CHAPTER IX GROWING EMBARRASSMENTS IN France, a century and a quarter after Cromwell's day, they said that every clerk who had read Rousseau's New Heloisa, every schoolmaster who had translated ten pages of Livy, every journalist who knew by heart the sophisms of the Social Contract, was sure that he had found the philosopher's stone and was instantly ready to frame a constitution. Our brave fathers of the Cromwellian times were almost as rash. There is no branch of political industry that men approach with hearts so light, and yet that leaves them at the end so dubious and melancholy, as the concoction of a Second Chamber. Cromwell and his parliament set foot on this pons asinorum of democracy, without a suspicion of its dangers. The Protector made it a condition at his conferences in the spring of 1657, that if he was to go on there must be other persons interposed between him and the House of Commons. To prevent tumultuary and popular spirits he sought a screen. It was granted that he should name another House. Nothing seemed simpler or more plausible, and yet he was steering straight upon reefs and shoals. A mistake here, said Thurloe, will be like war or marriage it admits of no repentance. If the old House of Lords had been alive, and had also by miracle been sincerely in the humour to work for national pacification, to restore it might have tended : CHAP. IX THE OTHER HOUSE 415 to union. As it was, to call out of empty space an artificial House, without the hold upon men's minds of history and ancient association, without defined powers, without marked distinction of persons or interests, and then to try to make it an effective screen against an elected House to whose assent it owed its own being, was not to promote union but directly to provoke division and to intensify it. Confident in his own good faith, and with a conviction that to frame laws in view of contingent possibilities has a tincture of impiety in it as a distrust of Providence, Cromwell never thought out the scheme; he left it in the Humble Petition and Advice with leaks, chinks, and wide apertures that might horrify the newest apprentice of a parliamentary draftsman. The natural result followed. The new House was not to be more than seventy in number nor less than forty, to be named by the Protector and approved by the House of Commons; a place in it was not hereditary; and it received no more impressive title than the Other House. Cromwell selected a very respectable body of some sixty men, beginning with his two sons, Richard and Henry, and including good lawyers, judges, generals, and less than a dozen of the old nobles. Some of the ablest, like Lockhart and Monk and Henry Cromwell, were absent from England, and all of the old nobles save five held aloof. Like smaller reformers since, Cromwell had never decided, to begin with, whether to make his Lords strong or weak: strong enough to curb the Commons, and yet weak enough for the Commons to curb them. The riddle seems unanswered to this day. He forgot too that by removing so many men of experience and capacity from the Commons, he was impairing the strength of his own government at the central point of attack. Attack was certain, for on the opening of the second session of his second parliament (Jan. 20, 1658) the ninety members whom he had shut out from the first session were to be admitted. Some of them after much consideration deemed it their duty "to leave that tyrant and his packed convention to stand upon his sandy foundation," but the majority seem to have thought otherwise and they reappeared. The looseness of the constituting document made the business of an opposition easy, if it were inclined to action. One clause undoubtedly enacted that no standing law could be altered, and no new law made, except by Act of Parliament. As a previous clause had defined a parliament to consist of two Houses, this seemed to confer on the Other House a co-ordinate share in legislation. On the other hand, the only section dealing with the specific attributes of the new House regards it as a court of civil and criminal appeal, and the opposition argued that the Other House was to be that and nothing else. It was here, and on the question of government by a single House, that the ground of party battle was chosen. Cromwell's enemies had a slight majority. After the debate had gone on for four days, he addressed them in an urgent remonstrance. He dwelt on the alarming state of Europe, the combinations against the protestant interest, the discord within that interest itself, the danger of a Spanish invasion to restore the Stuarts, the deadly perils of disunion at home. The House was deaf. For ten days more the stubborn debate on the name and place of the Other House went on. Stealthy attempts were made to pervert the army in the interest of a republican revival. As in the old times of the Long Parliament, the opposition worked up petitions in the city. These petitions were designed by the malcontents to serve as texts for motions and debates in favour of returning to a pure commonwealth. On the other wing there were some in the parliament who even held commissions from the king. CHAP. IX THE COMMONS RESIST 417 The Protector, well aware of all that was on foot, at last could endure it no more. In opening the session he had referred to his infirmity of health, and the labour of wrestling with the difficulties of his place, as Maidstone says, " drank up his spirits, of which his natural constitution yielded a vast stock." Royalists consoled themselves with stories that he was not well in mind or body; that his mutinous officers vexed him strangely; and that he was forced to take opium to make him sleep. The story of the circumstances of the last dealings of Oliver with a parliament was related as follows:A mysterious porter brought letters addressed to the Protector. Thurloe directed Maidstone, the steward, to take them to his Highness. The door of the apartment was closed, but on his knocking very hard, Cromwell cried out angrily to know who was there. Presently he unbarred the door, took the letters, and shut himself in again. By and by he sent for Whalley and Desborough, who were to be in command of the guard that night. He asked them if they had heard no news, and on their saying no, he again asked if they had not heard of a petition. He bade them go to Westminster. On their way they heard some of the soldiery using disaffected words. This they immediately reported, and Oliver told them to change the ordering of the guards for the night. The next morning (Feb. 4), before nine o'clock he called for his breakfast, telling Thurloe, who chanced to be ill, that he would go to the House, at which Thurloe wondered why his Highness resolved so suddenly. He did not tell him why, but he was resolved to go. And when he had his meal, he withdrew himself, and went the back way, intending alone to have gone by water; but the ice was so as he could not; then he came the foot way, and the first man of the guard he saw he commanded him to press the nearest coach, which he did, with but two horses in it, and so he 66 went with not above four footmen, and about five or six of the guards to the House; after which, retiring into the withdrawing room, drank a cup of ale and ate a piece of toast. Then the lord Fiennes, near to him, asked his Highness what he intended; he said he would dissolve the House. Upon which the lord Fleetwood said, I beseech your Highness consider first well of it; it is of great consequence. He replied, You are a milksop: by the living God I will dissolve the House. (Some say he iterated this twice, and some say it was, As the Lord liveth.)" His speech was for once short and concentrated, and he did not dissemble his anger. "What is like to come upon this," he concluded, " the enemy being ready to invade us, but our present blood and confusion? And if this be so, I do assign it to this cause your not assenting to what you did invite me to by your Petition and Advice, as that which might prove the settlement of the nation. And if this be the end of your sitting, and this be your carriage, I think it high time that an end be put to your sitting. And I so dissolve this parliament. And let God be judge between you and me." To which end, says one report, many of the Commons cried Amen. Cromwell's government had gone through six stages in the five years since the revolution of 1653. The first was a dictatorship tempered by a military council. Second, while wielding executive power as Lord-General, he called a parliamentary convention. Third, the convention vanished, and the soldiers installed him as Protector under the Instrument. Fourth, the system under the Instrument broke down, and for months the Protectorate again meant the personal rule of the head of the army. Fifth, the rule of the major-generals broke down, and was followed by a kind of constitutional monarchy. Sixth, the monarch and the parliament quarrelled, |