BOOKS.
REVOLUTIONS IN ENGLISH HISTORY.*
DR. 'VAUGHAN has just completed the great literary labour of his life, his account of Revolutions in English History. As a man of much reading, of clear and definite, if somewhat narrow, ideas, and with a certain power of bookmaking, he has a claim to be judged carefully and at length. Moreover, he represents a section of English society that is not often represented in secular literature, the religious bourgeoisie. His present work will pro- bably be the text-book in Homerton, and the distant oracle of ladies' schools. It has just attained that level of merit which will make it difficult even for those who are painfully conscious of its defects to condemn it as unreservedly as the world expects praise or censure to be given. If history be merely a pleasant story, with facts more or less carefully told and selected to illustrate a particular view, then, indeed, Dr. Vaughan deserves to stand high in the second order of narrators. It is because we believe it to be something immeasurably more than this, to be the recon- struction.of the life of the society of man in its integrity, to require the philosopher's instinct for law, the poet's sympathies with humanity, unwearied research, and unpurchaseable veracity, that we refuse the name of history to Dr. Vaughan's compilation.
The very scheme 6f the book is faulty. It professes to deal not with the regular growth of society, but with its explosions and fever-fits, and, therefore, beats the same relation to history that a sensation novel bears to a psychological romance. It assumes, so to speak, that there are certain abnormal epochs when the work of centuries is undone or transformed by a sudden catas- trophe, as if events were not everywhere so inextricably inter- laced that the last man is the lineal heir of the first. It follows from this tacit denial of law that only a special epoch is passed under review, and that Charles I. is severed from Henry VIII., as we suppose Louis XVI. would be from Louis XIV. But Dr. Vaughan goes even further than this. He separates faith from politics, and tries to consider the country and court parties of the Long Parliament independently of Puritans and Cavaliers. Prac- tically, indeed, he breaks down, and gives the religious element, if anything, a little more than its due. The second volume is repeated in the third. But this very difficulty should have taught him to correct or renounce a faulty plan before it was yet executed. Never, perhaps, was there a time when religion and policy were so largely interwoven as in the seventeenth century. Charles I. fought for the Church and the militia ; Cromwell and his saints had the laws of England as often on their lips as the Lord's laws.
The popular viewof the seventeenth century which Dr. Vaughan represents has been curiously compounded of different influences. The evangelical movement required that Puritanism should be justified and made less unlovely, and it found a rhetorician in Lord Macaulay, who abhorred Laud's littlenesses, and thought Hampden a Whig ; a poet in Mr. Kingsley, who pointed out that Puritan girls might be pretty ; and a thinker in Mr. Carlyle, who talked about "the veracities" where he meant the rule of the strong man armed. Dr. Vaughan reduces the winged words of genius to a prods-verbal, and we are disenchanted and recant our first impressions. What, for instance, is the meaning of Dr. Vaughan's argument, that the Puritans believed in an eternal law that was to shape all the actions of men, and which men's conscience was to interpret, while the Anglicans were Erastian ? Not to mention Hooker, who held firmly that law was the thought of God, and that all sovereignty was derived from the people, can any man assume that Laud and his fellows would have justified Charles I. in abolishing episcopacy or in administering the Sacraments? The worst folly ever talked by the most servile divines never went beyond the theory of passive obedience in outward acts. Nor can it be said that the Puritans, whose intense reality of conviction we heartily reverence, were superior in moral earnest- ness to their Anglican adversaries. Anglicanism had been a compromise under Elizabeth ; it was an idea under Charles I., and an idea for which many thousands of men were will- ing to lay down life and all that makes life valuable. Hales, Chillingworth, Andrews, Hall, Cosine, Brevint, and a host of minor men, had created the Church anew. Had it been the false thing Dr. Vaughan supposes, it would have gone down like stubble before the victorious enemy. The real significance
* Revolutions in Englide Historp. By Hobert Vaughan, D.D. Vol. 1.11. Iteoolutims in Government. London: Longman.
of the Commonwealth wars lies in the fact that both parties were heroic. As for making religion the law of life, what else were Laud's courts designed to do ? Striking at high and low indifferently, as their records show, they 'punished the drunken or quarrelsome rector as unsparingly as the brawling dissident, and made life as unbearable even to their own party as the Puritans made it afterwards. What both desired was a visible Church, with such power to repress the evil-doer as implied an Inquisition; and the issue has taught men to all time that there is no canker that eats more certainly into a state than the lie of a decent life enforced by authority. Talk of Puritan respect for the rights of conscience ! There was no man of the party more tolerant, because none more statesmanlike, than Cromwell, and he told the Irish frankly that he would leave conscience free, but would not allow the mass. Strafford had been more merciful in his generation. As for individual cases, the atrocities practised against Leighton and Pry-one were amply retorted by the Long Parliament, even in their short tenure of power before the bitterness of civil war had commenced. They imprisoned twelve bishops for saying, with perfect truth, that they were afraid to take their seats. When bad news came in from Ire- land, they petitioned the King to let seven English Capuchins who had been arrested under the penal laws be banged. They ordered one Sanderford, a London tailor, to be fined, pilloried, and sent to the House of Correction for life for calling the Parliament traitors. The executions later on of Laud, because they disliked him, and of Lord Capel, because they feared him, were sheer murders. It may be true that the Puritans were generally men of more decent life than the spiritual kinsmen of George Her- bert and of Nicholas Farrar, though there are many scandals afloat against some of the most burning lights of the elect. The middle classes generally are less tempted and more decorous than the upper in all sins of excess. We must balance hypocrisy against blasphemy, vindictive rancour against brutal violence, Vane against Goring, if we would hold our scales even. The task would be no pleasant one ; but simply from the fact that the Puritans triumphed, we believe the sum of their sins would be the blacker, and Dr. Vaughan, who records the infamies of such men as Goring and Lucas and their soldiery, should not forget that Massey's troops were unbearable in the west, that the Scotch committed every sort of violence in the north, till they were bought out with Charles L's purchase-money, and that Cromwell told the Scotch he would hang the peasants in every village, man for man, where an Englishman was killed by the mass-troopers or guerillas. It is not by these sort of arguments, or even by any positive results, that the comparative greatness of groat causes can be estimated. The divine right of kings has not been more fatal to England than the divine right of parliaments which the leading Puritans held, and which Dr. Vaughan endorses in his plea for Strafford's illegal execution. Liberty of conscience was the fruit of two failures to control thought, and men, in the utter weariness of an ideal unachieved, stumbled blindly on a greater result than victorious Puritanism had given them. Com- pared with Cromwell, Charles I. is a constitutional bigot. Yet the anon of this age did something more than grope in darkness about true thoughts. The Churchman knew that be was de- fending that principle of an organic life in societies which is the inner meaning of the principle of antiquity, and with which the ideas of progress and development are bound up; he held that law was external to the individual ; he sympathized with the past of Christendom and the alien Latin Church ; he clung to learning and European thought. The political Churchman, the cavalier, accepted the cumbrous feudalism of his times in a more unreasoning spirit as something not lightly to be tampered with. The Puritan was intense, national, and narrow. In taking the Bible, expounded by himself, for his rule of life, he rejected the culture and associations of sixteen centuries, the possible pro- gress of all future time. No eulogies on the purification of Oxford will outweigh the fact that so few men of learning were ever found among the Puritan ranks. In politics the Puritan was the bourgeois of all time. He abolished the HoUse of Peers; he held down the peasantry with an iron hand. "The rabble" aud " the vulgar," as Puritan writers call them, were royalists everywhere. The pear had nothing to gain from an aristocracy of ten-pound householders, inspired with the idea that it was omnipotent and infallible.
But it is in Dr. Vaughan's personal estimate of Charles I. and Cromwell that he is most feeble. The want of psychological insight, the incapacity to appreciate growth and change, come out here in their most naked nullity. To him Charles I. is the same weak, arbitrary prince throughout, and Cromwell the god- exponent. He gratified bourgeois pride and Protestant feeling by bullying every Catholic State, the strong and the weak, impartially. He waged an unjust war against Spain to gratify English hatred of the Inquisition, and to share the plunder of a declining power. He swept away extinct feu- dalisms at home, but he swept away the constitution and law with them, and governed the country by corporals. His rule could only be perpetuated by a succession of men unscrupulous and able as himself, and had such arisen the very name of freedom would be unknown in England. The Nemesis of his usurpations came upon him even in his life. He declined into vulgarities, established a court and court ceremonial, and was labouring to restore the House of Lords. The nobler men among his old associates, Hutchinson, Fairfax, and Ludlow, held aloof from him in sorrowful contempt. He wore armour under his clothes, and questioned his conscience in agony whether he had not once been in a state of grace. If the eye be indeed purged at the approach of death, he might look forth upon the Court of Charles II., and contrast that reality with the truths for which he had led men to die at Marston Moor and Naseby. The expiation of such a moment might, perhaps, redeem ten years of error ; but is it wise in Puritan apologists to bring the actualities of the Pro- tectorate into presence with the Puritan ideal ? Does Cromwell like man of heroic purpose. It is given to few men, indeed,—it was not given to these,—to exhibit such single-thoughted entirety in their lives. Had Charles I. died in 1640 he would have come down to us in history as the counterpart of Edward IL and Richard II., a prince of narrow intellect, of arbitrary impulses, and with the taint of dishonest Guise blood in his veins. We should have contrasted the sad thoughtful beauty of his face, as Vandyke painted it, with the private ac- counts of the man, awkward, slouching, and shy, and have wondered where the artist found the ideal that be drew. Yet in that portrait is the revelation, as it were, of an inner nature, which suffering brought out, tench by touch, into reality and mellowness. Misfortune could not make Charles wise or states- manlike; could not even teach him to unlearn his views of monarchy, or to be severely truthful. But it drew out the power of endurance, the energy of action, the sentiment of nobility a little short of kingship, and the belief that there were grander causes than a crown. In his worst years he had been a gentleman in many things. He had refused under great temptation to traffic in titles of honour, and he had main- tained the claims of the English flag even arrogantl against Richelieu. He had a sensitive abhorrence of bloodshed and suffering. But under trial he was transformed, so that men were almost fascinated by his ascendancy. "The King has made marvellous progress," said Lord Salisbury, when he met him again, after some years' separation, in the conferences of the Isle of Wight. Thirty years after his death one of his servants said, "I am comforted for the death that is coming on me by the thought that I shall see my Ring again in heaven." In the last scenes of his life Charles bore himself throughout with simple dignity. Even his want of veracity was something different from dishonesty. It was compounded of two things—a belief in statecraft inherited from his father, and a belief taught him by his chaplains in an age of casuistry, that he might annul compacts imposed upon him by violence. In matters of conviction Charles was eminently truthful, and died for being so. He could not say that England was worth a little snuffling through the nose in church, as Henry IV. declared that Paris was worth a mass. He was willing to dupe men by political strategy, but it must be in points that were not points of honour with him. Press him to renounce his faith, and he bowed his head and died. The trials to which Cromwell was exposed were of a subtler kind, and he gave way under them. Mixing among weak and narrow-minded men, he had become self-confi- dent and contemptuous of ordinary humanity. The faith in the Lord of Hosts had gradually been dwarfed into a faith in Crom- well, the Lord's Captain. The sense of power and the lust of power were confounded into a strong resolve to govern. In him, as Milton felt, English Puritanism had its grandest
the hero excuse Cromwell the tyrant ? C. H. P.
(We publish this most able critique without concurriug in its historic drift.■ ED. Spectator.]
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