results by motive, or real consequences by the ideals and intentions of the actor who produced them.

The first act of the revolutionary play cannot be understood until the curtain has fallen on the fifth. To ignore the Restoration is to misjudge the Rebellion. France, a century and more after, marched along a blood-stained road in a period that likewise extended not very much over twenty years, from the calling of the States-General, in 1789, through consulate and empire to Moscow and to Leipzig. Only time tells all. In a fine figure the sublimest of Roman poets paints the struggle of warrior hosts upon the plain, the gleam of burnished arms, the fiery wheeling of the horse, the charges that thunder on the ground. But yet, he says, there is a tranquil spot on the far-off heights whence all the scouring legions seem as if they stood still, and all the glancing flash and confusion of battle as though it were blended in a sheet of steady flame.1 So history makes the shifting things seem fixed. Posterity sees a whole. With the statesman in revolutionary times it is different. Through decisive moments that seemed only trivial, and by critical turns that he took to be indifferent, he explores dark and untried paths, groping his way through a jungle of vicissitude, ambush, stratagem, expedient; a match for fortune in all her moods; lucky if now and again he catch a glimpse of the polar star. Such is the case of Cromwell. The effective revolution came thirty years later, and when it came it was no Cromwellian revolution; it was aristocratic and not democratic, secular and not religious, parliamentary and not military, the substitution for the old monarchy of a territorial oligarchy supreme alike in Lords and Commons. Nor is it true to say that the church after the Restoration became a mere shadow of her ancient form. For two centuries, besides her vast influence as a purely ecclesiastical

1 Lucretius, ii. 323-332.

BOOK I

PROLOGUE

5

organisation, the church was supreme in the universities, those powerful organs in English national life; she was supreme in the public schools that fed them. The directing classes of the country were almost exclusively her sons. The land was theirs. Dissidents were tolerated; they throve and prospered; but they had little more share in the government of the nation than if Cromwell had never been born. To perceive all this, to perceive that Cromwell did not succeed in turning aside the destinies of his people from the deep courses that history had pre-appointed for them into the new channels which he fondly hoped he was tracing with the point of his victorious sword, implies no blindness either to the gifts of a brave and steadfast man, or to the grandeur of some of his ideals of a good citizen and a well-governed state.

It is hard to deny that wherever force was useless Cromwell failed; or that his example would often lead in what modern opinion firmly judges to be false directions; or that it is in Milton and Bunyan rather than in Cromwell that we seek what was deepest, loftiest, and most abiding in Puritanism. We look to its apostles rather than its soldier. Yet Oliver's largeness of aim; his freedom of spirit, and the energy that comes of a free spirit; the presence of a burning light in his mind, though the light in our later times may have grown dim or gone out; his good faith, his valour, his constancy, have stamped his name, in spite of some exasperated acts that it is pure sophistry to justify, upon the imagination of men over all the vast area of the civilised world where the English tongue prevails. The greatest names in history are those who, in a full career and amid the turbid extremities of political action, have yet touched closest and at most points the wide ever-standing problems of the world, and the things in which men's interest never dies. Of this far-shining company Cromwell was surely one.

CHAPTER I

EARLY LIFE

"I was by birth a gentleman, living neither in any considerable height nor yet in obscurity." Such was Cromwell's account of himself. He was the descend

ant in the third degree of Richard Cromwell, whose earlier name was Richard Williams, a Welshman, from Glamorganshire, nephew, and one of the agents of Thomas Cromwell, the iron-handed servant of Henry VIII., the famous sledge-hammer of the monks. In the deed of jointure on his marriage the future Protector is described as Oliver Cromwell alias Williams. Hence those who insist that what is called a Celtic strain is needed to give fire and speed to an English stock, find Cromwell a case in point.

Thomas Cromwell's sister married Morgan Williams, the father of Richard, but when the greater name was assumed seems uncertain. What is certain is that he was in favour with Thomas Cromwell and with the king after his patron's fall, and that Henry VIII. gave him, among other spoils of the church, the revenues and manors belonging to the priory of Hinchinbrook and the abbey of Ramsey, in Huntingdonshire and the adjacent counties. Sir Richard left a splendid fortune to an eldest son, whom Elizabeth made Sir Henry. This, the Golden Knight, so called from his profusion, was the father of Sir Oliver, a worthy of a prodigal turn like himself. Besides Sir Oliver, the Golden Knight had a younger son, Robert, and Robert in

6

CHAP. I

EARLY LIFE

7

turn became the father of the mighty Oliver of history, who was thus the great-grandson of the first Richard.

Robert Cromwell married (1591) a young widow, Elizabeth Lynn. Her maiden name of Steward is only interesting because some of her stock boasted that if one should climb the genealogical tree high enough, it would be found that Elizabeth Steward and the royal Stewarts of Scotland had a common ancestor. Men are pleased when they stumble on one of Fortune's tricks, as if the regicide should himself turn out to be even from a far-off distance of the kingly line. The better opinion seems to be that Steward was not Stewart at all, but only Norfolk Steward.

The story of Oliver's early life is soon told. He was born at Huntingdon on April 25, 1599. His parents had ten children in all; Oliver was the only son who survived infancy. Homer has a line that has been taken to mean that it is bad for character to grow up an only brother among many sisters; but Cromwell at least showed no default in either the bold and strong or the tender qualities that belong to manly natures. He was sent to the public school of the place. The master was a learned and worthy divine, the preacher of the word of God in the town of Huntingdon; the author of some classic comedies; of a proof in two treatises of the well-worn proposition that the Pope is Antichrist; and of a small volume called The Theatre of God's Judgments, in which he collects from sacred and profane story examples of the justice of God against notorious sinners both great and small, but more especially against those high persons of the world whose power insolently bursts the barriers of mere human justice. The youth of Huntingdon therefore drank of the pure milk of the stern word that bade men bind their kings in chains and their nobles in links of iron.

How long Oliver remained under Dr. Beard, what

proficiency he attained in study and how he spent his spare time, we do not know, and it is idle to guess. In 1616 (April 23), at the end of his seventeenth year, he went to Cambridge as a fellow-commoner of Sidney Sussex College. Dr. Samuel Ward, the master, was an excellent and conscientious man and had taken part in the version of the Bible so oddly associated with the name of King James I. He took part also in the famous Synod of Dort (1619), where Calvinism triumphed over Arminianism. His college was denounced by Archbishop Laud as one of the nurseries of Puritanism, and there can be no doubt in what sort of atmosphere Cromwell passed those years of life in which the marked outlines of character are unalterably drawn.

After little more than a year's residence in the university, he lost his father (June 1617). Whether he went back to college we cannot tell, nor whether there is good ground for the tradition that after quitting Cambridge he read law at Lincoln's Inn. It was the fashion for young gentlemen of the time, and Cromwell may have followed it. There is no reason to suppose that Cromwell was ever the stuff of which the studious are made. Some faint evidence may be traced of progress in mathematics; that he knew some of the common tags of Greek and Roman history; that he was able to hold his own in surface discussion on jurisprudence. In later days when he was Protector, the Dutch ambassador says that they carried on their conversation together in Latin. But, according to Burnet, Oliver's Latin was vicious and scanty, and of other foreign tongues he had none. There is a story about his arguing upon regicide from the principles of Mariana and Buchanan, but he may be assumed to have derived these principles from his own mother-wit, and not to have needed text-books. He had none of the tastes or attainments that attract us in many of those who either fought by his side or who fought against him.