CHAP. VI

OFFICERS OPPOSE KINGSHIP

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officers, as vainly arrogating to themselves too great a share in his Highness' government, and to have too big an opinion of their own merit in subverting the old." He thinks the gaudy feather in the hat of authority a matter of little concern either way. If the army men were foolish in resenting it with so much heat, the heat of those who insisted on it was foolish too. Whether the gaudy feather decked the hat or not, anything would be better than the loss of the scheme as a whole; the scheme was good in itself, and its loss would puff up the contrariants and make it easier for them, still remaining in power as they would remain, to have their own way. It is plain that the present dissension on the kingship was an explosion of griefs and jealousies that were not new.

At last Cromwell declared to several members, that he was resolved to accept. Lambert, Desborough, and Fleetwood warned him that if he did, they must withdraw from all public employment, and that other officers of quality would certainly go with them. Desborough happening, after he knew the momentous decision, to meet Colonel Pride, told him that Cromwell had made up his mind to accept the crown. "That he shall not,' said the unfaltering Pride. "Why," asked the other, "how wilt thou hinder it?" "Get me a petition drawn," answered Pride, "and I will prevent it. The petition was drawn, and on the day when the House was expecting Oliver's assent, a group of seven-and-twenty officers appeared at the bar with the prayer that they should not press the kingship any further. Pride's confidence in the effect of a remonstrance from the officers was justified by the event. When news of this daring move against both the determination of the Protector, and the strong feeling of the parliament, reached Whitehall, Cromwell was reported as extremely angry, calling it a high breach of privilege, and the

greatest injury they could have offered him short of cutting his throat. He sent for Fleetwood, reproached him for allowing things to go so far, while knowing so well that without the assent of the army he was decided against the kingship; and bade him go immediately to Westminster to stay further proceedings on the petition, and instantly invite the House to come to Whitehall to hear his definite reply. They came. He gave his decision in a short, firm speech, to the effect that if he accepted the kingship, at the best he should do it doubtingly, and assuredly whatever was done doubtingly was not of faith. "I cannot," he said, "undertake this government with the title of king; and that is mine answer to this great and weighty business." This was all he said, but everybody knew that he had suffered his first repulse, a wound in the house of his friend. He set his mark on

those who had withstood him, and Lambert was speedily dismissed. It is not easy to explain why, if Cromwell did not fear to exile Lambert from place, as he had not feared to send Harrison to prison, he should not have held to his course in reliance on his own authority in the army. Clarendon supposes his courage for once to have failed, and his genius to have forsaken him. Swift, in that whimsical list of Mean and Great Figures made by several persons in some particular action of their lives, counts Cromwell a great figure when he quelled a mutiny in Hyde Park, and a mean one the day when out of fear he refused the kingship. As usual, Cromwell was more politic than the army. It is strange that some who eulogise him as a great conservative statesman, yet eulogise with equal fervour the political sagacity of the army, who as a matter of fact resisted almost every conservative step that he wished to take, while they hurried him on to all those revolutionary steps to which he was most averse. However this may be, we may at least be

CHAP. VI CROMWELL AGAIN INSTALLED

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sure that "few men were better judges of what might be achieved by daring," and that if he determined that the occasion was not ripe, he must be assumed to have known what he was about.

The House proceeded with their measure on the new footing, and on June 26th Oliver was solemnly installed as Lord Protector under the new law. Though the royal title was in abeyance, the scene marked the conversion of what had first been a military dictatorship, and then the Protectorate of a republic, into a constitutional monarchy. A rich canopy was prepared at the upper end of Westminster Hall, and under it was placed the royal Coronation Chair of Scotland which had been brought from the Abbey. On the table lay a magnificent Bible, and the sword and sceptre of the Commonwealth. When the Lord Protector had entered, the Speaker in the name of the parliament placed upon his shoulders a mantle of purple velvet lined with ermine, girt him with the sword, delivered into his hands the sceptre of massy gold, and administered the oath of fidelity to the new constitution. A prayer was offered up, and then Cromwell amid trumpet blasts and loud shouting from the people who thronged the hall, took his seat in the chair, holding the sceptre in his right hand, with the ambassador of Louis the Fourteenth on the one side, and the ambassador of the United Provinces on the other. "What a comely and glorious sight it is," said the Speaker, "to behold a Lord Protector in a purple robe, with a sceptre in his hand, with the sword of justice girt about him, and his eyes fixed upon the Bible! Long may you enjoy them all to your own comfort and the comfort of the people of these nations." Before many months were over, Oliver was declaring to them, "I can say in the presence of God, in comparison with whom we are but like poor creeping ants upon the earth, that I would have been glad to have

lived under my woodside, to have kept a flock of sheep, rather than undertake such a government as this.

The Protectorate has sometimes been treated as a new and original settlement of the crucial question of parliamentary sovereignty. On the contrary, the history of the Protectorate in its two phases, under the two Instruments of 1653 and 1657 by which it was constituted, seems rather to mark a progressive return to an old system than the creation of a new one. The Agreement of the People (1649) was the embodiment of the idea of the absolute supremacy of a single elective House. The Instrument of Government (1653) went a certain way towards mitigating this supremacy, by entrusting executive power to a single person, subject to the assent and co-operation of a Council itself the creation, at first direct and afterwards indirect, of the single House. The Humble Petition and Advice (1657) in effect restored the principle of monarchy, and took away from parliament the right in future to choose the monarch. On him was conferred the further power of naming the members of the new Second House. The oath prescribed for a privy councillor was an oath of allegiance to the person and authority of the Lord Protector and his successors, and he was clothed with the more than regal right of deciding who the successor should be. On the other hand, the Council or cabinet by whose advice the Lord Protector was bound to govern, was to be approved by both Houses, and to be irremovable without the consent of parliament. The Protectorate then was finally established, so far as constitutional documents go and in rudimentary forms, on the same principles of parliamentary supremacy over the executive and of ministerial responsibility, that have developed our modern system of government by parliamentary cabinet.

CHAPTER VII

DOMESTIC TRAITS

THERE is no sign that the wonderful fortunes that had befallen him in the seventeen years since he quitted his woodside, his fields and flocks, had altered the soundness of Cromwell's nature. Large affairs had made his vision broader; power had hardened his grasp; manifold necessities of men and things had taught him lessons of reserve, compliance, suppleness, and silence; great station brought out new dignity. of carriage. But the foundations were unchanged. Time never choked the springs of warm affection in him, the true refreshment of every careworn life. In his family he was as tender and as solicitous in the hour of his glory as he had been in the distant days at St. Ives and Ely. It was in the spring of 1654 that he took up his residence at Whitehall. "His wife seemed at first unwilling to remove thither, tho' she afterwards became better satisfied with her grandeur. His mother, who by reason of her great age was not so easily flattered with these temptations, very much mistrusted the issue of affairs, and would be often afraid when she heard the noise of a musket, that her son was shot, being exceedingly dissatisfied unless she might see him once a day at least." Only six months after her installation in the splendours of Whitehall the aged woman passed away. My Lord Protector's mother," writes Thurloe in November," of ninety-four years old, died the last

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