A School History of England/Chapter 8
CHAPTER VIII
THE EARLY STUARTS AND THE GREAT CIVIL WAR, 1603–1660
James I, 1603–25; his character.Henry VIII and Elizabeth had given England unity and patriotism. Would the next race of Kings, the Stuarts, be able to maintain unity? That was the question which every one was asking while King James I was slowly riding from Scotland to London in 1603. James, of whom you may read the character in Sir Walter Scott's beautiful story, The Fortunes of Nigel, was already thirty-five, ‘an old king’, he said; and he had had a miserable time in Scotland between the turbulent nobles and the Presbyterian ministers who were always preaching at him. And he had been very poor. He knew England to be rich, and thought he was going to be a rich and great king. He was a firm and very learned Protestant, a kindly man, though irritable and conceited. He saw a great deal farther than most of his subjects saw, but he never understood the temper of the English people; and above all he did not know, as the Tudors had known, when he had ‘come to the place called Stop’. You might describe him as
A shifty mother’s shiftless son,
Bred up among intrigues and plots,
Learned in all things, wise in none!
Ungainly, babbling, wasteful, weak,
Shrewd, clever, cowardly, pedantic,
The sight of steel would blanch his cheek,
The smell of baccy drive him frantic.
He was the author of his line—
He wrote that witches should be burnt;
He wrote that monarchs were divine,
And left a son who proved they weren't!
Temper of England.Now the temper of the English people was going to be a very serious matter. They were fully ‘grown up’ and fully aware that they were grown up; and they did not want to be ‘in leading-strings’ any longer. Even the great Elizabeth, in her last years, had galled this proud temper a good deal. She had scolded her Parliaments and done high-handed things against the law. But she had served and guided her people faithfully, and they knew it and made allowances accordingly.
Mistakes of the Stuart kings.James I and his son Charles I never thought of themselves as ‘servants’ of their people. They wanted to rule as the Tudors had ruled, though the need for the guidance and the leading-strings had passed away. They were not ‘tyrants’ or cruel men or extortioners, but they irritated the nation until they provoked rebellion and civil war. And so they broke the unity of King and People, which was hardly restored again before the reign of Victoria the Great.
Their quarrels with Parlaments.The main thing to remember about them is that they quarrelled continually with their Parliaments, with the House of Lords almost as much as with the House of Commons; and nearly all their quarrels were over religion or money. The House of Commons took the lead in the quarrels, because it was the most powerful body of gentlemen in the country. The Tudors had flattered and strengthened it enormously, and added very largely to its numbers; for they had been rather afraid of the House of Lords. The Stuarts added more than a hundred members to the House of Lords in the ,_p.142.jpg)
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GREAT BRITAIN, TO ILLUSTRATE HISTORY FROM THE NORMAN CONQUEST TO THE PRESENT DAY
Religious quarrels; dangers from Rome again.First then, for the quarrels about religion. England was growing more Puritan every day. Men saw that the Church of Rome had ‘set its house in order’ since the Reformation, and so was regaining its ground everywhere. It was catching hold of kings and courtiers, even in lands that had been soundly Protestant fifty years before. Spain backed it up with sword and gun; and Spain, though the old men who had beaten the Armada might laugh at her, still seemed to be a gigantic power. James’s leaning to Spain.James I was bent on keeping peace with Spain and wished his son to marry a Spanish princess. This, said the Puritans, would simply bring back the Pope and Popery to England. The ‘Gunpowder Plot’, 1605.Once some wicked and hot-headed Catholics made a plot to blow up the King and both Houses of Parliament with gunpowder (1605). I think you have all heard of Guy Fawkes and the ‘Fifth of November’, but perhaps, when we see his absurd figure carried about in the streets, we are apt to forget that, on that day in the year 1605, he was actually found in a cellar under the Houses of Parliament, watching a lot of barrels of gunpowder to which he was going to set light the next morning when Parliament should have met. The King and the Prince of Wales, and all the Bishops, Lords and Commons would have met a horrible death, and the friends of Fawkes would then have seized the government on behalf of the Catholics. No wonder Protestants hated and feared a religion in whose name such things could be planned. Growth of the Puritans; ‘High Church’ and ‘Low Church’.The Puritans also said that the English Church was getting too much like the Catholic Church; or becoming, as we should say now, too ‘High Church’. The bishops were too powerful, the services too splendid, even the teaching was growing Catholic again. So these Puritans began to cry out, first for a limit to the power of the bishops, then for their abolition, and finally for the abolition of the Prayer Book. But, when it came to that cry, England was by no means united, and at last was divided on the religious question, into two camps of nearly equal strength, who were obliged to fight it out in a bloody civil war.
Civil quarrels; unlawful taxation, &c.On the second question, the quarrels about money, which we can call the ‘civil’ as opposed to the religious taxation, there was no real division of opinions. No one of any importance in England wanted the King to be able to take taxes at his pleasure, nor to keep people in prison without bringing them to trial, nor to make war or peace without consulting his Parliament. The Tudors had done many of these things, but, on the whole, with the approval of the whole nation and for its good. The people they kept in prison without trial were usually foreign spies or traitors, who were threatening the very existence of England as a nation. James and Charles, however, sent members of Parliament to prison for speeches made in Parliament against the ‘tyranny’ of the bishops, against taxes, against unpatriotic alliances with Spain. They took, at the English ports, Customs’ duties on goods without consent of Parliament. The Stuart navy.They did indeed maintain a fine navy, and they certainly built splendid ships, but they did nothing with them. Their sailors were itching to cut Spanish and Popish throats far away in America, and Portuguese throats far away in India; but the fleet was kept hanging about in the Channel, while the flag was insulted by Frenchmen, by Spaniards, and even by our old friends, the Protestant Dutch. So at last men were unwilling to serve in such a navy; and had to be ‘impressed’, that is, compelled to serve. ‘Ship-money’, 1637.And when King Charles, in 1635–6–7, asked for a tax called ‘Ship-money’, to maintain the Navy, men began to say ‘No’, ‘not without consent of Parliament’, and so on.
The Army or ‘Militia’.It was the same story with the Army, or rather with the old ‘militia’ of ‘every man armed in his county’, which did duty for an army. The Tudors had not been very successful in their efforts to make this force a real one. Men hated the service and shirked it when they could; they talked nonsense about ‘England not wanting an army when she had got such a fine navy’. You will often hear the same sort of nonsense talked nowadays; don't believe it! King James, towards the end of his reign, had a fine opportunity of showing that England could bite by land as well as by sea; The Thirty Years’ War in Germany, 1618–48.for a frightful war broke out in Germany between and Protestants, which was to last for thirty years; and all good Protestants in England and Scotland were eager to go and help their brothers in Germany. But James couldn't make his mind up: he talked big and sent messengers flying about to the Kings of Europe, but act he would not; and so nothing was done except that a great many volunteers went, both from England and Scotland, and learned soldiering to some purpose, as James's son, King Charles I, was to find out one day. Till that day there was no real army in England, although Charles, when he came to the throne, tried to establish a general right of ‘impressing’ soldiers, and quarrelled with his Parliaments at once about it. Lastly, James dismissed all his Parliaments in anger, and used rude language in doing so. Death of James I, 1625.When he died in 1625, nearly all the seeds of the future civil war had been sowed.
Charles I, 1625-49; his character.Charles I, the ‘Martyr King’, was a very different man from his father; he was shy, proud, cold, ignorant of the world, obstinate and mistrustful. He did not mean to lie, but he hardly ever told the whole truth; and so neither his enemies nor his friends could trust him. James would have liked to be good friends with his people, and was at bottom what we call ‘a good fellow’, with a strong sense of fun. Charles never made a joke in his life, and did not care twopence for public opinion, or for being friends with any one except his bishops. His wife, moreover, was a Catholic and a Frenchwoman and cared nothing for England. Though a firm Protestant, Charles was much more ‘High Church’ than James, and wanted to give the bishops more power. He did once interfere (1627) on behalf of the French Protestants, who were (rather mildly) illtreated at that time by their kings, but he made a complete mess of the task. His quarrels with three Parliaments, 1625–9.That was at the beginning of his reign, and, as in his first four years he quarrelled openly with his first three Parliaments, he could hardly get money enough to help him to live and govern England, and none to defend the honour of England abroad. Eleven years without Parliament, 1629-40.Then for eleven years, 1629–40, he called no Parliament at all. This was the longest interval without a Parliament since the reign of Henry III, and to all Englishmen, whose tempers were now boiling over, it seemed intolerable.
Prosperity of English trade.During this period Charles took the Customs’ duties at the ports, though Parliament had never granted them to him, and they proved to be his main source of income, for, of course, the long peace since 1605 had greatly increased English trade, not only with all European countries (especially Turkey, Russia, Portugal and Spain), but also, in spite of Spanish jealousy, with Spanish America, the West and East Indies, and the Colonies which were now beginning to be founded in North America (as I will tell you later on at p. 166). Our ‘East India Company’, which began to build for us our Indian Empire of to-day, had been founded at the end of Elizabeth's reign.
Charles’s quarrel with Scotland, 1637.Besides the ‘Customs’, there were lots of other little sources of income, many of them quite against the law, and altogether Charles had a revenue of about a million pounds a year, which certainly enabled him to live as long as he could keep the peace. Perhaps he might never have called a Parliament again if he had not quarrelled about religion with his subjects in Scotland. His Archbishop of Canterbury was William Laud, an honourable but narrow-minded man, who set himself to weed out the Puritan party in the Church of England, and to make every one conform to the services of the Prayer Book. All Puritan England was already growling deeply at this, when it occurred to Laud to try to enforce the same services and ceremonies on Presbyterian Scotland. Some steps in this direction had been begun by King James, but had met with very little success; there were, however, already some sort of restored bishops in Scotland, though they had no power. Suddenly, in 1637, Charles resolved to force upon Scotland a Prayer Book like the English one, as a first step towards making the Church quite uniform in the two kingdoms.
Resistance of the Scots, 1638.Scotland, poor, proud, and intensely patriotic, had for long felt sore and neglected since its native kings had gone from Edinburgh to London. At this ‘English’ insult it simply rose and slammed the door in the faces of the King and his Archbishop. A ‘Covenant’ was The ‘Covenant’, 1638.signed in Edinburgh and almost all over Scotland, which bound all men by the most solemn oath to maintain the Presbyterian Church and to root out bishops and all their works; the Covenanters flatly refused all compromise, and Charles, if he were to remain a king at all in Scotland, would have to fight. It would be no easy task; for neither Edward I nor Henry VIII at the head of a united England had been successful against the Scots. And Charles and Laud were almost the only people in England who did not think the Scots were right to resist! The Scots got together a much better army than Charles could get, and faced him sturdily; The first ‘Bishops’ War’, 1639.the first the first ‘Bishops’ War’, as the Puritans called it, was a dead failure. ‘Call your Parliament, Sir,’ was the only advice his councillors could give the King.
The Short Parliament, April–May, 1640.Charles gave way, and, in April, 1640, called a Parliament which, as he dismissed it in a few days, had the nickname of ‘The Short Parlament’. For, instead of giving him cash to crush Scotland with, it began to pour out a torrent of the grievances of the past eleven years, nay, of the past thirty-seven years; grievances about taxes, customs, ship-money; about bishops, popery in high places, judges who twisted the law to please the the King, and so forth. The second ‘Bishops’ War’, 1640.After one more effort at war with Scotland in the summer, during which the Scots simply walked into England as far as Durham and sat down there, the King had to own himself beaten, and to call, on November 3, 1640, Meeting of the Long Parliament, Nov. 3, 1640.a Parliament that was to be anything but short. History knows it as ‘The Long Parliament’.
The leaders of this body were no revolutionists or ‘radicals’. Nearly all were great lawyers or country gentlemen of old families and rich estates; Hampden, Pym, Holles, Vane, Cromwell, Hyde, Falkland, were the leaders in the Commons; Essex, Warwick, Bedford, Broke, and Saye In the Lords. The great merchants of the City of London, which was already perhaps the greatest place of trade in the world, were on the same side.
Intentions of its leaders.No one had the least intention of upsetting the throne of King Charles. But in civil matters all were agreed in wishing to purify the Law Courts and to restore the ‘ancient constitution’, by which they meant the control of Parliament over the Crown, as it had existed before the Wars of the Roses. The ‘strong government’ of the Tudors, they said, had been necessary at the time; it was no longer necessary. The King of England ought to be a ‘limited monarch’, not an ‘absolute monarch’, and Charles must be made to realize the fact.
Work of its first nine months.So, in about nine months, the whole fabric of the civil government was thoroughly overhauled. The King’s one honourable and clever minister, the Earl of Strafford, was sent to the Tower and at length beheaded. Archbishop Laud was sent to the Tower. The judges who had twisted the law to please the King were removed, and provision was made against their twisting it in the future. Several new law courts, which had grown up in Tudor times, were taken away; the power of levying any taxes without full consent of Parliament was taken away; and it was decided that henceforward Parliament should meet at least every three years.
A rift in the nation.All this was done with the most thundering applause of the nation, from Tweed to Tamar, from Kent to Cumberland; for, as I have said, all men were agreed as to the ‘civil’ causes of complaint against their King. But it was another story when questions relating to religion The religious question.were touched. Only one half of England was Puritan or wished to abolish bishops or Prayer Book. Three-fourths of the House of Lords and nearly half the House of Commons were against making any such change; and this at once began to give the King ‘a party’ in the State. He meant to use that party not only to save the Church, but also, if possible, to restore his own ‘strong government’ in civil matters. So things stood in the autumn of 1641; and two events then hurried on the civil war, the King’s visit to Scotland, and a rebellion in Ireland.
The King’s visit to Scotland, August, 1541.Our Parliament-men easily guessed that the King’s visit to Scotland was made in order to see whether, if he had to fight his Parliament, the Scots would help him. For he gave the Scots everything that they asked, and showered honours on their leaders; in fact, he appealed to their old jealousy of England. Still he got little or no promise of help there.
The Irish Rebellion, October, 1641.To understand the other thing, the Irish Rebellion, we must go back a long way. No English sovereign before the Tudors had seriously tried to govern Ireland. State of Ireland.The kings had often made grants of Irish land to Englishmen, who had then gone over there and had, in a few years, become wilder than the Irish themselves. There was some shadow of English government in Leinster, with a ‘Lord Deputy’ as Governor, and a sort of Irish Parliament; but, in the fifteenth century, the English territory had shrunk to a very narrow district round Dublin called ‘the Pale’. Outside the Pale, it was all broken heads and stolen cows, as it had been for a thousand years. Ireland under the Tudors.But Henry VIII had taken the task of government in hand, and had tried to turn the wild Irish chiefs into decent English landowners, who should really come to Parliament, help the judges in keeping order, and cultivate their lands properly. He had dissolved the Irish monasteries as he had dissolved the English, and had given their lands to these chiefs. He put down rebellious earls with a very strong hand, and quite successfully. He had taken the title of ‘King’ of Ireland. The ‘Reformation’ had been started in Ireland under Edward VI, but there had been little Reformation for Mary to suppress, and no ‘heretics’ were burned there. Certainly, until the middle of the sixteenth century, Ireland had shown little affection for Pope or Catholic faith. Catholic rebellionsBut rebellion in some shape remained the one thing that Irish chiefs loved, and it occurred to some of them, especially to one Shan O'Neill, early In the reign of Elizabeth, that a rebellion in the name of religion would be a much more successful affair than without that name: ‘England is now Protestant; therefore let Ireland rise for the Pope,’ was Shan’s idea. Philip of Spain saw a splendid chance (for the Pope and himself) of injuring Elizabeth by sending aid to Irish-Catholic rebellions; with Spanish aid.and, from 1570 at least, he continued to do so either secretly or openly until his death. The idea ‘caught on’, as we should say, with the whole Irish nation and every one went about shouting ‘Pope aboo’, ‘Spain aboo’, and ‘O'Neill (or Desmond, or some other wild earl) aboo’. Thus England, when she tried to keep order, always appeared to be ‘persecuting’ Catholics in Ireland. Colonies or ‘plantations’ in Ireland in sixteenth century.But Elizabeth could not face the frightful cost of keeping order there until the last two years of her reign, when she went to work in earnest and with some success. Usually she had preferred to plant ‘colonies’ of Englishmen upon some Irish districts which had been confiscated after a rebellion. Colony of Ulster, 1607.So Munster was ‘planted’, 1583; so Ulster was planted with Scottish landowners, tradesmen and artisans by James I. These last were mostly Presbyterians, and made vigorous and successful colonists. But, of course, the Irish landowners, who had rebelled and been turned out, always hoped to
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recover their land. And the rebellion of 1641 was prompted either by this hope, or by the fear of fresh confiscation.
Rebellion of Catholics, 1641.But to the Puritans in the English Parliament it seemed to be simply a rebellion of the ‘wicked Papists’, ‘probably got up by the King,’ they said, ‘certainly by the Queen, in order to give excuse for raising an army to use against the English Parliament.’ English Parliament frightened.And, with this fear in their heads, the leaders of Parliament were now driven to take steps far beyond any they had intended a year before. First they brought forward laws for the utter abolition of bishops and all their works; The ‘Militia Bill’, December, 1641.and then laws to transfer the command of the army or militia from the Crown to Parliament.
Civil war in sight.This last was revolution pure and simple. No king could agree to this, and so Charles began to set about preparations for war. Large numbers of Members of Parliament came to join him from both Houses; but those that remained at Westminster were of course all the more determined to fight.
Cavaliers and Roundheads.The words ‘rebellion’, ‘treason’, ‘traitor’ are very ugly words; and traitors in those days were put to a very ugly death. So, many moderate men, who had hated Charles's unlawful government, and applauded all the work of this Parliament during its first nine months, now threw in their lot with the Crown. So did many men who cared nothing for bishops; Charles was their King, and his flag was flying in the field. There were many men, too, who hated the long sermons and the gloomy nature of the Puritans; for the Puritans objected to country sports, maypoles, dancing, and to lots of innocent amusements. These ‘Cavaliers’ called the Parliament men ‘Roundheads’, ‘crop-eared rogues’, and so on; they gave the King an excellent force of cavalry, in which arm the Parliament was at first weak. The King’s best foot-soldiers were mostly Cornishmen or Welshmen, good fellows to fight, too.
But the Parliament had the richer districts of the kingdom, the South and East; London was in its grip; it had most of the fleet; and much the fuller purse. It is a great mistake to Imagine that the war was one of gentlemen against merchants and traders. Nearly half the country gentlemen of England were Puritans, and at first all the leaders on both sides were drawn from the upper classes; later on there were one or two instances, on each side, where men of lesser birth rose to high commands in the armies.
The two armies, 1642.The equipment of each force was much the same; the infantry carried either long clumsy muskets which could shoot about 300 yards at extreme range, or ‘pikes’, which were straight two-edged knives fastened on to long poles. Each side cast a few light field-guns, which did little damage; but later on the Parliament cast some heavy siege-guns which really finished the war. Each side had soldiers who had fought in the German wars: Prince Rupert, Sir Jacob Astley, Sir Ralph Hopton, for the King; Lord Essex, Lord Manchester, Sir William Waller, Sir Thomas Fairfax, for the Parliament. The King had perhaps this advantage: when the war began no one had yet dreamed of deposing him, much less of killing him. ‘Whatever we do, he will still be the King and his sons after him, was the idea in the minds even of the stanchest of his enemies. So at first Parliament was ‘afraid of beating the King too much’. But Charles had no need to be afraid of beating his rebels too much.
Fine temper of both sides.Once battle was joined each side displayed the greatest gallantry, chivalry and mercy. No war was ever fought with so much bloodshed in battle and so little cruelty after battle. Except where actual fighting or a siege was going on, civil life was not interrupted. Down to the end of 1643 the advantage was on the whole with the King. Then both men and money began to fail him, and an incomparable leader came to the front for the Parliament in the person of Oliver Cromwell, who was to finish the war and die, ten years later, something very like King of Great Britain.
With what feelings the men in either army must have looked upon each other before the first great battle!
Naked and grey the Cotswolds stand
Beneath the autumn sun,
And the stubble fields on either hand
Where Stour and Avon run,
There is no change in the patient land
That has bred us every one.
And saved us from this sin
Of war—red war—’twixt child and sire,
Household and kith and kin,
In the heart of a sleepy Midland shire,
With the harvest scarcely in.
On the brow-head or the plain,
And the raw astonished ranks stand fast
To slay or to be slain
By the men they knew in the kindly past
That shall never come again—
In the tavern or the hall,
At the justice-bench and the market-place,
At the cudgel-play or brawl,
Of their own blood and speech and race,
Comrades or neighbours all!
Whichever way it go,
For the brothers of the maids we love
Make ready to lay low
Their sisters’ sweethearts, as we move
Against our dearest foe.
Before our strength gives way.
For King or for the Commonweal
No matter which they say,
The first dry rattle of new-drawn steel
Changes the world to-day!
Progress of the war, 1642–3.The King very nearly got into London, after a fierce drawn battle at Edgehill in Warwickshire, in the autumn of 1642, but the Londoners turned out in such force for the defence of the city, and looked so grim, that Charles dared not fight his way in. The King at Oxford, 1643–6.He fell back on Oxford, and fixed his head-quarters there; it was an excellent centre; he meant to move one army up from Yorkshire, another from Cornwall, and a third from Oxford, and so to crush Parliament between three fires. All 1643 he strove for this, and his generals won victories both in the north and west. John Pym calls in the Scots to help Parliament.But then John Pym, the statesman who took the lead in Parliament, called in the aid of the Scots. The Scots agreed to come, but demanded that their ‘Covenant’, to enforce the Presbyterian Church on all three kingdoms, should be the price of their coming. Battle of Marston Moor, 1644.In 1644 they came and helped to rout the King’s best army at Marston Moor, near York.
Oliver Cromwell.The real victor in that battle was, however, Oliver Cromwell, a Huntingdonshire squire, forty-three years of age, who had never seen a shot fired until he began to raise the sturdy Puritan farmers of the Eastern Counties for the Parliament. He trained them and led ,_p.157.jpg)
The ‘New Model’ Army, 1645.In 1645 a new Parliamentary army, better paid and better armed and more in earnest, was raised under Fairfax and Cromwell, and it won, within three months, the great victory of Naseby, Battle of Naseby, 1645.which practically brought the Royalist cause to an end. A few gallant Highlanders under Montrose made a diversion for the King in Scotland, but Montrose too was beaten before the year was over. Charles had already called into England all the soldiers whom he had sent to put down the Irish rebels, and he tried to get the help of these same rebels themselves. This, as you can imagine, did not make his cause more popular with his English Protestant subjects. He was in fact a very bad leader of a very good cause. The King flies to the Scots, 1646, and is sold to the Parliament.Early in 1646 the King fled to the Scottish army and Oxford surrendered. The Scots, after trying to induce him to take the oath to the Covenant, sold him for £400,000 to the English Parliament as a prisoner and went back home. The Parliament spent the years 1647 and 1648 in trying to make some sort of treaty with Charles so that the government of the country might continue under a King; Charles argued each point, and was ready to promise, now this, now that, but never anything sincerely. All the time he was trying to get help from France, or from Scotland or from Ireland.
Parliament perplexed, 1646–7–8.Meanwhile the Parliamentary leaders had to try to fulfil their treaty with the Scots. They could abolish bishops, sell all the lands of the Church of England, turn out all the Royalist parsons, and forbid the use of the Prayer Book; but they found it almost impossible to establish a Presbyterian Church in England. In reality few Englishmen wanted this. Even those who had most wanted to pull down bishops began to see that ‘ministers and elders’ might try to force men’s consciences quite as much as bishops had done. Cromwell’s army quarrels with Parliament, 1647–8.No one felt this more than Cromwell; and what Cromwell thought, his army, which had finished the war, thought also. This army began to growl against its masters the Parliament. It also began to growl for the punishment of ‘Charles Stuart, that man of blood’. When Charles did at last persuade the Scots, who were by this time very cross with the Parliament, to come in again on his behalf, this growl became an open cry; Battle of Preston, 1648.the Army duly went and smashed the Scots at Preston, and then came back to London resolved on the King's death.
Trial and death of Charles I, January 30, 1649.Cromwell hesitated long; he was a merciful man, and he saw what a terrible thing he had to do—to kill a king! But he believed that the Lord guided his mind, and that there could be no peace while Charles lived. Parliament was utterly horrified at this suggestion, but it was at the mercy of the Army which it had created. Cromwell turned out over a hundred of its most moderate members and terrified the remainder. A sham court of justice was established to try and to condemn the King. Charles, of course, refused to acknowledge that any court had any power to try him; and he met his death on January 30, 1649, with perfect serenity and courage. The very men who did the deed were terrified at what they were doing.
Was Charles a martyr?Charles was a martyr, a martyr for the English Church and its government by bishops, a martyr for our beautiful and dear Prayer Book. But the fact that he was a martyr did not make him a good King or a good man.
What is to be put in his place?Yet, though Charles had often overridden the law, and, if he had got back to power, would have done so again, what had the Army and the dregs of the Long Parliament to put in his place? They confiscated and sold to new owners much of the land of those who had fought for the King. The ‘Commonwealth’ or Republic.They set up a sort of Republic which they called ‘The Commonwealth’, with a Council of State, and a single House of Parliament, in fact the ‘Rump’ of the Long Parliament, as witty cavaliers called it. They abolished the House of Lords the day after they had murdered the King. In reality they had abolished Law, Order, and the old natural Constitution; and all their efforts for the next eleven years to put anything artificial in its place were hopeless failures. The Rule of the Sword.The one real fact left in England was the Army; this meant the Rule of the Sword, the worst of all conceivable tyrannies, however good the men may be who wield that Sword.
They were good men who wielded it. Cromwell was a man of the most lofty character, and so were many of his associates. They were also great patriots and great Englishmen. But nineteen-twentieths of Englishmen hated the whole thing heart and soul, looked upon Charles I's death as an abominable murder, and only prayed for Charles II to come and avenge it.
Charles II in exile and in Scotland.That young man, now nineteen years old, had fled to the Continent. The Scots invited him to Scotland, made him take the Covenant (which he hated) and prepared to fight for him. Cromwell in Ireland, 1649.But Cromwell and his Ironsides, after going across and stamping out the Irish rebellion with a great deal of cruelty, Battles of Dunbar, 1650, and Worcester, 1651.made short work of one Scottish army at Dunbar in 1650, and of another, which had invaded England, at Worcester in 1651. The young King fought most gallantly at the latter battle, and had a series of hair-breadth escapes before he regained the Continent; you have often heard, perhaps, of how he spent a day in hiding in the upper branches of a great oak-tree in Shropshire—
And hummed a surly hymn.
That is why people wear oak leaves on May 29, and why so many public-houses still bear the sign of the ‘Royal Oak’.
Cromwell ‘Lord Protector’ of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 1659–8.Yet, if civil war was over, there was no civil peace in Britain; and in 1653 Cromwell was obliged to turn out the ‘Rump’ of the Long Parliament and to take on himself the government of England, Scotland, and Ireland as ‘Protector’, a title which pleased his old friends little more than it pleased his old enemies. He made experiment after experiment in forms of government; tried sometimes with, and sometimes without, some sort of sham Parliament; once he even tried to create a sort of sham House of Lords. But all these things were only thin disguises for the rule of the Sword and the Army. His rule good but hated.He was much pressed to take the title of King and to restore the old Constitution, but from this he shrank. Except to Papists and to the beaten Church of England he was not intolerant; he believed in letting men's consciences be free, and he strove to make people righteous and God-fearing. All that, however, was a dismal failure; it only disgusted all moderate people with the whole Puritan creed.
His Parliament of the three kingdoms.Yet, in Olivers five years of rule, he accomplished what the Stuarts had not done in forty-five. Not only had he subdued Scotland and Ireland, but he even made them send thirty members apiece to a sort of united Parliament in England. And far more than this; he made the name of England once more dreaded and honoured abroad as it had not been since the death of Elizabeth. His care of the Navy.He wrung from the Dutch a heavy payment for some wrongs they had done our traders in the Far East; he won for us a share in that Far-Eastern trade. He fell upon the Spaniards in the true style of Drake and Raleigh; he took their great plate fleet; he tore Jamaica from them; His victories over Spain.he sent his ‘Ironsides’ to France to aid France against Spain; they were the first great English army seen abroad since the fifteenth century, and where they fought they swept all before them. He took up the great cause of Protestantism all over Europe. His death, 1658.When he died in 1658 England was again the first naval power and almost the first military power in the world.
Richard Cromwell, Protector, 1658–9.But when his son Richard (‘Lazy Dick’ or ‘Tumbledown Dick’, as people called him) succeeded him as Protector, the whole unnatural arrangement crumbled away at once because it did not suit the spirit of the Anarchy.English people. There were eighteen months of anarchy; now some soldier, now the restored ‘Rump’ held power. At last, in January, 1660, General Monck, an old soldier of Cromwell's, who had the command in Scotland, made up his mind to restore the exiled King, Charles II.
Restoration of King Charles II, May 29, 1680.And on his thirtieth birthday, the 29th of May, 1660, that clever and unprincipled young gentleman rode into London amid the tears and shouts of a people gone mad with joy. The reign of the Sword was over, the reign of the Law had begun. Unfortunately this reign of the Sword left on men’s minds an unreasonable hatred and fear, not only of this Puritan army, but of all armies; and that hatred and fear has too often paralysed the arm of England, and is not wholly dead to-day. It has prevented men from seeing that to serve King and country in the Army is the second best profession for Englishmen of all classes; to serve in the Navy, I suppose we all admit, is the best. Charles II prudently kept up a few of the regiments of Cromwells old army, and even increased it a little during his reign. But he had often hard work to pay it, for his Parliaments were always jealous of a power that they knew had been their master once and might be so again.