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CHAP. I

IRETON

179

was not good. No better brain was then at work on either side, no purer character. Some found that he had "the principles and the temper of a Cassius in him," for no better reason than that he was firm, never shrinking from the shadow of his convictions, active, discreet, and with a singular power of drawing others, including first of all Cromwell himself, over to his own judgment. He had that directness, definiteness, and persistency to which the Pliables of the world often misapply the ill-favoured name of fanaticism. He was a man, says one, regardless of his own or any one's private interest wherever he thought the public service might be advantaged. He was very active, industrious, and stiff in his ways and purposes, says another; stout in the field, and wary and prudent in counsel; exceedingly forward as to the business of the Commonwealth. "Cromwell had

a great opinion of him, and no man could prevail so much, nor order him so far, as Ireton could." He was so diligent in the public service, and so careless of all belonging to himself, that he never regarded what food he ate, what clothes he wore, what horse he mounted, or at what hour he went to rest. Cromwell good-naturedly implies in Ireton almost excessive fluency with his pen; he does not write to him, he says, because "one line of mine begets many of his." The framing of constitutions is a pursuit that has fallen into just discredit in later days, but the power of intellectual concentration and the constructive faculty displayed in Ireton's plans of constitutional revision, mark him as a man of the first order in that line. He was enough of a lawyer to comprehend with precision the principles and forms of government, but not too much of a lawyer to prize and practise new invention and resource. If a fresh constitution could have been made, Ireton was the man to make it. Not less remarkable than his grasp and capacity of mind

was his disinterestedness. When he was serving in Ireland, parliament ordered a settlement of two thousand pounds a year to be made upon him. The news was so unacceptable to him that when he heard of it, he said that they had many just debts they had better pay before making any such presents, and that for himself he had no need of their land and would have none of it. It was to this comrade in arms and counsel that Cromwell, a year after Naseby (1646), gave in marriage his daughter Bridget, then a girl of two-and-twenty.

The king's surrender to the Scots created new entanglements. The episode lasted from May 1646 to January 1647. It made worse the bad feeling that had for long been growing between the English and the Scots. The religious or political quarrel about uniform presbytery, charges of military uselessness, disputes about money, disputes about the border strongholds, all worked with the standing international jealousy to intensify a strain that had long been dangerous, and in another year in the play of Scottish factions against one another was to become more dangerous still.

Terms of a settlement had been propounded to the king in the Nineteen Propositions of York, on the eve of the war in 1642; in the treaty of Oxford at the beginning of 1643; in the treaty of Uxbridge in 1644-45, the failure of which led to the New Model and to Naseby. By the Nineteen Propositions now made to him at Newcastle the king was to swear to the Covenant, and to make all his subjects do the same. Archbishops, bishops, and all other dignitaries were to be utterly abolished and taken away. The children of papists were to be educated by protestants in the protestant faith; and mass was not to be said either at court or anywhere else. Parliament was to control all the military forces of the kingdom for twenty years, and to raise money for them as it might think fit.

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CHAP. I

CHARLES AND THE CHURCH

181

An immense list of the king's bravest friends was to be proscribed. Little wonder is it that these proposals, some of them even now so odious, some so intolerable, seemed to Charles to strike the crown from his head as effectually as if it were the stroke of the axe.

Charles himself never cherished a more foolish dream than this of his Scottish custodians, that he would turn covenanter. Scottish covenanters and English puritans found themselves confronted by a conscience as rigid as their own. Before the summer was over the king's madness, as it seemed to them, had confounded all his presbyterian friends. They were in no frame of mind to apprehend even dimly the king's view of the divine right of bishops as the very foundation of the Anglican Church, and the one sacred link with the church universal. Yet they were themselves just as tenacious of the divine right of presbytery. Their independent enemies looked on with a stern satisfaction, that was slowly beginning to take a darker and more revengeful

cast.

In spite of his asseverations, nobody believed that the king "stuck upon episcopacy for any conscience." Here, as time was to show, the world did Charles much less than justice; but he did not conceal from the queen and others who urged him to swallow presbytery, that he had a political no less than a religious objection to it. "The nature

of presbyterian government is to steal or force the crown from the king's head, for their chief maxim is (and I know it to be true) that all kings must submit to Christ's kingdom, of which they are the sole governors, the king having but a single and no negative voice in their assemblies." When Charles said he knew this to be true, he was thinking of all the bitter hours that his father had passed in conflict with the clergy. He had perhaps heard of the scene between James VI. and Andrew Melvill

in 1596; how the preacher bore him down, calling the king God's silly vassal, and, taking him by the sleeve, told him that there are two kings and two kingdoms in Scotland: there is Christ Jesus the King, and his kingdom the kirk, whose subject King James VI. is, and of whose kingdom not a king, not a lord, not a head, but a member. "And they whom Christ has called and commanded to watch over his kirk and govern his spiritual kingdom, have sufficient power of him and authority so to do, the which no Christian, king nor prince, should control and discharge, but fortify and assist."

The sincerity of his devotion to the church did not make Charles a plain-dealer. He agreed to what was proposed to him about Ireland, supposing, as he told Bellièvre, the French ambassador, that the ambiguous expression found in the terms in which it was drawn up would give him the means by and by of interpreting it to his advantage. Charles, in one of his letters to the queen, lets us see what he means by an ambiguous expression. "It is true," he tells her, "that it may be I give them leave to hope for more than I intended, but my words are only to endeavour to give them satisfaction." Then he is anxious to explain that though it is true that as to places he gives them some more likely hopes, yet neither in that is there any absolute engagement, but there is the condition of giving me encouragement thereunto by their ready inclination to peace' annexed with it.”

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It is little wonder that just as royalists took dissimulation to be the key to Cromwell, so it has been counted the master vice of Charles. Yet Charles was not the only dissembler. At this moment the Scots themselves boldly declared that all charges about their dealing with Mazarin and the queen were wholly false, when in fact they were perfectly true. In later days the Lord Protector dealt with

CHAP. I

POSITION OF THE KING

183

Mazarin on the basis of toleration for catholics, but his promises were not to be publicly announced. Revolutions do not make the best soil for veracity. It would be hard to deny that before Charles great dissemblers had been wise and politic princes. His ancestor King Henry VII., his predecessor Queen Elizabeth of famous memory, his wife's father Henry IV. of France, Louis XI., Charles V., and many another sagacious figure in the history of European states, had freely and effectively adopted the maxims now commonly named after Machiavelli. In truth, the cause of the king's ruin lay as much in his position as in his character. The directing portion of the nation had made up its mind to alter the relations of crown and parliament, and it was hardly possible in the nature of things, —men and kings being what they are, that Charles should passively fall into the new position that his victorious enemies had made for him. Europe has seen many constitutional monarchies attempted or set up within the last hundred years. In how many cases has the new system been carried on without disturbing an old dynasty? We may say of Charles I. what has been said of Louis XVI. Every day they were asking the king for the impossible to deny his ancestors, to respect the constitution that stripped him, to love the revolution that destroyed him. How could it be?

It is beside the mark, again, to lay the blame upon the absence of a higher intellectual atmosphere. It was not a bad intellectual basis that made the catastrophe certain, but antagonism of will, the clash of character, the violence of party passion and personality. The king was determined not to give up what the reformers were determined that he should not keep. He felt that to yield would be to betray both those who had gone before him and his children who were to come after. His opponents felt that to fall back would be to go both body and soul into chains.

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