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Carlyle is misleading when, in deprecating a comparison between French Jacobins and English sectaries, he says that, apart from difference in situation," there is the difference between the believers in Jesus Christ and believers in Jean Jacques, which is still more considerable." It would be nearer the mark to say that the sectaries were beforehand with Jean Jacques, and that half the troubles that confronted Cromwell and his men sprang from the fact that English sectaries were now saying to one another something very like what Frenchmen said in Rousseau's dialect a hundred and forty years later. 'No man who knows right," says Milton, can be so stupid as to deny that all men were naturally born free." In the famous document drawn up in the army in the autumn of 1647, and known (along with two other documents under the same designation propounded in 1648-49) as the Agreement of the People, the sovereignty of the people through their representatives; the foundation of society in common right, liberty, and safety; the freedom of every man in the faith of his religion; and all the rest of the catalogue of the rights of man, are all set forth as clearly as they ever were by Robespierre or by Jefferson. In truth the phrase may differ, and the sanctions and the temper may differ; and yet in the thought of liberty, equality, and fraternity, in the dream of natural rights, in the rainbow vision of an inalienable claim to be left free in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, there is something that has for centuries from age to age evoked spontaneous thrills in the hearts of toiling, suffering, hopeful men-something that they need no philosophic book to teach them.

When Baxter came among the soldiers after Naseby, he found them breathing the spirit of conquerors. The whole atmosphere was changed. They now took the king for a tyrant and an enemy,

and wondered only whether, if they might fight against him, they might not also kill or crush him

in itself no unwarrantable inference. He heard them crying out, "What were the lords of England but William the Conqueror's colonels, or the barons but his majors, or the knights but his captains?" From this pregnant conclusions followed. Logic had begun its work, and in men of a certain temperament political logic is apt to turn into a strange poison. They will not rest until they have drained first principles to their very dregs. They argue down from the necessities of abstract reasoning until they have ruined all the favouring possibilities of concrete circumstance.

We have at this time to distinguish political councils from military. There was almost from the first a standing council of war, exclusively composed of officers of higher rank. This body was not concerned in politics. The general council of the army, which was first founded during the summer of 1647, was a mixture of officers and the agents of the private soldiers. It contained certain of the generals, and four representatives from each regiment, two of them officers and two of them soldiers chosen by the men. This important assembly, with its two combined branches, did not last in that shape for more than a few months. After the execution of the king, the agitators, or direct representatives of the men, dropped off or were shut out, and what remained was a council of officers. They retained their power until the end; it was with them that Cromwell had to deal. The politics of the army became the governing element of the situation; it was here that those new forces were being evolved which, when the Long Parliament first met, nobody intended or foresaw, and that gave to the Rebellion a direction that led Cromwell into strange latitudes.

Happy chance has preserved, and the industry

CHAP. III ATTITUDE OF CROMWELL

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of a singularly clear-headed and devoted student has rescued and explored, vivid and invaluable pictures of the half-chaotic scene. At Saffron Walden, in May (1647), Cromwell urged the officers to strengthen the deference of their men for the authority of parliament, for if once that authority were to fail, confusion must follow. At Reading, in July, the position had shifted, the temperature had risen, parliament in confederacy with the city had become the enemy, though there was still a strong group at Westminster who were the soldiers' friends. Cromwell could no longer proclaim the authority of parliament as the paramount object, for he knew this to be a broken reed. But he changed ground as little as he could and as slowly as he could.

Here we first get a clear sight of the temper of Cromwell as a statesman grappling at the same moment with presbyterians in parliament, with extremists in the army, with the king in the closet. It was a task for a hero. In manner he was always what Clarendon calls rough and brisk. He declared that he and his colleagues were as swift as anybody else in their feelings and desires; nay, more, "Truly, I am very often judged as one that goes too fast that way," and it is the peculiarity of men like me, he says, to think dangers more imaginary than real, “to be always making haste, and more sometimes perhaps than good speed." This is one of the too few instructive glimpses that we have of the real Oliver. Unity was first. Unity was first. Let no man exercise his parts to strain things, and to open up long disputes or needless contradictions, or to sow the seeds of dissatisfaction. They might be in the right or we might be in the right, but if they were to divide, then were they both in the wrong. On the merits of the particular question of the moment, it was idle to tell him that their friends in London would like to see them march up. 66 "Tis the general good of the kingdom that we ought to

consult. That's the question, what's for their good, not what pleases them." They might be driven to march on to London, he told them, but an understanding was the most desirable way, and the other a way of necessity, and not to be done but in a way of necessity. What was obtained by an understanding would be firm and durable. Things obtained by force, though never so good in themselves, would be both less to their honour and less likely to last. "Really, really, have what you will have; that you have by force, I look upon as nothing." "I could wish," he said earlier, that we might remember this always, that what we gain in a free way, it is better than twice as much in a forced, and will be more truly ours and our posterity's. It is one of the harshest ironies of history that the name of this 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.

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The general council of the army at Putney in October and November (1647) became a constituent assembly. In June Ireton had drawn up for them a declaration of their wishes as to the "settling of our own and the king's own rights, freedom, peace, and safety." This was the first sign of using military association for political ends. We are not a mere mercenary army, they said, but are called forth in defence of our own and the people's just rights and liberties. We took up arms in judgment and conscience to those ends, against all arbitrary power, violence, and oppression, and against all particular parties or interests whatsoever. These ideas were ripened by Ireton into the memorable Heads of the Proposals of the Army, a document that in days to come made its influence felt in the schemes of government during the Commonwealth and Protectorate.

In these discussions in the autumn of 1647, just

CHAP. III CROMWELL AND REPUBLICANS

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as the Levellers anticipate Rousseau, so do Oliver and Ireton recall Burke. After all, these are only the two eternal voices in revolutions, the standing antagonisms through history between the natural man and social order. In October the mutinous section of the army presented to the council a couple of documents, the Case of the Army Stated and an Agreement of the People-a title that was also given, as I have said, to a document of Lilburne's at the end of 1648, and to one of Ireton's at the beginning of 1649. Here they set down the military grievances of the army in the first place, and in the second they set out the details of a plan of government resting upon the supreme authority of a House of Commons chosen by universal suffrage, and in spirit and in detail essentially republican. This was the strange and formidable phantom that now rose up before men who had set out on their voyage with Pym and Hampden. If we think that the headsman at Whitehall is now little more than a year off, what followed is just as startling. Ireton at once declared that he did not seek, and would not act with those who sought, the destruction either of parliament or king. Cromwell, taking the same line, was more guarded and persuasive. The pretensions and the expressions in your constitutions, he said, are very plausible, and if we could jump clean out of one sort of government into another, it is just possible there would not have been much dispute. But is this jump so easy? How do we know that other people may not put together a constitution as plausible as yours? . . . Even if this were the only plan proposed, you must consider not only its consequences, but the ways and means of accomplishing it. According to reason and judgment, are the spirits and temper of the people of this nation prepared to receive and to go along with it? If he could see likelihood of visible popular support he would be satisfied, for, adds Oliver, in a sentence