THE CIVIL WARS AND OLIVER CROMWELL.1

Histoire de la République d'Angleterre et de Cromwell. Par M. GUIZOT. Richard Cromwell. Par M. GUIZOT.

History of Oliver Cromwell and the English Commonwealth. By M. Guizot. Translated from the French.

The Story of Corfe Castle, collected from ancient Chronicles and Records; also from the private Memoirs of a family resident there in the time of the Civil Wars. By the Right Hon. GEORGE BANKES, M.P. for the county of Dorset.

THE Volume by the member for the county of Dorset illustrates the private memoirs of an English family in the time of the civil wars. The more important work by the great French statesman presents that portion of our history which succeeded to the civil wars, and for a time embodied their results. But what we have to say of M. Guizot's book and its hero, we are not sorry to have the opportunity of prefacing by some remarks upon the actors in the preceding struggle; and so much of what the English memorialist relates of those earlier stages of the conflict requires correction, that we could offer perhaps no introduction so appropriate to such celebration of its later scenes as will invite our criticism in the French historian.

From an address prefixed to Mr. Bankes's book we learn its origin. It appears that in the borough and neighbourhood of Corfe Castle there is a society established for purposes of mutual improvement; that Mr. Bankes is its patron: and that in compliance with the

1 From the Edinburgh Review, January 1856. With additions.

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wish of its members to have subjects suggested for lecture and discussion, he was induced to gather together as materials for such a purpose, "from rare books and original family papers," a volume full of historical facts relating to persons who at former times have inhabited or possessed the castle which gives its name to the district. He adds that his collections refer especially to a period of history wherein their particular neighbourhood was much concerned, and the interest of which will not soon pass away.

Mr. Bankes so speaks of the civil wars of the seventeenth century, and most truly. They have an interest which still concerns not only particular neighbourhoods, but every particular family and fireside in the kingdom; for under Heaven we owe it mainly to them that all English homes are now protected and secure. The result has answered to their origin. They began in no sordid encounter of selfishness or faction, they involved no vulgar disputes of family or territory, and personal enmities formed no necessary part of them. They were a war, as one of their leaders said, without an enemy. In the principles they put to issue we continue ourselves to be not less interested than were our forefathers; and hardly a question of government has arisen since, affecting human liberty or the national welfare, which has not included a reference to this great conflict, and some appeal to the precedents it established. Nothing can be unimportant that relates to it, therefore, nor any service small that may clear up a doubt of the motives and conduct of its leaders; and if these, as the winter evenings have again arrived, should again be discussed in the Corfe Castle or any other improvement society, such hints as we are now about to offer will not be without their use.

We do not object to Mr. Bankes that he shows throughout his book a leaning to the Royalist party; for, believing that justice remained with the Parliament, we think not the less that high and noble qualities were

engaged on the side of the King." His error is in supposing that the latter may not be admitted without discredit and doubt of the former. Our study of the period has led us to other conclusions, some of which, in the same spirit which leads him to address his friends in Dorsetshire, we would address to himself. As he truly says of the society to which he is patron, the humblest who are industrious in their callings can always teach something, and the highest in attainments have much to learn. We must do our best for each other. When the wished-for Millennium shall at last arrive, it will doubtless form the whole human race into a society for purposes of mutual improvement."

The ancestor who connects with the most striking period of English history Mr. Bankes's family associations, was Sir John Bankes, Attorney-General to Charles I, and Chief Justice of the Common Pleas. The part allotted him on that great stage, however, was in reality a very small one, though he played it creditably. He was a respectable lawyer of honest intentions and very limited views, who interfered occasionally with good effect to moderate both parties, until both became committed to extremes; but when the sword flashed out as arbitrator, he turned aside helpless and useless, and, dying while yet the victory neither way inclined, he seems to have died in the persuasion that the disfavour of Heaven must fall heavily on both, and that both would be deserving of overthrow. However unfitted to its occasions, there was much of course to be said for a temper such as this. In itself a disposition kindly and pleasing, at any other time. than one of necessary conflict it might have done even useful public service. The descendant of Sir John Bankes was quite entitled to refer to him, therefore, as in all respects a favourable specimen of a lawyer in that age; but we must think it less discreet in the panegyrist to have contrasted his alleged upright ascent to worldly rank, with what he calls the "unseemly intrigues and courtly struggles" by which Sir Edward Coke clambered

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thither. Allusions not strictly untrue may yet convey an impression singularly false. Whatever his former failings may have been, to the student of our Civil Wars the Lord Chief Justice Coke presents himself in one aspect only. So far, his age redeems his youth and his manhood. It was he who gave to the opening of the struggle that stamp of ancient precedent and legal right, of which it never afterwards, in all its varying fortunes, lost the trace; and, in the presence of any attempt to compare such a man disadvantageously with one immeasurably his inferior, we are obliged to remember that while, in the Petition of Right, Sir Edward Coke has left a monument of his exertions for English liberty as imperishable as that which the Institutes contain of his knowledge of English law, Sir John Bankes has left no more durable record of either than an elaborate argument against Hampden in the case of ship-money.

Mr. Bankes is much enamoured of the character of Strafford, an illustrious client and occasional correspondent, or, as he prefers to style him, "the honoured

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friend," of his ancestor. He appears not to know that on a solemn reference to the Judges for their opinion on certain charges in the Impeachment of that statesman which the Lords had voted to be proved, Sir John Bankes formed no exception to the unanimous judgment which declared the charges to amount to treason. Widely differing on this point from his ancestor, Mr. Bankes can see nothing in his ancestor's "honoured friend" but a good financier and a great statesman. He does not seem to be aware how very possible it is for a good financier to be a bad statesman. There can be no doubt that Strafford's whole system, material and moral, was tried in advantageous circumstances in Ireland, and proved to be a sheer failure, neither more nor less. Without overthrowing the public liberties, indeed, it could not have succeeded; because it was an attempt to establish the royal prerogative above them. Nevertheless it also included much that had no unpopular aspect, for it was the design of a man

of courage and genius. Every petty oligarchy would have been reduced by it to subjection before the monarchy, and it would have struck down all the tyrannies but its own. The mere forms of parliament would universally have been respected and retained by Strafford, because he knew that despotism has no such efficient ally as parliaments deprived of parliamentary power. While he made the Irish customs more profitable by four times their annual amount, he would so have employed this enormous increase as again and again to multiply itself, through enlarged resources of commerce and trade. While he established vast monopolies for the Crown, he would have abolished private monopolies that had simply gorged its servants. And in the very act of imposing taxes arbitrarily, and levying them by military force, he fell with so heavy a hand on wrongdoers of high rank, as made the oppressed commonalty grudge less what they, too, had to endure. But it was of the very essence of this design, comprehensive as it was, that the good it might have wrought should perish by the evil it could not but inflict. The sword he had provided for safety turned and broke in his hand. A too vast ambition, joined with a too narrow aim, destroyed him. And his Irish administration is now chiefly memorable, not for the revenues and resources it so largely developed and his master as miserably wasted; not for the linen trade it established, which struck root and has saved the land; but because it has shown, by one of the greatest examples on record, of what small account is the statesmanship most successful in providing for material wants, which yet refuses to recognise the moral necessities of the people it assumes to govern.

Mr. Bankes objects to only one of Strafford's Irish measures; and he so puts his objection as to imply that, if Strafford deserved to suffer penalties of treason for it, not the less have several of the most favoured statesmen of our own day exposed themselves to the same wellmerited fate. "A measure," he says, "very lately adopted