by Will Durant
Cromwell’s development as a general was one of the surprises of the war. He shared with Lord Ferdinando Fairfax the honors of a victory at Winceby (October 11, 1643). At Marston Moor (July 2, 1644) Fairfax was routed, but Cromwell’s Ironsides saved the day. Other Parliamentary leaders, the earls of Essex and Manchester, suffered reverses or failed to follow up their successes; Manchester frankly admitted his unwillingness to overthrow the King. To get rid of these titled generals, Cromwell proposed a “Self-denying Ordinance” (December 9, 1644) by which all members of Parliament were to resign their commands. The proposal was defeated; it was revived and passed (April 3, 1645); Essex and Manchester retired; Sir Thomas Fairfax, son of Ferdinando, was made commander in chief, and he soon appointed Cromwell lieutenant general in charge of the cavalry. Parliament ordered the formation of a “New Model” army of 22,000 men. Cromwell undertook to train it.
He had had no military experience before the war, but his force of character, his steadiness of purpose and will, his skill in playing upon the religious and political feelings of men, enabled him to mold his regiments into a unique discipline and loyalty. The Puritan faith equaled the Spartan ethic in making invincible soldiers. These men did not “swear like a trooper”; on the contrary, no oaths were heard in their camp, but many sermons and prayers. They stole not, nor raped, but they invaded churches to rid them of religious images and “prelatical” or “papistical” clergymen.91 They shouted with joy or fury when they encountered the enemy. And they were never beaten. At Naseby (June 14, 1645), when the Royalists were routing Sir Thomas Fairfax’s infantry, Cromwell with his new cavalry turned the defeat into so thorough a victory that the King lost all his infantry, all his artillery, half his cavalry, and copies of his correspondence, which were published to show that he planned to bring more Irish troops into England and to repeal the laws against Catholics.
From that time Charles’s affairs rapidly worsened. The Marquis of Mont rose, his heroic general in Scotland, after many victories, was routed at Philiphaugh and fled to the Continent. On July 30, 1645, the Parliamentary army took Bath; on August 23 Rupert surrendered Bristol to Fairfax. The King turned in all directions for help, in vain. On every side and pretext his troops, feeling their cause hopeless, went over to the enemy. By separate and devious negotiations he tried to divide his foes—the Independents from the Parliament, Parliament from the Scots—and failed. He had already sent his pregnant wife across hostile country to find ship for France; now he bade Prince Charles escape from England by whatever possible means. He himself, disguised and with but two attendants, made his way to the north and surrendered to the Scots (May 5, 1646). The First Civil War was in effect at an end.
X. THE RADICALS: 1646–48
Charles had been led to hope that the Scots would treat him as still their King; they preferred to consider him their prisoner. They offered to help him regain his throne if he would sign the Solemn League and Covenant making the Presbyterian form of Christianity compulsory throughout the British Isles; he refused. The English Parliament sent commissioners to the Scots at Newcastle, proposing to accept Charles as King on condition that he accept the Covenant, consent to the proscription of leading Royalists, and allow Parliament to control all armed forces and name all high officials of the state; he refused. Parliament offered the Scots £400,000 to pay their arrears and expenses if they would return to Scotland and surrender the King to English commissioners. The Scottish Parliament agreed. It accepted the money not as a price for the King, but as just reimbursement for its outlay in the war; Charles, however, felt that he had been bartered for gold. He was removed to Holmby House in Northamptonshire (January 1647) as prisoner of the English Parliament.
The English army, now encamped at Saffron Walden, forty miles from London, reviewed its victories and called for commensurate rewards. The cost of maintaining these thirty thousand men had compelled Parliament to raise taxes to twice their maximum under Charles; even so it owed the soldiers from four to ten months of back pay. Moreover, the Puritan Independents, defeated in Parliament, were gaining the upper hand in the army, and Cromwell, their leader, was suspected of ambitions inconsistent with the sovereignty of Parliament. Worse yet, there were in his regiment “Levelers” who rejected all distinctions of rank in Church and state, and who called for manhood suffrage and religious liberty. A few of them were anarchist communists; William Walwyn declared that all things should be in common; then “there would be no need for government, for there would be no thieves or criminals.”92 John Lilburne, the most un-discourageable of the Levelers after every arrest and punishment, was “the most popular man in England” (1646).93 Cromwell was attacked as a Leveler, but, though sympathetic with them, he was hostile to their ideas, feeling that in the England of that day democracy would lead to chaos.
Parliament, now Presbyterian, resented the threat implied in the nearness of so large and troublesome an army so potently Independent. It passed a bill to disband half of it and to enroll the rest as volunteers for service in Ireland. The soldiers demanded their arrears; Parliament voted them a part in cash, the remainder in promises. The army refused to disband until fully paid. Parliament reopened negotiations with the King, and nearly reached an agreement with him to restore him on his consenting to accept the Covenant for three years. Warned of this, a squad of cavalry raided Holmby House, captured the King, and took him to Newmarket (June 3–5, 1647). Cromwell hurried to Newmarket and made himself head of a Council of the Army. On January 10 the army began a leisurely march upon London. En route it sent to Parliament a declaration formulated chiefly by Cromwell’s able son-in-law Henry Ireton, which condemned the absolutism of Parliament as no better than the King’s, and demanded the election of a new Parliament by a wider suffrage. Parliament was between two fires, for the merchants, the manufacturers, and the populace of London, fearing occupation by the army, clamored for the restoration of the King on almost any terms. A city crowd invaded Parliament (July 26), and compelled it to invite the King to London and to put the militia under Presbyterian command. Sixty-seven Independents left Parliament for the army.
On August 6 the troops entered London, bringing the King with them. The sixty-seven Independents were escorted back to their places in Parliament. From that time until Cromwell took supreme authority, the army dominated Parliament. It was not chaotic or unprincipled; it maintained order in the city and within its own ranks; and its demands, though probably impracticable at the time, were sanctioned by posterity. In the pamphlet The Case of the Army Truly Stated (October 9, 1647) it called for freedom of trade, abolition of monopolies, and restoration of common lands to the poor, and urged that no man be forced to testify against himself in court.94 In An Agreement of the People (October 30) it proclaimed that “all power is originally and essentially in the whole body of the people”; that the only just government is through representatives freely chosen by manhood suffrage; that therefore kings and lords, if allowed to exist, should be subordinate to the House of Commons; that no man should be exempt from the laws; and that all should enjoy full religious liberty.95 “Every man born in England, the poor man, the meanest man in the kingdom,” said Colonel Rainsborough, ought to have a voice in choosing those who made the laws of the land by which he was to live and die.96
Cromwell quieted the debate by summoning its leaders to prayer. The Levelers charged him with hypocrisy and with secret negotiations for restoring the King, and he confessed that he still believed in monarchy. He explained to the democrats that the resistance to their proposals would be too formidable to be overcome by mere “fleshly strength,” and after long argument he persuaded the leaders to reduce their demand for universal suffrage to a request for an extension of the franchise. Some soldiers refused to compromise; they wore the Agreement in their hats, and ignored Cromwell’s command to remove it. He had three ringleaders arrested; they were tried by court-martial and condemned to death; he ordered them to throw dice for their lives; the one who lost was shot. Disciplin
e revived.
Meanwhile the King escaped from his army captors, made his way to the coast and the Isle of Wight, and found friendly lodging in Carisbrooke Castle (November 14, 1647). He was heartened by news of Royalist rebellions against Parliament in the countryside and in the fleet. Scottish commissioners in London secretly offered a Scottish army to re-enthrone him if he would adopt Presbyterian Christianity and suppress other forms of religion. He accepted this “engagement,” but limited it to three years. The commissioners left London to raise an army. The Scottish Parliament ratified their plan for an invasion of England, and issued a manifesto (May 3, 1648) requiring all Englishmen to take the Covenant, to suppress all forms of religion except the Presbyterian, and to disband the Independent army. The English Parliament saw itself superseded and England subordinated to Scotland if these proposals came into force. It hurriedly made its peace with Cromwell and persuaded him to lead his troops against the Scots; doubtless it was glad to put him at a distance and in peril. After three days of pleading he prevailed upon the army to follow him back to battle. It went reluctantly, and some leaders vowed that if they again saved England, it would be their “duty … to call Charles Stuart, that man of blood, to account for the blood he had shed.”97
XI. FINIS: 1648–49
Cromwell’s energy made short work of the Second Civil War. While Fairfax put down Royalist revolts in Kent, Oliver turned west and captured a Royalist stronghold in Wales. The Scots crossed the Tweed on July 8 and moved with alarming speed to within forty miles of Liverpool. At Preston, in Lancashire, Cromwell’s nine thousand men met twice that number of Scots and Cavaliers and overwhelmed them (August 17).
While Cromwell and his army were saving Parliament, it plotted to protect itself from them by reopening negotiations for the restoration of the King. But it insisted that he should sign and enforce the Covenant; he would not. The returning army offered to support his restoration with severe limitations on the royal prerogative; he refused (November 17). To prevent his being restored by Parliament, the army captured him again and lodged him in Hurst Castle, opposite the Isle of Wight. Parliament condemned the action and voted to accept the King’s latest terms as a basis for settlement. The army leaders, anticipating death if Charles were restored, declared that none might be permitted to pass into the House but such as had continued “faithful to the public interest.” Early on December 6 Colonel Thomas Pride and a troop of soldiers surrounded and invaded the House of Commons and barred or expelled 140 Royalist and Presbyterian members; forty who resisted were jailed.98 Cromwell approved the action, and joined in voting for the speedy trial and execution of the King.
Of the five hundred members who in 1640 had composed the House of Commons only fifty-six now remained. This “Rump Parliament,” by a majority of six, passed an ordinance declaring it treason for a king to make war upon Parliament. The Lords rejected the ordinance as beyond the authority of the Commons; the Commons thereupon (January 4, 1649) resolved that the people were, “under God, the original of all just power”; that the Commons, as representing the people, had “the supreme power in this nation”; and that therefore its enactments, without the consent of the Lords or the king, had the force of law. On January 6 they named 135 commissioners to try the King. One commissioner, Algernon Sidney, told Cromwell they had no legal authority to try a king. Cromwell lost his temper. “I tell you,” he cried, “we will cut off his head with the crown upon it.”99 The army leaders made a last attempt to avoid regicide; they offered to acquit Charles if he would agree to the sale of the bishops’ lands and resign the power to veto the ordinances of Parliament. He said he could not, for he had sworn to be faithful to the Church of England. There was no question of his courage.
The trial began on January 19, 1649. The sixty or seventy impromptu judges who consented to act sat on a raised dais at one end of Westminster Hall, soldiers stood at the other, spectators thronged the galleries; Charles was seated in the center, alone. The presiding officer, John Bradshaw, stated the charge and asked the King to answer. Charles denied the authority of the court to try him, or that it represented the people of England, and claimed that government by a Rump Parliament dominated by the army was a worse tyranny than any he had ever shown. The galleries cried, “God save the King!” The pulpits condemned the trial; Bradshaw feared for his life in the streets. Prince Charles dispatched from Holland a sheet bearing only his signature, and promised the judges to abide by any terms they would write over his name if they would spare his father’s life.100 Four nobles offered to die in Charles’s stead; they were refused.101 Fifty-nine judges, including Cromwell, signed the death sentence. On January 30, before a vast and horror-stricken crowd, the King went quietly to his death. His head was severed with one blow of the executioner’s ax. “There was such a groan by the thousands then present,” wrote an eyewitness, “as I never heard before and desire I may never hear again.”102
Was the execution legal? Of course not. On the basis of existing law, the Parliament progressively and rudely appropriated royal rights sanctioned by the precedents of a hundred years. By definition a revolution is illegal; it can advance to the new only by violating the old. Charles was sincere in defending the powers he had inherited from Elizabeth and James; he was sinned against as well as sinning; his fatal error lay in not recognizing that the new distribution of wealth required, for social stability, a new distribution of political power.
Was the execution just? Yes, so far as war is just. Once law is set aside by trial at arms, the defeated may ask for mercy, but the victor may exact the ultimate penalty if he judges it necessary as a preventive of renewed resistance, or as a deterrent to others, or as protection for the lives of himself and his followers. Presumably a triumphant King would have hanged Cromwell, Ireton, Fairfax, and many more, perhaps with the tortures regularly allotted to persons convicted of treason.
Was the execution wise? Probably not. Cromwell apparently believed that a live king, no matter how securely imprisoned, would be a stimulus to repeated Royalist revolts. But so would the King’s son, unreachable in France or Holland, as yet unblemished with his father’s faults, and soon to be glorified with romance. The execution of Charles I led to a foreseeable revulsion of national feeling, which in eleven years restored his line. Subsequent history suggests that mercy would have been wisdom. When Charles’s son James II gave equally great offense, the Glorious Revolution of 1688, managed with aristocratic finesse, deliberately allowed him to escape to France; and the results of that deposition were permanent. However, it was the earlier Rebellion that made the later Revolution possible in all its swift effectiveness.
The Great Rebellion corresponded both to the Huguenot uprisings in sixteenth-century France and, despite many differences, to the French Revolution of 1789—in the first case the insurrection of a stern and simple Calvinism, sinewed by mercantile wealth, against a ritualistic Church and an absolutist government; in the second case the revolt of a national assembly, expressing the power of the purse and the middle class, against a landed aristocracy led by a well-meaning but blundering ruler. By 1789 the English had digested their two rebellions, and could look with horror and eloquence upon a revolution that, like its own, incarnadined a country and killed a king because the past had tried to stand still.
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I.In 1631, in Massachusetts Bay Colony, Roger Williams advocated unlimited toleration for Catholics, Jews, and infidels.
II.Excerpts from the Westminster Confession, ch. III: “By the decree of God, for the manifestation of His glory, some men and angels are predestined unto everlasting life, and others foreordained to everlasting death…. Those of mankind that are predestined unto life, God, before the foundation of the world was laid, according to His eternal and immutable purpose, and the secret counsel and good pleasure of His will, hath chosen in Christ unto everlasting glory, out of His mere free grace and love, without any foresight of faith or good works, or perseverance in either of them … and all to the praise
of His glorious grace … The rest of mankind God was pleased, according to the unsearchable counsel of His own will, whereby He extendeth or withholdeth mercy as He pleaseth, for the glory of His sovereign power over His creatures, to pass by, and to ordain them to dishonour and wrath for their sin, to the praise of His glorious iustice.”86
BOOK II
THE FAITHS FIGHT FOR POWER
1556–1648
CHAPTER IX
Alma Mater Italia
1564—1648
I. THE MAGIC BOOT
AFTER the double fury of Renaissance and Reformation, Italy was subsiding into a Spanish subjection harassed with poverty, solaced with religion, and gilded with peace. The Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis (1559) had awarded the duchy of Savoy to Emmanuel Philibert. Genoa, Lucca, Venice, and San Marino survived as independent republics. Mantua remained obedient to the Gonzaga dukes, Ferrara to the Estensi, Parma to the Farnese. The Medici ruled Tuscany—Florence, Pisa, Arezzo, Siena—but their ports were under Spanish control. Through her viceroys Spain governed the duchy of Milan and the Kingdom of Naples, which included Sicily and all Italy south of the Papal States. These, running across the center of the peninsula from the Mediterranean to the Adriatic, were ruled by popes hemmed in by Spanish power.