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quisite. He was as good a writer and speaker | ways taken off his hat when he went into a as any modern sovereign has been. But he church! The character of Charles would was not fit for active life. In negotiation he was always trying to dupe others, and duping only himself. As a soldier, he was feeble, dilatory, and miserably wanting, not in personal courage, but in the presence of mind which his station required. His delay at Gloucester saved the parliamentary party from destruction. At Naseby, in the very crisis of his fortune, his want of self-possession spread a fatal panic through his army. The story which Clarendon tells of that affair, reminds us of the excuses by which Bessus and Bobadil explain their cudgellings. A Scotch nobleman, it seems, begged the king not to run upon his death, took hold of his bridle, and turned his horse round. No man who had much value for his life would have tried to perform the same friendly office on that day for Oliver Cromwell.

scarcely rise in our estimation, if we believed that he was pricked in conscience after the manner of this worthy loyalist; and that, while violating all the first rules of Christian morality, he was sincerely scrupulous about churchgovernment. But we acquit him of such weakness. In 1641, he deliberately confirmed the Scotch declaration, which stated that the government of the church by archbishops and bishops was contrary to the word of God. In 1645, he appears to have offered to set up Popery in Ireland. That a king who had established the Presbyterian religion in one kingdom, and who was willing to establish the Catholic religion in another, should have insurmountable scruples about the ecclesiastical constitution of the third, is altogether incredible. He himself says in his letters that he looks on Episcopacy as a stronger support of monarchical power than even the army. From causes which we have already considered, the Established Church had been, since the Reformation, the great bulwark of the prerogative. Charles wished, therefore, to preserve it. He thought himself necessary both to the Parliament and to the army. He did not foresee, till too late, that by paltering with the Presbyterians he should put both them and himself into the power of a fiercer and more daring party If he had foreseen it, we suspect that the royal blood, which still cries to Heaven every thirtieth of January for judgments only to be averted by salt fish and egg-sauce, would never have been shed. One who had swal lowed the Scotch Declaration would scarcely strain at the Covenant.

One thing, and one alone, could make Charles dangerous-a violent death. His tyranny could not break the high spirit of the English people. His arms could not conquer, his arts could not deceive them; but his humiliation and his execution melted them into a generous compassion. Men who die on a scaffold for political offences almost always die well. The eyes of thousands are fixed upon them. Enemies and admirers are watching their demeanour. Every tone of voice, every change of colour, is to go down to posterity. Escape is impossible. Supplication is vain. In such a situation pride and despair have often been known to nerve the weakest minds with fortitude adequate to the occasion. Charles died patiently and bravely; not more patiently or bravely, indeed, than many other victims of political The death of Charles, and the strong mearage; not more patiently or bravely than his sures which led to it, raised Cromwell to a own judges, who were not only killed, but tor-height of power fatal to the infant commontured; or than Vane, who had always been considered as a timid man. However, his conduct during his trial and at his execution made a prodigious impression. His subjects began to love his memory as heartily as they had hated his person; and posterity has estimated his character from his death rather than from his life.

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wealth. No men occupy so splendid a place in history as those who have founded monarchies on the ruins of republican institutions. Their glory, if not of the purest, is assuredly of the most seductive and dazzling kind. In nations broken to the curb, in nations long accustomed to be transferred from one tyrant to another, a man without eminent To represent Charles as a martyr in the qualities may easily gain supreme power. The cause of Episcopacy is absurd. Those who defection of a troop of guards, a conspiracy of put him to death cared as little for the Assem- eunuchs, a popular tumult, might place an inbly of Divines as for the Convocation; and dolent senator or a brutal soldier on the throne would in all probability only have hated him of the Roman world. Similar revolutions have the more if he had agreed to set up the Pres- often occurred in the despotic states of Asia. byterian discipline; and, in spite of the opinion But a community which has heard the voice of Mr. Hallam, we are inclined to think that of truth and experienced the pleasures of liberthe attachment of Charles to the Church of ty, in which the merits of statesmen and of England was altogether political. Human na- systems are freely canvassed, in which obeture is indeed so capricious that there may be dience is paid not to persons but to laws, in a single sensitive point in a conscience which which magistrates are regarded not as the everywhere else is callous. A man without lords but as the servants of the public, in truth or humanity may have some strange which the excitement of party is a necessary scruples about a trifle. There was one devout of life, in which political warfare is reduced warrior in the royal camp whose piety bore a to a system of tactics;-such a community is great resemblance to that which is ascribed to not easily reduced to servitude. Beasts of burthe king. We mean Colonel Turner. That den may easily be managed by a new master; gallant cavalier was hanged after the Restora- but will the wild ass submit to the bonds? will tion for a flagitious burglary. At the gallows the unicorn serve and abide by the crib? will he told the crowd that his mind received great leviathan hold out his nostrils to the hook? consolation from one reflection-he had al-The mythological conqueror of the East, whose

HALLAM'S CONSTITUTIONAL HISTORY.

enchantments reduced the wild beasts to the which rose on the ruins of the old system. tameness of domestic cattle, and who har- The admirers of Inigo Jones have always nessed lions and tigers to his chariot, is but maintained that his works are inferior to those an imperfect type of those extraordinary minds of Sir Christopher Wren only because the great which have thrown a spell on the fierce spirits fire of London gave to the latter such a field of nations unaccustomed to control, and have for the display of his powers as no architect compelled raging factions to obey their reins, in the history of the world ever possessed. and swell their triumph. The enterprise, be it Similar allowance must be made for Cromwell. good or bad, is one which requires a truly If he erected little that was new, it was because great man. It demands courage, activity, ener-there had been no general devastation to clear gy, wisdom, firmness, conspicuous virtues, or a space for him. As it was, he reformed the vices so splendid and alluring as to resemble representative system in a most judicious

virtues.

manner.

He rendered the administration of justice uniform throughout the island. We will quote a passage from his speech to the Parliament in September, 1656, which contains, we think, stronger indications of a legislative mind than are to be found in the whole range of orations delivered on such occasions before or since.

Those who have succeeded in this arduous undertaking form a very small and a very remarkable class. Parents of tyranny, but heirs of freedom, kings among citizens, citizens among kings, they unite in themselves the characteristics of the system which springs from them, and of the system from which they have sprung. Their reigns shine with a double light, the last and dearest rays of departing freedom, mingled with the first and brightest glories of empire in its dawn. Their high qualities lend to despotism itself a charm drawn from the institutions under which they were formed, and which they have destroyed. They resemble Europeans who settle within the tropics, and carry thither the strength and the energetic habits acquired in regions more propitious to the constitution. They differ as widely from princes nursed in the purple of 2 imperial cradles as the companions of Gama from their dwarfish and imbecile progeny, which, born in a climate unfavourable to its growth and beauty, degenerates more and more at every descent from the qualities of the ori-upon this nation a day longer than you have ginal conquerors.

In this class three men stand pre-eminent;
Cæsar, Cromwell, and Bonaparte. The high-
est place in this remarkable triumvirate be-
longs undoubtedly to Cæsar. He united the
talents of Bonaparte to those of Cromwell;
and he possessed also what neither Cromwell
nor Bonaparte possessed, learning, taste, wit,
eloquence, the sentiments and the manners of
an accomplished gentleman.

Between Cromwell and Napoleon Mr. Hal-
lam has instituted a parallel scarcely less in-
genious than that which Burke has drawn be-
tween Richard Cœur de Lion and Charles the
Twelfth of Sweden. In this parallel, however,
and indeed throughout his work, we think
that he hardly gives Cromwell fair measure.
"Cromwell," says he, "far unlike his anti-
type, never showed any signs of a legislative
mind, or any desire to place his renown on
that noblest basis, the amelioration of social
institutions." The difference in this respect,
we conceive, was not in the characters of the
men, but in the characters of the revolutions
by means of which they rose to power. The
civil war in England had been undertaken to
defend and restore; the republicans of France
set themselves to destroy. In England the
principles of the common law had never been
disturbed, and most even of its forms had been
held sacred. In France the law and its minis-
ters had been swept away together. In France,
therefore, legislation necessarily became the
first business of the first settled government

"There is one general grievance in the nation. It is the law....I think, I may say it, I have as eminent judges in this land as have been had, or that the nation has had for these many years. Truly, I could be particular as to But the truth of it is, the executive part, to the administration; but that would trouble you. there are wicked and abominable laws that will be in your power to alter. To hang a man for sixpence, threepence, I know not what to hang for a trifle and pardon murder, is in the ministration of the law through the ill-framing of it. I have known in my experience abominable murders quitted; and to see men lose their lives for petty matters! This is a thing that God will reckon for; and I wish it may not lie

an opportunity to give a remedy; and I hope I shall cheerfully join with you in it."

Mr. Hallam truly says, that though it is im possible to rank Cromwell with Napoleon as a general, yet "his exploits were as much above the level of his contemporaries, and more the effects of an original uneducated capacity." Bonaparte was trained in the best military schools; the army which he led to Italy was one of the finest that ever existed. Cromwell passed his youth and the prime of his manhood in a civil situation. He never looked on war, till he was more than forty years old. He had first to form himself; and then to form his troops. Out of raw levies he created an army, the bravest and the best disciplined, the most He called his body orderly in peace, and the most terrible in war, that Europe had seen. into existence. He led it to conquest. He never fought a battle without gaining a victory. He never gained a victory without annihilating the force opposed to him. Yet his triumphs were not the highest glory of his military system. The respect which his troops paid to property, their attachment to the laws and religion of their country, their submission to the civil power, their temperance, their intelligence, their industry, are without parallel. It was after the Restoration that the spirit which their great leader had infused into them was most signally displayed. At the command of the es. tablished government, a government which had no means of enforcing obedience, fifty thou sand soldiers, whose backs no enemy had ever

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seen, either in domestic or continental war, | ed, he was punctilious only for his country. laid down their arms, and retired into the mass of the people; thenceforward to be distinguished only by superior diligence, sobriety, and regularity in the pursuits of peace, from the other members of the community which they had saved.

In the general spirit and character of his administration we think Cromwell far superior to Napoleon. "In civil government," says Mr. Hallam, "there can be no adequate parallel between one who had sucked only the dregs of a besotted fanaticism, and one to whom the stores of reason and philosophy were open." These expressions, it seems to us, convey the highest eulogium on our great countryman. Reason and philosophy did not teach the conqueror of Europe to command his passions, or to pursue, as a first object, the happiness of the people. They did not prevent him from risking his fame and his power in a frantic contest against the principles of human nature and the laws of the physical world, against the rage of the winter and the liberty of the sea. They did not exempt him from the influence of that most pernicious of superstitions, a presumptuous fatalism. They did not preserve him from the inebriation of prosperity, or restrain him from indecent querulousness and violence in adversity. On the other hand, the fanaticism of Cromwell never urged him on impracticable undertakings, or confused his perception of the public good. Inferior to Bonaparte in invention, he was far superior to him in wisdom. The French Emperor is among conquerors what Voltaire is among writers, a miraculous child. His splendid genius was frequently clouded by fits of humour as absurdly perverse as those of the pet of the nursery, who quarrels with his food, and dashes his playthings to pieces. Cromwell was emphatically a man. He possessed, in an eminent degree, that masculine and full-grown robustness of mind, that equally diffused intellectual health, which, if our national partiality does not mislead us, has peculiarly characterized the great men of England. Never was any ruler so conspicuously born for sovereignty. The cup which has intoxicated almost all others, sobered him. His spirit, restless from its buoyancy in a lower sphere, reposed in majestic placidity as soon as it had reached the level congenial to it. He had nothing in common with that large class of men who distinguished themselves in lower posts, and whose incapacity becomes obvious as soon as the public voice summons them to take the lead. Rapidly as his fortunes grew, his mind expanded more rapidly still. Insignificant as a private citizen, he was a great general; he was a still greater prince. The manner of Napoleon was a theatrical compound, in which the coarseness of a revolutionary guardroom was blended with the ceremony of the old court of Versailles. Cromwell, by the confession even of his enemies, exhibited in his deineanour the simple and natural nobleness of a inan neither ashamed of his origin nor vain of his elevation; of a man who had found his proper place in society, and who felt secure that he was competent to fill it. Easy, even to familiarity, where his own dignity was concern

His own character he left to take care of itself; he left it to be defended by his victories in war and his reforms in peace. But he was a jealous and implacable guardian of the public honour. He suffered a crazy Quaker to insult him in the midst of Whitehall, and revenged himself only by liberating him and giving him a dinner. But he was prepared to risk the chances of war to avenge the blood of a private Englishman.

No sovereign ever carried to the throne so large a portion of the best qualities of the middling orders, so strong a sympathy with the feelings and interests of his people. He was sometimes driven to arbitrary measures; but he had a high, stout, honest, English heart. Hence it was that he loved to surround his throne with such men as Hale and Blake. Hence it was that he allowed so large a share of political liberty to his subjects, and that, even when an opposition, dangerous to his power and to his person, almost compelled him to govern by the sword, he was still anxious to leave a germ from which, at a more favourable season, free institutions might spring. We firmly believe, that if his first parliament had not com menced its debates by disputing his title, his government would have been as mild at home as it was energetic and able abroad. He was a soldier-he had risen by war. Had his ambition been of an impure or selfish kind, it would have been easy for him to plunge his country into continental hostilities on a large scale, and to dazzle the restless factions which he ruled by the splendour of his victories. Some of his enemies have sneeringly remarked, that in the successes obtained under his administration, he had no personal share; as if a man who had raised himself from obscurity to empire, solely by his military talents, could have any unworthy reason for shrinking from military enterprise. This reproach is his highest glory. In the success of the English navy he could have no selfish interests. Its triumphs added nothing to his fame; its increase added nothing to his means of overawing his enemies; its great leader was not his friend. Yet he took a peculiar pleasure in encouraging that noble service, which, of all the instruments employed by an English government, is the most impotent for mischief, and the most powerful for good. His administration was glorious, but with no vulgar glory. It was not one of those periods of overstrained and convulsive exertion which necessarily produce debility and languor. Its energy was natural, healthful, temperate. He placed England at the head of the Protestant interest, and in the first rank of Christian powers. He taught every nation to value her friendship and to dread her enmity. But he did not squander her resources in a vain attempt to invest her with that supremacy which no power, in the modern system of Europe, can safely affect, or can long retain.

This noble and sober wisdom had its reward. If he did not carry the banners of the Commonwealth in triumph to distant capitals; if he did not adorn Whitehall with the spoils of the Stadthouse and the Louvre; if he did not portion out Flanders and Germany into princi

The most questionable act of his life was the execution of Charles. We have already strongly condemned that proceeding; but we by no means consider it as one which attaches any peculiar stigma of infamy to the names of those who participated in it. It was an unjust and injudicious display of violent party spirit; but it was not a cruel or perfidious measure. It had all those features which distinguish the errors of magnanimous and intrepid spirits from base and malignant crimes.

palities for his kinsmen and his generals; he | cuting fires of Rome. Even to the present day, did not, on the other hand, see his country his character, though constantly attacked, and overrun by the armies of nations which his scarcely ever defended, is popular with the ambition had provoked. He did not drag out great body of our countrymen. the last years of his life in exile and a prisoner, in an unhealthy climate and under an ungenerous jailor; raging with the impotent desire of vengeance, and brooding over visions of departed glory. He went down to his grave in the fulness of power and fame; and left to his son an authority which any man of ordinary firmness and prudence would have retained. But for the weakness of that foolish Ishbosheth, the opinions which we have been expressing would, we believe, now have formed the orthodox creed of good Englishmen. We might now be writing under the government his Highness Oliver the Fifth, or Richard the Fourth, Protector, by the Grace of God, of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland, and the dominions thereto belonging. The form of the great founder of the dynasty, on horseback, as when he led the charge at Naseby, or on foot, as when he tock the mace from the table of the Commons, would adorn all our squares, and overlook our public of fices from Charing-Cross; and sermons in his praise would be duly preached on his lucky day, the third of September, by court-chaplains, guiltless of the abominations of the surplice.

We cannot quit this interesting topic without saying a few words on a transaction, which Mr. Hallam has made the subjec 'of a severe accusation against Cromwel and which has been made by others the subject of a severe accusation against Mr. Hallam. We conceive that both the Protector and the historian may be vindicated. Mr. Hallam tells us that Cromwell sold fifty English gentlemen as slaves in Barbadoes. For making this statement he has been charged with two high literary crimes. The first accusation is, that, from his violent prejudice against Oliver, he has calumniated him falsely. The second, preferred by the same accuser, is, that from But, though his memory has not been taken his violent fondness for the same Oliver, he under the patronage of any party, though every has hidden his calumnies against him at the device has been used to blacken it, though to fag end of a note, instead of putting them into praise him would long have been a punishable the text. Both these imputations cannot poscrime, yet truth and merit at last prevail. sibly be true, and it happens that neither is so. Cowards, who had trembled at the very sound His censors will find, when they take the trouof his name, tools of office, who, like Downing, ble to read his book, that the story is mentioned had been proud of the honour of lacqueying his in the text as well as in the notes; and they coach, might insult him in loyal speeches and will also find, when they take the trouble to addresses. Venal poets might transfer to the read some other books, with which speculators king the same eulogies, little the worse for on English history ought to be acquainted, that wear, which they had bestowed on the Pro- the story is true. If there could have been tector. A fickle multitude might crowd to any doubt about the matter, Burton's Diary shout and scoff round the gibbeted remains of must have set it at rest. But, in truth, there the greatest Prince and Soldier of the age. was abundant and superabundant evidence, But when the Dutch cannon startled an effemi- before the appearance of that valuable publinate tyrant in his own palace, when the con- cation. Not to mention the authority to which quests which had been made by the armies of Mr. Hallam refers, and which alone is perCromwell were sold to pamper the harlots of fectly satisfactory, there is Slingsby Bethel's Charles, when Englishmen were sent to fight, account of the proceedings of Richard Cromunder the banners of France, against the inde- well's Parliament, published immediately after pendence of Europe and the Protestant reli- its dissolution. He was a member he must gion, many honest hearts swelled in secret at therefore have known what happened: and the thought of one who had never suffered his violent as his prejudices were, he never could country to be ill-used by any but himself. It have been such an idiot as to state positive must indeed have been difficult for any Eng-falsehoods with respect to public transactions lishman to see the salaried Viceroy of France, at the most important crisis of his fate, sauntering through his harem, yawning and talking nonsense over a despatch, or beslobbering his brothers and his courtiers in a fit of maudlin affection,*. without a respectful and tender remembrance of him, before whose genius the young pride of Louis, and the veteran craft of Mazarin, had stood rebuked; who had humbled Spain on the land, and Holland on the sea; and whose imperial voice had arrested the victorious arms of Sweden, and the perse

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which had taken place only a few days before. It will not be quite so easy to defend Cromwell against Mr. Hallam, as to defend Mr. Hallam against those who attack his history. But the story is certainly by no means so bad as he takes it to be. In the first place, this slavery was merely the compulsory labour to which every transported convict is liable. Nobody acquainted with the language of the last century can be ignorant that such con victs were generally termed slaves; until discussions about another species of slavery, far more miserable and altogether anmerited, ren dered the word too odious to be applied even to felons of English origin. These persons

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enjoyed the protection of the law during the term of their service, which was only five years. The punishment of transportation has been inflicted, by almost every government that England has ever had, for political offences. After Monmouth's insurrection, and after the rebellions in 1715 and 1745, great numbers of the prisoners were sent to America. These considerations ought, we think, to free Cromwell from the imputation of having inflicted on his enemies any punishment which in itself is of a shocking and atrocious character.

To transport fifty men, however, without a trial, is bad enough. But let us consider, in the first place, that some of these men were taken in arms against the government, and that it is not clear that they were not all so taken. In that case, Cromwell or his officers might, according to the usages of those unhappy times, have put them to the sword, or turned them over to the provost-marshal at once. This, we allow, is not a complete vindication; for execution by martial law ought never to take place but under circumstances which admit of no delay; and, if there is time to transport men, there is time to try them.

The defenders of the measure stated in the House of Commons, that the persons thus transported not only consented to go, but went with remarkable cheerfulness. By this, we suppose, it is to be understood, not that they had any very violent desire to be bound apprentices in Barbadoes, but that they considered themselves as, on the whole, fortunately and leniently treated, in the situation in which they had placed themselves.

When these considerations are fairly estimated, it must, we think, be allowed, that this selling into slavery was not, as it seems at first sight, a barbarous outrage, unprecedented in our annals, but merely a very arbitrary proceeding, which, like most of the arbitrary proceedings of Cromwell, was rather a violation of positive law than of any great principle of justice and mercy. When Mr. Hallam declares it to have been more oppressive than any of the measures of Charles the Second, he forgets, we imagine, that under the reign of that prince, and during the administration of Lord Clarenden, many of the Roundheads were, without any trial, imprisoned at a distance from England, merely in order to remove them beyond the reach of the great liberating writ of our law. But, in fact, it is not fair to compare the cases. The government of Charles was perfectly secure. The res dura et regni novitas" is the great apology of Cromwell.

war, even the bad cause had been rendered res pectable and amiable, by the purity and elevation of mind which many of its friends displayed. Under Charles the Second, the best and noblest of ends was disgraced by means the most cruel and sordid. The rage of faction succeeded to the love of liberty. Loyalty died away into servility. We look in vain among the leading politicians of either side for steadiness of principle, or even for that vulgar fidelity to party, which, in our time, it is esteemed infamous to violate. The inconsist ency, perfidy, and baseness, which the leaders constantly practised, which their followers defended, and which the great body of the people regarded, as it seems, with little disapprobation, appear in the present age almost incredible. In the age of Charles the First, they would, we believe, have excited as much astonishment. And

Man, however, is always the same. when so marked a difference appears between two generations, it is certain that the solution may be found in their respective circumstances. The principal statesmen of the reign of Charles the Second were trained during the civil war, and the revolutions which followed it. Such a period is eminently favourable to the growth of quick and active talents. It forms a class of men, shrewd, vigilant, inventive, of men whose dexterity triumphs over the most perplexing combinations of circumstances, whose presaging instinct, no sign of the times, no incipient change of public feelings, can elude. But it is an unpropitious season for the firm and masculine virtues. The statesman who enters on his career at such a time, can form no permanent connections-can make no accurate observations on the higher parts of political science. Before he can attach himself to a party, it is scattered; before he can study the nature of a government, it is overturned. The oath of abjuration comes close on the oath of alle giance. The association which was subscribed yesterday, is burned by the hangmen to-day. In the midst of the constant eddy and change, self-preservation becomes the first object of the adventurer. It is a task too hard for the strongest head, to keep itself from becoming giddy in the eternal whirl. Public spirit is out of the question; a laxity of principle, without which no public man can be eminent, or even safe, becomes too common to be scandalous; and the whole nation looks coolly on instances of apostasy, which would startle the foulest turncoat of more settled times.

From the moment that Cromwell is dead and The history of France since the revolution buried, we go on in almost perfect harmony affords some striking illustrations of these with Mr. Hallam to the end of his book. The remarks. The same man was minister of the times which followed the Restoration peculiarly republic, of Bonaparte, of Louis the Eight require that unsparing impartiality which is eenth, of Bonaparte again after his return from his most distinguishing virtue. No part of Elba, of Louis again after his return from our history, during the last three centuries, Ghent. Yet all these manifold treasons by no presents a spectacle of such general dreari- means seemed to destroy his influence, or even ness. The whole breed of our statesmen seem to fix any peculiar stain of infamy on his chato have degenerated; and their moral and in-racter. We, to be sure, did not know what to tellectual littleness strikes us with the more make of him; but his countrymen did not disgust, because we see it placed in immediate seem to be shocked; and in truth they had contrast with the high and majestic qualities of little right to be shocked: for there was the race which they succeeded. In the great civil scarcely one Frenchman distinguished in the

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