1846.] Charge of Usurpation. - 449 But Cromwell was an ambitious usurper, "guilty of his country's blood," is another charge! And yet he was not blood-thirsty. He fought not as if it were his trade. He girded himself for the fight, not under the impulse of youthful passion, nor to make his fortune in the world. He was in middle life when the great conflict of arms began in England. He was the father, and the affectionate father, of a large family of children. He had long since worked off the fervors of youth and early manhood. He had pursued for years the quiet labors of husbandry on the banks of the Ouse. He put on the harness at the mature age of three and forty, influenced by a strong conviction of duty, believing that he was fighting the battles of the living God. He effected an entire change in the character of the army. It was said of Cromwell's soldiers, "Not a man swears but he pays his twelve-pence; no plundering, no drinking, disorder or impiety allowed." He says in one of his letters to the Parliament from Ireland, during his campaign in that distracted island, "We serve you; we are willing to be out of our trade of war, and shall hasten, by God's assistance and grace, to the end of our work, as the laborer doth to be at his rest." The notion of John Milton was, "that the Protectorate of his Highness Oliver was a thing called for by the necessities and the everlasting laws." And even Hume allows that, if he had "been guilty of no crime but this temporary usurpation, the plea of necessity and public good, which he alleged, might be allowed, in every view, a reasonable excuse for his conduct." "I have lived," said Cromwell, in one of his speeches, "the latter part of my age in- if I may say so the fire; in the midst of troubles." "I can say, in the presence of God, in comparison with whom we are but like poor creeping ants upon the earth, I would have been glad to have lived under my wood-side, to have kept a flock of sheep, rather than undertaken such a government as this." It requires no uncommon measure of faith to credit this. It was no easy seat that he sat upon. To act the part of constable, and preserve the peace in three such nations as England, Scotland and Ireland then were; to subdue and to keep down so many factions as then existed; to guard against so many personal enemies at home and abroad; to satisfy the public mind teeming with so many wild theories of religion and government; - to do all this was not easy. It would have been better, so far as his own happiness was concerned, "to have kept a flock of sheep." And if it is once granted that he was justified by necessity in assuming supreme power, it will not be questioned by any that his government was vigorous, successful, glorious. England was never better governed, it will probably be conceded by all, than in the days of Cromwell. He made the name of his country to be respected and dreaded in every part of the globe. The helm was in the hand of a sharp-sighted pilot, who knew how to steer the ship of state through as boisterous a storm as England has ever been tossed by. He adopted and acted on the principle of toleration in religion, at a time when toleration was generally viewed as nothing better than a criminal indifference to God's truth. He made it the noble aim of his foreign policy, to unite all the Protestant nations of Europe, under the lead of the Commonwealth, against Popery. In the midst of his own perplexing affairs, he had an open ear and a sympathizing heart for the sufferings of the persecuted Protestants abroad, and he interposed effectually in their behalf. He was served by such men as Blake upon the ocean, and Matthew Hale upon the bench, and John Milton in the office of Secretary. Such are among the features of the Protector's government, justifying the splendid praise of the author of Paradise Lost in his well known sonnet. It pleased the Lord, in his Providence, to take him away before he had realized all his great ideas in Church and State; and Charles Stuart, the Second, with his pimps and mistresses, "Nell-Gwynn Defender of the faith," the father (of his people? not he) – of the English nobility, came in, and the compact strength and Christian decency of the Commonwealth disappeared. Who now will venture to praise the man that was recently so flattered? See the cringing, time-serving crowds sloping off and turning round, as soon as that eye, which would have awed them to the dust, is closed, and saluting the royal Charles, who returns, with all his father's high notions of authority and with none of his father's personal virtues, to bring back the double curse of a licentious court and a petticoat prelacy. See poets of transcendant genius, Dryden and Waller, (Milton, thank God! was not with them,) crooking the 1846.] The Regicides. 451 hinges of their supple knees to the rising sun; eating their own words; and applauding him who, with a generosity worthy of the Stuarts, could dig up the relics of the dead lion, that he might have the satisfaction of kicking, with his ass's hoof, the leader, before whose face had fled in dismay the broken squadrons of the royal host at Worcester. But the murder of the King-how, it is asked, shall that stain be wiped off from Oliver Cromwell's name? He sat, as is well known of all men, in the High Court of Justice before which King Charles I. was brought to trial; he consented to the sentence passed upon that unfortunate monarch; and his name appears among others affixed to the death-warrant. -ear "In the drama of modern history," Mr. Carlyle remarks, "one knows not any graver, more note-worthy scene; nest as very Death and Judgment." * * * “ "They have decided to have justice, these men; to see God's justice done, and his judgments executed on this earth." *** "We know it not, this atrocity of the English Regicides, shall never know it. Í reckon it perhaps the most daring action any body of men, to be met with in history, ever, with clear consciousness, deliberately set themselves to do. Dread phantoms, glaring supernal on you when once they are quelled and their light snuffed outnone knows the terror of the phantom." *** "The like of which action will not be needed for a thousand years again. Needed, alas, not till a new genuine hero-worship has arisen, has perfected itself, and had time to degenerate into a Flunkeyism and cloth-worship again! Which I take to be a very long date indeed!"— Vol. I. pp. 325–330. Affairs had got into such a position, that the nation could be settled, and the peace and prosperity of England be secured, only by the entire overthrow of one or other of the opposite parties. The king represented one of those parties in his own person; so much so, that if he were removed, his party and cause were destroyed. There was, of course, no one person on the popular side, who in any such sense represented his party, and therefore to make sure of the destruction of this side, a great many must be sacrificed. So that on the score of common humanity and simple equity, which is the only rule for Christian Republicans to adopt in forming their judgment upon this act, it was far preferable that one man should die for the peace of a nation, than that the civil strife should be indefinitely prolonged. Whether Oliver Cromwell and his associate regicides really governed themselves, in the act to which they consented, by such a pure and simple motive, without any mixture of malice, revenge, ambition, envy, rapacity and self-seeking, and how far, if at all, each or any of them was thus influenced, are questions above human fallibility to decide. To their own Master they must stand or fall. But the act is sufficiently justified historically by the simple course of reasoning which we have indicated. The very same principles that brought our ancestors hither, and upon which all that we value is based, brought Charles Stuart to the block, and made him in the midst of his days a headless trunk. Charles was in many respects a good man. He had commendable qualities. He was, we cannot doubt, perfectly sincere in believing that the world was made, by the Lord of the universe, to be governed by Kings. He bore himself firmly, with calm dignity, to the end. He died as a Christian should die. There was nothing on his conscience to trouble him except the blood of Strafford. Strafford was the only one of his friends whom he had had the timidity to forsake. The account of the closing scenes of this monarch's life, as given by Hume, deeply interests the reader, and awakens respect and compassion towards the royal sufferer. But the ideas which he had inherited from his royal ancestors, and which he held so tenaciously, came into collision with the new ideas of the age. The two forces could not, or would not turn aside to pass each other. Neither would or could turn round, that they might pursue together the same track. There could be progress only in one way. One of the parties or the other must pass over the dead body of its antagonist. "The king of England, with his chief priests, was going one way; the Nation of England, by eternal laws, was going another; the split became too wide for healing." And it was for some time doubtful, whether the king or his enemies would finally prevail. Till his head was in the hands of the executioner, and his blood on the handkerchiefs of the people, it was uncertain,—and the Independents knew this quite well, which party should finally be uppermost in the conflict. "History, which has wept for a misguided Charles Stuart, and blubbered, in the most copious, helpless manner, near two 1846.] Puritanism in America. 453 centuries now, whole floods of brine, enough to salt the Herring fishery," and in the intervals of blubbering has uttered through the nose a maledictory interjection against the fanatical Independents, the miscreant Regicides, has no whine to suspire over the multitude of poor obscure victims that Laud and such as he, cut-throats by the grace of God, sent to the shades, or that larger multitude of trembling heretics upon whom dominant and persecuting Presbyterianism was ready to fasten its fangs. But the defence of Cromwell's character from the charges which stupidity and malignity have brought against him, although important, is not, after all, of chief importance. Neither his, nor any man's character will bear indiscriminate eulogy, or deserves indiscriminate censure. He was only one item in a vast social account, one individual in a great social movement, more prominent certainly than others, a Leader, as mortals call one another. But in the great Epic of Providence, leaders should be printed with a small initial. Under the great monarchy of the Lord, leaders are only poor subalterns, pigmy agents, raised up to utter the word, "thus saith the Lord," and dashed in pieces, whenever in their pitiful pride they stand against the divine world-movement. It is not Oliver Cromwell alone, that suffers injustice at the hands of the English Toryarchy. No. It is the whole movement in the latter part of the sixteenth and through the first half of the seventeenth centuries, that is lashed across the Protector's shoulders. It is we, the rightful heirs of Puritanism, who are insulted and defamed in the person of him who was the strongest man in that battle of humanity. What we would insist on strenuously is, that we of New England, who are shoots from that old Puritan stock, should be especially careful not to allow our minds to be controlled on this subject by writers, all whose interests and biasses incline them to take an opposite view from ours of that old drama and its persons. We are the fruit of the same seed that produced the Commonwealth in England. In the land of our fathers the great cause of civil and religious liberty was overborne, trampled down and speedily ruined, and the royal game-cocks crowed lustily over the annus mirabilis, the glorious Restoration, forsooth. But in America the cause was safe by reason of the VOL. XL. 4TH S. VOL. V. NO. II. 40 |