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What is not improbable is that Cromwell may have told Joyce to secure the king's person at Holmby against the suspected designs of the parliament, and that the actual removal was prompted on the spot by a supposed or real emergency. On the other hand, the hypothesis is hardly any more improbable that the whole design sprang from the agitators, and that Cromwell had no part in it. It was noticed later as a significant coincidence that on the very evening on which Joyce forced his way into the king's bed-chamber, Cromwell, suspecting that the leaders of the presbyterian majority were about to arrest him, mounted his horse and rode off to join the army. His share in Joyce's seizure and removal of the king afterwards is less important than his approval of it as a strong and necessary lesson to the majority in the parliament.

So opened a more startling phase of revolutionary transformation. For Joyce's exploit at Holmby begins the descent down those fated steeps in which each successive violence adds new momentum to the violence that is to follow, and pays retribution for the violence that has gone before. Purges, proscriptions, camp courts, executions, majorgenerals, dictatorship, restoration-this was the toilsome, baffling path on to which, in spite of hopeful auguries and prognostications, both sides were now irrevocably drawn.

Parliament was at length really awake to the power of the soldiers, and their determination to use it. The city, with firmer nerve but still with lively alarm, watched headquarters rapidly changed to St. Albans, to Berkhamsted, to Uxbridge, to Wycombe-now drawing off, then hovering closer, launching to-day a declaration, to-morrow a remonstrance, next day a vindication, like dangerous flashes out of a sullen cloud.

For the first time "purge" took its place in the political vocabulary of the day. Just as the king

CHAP. II

THE FIRST PURGE

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had attacked the five members, so now the army attacked eleven, and demanded the ejection of the whole group of presbyterian leaders from the House of Commons, with Denzil Holles at the head of them (June 16-26). Among the Eleven were men as pure and as patriotic as the immortal Five, and when we think that the end of these heroic twenty years was the Restoration, it is not easy to see why we should denounce the pedantry of the parliament, whose ideas for good or ill at last prevailed, and should reserve all our glorification for the army, who proved to have no ideas that would either work or that the country would accept. The demand for the expulsion of the Eleven was the first step in the path that was to end in the removal of the Bauble in 1653.

Incensed by these demands, and by what they took to be the weakness of their confederates in the Commons, the city addressed one strong petition after another, and petitions were speedily followed by actual revolt. The seamen and the watermen on the river-side, the young men and apprentices from Aldersgate and Cheapside, entered into one of the many solemn engagements of these distracted years, and when their engagement was declared by the bewildered Commons to be dangerous, insolent, and treasonable, excited mobs trooped down to Westminster, made short work of the nine gentlemen who that day composed the House of Lords, forcing them to cross the obnoxious declaration off their journals, and tumultuously besieged the House of Commons, some of them even rudely making their way, as Charles had done six years before, within the sacred doors and on to the inviolable floor, until members drew their swords and forced the intruders out. When the Speaker would have left the House, the mob returned to the charge, drove him back to his chair, and compelled him to put the motion that the king be invited to

come to London forthwith with honour, freedom, and safety. So readily, as usual, did reaction borrow at second hand the turbulent ways of revolution.

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In disgust at this violent outrage, the Speakers of the two Houses (July 30), along with a considerable body of members, betook themselves to the army. When they accompanied Fairfax and his officers on horseback in a review on Hounslow Heath, the troopers greeted them with mighty acclamations of Lords and Commons and a free parliament." The effect of the manoeuvres of the reactionists in the city was to place the army in the very position that they were eager to take, of being protectors of what they chose to consider the true parliament, to make a movement upon London not only defensible, but inevitable, to force the hand of Cromwell, and to inflame still higher the ardour of the advocates of the revolutionary Thorough. Of the three great acts of military force against the parliament, now happened the first (August 1647). The doors were not roughly closed as Oliver closed them on the historic day in April 1653, and there was no sweeping purge like that of Pride in December 1648. Fairfax afterward sought credit for having now resisted the demand to put military violence upon the House, but Cromwell with his assent took a course that came to the same thing. He stationed cavalry in Hyde Park, and then marched down to his place in the House, accompanied by soldiers, who after he had gone in hung about the various approaches with a significance that nobody mistook. The soldiers had definitely turned politicians, and even without the experience that Europe has passed through since, it ought not to have been very hard to foresee what their politics would be.

CHAPTER III

THE OFFICERS AS POLITICIANS

ENGLAND throughout showed herself the least revolutionary of the three kingdoms, hardly revolutionary at all. Here was little of the rugged, dour, and unyielding persistency of the northern Covenanters, none of the savage aboriginal frenzy of the Irish. Cromwell was an Englishman all over, and it is easy to conceive the dismay with which in the first half of 1647 he slowly realised the existence of a fierce insurgent leaven in the army. The worst misfortune of a civil war, said Cromwell's contemporary, De Retz, is that one becomes answerable even for the mischief that one has not done. "All the fools turn madmen, and even the wisest have no chance of either acting or speaking as if they were in their right wits." In spite of the fine things that have been said of heroes, and the might of their will, a statesman in such a case as Cromwell's soon finds how little he can do to create marked situations, and how the main part of his business is in slowly parrying, turning, managing circumstances for which he is not any more responsible than he is for his own existence, and yet which are his masters, and of which he can only make the best or the worst.

Cromwell never showed a more sagacious insight into the hard necessities of the situation than when he endeavoured to form an alliance between the king and the army. All the failures and disasters that harassed him from this until the day of his death arose from the breakdown of the negotiations

now undertaken. The restoration of Charles I. by Cromwell would have been a very different thing from the restoration of Charles II. by Monk. In the midsummer of 1647 Cromwell declared that he desired no alteration of the civil government, and no meddling with the presbyterian settlement, and no opening of a way for "licentious liberty under pretence of obtaining ease for tender consciences."

Unhappily for any prosperous issue, Cromwell and his men were met by a constancy as fervid as their own. Charles followed slippery and crooked paths; but he was as sure as Cromwell that he had God on his side, that he was serving divine purposes and upholding things divinely instituted. He was as unyielding as Cromwell in fidelity to what he accounted the standards of personal duty and national well-being. He was as patient as Cromwell in facing the ceaseless buffets and misadventures that were at last to sweep him down the cataract. Charles was not without excuse for supposing that by playing off army against parliament, and independent against presbyterian, he would still come into his own again. The jealousy and ill - will between the contending parties was at its height, and there was no reason either in conscience or in policy why he should not make the most of that fact. Each side sought to use him, and from his own point of view he had a right to strike the best bargain he could with either. Unfortunately, he could not bring himself to strike any bargain at all, and the chance passed. Cromwell's efforts only served to weaken his own authority with the army, and he was driven to give up hopes of the king, as he had already been driven to give up hopes of the parliament. This was in effect to be thrown back against all his wishes and instincts upon the army alone, and to find himself, by nature a moderator with a passion for order in its largest meaning, flung into the midst of military and constitutional anarchy.

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