16th of September. "Cromwell sate in the house, and the speaker made a speech to him, and gave him the thanks of the house for his great services. . . . Cromwell and most of the members of parliament, and divers commanders of the army, were feasted by the lord mayor in London. . . . The parliament resumed the debate touching a new representative.' This ". new representative," the reader need not be told †, was the act which was to put a period to the sittings of this famous assembly, and to call together a new parliament, on the improved basis of an extended and popular suffrage. In Cromwell, in resuming his parliamentary duties by a revival of this debate, at once fixed public attention on the weak point of the present government, and diverted it from any suspicion of his own designs. The wily blow had been in some sort warded off by the previous movements of Vane‡; but it fell heavily still. There was another measure which he forced upon the house, with a like dishonest aim, and which finds mention by Whitelocke, in the record of the same day's proceedings "Debate of an act of oblivion and general pardon, with some expedients for satisfaction of the soldiery, and the ease of the people."§ other words, the all-powerful conqueror, out of the first excitement of gratitude in the midst of which he stood, forced from the reluctant statesmen their assent to a resolution of amnesty so wide, that it almost struck at the root of the commonwealth. || It was in effect resolved, that all political offences committed before the battle of Worcester should be forgiven, with the exception of certain cases, which seemed to demand the visitation of public justice. A decision which, though it implied a gross injustice to those who had already been mulcted heavily, relieved the royalists from all Memorials, p. 485. + See Life of Vane, p. 138. See the detail of them in the Memoir of Vane, where the present subject is treated at much greater length. Memorials, p. 485. They assented, Ludlow observes, "the parliament being unwilling to deny Cromwell anything for which there was the least colour of reason." Vol. ii. p. 448. apprehension of farther penalties. Cromwell in this served a twofold purpose. He largely increased the number of his personal friends, and, taking advantage of the opposition of the chief members of the government, he was able to increase the number of their personal enemies. Proscription and confiscation are at all times admirable charges to build a prejudice upon. It was not the least of his incidental advantages, moreover, that he considerably weakened the resources of the republican exchequer. may * At this crisis, too, it was, that a higher than human power gave still greater impulse and practical efficacy to his vast design. On the 8th of December the fatal news reached London of the sudden death of the gallant and virtuous Ireton. It snapt the last bond which could, in the last extremity, have bound Cromwell to his duty, or imposed restraint on his parricide ambition. Mrs. Hutchinson tells us, that on the very eve of this calamity, "Ireton had determined to come over to England, in order to divert Cromwell from his destructive courses." Whatever truth or error there be in this assertion, it indicates at least the inflexible sentiments of this famous person. His last public action in regard to the commonwealth was worthy of his entire life. When the vote was transmitted to him immediately after the Worcester victory, by which he received an estate of two thousand a year, he alone, of all whom such grants enriched, refused acceptance. In the spirit of the antique days of Roman virtue†, he answered to the parliament, that their gift was unacceptable to him. They had many just debts," he added, "which he desired they would pay, before they made any such presents; that he had no need of their land, and therefore would not have it; and that he should be 66 *Whitelocke says of him, that he was "very stiff in his ways and purposes;" a quality our supple lawyer could scarcely understand or appreciate the value of. "He was," he proceeds, " of good abilities for council, as well as action, and made much use of his pen... Cromwell had a great opinion of him, and no man could prevail so much, or order him so far, as Ireton could... He was stout in the field, and wary and prudent in his counsel, and exceedingly forward as to the business of a commonwealth," + Bishop Burnet likened him to Cassius. more contented to see them doing the service of the nation than so liberal in disposing of the public treasure. His death, Whitelocke afterwards tells us, struck a sadness into Cromwell. This may well be doubted. The first momentary grief which such tidings must have caused, appears to have been absorbed at once in those projects of ambition from which the single remaining check had been thus suddenly and opportunely snatched away. His next thought, after the mournful tidings, was not of grief, but glory. The body of Ireton was ordered in deference to the wishes of "the lord general and of some of his relations" who, according to Ludlow, were were not ignorant of his vast designs now on foot"—to be brought over to England, and to be laid, after a magnificent funeral at the public charge, among the tombs of kings, in the abbey of Westminster. And, detailing this, Ludlow exclaims, with affectionate and high-souled enthusiasm, that if the great deceased could have foreseen what was thus done, he would certainly have made it his desire that his body might have found a grave where his soul left it, so much did he despise those pompous and expensive vanities; having erected for himself a more glorious monument in the hearts of good men, by his affection to his country, his abilities of mind, his impartial justice, his diligence in the public service, and his other virtues, which were a far greater honour to his memory than a dormitory among the ashes of kings. But if any doubt remained that grief at this event held no supremacy in the breast of Cromwell, and that the event itself did not rather clear the great path before him, it is set at rest by a remarkable incident which dates on the second day after the news reached London. On the 10th of December, Cromwell summoned and held a meeting, at the speaker's house, of those friends, military and civil, who were supposed to be well affected towards his own political views. The two or three Biog. Britt., 3109. Ludlow adds, " And truly I believe he was in earnest; for as he was always careful to husband those things that belonged to the state to the best advantage, so was he most liberal in employing his own purse and person in the public service."- Memoirs, vol. i. p. 371. honest men who attended must have been startled at the question first propounded there; but the majority of the meeting had few natural emotions to thrust in the way of anything that either honesty or dishonesty might propose. They were lawyers chiefly; and Whitelocke, one of them, has happily left on record some detail of what passed. The ground which Cromwell took in addressing these assembled gentlemen was,-"that now the old king being dead, and his son being defeated, he held it necessary to come to a settlement of the nation ;" and, in order thereunto, "he had requested this meeting, that they together might consider and advise what was fit to be done, and presented to the parliament." By what pretension, it may be asked, could a servant of the republic thus presume to call its stability in question? It is clear that, in the mere act of doing it, he was guilty of treason to the government then existing, and of which he was himself a member. Whitelocke tells us, that a "great many" were at the meeting. "divers members of parliament, and some chief officers of the army." But Bradshaw would not attend, nor Vane, nor Marten, nor Scot, nor Blake, nor Harrington. Ludlow, by the wily craft of Cromwell, was in a sort of honourable banishment in Ireland, and what once was the soul of Ireton, lay a senseless clod on that distant shore. The meeting was obviously summoned in defiance of the council of the commonwealth; only the lawyers who belonged to it, and who would as readily belong to any thing else, attended. It is clear that all who were emphatically called the statesmen held aloof from it; and it would be an instance of their forgetfulness of duty, at once marvellous and irreconcileable with their previous character and actions, to have suffered such a meeting to go on, presuming that they knew its object,—were it not a proof more certain still, that in a sudden and general, and now for the first time visible and declared, defection of the army from their cause, they had lost all present power of prevention. To the PEOPLE remained their last appeal; and this they had now resolved to make; too late, alas! for present success, but not too late for a lesson to posterity. The speaker of the house of commons opened the conference. "My lord," he said, addressing Cromwell, "this company were very ready to attend your excellency; and the business you are pleased to propound to us is very necessary to be considered. God hath given marvellous success to our forces under your command; and if we do not improve these mercies to some settlement, such as may be to God's honour, and the good of this commonwealth, we shall be very much blameworthy." Hereupon, one of the few honest men who were present, but who was not more honest than gullible, major-general Harrison, interposed a few words, which are enough to express the delusions already widely spread among the republican officers as to the possibility of erecting a democracy of saints on the ruins of civil authority.* "I think," he remarked, "that which my lord-general hath propounded, is to advise as to a settlement, both of our civil and spiritual liberties; and so that the mercies which the Lord hath given unto us may not be cast away. How this may be done is the great question." And now much might have arisen from this of a very awkward bearing on the designs of Cromwell, had it not been for the lucky interposition of that most grave and accomplished lawyer, the lord commissioner Whitelocke. "It is a great question, indeed," he observes, "and not suddenly to be resolved; yet it were pity that a meeting of so many able and worthy persons as I see here should be fruitless. I should humbly offer in the first place, whether it be not requisite to be understood in what way this settlement is desired, whether of an absolute republic, or with any mixture of monarchy ?" This was, to use a homely expression, hitting the nail on the right head, and accordingly, with equal force and promptitude, Cromwell * See the last volume of this work, p. 168. Harrison's faith in Cromwell was, (and the other republican enthusiasts in the army shared it,) that he pretended to love and favour a sort of men who acted upon higher principles than those of civil liberty." |