faithfully served by papists, episcopalians, and other malignants. To such men his duty to God and his country, as he understood it, forbade him to extend toleration.

'It was not till 1645 that Cromwell had begun to stand clearly out in the popular imagination, alike of friends and foes. He was the idol of his troops. He prayed and preached among them; he played uncouth practical jokes with them; he was not above a snowball match against them; he was a brisk, energetic, skilful soldier, and he was an invincible commander. In Parliament he made himself felt, as having the art of hitting the right debating-nail upon the head. The saints had an instinct that he was their man, and that they could trust him to stand by them when the day of trial came. A good commander of horse, say the experts, is as rare as a good commander-in-chief-he needs so rare a union of prudence with impetuosity. What Cromwell was in the field he was in council: bold but wary; slow to raise his arm, but swift to strike; fiery in the assault, but knowing when to draw bridle. These rare combinations were invaluable, for even the heated and headlong revolutionary is not sorry to find a leader cooler than himself. Above all, and as the mainspring of all, he had heart and conscience. While the Scots are striving to make the king into a Covenanter, and the Parliament to get the Scots out of the country, and the Independents to find means of turning the political scale against the Presbyterians, Cromwell finds time to intercede with a Royalist gentleman on behalf of some honest poor neighbours who are being molested for their theologies.*

The saints looked upon him as their own. He was the idol of the army. Such a position gave Cromwell immense power for good or for evil; but its conditions were evidently much more conformable to the exercise of arbitrary military authority than to the practice of a wide-minded, constructive, liberal statesmanship. By the end of 1646 the army had brought to a triumphant close what is known as the first civil war, and the following year it became abundantly clear that out of the struggle between King and Parliament was to be evolved another, scarcely, if at all, less formidable -viz. between Parliament and Army. Many admirers of Cromwell have, in truth, done him injustice by inviting us to see in that great man the kind of statesmanship which neither the age, nor the special conditions of the moment, nor the man's own character rendered possible. The army was naturally and rightly dissatisfied with the Government, that is, the Parliament. Even saints must be paid, and army pay was lamentably in arrear. The soldiers petitioned, and their discontent involved that of the extreme

Morley, p. 217.

Puritan sections of the community from which they sprang. The House of Commons treated the petitions with scanty respect, and, when the soldiers remonstrated, the House at once got on its high horse and passed angry resolutions against them as enemies of the State and disturbers of the public peace. This,' says Mr. Morley, with a touch all his own, is the party of order all over.'* Whether Cromwell was cognisant beforehand of the sudden coup at Hornby House by which the army possessed itself of the King's person is uncertain. It had, however, his approval :

From this exploit,' says Mr. Morley, begins the descent down those fated steps in which each successive violence adds new momentum to the violence which is to follow, and pays retribution for the violence that has gone before. Purges, proscriptions, camp courts, executions, major-generals, dictatorship, restoration-this was the toilsome, baffling path on to which, in spite of hopeful auguries and prognostications, both sides were now irrevocably drawn.'

Hitherto it had been Cromwell's justification of the war that it was necessary in the defence of the freedom of parliament; and Cromwell's own inclination would never have led him to set aside the authority of the House of Commons in favour of military rule. In revolutionary times-nay, in exciting times far short of revolution-those who are supposed to lead are in truth themselves under the strong compulsion of circumstances, and forced to follow. Cromwell found it necessary to defer to the Council of the Army, and to what that Council had behind it. For his own part he would have preferred at this time to arrive at an understanding between the King and the army; but, great as had become his ascendency in the State, that was beyond his power.

'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 worst.'

Certain it is that Cromwell would have preferred to retain a King and a House of Lords; but the first essential, in his opinion, in those troubled times was to maintain, in the cause of order and peace, a steadfast and united army. Within the army it soon became clear that there could be

Morley, p. 220.

no peace except by satisfying its passionate desire to sweep away the Man of Blood' and the authority of all who adhered to him. To Cromwell no doubt it seemed at last that the choice lay between the rule of the army and anarchy. If the army was torn by discord, what hope remained for the nation? No other authority was left standing; and to him, and as a matter of fact, the army was much more than a body of drilled men. It was the representative of the vehement puritanism that possessed a considerable portion-the godly portion-of the people. No one knew better than Cromwell the evil, if it could be avoided, of carrying even desirable measures by brute force.

'Remember,' he said, 'that what we gain in a free way is better than twice as much in a forced way, and will be more truly ours and our posterity's;'

a sentiment highly praised by Mr. Morley, who thinks it one of the harshest ironies of history

'that the name of the famous man who started on the severest stage of his journey with this broad and far-reaching principle should have become the favourite symbol of the shallow faith that force is the only remedy.'

When once Cromwell had made up his mind to follow the lead of the extremists, there was no more hesitation on his part. He felt himself an instrument to carry out the divine decrees. Doubt was no longer possible to him, and there is no reason to suppose that his conscience was ever disturbed by subsequent questionings as to the righteousness of the policy he had pursued. Unfortunately, in exciting times violence is the very thing for which most men foolishly and loudly clamour.

To Mr. Morley violence is always hateful, even when practised by his own side. With the whole world he joins in condemnation of King Charles for arresting the five members in 1642. For the same reason, in more select company, he condemns the ejection of the Presbyterian leaders in June 1648. Violence begets violence, and the action of the army in ejecting the Eleven was not different in kind from that of the King in seizing the more famous Five. Moreover, it was but the first step in the path towards the complete suppression of the House of Commons by the soldiers, and the removal of the Bauble in 1653. As to the King's trial, how can the hater of violence give hearty approval to such a mockery of justice? The tribunal, Mr. Morley points out,

was without parliamentary authority, or any other authority than that of the soldiers who constructed it for the express purpose of condemning the King. The Petition of Right was not twenty years old. It had forbidden martial law. Yet 'martial law this was, and nothing else, if that be the ' name for the uncontrolled arbitrament of the man with the sword.'

6

Out of the half-dozen books named at the head of this article, one only maintains the attitude common enough amongst conservative writers in the pre-Carlyle period. Sir Reginald Palgrave, till lately the able and respected Clerk of the House of Commons, claims to put before us, as a true portrait, the man as he appeared to his bitterest foes at a period of unexampled political heat and passion, and thereby, no doubt, discloses a smart contrast between the 'pitiable Protector of 1653-58, and Cromwell the Great and Good of 1845-89.' He endeavours to prove that the moral and political influence which Cromwell and his government wrought upon his subjects diffused over 'England the contagion of systematic fraud.' Yet we think that Sir Reginald has quite lately admitted that since Carlyle's publication of the Speeches and Letters' it is impossible to doubt the sincerity of Cromwell at the bar of his own conscience. He may have been passionate, prejudiced, bigoted, as great men have often been; but no intelligent being surely can doubt that he was working, and very often working against almost overwhelming difficulty, for what he believed to be a great and good cause. There will not be many who will arrive at Sir Reginald Palgrave's 'conclusion of the whole matter.'

If an adventurer,' he writes, 'attempts an upward climb "into good society," and is repulsed, he naturally falls back into his former habits, and among his former chums. Cromwell, mighty adventurer as he was, could not escape the adventurer's lot. Dispossessed of his sham Royal Protectorate by a mutinous House of Commons, he returned at once to the boon companions he had discarded, and to his wonted method of terrorism. In a moment down he sank, for the last time, into the drudge.'

On February 4, 1658, Cromwell dissolved Parliament. Two days later he sneaks up to the army officers; he calls them 'together, speaks to them "familiarly," drinks wine with them "very plenteously," and prostrates himself before 'them,'* and so on. Let any one who reads this turn to the Oliver Cromwell the Protector,' citing Hist. MSS. Comm. 5th Report, pp. 166–177.

Protector's own language in dissolving his last Parliament, let him recall the undoubted facts of the time, the imminent dangers of the moment, the duty which he as Protector undoubtedly owed to the State, and then ask himself whether Cromwell was the mere vulgar upstart, the unpatriotic self-seeker here described. Let him place the 'sham Royal' Protectorate side by side with the genuinethe legitimate article-the Stuart throne, and say which is the more worthy of the respect of Englishmen.

Our modern authors have of course much to say on those well-worn themes, the conduct of Cromwell as regards the trial and execution of the King, and his treatment of the Roman Catholics of Ireland. Mr. Morley, as might be expected, is far the most fair-minded and judicial in his handling of these much-contested matters. The English Radical statesman has a healthy dislike, as has been already noticed, to violence wherever he finds it, but perhaps too little disposition to distinguish it from the force which, on occasions, the maintenance of right and peace often requires. The different standpoint of historians, themselves so dissimilar as those named at the head of this article, is naturally very clearly marked.

To biographers who are also politicians the career of the great Protector is beset with difficulty. To the Radical, on the first blush, it is all plain sailing. With the overthrow of a tyrannical monarchy he naturally sympathises keenly. But Cromwell was something of a coercionist; ' and if there is one thing hateful to a Radical like Mr. Morley, it is military coercion. Moreover Mr. Morley is not merely a Radical, he is the most eminent advocate of Irish-Roman Catholic Irish-claims; and Cromwellianism in Ireland was not exactly the governing of Irishmen on Irish ideas. Mr. Roosevelt, as becomes an eminent statesman of the Great Republic, is grandly superior to the old-world sentiment that hangs about kings in monarchical Europe. He hardly

knows how to characterise American citizens who erect stained-glass windows at Philadelphia to the Royal Martyr,' and even in New York and Boston hold absurd festivals in his praise. But if amongst American politicians there is little sympathy for kings, there is plenty for the woes of Irishmen, and the admiration due to the conqueror and executioner of his Sovereign is greatly diminished by Cromwell's ill-treatment of that much-suffering people. There are, however, no cross currents in the sentiments with which the late Clerk of the House of Commons regards the