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necessity of the hour? His experience in the field had taught him why it was the royalists gained upon their adversaries in battle, and he at once declared that it would not do to go on enlisting "poor tapsters and town"apprentice people" against well-born cavaliers, but that, to cope with men of honour, men of religion must be enrolled. When he expressed this design to Hampden, it might be said that, on the instant, the whole issue of the war was determined; but is it necessary to suppose him carrying his own thoughts so far? When he proceeded to organise his God-fearing regiment of Ironsides, is it conceivable that he cared, or was troubled to anticipate, to what a destiny they might bear himself? Clarendon has made it a reproach against him that on one occasion he said he could tell what he would not have, but not what he would have; but was not this only another expression of the thought, that he had no concern but the duty of the hour, no wish but to do it in the hour, and that he knew not and cared not whither it might lead him?

As time went on, indeed, as he commanded armies, won battles, and saw himself indisputably the first soldier and captain in the war, to direct and govern men became clearly as much a part of his no longer avoidable duty, as any commonest avocation that had occupied him on his Ely farm. With this, too, let it also be admitted, there must of course have opened upon him that wider range of worldly opportunities to which, whether they shape themselves to ambition or any other inclination of the mind, it is so easy to give the name, or to make available under the sanction, of duty itself. Doubtless to many such temptations Cromwell yielded. In his religious creed he is said (we must confess on what seems to us very doubtful authority) to have held the somewhat dangerous doctrine, that having once been in a state of grace it was not possible to fall from it; and from time to time, if this were so, it must insensibly have relaxed to him even the restraints of religion itself. But that there was any con

scious hypocrisy in his language, or any settled scheme of mere ambition in his conduct, we find it difficult to believe. Higher and higher as he was mounting, still to the last he might have asked himself Whither. When at the close of the war he appears heaped with all the favours a grateful people and parliament could bestow, there is yet not one which had not fallen to him naturally, or that it would not have been monstrous as well as foolish to deny to him. Every step of the ascent had been solidly and laboriously won; he stood upon it as of right; and surely no man ever rose so high with less of what we must call usurpation. In the honours paid to him, in the very trappings of state thrown over him, when he left London upon his last campaign and returned with the final victory, there was not a man in the popular ranks, of however rigid and ascetic public virtue, who might not feel that he was also himself participating as in a gain and glory of his own. When the Lord General passed out of the city in his coach, drawn by six gallant Flander's mares, whitish gray, and "with colonels for his life guard such as the world might not parallel," it may be very doubtful if less would have satisfied the most exacting republican whose claims and whose power he then and there represented. When he returned in a more than regal triumph, receiving homage from the populace, halting to hawk with the gentry, and presenting horses and prisoners to the parliamentary delegates appointed to give him welcome, it was yet but the glory of their common country which all men were content to see reflected in the ceremony and the pomp which surrounded him.

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Should it be matter of blame, then, that still he rose to the occasion which called him, and that even this position did not take him unawares? As he farmed at Ely and St. Ives, as he fought at Marston Moor and Naseby, so now he fell into his allotted place as Milton's "chief of men." Such is the sum of reproach with any fairness up to this date to be imputed to him. "This man will be King of England "yet," said the Rev. Mr. Peters inwardly to himself, as

he observed at the time, in his air and manner, an indescribable kind of exaltation. Sir Philip Warwick afterwards observed it too; and, being entirely at a loss to reconcile so "great and majestic a deportment and comely pre"sence" with what he remembered of his very ill-made apparel, and not very clean or sufficient linen, when he first heard him speak in the parliament-house twelve years before, is much disposed to attribute the change to the fact of his having meanwhile "had a better tailor and "more converse among good company." The same difficulty occurs even to Clarendon, who more shrewdly dismisses it with the remark, that "his parts seemed to "be raised, as if he had concealed his faculties till he "had occasion to use them." But we shall not ourselves have any difficulty at all, if we simply believe of such a man that only the occasion for use would ever tempt him to the assumption or display. A readiness for the duty of the hour, and no restlessness beyond it, would seem to be the lesson of Cromwell's life, whatever part of it we examine; and if we think the forcible dissolution of the Long Parliament an interruption to the temperate wisdom which generally guided him, it is because we feel that without it the supreme power must nevertheless have been his, unattended by the difficulties in which the consequences of that act involved him. At the very last, he said himself, he was doubtful about doing it; but another and stronger impulse got the mastery over him. "When I went there," he told his council of officers, "I did not think to have done this. "But perceiving the spirit of God so strong upon me, "I would not consult flesh and blood." And so we arrive again at what he told Monsieur the President de Bellièvre, that One never mounts so high as when one does not know where one is going.

But M. Guizot would attach little importance to that stronger impulse which the Lord General there professed to have over-ruled him. We do not know that anything has impressed us more throughout his book than its

extremely partial and imperfect recognition of the religious element, which formed so large a portion not merely of Cromwell himself, but of the entire English Revolution. Doubtless it arises from the fact that this element, so necessary in the study of it, lies too far away from those evils which dwell insensibly and most strongly upon the historian's mind, and from which his study of these great events in our history had deliberately or unconsciously arisen. He is even careful to hint his belief, more than once, that there were in those days more infidels in England than we commonly suppose. It is curious to contrast his view in this respect with that of another French writer, M. de Lamartine, who, regarding Cromwell from the thick of French republicanism, has very partially and confusedly, but as he believes wholly, accepted Mr. Carlyle's interpretation, and informs his countrymen that Cromwell was a fanatic. M. Guizot, accustomed through his own life to submit to the dictates of a calm unostentatious piety all public actions, and not unfrequently reminding his reader that a Divine Providence is ordering and disposing the affairs of States, yet cannot see in Cromwell either fanatic or chosen man of God. In no part of his history of Oliver do we find any swerving from this view, and subsequent and very recent reflection appears only to have confirmed him in it. In the whole of his account of Richard Cromwell there is no more striking passage than that in which, describing the respective positions occupied by the followers of Oliver and the advocates of the Republic, he again expresses forcibly the distinction between the purely worldly character of the Protectorate and the Divine purpose it was called to fulfil. The Cromwellians under Richard, he says, rather by experience and political instinct than by any principle clearly comprehended or defined, did not think that the people should be held sufficient to constitute the entire Government, or that it had the right to unmake and reconstruct it at its pleasure. In their opinion the Government required, for the maintenance and good order

of society, some base independently subsistent, recognised by the people, but anterior, and in a certain degree superior, to its shifting will. Originally conquest, afterwards the hereditary principle in monarchy, and the preponderance of great landowners, had created in the English Government such power, independent in itself, immovable in right, and indispensable to society. By the course of things, however, the territorial proprietorship had in part changed hands, and, by its own faults, the hereditary principle of monarchy had succumbed. But God then raised up Oliver, and gave him the power with the victory. Conqueror and actual master, surrounded by his comrades in war, and treating with a house elected by the people, he had been able to found, for his successor as for himself, the Protectorate and its Constitution; and thus was provided that anterior and independent power, born of events, not of the people's will, and which the people should be held as little able to destroy according to its fancy, as it had been able of its motion to create. This great fact, therefore, accomplished upon the ruins of the ancient monarchy, and in the name of necessity, by the genius of a great man sustained by God, it became the duty of all men to recognise and accept; and, from the uniform tone of his reasoning, it is manifest that the historian himself would so have accepted it, though he sees that it carried with it also the seeds of failure inseparable from its revolutionary origin.

He thus in a great measure excludes from consideration that particular element in Cromwell's idea of Government which led him, in the re-constitution of the State with a view to that bequest to his successor, to be indifferent whether it was republican or monarchical in its political form, provided only that, above all things, it was godly in its spirit. Yet a sound perception of this might have led him to far more just conclusions as to the views also held by Cromwell in regard not only to his system of rule during life, but to the very succession he desired to leave after him. Upon a close examination

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