MR. PICTON'S LIFE OF OLIVER CROMWELL.* THAT the reading public
takes interest in the history of Eng- land during the seventeenth century seems to be proved by the large number of books written upon the subject. Nor is this surprising, for the seventeenth century is, for practical pur- poses, our transition time between past and present, the period when, in din of battle and clamour of controversy, our affairs were getting placed on their modern footing, and the terms of that partnership between England and Scotland, that arrange- ment between Church and State, that compromise between Crown and Parliament, which have since been, in the main, preserved, were being settled. And yet we are convinced that ignorance of our history during the seventeenth century is widely prevalent and very dense. The literature of the time, except here and there a book, has become obsolete. Its watch- words, its party cries, its nicknames, its dominant ideas, have passed away. Not long ago, Mr. Harrison, a man of informa- tion and intelligence far above the average, called Milton, in one of his pieces of fervently eloquent declamation, the "great malignant." The words might thrill Milton's bones with horror, after their rest of two hundred years. To apply the term " malignant" to Milton is what it would be to call Gam- betta " the bold Imperialist." The word expressed, more per- haps than any other, that combination of fury and hatred with which the Puritan and Parliament party regarded the party of prerogative and of prelacy.
This train of reflection has' been strongly pressed upon us in looking over Mr. Allanson Picton's volume upon Cromwell. It is in many respects meritorious. Mr. Picton is an able, care- ful, studiously candid writer. No man could approach the subject with more sincere purpose to speak the truth. He has read a good deal in the authorities, has mastered Cromwell's letters, and does not, we think, fall into serious mistakes on matters of detail. True, we have not hunted for such, but if there were many they would have come in our way; and we recollect nothing more important than the statement that Carlyle does not give a letter of Crom- well's containing a notable allusion to Naseby, which letter Mr. Picton will find in Appendix No. 9 of Carlyle's book, third edition.
• Olirer Cromwell: the Man and his Mission. By 5. Allanson Piston. London : Cassell, Fetter, Halpin, and Co. lees.
His account of Cromwell's early life is remarkably clear and ample,—perhaps a little, but certainly not much, too ingeniously imaginative in fitting the circumstances of Cromwell's boyhood.
to his future career. In the general estimate of Cromwell,. we find a great deal to admire and accept. Mr. Picton has the right notion of Cromwell as a mass of rugged energy and lightning-like genius, thoroughly imbued and inspired with what Hume called enthusiasm, what German discoursers on the philosophy of history would call the religious idea, and what he himself called faith in God. Need we say more to evince our belief that this volume is a valuable contribution to• the literature of the subject P Nevertheless, Mr. Picton's book illustrates the extreme difficulty of attaining to a really deep and intelligent appre- hension of the motives and objects, the good qualities and the shortcomings, the opinions and the sentiments, the party dis- tinctions and real causes of misunderstanding, among our ancestors of the seventeenth century. He often strikes ns as writing like an outsider, — un outsider who, standing on the wall of a city, can discern the costume and movements, and even to some extent the features, of those who people its streets, but has no inner vision of their hearts and souls. His temper is that of a philosophico-religious critic of great mental serenity ; and he has to judge of men who- were in the throes of intense excitement. He does not give us the atmosphere of the time, with its terrible vibrations.. It is in this respect that, despite grave drawbacks, Carlyle has value,—nay, even transcendent value, as an historian. He has not only the Homeric breadth and vividness of narrative, but that intense Homeric sympathy which, as we read the Iliad, makes ns feel that the poet' lives in his own Achilles. Carlyle is, indeed, the Homer of revolutions, and chiefly of the Puritan revolution. He entered into the stern enthu- siasm of the men who rose against Charles, with the impassioned sympathy of a Puritan or a Covenanter born out of due time. Even Carlyle, however, did to some slight extent, though less beyond all comparison than previous writers, translate the language of the seventeenth century into that of the nineteenth; and it may be reasonably doubted whether Cromwell would have endorsed at all points the exposition and vindication of his character and purposes tendered by his most celebrated wor- shipper.
But Mr. Picton is much less capable of feeling as Puritans- and Covenanters felt than the son of the grim Presbyterian peasant of Ecclefechan. He makes us aware, at a critical and crucial stage in his narrative, that such a thing as popular theological enthusiasm—such a thing as a nation caring intensely about questions of doctrine and Church government— has not been imaginatively apprehended by him. But here we come upon the differentia of the Puritan period. Mr. Picton has not realised the truly singular, yet strictly historical phenomenon of an England and a Scotland in which, for the great body of the people, from squires, well-to-do farmers, and merchants, down to ploughmen and apprentices, the points in dispute beeween Papist and Protestant, between Arminian and Calvinist, between Episcopalian, Presbyterian, and Independent, were matters of an interest as intense and consuming as that which Jacobins of 1794 took in their Republic, or that which Reformers of 1831 took in their Bill. He says that the grievance of" the Eng- lish people " against Charles, Land, and Strafford " had been mainly that of illegal impositions, and only secondarily that of re- ligious persecution." This we hold tobe the most comprehensively fatal error into which it is possible for any man to fall in treat- ing of the history of Great Britain in the seventeenth century. Without forgetting for one moment that the popular party was resolutely bent upon placing the political liberties of the country on an impregnable basis, and making Parliament not the mere instrument and appanage of the Sovereign, but authoritative, in the last resort, over the Sovereign himself, we, nevertheless, are absolutely certain that the main impelling fervour of the Revolution was religion.
How any one can read Milton's pamphlets, and in par- ticular that apostrophe to England sitting like a mother- bereaved of her children, who had been driven into the wilderness -of the West, and yet think that it was for exemption from taxes, and not for freedom to worship God according to conscience, that the Puritans drew the sword, we are linable to comprehend- When we speak, however, of the Puritan demand for liberty to worship God according to conscience, we must beware of the al- most equally fatal error of supposing that they fought for what we
moderns understand by toleration. That was not, in England at least, the contention of the time. Toleration was on the way; the century was not to close before, with the aid of Dutch William, our perverse ancestors found themselves grudgingly and grumblingly compelled to adopt it; but the generation of the Civil Wars had, for their special work in connection with toleration, to demon- strate, amid bloodshed and heartbnrning, that civilisation had become impossible without it, that its evolution was a necessity of progressive national life. If we would understand the Puritan Revolution, we must realise that no one in the time of the Long Parliament was tolerant. Some men were vastly more tolerant than others. Milton and Cromwell distanced the great body of their contemporaries in this matter. But Cromwell fiercely re- fused to tolerate the Mass even in Ireland, and Milton expressly held that Roman Catholics could not be tolerated. Indeed,
the English of that age, even the foremost of them, were -hardly on a level with men of light and leading on the Con-
tinent. Richelien's scheme of toleration embraced Protestants as well as Roman Catholics, and Cromwell, while claiming privileges for members of the Reformed Church in France, avowed himself unable to meet Mazarin half-way by granting at home what he asked for abroad.
What rendered the problem of arrangement and pacification amid the contending parties impossible in England, except by the transmutation of Cromwell's sword into a sceptre, was that -each party made conscience of finality for its own principle. Had the Episcopalians been able to tolerate the Presbyterians, or the Presbyterians to tolerate the Independents, the sword might never have been drawn, or would have been soon restored to its sheath. Mr. Picton frankly admits that, when the In- dependents had their own chance, in America, they were as intolerant as the others. This fact will present to us no diffi- culty, and cause us little offence, if we apprehend that each party believed itself to possess the very truth of God, and conceived that all other doctrines were more or less hateful and insulting to Him. It was not to escape a dreaded spiritual despotism, it was to procure liberty to adopt their own model of doctrine and disci- pline, that the Independents came to a quarrel with the Presby- terians. Mr. Picton concedes, with his usual candour, that the inquisitorial despotism of Presbyterianism, of which he speaks, has never been exemplified. But he might have added that the Presbyterian Churches have everywhere been conspicuously self-contented ; that in Scotland (where the Presbyterian system, -whatever he may suppose to the contrary, was in operation in absolute perfection during the ascendancy of the Covenanters), all Dissent has originated in the wish of the people to be more Presbyterian than the State Church ; and that neither in Scot- land nor in America has Presbyterianism been other than a nurse of political freedom. Accustomed to the Congregational discipline, under which the Church satisfies itself that every member is in a state of grace, Mr. Picton omits the enormously important consideration, as bearing on the question of inquisi- torial despotism, that the Presbyterian Churches have always made membership depend not upon proof afforded of personal grace, but upon such reasonable presumption thereof as is afforded by a satisfactory acquaintance with Biblical doctrine and an externally unblemished walk. Let it not be fancied that we are pleading the cause of Presbyterianism, or maintaining that the Presbyterians of the Long Parliament were, on the whole, justified in coming to a breach with the Army and with Cromwell. What we say is, that Mr. Picton, in expatiating on the general principle of toleration, misses the mark in respect of the particular grievance complained of by the Independents. The hardship was that they, who had been the forlorn hope in the struggle, should be stigmatised as " Sectaries," and not per- mitted to practise their own worship. How, the modern reader asks, could the Parliament, led by the Presbyterians, make so monstrous a proposal ? The answer is that, on parchment, their case was very strong. In the Grand Remonstrance, the manifesto of the popular party on the eve of the conflict with the King, it is expressly and pointedly declared that no liberty is claimed for the separate Congregational model. In the League or Covenant drawn up between the Parliament and the Scots, when the Army of the latter entered England, before the great battle of Marston Moor, the clause relating to the ecclesiasti- cal arrangement to be adopted in England was, probably through the adroitness of Vane, left ambiguous, but the Presbyterians -could reasonably argue that its meaning had been determined by the specifications of the Grand Remonstrance. In one word, the Presbyterians had a lawyer's case ; Cromwell and the Army planted their feet on natural justice. No previous understand- ings, no parchment provisions, said Cromwell and his men, could justify the Parliament in decreeing that the soldiers of Naseby and Preston, if they wished to serve God in the manner of the so-called Sectaries, must follow their brethren to the wilds of America.
We have said that, in matters of detail, Mr. Picton is gener- ally right, but we cannot add that he has presented a quite accurate view of the great forces and influences that played a part in the Revolutionary commotions of England in the seven- teenth century. Can it be believed that the name of Charles's Queen does not occur in Mr. Piston's index ? He seems wholly oblivious to the part she played in the troubles. Yet we have it under the King's hand that it was to save her that he took steps at the most critical moments, and nothing can be surer than that, had she been away, all would have been different.
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