honest Englishmen for the defence of the pub- reach them. Here his own case differed widely lic good, of durable tranquillity, of temperate from theirs. Not only was his condemnation freedom, were buried in the grave of Hamp-in itself a measure which only the strongest den. necessity could vindicate, but it could not be The self-denying ordinance was passed, and procured without taking several previous the army was remodelled. These measures steps, every one of which would have rewere undoubtedly full of danger. But all that quired the strongest necessity to vindicate it. was left to the Parliament was to take the less It could not be procured without dissolving of two dangers. And we think that, even if the government by military force, without esthey could have accurately foreseen all that tablishing precedents of the most dangerous followed, their decision ought to have been the description, without creating difficulties which same. Under any circumstances, we should the next ten years were spent in removing, have preferred Cromwell to Charles. But without pulling down institutions which it there could be no comparison between Crom- soon became necessary to reconstruct, and well and Charles victorious-Charles restored, setting up others which almost every man was Charles enabled to feed fat all the hungry soon impatient to destroy. It was necessary grudges of his smiling rancour, and his cringing to strike the House of Lords out of the constipride. The next visit of his majesty to his tution, to exclude members of the House of faithful Commons would have been more se- Commons by force, to make a new crime, a rious than that with which he last honoured new tribunal, a new mode of procedure. The them; more serious than that which their own whole legislative and judicial systems were general paid them some years after. The trampled down for the purpose of taking a sinking would scarce have been content with col-gle head. Not only those parts of the constilaring Marten, and praying that the Lord would tution which the republicans were desirous to deliver him from Vane. If, by fatal misman-destroy, but those which they wished to retain agement, nothing was left to England but a choice of tyrants, the last tyrant whom she should have chosen was Charles. ers. and exalt, were deeply injured by these transactions. High courts of justice began to usurp the functions of juries. The remaining deleFrom the apprehension of this worst evil the gates of the people were soon driven from Houses were soon delivered by their new lead-their seats, by the same military violence The armies of Charles were everywhere which had enabled them to exclude their colrouted; his fastnesses stormed; his party hum-leagues. bled and subjugated. The king himself fell If Charles had been the last of his line, there into the hands of the Parliament; and both the would have been an intelligible reason for putking and the Parliament soon fell into the ting him to death. But the blow which termi hands of the army. The fate of both the cap-nated his life, at once transferred the allegiance Hives was the same. Both were treated alternately with respect and with insult. At length the natural life of the one, and the political life of the other, were terminated by violence; and the power for which both had struggled was united in a single hand. Men naturally sympathize with the calamities of individuals; but they are inclined to look on a fallen party with contempt rather than with pity. Thus misfortune turned the greatest of Parliaments into the despised Rump, and the worst of kings into the Blessed Martyr. of every royalist to an heir, and an heir who was at liberty. To kill the individual, was truly, under such circumstances, not to destroy, but to release the king. We detest the character of Charles; but a man ought not to be removed by a law ex post facto, even constitutionally procured, merely because he is detestable. He must also be very dangerous. We can scarcely conceive that any danger which a state can apprehend from any individual, could justify the violent measures which were necessary to procure a Mr. Hallam decidedly condemns the execu- sentence against Charles. But in fact the tion of Charles; and in all that he says on danger amounted to nothing. There was inthat subject, we heartily agree. We fully con- deed danger from the attachment of a large cur with him in thinking that a great social party to his office. But this danger, his execuschism, such as the civil war, is not to be con- tion only increased. His personal influence founded with an ordinary treason; and that was little indeed. He had lost the confidence the vanquished ought to be treated according of every party. Churchmen, Catholics, Presbyto the rules, not of municipal, but of interna-terians, Independents, his enemies, his friends, tional law. In this case the distinction is of his tools, English, Scotch, Irish, all divisions the less importance, because both international and subdivisions of his people had been deand municipal law were in favour of Charles.ceived by him. His most attached councillors He was a prisoner of war by the former, a turned away with shame and anguish from his king by the latter. By neither was he a trai- | false and hollow policy; plot intertwined with tor. If he had been successful, and had put plot, mine sprung beneath mine, agents dishis leading opponents to death, he would have deserved severe censure; and this without re.erence to the justice or injustice of his cause. Yet the opponents of Charles, it must be admitted were technically guilty of treason. He might have sent them to the scaffold without violating any established principle of jurisprudence. He would not have been compelled to overturn the whole constitution in order to owned, promises evaded, one pledge given in private, another in public.-"Oh, Mr. Secretary," says Clarendon, in a letter to Nicholas, "those stratagems have given me more sad hours than all the misfortunes in war which have befallen the king; and look like the effects of God's anger towards us." The abilities of Charles were not formida ble. His taste in the fine arts was indeed ex H quisite. He was as good a writer and speaker ways taken off his hat when he went into a as any modern sovereign has been. But he church! The character of Charles would was not fit for active life. In negotiation he scarcely rise in our estimation, if we believed was always trying to dupe others, and duping that he was pricked in conscience after the only himself. As a soldier, he was feeble, manner of this worthy loyalist; and that, while dilatory, and miserably wanting, not in perso- violating all the first rules of Christian moralinal courage, but in the presence of mind which ty, he was sincerely scrupulous about churchhis station required. His delay at Gloucester government. But we acquit him of such weaksaved the parliamentary party from destruc- ness. In 1641, he deliberately confirmed the tion. At Naseby, in the very crisis of his for- Scotch declaration, which stated that the gotune, his want of self-possession spread a fatal vernment of the church by archbishops and panic through his army. The story which bishops was contrary to the word of God. In Clarendon tells of that affair, reminds us of 1645, he appears to have offered to set up the excuses by which Bessus and Bobadil ex- Popery in Ireland. That a king who had esplain their cudgellings. A Scotch nobleman, tablished the Presbyterian religion in one it seems, begged the king not to run upon his kingdom, and who was willing to establish the death, took hold of his bridle, and turned his Catholic religion in another, should have inhorse round. No man who had much value surmountable scruples about the ecclesiastifor his life would have tried to perform the cal constitution of the third, is altogether incresame friendly office on that day for Oliver dible. He himself says in his letters that he Cromwell. looks on Episcopacy as a stronger support of monarchical power than even the army. From causes which we have already considered, the Established Church had been, since the Reformation, the great bulwark of the prerogative. Charles wished, therefore, to preserve it. He thought himself necessary both to the Parliament and to the army. He did not foresee, till too late, that by paltering with the Presbyterians he should put both them and himself into the power of a fiercer and more daring party If he had foreseen it, we suspect that the royal blood, which still cries to Heaven every thirtieth of January for judgments only to be averted by salt fish and egg-sauce, would never have been shed. One who had swallowed the Scotch Declaration would scarcely strain at the Covenant. One thing, and one alone, could make Charles dangerous-a violent death. His tyranny could not break the high spirit of the English people. His arms could not conquer, his arts could not deceive them; but his humiliation and his execution melted them into a generous compassion. Men who die on a scaffold for political offences almost always die well. The eyes of thousands are fixed upon them. Enemies and admirers are watching their demeanour. Every tone of voice, every change of colour, is to go down to posterity. Escape is impossible. Supplication is vain. In such a situation pride and despair have often been known to nerve the weakest minds with fortitude adequate to the occasion. Charles died patiently and bravely; not more patiently or bravely, indeed, than many other victims of political The death of Charles, and the strong mearage; not more patiently or bravely than his sures which led to it, raised Cromwell to a own judges, who were not only killed, but tor-height of power fatal to the infant commontured; or than Vane, who had always been considered as a timid man. However, his conduct during his trial and at his execution made a prodigious impression. His subjects began to love his memory as heartily as they had hated his person; and posterity has estimated his character from his death rather than from his life. To represent Charles as a martyr in the cause of Episcopacy is absurd. Those who put him to death cared as little for the Assembly of Divines as for the Convocation; and would in all probability only have hated him the more if he had agreed to set up the Presbyterian discipline; and, in spite of the opinion of Mr. Hallam, we are inclined to think that the attachment of Charles to the Church of England was altogether political. Human nature is indeed so capricious that there may be a single sensitive point in a conscience which everywhere else is callous. A man without truth or humanity may have some strange scruples about a trifle. There was one devout warrior in the royal camp whose piety bore a great resemblance to that which is ascribed to the king. We mean Colonel Turner. That gallant cavalier was hanged after the Restoration for a flagitious burglary. At the gallows he told the crowd that his mind received great consolation from one reflection-he had al wealth. No men occupy so splendid a place in history as those who have founded monarchies on the ruins of republican institutions. Their glory, if not of the purest, is assuredly of the most seductive and dazzling kind. In nations broken to the curb, in nations long accustomed to be transferred from one tyrant to another, a man without eminent qualities may easily gain supreme power. The defection of a troop of guards, a conspiracy of eunuchs, a popular tumult, might place an indolent senator or a brutal soldier on the throne of the Roman world. Similar revolutions have often occurred in the despotic states of Asia. But a community which has heard the voice of truth and experienced the pleasures of liberty, in which the merits of statesmen and of systems are freely canvassed, in which obedience is paid not to persons but to laws, in which magistrates are regarded not as the lords but as the servants of the public, in which the excitement of party is a necessary of life, in which political warfare is reduced to a system of tactics;-such a community is not easily reduced to servitude. Beasts of burden may easily be managed by a new master; but will the wild ass submit to the bonds? will the unicorn serve and abide by the crib? will leviathan hold out his nostrils to the hook ? The mythological conqueror of the East, whose enchantments reduced the wild beasts to the tameness of domestic cattle, and who harnessed lions and tigers to his chariot, is but an imperfect type of those extraordinary minds which have thrown a spell on the fierce spirits of nations unaccustomed to control, and have compelled raging factions to obey their reins, and swell their triumph. The enterprise, be it good or bad, is one which requires a truly great man. It demands courage, activity, energy, wisdom, firmness, conspicuous virtues, or vices so splendid and alluring as to resemble virtues. Those who have succeeded in this arduous undertaking form a very small and a very remarkable class. Parents of tyranny, but heirs of freedom, kings among citizens, citizens among kings, they unite in themselves the characteristics of the system which springs from them, and of the system from which they have sprung. Their reigns shine with a double light, the last and dearest rays of departing freedom, mingled with the first and brightest glories of empire in its dawn. Their high qualities lend to despotism itself a charm drawn from the institutions under which they were formed, and which they have destroyed. They resemble Europeans who settle within the tropics, and carry thither the strength and the energetic habits acquired in regions more propitious to the constitution. They differ as widely from princes nursed in the purple of imperial cradles as the companions of Gama from their dwarfish and imbecile progeny, which, born in a climate unfavourable to its growth and beauty, degenerates more and more at every descent from the qualities of the original conquerors. In this class three men stand pre-eminent; Cæsar, Cromwell, and Bonaparte. The highest place in this remarkable triumvirate belongs undoubtedly to Cæsar. He united the talents of Bonaparte to those of Cromwell; and he possessed also what neither Cromwell nor Bonaparte possessed, learning, taste, wit, eloquence, the sentiments and the manners of an accomplished gentleman. Between Cromwell and Napoleon Mr. Hallam has instituted a parallel scarcely less ingenious than that which Burke has drawn between Richard Cœur de Lion and Charles the Twelfth of Sweden. In this parallel, however, and indeed throughout his work, we think that he hardly gives Cromwell fair measure. "Cromwell," says he, "far unlike his antitype, never showed any signs of a legislative mind, or any desire to place his renown on that noblest basis, the amelioration of social institutions." The difference in this respect, we conceive, was not in the characters of the men, but in the characters of the revolutions by means of which they rose to power. The civil war in England had been undertaken to defend and restore; the republicans of France set themselves to destroy. In England the principles of the common law had never been disturbed, and most even of its forms had been held sacred. In France the law and its ministers had been swept away together. In France, therefore, legislation necessarily became the first business of the first settled government which rose on the ruins of the old system. The admirers of Inigo Jones have always maintained that his works are inferior to those of Sir Christopher Wren only because the great fire of London gave to the latter such a field for the display of his powers as no architect in the history of the world ever possessed. Similar allowance must be made for Cromwell. If he erected little that was new, it was because there had been no general devastation to clear a space for him. As it was, he reformed the representative system in a most judicious manner. He rendered the administration of justice uniform throughout the island. We will quote a passage from his speech to the Parliament in September, 1656, which contains, we think, stronger indications of a legislative mind than are to be found in the whole range of orations delivered on such occasions before or since. "There is one general grievance in the na tion. It is the law.... I think, I may say it, I have as eminent judges in this land as have been had, or that the nation has had for these many years. Truly, I could be particular as to the executive part, to the administration; but that would trouble you. But the truth of it is, there are wicked and abominable laws that will be in your power to alter. To hang a man for sixpence, threepence, I know not what-to hang for a trifle and pardon murder, is in the ministration of the law through the ill-framing of it. I have known in my experience abominable murders quitted; and to see men lose their lives for petty matters! This is a thing that God will reckon for; and I wish it may not lie upon this nation a day longer than you have an opportunity to give a remedy; and I hope I shall cheerfully join with you in it." Mr. Hallam truly says, that though it is im possible to rank Cromwell with Napoleon as a general, yet "his exploits were as much above the level of his contemporaries, and more the effects of an original uneducated capacity." Bonaparte was trained in the best military schools; the army which he led to Italy was one of the finest that ever existed. Cromwell passed his youth and the prime of his manhood in a civil situation. He never looked on war, till he was more than forty years old. He had first to form himself; and then to form his troops. Out of raw levies he created an army, the bravest and the best disciplined, the most orderly in peace, and the most terrible in war, that Europe had seen. He called his body into existence. He led it to conquest. He never fought a battle without gaining a victory. He never gained a victory without annihilating the force opposed to him. Yet his triumphs were not the highest glory of his military system. The respect which his troops paid to property, their attachment to the laws and religion of their country, their submission to the civil power, their temperance, their intelligence, their industry, are without parallel. It was after the Restoration that the spirit which their great leader had infused into them was most signally displayed. At the command of the es tablished government, a government which had no means of enforcing obedience, fifty thou sand soldiers, whose backs no enemy had eve seen, either in domestic or continental war, | ed, he was punctilious only for his country. laid down their arms, and retired into the mass His own character he left to take care of itself; of the people; thenceforward to be distinguished only by superior diligence, sobriety, and regularity in the pursuits of peace, from the other members of the community which they had saved. he left it to be defended by his victories in war and his reforms in peace. But he was a jealous and implacable guardian of the public honour. He suffered a crazy Quaker to insult him in the midst of Whitehall, and revenged himself only by liberating him and giving him a dinner. But he was prepared to risk the chances of war to avenge the blood of a private Englishman. In the general spirit and character of his administration we think Cromwell far superior to Napoleon. "In civil government," says Mr. Hallam, "there can be no adequate parallel be- No sovereign ever carried to the throne so tween one who had sucked only the dregs of large a portion of the best qualities of the mida besotted fanaticism, and one to whom the dling orders, so strong a sympathy with the stores of reason and philosophy were open." feelings and interests of his people. He was These expressions, it seems to us, convey the sometimes driven to arbitrary measures; but highest eulogium on our great countryman. he had a high, stout, honest, English heart. Reason and philosophy did not teach the con- Hence it was that he loved to surround his queror of Europe to command his passions, or throne with such men as Hale and Blake. to pursue, as a first object, the happiness of the Hence it was that he allowed so large a share people. They did not prevent him from risk- of political liberty to his subjects, and that, even ing his fame and his power in a frantic contest when an opposition, dangerous to his power against the principles of human nature and the and to his person, almost compelled him to golaws of the physical world, against the rage of vern by the sword, he was still anxious to leave the winter and the liberty of the sea. They did a germ from which, at a more favourable seanot exempt him from the influence of that most son, free institutions might spring. We firmly pernicious of superstitions, a presumptuous fa- believe, that if his first parliament had not comtalism. They did not preserve him from the menced its debates by disputing his title, his inebriation of prosperity, or restrain him from government would have been as mild at home indecent querulousness and violence in adver- as it was energetic and able abroad. He was sity. On the other hand, the fanaticism of a soldier-he had risen by war. Had his amCromwell never urged him on impracticable bition been of an impure or selfish kind, it undertakings, or confused his perception of the would have been easy for him to plunge his public good. Inferior to Bonaparte in inven- country into continental hostilities on a large tion, he was far superior to him in wisdom. scale, and to dazzle the restless factions which The French Emperor is among conquerors he ruled by the splendour of his victories. what Voltaire is among writers, a miraculous Some of his enemies have sneeringly remarkchild. His splendid genius was frequently ed, that in the successes obtained under his clouded by fits of humour as absurdly perverse administration, he had no personal share; as as those of the pet of the nursery, who quar- if a man who had raised himself from obscurirels with his food, and dashes his playthings to ty to empire, solely by his military talents, pieces. Cromwell was emphatically a man. could have any unworthy reason for shrinking He possessed, in an eminent degree, that mas- from military enterprise. This reproach is his culine and full-grown robustness of mind, that highest glory. In the success of the English equally diffused intellectual health, which, if navy he could have no selfish interests. Its our national partiality does not mislead us, triumphs added nothing to his fame; its inhas peculiarly characterized the great men of crease added nothing to his means of overEngland. Never was any ruler so conspicu-awing his enemies; its great leader was not ously born for sovereignty. The cup which his friend. Yet he took a peculiar pleasure in has intoxicated almost all others, sobered him. encouraging that noble service, which, of all the His spirit, restless from its buoyancy in a lower instruments employed by an English governsphere, reposed in majestic placidity as soon ment, is the most impotent for mischief, and the as it had reached the level congenial to it. He most powerful for good. His administration had nothing in common with that large class was glorious, but with no vulgar glory. It was of men who distinguished themselves in lower not one of those periods of overstrained and posts, and whose incapacity becomes obvious convulsive exertion which necessarily produce as soon as the public voice summons them to debility and languor. Its energy was natural, take the lead. Rapidly as his fortunes grew, healthful, temperate. He placed England at his mind expanded more rapidly still. Insigni- the head of the Protestant interest, and in the ficant as a private citizen, he was a great gene- first rank of Christian powers. He taught ral; he was a still greater prince. The manner every nation to value her friendship and to of Napoleon was a theatrical compound, in dread her enmity. But he did not squander her which the coarseness of a revolutionary guard-resources in a vain attempt to invest her with room was blended with the ceremony of the old court of Versailles. Cromwell, by the confession even of his enemies, exhibited in his demeanour the simple and natural nobleness of a man neither ashamed of his origin nor vain of his elevation; of a man who had found his proper place in society, and who felt secure that he was competent to fill it. Easy, even to familiarity, where his own dignity was concern that supremacy which no power, in the modern system of Europe, can safely affect, or can long retain. This noble and sober wisdom had its reward. If he did not carry the banners of the Commonwealth in triumph to distant capitals; if he did not adorn Whitehall with the spoils of the Stadthouse and the Louvre; if he did not portion out Flanders and Germany into princi palities for his kinsmen and his generals; he' cuting fires of Rome. Even to the present day, did not, on the other hand, see his country his character, though constantly attacked, and overrun by the armies of nations which his scarcely ever defended, is popular with the ambition had provoked. He did not drag out great body of our countrymen. the last years of his life in exile and a prisoner, in an unhealthy climate and under an ungenerous jailor; raging with the impotent desire of vengeance, and brooding over visions of departed glory. He went down to his grave in the fulness of power and fame; and left to his son an authority which any man of ordinary firmness and prudence would have retained. and The most questionable act of his life was the execution of Charles. We have already strongly condemned that proceeding; but we by no means consider it as one which attaches any peculiar stigma of infamy to the names of those who participated in it. It was an unjust and injudicious display of violent party spirit; but it was not a cruel or perfidious measure. But for the weakness of that foolish Ish- It had all those features which distinguish the bosheth, the opinions which we have been ex-errors of magnanimous and intrepid spirits pressing would, we believe, now have formed from base and malignant crimes. the orthodox creed of good Englishmen. We We cannot quit this interesting topic withnight now be writing under the government out saying a few words on a transaction, his Highness Oliver the Fifth, or Richard which Mr. Hallam has made the subjec `of a the Fourth, Protector, by the Grace of God, of severe accusation against Cromwe the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and which has been made by others the subject of Ireland, and the dominions thereto belonging. a severe accusation against Mr. Hallam. We The form of the great founder of the dynasty, conceive that both the Protector and the hison horseback, as when he led the charge at torian may be vindicated. Mr. Hallam tells Naseby, or on foot, as when he took the mace us that Cromwell sold fifty English gentlenen from the table of the Commons, would adorn as slaves in Barbadoes. For making this all our squares, and overlook our public of statement he has been charged with two high fices from Charing-Cross; and sermons in his literary crimes. The first accusation is, that, praise would be duly preached on his lucky from his violent prejudice against Oliver, he day, the third of September, by court-chaplains, has calumniated him falsely. The second, guiltless of the abominations of the surplice. preferred by the same accuser, is, that from his violent fondness for the same Oliver, he has hidden his calumnies against him at the fag end of a note, instead of putting them into the text. Both these imputations cannot pos sibly be true, and it happens that neither is so. His censors will find, when they take the trouble to read his book, that the story is mentioned in the text as well as in the notes; and they will also find, when they take the trouble to read some other books, with which speculators on English history ought to be acquainted, that the story is true. If there could have been any doubt about the matter, Burton's Diary must have set it at rest. But, in truth, there was abundant and superabundant evidence, before the appearance of that valuable publication. Not to mention the authority to which Mr. Hallam refers, and which alone is perfectly satisfactory, there is Slingsby Bethel's account of the proceedings of Richard Cromwell's Parliament, published immediately after its dissolution. He was a member: he must therefore have known what happened: and violent as his prejudices were, he never could have been such an idiot as to state positive falsehoods with respect to public transactions which had taken place only a few days before. It will not be quite so easy to defend Cromwell against Mr. Hallam, as to defend Mr. Hallam against those who attack his history. But the story is certainly by no means so bad as he takes it to be. In the first place, this slavery was merely the compulsory labour to which every transported convict is liable. Nobody acquainted with the language of the last century can be ignorant that such con victs were generally termed slaves; until dis cussions about another species of slavery, far more miserable and altogether anmerited, ren dered the word too odious to be applied even to felons of English origin. These persons But, though his memory has not been taken under the patronage of any party, though every device has been used to blacken it, though to praise him would long have been a punishable crime, yet truth and merit at last prevail. Cowards, who had trembled at the very sound of his name, tools of office, who, like Downing, had been proud of the honour of lacqueying his coach, might insult him in loyal speeches and addresses. Venal poets might transfer to the king the same eulogies, little the worse for wear, which they had bestowed on the Protector. A fickle multitude might crowd to shout and scoff round the gibbeted remains of the greatest Prince and Soldier of the age. But when the Dutch cannon startled an effeminate tyrant in his own palace, when the conquests which had been made by the armies of Cromwell were sold to pamper the harlots of Charles, when Englishmen were sent to fight, under the banners of France, against the independence of Europe and the Protestant religion, many honest hearts swelled in secret at the thought of one who had never suffered his country to be ill-used by any but himself. It must indeed have been difficult for any Englishman to see the salaried Viceroy of France, at the most important crisis of his fate, sauntering through his harem, yawning and talking nonsense over a despatch, or beslobbering his brothers and his courtiers in a fit of maudlin affection, without a respectful and tender remembrance of him, before whose genius the young pride of Louis, and the veteran craft of Mazarin, had stood rebuked; who had humbled Spain on the land, and Holland on the sea; and whose imperial voice had arrested the victorious arms of Sweden, and the perse *These particulars, and many more of the same kind, are recorded by Pepys. VOL. I.-12 H2 |