[1653 A.D.] remained in the house, in great indignation and embarrassment, for they were not sufficiently numerous to make a house; but twenty-seven of them, Harrison among the number, resolved to keep their seats, and proposed to pass the time in prayer. But two officers, Colonel Goffe and Major White, suddenly entered the house and desired them to withdraw; they answered that they would not do so, unless compelled by force. White called in a file of musketeers; the house was cleared, and sentinels were placed at the doors, in charge of the keys. The cavaliers, in their ironical narratives of the occurrence, assert that, on entering the house, White said to Harrison, "What do you here?" "We are seeking the Lord," replied Harrison. "Then," returned White, "you may go elsewhere, for, to my certain knowledge he has not been here these twelve years." Meanwhile, the speaker, and the members who had accompanied him, had arrived at Whitehall. They first of all went into a private room, and hurriedly wrote a brief resignation of their power into Cromwell's hands. This they signed, and then demanded an interview with the lord-general. He expressed extreme surprise at their proceeding, declaring that he was not prepared for such an offer, nor able to load himself with so heavy and serious a burden. But Lambert, Sydenham, and the other members present, insisted; their resolution was taken-he must accept the restoration of power which he had himself conferred. He yielded at last. The act of abdication was left open for three or four days, for the signatures of those members who had not come to Whitehall; and it soon exhibited eighty names - a majority of the whole assembly. Cromwell had slain the Long Parliament with his own hand; he did not vouchsafe so much honour to the parliament which he had himself created; a ridiculous act of suicide, and the ridiculous nickname which it derived from one of its most obscure members, Mr. Praisegod Barebone,' a leather-seller in the city of London, are the only recollections which this assembly has left in history. And yet, it was deficient neither in honesty nor in patriotism; but it was absolutely wanting in dignity when it allowed its existence to rest on a falsehood, and in good sense when it attempted to reform the whole framework of English society: such a task was infinitely above its strength and capacity. The Barebone Parliament had been intended by Cromwell as an expedient; it disappeared as soon as it attempted to become an independent power. Four days after the fall of the Barebone Parliament, on the 16th of December, 1653, at one o'clock in the afternoon, a pompous cavalcade proceeded from Whitehall to Westminster, between a double line of soldiery. The lords commissioners of the great seal, the judges, the council of state, the lord mayor and aldermen of the city of London, in their scarlet robes and state carriages, headed the procession. After them came Cromwell, in a simple suit of black velvet, with long boots, and a broad gold band round his hat. His guards and a large number of gentlemen, bareheaded, walked before his carriage, which was surrounded by the principal officers of the army, sword in hand, and hat on head. On arriving at Westminster Hall, the procession entered the court of chancery, at one end of which a chair of state had been placed. Cromwell stood in front of the chair, and as soon as the assembly was seated, Major-General Lambert announced the voluntary 'Godwin and Forster have taken considerable pains to establish that this person's real name was Barbone, and not Barebone, and thus to remove the ridicule attaching to the latter name; but, by their own admission, the writ of summons addressed to this member spells his name as Barebone; I have therefore retained this spelling, which seems to be at once officially and historically correct. [1653 A.D.] dissolution of the late parliament, and in the name of the army, of the three nations, and of the exigencies of the time, prayed the lord-general to accept the office of protector of the commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland. THE INSTRUMENT OF GOVERNMENT MAKES CROMWELL PROTECTOR The instrument of government, as the plan of the new constitution was named, was then read by one of the clerks of the council. Cromwell having with feigned reluctance given his consent, the oath was read to him by the lord-commissioner Lisle, and he signed it. Lambert then on his knees offered him the civic sword in a scabbard; he took it, and at the same time laid aside his own military one. He then sat down and put on his hat; the commissioners handed him the seal, the lord mayor the sword; he took them and gave them back. Having exercised these acts of sovereignty he returned to Whitehall. Next day the new government was proclaimed with the ceremonies usual at the accession of a king. The substance of the instrument was, that the supreme authority should be in the lord protector and the parliament; the protector to be assisted by a council of not less than thirteen, nor more than twenty-one persons, immovable except for corruption or other miscarriage in their trust. The former functions of royalty in general were to be exercised by the protector, with the consent of parliament or the council. A parliament was to be summoned for the 3rd of September, 1654, and once in every third year, reckoned from the dissolution of the last, and not to be adjourned, prorogued, or dissolved for the space of five months without its own consent. The parliament was to consist of four hundred members for England and Wales, thirty for Scotland, and thirty for Ireland. The smaller boroughs were disfranchised and the number of county members was increased; the qualification for electors was to be the possession of an estate, real or personal, of the value of 2001. Those persons who had aided or abetted the royal cause in the late wars were to be incapable of being elected or of voting at elections for the next and three succeeding parliaments. Catholics, and the aiders and abettors of the Irish rebellion, were to be disabled forever. A provision more certain and less subject to scruple than tithes was to be made for the teachers of religion. All who professed faith in God through Jesus Christ were to be protected; but this liberty was not to extend "to popery or prelacy, or to such as under the profession of Christ hold forth and practise licentiousness." Óliver Cromwell had thus, by taking advantage of a train of favourable circumstances, raised himself to the summit on which, since his victory at Worcester, he had probably fixed his view. His usurpation, if such it is to be called, was the greatest benefit that could befall the country in its present condition. Had the Presbyterians recovered their power, they would have bound their odious intolerant religious despotism on the necks of the people; the royalists, if triumphant, would have introduced the plenitude of absolute power. The rule of Cromwell gave time for men's minds to settle. Von Ranke contrasts Cromwell's coup d'état with that of Napoleon, as follows: a "Were we to describe in a word the chief difference between the revolution in England and the similar catastrophe that occurred in France a hundred and fifty years later, we might say that the social revolution in France was practically complete before the victorious general grasped the sovereignty; while, by contrast, in England the rule of the sword intervened at an earlier period, and put a check to the progress of revolution the moment it began to undermine the social foundations."b [1653 A.D.] Hallam on Cromwell's Usurpation 8 It can admit of no doubt that the despotism of a wise man is more tolerable than that of political or religious fanatics; and it rarely happens that there is any better remedy in revolutions which have given the latter an ascendant. Cromwell's assumption, therefore, of the title of protector was a necessary and wholesome usurpation, however he may have caused the necessity; it secured the nation from the mischievous lunacy of the Anabaptists, and from the more cool-blooded tyranny of that little oligarchy which arrogated to itself the name of commonwealth's men. Though a gross and glaring evidence of the omnipotence of the army, the instrument under which he took his title accorded to him no unnecessary executive authority. The sovereignty still resided in the parliament; he had no negative voice on their laws. Until the meeting of the next parliament a power was given him of making temporary ordinances; but this was not, as Hume, on the authority of Clarendon and Warwick," has supposed, and as his conduct, if that were any proof of the law, might lead us to infer, designed to exist in future intervals of the legislature. In the ascent of this bold usurper to greatness he had successively employed and thrown away several of the powerful factions who distracted the nation. He had encouraged the levellers and persecuted them; he had flattered the Long Parliament and betrayed it; he had made use of the sectaries to crush the commonwealth; he had spurned the sectaries in his last advance to power. These, with the royalists and the Presbyterians, forming in effect the whole people, though too disunited for such a coalition as must have overthrown him, were the perpetual, irreconcilable enemies of his administration. Master of his army, which he knew well how to manage, surrounded by a few deep and experienced counsellors, furnished by his spies with the completest intelligence of all designs against him, he had no great cause of alarm from open resistance. But he was bound by the instrument of government to call a parliament; and in any parliament his adversaries must be formidable." CHAPTER V CROMWELL AS PROTECTOR [1658-1658 A.D.] Cromwell at the head of the army had conquered and crushed king, lords, and commons. As opposed to the constitution of the kingdom he seemed to be a great destroyer. But further than this he would not budge. The instant his partisans inclined to threaten civil institutions and the social structure they found him their most potent enemy. In the wreckage of all authority, political or churchly, Cromwell rose the champion of the social fabric of property, of civil rights, and the lower clergy. It was in this spirit that he grasped the supreme power-and with the approval of a large part of the public. Both lawyers and clergymen had seen their very existence endangered by the destructive enactments of the Independents. Cromwell was their deliverer; to them the full meaning of the word was implied by his title, protector. - VON RANKE, Ir cannot be supposed that this elevation of Cromwell to the supreme power was viewed with satisfaction by any other class of men than his brethren in arms, who considered his greatness their own work, and expected from his gratitude their merited reward. But the nation was surfeited with revolutions. They readily acquiesced in any change which promised the return of tranquillity in the place of solicitude, danger, and misery. The protector, however, did not neglect the means of consolidating his own authority. Availing himself of the powers entrusted to him by the "instrument," he gave the chief commands in the army to men in whom he could confide; quartered the troops in the manner best calculated to put down any insurrection; and, among the multitude of ordinances which he published, was careful to repeal the acts enforcing the Engagement; to forbid all meetings on racecourses or at cockpits, to explain what offences should be deemed treason against his government; and to establish a high court of justice for the trial of those who might be charged with such offences. [1653 A.D.] He could not, however, be ignorant that, even among the former companions of his fortunes, the men who had fought and bled by his side, there were several who, much as they revered the general, looked on the protector with the most cordial abhorrence. They scrupled not, both in public companies, and from the pulpit, to pronounce him "a dissembling perjured villain"; and they openly threatened him with "a worse fate than had befallen the last tyrant." If it was necessary to silence these declaimers, it was also dangerous to treat them with severity. He proceeded with caution, and modified his displeasure by circumstances. Some he removed from their commissions in the army and their ministry in the church; others he did not permit to go at large till they had given security for their subsequent behaviour; and those who proved less tractable, or appeared more dangerous, he incarcerated in the Tower. Among the last were Harrison, formerly his fellow-labourer in the dissolution of the Long Parliament, now his most implacable enemy; and Feakes and Powell, the Anabaptist preachers, who had braved his resentment during the last parliament. Symson, their colleague, shared their imprisonment, but procured his liberty by submission. To the royalists, as he feared them less, he showed less forbearance. Charles, who still resided in Paris, maintained a constant correspondence with the friends of his family in England. Among the agents whom he employed were men who betrayed his secrets, or pretended secrets, to his enemies, or who seduced his adherents into imaginary plots, that by the discovery they might earn the gratitude of the protector. Of the latter class was an individual named Henshaw, who had repaired to Paris, and been refused what he solicited-admission to the royal presence. On his return, he detailed to certain royalists a plan by which the protector might be assassinated on his way to Hampton Court, the guards at Whitehall overpowered, the town surprised, and the royal exile proclaimed. When a sufficient number were entangled in the toil, forty were apprehended and examined. Of these, three were selected for trial before the high court of justice. Fox pleaded guilty and obtained his pardon. Vowell, a schoolmaster, and Gerard, a young gentleman two-and-twenty years of age, received judgment of death. On the same scaffold, but an hour later, perished a foreign nobleman, only nineteen years old, Dom Pantaleon Sa, brother to Guimaraes, the Portuguese ambassador. Six months before, he and Gerard, whose execution we have just noticed, had quarrelled in the New Exchange. Pantaleon, the next evening, repaired to the same place with a body of armed followers; a fray ensued; Greenway, a person unconcerned in the dispute, was killed by accident or mistake; and the Portuguese fled to the house of the ambassador, whence they were conducted to prison by the military. The people, taking up the affair as a national quarrel, loudly demanded the blood of the reputed murderers. On behalf of Pantaleon it was argued that he was an ambassador, and therefore answerable to no one but his master; but the instrument which he produced in proof of the first allegation was no more than a written promise that he should succeed his brother in office. He was sacrificed, if we believe one of them, to the clamour of the people, whose feelings were so excited, that when his head fell on the scaffold, the spectators proclaimed their joy by the most savage yells of exultation. It was the very day on which his brother, perhaps to propitiate the protector, had signed the treaty between the two nations. These executions had been preceded by one of a very different description. Colonel Worseley had apprehended a Catholic clergyman, of the name of Southworth, who, thirty-seven years before, had been convicted at Lan H. W. — VOL. XX. L |