disorganized by victory as often as by defeat, and illustrated on
numerous fields the now discredited maxim that cavalry cannot
charge twice in one day. Cromwell shares with Frederick the
Great the credit of founding the modern cavalry spirit. As a
horsemaster he was far superior to Murat. His marches in the
eastern campaign of 1643 show a daily average at one time of
28 m. as against the 21 of Murat’s cavalry in the celebrated
pursuit after Jena. And this result he achieved with men of
less than two years’ service, men, too, more heavily equipped
and worse mounted than the veterans of the Grande Armée.
It has been said that his battles were decided by shock action;
the real emphasis should be laid upon the word “decided.”
The swift, unhesitating charge was more than unusual in the
wars of the time, and was possible only because of the peculiar
earnestness of the men who fought the English war. The
professional soldiers of the Continent could rarely be brought
to force a decision; but the English, contending for a cause,
were imbued with the spirit of the modern “nation in arms”;
and having taken up arms wished to decide the quarrel by arms.
This feeling was not less conspicuous in the far-ranging rides,
or raids, of the Cromwellian cavalry. At one time, as in the
case of Blechingdon, they would perform strange exploits worthy
of the most daring hussars; at another their speed and tenacity
paralyses armies. Not even Sheridan’s horsemen in 1864–65
did their work more effectively than did the English squadrons
in the Preston campaign. Cromwell appreciated this feeling at
its exact worth, and his pre-eminence in the Civil War was due
to this highest gift of a general, the power of feeling the pulse
of his army. Resolution, vigour and clear sight marked his
conduct as a commander-in-chief. He aimed at nothing less than
the annihilation of the enemy’s forces, which Clausewitz was
the first to define, a hundred and fifty years later, as the true
objective of military operations. Not merely as exemplifying
the tactical envelopment, but also as embodying the central
idea of grand strategy, was Worcester the prototype of Sédan.
The contrast between a campaign of Cromwell’s and one of
Turenne’s is far more than remarkable, and the observation of
a military critic who maintains that Cromwell’s art of war was
two centuries in advance of its time, finds universal acceptance.
At a time when throughout the rest of Europe armies were manœuvring against one another with no more than a formal result, the English and Scots were fighting decisive battles; and Cromwell’s battles were more decisive than those of any other leader. Until his fiery energy made itself felt, hardly any army on either side actually suffered rout; but at Marston Moor and Naseby the troops of the defeated party were completely dissolved, while at Worcester the royalist army was annihilated. Dunbar attested his constancy and gave proof that Cromwell was a master of the tactics of all arms. Preston was an example like Austerlitz of the two stages of a battle as defined by Napoleon, the first flottante, the second foudroyante.
Cromwell’s strategic manœuvres, if less adroit than those of Turenne or Montecucculi, were, in accordance with his own genius and the temper of his army, directed always to forcing a decisive battle. That he was also capable of strategy of the other type was clear from his conduct of the Irish War. But his chief work was of a different kind and done on a different scale. The greatest feat of Turenne was the rescue of one province in 1674–1675; Cromwell, in 1648 and again in 1651, had two-thirds of England and half of Scotland for his theatre of war. Turenne levelled down his methods to suit the ends which he had in view. The task of Cromwell was far greater. Any comparison between the generalship of these two great commanders would therefore be misleading, for want of a common basis. It is when he is contrasted with other commanders, not of the age of Louis XIV., but of the Civil War, that Cromwell’s greatness is most conspicuous. Whilst others busied themselves with the application of the accepted rules of the Dutch, the German, and other formal schools of tactical thought, Cromwell almost alone saw clearly into the heart of the questions at issue, and evolved the strategy, the tactics, and the training suited to the work to which he had set his hand.
Cromwell’s career as a statesman has been already traced in
its different spheres, and an endeavour has been made to show the
breadth and wisdom of his conceptions and at the
same time the cause of the immediate failure of his
Cromwell’s states-
manship.constructive policy. Whether if Cromwell had survived
he would have succeeded in gradually establishing
legal government is a question which can never be answered.
His administration as it stands in history is undoubtedly open
to the charge that after abolishing the absolutism of the ancient
monarchy he substituted for it, not law and liberty, but a military
tyranny far more despotic than the most arbitrary administration
of Charles I. The statement of Vane and Ludlow, when they
refused to acknowledge Cromwell’s government, that it was
“in substance a re-establishment of that which we all engaged
against,” was true. The levy of ship money and customs by
Charles sinks into insignificance beside Cromwell’s wholesale
taxation by ordinances; the inquisitional methods of the
major-generals and the unjust and exceptional taxation of
royalists outdid the scandals of the extra-legal courts of the
Stuarts; the shipment of British subjects by Cromwell as slaves
to Barbados has no parallel in the Stuart administration; while
the prying into morals, the encouragement of informers, the
attempt to make the people religious by force, were the counterpart
of the Laudian system, and Cromwell’s drastic treatment
of the Irish exceeded anything dreamed of by Strafford. He
discovered that parliamentary government after all was not
the easy and plain task that Pym and Vane had imagined, and
Cromwell had in the end no better justification of his rule than
that which Strafford had suggested to Charles I.,—“parliament
refusing (to give support and co-operation in carrying on the
government) you are acquitted before God and man.” The
fault was no doubt partly Cromwell’s own. He had neither the
patience nor the tact for managing loquacious parliamentary
pedants. But the chief responsibility was not his but theirs.
John Morley (Oliver Cromwell, p. 297) has truly observed of the
execution of Charles I., that it was “an act of war, and was
just as defensible or just as assailable, and on the same grounds,
as the war itself.” The parliamentary party took leave of
legality when they took up arms against the sovereign, and it
was therefore idle to dream of a formally legal sanction for any
of their subsequent revolutionary proceedings. An entirely
fresh start had to be made. A new foundation had to be laid
on which a new system of legality might be reared. It was for
this that Cromwell strove. If the Rump or the Little Parliament
had in a business-like spirit assumed and discharged the functions
of a constituent assembly, such a foundation might have been
provided. It was only when five years had passed since the
death of the king without any “settlement of the nation” being
arrived at, that Cromwell at last accepted a constitution drafted
by his military officers, and attempted to impose it on the
parliament. And it was not until the parliament refused to
acknowledge the Instrument as the required starting point for
the new legality, that Cromwell in the last resort took arbitrary
power into his hands as the only method remaining for carrying
on the government. For much as he hated arbitrariness, he
hated anarchy still more. While therefore Cromwell’s administration
became in practice little different from that of Strafford,
the aims and ideals of the two statesmen had nothing in common.
It is therefore profoundly true, as observed by S. R. Gardiner
(Cromwell, p. 315), that “what makes Cromwell’s biography
so interesting in his perpetual effort to walk in the paths of
legality—an effort always frustrated by the necessities of the
situation. The man—it is ever so with the noblest—was greater
than his work.” The nature of Cromwell’s statesmanship is to
be seen rather in his struggles against the retrograde influences
and opinions of his time, in the many political reforms anticipated
though not originated or established by himself, and in his
religious, perhaps fanatical, enthusiasm, than in the outward
character of his administration, which, however, in spite of its
despotism shows itself in its inner spirit of justice, patriotism
and self-sacrifice, so immeasurably superior to that of the
Stuarts.
