presentative of the old institutions, and of the parlia-
ment as the representative of the new institutions.
Neither king nor parliament was ready to accept the
task. Old and new prejudices combined to reject the
notion that entire liberty of speech could be otherwise
than a danger to the state. The army offered to the
king its support on condition of his acceptance of its
views. Charles was ready to negotiate, but he was
also ready to intrigue. He watched his opportunity and
invited the Scotch to invade England in combination
with a royalist rising in the southern kingdom. The
army, exasperated by the trickery, demanded the
king's head. To obtain it they had to content them-
selves with the mere shadow of parliamentary authority.
The House of Lords absolutely refused to concur.
House of Commons remaining at Westminster was
but a minority of the House originally elected, and
it was not till a majority of that minority was ejected
by violence, that a vote was passed erecting a High
Court of Justice for the trial of the king, and throwing
off all claim to co-ordinate authority by the Lords. The
sentence was a foregone conclusion; but if Charles
met his death upon the scaffold, it was by the act of
the army and not by the act of the nation. That
army was not to be subdued in fight. In two years and

The

a half it beat down resistance in Ireland and in Scotland,
and overwhelmed all possible opposition in England.
Then came the inevitable conflict with the remnant of
the Long Parliament. When Cromwell drove out the
handful of members who remained, all English institu-
tions were levelled to the ground. King, Lords, and
Commons had vanished from the scene.
The army
alone remained.

СНАР.

VII.

150

СНАР.
VIII.

§ I. Aims

tectorate.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE PROTECTORATE, THE RESTORATION, AND THE
REVOLUTION.

THE army was the guardian of the new principle of religious liberty. It was the peculiar merit of the great man at its head, that he saw distinctly that other things than personal liberty were required for good government. He saw that it was necessary that the nation itself should step forward as the guardian of that treasure, and should speak its voice through the only means on which, in the long run, a nation can speak-through an elected assembly. He saw too that, though a king standing outside the national feeling had lost the power and the right to command, complicated affairs required from day to day to be treated by an executive body which could only secure unity and energy of action by being made dependent on the sway of a single mind. Gradually too he perceived the necessity of countervailing the possible waywardness or tyrannical instincts of a single house, by the intervention of a second. In other words, he saw that the old constitution required to be modified and purified, not to be replaced by one entirely different. Every constitutional change made by him drew England back to the old forms, and indicated the way which ultimately led to the Restoration. For his own lifetime. he was able to keep power in his hands; but he could

not hand it down to his successors.

There are forlorn hopes in politics as well as in war, and Cromwell's Protectorate was one of them. The task of establishing religious liberty was beyond his strength. The nation would never make up its mind to permit it till it ceased to fear it, and it would not cease to fear it till it could be sure that power would not be used to force or entice the majority to abandon its opinions, or at least to rear up the succeeding generation in different opinions.

The principle of the supremacy of majorities, which is the cardinal point of parliamentary government, must be accepted fully before religious or political liberty can be accorded. That principle had not yet been admitted by any government which had succeeded to power since. the beginning of the Reformation. Elizabeth had successfully set it at nought because the majority of her subjects were divided in opinion, and because many of them who were hostile to her on religious grounds, agreed with her on political grounds. Charles and Laud failed in their attempt to set it at nought, because they treated the nation with contempt, and drove all the various sec tions of their adversaries into a united opposition. In this at least Cromwell was but treading in the steps of Charles. He kept aloft a standard which was the standard of a noble and high-hearted minority, but which was only the standard of minority after all. The real Puritans were but a few amongst the population of England, and those who cared for religious liberty were but a few amongst the Puritans. Such a position was most injurious to those who maintained it. It became impossible for the champions of religious liberty to permit religious liberty to exist in any complete sense. In old stories the fierce energy of the dwarf is often contrasted with the lazy good-nature of the giant. The Puritan army was but a vigorous dwarf after all when

CHAP.

VIII.

$2. The Minorities. Rights of

CHAP.
VIII.

§ 3. Go

vernment

by the Army.

compared with the English nation. It could not venture to overlook many things which a strong national government would have borne without wincing. Its principle was a right one, that the only limit to liberty of speech should be where it endangers the true interests of the state. But they could not help confounding the interests of the state in its natural organisation with the interests of the highly artificial state which they had called into existence. A theory which would be properly applied to incendiaries who claimed the right of publicly instigating men to a new gunpowder plot, in order to terrorise unarmed populations into submission by massacre, was by no means properly applied to suppress even private meetings for worship according to the forms of the Book of Common Prayer. As in the days of Laud the pressure upon men whose religious opinions were weak was felt more widely than the pressure upon those whose religious opinions were strong. Tolerant on the score of belief, the Puritan government was intolerant on the score of morality. In its attempt to suppress vice, it waged warfare against many acts which were not in themselves vicious, and against many more which, though evil in themselves, were regarded with leniency by the average opinion of the time. No wonder that the Book of Common Prayer gained more adherents than it had in the days when Laud sat in the High Commission Court and the Star Chamber. Cromwell found himself proscribing the religion of a people in the name of religious liberty.

Nor was it only the fact that the government was supported by a minority which roused opposition. The fact that this minority was an armed one was still more exasperating. Those who lead opinion will always be the few, and not the many; but it is necessary that the few should pay the many the compliment of employing

He

persuasion. Such a compliment an army cannot pay.
Its instrument of control lies in the text of pike and gun.
From this necessity Cromwell tried hard to escape.
had no pleasure in ruling by force. But he could not
help himself. When parliaments were recalcitrant he
had no resource but in the buff-coated soldiers who were
always ready to intervene at his bidding. Government
appealing to armed force cannot be permanently strong.
It was said to a ruler of our own day that he could do
anything with bayonets except sit upon them. And
even besides the popular repulsion to military power,
there would have always remained a popular repulsion
to the men of whom Cromwell's army was composed,
even if they could have dropped their muskets and
slipped off their uniform to appear in civilian garb.
On their side were all the worst and most contemptible
hypocrites of the day, who found it easy to imitate their
forms of speech, and to chatter of saving grace and the
interests of the soul, to cover the vilest iniquity. They
themselves were for the most part honourable and high-
souled Christian men, with the most exalted ideal of
morality, and the most profound conviction that a
special work of Almighty grace had been wrought in
their own souls, and that they were the chosen saints of
the Most High appointed to carry on God's work upon
the earth. Their spiritual fervour regarded with disdain
the ordinary mass of humanity, and, as always happens,
the ordinary mass of humanity was irritated at being so
regarded. Never yet was any effort successful to raise
a people by compulsion above its average standard.
It turns upon those who attempt it, as the Florentine
people turned upon Savonarola, as the French people
turned upon Saint Just. For a time Cromwell staved
off the evil hour. When he died, anarchy was let loose,
and after a brief interval the nation threw itself into the
arms of Charles II.

CHAP.

VIII.