Essay II.: On the Character of the Great Men of the Revolution of 1640, a Propos of the History of Cromwell, by M. Ville

Under the title of the history of Cromwell, M. Villemain has written a complete history of the revolutions of England, from the commencement of the debates between public opinion and King Charles the First, until the return of Charles the Second. Cromwell figures in that great scene amongst many other men. The author could not present him alone; and if Cromwell does not appear to command all that surrounds him, it is the fault of facts, not his. To a just and sincere historian, Cromwell is not the hero of his own history. Cromwell has a rival, whose fortunate or unfortunate destiny affects the mind of the reader more than victories, stratagems, or blows; this rival is liberty; liberty, already full of life in the hearts of energetic men, when Cromwell was nothing: liberty, greater than Cromwell in his greatness even when he trampled her, faint and expiring, under his feet.

Some critics have poetically lamented that the great figure (thus they call Cromwell) did not appear sufficiently in this work. To give some value to this remark, the precise places in the book should have been pointed out where he ought to have appeared and did not; to speak clearly, the altered facts, or omitted circumstances, should have been placed under the eyes of the public. Without these, the reproach made to the historian is void, and it seems only to have been made for the pleasure of venturing the pompous expression of the great figure, which is an insult to the Revolution of 1640, and to those which have had the same fate.

There is, perhaps, no country where the events of the history of Cromwell have been read less than in France; and there is no country where it is so intrepidly affirmed that Cromwell was a great man. Very little memory is required to discover whence comes this respected opinion, and that it is with us a part of the traditions of the old régime. At the time that the Englishman Sydney daily called Cromwell a tyrant, and acted consistently with this repeated malediction, at that very time the French minister Mazarin acknowledged him to be the genius of the century, and the King of France, Louis XIV., spoke to his ambassadors with uncovered head. Such are the imposing opinions which have doubtless formed our own. Sydney’s judgment has disappeared before these great authorities. What is indeed a rebel in presence of two great statesmen? Of what weight can be the reason of him who only knew how to die for liberty, compared with the reason of those who knew how to govern long and peacefully? Sydney, it is true, has a guarantee of his judgment on Cromwell in the real sentiments of the English people, expressed by ten years of continual insurrections. But Louis XIV. and Mazarin had on their side Christina, Queen of Sweden, who admired Cromwell for having turned out the Parliament; the King of Portugal, who tenderly called him his brother; the King of Spain, who tried to persuade him to make himself king, and offered his assistance; and the Prince of Conti, who spoke of Richard, Cromwell’s son, as of the meanest of mankind, because he only knew how to be a citizen. It is not a paradox to say, that the prestige which attaches itself to the name of Cromwell in the mind of those who know nothing of him but his name, is the work of the men in authority, and the writers in support of that authority. Clarendon, absent from England during all the revolution, admires on returning with Charles II. the destruction of liberty, the dejection of the general mind, the easy obedience, and the enormity of the taxes and army; and seeing this, he celebrates in a book written for the king, the great things which the usurper has done. The poet Cowley, who had been present at the creation of these great things, and had suffered his share of them, does not rejoice quite so much as Lord Clarendon; when he wants to speak of the Protector, his pen only finds these words of gloomy energy: “That man made a jest of our sufferings.” The name of Mazarin’s hero was during his lifetime very much the fashion at courts, and very little so among the nations. We were not a nation then; but the people of Holland were; and it may be seen in the books of the period, what was thought and said there respecting the destroyer of English liberty. We are a nation at the present day; this is doubtless not a reason for us to believe what others have believed, but it is one for us to read seriously, to think for ourselves, and throw off the yoke of the admiration of Louis XIV. and the anathemas of the Prince of Conti.

We love liberty, we seek it; yet the names of those who have loved and sought it are as unknown to us as if they had never existed. How many of us know Ludlow, Harrison, Vane, Haslerig, and even the great Sydney. A French mouth would find a difficulty in pronouncing these foreign names; but our children learn to lisp the name of the Protector Cromwell. The Gauls had said truly: “Woe to the conquered!” Human opinion is often unfaithful to the cause of humanity. In the presence of the victorious chief of a revolution, when the field of battle is cleared, when the victor is the only man displaying himself, the remembrance of this great defeat is reduced in our minds to a few deceived hopes, a few convictions belied, a few vanished chimeras. Our interest, which always requires to be excited by some perceptible being, is easily lost on metaphysical subjects; and for want of food, is bestowed on the success of the conqueror, on the success of our own enemy. We rejoice in his joy; we join our voice to the acclamations which proclaim our nothingness. Such is the fatal force of human feeling; the French have experienced it.

But we must know that these hopes are not pure abstractions or chimeras of liberty, with the destinies of which we find it so difficult to sympathize. They had taken root in the hearts of men; they had fastened themselves invincibly there; they could not cease to exist without those hearts having ceased to beat. This is what we should never forget.

M. Villemain’s merit is that of having been more just than blind fate, and having raised up those she had thrown down; historian of the conqueror, he has made himself the friend of the conquered; he has placed under our eyes, by the side of the sad spectacle of the overthrows of liberty, the picture of its various struggles, and of the virtues which defended it. The constancy and misfortunes of patriots, the energetic protestations of cities, the resistance of a simple merchant, the obscure sufferings of a writer, occupy a great place in his pages. He has not forgotten to celebrate the great characters and perilous enterprises of those who were indignant that English liberty should be lost after so much blood shed in its cause. Those who have criticised his work have little noticed this care, which is one of the author’s best titles to public esteem. Among so many happily sketched characters, the only one which appears to have struck any body is that of Admiral Blake. Is it because Blake commands, is victorious, and runs down Dutch ships? Is it because he said to his sailors, “that they ought not to meddle with what was passing in London, but only occupy themselves about foreigners.” Is it that in effect the type of a public man is a general gaining battles, and bearing in him that political passiveness which illustrates the despotism of a master in the name of the glory of his native land? We think not; and woe to France if she still thought it.

Why has not Bradshaw been remarked sooner, who, when Cromwell had turned out the Parliament, said to him openly: “Parliament is not dissolved; know, that beneath heaven there is no authority but its own which has the power to dissolve it?” Ludlow, who said to Cromwell’s own son, “I should detest my own father, if he were in the place of yours;” who, when threatened by Cromwell with being sent to the Tower, calmly contested his right to order an arrest, and said: “A justice of the peace might do it, for he is authorized by the law; but you are not;” who thought himself guilty in having a place as soon as liberty was destroyed, and replied to the trivial objection, that by abandoning his post he lost the opportunity of doing good, “It is wrong to aid the usurpation of Cromwell; and I will not do evil, even that good may come of it?” Harrison, who for his part determined to be poor and persecuted; who braved Cromwell’s hatred without yielding, and without complaining? Hutchinson, who, pressed by Cromwell to accept a place and favours, replied: “I will not enrich myself by assisting to enslave my country?” Colonel Rich, who, called before Cromwell’s council of state, obstinately refused the oath to undertake nothing against his person and power? Sydney, inflexible under Cromwell as under Charles the First? Lilburn, mutilated by order of King Charles the First for having dared to write, and who thus marked with the reprobation of tyranny, braved it again by writing under Cromwell? Tyranny did not forget him; “he died in prison,” eloquently says M. Villemain, “a martyr to liberty under all authorities, and treated as a chimerical and senseless mind by those who cannot conceive resistance to the strongest.”

All these men, and many others whose names might be mentioned, inhabited prisons under Cromwell; and those among them who survived the sufferings of imprisonment, and were unabled to escape from their country, stained with blood the scaffolds under Charles the Second.

Such are those who suffered: does any one wish to know what he was in comparison, who had fortune on his side, and for whom glory is now to be demanded? It suffices to follow him in his actions, and to repeat some of his words; the reader can decide between them.

Already, in 1644, Cromwell, then only an officer, endeavoured to prejudice the cause of liberty by exciting an ill-feeling between the English and the Scotch, who had come to assist the English against the designs of Charles the First. In 1645, he was lieutenant-general; clubs of armed citizens had assembled to preserve property from the pillage inseparable upon war; Cromwell put them down in several places; and when he met with any resistance, he caused his soldiers to attack them. In 1648, when the Parliament, seeing hostilities at an end, and the king a prisoner, wished to disband the army, Cromwell openly excited sedition among the troops; he sought to corrupt the officers, telling them that it was a disgraceful thing to serve a Parliament, and that it was preferable to be in a general’s pay; he indecently repeated that the Commons would not keep themselves quiet, until the army had pulled their ears for them. In 1647, Cromwell took possession of King Charles the First, the prisoner of the English, and negotiated with him to sell him the support of the army against the nation. He promised to purge the House of Commons, so as to give it the constitution necessary to the interests of his majesty.

In 1648, when some young citizens of London came to the bar of the House of Commons to present petitions against the military power, and to demand that the House should make a treaty with Charles the First, in the name of the nation, Cromwell, at the head of his dragoons, drove them through the streets, ordering the soldiers to spare neither women nor children. In the same year, irritated at the king’s negotiating with some Scotch envoys, he raised up the army against him, and after having driven all the energetic men out of the House of Commons, and subdued the rest by terror, he sent to the scaffold, in virtue of a sentence of the Parliament, the man with whom he had negotiated against that very Parliament.

In 1649, he caused those men of his army to be put to the sword and shot, who, remembering that they had fought for liberty, claimed it in England’s name. In 1650, he exercised in Ireland the right of war of barbarian times, putting to the sword all the garrisons which surrendered: become master of the country, he banished all its inhabitants into one single, deserted, and uncultivated province, in which they were ordered to remain under penalty of death; and he divided the rest of the soil among his soldiers. In 1652, he wished to make himself king: “Your plan,” answered those to whom he confided it, “is opposed to the wishes of the nation; you will have nine persons out of ten against you.” “Probably so,” said Cromwell; “but if I disarm the nine first, and put a sword into the hands of the tenth, will not that answer?” In 1654, the Tower of London was full of republican prisoners. In 1655, in a trial in which Cromwell was interested, he subpœnaed the jury by his particular orders; a judge dismissed this illegal jury; the protector loaded this courageous man with reproaches, and let fall these words: “You are not made to be a judge.” In 1656, he circulated threats against the electors who should give their vote to men who were not devoted to him. He five times drove away by armed force the representatives of the nation; he first imprisoned eleven members, then thirty-nine, at last all those of the former patriots who would not join his tyranny, and the officers who, after having served the Parliament, became suspicious from their inaction.

He trampled pitilessly on the two fundamental securities of social existence, liberty of thought, and justice of judgment. He was deaf to the complaints of the friends of the nation, who when he took his first steps in power, said to him, through the lips of Milton: “Respect the hope of the country, respect the presence and the wounds of so many brave men, who have fought for liberty with thee; respect the opinion of other nations, and the great idea they entertain of this republic, which we have so gloriously erected.” But those whom he persecuted were calm in the midst of their adversity, and he was restless, as if he had thought himself condemned to death by a decree of humanity binding to all men, and had expected the executioner every moment. His mother could never hear the sound of fire-arms without starting and naming him, and he never went out except armed under his clothes.

In the following article, we shall consider the general character of parties in the English Revolution, as we have first considered the character of individuals; M. Villemain’s work appears to us remarkable also in this point of view.