Page images
PDF
EPUB

than a feather in a man's cap. Then he went on to point out that an even larger share of responsibilities for existing difficulties lay with the Army than with himself. They had made him their drudge to dissolve the Long Parliament, which had indeed contracted evil enough by too long sitting, and to call a Parliament or Convention of their naming, and afterwards to put forward the Instrument which the last Parliament had discussed so unreasonably. Yet stood not that instrument, he asked, in need of mending? 'Was not the case hard with me to be put upon to swear to that which was so hard to be kept?' It was time, he concluded, to come to a settlement and lay aside arbitrary proceedings so unacceptable to the nation. The recent proceedings against James Naylor for blasphemy showed that the House stood in need of a check or balancing power in the shape of another House. By this judicial power they fall upon life and member, and doth the Instrument enable me to control it?' 16 Carlyle gives a very defective summary of this speech, which reveals Cromwell's own attitude, which shows a tendency to dissociate himself from the Army and to rely on constitutional support.

[ocr errors]

A month later the Address and Remonstrance' had been turned into the more respectful Petition and Advice, and on the 31st of March it was presented to the Protector. The story of his hesitation about the title of king and his final refusal in deference to the feeling of the Army is too well known to need repetition. The fact that he was for the time content with the title of Protector made little difference in the new or restored constitution contained in the Petition and Advice as modified, in accordance with some of Cromwell's suggestions, by the Explanatory Petition and Advice. It was in essentials a return to constitutional government on the old pattern. The Protector's veto was unrestricted. The members of the other House were to be summoned by him, subject to the approval of Parliament on the first occasion, and afterwards of the House itself, and were to enjoy the powers and jurisdiction of the old House of Lords. According to Thurloe, it was to be a stronghold of Puritanism, a great security and bulwark to the honest interest and to the good people that have been engaged therein.' In the next place the rights and privileges of Parliament were to be secured, and there were to be no further exclusions of members. Νο taxes or laws were to be made or abrogated without consent of Parliament. Article 7 declared the willingness of Parliament to settle on the Protector a constant yearly revenue of 1,300,000l., but the actual grant subsequently made was only for three years, and did not make him independent. The Protector was to govern by the advice of his Privy Council, and appointments to the Council and to the chief offices of State were to be by the advice of

16 Burton's Diary, vol. i. p. 382.

the Council and subject to the approval of Parliament. The naval and military forces were to be disposed of by the Protector with the consent of Parliament and, when Parliament was not sitting, of the Council. The measure of Parliamentary reform in the late Instrument was tacitly treated as invalid, and it was left to the existing Parliament to settle the future distribution of seats. They omitted to do so, and the next elections took place in England, in the old constituencies and on the old franchise, and were followed by a wrangle as to whether the Scotch and Irish members were entitled to be admitted. Whitelock has generally been mentioned as the most active of the lawyers in Parliament in support of these changes, but it is probable that Thurloe, who was Secretary of State, had the conduct of the negotiations with Cromwell, and that the thanks of the House voted to him in his place in Parliament on 11th of April marked the successful accomplishment of his mission.1

Two further measures were necessary to complete the legal settlement and dispose of past controversies. An Act was passed confirming or disallowing after a certain date all the Acts of Barebones' Parliament and the ordinances of the Protector and Council made before the meeting of the first Protectorate Parliament. The preamble recited that since the 26th day of April, 1653 (the expulsion of the Rump), in the great exigencies and necessities of these nations, divers acts and ordinances have been made without the consent of the people assembled in Parliament, which is not according to the fundamental laws of the nations and the rights of the people, and is not for the future to be drawn into example,' and proceeded to enact that all such acts and ordinances not therein confirmed were for the future to be treated as null and void. Many things, also, as already mentioned, had been done by the Major-Generals and others acting under the directions of the Protector and Council for which no colour of law or ordinance could be shown. To cover these and fully regularise the situation an Act of Indemnity was passed at Whitelock's suggestion 'for indemnifying such persons as acted for the service of the public,' which protected all who had acted under the orders of the Protector and Council, while at the same time marking the illegality of their conduct. The Instrument of Government was now 'out of doors,' as old Lenthall put it, Burton tells us; and it was proposed that there should be some solemnity to show that Parliamentary government was restored. Accordingly on the 26th of June, 1657, the Protector took the oath to observe the new constitution with a ceremony falling little short of a coronation, and Parliament adjourned until the following January that the new House might be constituted.

The immediate results were not successful, and indeed for the rest of his life the Protector found himself confronted, as his predecessors had been, with all the difficulties of carrying on constitu17 Com. Journ. April 11, 1657.

tional government in its then imperfect stage of development. When Parliament met, in January 1657-8, the admission of the ninety-three excluded members, and the removal of the Protector's most influential friends to the Other House, left his opponents in a large majority. They began by calling in question the authority of the new constitution, and the right of the Other House to be called the House of Lords. Efforts were at the same time made to stir up discontent in the Army, and to get signatures in the City to what Cromwell called a treasonable petition, which addressed the House of Commons as the Parliament of the Commonwealth of England, thus entirely ignoring the existing constitution. Among other things the petitioners protested against unparliamentary taxation, arbitrary imprisonment, and the dismissal of officers from their commissions without a trial by court-martial. Seeing that a dangerous spirit was abroad, Cromwell hurried down, and after an angry speech reproaching the members with intriguing against the constitution to which they had sworn, dissolved them after ten days' session. That the agitation in the Army had not been without result appears from his speech to the 200 officers a few days later, and from his requiring all the principal officers to declare themselves in favour of the Government, and dismissing those who adhered to the Commonwealth ideals. For a moment he seems to have had an idea of discarding constitutional courses and resorting to arbitrary methods; but the idea was speedily abandoned, and when the end came, a few months later, in September 1658, he was contemplating calling a new Parliament and in good hopes that it would prove more tractable than the last.

Cromwell's evolution, here briefly indicated, from military dictator to constitutional ruler makes a very interesting story, even though the results were not destined to be lasting. The question has often been asked whether, had he lived another ten years, he would have succeeded in winning acceptance for a constitutional monarchy under a dynasty of Cromwells. Constitutional arguments help very little here, and even general history can supply no certain answer. As our greatest authority has pointed out, Cromwell was the representative of the forces of militant Puritanism, which were not in harmony with the larger mind of the Nation; and it is not easy to see how he and his dynasty could have escaped, even had they wished to do so, from that compromising environment.

In this article I have confined myself to purely constitutional issues; but, without departing from this attitude, it may not be amiss to point out that the current notion, which has recently received distinguished patronage at the Cromwell celebration, that Cromwell's rule was a period of exceptional religious toleration, receives no countenance from history. As Mr. Gardiner has recently put it, there was toleration for Puritans and for no one else, for the admission of a few

Jews to dwell here unmolested can scarcely affect the question. Nobody speaks of the Presbyterians, Independents and Baptists as enjoying toleration under the Clarendon Code in the next reign; yet almost every one of its enactments found a precedent in their own treatment of the adherents of the suppressed Church during the Interregnum. There was, of course, this difference-that under Cromwell the clergy were ejected for reading the Book of Common Prayer, and under Charles for refusing to read it. As for the Catholics, I find in Scobell's Collection that one of the last Acts to which Cromwell gave his assent, in 1657, provided that all persons in these islands over sixteen years of age suspected of being Papists were required to take an oath abjuring 'salvation by works' and other distinctive tenets of their creed, or to forfeit two-thirds of all that they possessed. God win tells us that this measure was intended as 'a boon to the Presbyterians,' and that the Protector's son, Henry Cromwell, refused to put it in force against the Irish on top of all the confiscations they had already endured. Cromwell himself may have been opposed to this measure, but the fact that he was constrained to assent to it at least shows that, if he understood toleration, he was prevented from practising it.

J. P. WALLIS.

ON SOME DIFFICULTIES INCIDENTAL

TO MIDDLE AGE

IT is our misfortune, as we go onwards through life, engrossed mainly, and pardonably enough, by the present, that the successive phases of existence are apt to come upon us before we have quite realised how we are to bear ourselves in them. By the time we are beginning to learn they have nearly passed, it may be, and the picture of the immediate future presents itself in yet another focus, that surprises us afresh. The joins of life are apt to be awkward, unless the join is very skilfully made, and the one we are about to consider is perhaps the most difficult of them all. It is a time that stands half-way between youth and age, giving a hand to each; with many of the drawbacks of both, and all the advantages of neither; a time which is a strange and inconsistent medley of warring possibilities and impossibilities, still retaining some of the aptitudes and predilections of youth, without its glorious convictions of success, but tinged with a secret acceptance of defeat, which yet falls short of the definite and dignified renunciation that accompanies old age. That secret acceptance of the inevitable, that inward renunciation-of which the world need not always know-is a lesson that we all have to learn; and, like other lessons, if we do it in a hurry, we shall acquire it but imperfectly. If we learn to renounce, as we go on, with dignity and silence, our sufferings in so doing-if we are wise they will scarcely deserve the name—will not be magnified by being seen through other people's attempts at sympathy. Arrived at middle age, it is very possible that most of us will have been called upon to renounce a good deal; we started, probably, with the conviction that our heads would strike the stars, and we have become strangely reconciled to the fact that they do not reach the ceiling. But it was no doubt better to start with the loftier idea: a man should allow a good margin for shrinkage in his visions of the future. And it is curious, it is pathetic, to see with what ease we may accomplish the gradual descent to the lower level, on which we find ourselves at last going along, if in somewhat less heroic fashion than we anticipated, yet on the whole

« PreviousContinue »