So presbyterians and independents feared and hated each other, not merely because each failed in intellectual perception of the case of their foe, but because their blood was up, because they believed dissent in opinion to mean moral obliquity, because sectional interests were at stake, and for all those other reasons which spring from that spirit of sect and party which is so innate in man, and always mingles so much evil with whatever it may have of good. The undoing of Charles was not merely his turn for intrigue and double-dealing; it was blindness to signs, mismeasurement of forces, dishevelled confusion of means and ends. Unhappily mere foolishness in men responsible for the government of great states is apt to be a curse as heavy as the crimes of tyrants. With strange self-confidence, Charles was hard at work upon schemes and combinations, all at best most difficult in themselves, and each of them violently inconsistent with the other. He was hopefully negotiating with the independents, and at the same time both with the catholic Irish and with the presbyterian Scots. He looked to the support of the covenanters, and at the same time he relied upon Montrose, between whom and the covenanters there was now an antagonism almost as vindictive as a Corsican blood-feud. He professed a desire to come to an understanding with his people and parliament, yet he had a chimerical plan for collecting a new army to crush both parliament and people; and he was looking each day for the arrival of Frenchmen, or Lorrainers, or Dutchmen or Danes, and their march through Kent or Suffolk upon his capital. While negotiating with men to whom hatred of the Pope was the breath of their nostrils, he was allowing the queen to bargain for a hundred thousand crowns in one event, and a second hundred in another, from Antichrist himself. He must have known, moreover, that nearly every move in this CHAP. I THE QUEEN 185 stealthy game was more or less well known to all those other players against whom he had so improvidently matched himself. The queen's letters during all these long months of tribulation shed as much light upon the character. of Charles as upon her own. Complaint of his lack of constancy and resolution is the everlasting refrain. Want of perseverance in his plans, she tells him, has been his ruin. When he talks of peace with the parliament she vows that she will go into a convent, for she will never trust herself with those who will then be his masters. "If you change again, farewell for ever. If you have broken your resolution, nothing but death for me. As long as the parliament lasts you are no king for me; I will not put my foot in England." We can have no better measure of Charles's weakness than that in the hour of adversity, so desperate for both of them, he should be thus addressed by a wife to whom he had been wedded for twenty years. His submission is complete. He will not have a gentleman for his son's bedchamber, nor Montrose for his own bedchamber, without her consent. He will not decide whether it is best for him to make for Ireland, France, or Denmark, until he knows what she thinks best. "If I quit my conscience," he pleads, in the famous sentiment of Lovelace, "how unworthy I make myself of thy love!" With that curious streak of immovable scruple so often found in men in whom equivocation is a habit of mind and practice, he had carefully kept his oath never to mention matters of religion to his catholic queen, and it is only under stress of this new misconstruction that he seeks to put himself right with her, by explaining his position about apostolic succession, the divine right of bishops, and the absolute unlawfulness of presbyterianism, ever the ally and confederate of rebellion. Nothing that he was able to do could disarm the universal anger and suspicion which the seizure of the king's papers at Naseby had begun, and the discovery of a copy of the Glamorgan treaty at Sligo (October 1645) had carried still deeper. The presbyterians in their discomfiture openly expressed their fears that the king was now undone for ever. Charles in a panic offered to hand over the management of Ireland to his parliament, thus lightly dropping the whole Irish policy on which he had for long been acting, flinging to the winds all his engagements, understandings, and promises to the Irish catholics, and handing them over without conditions to the tender mercies of enemies fiercely thirsting for a bloody retaliation. His recourse to foreign powers was well known. The despatch of the Prince of Wales to join his mother in France was felt to be the unsealing of "a fountain of foreign war"; as the queen had got the prince into her hands, she could make the youth go to mass and marry the Duke of Orleans's daughter. Ten thousand men from Ireland were to overrun the Scottish lowlands, and then to raise the malignant north of England. The King of Denmark's son was to invade the north of Scotland with three or four thousand Dutch veterans. Eight or ten thousand French were to join the remnant of the royal army in Cornwall. Even the negotiations that had been so long in progress at Münster, and were by and by to end the Thirty Years' War and consummate Richelieu's great policy in the treaties of Westphalia, were viewed with apprehension by the English reformers; for a peace might mean the release both of France and Spain for an attack upon England in these days of divine wrath and unsearchable judgments against the land. Prayer and fasting were never more diligently resorted to than now. The conflict of the two English parties lost none of its sharpness or intensity. The success of the policy of the independents, so remarkably shown at Naseby, CHAP. I THE SCOTS WITHDRAW 187 pursued as it had been against common opinion at Westminster, became more commanding with every new disclosure of the king's designs. In the long and intricate negotiations with the king and with the Scots at Newcastle, independent aims had been justified and had prevailed. The baffled presbyterians only became the more embittered. At the end of January 1647, a new situation became defined. The Scots, unable to induce the king to make those concessions in religion without which not a Scot would take arms to help him, and having received an instalment of the pay that was due to them, marched away to their homes across the border. Commissioners from the English parliament took their place as custodians of the person of the king. By order of the two Houses, Holmby in the county of Northampton was assigned to him as his residence, and here he remained until the month of June, when once more the scene was violently transformed. CHAPTER II THE CRISIS OF 1647 If ever there was in the world a revolution with ideas as well as interests, with principle and not egotism for its mainspring, it was this. it was this. At the same time as England, France was torn by civil war, but the civil war of the Fronde was the conflict of narrow aristocratic interests with the newly consolidated supremacy of the monarch. It was not the forerunner of the French Revolution, with all its hopes and promises of a regenerated time; the Fronde was the expiring struggle of the belated survivors of the feudal age. The English struggle was very different. Never was a fierce party conflict so free of men who, in Dante's blighting phrase, were for themselves." Yet much as there was in the puritan uprising to inspire and exalt, its ideas, when tested by the pressure of circumstance, showed themselves unsettled and vague; principles were slow to ripen, forces were indecisively distributed, its theology did not help. This was what Cromwell, henceforth the great practical mind of the movement, was now painfully to discover. 66 It was not until 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 |
