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CHAPTER VI

CROMWELL AND PARLIAMENT

THE Puritans found opposition and fighting a great deal easier than governing a country which was royalist at heart. They did not dare to call a freely elected Parliament and let the nation decide on the form of government to be adopted. The remnant of the Long Parliament which continued to sit after the execution of the king was divided into factions, and many of the members were corruptly seeking their own advancement. When Cromwell urged this Parliament to dissolve itself, it proposed that the members then sitting should be continued in the new Parliament without election and should exercise the right to exclude new members whom they did not approve. This roused the ire of Cromwell, and in April, 1653, he forcibly dissolved the assembly but refused to call an elected Parliament which he had been urging.

§ 1. The Issues between the Army and Parliament1

The military revolution of 1653 is the next tall landmark after the execution of the king. It is almost a commonplace that "we do not know what party means if we suppose that its leader is its master," and the real extent of Cromwell's power over the army is hard to measure. In the spring of 1647, when the first violent breach between army and Parliament took place, the extremists swept him off his feet. Then he acquiesced in Pride's Purge, but he did not originate it. In the action that preceded the trial and despatching of the king it seems to have been Harrison who took the leading part. In 1653 Cromwell said, "Major-General Harrison is an honest man, and aims at good things; yet from the impatience of his spirit, he will not wait the Lord's leisure, but

1 Morley, Cromwell, pp. 329 ff. By permission of The Century Company, Publishers.

hurries one into that which he and all honest men will have cause to repent." If we remember how hard it is to fathom decisive passages in the history of our own time, we see how much of that which we would most gladly know in the distant past must ever remain a surmise. But the best opinion in respect of the revolution of April, 1653, seems to be that the Royalists were not wrong who wrote that Cromwell's authority in the army depended much on Harrison and Lambert and their fanatical factions; that he was forced to go with them in order to save himself; and that he was the member of the triumvirate who was most anxious to wait the Lord's leisure yet a while longer.

The immediate plea for the act of violence that now followed is as obscure as any other of Cromwell's proceedings. In the closing months of 1652 he once more procured occasions of conference between himself and his officers on the one hand, and members of Parliament on the other. He besought the Parliament men by their own means to bring forth of their own accord the good things that had been promised and were so long expected - "so tender were we to preserve them in the reputation of the people." The list of "good things" demanded by the army in the autumn of 1652 hardly supports the modern exaltation of the army as the seat of political sagacity. The payment of arrears, the suppression of vagabonds, the provision of work for the poor, were objects easy to ask, but impossible to achieve. The request for a new election was the least sensible of all.

When it was known that the army was again waiting on God and confessing its sinfulness, things were felt to look grave. Seeing the agitation, the Parliament applied themselves in earnest to frame a scheme for a new representative body. The army believed that the scheme was a sham, and that the semblance of giving the people a real right of choice was only to fill up vacant seats by such persons as the House now in possession should approve. This was nothing less than to perpetuate themselves indefinitely. Cromwell and the officers had a scheme of their own: that the Parliament should name a certain number of men of the right sort, and these nominees should build a constitution. The Parliament, in other words, was to abdicate after calling a constituent convention. On April 19 a meeting took place in Oliver's apartment at Whitehall with a score of the more important members of Parliament. There the plan of the officers and the rival plan of Vane and his friends were brought face to face. What the exact scheme of the Parliament was, we cannot accurately tell, and we

are never likely to know. Cromwell's own descriptions of it are vague and unintelligible. The bill itself he carried away with him under his cloak when the evil day came, and no copy of it survived. It appears, however, that in Vane's belief the best device for a provisional government - and no other than a provisional government was then possible was that the remnant should continue to sit, the men who fought deadly battles at Westminster in 1647 and 1648, the men who had founded the Commonwealth in 1649, the men who had carried on its work with extraordinary energy and success for four years and more. These were to continue to sit as a nucleus for a full representative, joining to themselves such new men from the constituencies as they thought not likely to betray the cause. On the whole we may believe that this was perhaps the least unpromising way out of difficulties where nothing was very promising. It was to avoid the most fatal of all the errors of the French Constituent, which excluded all its members from office and from seats in the Legislative Assembly to whose inexperienced hands it was intrusting the government of France. To blame its authors for fettering the popular choice was absurd in Cromwell, whose own proposal instead of a legislature to be partially and periodically renewed (if that was really what Vane meant) was now for a nominated council without any element of popular choice at all. The army, we should not forget, were even less prepared than the Parliament for anything like a free and open general election. Both alike intended to reserve Parliamentary representation exclusively to such as were godly men and faithful to the interests of the Commonwealth. An open general election would have been as hazardous and probably as disastrous now as at any moment since the defeat of King Charles in the field, and a real appeal to the country would only have meant ruin to the good cause. Neither Cromwell, nor Lambert, nor Harrison, nor any of them, dreamed that a Parliament to be chosen without restrictions would be a safe experiment. The only questions were: what the restrictions were to be, who was to impose them, who was to guard and supervise them. The Parliamentary Remnant regarded themselves as the fittest custodians, and it is hard to say that they were wrong. In judging these events of 1653 we must look forward to events three years later. Cromwell had a Parliament of his own in 1654; it consisted of four hundred and sixty members; almost his first step was to prevent more than a hundred of them from taking their seats. He may have been right; but why was the Parliament wrong for acting on the same

principle? He had another Parliament in 1656, and again he began by shutting out nearly a hundred of its elected members. When the army cried for a dissolution, they had no ideas as to the Parliament that was to follow. At least this much is certain: that whatever failure might have overtaken the plan of Vane and the Parliament, it could not have been more complete than the failure that overtook the plan of Cromwell.

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Apart from the question of the constitution of Parliament, and perhaps regarding that as secondary, Cromwell quarrelled with what, rightly or wrongly, he describes as the ultimate ideal of Vane and his friends. We should have had fine work, he said four years later a council of State and a Parliament of four hundred men executing arbitrary government, and continuing the existing usurpation of the duties of the law courts by legislature and executive. Undoubtedly "a horrid degree of arbitrariness" was practised by the Rump, but some allowance was to be made for a government in revolution; and if that plea be not good for the Parliament, one knows not why it should be good for the no less "horrid arbitrariness" of the Protector. As for the general character of the constitution here said to be contemplated by the Remnant, it has been compared to the French convention of 1793; but a less odious and a truer parallel would be with the Swiss Confederacy to-day. However this may be, if dictatorship was indispensable, the dictatorship of an energetic Parliamentary oligarchy was at least as hopeful as that of an oligarchy of soldiers. When the soldiers had tried their hands and failed, it was to some such plan as this that, after years of turmoil and vicissitude, Milton turned. At worst it was no plan that either required or justified violent deposition by a file of troopers.

§ 2. Forcible Dissolution of Parliament

The conference in Cromwell's apartments at Whitehall on April 10 was instantly followed by one of those violent outrages for which we have to find a name in the dialect of continental revolution. It had been agreed that discussion should be resumed the next day, and meanwhile that nothing should be done with the bill in Parliament. When the next morning came, news was brought to Whitehall that the members had already assembled, were pushing the bill through at full speed, and that it was on the point of becoming law forthwith. At first Cromwell and the officers could not believe that Vane and his friends were capable

of such a breach of their word. Soon there came a second messenger and a third, with assurance that the tidings were true, and that not a moment was to be lost if the bill was to be prevented from passing. It is perfectly possible that there was no breach of word at all. The Parliamentary probabilities are that the news of the conference excited the jealousy of the private members, as arrangements between front benches are at all times apt to do; that they took the business into their own hands, and that the leaders were powerless. In astonishment and anger, Cromwell, in no more ceremonial apparel than his plain black clothes and gray worsted stockings, hastened to the House of Commons. He ordered a guard of soldiers to go with him. That he rose that morning with the intention of following the counsels that the impatience of the army had long prompted, and finally completing the series of exclusions, mutilations, and purges by breaking up the Parliament altogether, there is no reason to believe. Long premeditation was never Cromwell's way. He waited for the indwelling voice, and more than once, in the rough tempests of his life, that demoniac voice was a blast of coarse and uncontrolled fury. Hence came one of the most memorable scenes of English history. There is a certain discord as to details among our too scanty authorities, some even describing the fatal transaction as passing with much modesty and as little noise as can be imagined. The description derived by Ludlow who was not present, from Harrison who was, gathers up all that seems material. There appear to have been between fifty and sixty members present.

Cromwell sat down and heard the debate for some time. Then calling to Major-General Harrison, who was on the other side of the House, to come to him, he told him that he judged the Parliament ripe for a dissolution and this to be the time for doing it. The major-general answered, as he since told me, 'Sir, the work is very great and dangerous: therefore I desire you seriously to consider of it before you engage in it.' 'You say well,' replied the general, and thereupon sat still for about a quarter of an hour. Then, the question for passing the bill being to be put, he said to Major-General Harrison, 'This is the time: I must do it,' and suddenly standing up made a speech, wherein he loaded the Parliament with the vilest reproaches, charging them not to have a heart to do anything for the public good, to have espoused the corrupt interest of presbytery and the lawyers, who were the supporters of tyranny and oppression, accusing them of an intention to perpetuate themselves in power; they had not been forced to

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