The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans to the Accession of King George the Fifth Part 2

[Sidenote b: A.D. 1643. June 6]

raised by the king." The Lords, the citizens, the army followed their example; and an ordinance was published that every man in his parish church should make the same vow and covenant.[1][a] As for the prisoners, instead of being sent before a court of law, they were tried by a court-martial.[b]

Six were condemned to die: two suffered.[c] Waller saved his life by the most abject submission. "He seemed much smitten in conscience: he desired the help of G.o.dly ministers," and by his entreaties induced the Commons to commute his punishment into a fine of ten thousand pounds and an order to travel on the continent. To the question why the princ.i.p.al should be spared, when his a.s.sistants suffered, it was answered by some that a promise of life had been made to induce him to confess, by others that too much

[Footnote 1: Journals, May 31; June 6, 14, 21, 27, 29. Rushworth, v.

322-333. Whitelock, 67, 70, 105. The preamble began thus: "Whereas there hath been and now is in this kingdom a popish and traitorous plot for the subversion of the true Protestant religion, and liberty of the subject, in pursuance whereof a popish army hath been raised and is now on foot in divers parts of the kingdom," &c.--Journals, June 6. Lords' Journals, vi.

87. I am loath to charge the framers and supporters of this preamble with publis.h.i.+ng a deliberate falsehood, for the purpose of exciting odium against the king; but I think it impossible to view their conduct in any other light. The popish plot and popish army were fictions of their own to madden the pa.s.sions of their adherents. Charles, to refute the calumny, as he was about to receive the sacrament from the hands of Archbishop Ussher, suddenly rose and addressed him thus, in the hearing of the whole congregation: "My Lord, I have to the utmost of my soul prepared to become a worthy receiver; and may I so receive comfort by the blessed sacrament, as I do intend the establishment of the true reformed Protestant religion, as it stood in its beauty in the happy days of Queen Elizabeth, without any connivance at popery. I bless G.o.d that in the midst of these publick distractions I have still liberty to communicate; and may this sacrament be my d.a.m.nation, if my heart do not joyn with my lipps in this protestation."--Rush. v. 346. _Connivance_ was an ambiguous and therefore an ill-chosen word. He was probably sincere in the sense which _he_ attached to it, but certainly forsworn in the sense in which it would be taken by his opponents.]

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blood had already been shed in expiation of an imaginary plot.[1]

In the meanwhile Ess.e.x, after several messages from the parliament, had removed from Reading, and fixed his head-quarters at Tame. One night Prince Rupert, making a long circuit, surprised Chinnor in the rear of the army, and killed or captured the greater part of two regiments that lay in the town.[a] In his retreat to Oxford, he was compelled to turn on his pursuers at Chalgrove; they charged with more courage than prudence, and were repulsed with considerable loss. It was in this action that the celebrated Hampden received the wound of which he died. The reputation which he had earned by his resistance to the payment of the s.h.i.+p-money had deservedly placed him at the head of the popular leaders. His insinuating manner, the modesty of his pretensions, and the belief of his integrity, gave to his opinions an irresistible weight in the lower house; and the courage and activity which he displayed in the army led many to lament that he did not occupy the place held by the more tardy or more cautious earl of Ess.e.x. The royalists exulted at his death as equal to a victory; the patriots lamented it as a loss which could not be repaired. Both were deceived. Revolutions are the seed-plots of talents and energy. One great leader had been withdrawn; there was no dearth of others to supply his place.[2]

[Footnote 1: After a minute investigation, I cannot persuade myself that Waller and his friends proceeded farther than I have mentioned. What they might have done, had they not been interrupted, is matter of mere conjecture. The commission of array, which their enemies sought to couple with their design, had plainly no relation to it.]

[Footnote 2: Rushworth, v. 265, 274. Whitelock, 69, 70. Clarendon, ii. 237, 261.]

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To the Root-and-branch men the rank, no less than the inactivity of Ess.e.x, afforded a legitimate ground of suspicion. In proportion as he sank in their esteem, they were careful to extol the merits and flatter the ambition of Sir William Waller. Waller had formerly enjoyed a lucrative office under the crown, but he had been fined in the Star-chamber, and his wife was a "G.o.dly woman;" _her_ zeal and his own resentment made him a patriot; he raised a troop of horse for the service, and was quickly advanced to a command. The rapidity of his movements, his daring spirit, and his contempt of military rules, were advantageously contrasted with the slow and cautious experience of Ess.e.x; and his success at Portsmouth, Winchester, Chichester, Malmesbury, and Hereford, all of which he reduced in a short time, ent.i.tled him, in the estimation of his admirers, to the quaint appellation of William the Conqueror. While the forces under Ess.e.x were suffered to languish in a state of dest.i.tution,[1] an army of eight thousand men, well clothed and appointed, was prepared for Waller. But the event proved that his abilities had been overrated. In the course of a week he fought two battles, one near Bath, with Prince Maurice,[a] the other with Lord Wilmot, near Devizes[b]: the first was obstinate but indecisive, the second b.l.o.o.d.y and disastrous. Waller hastened from the field to the capital, attributing the loss of his army, not to his own errors, but to the jealousy of Ess.e.x. His patrons did not abandon their favourite.

Emulating the example of the Romans,

[Footnote 1: His army was reduced to "four thousand or five thousand men, and these much malcontented that their general and they should be misprised, and Waller immediately prized."--Baillie, i. 391. He had three thousand marching men, and three hundred sick.--Journals, vi. 160.]

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they met the unfortunate general in triumphal procession, and the speaker of the Commons officially returned him thanks for his services to his country.[1][a]

This tone of defiance did not impose on the advocates of peace. Waller's force was annihilated; the grand army, lately removed to Kingston, had been so reduced by want and neglect, that Ess.e.x refused to give to it the name of an army; the queen had marched without opposition from Yorks.h.i.+re to Oxford, bringing to her husband, who met her on Edge-hill, a powerful reinforcement of men, artillery, and stores[b]; and Prince Rupert, in the course of three days, had won the city and castle of Bristol, through the cowardice or incapacity of Nathaniel Fiennes, the governor.[2][c] The cause of the parliament seemed to totter on the brink of ruin; and the Lords, profiting of this moment of alarm, sent to the Commons six resolutions to form the basis of a new treaty. They were favourably received; and after a debate, which lasted till ten at night, it was resolved by a majority of twenty-nine to take them into consideration.[3][d]

But the pacific party had to contend with men of

[Footnote 1: Rushworth, v. 284, 285. Clarendon, ii. 278, 290. Journals, July 27. May, 201--205. His first successes were attributed to Colonel Hurry, a Scotsman, though Waller held the nominal command--Baillie, i. 351.

But Hurry, in discontent, pa.s.sed over to the king, and was the planner of the expedition which led to the death of Hampden.--Clarendon, ii. 264.

Baillie, i. 371.]

[Footnote 2: Fiennes, to clear himself from the imputation of cowardice, demanded a court-martial, and Prynne and Walker, who had accused him in their publications, became the prosecutors. He was found guilty, and condemned to lose his head, but obtained a pardon from Ess.e.x, the commander-in-chief.--Howell, State Trials, iv. 186-293.]

[Footnote 3: Clarendon Papers, ii. 149. The Lords had in the last month declared their readiness to treat; but the proceedings had been suspended in consequence of a royal declaration that the houses were not free, nor their votes to be considered as the votes of parliament.--Journals, vi. 97, 103, 108.]

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the most determined energy, whom no dangers could appal, no difficulties subdue. The next day was Sunday, and it was spent by them in arranging a new plan of opposition.[a] The preachers from their pulpits described peace as the infallible ruin of the city; the common council voted a pet.i.tion, urging, in the most forcible terms, the continuation of the war; and placards were affixed in the streets, calling on the inhabitants to rise as one man, and prevent the triumph of the malignants.[b] The next morning Alderman Atkins carried the pet.i.tion to Westminster, accompanied by thousands calling out for war, and utterings threats of vengeance against the traitors. Their cries resounded through both the houses. The Lords resolved to abstain from all public business till tranquillity was restored, but the Commons thanked the pet.i.tioners for their attachment to the cause of the country. The consideration of the resolutions was then resumed; terror had driven the more pusillanimous from the house; and on the second division the war party obtained a majority of seven.[1]

Their opponents, however, might yet have triumphed, had they, as was originally suggested, repaired to the army, and claimed the protection of the earl of Ess.e.x. But the lord Saye and Mr. Pym hastened to that n.o.bleman and appeased his discontent with

[Footnote 1: Clarendon, ii. 320. Journals, Aug. 5, 7, Lords', vi, 171, 172.

Baillie, i. 390. On the Sat.u.r.day, the numbers were 94 and 65; on the Monday 81 and 79; but the report of the tellers was disputed, and on the second division it gave 81 and 89. Two days later, between two thousand and three thousand women (the men dared mot appear) presented a pet.i.tion for peace, and received a civil answer; but as they did not depart, and some of them used menacing language, they were charged and dispersed by the military, with the loss of several lives.--Journals, June 9. Clarendon, iii. 321 Baillie. i. 390.]

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excuses and promises. They offered to punish those who had libelled his character; they professed an unbounded reliance on his honour; they a.s.sured him that money, clothing, and recruits were already prepared to re-establish his army. Ess.e.x was won; and he informed his friends, that he could not conscientiously act against the parliament from which he held his commission. Seven of the lords, almost half of the upper house, immediately retired from Westminster.[1]

The victorious party proceeded with new vigour in their military preparations. Measures were taken to recruit to its full complement the grand army under Ess.e.x; and an ordinance was pa.s.sed to raise a separate force of ten thousand horse for the protection of the metropolis.

Kimbolton, who on the death of his father had succeeded to the t.i.tle of earl of Manchester, received a commission to levy an army in the a.s.sociated counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, Ess.e.x, Cambridge, Ely, and Hertford.[2]

Committees were appointed to raise men and money in numerous other districts, and were invested with almost unlimited powers; for the exercise of which in the service of the parliament,

[Footnote 1: Clarendon, 323-333. Northumberland repaired to his house at Petworth; the earls of Bedford, Holland, Portland, and Clare, and the lords Lovelace and Conway, to the king at Oxford. They were ungraciously received, and most of them returned to the parliament.]

[Footnote 2: The first a.s.sociation was made in the northern counties by the earl of Newcastle in favour of the king, and was afterwards imitated by the counties of Devon and Cornwall. The patriots saw the advantage to be derived from such unions, and formed several among their partisans. The members bound themselves to preserve the peace of the a.s.sociated counties; if they were royalists, "against the malevolent and ambitious persons who, in the name of the two houses, had embroiled the kingdom in a civil war;"

if they were parliamentarians, "against the papists and other ill-affected persons who surrounded the king." In each, regulations were adopted, fixing the number of men to be levied, armed, and trained, and the money which for that purpose was to be raised in each towns.h.i.+p.--Rushworth, v. 66, 94-97, 119, 381.]

they were made responsible to no one but the parliament itself. Sir Henry Vane, with three colleagues from the lower house, hastened to Scotland to solicit the aid of a Scottish army; and, that London might be secure from insult, a line of military communication was ordered to be drawn round the city. Every morning thousands of the inhabitants, without distinction of rank, were summoned to the task in rotation; with drums beating and colours flying they proceeded to the appointed place, and their wives and daughters attended to aid and encourage them during the term of their labour.[a] In a few days this great work, extending twelve miles in circuit, was completed, and the defence of the line, with the command of ten thousand men, was intrusted to Sir William Waller. Ess.e.x, at the repeated request of the parliament, reluctantly signed the commission, but still refused to insert in it the name of his rival. The blank was filled up by order of the House of Commons.[1]

Here, however, it is time to call the attention of the reader to the opening career of that extraordinary man, who, in the course of the next ten years, raised himself from the ign.o.ble pursuits of a grazier to the high dignity of lord protector of the three kingdoms. Oliver Cromwell was sprung from a younger branch of the Cromwells, a family of note and antiquity in Huntingdons.h.i.+re, and widely spread through that county and the whole of the Fenn district. In the more early part of his life he fell into a state of profound and prolonged melancholy; and it is plain from the few and disjointed doc.u.ments which have come down to us, that his mental faculties were

[Footnote 1: May, 214. Journals, July 18, 19, 27; Aug. 3, 7, 9, 15, 26.

Lords', vi. 149, 158, 175, 184.]

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impaired, that he tormented himself with groundless apprehensions of impending death, on which account he was accustomed to require the attendance of his physician at the hour of midnight, and that his imagination conjured up strange fancies about the cross in the market-place at Huntingdon,[1] hallucinations which seem to have originated in the intensity of his religious feelings, for we are a.s.sured that "he had spent the days of his manhood in a dissolute course of life in good fellows.h.i.+p and gaming;"[2] or, as he expresses it himself, he had been "a chief, the chief of sinners, and a hater of G.o.dliness." However, it pleased "G.o.d the light to enlighten the darkness" of his spirit, and to convince him of the error and the wickedness of his ways; and from the terrors which such conviction engendered, seems to have originated that aberration of intellect, of which he was the victim during great part of two years.

On his recovery he had pa.s.sed from one extreme to the other, from the misgivings of despair to the joyful a.s.surance of salvation. He now felt that he was accepted by G.o.d, a vessel of election to work the work of G.o.d, and bound through grat.i.tude "to put himself forth in the cause of the Lord."[3] This flattering belief, the

[Footnote 1: Warwick's Memoirs, 249. Warwick had his information from Dr.

Simcott, Cromwell's physician, who p.r.o.nounced him _splenetic_. Sir Theodore Mayerne was also consulted, who, in his ma.n.u.script journal for 1628, describes his patient as _valde melancholicus_.--Eliis, Orig. Letters, 2nd series, iii. 248.]

[Footnote 2: Warwick, 249.]

[Footnote 3: In 1638 he thus writes of himself to a female saint, one of his cousins: "I find that G.o.d giveth springs in a dry barren wilderness, where no water is. I live, you know where, in Meshec, which they say signifies prolonging,--in Kedar, which signifies blackness. Yet the Lord forsaketh me not, though he do prolong. Yet he will, I trust, bring me to his tabernacle, his resting place." If the reader wish to understand this Cromwellian effusion, let him consult the Psalm cxix. in the Vulgate., or cxx. in the English translation. He says to the same correspondent, "You know what my manner of life hath been. Oh! I lived in and loved darkness, and hated light. I was a chief, the chief of sinners. This is true. I hated G.o.dliness. Yet G.o.d had mercy on me. Oh, the riches of his mercy!"--Cromwell's Letters and Speeches by Carlyle, i. 121. Warwick bears testimony to the sincerity of his conversion; "for he declared he was ready to make rest.i.tution to any man who would accuse him, or whom he could accuse himself to, to have wronged."--Warwick, 249.]

fruit of his malady at Huntingdon, or of his recovery from it, accompanied him to the close of his career: it gave in his eyes the sanction of Heaven to the more questionable events in his life, and enabled him to persevere in habits of the most fervent devotion, even when he was plainly following the unholy suggestions of cruelty, and duplicity, and ambition.

It was probably to withdraw him from scenes likely to cause the prolongation or recurrence of his malady, that he was advised to direct his attention to the pursuits of agriculture. He disposed by sale of his patrimonial property in Huntingdon, and took a large grazing farm in the neighbourhood of the little town of St. Ives.[a] This was an obscure, but tranquil and soothing occupation, which he did not quit till five years later, when he migrated to Ely, on the death of his maternal uncle, who had left to him by will the lucrative situation of farmer of the t.i.thes and of churchlands belonging to the cathedral of that city. Those stirring events followed, which led to the first civil war; Cromwell's enthusiasm rekindled, the time was come "to put himself forth in the cause of the Lord," and that cause he identified in his own mind with the cause of the country party in opposition to the sovereign and the church. The energy with which he entered into the controversies of the time attracted public notice, and the burgesses of Cambridge chose him for their representative in both the parliaments called by the king in 1640. He carried with him to the house the simplicity of dress, and the awkwardness of manner, which bespoke the country farmer; occasionally he rose to speak, and then, though his voice was harsh, his utterance confused, and his matter unpremeditated, yet he seldom failed to command respect and attention by the originality and boldness of his views, the fervour with which he maintained them, and the well-known energy and inflexibility of his character.[1] It was not, however, before the year 1642 that he took his place among the leaders of the party. Having been appointed one of the committees for the county of Cambridge and the isle of Ely, he hastened down to Cambridge, took possession of the magazine, distributed the arms among the burgesses, and prevented the colleges from sending their plate to the king at Oxford.[a]

From the town he transferred his services to the district committed to his charge. No individual of suspicious or dangerous principles, no secret plan or a.s.sociation of the royalists, could elude his vigilance and activity. At the head of a military force he was everywhere present, making inquiries, inflicting punishments, levying weekly the weekly a.s.sessments, impressing men, horses, and stores, and exercising with relentless severity all those repressive and vindictive powers with which the recent ordinances had armed the committees. His exertions were duly appreciated. When the parliament selected officers to command the seventy-five troops of horse, of sixty men each, in the new army under the earl of Ess.e.x,[b] farmer Cromwell received the

[Footnote 1: Warwick, 247]

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[Sidenote b: A.D. 1642. Sept. 14.]