation. They were.

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