The Evolution of States Part 49
As it was, Cromwell lived only long enough to create an intellectual as well as a conservative reaction. Surprise has been sometimes expressed, and must have been oftener felt, at the virtual High Toryism of the doctrine of Hobbes,[1112] who was so little conservative in his general habit of mind. The truth is that in 1651, or at least in 1660, the monarchism of Hobbes was the ostensible Liberalism of the hour.
Parliamentarism had meant first sectarian tyranny, then anarchy, then military despotism; and there was not the slightest prospect of a parliamentary government which should mean religious or intellectual freedom all round. Hobbes would infallibly have been at least thrown into prison by the Long Parliament if in its earlier time of power he had published his remarks on the Pentateuch. They punished for much milder exercises of critical opinion. A strong monarchy was become, from the point of view of many enlightened men, positively the best available security for general freedom of life, at a time when the spirit of religion had multiplied tenfold the normal impulses to social tyranny and furnished the deepest channel of social ill-will compatible with national unity. It lay in Christianity, as it lay earlier in Judaism, to breed an intensity of religious strife such as the pagan world never knew. Various countries had seen sects arise and grapple with each other on the score of this or that interpretation of the Hebrew sacred books, and men of conservative bias felt that they were face to face with insane forces incompatible with a democratic system. Religious lore, above all other learning, could make men more "excellently foolish," as Hobbes put it, than was possible to mere ignorance, making new and uncontrollable motives to disunion.
It is not to be a.s.sumed, indeed, that a revolution begun on any motive whatever would have maintained itself at the then developed stage of political intelligence; for the English people, which constantly accuses others of lack of faculty for union, had never shown itself any better fitted for rational compromise than the Irish, given conditions of equal stress. Scandinavian, German, Dutch, English--all the Teutonic sections alike had in all ages shown in the fullest degree the force of the primary pa.s.sions of self-a.s.sertion and mutual repulsion, cordially uniting only, if at all, for purposes of aggression. But in the case under notice it was the religious pa.s.sions that dug the channels of strife; and they must be held to have added to the volume of blind emotion. Thus intensified, the principle had shown itself potent to wreck any commonwealth; and there remained only the choice between a usurper governing through an army and a "legitimate" monarch governing as of old by way of Parliament and a civil service. Parliament had been the most offensive tyrant of all, for while making most parade of legality it had been the most self-seeking,[1113] and perhaps even the least respectable as regards its _personnel_. The Liberals of the latter time had their cue given to them by the memorable Falkland, who, grievedly "ingeminating Peace, Peace," had recoiled from the intolerant Puritans, and sadly joined the intolerant Royalists. Macaulay's thrust at him for this,[1114] if technically just, was hardly seemly on the critic's part, for Falkland represented exactly the temper of Macaulay's own politics. He was an ideal Whig of the later school--the very saint of moderation. Falkland had indeed special ground for withdrawal from the Puritan party, in that he was convinced that Hampden and Pym had deceived him as to the king's complicity in the Irish Rebellion and other matters. He had been "persuaded to believe many things which he had since found to be untrue."[1115] But in most things the Puritans must have jarred on him.[1116] Where he had consented to go, albeit deliberately to his death, as a Cavalier, his disciples might well become theoretic monarchists when the whole torrent of public opinion went for the Restoration.
Of course, the hope of social freedom was destined to frustration under the restored monarchy just as before, since there was still no culture force sufficient to purify the animal instinct of antagonism. The Restoration only meant that the Episcopalian dog was uppermost and the Nonconformist under. But all the same, Commonwealth principles were profoundly discredited; and it is notable that never since has Republican principle ostensibly regained in England the stature it had reached in the hotbeds of the Great Rebellion and the Protectorate. The long struggle against the king had educated many of the strivers into democratism, as did the later struggle of the American colonies against George III. Even in the Parliament of Richard Cromwell, after Republican hopes had been so blasted, there were forty-seven avowed Republicans,[1117] the remnant of the breed. With the return of the monarchy it virtually disappears from English politics for a hundred and thirty years;[1118] when again it rises for a moment in the hot air of the French Revolution, only to disappear again for nearly another century. It was after the Rebellion, and not before, that the dogma of divine right became completely current orthodoxy in England.[1119]
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The collapse of Republicanism meant the collapse of the cla.s.s politics that had grown up in the war and in the Commonwealth alongside of the creed politics. The creed politics itself, when carried to the lengths of the doctrine of the Independents, meant a challenge to the political system; and among the more advanced reasoners of the period were some who saw that to put down kingly tyranny was of little avail while cla.s.s inequalities remained. The Long Parliament, though not going this length, went far in the way of putting down some established abuses; and there are many records of a more searching spirit of innovation. It is important to realise that alike under Charles I and Cromwell the Parliaments tended to be partly composed of and ruled by the more audacious spirits of the time, simply because these had the advantage in discussion wherever they were. The incapacity for speech which in later times has made the Conservative party welcome adventurers as its mouthpieces meant the partial obliteration of the conservative cla.s.s in the early days of unorganised parliamentary strife; and Cromwell's own Parliaments baffled him in virtue of their large elements of upstart intelligence. He himself, having entered the war from a mixture of motives in which there was no idea of social reconstruction, was merely irritated by the ideals of the more radical agitators, which he could not out-argue, but on which he promptly put his foot. It is true that in the immense ferment set up by the Rebellion impracticable ideas abounded, and that they suggested risks of civil anarchy, even as the mult.i.tude of sectaries threatened chaos in religion. We find indeed an express affirmation of anarchism in the literature of the period;[1120]
and generally the English Revolution had in it most of the subversive elements which later evolved the French, the determining difference being that the English was not attacked from the outside. But there were practical plans also. Lilburne had a really constructive scheme of popular enfranchis.e.m.e.nt,[1121] which might have built up a democratic force of resistance to royalism as such; but Cromwell, while ready to overthrow any part of the const.i.tution that hampered him, would build up nothing in its place. He would have no alteration of the social structure, save in so far as he must protect his Independents from the Presbyterians and Episcopalians alike. And of course, when his polity fell, the ideals of the independents of politics--who had represented only a tribe of scattered intelligences, much fewer than the mere religious sectaries, who were themselves but a vigorous minority--speedily disappeared from English affairs. The standards of the average orthodox cla.s.s became the standards of public life.
On the side of international relations, finally, Cromwell and the Commonwealth did nothing to improve politics. Commerce began to spread afresh; and commercial and racial jealousy, under the Puritan as later under the Restoration rule, bred war with the Dutch, just as religious hatreds had made war between England and Spain. The final proof of Cromwell's lack of political wisdom is given in his utterly fantastic scheme for a const.i.tutional union of the English and Dutch republics, a scheme which could not have worked for a week. When this proposal was declined by the Dutch States-General, he seems to have been as ready as any filibuster in England to go to war with the States;[1122] and it is evident that the Navigation Act of 1651 was at once an act of revenge for the insults put upon the English amba.s.sadors by the Dutch Orangeist populace, against the will of the Dutch Government, and a wanton effort to punish the States for declining the Protector's absurd proposals.[1123] The two Protestant republics thereupon grappled like two worrying dogs; and for their first ostensible victory the English Parliament publicly thanked G.o.d as unctuously as for any of the victories of the Civil War.[1124] In their hands and Cromwell's international politics sank at once to the normal levels of primitive instinct.
Mr. Frederic Harrison (_Cromwell_, ch. xiii) glorifies Cromwell's foreign policy on the score that it made England great in the eyes of foreign countries. Exactly so might we eulogise the foreign policy of Louis XIV or Philip II or Napoleon--so long as it succeeded. Cromwell, up to the time when he began to scheme an empire of naval aggression, simply aimed at a Protestant combination as other rulers aimed at Catholic combinations. There was nothing new in the idea; and it would have been astonishing if he had _not_ maintained the naval power of the country. It was to this very end that the luckless Charles imposed his ship-money, which Hampden and his backers refused to pay. As regards home politics, again, Mr. Harrison praises Cromwell for preserving order with unprecedented success, making no allowance for the fact that Cromwell was the first Englishman who governed through a standing army, and making no attempt to refute Ludlow's statements (cited by Hallam, ii, 251, _note_; cp. Vaughan, p. 524, _note_) as to the gross tyranny of the major-generals, or to meet the charge against Cromwell of selling scores of royalists into slavery at Barbadoes.
Mr. Harrison finally justifies Cromwell's policy in the main on the score of "necessity," despite the proverbial quotation. It was exactly on the plea of necessity that Charles justified himself in his day, when Cromwell joined in resisting him. Mr. Harrison again extols the "generosity" and "moral elevation" of the intervention for the Vaudois, when on the same page he has to admit the infamy of the Cromwellian treatment of Ireland. He sees no incongruity in Milton's emotion over the "slaughtered saints" of Protestantism, while Catholic ecclesiastics were with his approval being slain like dogs. Moral and social science must hold the balances more evenly than this.
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While thus showing that in his foreign relations in general he had no higher principle than that which led him to protect the Protestant Vaudois, Cromwell himself could not or would not tolerate Catholicism in England. What was immeasurably worse, he had put thousands of Irish Catholics to the sword, and reduced tens of thousands more to the life conditions of wild animals. His policy in Ireland, if judged by the standards we apply to the rule of other men, must be p.r.o.nounced one of blind brutality. He had helped to make a civil war in England because his cla.s.s was at times arbitrarily taxed, and had fears that its worship would be interfered with; and in so doing he felt he had the support and sanction of Omnipotence. When it came to dealing with Irishmen who stood up for their race ideals and their religion, he acted as if for him principles of moral and religious right did not exist.[1125] His most ferocious deeds he justified by reference to the Ulster ma.s.sacre of 1641, as if all Irishmen had been concerned in that, and as if the previous English ma.s.sacres had not been tenfold more b.l.o.o.d.y. Under his own Government, by the calculation of Sir William Petty, out of a population of 1,466,000, 616,000 had in eleven years perished by the sword, by plague, or by famine artificially produced. Of these, 504,000 were reckoned to be of Irish and 112,000 of English descent. And it was planned to reduce the survivors to a life of utter dest.i.tution in Connaught and Clare. By the settlement of 1653, ten of the thirty-two Irish counties were allotted to the "Adventurers" who in 1641 had advanced sums of money to aid in putting down the Irish Rebellion; twelve were divided among Cromwell's soldiers; seven, with all the cities and corporations of the kingdom, were reserved for the Commonwealth; and three of the most barren counties--for the most part unreclaimed--were left for the natives. The settlement could not be carried out as planned by the Government, and as evidently desired by Fleetwood, the Lord Deputy, and many of the officers. The very greed of the soldiery defeated the project of a "universal transplantation," for they were as eager for Irish labour as for Irish land.[1126] But the confiscation of the land was carried out to the full, and mult.i.tudes were forced into Connaught. The worst tyranny of Charles is thus as dust in the balance with Cromwell's expropriation of myriads of conquered Irish. For them he had neither the show of law nor the pretence of equity. They were treated as conquered races had been treated, not by the Romans, who normally sought to absorb in their polity the peoples they overcame, but by barbarians in their mutual wars, where the loser was driven to the wilderness. Far from seeking to grapple as a statesman with the problem of Irish disaffection, he struck into it like a Berserker, on the same inspiration of animal fury as took him into the breach at Drogheda; and his or his officers' enactments, providing for the slaughter of all natives who did not carry certificates of having taken the anti-Royalist oath, are to be matched in history only with the treatment of the conquered Slavs by the Christianising Germans in the Dark Ages.
Dr. Gardiner and Mr. Harrison partly defend the ma.s.sacre of Drogheda as justified by the "laws of war" of the time. It is true that for the period it was not very much out of the way. The Royalist Manley, describing it, says only (_History of the Rebellions_, 1691, p. 227): "I would not condemn the promiscuous slaughter of the Citizens and Souldiers, of Cruelty, because it might be intended for Example and Terror to others, _if the like Barbarity had not been committed elsewhere_." But Manley seems to have forgotten the friars, whose slaughter neither laws of war nor European custom exonerated. There were really no "laws of war" in the case. Dr. Gardiner (_Student's History_, p. 562; _Commonwealth and Protectorate_, small ed. i, 118) puts it that these laws "left garrisons refusing, as that of Drogheda had done, to surrender an _indefensible_ post ... to the mercy or cruelty of the enemy." But it is unwarrantable to call Drogheda an "indefensible post." Dr.
Gardiner's thesis that any captured post, however hard to take, is _ipso facto_ proved to have been indefensible, may be dismissed as a very bad sophism. Elsewhere he himself puts it (p. 132, _note_) that men "defending a fortified town _after the defences had been captured_" were liable to be slain--a very different thing.
Drogheda contained 3,000 foot, mostly English, "the flower of Ormond's army," as Dr. Gardiner avows.
Mr. Harrison (_Oliver Cromwell_, p. 136) perhaps errs in saying that its commander, Sir Arthur Aston, an officer of "great name and experience ... at that time made little doubt of defending it against all the power of Cromwell." Cp. Gardiner, _Com. and Prot._, small ed. i, 128, as to Aston's straits. It had, however, actually resisted siege by the Catholics for three years, and it was only by desperate efforts that Cromwell carried it. He went into the breach with the forlorn hope, and he gave the order for slaughter, as he himself admits, in the fury of action. The first order, be it observed, was to slay all "in arms _in the town_"--this at a time when men commonly carried arms in time of peace, and members wore their swords in Parliament. It simply meant a ma.s.sacre of the male inhabitants. The garrison was not so slaughtered: when the surrender of the garrison came, Cromwell's blood-l.u.s.t was slaked, and he spared all but every tenth man--for slavery in the Barbadoes. Nor did his men merely slay those taken in arms. He tells that "their friars were knocked on the head promiscuously"; and it is impossible wholly to refuse to believe the royalist statement of the time, that men, women, and children were indiscriminately slaughtered. Dr. Gardiner, on somewhat insufficient grounds (_History of the Commonwealth_, i, 135, 136, _note_), entirely rejects the personal testimony of the brother of Anthony a Wood (Anthony's _Autobiography_, ed. Oxford, 1848, pp.
51, 52) as to Cromwell's men holding up children as shields when pursuing some soldiers of the garrison who defended themselves. Dr.
Gardiner is himself in error in respect of one charge of improbability which he brings against the narrative, as quoted by himself. But in any case his own narrative, as he evidently feels, shows the Cromwellian troops to have been sufficiently ferocious.
Quarter was promised, and then withheld (Gardiner, i, 117, _note_, 118); and by Dr. Gardiner's own showing the "Parliamentary" account itself avows that the final surrender of the defenders on the "mount" was obtained by sheer treachery--a fact which Dr. Gardiner gloses even while showing it. A Puritan drunk with the l.u.s.t of battle is a beast like any other. Cromwell himself had to quiet his conscience with his usual drug of religion. But if this act had been done by Cavaliers or Catholics upon a Puritan garrison and Independent priests, he and his party would have held it up to horror for ever.
The only defence he could make was that this was vengeance for the great Irish Ma.s.sacre--that is to say, that he had shown he could be as b.l.o.o.d.y as the Irish, who on their part had all the English ma.s.sacres of the previous generation to avenge--a circ.u.mstance carefully ignored by clerical writers who still justify Cromwell in the name of Christianity, as seeking to make future ma.s.sacres impossible. All the while, there was not the slightest pretence of showing that the garrison of Drogheda had been concerned in the old ma.s.sacre. Compare, on this, the emphatic verdict of Dr. Gardiner, _History of the Commonwealth_, i, 139. Mr. Harrison (p. 145) quotes Cromwell's challenge to opponents to show any instance of a man "not in arms" being put to death with impunity--this after he had avowed the slaughter of all priests and chaplains! His general a.s.sertion of the scrupulousness of his party was palpably false; and it is idle to say that he must have believed it true. That Ireton's Puritan troops slew numbers of disarmed and unarmed Irish with brutal cruelty and treachery _against Ireton's reiterated orders_, is shown by Dr. Gardiner; and he tells how Ireton hanged a girl who tried to escape from Limerick (_Commonwealth_, ii, 48, 53). Is it then to be supposed that Cromwell's men were more humane when he was hounding them on to ma.s.sacre? As to the further slaughter of natives, there stands the a.s.sertion of Father French (_Narrative of the Earl of Clarendon's Settlement and Sale of Ireland_, Dublin, rep. 1846, p. 86) that under the Proclamation which commanded the soldiers to slay any men met on the highway without a certificate of having "taken the engagement" abjuring the monarchy, "silly Peasants who out of Ignorance or want of care ...
left their tickets at home, were barbarously murdered." In the circ.u.mstances the statement is only too credible.
There remains to be considered the old plea that the ma.s.sacre of Drogheda made an end of serious resistance, and so saved life. Thus Carlyle: "Wexford Storm followed (not by forethought, it would seem, but by chance of war) in the same fashion; and there was no other storm or slaughter needed in that country" (_Cromwell_, Comm. on Letter CV). This is one of Carlyle's innumerable misstatements of fact. Even on his own view, the Wexford slaughter had to follow that of Drogheda. But, as Gardiner shows, Cromwell's bloodshed at Drogheda and Wexford, "so far from sparing effusion of blood," though "successful at Ross and at a few lesser strongholds, had only served to exasperate the garrisons of Duncannon, of Kilkenny, and of Clonmel; and in his later movements Cromwell, always prepared to accept the teaching of events(!), had discovered that the way of clemency was the shortest road to conquest" (_Com.
and Prot._ i, 157; cp. p. 137). The laudation here too is characteristic; but it disposes of Carlyle's.
Carlyle would never be at pains enough to check his presuppositions by the records. As Gardiner tells (p. 123, _note_), he denounces an editor for printing a postscript in which Cromwell admitted the slaughter of "many inhabitants" of Drogheda. This, said Carlyle, had no authority in contemporary copies. "It appears," writes Dr.
Gardiner, "in the _official_ contemporary copy in _Letters from Ireland_." What is more, the editor in question had given the reference!
There are men who to-day will still applaud Cromwell because he quenched the Irish trouble for the time in ma.s.sacre and devastation; and others, blenching at the atrocity of the cure, speak of it with bated breath as doing him discredit, while they bate nothing of their censure of the arbitrariness of Charles. Others excuse all Puritan tyranny because of its "sincerity," as if that plea would not exculpate Torquemada and Alva. The plain truth is that Cromwell in no way rose above the moral standards of his generation in his dealings with those whom he was able to oppress. He found in his creed his absolution for every step to which blind instinct led him, in Ireland as in England; and it seems to be his destiny to lead his admirers into the same sophistries--pious with a difference--as served to keep him on good terms with his conscience after suppressing an English Parliament or slaughtering an Irish garrison.
Take, for instance, the fashion in which D'Aubigne shuffles over the Irish ma.s.sacres, after quoting Cromwell's worst cant on the subject: "This extract will suffice. Cromwell acted in Ireland like a great statesman, and the means he employed were those best calculated promptly to restore order in that unhappy country. And yet we cannot avoid regretting that a man--a Christian man--should have been called to wage so terrible a war, and to show towards his enemies _greater severity than had ever, perhaps, been exercised by the pagan leaders of antiquity_. 'Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of G.o.d'" (_The Protector_, 3rd ed. p. 159).
It is too much even to say, as a more scrupulous critic has done, that the phenomenon of the Commonwealth represented a great attempt at a higher life on the part of men n.o.bler and wiser than their contemporaries.[1127] It was simply the self-a.s.sertion of energetic men of whom some were in some respects ahead of their time; while the others were as bad as their time, and in some respects rather behind it--men bewildered by fanaticism, and incapable of a consistent ethic, whose failure was due as distinctly to their own intellectual vices as to their environment. No serious poetry of any age is more devoid of moral principle than the verses in which Marvell and Waller exult over the wanton attack on Spain, and kindle at the prospect of a future of unscrupulous conquest. Both men were religious; both as ready to sing of "Divine Love" as of human hate; and both in their degree were good types of the supporters of Cromwell. The leaders from the very outset are visibly normal agitators, full of their own grievances, and as devoid of the spirit of fellow-feeling, of concern for all-round righteousness, as any of the men they impeached. Their movement went so far as it did because, firstly, they were vigorous men resisting a weak man, and later their own natural progress to anarchy was checked by the self-a.s.sertion of the strongest of them all. Thus their and his service to progressive political science is purely negative. They showed once for all that an ignorance guided by religious zeal and "inspiration" is more surely doomed to disaster than the ignorance of mere primary animal instinct; and that of the many forms of political optimism, that of Christian pietism is for the modern world certainly not the least pernicious. The Puritan name and ideal are in these days commonly a.s.sociated with high principle and conscientiousness; and it is true that in the temper and the tactic of the early revolutionary movement, despite much dark fanaticism, there was a certain masculine simplicity and sincerity not often matched in our politics since. But as the years went on, principles gave way, dragged down by fanaticism and egoism; and the Puritan temper, lacking light, bred deadly miasmas. Milton himself sinks from the level of the _Areopagitica_ to that of the _Eikonoklastes_, an ign.o.ble performance at the behest of the Government, who just then were suppressing the freedom of the press.[1128] In strict historical truth the Puritan name and the ideal must stand for utter failure to carry on a free polity, in virtue of incapacity for rational a.s.sociation; for the stifling of some of the most precious forces of civilisation--the artistic; and further for the grafting on normal self-seeking of the newer and subtler sin of solemn hypocrisy.
This holds good of the Puritan party as a whole. It is possible, however, to take too low a view of the judgment of any given section of it. Dr. Gardiner, for instance, somewhat strains the case when he says (_Student's History_, p. 567) of the Barebone Parliament: "Unfortunately, these G.o.dly men [so styled by Cromwell]
were the most crotchety and impracticable set ever brought together. The majority wanted to abolish the Court of Chancery without providing a subst.i.tute, _and to abolish t.i.thes without providing any other means for the support of the clergy_." It seems clear that it was the intention of the majority to provide an equivalent for the t.i.thes (see Vaughan, pp. 508, 509; cp. Hallam, ii, 243, 244); and the remark as to the Court of Chancery appears to miss the point. The case against that Court was that it engrossed almost all suits, and yet intolerably delayed them; the proposal was to let the other Courts do the work. Cp. Dr.
Gardiner's _Commonwealth and Protectorate_, ii, 241, 262; and as to the t.i.thes, i, 192; ii, 32, 240, 275, 276.
It would be hard to show that either Cromwell or the men he used and overrode were, under trial, more conscientious than the average public men of later times. Well-meaning he and many of them were; but, then, most men are well-meaning up to their lights; the moral test for all is consistency with professed principle under changing conditions. And hardly one was stedfastly true to the principles he put forward. They prevaricated under pressure--under harder pressure, no doubt--like other politicians, with only the difference that they could cite random texts and "the Lord" in their justification. And inasmuch as their G.o.dly strifes were as blind and as insoluble as those of any factions in history, they furnished no aid and no encouragement to posterity to attempt anew the great work of social regeneration. If that is ever to be done, it must be with saner inspiration and better light than theirs.
It is time that, instead of extolling them as men of superior moral stature and inspiration, we now realise they brought to a bewildering problem a vain enlightenment.
On this view, it may be noted, we have a sufficient explanation of the dissimulations of which Cromwell was undoubtedly guilty.
Between the antiquated asperity of Villemain, who, while extolling his capacity, charges him with _fourberie habituelle_ (_Hist. de Cromwell_, 5e edit. p. 272), and the foregone condonations of Carlyle, there is a mean of common sense. Cromwell was a man of immense energy and practical capacity, but with no gift for abstract thought, and spellbound by an incoherent creed.
Consequently he was bound to come to serious confusion when he had to deal with tense complexities of conduct and violently competing interests. Coming into desperate positions, for which his religion was worse than no preparation, and in which it could not possibly guide him aright, he must needs trip over the snares of diplomacy, and do his equivocations worse than a more intellectual man would.
Cromwell's lying sounds the more offensive because of its constant tw.a.n.g of pietism; but that was simply the dialect in which he had been brought up. Had he lived in our day he would have been able to prevaricate with a wider vocabulary, which makes a great difference.
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Lest such a criticism should be suspected of prejudice, it may be well to note that a contemporary Doctor of Divinity has at some points exceeded it. It is Dr. Cunningham who argues that, in consequence of the Puritan bias leading to a cult of the Old Testament rather than the New, there occurred under Puritan auspices "a retrogression to a lower type of social morality, which showed itself both at home and abroad."[1129]
He traces Puritan influence specially "(_a_) in degrading the condition of the labourer; (_b_) in reckless treatment of the native [= coloured]
races; (_c_) in the development of the worst forms of slavery."[1130]
The present writer, who rarely finds it necessary to oppose a Protestant clergyman on such an issue, is disposed to think the charge overdrawn, for the following reasons: (1) The English treatment of Ireland was to the full as cruel in the Elizabethan period, before Puritanism had gone far, as under Cromwell; (2) the Catholic Spaniards in Mexico and Peru were as cruel as the Puritan colonists in New England. It is true that "in all the terrible story of the dealings of the white man with the savage there are few more miserable instances of cold-blooded cruelty than the wholesale destruction of the Pequod nation--men, women, and children--by the Puritan settlers"[1131] of Connecticut. But when Catholics and pre-Puritan Protestants and Dutch Protestants act similarly, the case is not to be explained on Dr. Cunningham's theory.
The fallacy seems to lie in supposing that the New Testament has ever been a determinant in these matters. Mosheim confesses that in the wars of the Crusades the Christians were more ferocious than the Saracens;[1132] and Seneca was at least as humane as Paul.
There is distinct validity, on the other hand, in the charge that Puritanism worsened the life of the working cla.s.ses, first by taking away their ecclesiastical holidays and gild-festivals, and finally by taking all recreation out of their Sunday. The latter step may be regarded as the a.s.sertion of the economic interest of the Protestant clergy against the social needs of their flocks. It was not that the labourers were well off before the Rebellion--here again we must guard against false impressions[1133]--but that "Puritan ascendancy rendered the lot of the labourer hopelessly dull."[1134] There is reason to believe, further, that the Stuart administration, applying the Elizabethan Poor Law, took considerable pains to relieve distress,[1135]
and that the Commonwealth, on the contrary, treated the lapsed ma.s.s without sympathy;[1136] and it is not unlikely that, as has been suggested, this had something to do with the popular welcome given to the Restoration.[1137] The conclusion is that "neither the personal character nor the political success of the Puritans need lead us to ignore their baleful influence on society,"[1138] which was, in the opinion of Arnold, despite his pa.s.sion for their favourite literature, to imprison and turn the key upon the English spirit for two hundred years. Here again the impartial naturalist will detect exaggeration, but much less than in the current hyperboles to the contrary.
For the rest, the commercial and industrial drift of England, the resort to the mineral wealth[1139] that was to be the economic basis of later commerce and empire, the pursuit of capitalistic manufacture, the building up of a cla.s.s living on interest as the privileged cla.s.s of the past had lived on land monopoly--all went on under Puritanism as under Catholicism,[1140] Anglicanism, Calvinism, Lutheranism. The early Puritans, taking up the Catholic tradition, denounced usury; but the clergy of industrial and burgher-ruled States, beginning with Calvin, perforce receded from that veto.[1141] Even under Elizabeth there was a good deal of banking,[1142] and under Cromwell English merchants and money-dealers had learned all the lessons the Dutch could teach them, weighing the Protector's borrowing credit in the scales of the market as they would any other. The spirit of pitiless commercial compet.i.tion flourished alike under Roundhead and Cavalier,[1143] save in so far as it was manacled by invidious monopolies; the l.u.s.t of "empire" was as keen among the middle cla.s.s in Cromwell's day as in Elizabeth's and our own; and even the lot of the workers began to approximate to its modern aspect through the greater facility of transfer[1144] which followed on the old rigidity of feudal law and medieval usage. The industrial age was coming to birth.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1089: Even on this side the king was not fortunate. It would perhaps do him little harm that "he spoke and behaved with indelicacy to ladies in public" (Hallam, citing Milton's _Defensio_ and Warburton's _Notes on Clarendon_, vii. 626); but his frigidity and haughtiness were more serious matters. He actually caned Vane for entering a room in the palace reserved for persons of higher rank (_id._, citing Carte's _Ormond_, i, 356). In the next reign people contrasted his aloofness with his son's accessibility (see _Pepys' Diary_, _pa.s.sim_). Hallam sums up that "he had in truth none who loved him, till his misfortunes softened his temper, and excited sympathy" (10th ed. ii, 226).]
[Footnote 1090: That is, in England. In Scotland they did. It is quite clear that the Scotch disaffection dated from Charles's proposal and attempt, at the very outset of his reign, to recover the t.i.thes that had been appropriated by the n.o.bility. (Compare Burton, _History of Scotland_, v, 270; vi. 45, 75, 77-79, 84, 225; Burnet, _Own Time_, bk.
i, ed. 1838, p. 11; Gardiner, _History of England, 1603-1642_, vii, 278; Laing, _History of Scotland_, 2nd ed. iii, 91; Sir James Balfour, _Annals of the Stuart Kings_, ii, 128; Sir Roger Manley, _History of the Rebellions_, 1691. p. 7.) This scheme, though dropped, was naturally never renounced in the king's counsels; and the Church riots of 1637, which are specially embalmed in the egregious myth of Jenny Geddes, are explicitly recorded to have been planned by outsiders. See Guthry's _Memoirs_, 2nd ed. 1747, p. 23. Burton (vi, 153) rejects this testimony on astonishingly fallacious grounds. Of course, the resentment of English interference with Scotch affairs counted for a great deal.]
[Footnote 1091: It is to be remembered, as explaining Charles's sacrifice of Strafford, that the latter was generally detested even at Court (Hallam, ii, 108-10). And at the outset the general hatred of the n.o.bility to Laud was the great cause of Charles's weakness (_id._ ii, 86). In France, soon afterwards, the aristocratic hatred to Mazarin set up the civil war of the Fronde.]
[Footnote 1092: Hallam, _Const. Hist._ ii, 7.]
[Footnote 1093: _Id._ ii, 10-11.]
[Footnote 1094: _Id._ p. 25. Cp. p. 35.]
[Footnote 1095: As to which see Hallam, ii, 81-82.]
[Footnote 1096: Cunningham, _English Industry and Commerce_, ii, 219.]
[Footnote 1097: Hallam makes an excellent generalisation of Charles's two contrasted characteristics of obstinacy and pliability. "He was tenacious of ends, and irresolute as to means; better fitted to reason than to act; never swerving from a few main principles, but diffident of his own judgment in its application to the course of affairs" (as cited, ii, 229). He had cause to be so diffident. Hallam more than once observes how bad his judgment generally was.]
[Footnote 1098: It is an error to a.s.sert, as is often done, that before Carlyle's panegyric the normal English estimate of Cromwell was utterly hostile. Burnet, and even Clarendon and Hume, mixed high praise with their blame; and Macaulay was eloquently panegyrical long before Carlyle. The subject is discussed in the author's article on "Cromwell and the Historians" in _Essays in Sociology_, vol. 2.]
[Footnote 1099: It is to be noted that while he was trampling down all the const.i.tutional safeguards for which he had professed to fight, he kept the English universities on relatively as sound a footing as the army. He thus wrought for the advance of reason in the next generation.
But he had his share in the Puritan work of destroying the artistic taste and practice of the nation.]
[Footnote 1100: He had, indeed, proposed to the Dutch a joint campaign for the conquest of Spanish America (Gardiner, _History of the Commonwealth_, ii, 478). But even in that case he would have counted on plunder.]