University of Virginia Library

Oliver Cromwell and Charles I.
1648.

In the first years of the seventeenth century, there stood a
small and dilapidated grange, or old-fashioned farm-house, on
the outskirts of the little borough town of St. Joes, in Huntingdonshire,
the seat of the last scion of a noble family, now
lapsed from its high estate and fallen into unmerited decay—
the family of Cromwell—which had been distinguished so long
before as the reign of Henry VIII., and which even claimed
to share the royal blood of the unhappy race of Stuarts, whom
they were destined, in the end, to supplant by energy of will
and arbitration of the sword.

The present tenant of that desolate and dismal grange was
a young man, the heir and sole remaining stay of the old house,
a strong, thick-set, ungraceful person, with large, coarse features,
redeemed, however, in the eye at least of the physiognomist,
by the fine massive forehead, and the singular expression
of thought, combined with immutable resolve and indomitable
will, which pervaded all his features.

It was a dark and stormy night of November, and the wind
was wailing with a sad and hollow sound among the stunted
willows which surrounded the old farm-house, nurtured by the
stagnant waters of the broad cuts and dikes made for the drainage
of the sour and sterile soil from which they sprang. But

the night was not more gloomy than the countenance, perhaps
than the thoughts, of the ruined agriculturist, who sat alone
by the cheerless hearth, poring over the maps and plans of extensive
fen improvements, in which he had sunk the remnant
of his impoverished fortunes, by the dim light of a single waning
lamp.

There were no ornaments of any kind to be seen in the dismal
apartment, unless a few weapons and pieces of old armor
hanging on the walls, upon which the fitful light of the wood
fire played with varying flashes, might be called ornaments.
The floor was of brick, sanded; the walls exhibited their bare
and paintless plaster; the furniture was of the humblest—two
or three straight-backed oaken chairs, the ponderous table at
which he sat, strewn with papers of calculation, maps, and diagrams,
and one large book clasped with brass and bound in
greasy calf-skin, which, by its shape, was evidently the volume
of Holy Writ. Another trevet table, in the chimney corner,
supported a coarse, brown loaf, a crust of old cheese, and a
black jack of small ale, the supper of the agricultural speculator,
of the visionary and enthusiastical religionist.

At length he arose from the table, before which he had been
so long seated, and traversed the room with heavy and resounding
steps, his hands clasped behind his back and his head bowed
forward on his chest, muttering half-heard words between his
close-set teeth, and occasionally heaving deep sighs. After a
while he paused, as he reached the trevet table, took a deep
draught of ale from the black jack, and then, opening the ponderous
Bible, read a chapter of Isaiah, one of the most fiercely
denunciatory against Pharaoh and the princes of Egypt, after
which he cast himself on his knees and unburdened himself of
a long, rambling, vehement, extemporaneous prayer, which, according

to our notions, partook far more of the nature of cursing
ing than of praying, of blasphemy than of piety.

This duty performed, he took up the lamp from the table,
and leaving the room, ascended a great, creaking, half-dismantled
staircase, which led to a sort of corridor with many doors of
sleeping apartments opening upon it. Into one of these he entered,
locking the door behind him, and securing it with several
heavy bolts, and, setting down his light upon a rude oaken
bureau, placed his broadsword beneath his pillow, and disattired
himself with great haste and little ceremony.

Within five minutes the light was extinguished and the man
ensconced in the old-fashioned bed-clothes of a huge four-post
tester-bed, which had once, evidently, like its occupant, known
better days, surrounded with heavy curtains of faded and moth-fretted
damask drawn closely around it on all sides. For a
time, all was silent, except the heavy breathing—degenerating
at times into what seemed almost sighs—of the sleeper, and the
occasional howl of a mastiff without, baying the moon, when,
at fitful intervals, she waded out from among the giant clouds,
and cast her wavering and pallid gleams, fleeting like ghosts
along the bare walls of that great unfurnished chamber.

What followed would be too strange, too improbable for grave
recital, were it not that we find it recorded, beyond the possibility
of cavil, in contemporaneous history, long before the occurrence
of the events which it would seem to foreshadow; and
it was undoubtedly accredited as a fact by the early associates
and comrades of the great and extraordinary man, of whom it
is related, and whose actual life was as real, as practical, and as
stern, as his inner existence was visionary, morbidly fanciful, and
fanatically enthusiastical.

His curtains, he avowed ever, were drawn asunder with a loud
jingling of the rings by which they were suspended, and he

might see, in the opening of their folds, a misty shape, gigantical,
but undefined, while a voice thundered in his ears, mightier
than any human utterance, “Arise, Oliver, arise! thou that
shalt be, not king, but the first man in England!”

And this was thrice repeated; and thenceforth a new spirit
was awakened in the soul of the strong, iron-minded, adamant-willed
visionary, whose very superstitions were to him, not as
to other men, weaknesses, but strength—an impenetrable armor
for his own defence; an indomitable weapon against his enemies;
and the name of that new spirit, though it may well be
he who felt it knew it not, was ambition.

The name of that man was Oliver Cromwell, and of a surety
in after times he was, “although not king, the first man in England,”
the first not in his own days but perhaps in all days—
not only then, but now, and perhaps for ever.

Despite all his errors, all his crimes—for the ambitious rarely
fail of crime—this is his great redemption, that he was purely,
patriotically English; that, with him, his country, and his
country's greatness, were ever the leading objects, paramount
to self; and that when, by his own energy and will, he had
made himself “the first man in England,” he rested not from
his fierce struggle with the world till he had rendered “England
the first realm in Europe,” and the name of Englishman as
much respected throughout Christendom as was that in the
ancient time of “civis Romanus.”

Nearly at the same date with the occurrence above related,
the throne of England was ascended, among the general rejoicings
and almost universal satisfaction of his people, by a
young, graceful, and amiable prince, son of an old, debauched,
degraded, drunken despot, half pedant and half fool, addicted
to vices which are so hideous as to lack a name; as a king,
and as a man, alike without one virtue, one redeeming phase

of character; an animal, in one word, unworthy to be styled
a man, who lived detested, and died amid the secret joy and
scarcely simulated mourning of the subjects by whom he had
been scarcely tolerated while alive and powerful.

Popular himself, and wedded happily while young to a young
and beautiful princess—the daughter of one of the greatest
and the most popular of European princes, Henry IV. of
France; singularly handsome; learned enough for a gentleman
and king—skilful in manly exercises—grave and decorous,
perhaps somewhat austere, but ever with a gracious and serene
austerity in his deportment; really and genuinely pious, and
devoted heart and soul to the doctrines of the church of England;
singularly pure in his morals, and virtuous, without a
stain in his domestic relations—Charles I., of England, might
have been, had he but seen the right path and taken it, the
most popular, and one of the greatest of the kings of England;
he was the weakest, though by no means the worst, and the
most unfortunate.

His first and greatest misfortune was the period of his birth,
an absolute, or nearly absolute monarch, when the limits of
royal prerogative and parliamentary privilege, of royal power
and popular rights, were altogether undefined, among a people
on whom were gradually dawning, through the medium of the
Reformation, and the perverted views of the ultra-reforming
and fanatical Puritans, the principles of constitutional liberty,
and the fixed determination to uphold it, as the inalienable
birthright of every Englishman.

His second was his false and detestable education under the
doctrines of that subtle Scottish sophist, his abominable father,
the first James, who instilled into him, from his earliest youth,
his own favorite doctrine, that the best, the wisest, and most
royal way of governing a people is by cheating them; a way

of governance which he exultingly termed kingcraft, not in
contempt as men now speak of priestcraft, but as a term of high
and honorable import. Added to this, he taught him, ever and
anon, that a people has no rights, nor an individual member of
the people; and that a king has no duties except to govern,
well if it like him, if not, ill—only to govern de jure divino.
The last, and most fatal of all his lessons, which he inculcated
so steadily upon him that it seems to have taken ineradicable
root in his mind, was that no faith was required from a king to
his subjects.

His last was his own infirmity of character. Principles, to
use the term correctly, Charles appears to have had none—
unless we may call his attachment to the established church,
and his unquestionable religious character, by this title. Settled
opinions and rooted habits he had many, and these, with many
men, are apt to pass for principles; and of these, strengthened
by his natural obstinacy, and confirmed yet further by opposition,
we are inclined to regard his adherence to the church,
through good report and ill, through life and unto death, as one,
and undoubtedly the best and truest.

Sincere in his religion, in all things else he was habitually,
by education, and we think by hereditary temperament, the
most insincere of men. To friends and to enemies he was alike
untrue and faithless. The former could never rely on his protection,
the latter could never put trust in his most solemn
asseverations.

Obstinate and unyielding to the last against the advice of
the best and wisest of his friends, where concession would have
been wisdom; wherever resistance to the end became the right
and only course of conduct, he was invariably found vacillating,
weak, infirm of purpose.

Had he been obstinate in the right, when the head of the

noble Stafford was demanded at his hands, the only pilot who
could have steered the ship of royalty safe through the tempest
of Puritan democracy, he never had lost his crown, or bowed
his own head to that block on which he sacrificed the bravest
and most able of his counsellors.

Had he been timely wise, and listened to conditions, when
the last fight had been fought at Long Marston, “never,” to use
the words of Sir John Berkeley, perhaps the wisest of his late
advisers—“never would crown so nearly lost have been regained
on terms so easy.” But it was not so written; and the eye
even of the most blinded follower of loyalty must perceive that
it was good, both for the peoples and the princes, yea, and for
the world, the human race at large, that King Charles I. should
perish on the block; that his power, if not his crown, should
fall on the head of that most royal-minded of plebeians, who
swayed England's sceptre as none of her kings, save perhaps
Elizabeth, ever swayed it; and who did more than ever man
did for the development of that great race, then starting on its
vast, sublime career of war and commerce, liberty and toleratian,
science in peace and victory in arms, which we misname
the Anglo-Saxon; and which, so surely as the great sun stands
still, and the earth travels round it, shall girdle the globe from
east again to east, and cover it from pole to pole, until no
prayer shall mount to God but in the accents of the English
tongue.

If there be one man of men whom England and America
should unite to venerate, it is that hard, morose, rude Oliver,
who secured for the Ocean Isle that position among European
nations which she still maintains, that pre-eminence upon the
seas which secured to virgin America the glorious privilege of
being Anglo-Saxon and progressive, rather than Dutch or Spanish,
and degenerating still into the last abyss of inanition.

The limits of our narrative preclude, of course, the possibility
of our sketching, with the briefest pen, the consecutive
events in council and in field which signalized the greatest and
most durable of revolutions; the watch-cry and trophy of which
were Privilege of Parliaments and the Bill of Rights; and the
effects of which still endure in the civil freedom and religious
liberty, in the maintenance of governmental powers, and the
independence of individual rights peculiar to the genuine free
politics of England and the United States, as contrasted to the
spurious and bastard combination of despotic and anarchical
principles which signalize the sham republics of all other races.

In the first instance, perhaps, the Parliament, and the Commons
more especially, manifested a want of confidence, and, still
more, a want of liberality, in granting necessary supplies to the
king, which circumstances, up to that time, would scarcely
appear to have warranted. But, ere long, the king manifested
his true intentions, and came out under his genuine colors. To
levy taxes by his own arbitrary imposition, to govern England
of his own will, wholly dispensing with the use of Parliaments
altogether, was the scheme of Charles I., ably carried into effect
for a time by Thomas Wentworth, the able, haughty, and unhappy
Earl of Strafford, and, as united to the suppression of all
other churches save that of England only, comprehensively
embodied by him in the singular term, “thorough.”

How Hampden, Pym, St. John, the elder Vane, Eliot, and
other noble spirits strove, suffered, and, in the end, triumphed,
for the liberties of England, history has told trumpet-tongued
with all her spirit-kindling echoes; but few know the fact that,
in the House of Commons, even so early as the petition for the
bill of rights, and the subsequent remonstrance, Oliver Cromwell
was already a man of mark; in council, it is probable, not
oratory; for he never became a fluent or powerful speaker,

even when his accents were heard from the protectoral chair;
and he seems, like Talleyrand in after days, to have regarded
language as a special gift for the concealment of thought.

On the eventful evening of the carrying of the Remonstrance,
on which the debate was waged with such fury that many of
the elder and sager members presaged an armed conflict and
bloodshed—for gentlemen in those days habitually, as of their
right, wore swords—when the members were leaving the house,
a gentleman asked John Hampden, pointing to Oliver, who, by
the way, was Hampden's cousin, “Who is that slovenly, ill-dressed
fellow?” To which the great, pure patriot replied,
“That sloven, should this controversy between the king and
commons be carried to the appeal of arms, which may God
forbid, I say to you, that sloven will be the greatest man in
England.”

And John Hampden was no indifferent judge in such matters;
nor, though he did not live to see it, was he mistaken in the
issue. But he lived not to see it; and, had he lived, it is probable
that he would have resisted, unto the death, the usurping
ambition of the Great Independent, even as he resisted the
usurped prerogative of the lawful king.

But John Hampden fell, shot to the death through the left
shoulder with three bullets, at the head of his own regiment of
Buckinghamshire volunteers, on the sad field of Chalgrove, the
purest and most moderate of patriots.

And, shortly afterwards, at Newbury, fell Lucius Cary, Viscount
Falkland, of whom Clarendon has recorded that, although
conscience and patriotism compelled him to take up arms
and to do battle for the king, he was ever from that moment
wont, even in the company of his most intimate friends, to fall
into deep fits of melancholy musing, and to ingeminate, with
shrill and touching accents, the word, peace, peace. He fell, the

purest and most moderate of royalists; and, thenceforth, purity
seemed dead, and moderation likewise, on both sides, and the
mortal sword, as ever, was the arbiter.

It was to the great insight of Oliver Cromwell into the minds
of men—for he early discerned that some new spirit must be
aroused in the minds of men to counterbalance the antique
chivalry and loyalty among the “decayed tapsters and pimple-nosed
serving-men,” of whom, by his own allegation, the bulk
of the parliamentarian armies were composed—that the ultimate
victory of the parliament must be ascribed.

To meet this spirit of chivalry, he awakened the spirit of
militant religion; and, as ever must be the case when the religion
of the masses becomes militant, as in the crusades, as in
the Huguenot wars of France, and as in his own case especially,
with it, his own creation, he overrode the oldest monarchy, the
most sublime and stately hierarchy, the noblest and most puissant
aristocracy of Europe; he overrode, secondly, the Parliament
of England; he overrode, in the last place, though in our
opinion wisely, justly, and for the preservation of his country
from the worse curse of fanatical intolerance and social anarchy,
the liberties of England herself, and made himself, all but in
name, the mightiest and wisest of her kings.

Charles died on the scaffold, by the connivance rather than
by the act of Cromwell. Prevented it, assuredly he might have
done; but, preventing, must himself have perished; for Charles
could not be trusted. Oliver would have spared him once, nay,
but reinstated him; but the fatal discovery of a genuine letter,
wherein the fated king assured his queen that “for those knaves,”
meaning Essex and Cromwell, “to whom he had promised a
silken garter, he had in lieu of it a hempen halter,” sealed his
fate thenceforth for ever.

The scabbard was cast away between them, and in the strife

of swords, as ever must be the case, the weaker went to the
wall. Charles the First died to be pitied as a private man, to
be deplored by the church of which he was a faithful son, but
certainly not regretted as a king, for he was clearly in intent
a traitor and tyrant; yet can it not be said of him, as it was of
Julius Cæsar, “Jure cœsus habeatur!”—Let him be held justly
slain!—for, in the English constitution, from time immemorial,
there is no rule or precedent by which a king can be brought
to trial by his subjects.

Still, he had not much reason for complaint; during his
whole life he had sacrificed to expediency only, not to justice, or
to the rights of man, or to his oaths before God; and himself
to expediency he fell a royal victim. He fell by the axe on the
scaffold at Whitehall, and Heaven had no thunders by which
to bruit aloud its indignation or its horror at his fall.

By his death, he aroused again the spirit of aggrieved loyalty
to arms, and fatal Dunbar, bloody Worcester, the great usurper's
“crowning mercy,” proved how gallant and true was the heart
of the English gentry, proved how ineffectual and vain is gallantry
or truth, is heart and hand, against the iron bands of
discipline, against the leadership of a leader competent to govern
the energies and point the enthusiasm of his men.

When Cromwell flung his arm aloft, amid the sun-burst
through the mist which revealed his enemies rushing down at
the bidding of their frenzied preachers to “do battle at Armageddon,”
and shouted, in his massive tones, “Let God arise, and
let his enemies be scattered!” he showed himself a captain
among captains. The far-famed “sun of Austerliz” is trite and
tame beside that glorious battle-word. When he drove, ignominiously,
the “Rump” of the Long Parliament from the station
which it had so long misused, from domination over a nation
which it had so long misgoverned; when he bade his obedient

Ironsides “carry away that bauble,” he proved himself a braver
and more consistent patriot than when he thundered upon the
flank of the half-victorious cavaliers at Marston, and conquered
the reeling fight; than when he fought bareheaded in the van
of the last deadliest mêlée of Naseby; than when he dared to
sign the death-warrant of his hapless king.

When he once sat upon the throne—for which he had played,
as some men will have it, so foully, though we cannot regard
it as so altogether—he used that usurped power solely for England's
good and England's glory; he wore, if not a crown, “a
more than dictatorial wreath,” conquered, indeed, by might, but
affixed by mercy.

The worst blot on his name is the deeds which have rendered
that name, to this day, a curse in Ireland; but it must be remembered
that he was dealing with men whom he regarded as
murderers and heathens, and deeming himself probably the Godordained
avenger of protestant and pious blood.

His greatest glory is Spain humbled, Holland overcome,
Scotland and Ireland pacified, the colonies planted, the navigation
act passed, the maritime glory of England, the Anglo-Saxonism
of North America secured. These are his high glories
—glories enough for the greatest. They should secure him immortality
among men—may they secure him pardon before God!

When he died, the greatest tempest on record—until that
kindled tempest which scourged the earth when Napoleon, the
second Cromwell, was departing from his scene of mingled
crime and glory—devastated Europe from the Baltic to Cape
Bon, from the Bosphorus to the Bay of Biscay, uptearing trees,
upheaving hills, unroofing houses, killing both man and beast
in the open field, with one continuous glare of lightning, one
roll of continuous thunder.

And, as the death hours of these, the two greatest of usurpers,

were thus similar, so were their last words strikingly alike.
Cromwell, having lain senseless for above an hour, started to
consciousness at a tremendous thunderclap, and exclaimed,
“Ordnance!” Napoleon, transported by the din of elemental
strife into the strife of men, muttered the words, “tête d'armée,”
and passed into that world where the drum hath no sound and
the sword is edgeless.

Both were great in their day; both were guilty; but both
were instruments of the God who made them, not for evil, but
unto good. It is for Him alone to judge them, as it is His alone
to show mercy. Requiescant!