The settlement of the kingdom after the war ended was a task of far greater difficulty than the defeat of the King’s armies. It could not be solved by putting Charles upon his throne again as if nothing had happened. Measures had to be devised for securing permanent guarantees against misgovernment in the future, and for rendering a new war impossible. Moreover, these ends must be attained by means of an agreement between the King and the Parliament, because the working of the constitution depended on the co-operation of the two powers, and on the reconciliation of the two parties which had followed their flags. Nor was it possible to effect a lasting settlement without taking into account the new ideas and the new forces which had come into existence during the four years’ struggle.
Since the beginning of the Civil War an ecclesiastical revolution had taken place in England. As soon as hostilities commenced the Root and Branch 143party gained the ascendancy in Parliament, and in the first negotiations with the King, the total abolition of Episcopacy was one of the demands made. In July, 1643, Parliament summoned an assembly of divines to meet at Westminster, and undertake the reformation of the Church. Then followed the acceptance by Parliament of the Solemn League and Covenant, the implied promise to model the Church of England upon that of Scotland, and the inclusion of representatives of the Scottish clergy in the Assembly of Divines.
Step by step the English Church was transformed. In January, 1645, the two Houses passed a series of resolutions for the reorganisation of the Church upon a Presbyterian basis, followed by ordinances which established one after another the component parts of the system. By the close of 1646, the use of the Prayer-book had been prohibited, and a “Directory,” drawn up by the Assembly, had been enjoined in its stead, while new Articles of Belief, a new Confession of Faith, and a new Catechism were in preparation. Bishops and all the ecclesiastical hierarchy dependent on them had been abolished, and their lands vested in trustees for the payment of the debts of the State (October, 1646). The work was still incomplete, but under all outward conformity there would be an essential difference between the Presbyterian Churches of England and Scotland. In Scotland the Church was dependent upon no one; in England it would be dependent upon Parliament. Whatever the Westminster Assembly might decide was established only by the authority of 144Parliament, which revised its conclusions, criticised its formularies, and limited its functions as it thought fit. Compared to an ideal Presbyterian Church ruling by its inherent right as the one divinely ordained form of Church government, the English Church would be, as a Scottish divine complained, “only a lame Erastian presbytery.” Such as it was, however, its clergy were as high in their claim to authority as English bishops, and as intolerant as Scottish ministers. They proved in a hundred different ways the truth of Milton’s maxim that “new presbyter is but old priest writ large.”
During the years which saw the growth of English Presbyterianism, a rival system of ecclesiastical organisation had also taken root in England. The Independents drew their inspiration not from Scotland, but from the Puritan exiles in Holland and the Puritan colonists in New England. To the idea of a national Church with its local basis and its hierarchy of authorities, they opposed the idea that a true Church was a voluntary association of believers, and that each congregation was of right complete, autonomous, and sovereign. Most of them accepted the theology of Calvin even when they rejected his ecclesiastical organisation; all claimed the right to interpret the Bible for themselves without regard to tradition or authority. Their principle was that set forth in the advice which John Robinson gave to the Pilgrim Fathers—to be ready to receive whatever truth should be made known to them from the written word of God. Hence came their ardent faith in new revelations, 145with the diversity of doctrines and the multiplicity of sects which were its natural consequence. Hence the horror with which Presbyterians and Episcopalians alike regarded a system which began by a denial of their theory of Church and State, and ended by an attack upon the fundamentals of their creed.
Just as the two divisions of the parliamentary party differed as to the constitution of the Church, so they differed as to the constitution of the State. Each was a political as well as a religious party. The aim of the Presbyterians was to make King and Church responsible to Parliament, and so far the Independents went with them. But while one party proclaimed the sovereignty of Parliament, and justified its claim by historical precedent, the other proclaimed the sovereignty of the people, and based its claim on an appeal to natural rights. Church democracy, as Baxter called Independency, brought in its train State democracy. Applied to politics, the ecclesiastical theories of the Independents developed into the fundamental principles of democratic government. Those who held that a Church was a voluntary association of believers bound together by a mutual covenant, naturally adopted the corollary that a State was an association of freemen based on a mutual contract. If it was the right of the members of a religious body to elect their own ministers, it was evidently equally just that the members of a civil society should elect their own magistrates. More than once in its paper wars with the King, Parliament had put forward the view 146that Kings were but officers, whose power was a trust from the people, but it shrank from the distinct enunciation or the practical application of the principle its declarations contained. It was therefore in opposition to the Long Parliament that the sovereignty of the people was first asserted in English political life. In 1646, when John Lilburn was imprisoned by the Lords for libelling Manchester he appealed to the House of Commons as “the supreme authority of the nation,” and denied the authority of the Peers because they were not elected by the people. When the House of Commons refused to hear him he appealed “to the universality of the people,” as “the sovereign lord” from whom they derived their power, and by whom they were to be called to account for its use.
As yet, however, Lilburn’s principles found little acceptance in Parliament, and the Lower House had no intention of quarrelling with the Upper on a question of abstract rights. In the Commons, even after the new elections of 1645 and 1646 had recruited the numbers of the House, the Independents were a minority both on political and ecclesiastical questions. On a purely religious issue they could muster fifty or sixty votes, of whom probably less than half were convinced democrats. But the ties of party allegiance were weak, and the ability of the Independent leaders gave them an influence beyond the circle of their followers. On questions such as the conduct of the war, the control of the pretensions of the Westminster Assembly, and the claim of the Scots to dispose of the King, a majority of the House 147adopted the policy of the Independents. But when the war was over, and the dispute with the Scots settled, the ascendancy passed to the Presbyterian leaders, and remained with them.
On the other hand, the army had been from the beginning a stronghold of Independency, and there its adherents grew more numerous every day. In the summer of 1645, when Richard Baxter became chaplain to a regiment of cavalry, he found it full of hotheaded sectaries. Every sect and every heresy was represented in its ranks. “Independency and Anabaptism were most prevalent; Antinomianism and Arminianism equally distributed.” One day he had to confute the opponents of Infant Baptism, and another to vindicate Church order and Church government. But the most universal belief amongst officers and soldiers, and the error he most often had to controvert, was that the civil magistrate had no authority in matters of religion either to restrain or to compel, and that every man had a right to believe and to preach whatever he pleased.
In the army, too, the political principles of Independency had reached their fullest and freest development. Baxter found officers and soldiers “vehement against the King and against all government but popular.”
“I perceived” he writes, “that they took the King for a tyrant and an enemy, and really intended absolutely to master him or to ruin him, and that they thought, that if they might fight against him they might kill or conquer him; and if they might conquer they were never more to trust him further than he was in their power; and they 148thought it folly to irritate him by wars or contradictions in Parliament, if so be they needs must take him for their King, and trust him with their lives when they had thus displeased him.”
These were the principles upon which they thought any settlement should be based, and they meant to make their views heard. “They plainly showed me,” continues Baxter, “that they thought God’s providence would cast the trust of religion and the kingdom upon them as conquerors.”
In peace, even more than in war, the army looked to Cromwell to lead it. Apart from his splendid military gifts, he had all the qualities required to win popularity with soldiers. Cromwell had none of the reserve or reticence of Fairfax. A large-hearted, expansive, vigorous nature found expression in his acts and utterances. “He was of a sanguine complexion,” says Baxter, “naturally of such a vivacity, hilarity, and alacrity, as another man is when he hath drunken a cup of wine too much.” Elsewhere he speaks of Cromwell’s “familiar rustic carriage with his soldiers in sporting,” and one of Cromwell’s officers tells us that “Oliver loved an innocent jest.” Nor did it make him less popular that underneath this geniality lay a fiery temper, which sometimes flamed up into vehement utterances or sudden bursts of passion. Partly for this very reason he was generally credited with much more democratic opinions than he really had. People remembered his hard sayings about the Lords during his quarrel with Manchester, and took a practical man’s irritation against half-hearted and incapable leaders for rooted 149hostility to an institution. His patronage of Lilburn seemed another proof of his extreme views. Cromwell had procured Lilburn’s release from imprisonment in 1640, obtained him a commission in Manchester’s army in 1643, and intervened on his behalf with the House of Commons in 1645. People attributed to sympathy with advanced democracy what was really due to hatred of oppression and injustice. Lilburn’s praises fostered the illusion. Great as Cromwell was in the field, argued Lilburn, he was still more useful in Parliament.
“O for self-denying Cromwell home again ... for he is sound at the heart and not rotten-cored, hates particular and self-interests, and dares freely to speak his mind.” “Myself and all others of my creed,” wrote Lilburn to Cromwell in 1647, “have looked upon you as the most absolute single-hearted great man in England, untainted or unbiassed with ends of your own.”
In religion, however, Cromwell represented the army more completely than in politics. Cromwell was, as Baillie truly termed him, “the great Independent”—a type of Independency itself, representing not any particular species of Independent, but the whole genus which the term included. He called himself by the name of no sect, “joined himself to no party,” and “did not profess of what opinion he was.” “In good discourse” he would sometimes “very fluently pour himself out in the extolling of Free Grace,” but he refused to dispute about doctrinal questions. There are indications in some of Cromwell’s utterances that he was attracted 150to those who called themselves “Seekers,” because they found satisfaction not in any visible form or definite creed, but in the perpetual quest for truth and perfection. “To be a Seeker,” says Cromwell in a letter written about this time, “is to be of the best sect next after a Finder, and such an one shall every faithful humble Seeker be in the end.” But while standing a little apart from every sect, Cromwell seemed to share the aspirations and enthusiasms of each. “Anabaptists, Antinomians, Seekers, Separatists,” he sympathised with all, welcomed all to the ranks of the army, and “tied all together by the point of liberty of conscience, which was the common interest in which they all did unite.”
Of this demand for freedom of conscience, Cromwell had ever made himself the spokesman. At the outset of the war, he and his officers had proposed to make their regiment “a gathered Church.” While he was governor of Ely, he and his deputy-governor, Ireton, had filled the island with Independents until people complained that for variety of religions the place was “a mere Amsterdam.” When he became Lieutenant-General of Manchester’s army, Independency had spread from his regiment to the rest of the troopers he commanded.
“If you look on his regiment of horse,” said an opponent, “what a swarm there is of those that call themselves godly men; some profess to have seen visions and had revelations. Look on Colonel Fleetwood’s regiment with his Major Harrison, what a cluster of preaching officers and troopers there is. To say the truth almost our horse be made of that faction.”
151Cromwell protected them against Manchester’s Presbyterian chaplains and against the hostility of Presbyterian officers. In March, 1644, when Major-General Crawford cashiered the lieutenant-colonel of his regiment on the ground that he was an Anabaptist, Cromwell at once remonstrated. If any military offence were chargeable upon the lieutenant-colonel, he must be tried by court-martial; if none, Crawford must restore him to his command. “Admit he be an Anabaptist, shall that render him incapable to serve the public? Sir, the State in choosing men to serve it, takes no notice of their opinions; if they be willing to serve it faithfully, that suffices.” Six months later, after a second quarrel with Crawford on the same subject, Cromwell procured from Parliament what was known as “the Accommodation Order.” A committee was to be appointed
“to take into consideration the differences in opinion of the members of the Assembly of Divines in point of Church government, and to endeavour a union if it be possible; and in case that cannot be done, to endeavour the finding out some way, how far tender consciences, who cannot in all things submit to the common rule which shall be established, may be borne with according to the Word, and as may stand with the public peace” (September 13, 1644).
After every victory of the “New Model,” Cromwell reminded Parliament of the necessity of legally establishing the toleration which this vote promised. “Honest men served you faithfully in this action,” he wrote from the field of Naseby; “they are trusty; 152I beseech you in the name of God not to discourage them. He that ventures his life for the liberty of his country, I wish he trust God for the liberty of his conscience, and you for the liberty he fights for.” So little did the Commons share his feeling, that they mutilated his letter by omitting in the published copies his plea for toleration, but he repeated it in still plainer language after the storming of Bristol.
“Presbyterians and Independents, all here have the same spirit of faith and prayer ... they agree here, have no names of difference; pity it should be otherwise anywhere. All that believe have the real unity which is most glorious because inward and spiritual.... For being united in forms, commonly called Uniformity, every Christian will for peace sake study and do as far as conscience will permit. And from brethren in things of the mind we look for no compulsion, but that of light and reason.”
Parliament had answered by mutilating this letter as it had mutilated the other. What prospect was there, now that the swords of the Independents were no longer needed, that their political and religious demands would be listened to, or that no compulsion save that of light and reason would be exercised against their consciences? As to religion, if Parliament allowed the Presbyterian clergy to work their will, Independents could expect nothing but persecution. “To let men serve God according to the persuasion of their own consciences,” wrote one Presbyterian divine, “was to cast out one devil that seven wors............