We have no evidence, indeed, that any Quakers were in Maryland at the passage of the law; and when they came, their case was misunderstood; for the dislike toward them arose from their supposed want of respect for the constituted authorities, and their refusal to take the oath of submission. A constitutional difficulty might also readily occur to anyone, as it certainly did to the Proprietary, who was bound by the charter to maintain the fundamental principles of Anglo-Saxon law, which had always regarded the instrumentality of the oath in the administration of practical justice as the corner-stone of a system. But every disposition was manifested to render them comfortable; and they soon became a flourishing and influential denomination.

Notwithstanding the imperfection which ever marks human legislation, it is wonderful to think how far our ancestors went in the march of religious freedom. The earliest policy of Maryland was in striking contrast with that of every other colony. The toleration which prevailed from the first, and fifteen years later was formally ratified by the voice of the people, must, therefore, be regarded as the living embodiment of a great idea; the introduction of a new element into the civilization of Anglo-American humanity; the beginning of another movement in the progress of the human mind.

FOOTNOTES:

[36] The words in the English copy of the charter are "God's holy and true Christian religion"; in the Latin, "Sacrosancta Dei et vera Christiana religio."

[37] "The Virginians," says Chalmers, "boasted, with their wonted pride, that the colonists of Kent sent burgesses to their assembly, and were subjected to their jurisdiction, before Maryland had a name." Nor was the boast without foundation. Their early legislative journals show conclusively that the island was represented by Captain Nicholas Martin.

[38] The date of the settlement cannot be accurately given. Ethan Allen supposes it was during the year 1629.



GREAT CIVIL WAR IN ENGLAND

EXECUTION OF CHARLES I

A.D. 1649

LORD MACAULAY CHARLES KNIGHT

No period of English history is more crowded with important events than that of the civil war. The intolerant reign of James I had brought him into conflict, not only with the religious elements in the kingdom, but also with Parliament.

Like James, his son and successor, Charles I, was a stubborn believer in the divine right of the monarch; and as James had shown throughout his reign a flagrant disregard of law, so Charles from the outset betrayed the same disposition. He surrounded himself with advisers who supported his favorite views. In the first fifteen months of his reign he summoned two parliaments only to dissolve them in anger. Next he raised money by forced loans and other expedients which were odious to many of his subjects.

For the first time England was now divided between two great parties. Matters proceeded with constantly increasing friction, and at last the struggle developed into civil war. Macaulay's summary of it, and Knight's picture of its culmination in that most melancholy tragedy, the execution of the King, cover the subject in its essential aspects, without unnecessary dealing with minor details.

LORD MACAULAY

In August, 1642, the sword was at length drawn; and soon, in almost every shire of the kingdom, two hostile factions appeared in arms against each other. It is not easy to say which of the contending parties was at first the more formidable. The Houses commanded London and the counties round London, the fleet, the navigation of the Thames, and most of the large towns and seaports. They had at their disposal almost all the military stores of the kingdom, and were able to raise duties, both on goods imported from foreign countries and on some important products of domestic industry.

King Charles was ill provided with artillery and ammunition. The taxes which he laid on the rural districts occupied by his troops produced, it is probable, a sum far less than that which the Parliament drew from the city of London alone. He relied, indeed, chiefly, for pecuniary aid on the munificence of his opulent adherents. Many of these mortgaged their land, pawned their jewels, and broke up their silver chargers and christening-bowls in order to assist him. But experience has fully proved that the voluntary liberality of individuals, even in times of the greatest excitement, is a poor financial resource when compared with severe and methodical taxation, which presses on the willing and unwilling alike.

Charles, however, had one advantage, which, if he had used it well, would have more than compensated for the want of stores and money, and which, notwithstanding his mismanagement, gave him, during some months, a superiority in the war. His troops at first fought much better than those of the Parliament. Both armies, it is true, were almost entirely composed of men who had never seen a field of battle. Nevertheless, the difference was great. The Parliamentary ranks were filled with hirelings whom want and idleness had induced to enlist. Hampden's regiment was regarded as one of the best; and even Hampden's regiment was described by Cromwell as a mere rabble of tapsters and serving-men out of place.

The royal army, on the other hand, consisted in great part of gentlemen, high-spirited, ardent, accustomed to consider dishonor as more terrible than death, accustomed to fencing, to the use of fire-arms, to bold riding, and to manly and perilous sport, which has been well called the image of war. Such gentlemen, mounted on their favorite horses, and commanding little bands composed of their younger brothers, grooms, gamekeepers, and huntsmen, were, from the very first day on which they took the field, qualified to play their part with credit in a skirmish. The steadiness, the prompt obedience, the mechanical precision of movement, which are characteristic of the regular soldier, these gallant volunteers never attained. But they were at first opposed to enemies as undisciplined as themselves, and far less active, athletic, and daring. For a time, therefore, the Cavaliers were successful in almost every encounter.

The Houses had also been unfortunate in the choice of a general. The rank and wealth of the Earl of Essex made him one of the most important members of the Parliamentary party. He had borne arms on the Continent with credit, and, when the war began, had as high a military reputation as any man in the country. But it soon appeared that he was unfit for the post of commander-in-chief. He had little energy and no originality. The methodical tactics which he had learned in the war of the Palatinate did not save him from the disgrace of being surprised and baffled by such a captain as Rupert, who could claim no higher fame than that of an enterprising partisan.

Nor were the officers who held the chief commissions under Essex qualified to supply what was wanting in him. For this, indeed, the Houses are scarcely to be blamed. In a country which had not, within the memory of the oldest person living, made war on a great scale by land, generals of tried skill and valor were not to be found. It was necessary, therefore, in the first instance, to trust untried men; and the preference was naturally given to men distinguished either by their station or by the abilities which they had displayed in Parliament.

In scarcely a single instance, however, was the selection fortunate. Neither the grandees nor the orators proved good soldiers. The Earl of Stamford, one of the greatest nobles of England, was routed by the Royalists at Stratton. Nathaniel Fiennes, inferior to none of his contemporaries in talents for civil business, disgraced himself by the pusillanimous surrender of Bristol. Indeed, of all the statesmen who at this juncture accepted high military commands, Hampden alone appears to have carried into the camp the capacity and strength of mind which had made him eminent in politics.

When the war had lasted a year, the advantage was decidedly with the Royalists. They were victorious, both in the western and in the northern counties. They had wrested Bristol, the second city in the kingdom, from the Parliament. They had won several battles, and had not sustained a single serious or ignominious defeat. Among the Roundheads adversity had begun to produce dissension and discontent. The Parliament was kept in alarm, sometimes by plots and sometimes by riots. It was thought necessary to fortify London against the royal army, and to hang some disaffected citizens at their own doors. Several of the most distinguished peers who had hitherto remained at Westminster fled to the court at Oxford; nor can it be doubted that if the operations of the Cavaliers had at this season been directed by a sagacious and powerful mind, Charles would soon have marched in triumph to Whitehall.

But the King suffered the auspicious moment to pass away; and it never returned. In August, 1643, he sat down before the city of Gloucester. That city was defended by the inhabitants and by the garrison, with a determination such as had not, since the commencement of the war, been shown by the adherents of the Parliament. The emulation of London was excited. The train-bands of the city volunteered to march wherever their services might be required. A great force was speedily collected and began to move westward. The siege of Gloucester was raised; the Royalists in every part of the kingdom were disheartened; the spirit of the Parliamentary party revived; and the apostate lords, who had lately fled from Westminster to Oxford, hastened back from Oxford to Westminster.

And now a new and alarming class of symptoms began to appear in the distempered body politic. There had been, from the first, in the Parliamentary party, some men whose minds were set on objects from which the majority of that party would have shrunk with horror. These men were, in religion Independents. They conceived that every Christian congregation had, under Christ, supreme jurisdiction in things spiritual; that appeals to provincial and national synods were scarcely less unscriptural than appeals to the court of arches or to the Vatican; and that popery, prelacy, and Presbyterianism were merely three forms of one great apostasy. In politics, the Independents were, to use the phrase of their time, root and branch men, or, to use the kindred phrase of our own time, radicals. Not content with limiting the power of the monarch, they were desirous to erect a commonwealth on the ruins of the old English polity.

At first they had been inconsiderable, both in numbers and in weight; but before the war had lasted two years they became, not indeed the largest, but the most powerful, faction in the country. Some of the old Parliamentary leaders had been removed by death; and others had forfeited the public confidence. Pym had been borne, with princely honors, to a grave among the Plantagenets. Hampden had fallen, as became him, while vainly endeavoring, by his heroic example, to inspire his followers with courage to face the fiery cavalry of Rupert. Bedford had been untrue to the cause. Northumberland was known to be lukewarm. Essex and his lieutenants had shown little vigor and ability in the conduct of military operations. At such a conjuncture it was that the Independent party, ardent, resolute, and uncompromising, began to raise its head, both in the camp and in the House of Commons.

The soul of that party was Oliver Cromwell. Bred to peaceful occupations, he had, at more than forty years of age, accepted a commission in the Parliamentary army. No sooner had he become a soldier than he discerned, with the keen glance of genius, what Essex, and men like Essex, with all their experience, were unable to perceive. He saw precisely where the strength of the Royalists lay, and by what means alone that strength could be overpowered. He saw that it was necessary to reconstruct the army of the Parliament. He saw also that there were abundant and excellent materials for the purpose, materials less showy, indeed, but more solid, than those of which the gallant squadrons of the King were composed. It was necessary to look for recruits who were not mere mercenaries, for recruits of decent station and grave character, fearing God and zealous for public liberty. With such men he filled his own regiment, and, while he subjected them to a discipline more rigid than had ever before been known in England, he administered to their intellectual and moral nature stimulants of fearful potency.

The events of the year 1644 fully proved the superiority of his abilities. In the South, where Essex held the command, the Parliamentary forces underwent a succession of shameful disasters; but in the North the victory of Marston Moor fully compensated for all that had been lost elsewhere. That victory was not a more serious blow to the Royalists than to the party which had hitherto been dominant at Westminster; for it was notorious that the day, disgracefully lost by the Presbyterians, had been retrieved by the energy of Cromwell and by the steady valor of the warriors whom he had trained.

These events produced the "Self-denying Ordinance" and the new model of the army. Under decorous pretexts, and with every mark of respect, Essex and most of those who had held high posts under him were removed; and the conduct of the war was intrusted to very different hands. Fairfax, a brave soldier, but of mean understanding and irresolute temper, was the nominal lord-general of the forces; but Cromwell was their real head.

Cromwell made haste to organize the whole army on the same principles on which he had organized his own regiment. As soon as this process was complete, the event of the war was decided. The Cavaliers had now to encounter natural courage equal to their own, enthusiasm stronger than their own, and discipline such as was utterly wanting to them. It soon became a proverb that the soldiers of Fairfax and Cromwell were men of a different breed from the soldiers of Essex. At Naseby took place the first great encounter between the Royalists and the remodelled army of the Houses. The victory of the Roundheads was complete and decisive. It was followed by other triumphs in rapid succession. In a few months the authority of the Parliament was fully established over the whole kingdom. Charles fled to the Scots, and was by them, in a manner which did not much exalt their national character, delivered up to his English subjects.

While the event of the war was still doubtful, the Houses had put the primate to death, had interdicted, within the sphere of their authority, the use of the liturgy, and had required all men to subscribe that renowned instrument known by the name of the "Solemn League and Covenant." Covenanting work, as it was called, went on fast. Hundreds of thousands affixed their names to the rolls, and, with hands lifted up toward heaven, swore to endeavor, without respect of persons, the extirpation of popery and prelacy, heresy and schism, and to bring to public trial and condign punishment all who should hinder the reformation of religion. When the struggle was over, the work of innovation and revenge was pushed on with increased ardor. The ecclesiastical polity of the kingdom was remodelled. Most of the old clergy were ejected from their benefices. Fines, often of ruinous amount, were laid on the Royalists, already impoverished by large aids furnished to the King. Many estates were confiscated. Many proscribed Cavaliers found it expedient to purchase, at an enormous cost, the protection of eminent members of the victorious party. Large domains, belonging to the crown, to the bishops, and to the chapters, were seized, and either granted away or put up to auction. In consequence of these spoliations, a great part of the soil of England was at once offered for sale. As money was scarce, as the market was glutted, as the title was insecure, and as the awe inspired by powerful bidders prevented free competition, the prices were often merely nominal. Thus many old and honorable families disappeared and were heard of no more; and many new men rose rapidly to affluence.

But, while the Houses were employing their authority thus, it suddenly passed out of their hands. It had been obtained by calling into existence a power which could not be controlled. In the summer of 1647, about twelve months after the last fortress of the Cavaliers had submitted to the Parliament, the Parliament was compelled to submit to its own soldiers. Thirteen years followed, during which England was, under various names and forms, really governed by the sword. Never before that time, or since that time, was the civil power in our country subjected to military dictation.

The army which now became supreme in the state was an army very different from any that has since been seen among us. At present the pay of the common soldier is not such as can seduce any but the humblest class of English laborers from their calling. A barrier almost impassable separates him from the commissioned officer. The great majority of those who rise high in the service rise by purchase. So numerous and extensive are the remote dependencies of England that every man who enlists in the line must expect to pass many years in exile, and some years in climates unfavorable to the health and vigor of the European race. The army of the Long Parliament was raised for home service. The pay of the private soldier was much above the wages earned by the great body of the people; and, if he distinguished himself by intelligence and courage, he might hope to attain high commands.

The ranks were accordingly composed of persons superior in station and education to the multitude. These persons, sober, moral, diligent, and accustomed to reflect, had been induced to take up arms, not by the pressure of want, not by the love of novelty and license, not by the arts of recruiting-officers, but by religious and political zeal, mingled with the desire of distinction and promotion. The boast of the soldiers, as we find it recorded in their solemn resolutions, was that they had not been forced into the service, nor had enlisted chiefly for the sake of lucre, that they were no janizaries, but freeborn Englishmen, who had, of their own accord, put their lives in jeopardy for the liberties and religion of England, and whose right and duty it was to watch over the welfare of the nation which they had saved.

A force thus composed might, without injury to its efficiency, be indulged in some liberties which, if allowed to any other troops, would have proved subversive of all discipline. In general, soldiers who should form themselves into political clubs, elect delegates, and pass resolutions on high questions of state, would soon break loose from all control, would cease to form an army, and would become the worst and most dangerous of mobs. Nor would it be safe in our time to tolerate in any regiment religious meetings, at which a corporal versed in Scripture should lead the devotions of his less gifted colonel, and admonish a backsliding major. But such was the intelligence, the gravity, and the self-command of the warriors whom Cromwell had trained that in their camp a political organization and a religious organization could exist without destroying military organization. The same men, who, off duty, were noted as demagogues and field preachers were distinguished by steadiness, by the spirit of order, and by prompt obedience on watch, on drill, and on the field of battle.

In war this strange force was irresistible. The stubborn courage characteristic of the English people was, by the system of Cromwell, at once regulated and stimulated. Other leaders have maintained order as strict. Other leaders have inspired their followers with zeal as ardent. But in his camp alone the most rigid discipline was found in company with the fiercest enthusiasm. His troops moved to victory with the precision of machines, while burning with the wildest fanaticism of crusaders. From the time when the army was remodelled to the time when it was disbanded, it never found, either in the British Islands or on the Continent, an enemy who could stand its onset. In England, Scotland, Ireland, Flanders, the Puritan warriors, often surrounded by difficulties, sometimes contending against three-fold odds, not only never failed to conquer, but never failed to destroy and break in pieces whatever force was opposed to them. They at length came to regard the day of battle as a day of certain triumph, and marched against the most renowned battalions of Europe with disdainful confidence.

Turenne was startled by the shout of stern exultation with which his English allies advanced to the combat, and expressed the delight of a true soldier when he learned that it was ever the fashion of Cromwell's pikemen to rejoice greatly when they beheld the enemy; and the banished Cavaliers felt an emotion of national pride when they saw a brigade of their countrymen, outnumbered by foes and abandoned by friends, drive before it in headlong rout the finest infantry of Spain, and force a passage into a counter-scarp which had just been pronounced impregnable by the ablest of the marshals of France.

But that which chiefly distinguished the army of Cromwell from other armies was the austere morality and the fear of God which pervaded all ranks. It is acknowledged by the most zealous Royalists that, in that singular camp, no oath was heard, no drunkenness or gambling was seen, and that, during the long dominion of the soldiery, the property of the peaceable citizen and the honor of woman were held sacred. If outrages were committed, they were outrages of a very different kind from those of which a victorious army is generally guilty. No servant girl complained of the rough gallantry of the redcoats. Not an ounce of plate was taken from the shops of the goldsmiths. But a Pelagian sermon, or a window on which the Virgin and Child were painted, produced in the Puritan ranks an excitement which it required the utmost exertions of the officers to quell. One of Cromwell's chief difficulties was to restrain his musketeers and dragoons from invading by main force the pulpits of ministers whose discourses, to use the language of that time, were not savory; and too many of our cathedrals still bear the marks of the hatred with which those stern spirits regarded every vestige of popery.

To keep down the English people was no light task even for that army. No sooner was the first pressure of military tyranny felt than the nation, unbroken to such servitude, began to struggle fiercely. Insurrections broke out even in those counties which, during the recent war, had been the most submissive to the Parliament. Indeed, the Parliament itself abhorred its old defenders more than its old enemies, and was desirous to come to terms of accommodation with Charles at the expense of the troops. In Scotland, at the same time, a coalition was formed between the Royalists and a large body of Presbyterians who regarded the doctrines of the Independents with detestation.

At length the storm burst. There were risings in Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Kent, Wales. The fleet in the Thames suddenly hoisted the royal colors, stood out to sea, and menaced the southern coast. A great Scottish force crossed the frontier and advanced into Lancashire. It might well be suspected that these movements were contemplated with secret complacency by a majority both of the Lords and of the Commons.

But the yoke of the army was not to be so shaken off. While Fairfax suppressed the risings in the neighborhood of the capital, Oliver routed the Welsh insurgents, and, leaving their castles in ruins, marched against the Scots. His troops were few, when compared with the invaders; but he was little in the habit of counting his enemies. The Scottish army was utterly destroyed. A change in the Scottish government followed. An administration, hostile to the King, was formed at Edinburgh; and Cromwell, more than ever the darling of his soldiers, returned in triumph to London.

And now a design, to which, at the commencement of the civil war, no man would have dared to allude, and which was not less inconsistent with the Solemn League and Covenant than with the old law of England, began to take a distinct form. The austere warriors who ruled the nation had, during some months, meditated a fearful vengeance on the captive King. When and how the scheme originated, whether it spread from the general to the ranks or from the ranks to the general, whether it is to be ascribed to policy using fanaticism as a tool or to fanaticism bearing down policy with headlong impulse, are questions which, even at this day, cannot be answered with perfect confidence.

It seems, however, on the whole, probable that he who seemed to lead was really forced to follow, and that, on this occasion, as on another great occasion a few years later, he sacrificed his own judgment and his own inclinations to the wishes of the army. For the power which he had called into existence was a power which even he could not always control; and, that he might ordinarily command, it was necessary that he should sometimes obey. He publicly protested that he was no mover in the matter, that the first steps had been taken without his privity, that he could not advise the Parliament to strike the blow, but that he submitted his own feelings to the force of circumstances which seemed to him to indicate the purposes of Providence.

It has been the fashion to consider these professions as instances of the hypocrisy which is vulgarly imputed to him. But even those who pronounce him a hypocrite will scarcely venture to call him a fool. They are therefore bound to show that he had some purpose to serve by secretly stimulating the army to take that course which he did not venture openly to recommend. It would be absurd to suppose that he who was never by his respectable enemies represented as wantonly cruel or implacably vindictive, would have taken the most important step of his life under the influence of mere malevolence. He was far too wise a man not to know, when he consented to shed that august blood, that he was doing a deed which was inexpiable, and which would move the grief and horror, not only of the Royalists, but of nine-tenths of those who had stood by the Parliament. Whatever visions may have deluded others, he was assuredly dreaming neither of a republic on the antique pattern nor of the millennial reign of the saints. If he already aspired to be himself the founder of a new dynasty, it was plain that Charles I was a less formidable competitor than Charles II would be.

At the moment of the death of Charles I the loyalty of every Cavalier would be transferred, unimpaired, to Charles II. Charles I was a captive: Charles II would be at liberty. Charles I was an object of suspicion and dislike to a large proportion of those who yet shuddered at the thought of slaying him: Charles II would excite all the interest which belongs to distressed youth and innocence. It is impossible to believe that considerations so obvious and so important escaped the most profound politician of that age. The truth is that Cromwell had at one time meant to mediate between the throne and the Parliament, and to reorganize the distracted state by the power of the sword, under the sanction of the royal name.

In this design he persisted till he was compelled to abandon it by the refractory temper of the soldiers and by the incurable duplicity of the King. A party in the camp began to clamor for the head of the traitor, who was for treating with Agag. Conspiracies were formed. Threats of impeachment were loudly uttered. A mutiny broke out, which all the vigor and resolution of Oliver could hardly quell. And though, by a judicious mixture of severity and kindness, he succeeded in restoring order, he saw that it would be in the highest degree difficult and perilous to contend against the rage of warriors, who regarded the fallen tyrant as their foe and as the foe of their God. At the same time it became more evident than ever that the King could not be trusted. The vices of Charles had grown upon him. They were, indeed, vices which difficulties and perplexities generally bring out in the strongest light. Cunning is the natural defence of the weak. A prince, therefore, who is habitually a deceiver when at the height of power, is not likely to learn frankness in the midst of embarrassments and distresses.

Charles was not only a most unscrupulous but a most unlucky dissembler. There never was a politician to whom so many frauds and falsehoods were brought home by undeniable evidence. He publicly recognized the Houses at Westminster as a legal Parliament, and at the same time made a private minute in council declaring the recognition null. He publicly disclaimed all thought of calling in foreign aid against his people; he privately solicited aid from France, from Denmark, and from Lorraine. He publicly denied that he employed papists: at the same time he privately sent to his generals directions to employ every papist that would serve. He publicly took the sacrament at Oxford as a pledge that he never would even connive at popery. He privately assured his wife that he intended to tolerate popery in England; and he authorized Lord Glamorgan to promise that popery should be established in Ireland. Then he attempted to clear himself at his agent's expense.

Glamorgan received, in the royal handwriting, reprimands intended to be read by others, and eulogies which were to be seen only by himself. To such an extent, indeed, had insincerity now tainted the King's whole nature, that his most devoted friends could not refrain from complaining to each other, with bitter grief and shame, of his crooked politics. His defeats, they said, gave them less pain than his intrigues. Since he had been a prisoner, there was no section of the victorious party which had not been the object both of his flatteries and of his machinations; but never was he more unfortunate than when he attempted at once to cajole and to undermine Cromwell.

Cromwell had to determine whether he would put to hazard the attachment of his party, the attachment of his army, his own greatness, nay, his own life, in an attempt which would probably have been vain, to save a prince whom no engagement could bind. With many struggles and misgivings, and probably not without many prayers, the decision was made. Charles was left to his fate. The military saints resolved that, in defiance of the old laws of the realm, and of the almost universal sentiment of the nation, the King should expiate his crimes with his blood. He for a time expected a death like that of his unhappy predecessors, Edward II and Richard II. But he was in no danger of such treason. Those who had him in their grip were not midnight stabbers. What they did they did in order that it might be a spectacle to heaven and earth, and that it might be held in everlasting remembrance. They enjoyed keenly the very scandal which they gave. That the ancient constitution and the public opinion of England were directly opposed to regicide made regicide seem strangely fascinating to a party bent on effecting a complete political and social revolution.

In order to accomplish their purpose, it was necessary that they should first break in pieces every part of the machinery of the government; and this necessity was rather agreeable than painful to them. The Commons passed a vote tending to accommodation with the King. The soldiers excluded the majority by force. The Lords unanimously rejected the proposition that the King should be brought to trial. Their house was instantly closed. No court known to the law would take on itself the office of judging the fountain of justice. A revolutionary tribunal was created. That tribunal pronounced Charles a tyrant, a traitor, a murderer, and a public enemy; and his head was severed from his shoulders, before thousands of spectators, in front of the banqueting-hall of his own palace.

In no long time it became manifest that those political and religious zealots to whom this deed is to be ascribed had committed, not only a crime, but an error. They had given to a prince, hitherto known to his people chiefly by his faults, an opportunity of displaying, on a great theatre, before the eyes of all nations and all ages, some qualities which irresistibly call forth the admiration and love of mankind, the high spirit of a gallant gentleman, the patience and meekness of a penitent Christian. Nay, they had so contrived their revenge that the very man whose life had been a series of attacks on the liberties of England now seemed to die a martyr in the cause of those liberties. No demagogue ever produced such an impression on the public mind as the captive King, who, retaining in that extremity all his regal dignity, and confronting death with dauntless courage, gave utterance to the feelings of his oppressed people, manfully refused to plead before a court unknown to the law, appealed from military violence to the principles of the constitution, asked by what right the House of Commons had been purged of its most respectable members and the House of Lords deprived of its legislative functions, and told his weeping hearers that he was defending, not only his own cause, but theirs.

His long misgovernment, his innumerable perfidies, were forgotten. His memory was, in the minds of the great majority of his subjects, associated with those free institutions which he had during many years labored to destroy; for those free institutions had perished with him, and, amid the mournful silence of a community kept down by arms, had been defended by his voice alone. From that day began a reaction in favor of monarchy and of the exiled house, a reaction which never ceased till the throne had again been set up in all its old dignity.

CHARLES KNIGHT

The drawbridge of Hurst castle[39] is lowered during the night, December 17, 1648, and the tramp of a troop of horse is heard by the wakeful prisoner. He calls for his attendant Herbert, who is sent to ascertain the cause of this midnight commotion. Major Harrison is arrived. The King is agitated. He has been warned that Harrison is a man chosen to assassinate him. He is reassured in the morning, in being informed that the major and his troop are to conduct him to Windsor. Two days after, the King sets out, under the escort of Lieutenant-Colonel Cobbett. At Winchester he is received in state by the mayor and aldermen; but they retire alarmed on being told that the House has voted all to be traitors who should address the King.

The troop commanded by Cobbett has been relieved on the route by another troop, of which Harrison has the command. They rest at Farnham. Charles expresses to Harrison, with whose soldierly appearance he is struck, the suspicions which had been hinted regarding him. The major, in his new buff coat and fringed scarf of crimson silk, told the King "that he needed not to entertain any such imagination or apprehension; that the Parliament had too much honor and justice to cherish so foul an intention; and assured him that whatever the Parliament resolved to do would be very public, and in a way of justice to which the world should be witness, and would never endure a thought of secret violence." This, adds Clarendon, "his majesty could not persuade himself to believe; nor did imagine that they durst ever produce him in the sight of the people, under any form whatsoever of a public trial."

The next day the journey was pursued toward Windsor. The King urged his desire to stop at Bagshot, and dine in the forest at the house of Lord Newburgh. He had been apprised that his friend would have ready for him a horse of extraordinary fleetness, with which he might make one more effort to escape. The horse had been kicked by another horse the day before and was useless. That last faint hope was gone. On the night of December 23d the King slept, a prisoner surrounded with hostile guards, in the noble castle which in the days of his youth had rung with Jonson's lyrics and ribaldry; and the "Gipsy of the Masque" had prophesied that his "name in peace or wars, nought should bound."

But even here he continued to cherish some of the delusions which he had indulged in situations of far less danger. He was still surrounded with something of regal pomp. He dined, as the ancient sovereigns had dined, in public—as Elizabeth, and his father, and he himself had dined—seated under a canopy, the cup presented to him on the knee, the dishes solemnly tasted before he ate. These manifestations of respect he held to be indicative of an altered feeling. But he also had an undoubting confidence that he should be righted, by aid from Ireland, from Denmark, from other kingdoms—"I have three more cards to play, the worst of which will give me back everything." After three weeks of comparative comfort, the etiquette observed toward him was laid aside; and with a fearful sense of approaching calamity in the absence of "respect and honor, according to the ancient practice," is there anything more contemptible than a despised prince?

During the month in which Charles had remained at Windsor there had been proceedings in Parliament of which he was imperfectly informed. On the day he arrived there it was resolved by the Commons that he should be brought to trial. On January 2, 1649, it was voted that, in making war against the Parliament, he had been guilty of treason; and a high court was appointed to try him. One hundred fifty commissioners were to compose the court—peers, members of the Commons, aldermen of London. The ordinance was sent to the Upper House and was rejected. On the 6th a fresh ordinance, declaring that the people being, after God, the source of all just power, the representatives of the people are the supreme power in the nation; and that whatsoever is enacted or declared for law by the Commons in Parliament hath the force of a law, and the people are concluded thereby, though the consent of king or peers be not had thereto.

Asserting this power, so utterly opposed either to the ancient constitution of the monarchy or to the possible working of a republic, there was no hesitation in constituting the high court of justice in the name of the Commons alone. The number of members of the court was now reduced to one hundred thirty-five. They had seven preparatory meetings, at which only fifty-eight members attended. "All men," says Mrs. Hutchinson, "were left to their free liberty of acting, neither persuaded nor compelled; and as there were some nominated in the commission who never sat, and others who sat at first but durst not hold on, so all the rest might have declined it if they would when it is apparent they should have suffered nothing by so doing."

Algernon Sidney, although bent upon a republic, opposed the trial, apprehending that the project of a commonwealth would fail if the King's life were touched. It is related that Cromwell, irritated by these scruples, exclaimed: "No one will stir. I tell you, we will cut his head off with the crown upon it." Such daring may appear the result of ambition or fear or revenge or innate cruelty in a few men who had obtained a temporary ascendency. These men were, on the contrary, the organs of a widespread determination among thousands throughout the country, who had long preached and argued and prophesied about vengeance on "the great delinquent"; and who had ever in their mouths the text that "blood defileth the land, and the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it."[40] They had visions of a theocracy, and were impatient of an earthly king.

Do we believe, as some, not without reasonable grounds, may believe, that the members of the high court of justice expressed such convictions upon a simulated religious confidence? Do we think that, in the clear line of action which Cromwell especially had laid down for his guidance, he cloaked his worldly ambition under the guise of being moved by some higher impulse than that of taking the lead in a political revolution? Certainly we do not. The infinite mischiefs of assuming that the finger of God directly points out the way to believers when they are walking in dangerous and devious paths may be perfectly clear to us who calmly look back upon the instant events which followed upon Cromwell's confidence in his solemn call to a fearful duty. But we are not the more to believe, because the events have a character of guilt in the views of most persons, that such a declared conviction was altogether, or in any degree, a lie.

Those were times in which, more for good than for evil, men believed in the immediate direction of a special providence in great undertakings. The words "God hath given us the victory" were not with them a mere form. If we trace amid these solemn impulses the workings of a deep sagacity—the union of the fierce resolves of a terrible enthusiasm with the foresight and energy of an ever-present common-sense—we are not the more to conclude that their spiritualism or fanaticism or whatever we please to call their ruling principle was less sincere by being mixed up with the ordinary motives through which the affairs of the world are carried on. Indeed, when we look to the future course of English history, and see—as those who have no belief in a higher direction of the destiny of nations than that of human wisdom can alone turn away from seeing—that the inscrutable workings of a supreme power led our country in the fulness of time to internal peace and security after these storms, and in a great degree in consequence of them, can we refuse our belief that the tragical events of those days were ordered for our good? Acknowledging that the overthrow of a rotten throne was necessary for the building up of a throne that should have its sole stable foundation in the welfare of the people, can we affirm that the men who did the mightier portion of that work—sternly, unflinchingly, illegally, yet ever professing to "seek to know the mind of God in all that chain of Providence"—are quite correctly described, in the statute for their attainder, as "a party of wretched men, desperately wicked, and hardened in their impiety"?

On January 19th Major Harrison appeared again at Windsor with his troop. There was a coach with six horses in the court-yard, in which the King took his seat; and, once more, he entered London, and was lodged at St. James' palace. The next day the high court of justice was opened in Westminster hall. The King came from St. James' in a sedan; and after the names of the members of the court had been called, sixty-nine being present, Bradshaw, the president, ordered the sergeant to bring in the prisoner. Silently the King sat down in the chair prepared for him. He moved not his hat, as he looked sternly and contemptuously around. The sixty-nine rose not from their seats and remained covered. It is scarcely eight years since he was a spectator of the last solemn trial in this hall—that of Strafford. What mighty events have happened since that time!

There are memorials hanging from the roof which tell such a history as his saddest fears in the hour of Strafford's death could scarcely have shaped out. The tattered banners taken from his Cavaliers at Marston Moor and Naseby are floating above his head. There, too, are the same memorials of Preston. But still he looks around him proudly and severely. Who are the men that are to judge him, the King, who "united in his person every possible claim by hereditary right to the English as well as the Scottish throne, being the heir both of Egbert and William the Conqueror"? These men are, in his view, traitors and rebels, from Bradshaw, the lawyer, who sits in the foremost chair, calling himself lord-president, to Cromwell and Marten in the back seat, over whose heads are the red cross of England and the harp of Ireland, painted on an escutcheon, while the proud bearings of a line of kings are nowhere visible.

Under what law does this insolent president address him as "Charles Stuart, King of England," and say: "The Commons of England being deeply sensible of the calamities that have been brought upon this nation, which are fixed upon you as the principal author of them, have resolved to make inquisition for blood"? He will defy their authority. The clerk reads the charge, and when he is accused therein of being tyrant and traitor he laughs in the face of the court. "Though his tongue usually hesitated, yet it was very free at this time, for he was never discomposed in mind," writes Warwick. "And yet," it is added, "as he confessed himself to the Bishop of London that attended him, one action shocked him very much; for while he was leaning in the court upon his staff, which had a head of gold, the head broke off on a sudden. He took it up, but seemed unconcerned, yet told the Bishop it really made a great impression upon him." It was the symbol of the treacherous hopes upon which he had rested—golden dreams that vanished in this solemn hour.

Again and again contending against the authority of the court, the King was removed, and the sitting was adjourned to the 22d. On that day the same scene was renewed; and again on the 23d. A growing sympathy for the monarch became apparent. The cries of "Justice, justice!" which were heard at first were now mingled with "God save the King!" He had refused to plead; but the court nevertheless employed the 24th and 25th of January in collecting evidence to prove the charge of his levying war against the Parliament. Coke, the solicitor-general, then demanded whether the court would proceed to pronouncing sentence; and the members adjourned to the Painted Chamber.

On the 27th the public sitting was resumed. When the name of Fairfax was called, a voice was heard from the gallery, "He has too much wit to be here." The King was brought in; and, when the president addressed the commissioners, and said that the prisoner was before the court to answer a charge of high treason and other crimes brought against him in the name of the people of England, the voice from the gallery was again heard, "It's a lie—not one-half of them." The voice came from Lady Fairfax. The court, Bradshaw then stated, had agreed upon the sentence.

Ludlow records that the King "desired to make one proposition before they proceeded to sentence; which he earnestly pressing, as that which he thought would lead to the reconciling of all parties, and to the peace of the three kingdoms, they permitted him to offer it: the effect of which was that he might meet the two Houses in the Painted Chamber, to whom he doubted not to offer that which should satisfy and secure all interests." Ludlow goes on to say, "Designing, as I have been since informed, to propose his own resignation, and the admission of his son to the throne upon such terms as should have been agreed upon."

The commissioners retired to deliberate, "and being satisfied, upon debate, that nothing but loss of time would be the consequence of it, they returned into the court with a negative to his demand." Bradshaw then delivered a solemn speech to the King, declaring how he had through his reign endeavored to subvert the laws and introduce arbitrary government; how he had attempted, from the beginning, either to destroy parliaments or to render them subservient to his own designs; how he had levied war against the Parliament, by the terror of his power to discourage forever such assemblies from doing their duty, and that in this war many thousands of the good people of England had lost their lives. The clerk was lastly commanded to read the sentence, that his head should be severed from his body; "and the commissioners," says Ludlow, "testified their unanimous assent by standing up." The King attempted to speak, "but, being accounted dead in law, was not permitted."

On January 29th the court met to sign the sentence of execution, addressed to "Colonel Francis Hacker, Colonel Huncks, and Lieutenant-Colonel Phayr, and to every one of them." This is the memorable document:

"Whereas Charles Stuart, king of England, is and standeth convicted, attainted and condemned of High Treason and other high Crimes: and Sentence upon Saturday last was pronounced against him by this Court, to be put to death by the severing of his head from his body; of which Sentence execution remaineth to be done:

"These are therefore to will and require you to see the said Sentence executed, in the open street before Whitehall, upon the morrow, being the thirtieth day of this instant month of January, between the hours of ten in the morning and five in the afternoon with full effect. And for so doing, this shall be your warrant.

"And these are to require all Officers and Soldiers, and others the good people of this Nation of England, to be assisting unto you in this service.

"Given under our hands and seals.

"JOHN BRADSHAW. "THOMAS GREY. "OLIVER CROMWELL." And fifty-six others.

The statements of the heartless buffoonery, and the daring violence of Cromwell, at the time of signing the warrant, must be received with some suspicion. He smeared Henry Marten's face with the ink of his pen, and Marten in return smeared his, say the narratives. Probably so. With reference to this anecdote it has been wisely observed, "Such 'toys of desperation' commonly bubble up from a deep flowing stream below." Another anecdote is told by Clarendon; that Colonel Ingoldsby, one who signed the warrant, was forced to do so with great violence, by Cromwell and others; "and Cromwell, with a loud laughter, taking his hand in his, and putting the pen between his fingers, with his own hand writ 'Richard Ingoldsby,' he making all the resistance he could."

Ingoldsby gave this relation, in the desire to obtain a pardon after the Restoration; and to confirm his story he said, "if his name there were compared with what he had ever writ himself, it could never be looked upon as his own hand." Warburton, in a note upon this passage, says, "The original warrant is still extant, and Ingoldsby's name has no such mark of its being wrote in that manner."

The King knew his fate. He resigned himself to it with calmness and dignity; with one exceptional touch of natural human passion, when he said to Bishop Juxon, although resigning himself to meet his God: "We will not talk of these rogues, in whose hands I am; they thirst for my blood, and they will have it, and God's will be done. I thank God, I heartily forgive them, and I will talk of them no more." He took an affectionate leave of his daughter, the Princess Elizabeth, twelve years old; and of his son, the Duke of Gloucester, of the age of eight. To him he said: "Mark, child, what I say: they will cut off my head, and perhaps make thee king; but thou must not be king so long as thy brothers Charles and James live." And the child said, "I will be torn in pieces first."

There were some attempts to save him. The Dutch ambassador made vigorous efforts to procure a reprieve, while the French and Spanish ambassadors were inert. The ambassadors from the states nevertheless persevered, and early in the day of the 30th obtained some glimmering of hope from Fairfax. "But we found," they say in their despatch, "in front of the house in which we had just spoken with the general, about two hundred horsemen; and we learned, as well on our way as on reaching home, that all the streets, passages, and squares of London were occupied by troops, so that no one could pass, and that the approaches of the city were covered with cavalry, so as to prevent anyone from coming in or going out. The same day, between two and three o'clock, the King was taken to a scaffold covered with black, erected before Whitehall."

To that scaffold before Whitehall Charles walked, surrounded by soldiers, through the leafless avenues of St. James' Park. It was a bitterly cold morning. Evelyn records that the Thames was frozen over. The season was so sharp that the King asked to have a shirt more than ordinary when he carefully dressed himself. He left St. James' at ten o'clock. He remained in his chamber at Whitehall for about three hours in prayer, and then received the sacrament. He was pressed to dine, but refused, taking a piece of bread and a glass of wine. His purposed address to the people was delivered only to the hearing of those upon the scaffold, but its purport was that the people "mistook the nature of government; for people are free under a government, not by being sharers in it, but by due administration of the laws of it." His theory of government was a consistent one. He had the misfortune not to understand that the time had been fast passing away for its assertion. The headsman did his office; and a deep groan went up from the surrounding multitude.

It is scarcely necessary that we should offer any opinion upon this tremendous event. The world had never before seen an act so daring conducted with such a calm determination; and the few moderate men of that time balanced the illegality and also the impolicy of the execution of Charles, by the fact that "it was not done in a corner," and that those who directed or sanctioned the act offered no apology, but maintained its absolute necessity and justice. "That horrible sentence upon the most innocent person in the world; the execution of that sentence by the most execrable murder that was ever committed since that of our blessed Saviour," forms the text which Clarendon gave for the rhapsodies of party during two centuries. On the other hand, the eloquent address of Milton to the people of England has been in the hearts and mouths of many who have known that the establishment of the liberties of their country, duly subordinated by the laws of a free monarchy, may be dated from this event: "God has endued you with greatness of mind to be the first of mankind, who, after having conquered their own king, and having had him delivered into their hands, have not scrupled to condemn him judicially, and, pursuant to that sentence of condemnation, to put him to death."

In these times in England, when the welfare of the throne and the people are identical, we can, on the one hand, afford to refuse our assent to the blasphemous comparison of Clarendon—blasphemy more offensively repeated in the church service for January 30th; and at the same time affirm that the judicial condemnation which Milton so admires was illegal, unconstitutional, and in its immediate results dangerous to liberty. But feeling that far greater dangers would have been incurred if "the caged tiger had been let loose," and knowing that out of the errors and anomalies of those times a wiser revolution grew, for which the first more terrible revolution was a preparation, we may cease to examine this great historical question in any bitterness of spirit, and even acknowledge that the death of Charles, a bad king, though in some respects a good man, was necessary for the life of England, and for her "teaching other nations how to live."

We must accept as just and true Milton's admonition to his countrymen in reference to this event, which he terms "so glorious an action," with many reasonable qualifications as to its glory; and yet apply even to ourselves his majestic words: "After the performing so glorious an action as this, you ought to do nothing that is mean and little, not so much as to think of, much less to do, anything but what is great and sublime. Which to attain to, this is your only way: as you have subdued your enemies in the field, so to make appear, that unarmed, and in the highest outward peace and tranquillity, you of all mankind are best able to subdue ambition, avarice, the love of riches, and can best avoid the corruptions that prosperity is apt to introduce—which generally subdue and triumph over other nations—to show as great justice, temperance, and moderation in the maintaining your liberty, as you have shown courage in freeing yourselves from slavery."

FOOTNOTES:

[39] Charles I had been confined here for nearly three weeks.

[40] Ludlow uses this text, from Numbers xxxv, in explaining his convictions.



CROMWELL'S CAMPAIGN IN IRELAND

A.D. 1649

FREDERIC HARRISON

Alike on account of its effect upon the Irish people and by reason of the historical debate of which it has continued to be the subject, Cromwell's Irish campaign is a matter of much moment to students of British policy and conquest.

Cromwell had already won a complete victory for the Parliamentary forces over the Royalists of England and Scotland, and had suppressed an insurrection in Wales. As a member of the High Court he had signed the death-warrant of Charles I, and on the establishment of the Commonwealth, early in 1649, his preeminence in both military and political leadership gave him almost absolute control of the English government.

In 1641 there had been a Catholic uprising in Ireland which was attended with considerable success, won at the cost of slaughter often characterized as massacre. Although Charles I made peace with the insurrectionists in 1643, and soon afterward most of them became Royalists, disorders in Ireland still continued. At last the English Parliament resolved to put an end to these tumults, and in March, 1649, Cromwell was appointed to the supreme command in Ireland.

Among the many able writers on Oliver Cromwell none has treated this portion of his career with greater clearness and impartiality than Frederic Harrison, whose history of the campaign in Ireland has been selected, particularly for the sake of these merits, for presentation here.

The reconquest of Ireland was by all felt to be the most urgent interest of the young commonwealth; there was almost as much agreement to intrust Cromwell with the task; and after some consideration, and prayerful consultations in the army, he accepted the duty. The condition of England was precarious indeed; service in Ireland was not popular in the army; and an ambitious adventurer would have been loath to quit England while the first place was still unoccupied. It was at great risk to the cause, and at much personal sacrifice, that Cromwell accepted the difficult post in Ireland as his first duty to his country and to religion.

His campaign and the subsequent settlement in Ireland are among those things which weigh heaviest on Cromwell's memory, and which of his stoutest admirers one only has heartily approved. Fortunately, there is no part of his policy where his conduct is more simple and his motives are more plain. The Irish policy of Cromwell was the traditional policy of all Englishmen of his creed and party, and was distinguished from theirs only by his personal vigor and thoroughness. He was neither better nor worse than the English Puritans, or rather all English statesmen for many generations: he was only keener and stronger. When he, with Vane, Fairfax, Whitelocke, and other commissioners, went to the Guildhall to obtain a loan for the campaign, they told the common council that this was a struggle not between Independent and Presbyterian, but between papist and Protestant; that papacy or popery was not to be endured in that kingdom; and they cited the maxim of James I: "Plant Ireland with Puritans, root out papists, and then secure it."

To Cromwell, as to all English Puritans, it seemed a self-evident truth that one of the three realms could not be suffered to become Catholic; as little could it be suffered to become independent, or the open practice of the Catholic religion allowed there, any more than in England; finally, that peace and prosperity could never be secured in Ireland without a dominant and preponderating order of English birth and Protestant belief. By Cromwell, as by the whole Puritan body—we may fairly say by the whole body of Protestants—the Irish rebellion of 1641 was believed to have opened with a barbarous, treacherous, and wholesale massacre, followed during nine years by one prolonged scene of confusion and bloodshed, ending in an almost complete extinction of the Protestant faith and English interests.

The victorious party, and Cromwell more deeply than others, entered on the recovery of Ireland in the spirit of a religious war, to restore to the Protestant cause one of the three realms which had revolted to the powers of darkness. Such was for centuries the spirit of Protestant England.

Five months were occupied in the preparations for this distant and difficult campaign. Cromwell's nomination was on March 15, 1649. On the same day Milton was appointed Latin secretary to the council. During April Cromwell arranged the marriage of his eldest son with the daughter of a very quiet, unambitious squire. On July 10th he set forth from London with much military state. His lifeguard was a body of gentlemen "as is hardly to be paralleled in the world." He still waited a month in the West, his wife and family around him; and thence wrote his beautiful letter to Mayor about his son, and the letter to "my beloved daughter Dorothy Cromwell, at Hursley."

At length all was ready, and he set sail on August 13th with nine thousand men in about one hundred ships. He was invested with supreme civil, as well as military, command in Ireland; amply supplied with material and a fleet. Ireton, his son-in-law, was his second in command.

On landing in Dublin, the general made a speech to the people, in which he spoke of his purpose as "the great work against the barbarous and bloodthirsty Irish, and all their adherents and confederates, for the propagating of the gospel of Christ, the establishing of truth and peace, and restoring that bleeding nation to its former happiness and tranquillity." His first act was to remodel the Irish army, making "a huge purge of the army which we found here: it was an army made up of dissolute and debauched men"; and the general issued a proclamation against swearing and drunkenness, and another against the "wickedness" that had been taken by the soldiery "to abuse, rob, and pillage, and too often to execute cruelties upon the country people," promising to protect all peaceable inhabitants, and to pay them in ready money for all goods. Two soldiers were shortly hanged for disobeying these orders.

Having made a general muster of his forces in Dublin, and formed a complete body of fifteen thousand horse and foot, he selected a force of ten thousand stout, resolute men, and advanced on Drogheda (in English, Tredagh). Drogheda is a seaport town on the Boyne, about twenty-three miles due north of Dublin. It was strongly fortified, and Ormonde,[41] as Clarendon tells us, had put into it "the flower of his army, both of soldiers and officers, most of them English, to the number of three thousand foot, and two or three good troops of horse, provided with all things." Sir Arthur Ashton, an English Catholic, an officer "of great name and experience, and who at that time made little doubt of defending it against all the power of Cromwell," was in chief command.

Cromwell's horse reached Drogheda on September 3d, his memorable day; some skirmishes followed, and on the 10th the batteries opened in earnest, after formal summons to the garrison to surrender. A steeple and a tower were beaten down the first day; all through the 11th the batteries continued, and at length effected "two reasonable breaches." About five in the evening of the second day the storm began. "After some hot dispute we entered, about seven or eight hundred men; the enemy disputing it very stiffly with us." But a tremendous rally of the garrison—wherein Colonel Castle and other officers were killed—drove out the column, which retreated disheartened and baffled. Then the general did that which as commander he was seldom wont to do, and which he passes in silence in his despatches.

"Resolved," says Ludlow, "to put all upon it, he went down to the breach; and calling out a fresh reserve of Colonel Ewer's men, he put himself at their head, and with the word 'our Lord God,' led them up again with courage and resolution, though they met with a hot dispute." Thus encouraged to recover their loss, they got ground of the enemy, forced him to quit his intrenchments, and poured into the town. There many retreated to the Millmount, a place very strong and difficult of access; "exceedingly high and strongly palisaded." This place commanded the whole town: thither Sir Arthur Ashton and other important officers had betaken themselves. But the storming party burst in, and were ordered by Cromwell to put them all to the sword. The rest of the garrison fled over the bridge to the northern side of the town; but the Ironsides followed them hotly, both horse and foot, and drove them into St. Peter's Church and the towers of the ramparts.

St. Peter's Church was set on fire by Cromwell's order. He writes to the speaker: "Indeed, being in the heat of action, I forbade them to spare any that were in arms in the town: and I think that night they put to the sword about two thousand men." Next day the other towers were summoned, and the work of slaughter was renewed for two days, until the entire garrison was annihilated. It was unquestionably a massacre. "That night they put to the sword about two thousand men." In St. Peter's Church "near a thousand of them were put to the sword, fleeing thither for safety." "Their friars were knocked on the head promiscuously." "I do not think we lost a hundred men upon the place." Such are a few passages from Cromwell's own despatches.

The slaughter was indeed prodigious. The general writes: "I believe we put to the sword the whole number of the defendants. I do not think thirty of the whole number escaped with their lives." "The enemy were about three thousand strong in the town." "I do not believe, neither do I hear, that any officer escaped with his life, save only one lieutenant." He subsequently gives a detailed list of the slain, amounting to about three thousand. Hugh Peters, the chaplain, reports as follows:

"Sir, the truth is, Drogheda is taken, three thousand five hundred fifty-two of the enemy slain, and sixty-four of ours. Ashton the governor, killed, none spared." It is also certain that quarter was refused. "I forbade them to spare any that were in arms in the town." It is expressly told us that all officers and all priests taken were killed. From the days of Clarendon it has been repeated by historians that men, women, and children were indiscriminately slaughtered, and there is evidence of an eye-witness to that effect; but this is not believed to have been done by the order, or even with the knowledge, of the general. The Royalist accounts insist that quarter was promised at first; and that the butchery of men in cold blood was carried on for days. Here again the act must have been exceptional and without authority.

To Cromwell himself this fearful slaughter was a signal triumph of the truth. "It hath pleased God to bless our endeavors." "This hath been a marvellous great mercy." "I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches, who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood; and that it will tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future. Which are the satisfactory grounds to such actions, which otherwise cannot but work remorse and regret." "It was set upon some of our hearts, That a great thing should be done, not by power or might, but by the Spirit of God." In the same sense it was received by Parliament and council of state, by some of the noblest spirits of their age.

Ludlow says simply that this "extraordinary severity was used to discourage others from making opposition." It had always been the policy of Cromwell in battle to inflict a crushing defeat; at Marston, at Naseby, and at Preston he had "taken execution of the enemy" for hours and over miles of country. At Basing and elsewhere, after a summons and a storm, he had slaughtered hundreds without mercy. And such was the law of war in that age, practised on both sides without hesitation. But the item of numbers and of time tells very heavily here. The killing of hundreds in hot blood differs from the massacre of thousands during days.

There was no such act in the whole civil war as the massacre—prolonged for days—of three thousand men enclosed in walls entirely at the mercy of their captors, to say nothing of the promiscuous slaughter of priests, if not of women and unarmed men.

In England such a deed could not have been done; and not in Ireland, but that they were Catholics fighting in defence of their faith. The fact that the garrison were Catholics, fighting on Irish soil, placed them, to the Puritan Englishman, out of the pale. No admiration for Cromwell, for his genius, courage, and earnestness—no sympathy with the cause that he upheld in England—can blind us to the truth, that the lurid light of this great crime burns still after centuries across the history of England and of Ireland; that it is one of those damning charges which the Puritan theology has yet to answer at the bar of humanity.

The tremendous blow at Drogheda struck terror into Ormonde's forces. Dundalk and Trim were abandoned in haste. O'Neil swore a great oath that as Cromwell had stormed Drogheda, if he should storm hell he should take it. One fort after another yielded; and in a fortnight from the taking of Drogheda Cromwell was master of the country north of Dublin. Marching from Dublin south, on September 23d, his army took forts in Wicklow, Arklow, and Enniscorthy; and on October 1st the general encamped before Wexford, an important seaport at the southeastern corner of the island. The town was strong, with a rampart fifteen feet thick, a garrison of over two thousand men, one hundred cannon, and in the harbor two ships armed with fifty-four guns.

Cromwell summoned the governor to surrender, not obscurely threatening him with the fate of Drogheda. "It will clearly appear," he said, "where the guilt will lie if innocent persons should come to suffer with the nocent." His terms were quarter and prison to the officers, quarter and freedom to the soldiers, protection from plunder to the town. These terms were refused, and both sides continued the fight. Suddenly, some breaches being made in the castle, the captain surrendered it, and by a surprise the whole army of the Commonwealth poured into the town. The townsmen took part in the defence; and townsmen and garrison together were forced into the market-place.

There, as at Drogheda, a promiscuous massacre ensued. Upward of two thousand were slain, and with them not a few of the citizens; and the town was delivered over to pillage. It is asserted by the Catholic writers that a body of women, who had taken refuge round the cross, were deliberately slaughtered, and that a general massacre took place without regard to sex or age. Priests were killed at once, and in the sack and pillage undoubtedly some noncombatants, it may be some women and children. But these things were incidents of such a storm, and were not done by design or order of the general. This is his own story:

"While I was preparing of it; studying to preserve the Town from plunder, that it might be of the more use to you and your Army—the Captain, who was one of the Commissioners, being fairly treated, yielded up the Castle to us. Upon the top of which our men no sooner appeared, but the Enemy quitted the Walls of the Town; which our men perceiving, ran violently upon the Town with their ladders, and stormed it. And when they were come into the market-place, the Enemy making a stiff resistance, our forces brake them; and then put all to the sword that came in their way. Two boatfuls of the Enemy attempting to escape, being overprest with numbers, sank; whereby were drowned near three hundred of them. I believe, in all, there was lost of the Enemy not many less than Two-thousand; and I believe not Twenty of yours from first to last of the Siege. And indeed it hath, not without cause, been deeply set upon our hearts, That, we intending better to this place than so great a ruin, hoping the Town might be of more use to you and your Army, yet God would not have it so; but by an unexpected providence, in His righteous justice, brought a just judgment upon them; causing them to become a prey to the Soldier—who in their piracies had made preys of so many families, and now with their bloods to answer the cruelties which they have exercised upon the lives of divers poor Protestants!

"This Town is now so in your power, that of the former inhabitants, I believe scarce one in twenty can challenge any property in their houses. Most of them are run away, and many of them killed in this service. And it were to be wished that an honest people would come and plant here."

The blow that had desolated Drogheda and Wexford did not need to be repeated. Ross was taken; the Munster garrisons—Cork, Kinsale, and others—joined the Commonwealth. And within three months of Cromwell's march from Dublin, the whole of the towns on the eastern and southern sides of Ireland, except Waterford and some others, were reduced to the Parliament. Waterford resisted them; a wet winter set in; and with the wet, dysentery and fever. Cromwell fell ill; many officers sickened; General Jones died. "What England lost hereby is above me to speak," wrote the general. "I am sure I lost a noble friend and companion in labors. You see how God mingles out the cup to us. Indeed we are at this time a crazy company: yet we live in His sight; and shall work the time that is appointed us, and shall rest after that in peace."

After a short rest, on January 29th Cromwell was again in the field. He passed into the heart of the island—into Kilkenny and Tipperary; Clogheen, Castletown, Fethard, Callan, Cashel, Cahir, Kilkenny, Carrick, were taken after a short defence; and Clonmel at last surrendered after a desperate attempt at storm, which cost Cromwell, it is said, two thousand men. This was his last great fight in Ireland. He had now crushed opposition in the whole east and south of the island; the north had returned to the Protestant cause; Waterford fell soon after; and except Limerick, Galway, and a few fortresses, the Parliament's forces were masters of the island. Cromwell had been nine months in Ireland, and at no time possessed an army of more than fifteen thousand men. Within that time he had taken a score of strong places, and in a series of bloody encounters had dispersed or annihilated armies of far greater number than his own. An official summons to England had been sent in January; and it was not till the end of May that he actually obeyed it.

As Cromwell's practice in warfare in Ireland differed somewhat from what he observed elsewhere, and as from that day to this it has been the subject of furious invective, a few words thereon are plainly needed. Cromwell had gone to Ireland, at imminent risk to his cause, to recover it to the Parliament in the shortest possible time, and with a relatively small army. He had gone there first to punish, as was believed, a wholesale massacre and a social revolution, to restore the Irish soil to England, and to replace the Protestant ascendency. In the view of the Commonwealth government, the mass was by law a crime, Catholic priests were legally outlaws, and all who resisted the Parliament were constructively guilty of murder and rebellion. Such were the accepted axioms of the whole Puritan party, and of Cromwell as much as any man.

In such a war he held that where a place was stormed after summons, all in arms might justly be put to the sword, though no longer capable of resistance, and though they amounted to thousands. "They," he writes, "refusing conditions seasonably offered, were all put to the sword." Repeatedly he shot all officers who surrendered at discretion. Officers who had once served the Parliament he hanged. Priests, taken alive, were hanged. "As for your clergymen, as you call them," wrote Oliver to the governor of Kilkenny, "in case you agree for a surrender, they shall march away safely; but if they fall otherwise into my hands, I believe they know what to expect from me." At Gowran the castle surrendered. "The next day the colonel, the major, and the rest of the commission officers were shot to death. In the same castle also he took a popish priest, who was chaplain to the Catholics in this regiment; who was caused to be hanged."

The Bishop of Ross, marching to save Clonmel with five thousand men, was defeated by Broghill, captured, and hanged in sight of his own men. The Bishop of Clogher was routed by Coote and Venables and shared the same fate. "All their friars were knocked on the head promiscuously," Cromwell wrote at Drogheda—as the Catholic martyrologies assert, with torture. Peaceable inhabitants were not to be molested. But all who had taken part in or supported the rebellion of 1641 were liable to justice.

For soldiers he found a new career. By a stroke of profound policy he encouraged foreign embassies to enlist Irish volunteers, giving them a free pass abroad. And thus it is said some forty thousand Irishmen ultimately passed into the service of foreign sovereigns. With great energy and skill the Lord-Lieutenant set about the reorganization of government in Ireland. A leading feature of this was the Cromwellian settlement afterward carried out under the Protectorate, by which immense tracts of land in the provinces of Ulster, Leinster, and Munster were allotted to English settlers, and the landowners of Irish birth removed into Connaught.

Cromwell has left on record his own principles of action in the famous declaration which he issued in January in reply to the Irish bishops:

"Ireland," he says, "was once united to England. Englishmen had inheritances and leases which they had purchased: and they lived peaceably. You broke this Union. You, unprovoked, put the English to the most unheard-of and most barbarous massacre (without respect of sex or age) that ever the sun beheld. It is a fig-leaf of pretence that they fight for their king: really it is for men guilty of blood—helium prelaticum et religiosum—as you say. You are a part of Anti-Christ, whose kingdom the Scripture so expressly speaks should be laid in blood, yea, in the blood of the saints.

"You quote my own words at Ross," he says, "that where the Parliament of England have power, the exercise of the mass will not be allowed of; and you say that this is a design to extirpate the Catholic religion. I cannot extirpate what has never been rooted. These are my intentions. I shall not, where I have power, suffer the exercise of the mass. Nor shall I suffer any Papists, where I find them seducing the people, or by overt act violating the laws. As for the people, what thoughts they have in matters of religion in their own breasts I cannot reach."

But as to the charge of massacre, destruction, or banishment he says: "Give us an instance of one man since my coming into Ireland, not in arms, massacred, destroyed or banished; concerning the massacre or the destruction of whom justice hath not been done, or endeavored to be done."

This very pointed and daring challenge could hardly have been publicly made by such a man as Cromwell, if, to his knowledge, a slaughter of women and unarmed men had occurred. On the other hand, it is certain that priests and others had been killed in cold blood; and a general who delivers over a city to pillage, and forbids quarter, can hardly say where outrage and massacre will cease. As to banishment, the "Cromwellian settlement" was necessarily based on the banishment of those whom the settlers displaced.

With regard to the policy of confiscation and resettlement, Cromwell warmly justifies it. It is the just way of meeting rebellion, he says. You have forfeited your estates, and it is just to raise money by escheating your lands. But apart from the land forfeited, which is but a part of the account, if ever men were engaged in a just and righteous cause it was this, he asserts:

"We are come to ask an account of the innocent blood that hath been shed; and to endeavor to bring to an account—by the presence and blessing of the Almighty, in whom alone is our hope and strength—all who, by appearing in arms, seek to justify the same. We come to break the power of lawless Rebels, who having cast off the Authority of England, live as enemies to Human Society; whose principles, the world hath experience, are, To destroy and subjugate all men not complying with them. We come, by the assistance of God, to hold forth and maintain the lustre and glory of English Liberty in a Nation where we have an undoubted right to do it;—wherein the people of Ireland (if they listen not to such seducers as you are) may equally participate in all benefits; to use liberty and fortune equally with Englishmen, if they keep out of arms."

Such was the basis of the famous "Cromwellian settlement"—by far the most thorough act in the long history of the conquest of Ireland; by far the most wholesale effort to impose on Ireland the Protestant faith and English ascendency. Wholesale and thorough, but not enough for its purpose. It failed like all the others; did more, perhaps, than any other to bind Ireland to the Catholic Church, and to alienate Irishmen from the English rule. On the Irish race it has left undying memories and a legend of tyranny which is summed up in the peasants' saying of the "Curse of Cromwell."

Cromwell, not worse than the Puritans and English of his age, but nobler and more just, must yet for generations to come bear the weight of the legendary "curse." He was the incarnation of Puritan passion, the instrument of English ambition; the official authority by whom the whole work was carried out, the one man ultimately responsible for the rest; and it is thus that on him lies chiefly the weight of this secular national quarrel.

FOOTNOTES:

[41] James Butler, first Duke of Ormonde, was now head of the Irish Royalists.—ED.



MOLIERE CREATES MODERN COMEDY

A.D. 1659

HENRI VAN LAUN

The seventeenth century was the period of a very remarkable literary outburst in France, an outburst which has done much to mould French genius of more recent times. The latter part of the century, which has been called the Augustan age of France, the age of Louis XIV, has certainly been but seldom equalled in the number and variety of the writers who adorned it. Yet it owes much of its brilliancy, much of its rapid development, to the training of the decades previous to 1650, and especially to the enthusiastic patronage of that great statesman Richelieu. Were a Frenchman seeking for a single event, a single date to mark the most striking moment of this literary era, he would probably select the foundation of the French Academy by Richelieu, in 1635. Or perhaps he might turn to the production of Corneille's most famous tragedy, Le Cid, in 1633. Neither of these events, however, has quite what we would recognize as a world-wide significance. The Academy has done much for France, but it has always remained a French academy, and the forty "immortal" Frenchmen who constitute its membership have not always owed their election solely to literary eminence. Neither have Corneille's tragedies been accepted as models by the world at large.

But under Corneille's influence the French stage developed from a state of buffoonery and wooden imitation of the ancients to a state where a greater artist than Corneille gave it really world-wide prominence. Moliere is not only the most celebrated of French actor-managers; he is the greatest of all character-comedy writers, the teacher of all future generations, and the satiric scourge of his own. When in 1659 his comedy Les precieuses Ridicules took Paris by storm, it did more than make a reformation of the manners of its own. It taught the world what true comedy should be, and it sent ringing through the universe forever a mighty trumpet-note against hypocrisy and folly.

The drama attained its highest excellence and repute in the age of Louis XIV, and we should not be making a very hazardous assertion if we were to say that the literature of that epoch in France attained its height of glory in the drama. No French dramatist has excelled Moliere, Corneille, and Racine; no group of authors in the seventeenth century were more brilliant, more powerful, more originative. When we turn our eyes upon the stage for which these three wrote, we find ourselves in the full splendor of the Augustan age, in all its refinement and culture, its luxury and elegance, its strength of wit and justness of expression, its social polish and gorgeous display.

Great as was the advance made by the audience of Jodelle upon the audience of the "moralities" and "sotties," the advance of the court and society under the Valois was equally great. The Grand Monarque, listening to a masterpiece of Corneille, Moliere, or Racine, surrounded by his brilliant circle of lords and ladies, represented an almost incalculable development of ceremonious culture, in idea, in apparel, and in general surroundings, since the day when, about a hundred years before, while the blossom of the Renaissance was barely expanded, the popinjay King Henry II looked on at the first crude sketch of a French classical play. Stage, scenery, appointments, audience, critic, music, actors, and authors, all now bore witness to and adorned, as they were in fact the most elaborate product of, an Augustan age.

Paris up to this time had had little opportunity of knowing what true comedy was. It had had farces in abundance, not only of home growth, but imported, and from Italy in particular. When Moliere came before the public with his homogeneous and well-trained company, and his repertory of excellent character-sketches and comic situations, the prevailing sentiment was expressed by a member of the audience which listened to the first production of his Precieuses Ridicules: "Courage, Moliere; this is genuine comedy!"

France had long been waiting for genuine comedy; waiting rather by an instinctive requirement of the national genius, and with an aptitude to appreciate the highest comic art as soon as it might be manifested, than with any definite conception of the exact thing that was lacking on the stage. The French nature was precisely fitted to produce and to enjoy the loftiest style of character-comedy, but no modern literature had hitherto exhibited that which Moliere was to provide. The author of the Precieuses Ridicules and Tartuffe was essentially the outcome of his age, the dramatist of drawing-room life, whose genius enabled him to web the foibles of the salon with elegant phraseology, and scenic effect with admirable poetic expression; and the contrast between his lofty and conscientious work and the puerilities and license of the Spanish and Italian models was as marked as it was readily recognized.

Yet it was no easy matter to acclimatize in France even the high style of comedy introduced by Moliere, and he had to inter-mix it with a good many farces to make it go down. For twelve long years, leading the life of a strolling player, Moliere observed and studied character; and when at last he thought himself safe from opposition, under the powerful patronage of Louis XIV, the Church, the University, the Sorbonne, and the bigotry of the statesmen—once more united as in the age of Francis I—conspired to cast stumbling-blocks in the way of literary freedom. It was the authorities of the Church which, shocked and jealous at the enthusiasm which greeted the appearance of Tartuffe, brought the veto of the King to bear against the company of the Palais Royal; and though Moliere believed that his private intercession had obtained the removal of this veto, his enemies were bold and powerful enough during the absence of Louis, on the further representation of the play, to prevent its production a second time. Moliere was able to cope with his adversaries; yet it is a noteworthy fact that the decree of excommunication passed against comedians in France was not absolutely rescinded until the present century.

We do not forget that Corneille wrote comedies before Moliere; and indeed there is no doubt that the younger of the two dramatists owed something, even in comedy, to the older. Moliere began by adapting from and imitating the Italian and Spanish comedy-writers, upon whom many of his first farces were founded, and it is not at all unlikely that he even remodelled some of the earlier sotties. It was perhaps due to Corneille's influence as much as to anything else that his genius at last discovered its true level. He confessed to Boileau his great indebtedness to Le Menteur. "When it was first performed," he says, "I had already a wish to write, but was in doubt as to what it should be. My ideas were still confused, but this piece determined them. In short, but for the appearance of Le Menteur, though I should no doubt have written comedies of intrigue, like L'Etourdi, or Le Depit Amoureux, I should perhaps never have written the Misanthrope." Eliminate the generosity from this confession, and no doubt the truth remains that Moliere did form his best style of comedy upon the master of French tragedy.

Jean Baptiste Poquelin, who subsequently assumed the name of Moliere, was born in the year that Francois de Sales died, one year after the birth of La Fontaine, four years before the birth of his friend Chapelle and of Madame de Sevigne. When Le Cid was first performed he was fourteen years old, and twenty-two at the time of the first representation of Le Menteur. The son of a valet-de-chambre tapissier of Louis XIII, he succeeded in due course to the emoluments and honors, such as they were, of his father; but he had early conceived a passion for the stage, and in 1643 he attached himself to the Illustre Theatre of Madeleine Bejart, a woman four years his senior. With her were already associated her brother Joseph, her sister Genevieve, about two years younger than Moliere, and eight others, most of whom had dropped out of the company before its final settlement in Paris.

For a year or two the Illustre Theatre tempted fortune in the capital without success, and in 1646 they commenced a tour through the provinces which was destined to continue for twelve years. The debts which they had incurred weighed upon them during the whole of this time, and principally upon Moliere, who was once imprisoned and several times arrested at the suit of the company's creditors. No doubt these latter had discovered that the young actor had friends who would rescue him from durance, which was done on several occasions, but as late as 1660 we read of Moliere's discharging probably the last of the debts for which at this period he made himself responsible.

The plays first acted by Moliere and his friends were, of course, the farces then most in vogue; among others the comedies of Scarron and the yet inferior productions of Denis Beys and Desfontaines. The former had written a ridiculous piece called L'Hopital des Fous. The latter was the author of Eurymedon ou l'Illustre Pirate, l'Illustre Comedien ou le Martyre de Saint-Genes, and of several other inflated pieces. It would be difficult to fix the exact date at which Moliere's earliest plays were produced, but it is probable that he began to write for his company as soon as he had enlisted in it. He seems, like Shakespeare, to have, in part at least, adapted the plays of others; but in 1653, if not earlier, he had produced L'Etourdi, and in 1656 Le Depit Amoureux.

The Illustre Theatre is heard of at Nantes, Limoges, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Narbonne, and Lyons, where Moliere produced his first serious attempt at high comedy in verse, L'Etourdi. In 1653 they played by invitation at the country seat of the Prince de Conti, the schoolfellow of Moliere. Three years later they played the Depit Amoureux at Beziers during the meeting in that town of the Parliament of Languedoc. At Grenoble, in 1658, the painter Mignard, with other of his admirers, persuaded him to take his company—for he was joint manager with Madeleine Bejart—to Paris; and this he did, after a concluding trip to Rouen. In Paris they began by playing before Philippe, Duke of Anjou, the brother of Louis XIV, who took them under his protection and introduced them to the court.

At this time the company was considerably stronger, as well as richer, than when it left Paris. There were now four ladies, Madeleine Bejart, Genevieve Bejart, Duparc, and Debrie; the two brothers Bejart—the youngest, Louis, had joined at Lyons—Duparc, Debrie, Dufresne, and Croisac making, with Moliere himself, eleven persons. It may be concluded that their tour, or, at all events, that part of it which dated from Lyons, had been very successful; for we find that Joseph Bejart, who died early in 1659, left behind him a fortune of twenty-four thousand golden crowns. So at least we are told by the physician Guy-Patin in a letter dated May 27, 1659; and he adds, "Is it not enough to make one believe that Peru is no longer in America, but in Paris?"

The condition of the drama in Paris at the time when Moliere returned to the capital was anything but satisfactory. There were in 1658 five theatres in Paris: One at the Hotel de Bourgogne; one at the Marais; one under the patronage of Mademoiselle, daughter of Gaston, Duke of Orleans; a Spanish company; and an Italian company at the Petit Bourbon, under the managership of Torelli. It was with the first and last of these that Moliere came chiefly into conflict; and it is probable that the other three were of no great account, at all events as competitors for the favor of the general public. Torelli soon found that the newcomer commanded his hundreds where he himself could only count by scores, and he gave up the Petit Bourbon to Moliere in 1659.