IN BEHALF OF THE VAUDOIS. cxiii an employment of his soldiers was without any order from him, and contrary to his wishes; and that the conduct of the Duke of Savoy, who was an independent sovereign, was not a matter of which he could be competent to take cognizance. But Cromwell reminded his Christian majesty of what he might readily accomplish, and of what was expected from him, and did so in terms which disposed him to promise that his best offices should be employed to bring about a satisfactory settlement of the dispute between the duke and the protestants of the valleys. Louis, after shewing a strong disinclination to act at all in this affair, now moved with a precipitation which equally justified suspicion. The duke consented to leave his claims subject to the arbitration of the King of France; and under the mediation of Servien, the French ambassador, and of the four ambassadors from the protestant cantons of Switzerland, terms of peace were offered to the deputies of the Piedmontese at Pignerol, which they were prevailed upon to accept. These terms were much more favourable than would have been submitted to them had not the interference of Cromwell attracted so much attention to their wrongs. But it was foreseen that larger concessions would be demanded, and a more jealous scrutiny extended to the language employed in the articles of this treaty, if it should be procrastinated until the arrival of the special ambassadors deputed from England, and from the States-general of the United Provinces. Cromwell spoke of the treaty of Pignerol, from the first, as a smuggled, treacherous proceeding, and the subsequent conduct of the Savoy government confirmed every suspicion entertained concerning its sincerity. So ambiguous was much of the language adopted in that treaty, that its articles were afterwards pleaded in support of many acts of oppression, precisely of the kind which it was supposed they had been framed to preclude. But Cromwell, as the following documents will especially shew, never ceased to watch and check the malevolence of their enemies; and though they continued subject to many grievances, no attempt was made to renew the atrocities of 1655. It should be added, that the collections made for their relief in the churches throughout England, amounted to nearly forty thousand pounds. These monies were transmitted to them in several payments, and appear to have been distributed with humanity and discretion. _^ In conclusion, then, let the actions of Cromwell be judged, as every sober man is concerned his own should be judged, not in themselves merely, but in connexion with a due consideration of the circumstances of them; and let his character, as developed by his actions thus viewed, be regarded as a whole, and not in any of its parts only; and though, even then, there may be infirmity enough remaining to prefer a large demand on our charitable forbearance, the Cromwell present to our imagination will not be that compound of everything guilty in ambition, vulgar in sentiment, and hateful in hypocrisy, which it has been the pleasure of our fashionable writers since 1660 to depict as the portraiture of this extraordinary The English people have not shewn themselves disposed to admire such monsters as these representations exhibit; and Cromwell, notwithstanding the ceaseless effort made by certain classes to cover him with infamy, was popular with a large portion of the people of England during his life, and, with all his acknowledged faults, he retains the same place in their honest admiration to this day. He understood the character of his countrymen far better than his censors have understood his own; and was himself so much built up by the influence of the man. HOW IT SHOULD BE JUDGED. CXV qualities to which his head and heart did homage, as to embody in his own mental and moral habits, an extraordinary measure of that robust intelligence and virtue by which the middle classes in England have always been distinguished. Few men who have been in anything like the same degree the property of their times, have acquitted themselves in their private relations in a manner bespeaking a more just sense of the obligations which belong to such connexions. His heart was manifestly formed to enjoy, in an eminent degree, the pleasures which good men derive from the exercise of the domestic affections. His enemies may insinuate the contrary—but history reports, that whatever storms were raging abroad, his home was a sanctuary in which he found himself encircled by affection and fidelity. In religion, his opinions were in substance those of the puritans, which were allied in his case with the same varied and powerful exercise of feeling and imagination, the same strong blending of light and shadow, which characterized the mental history of that class of Christians. He was, indeed, more tolerant, in some respects, than the puritans had ever been; but he shared, almost to the full, in their hatred of popery, and was susceptible of enthusiastic illusion in a greater degree than can be affirmed concerning that body. It has been common to attribute his language and conduct on the subject of religion to hypocrisy; but that it was, on the whole, sincere, is beyond reasonable doubt. His private correspondence, and his death-bed, afford sufficient evidence on this point. In his public conduct, the great charge against him is that of dissimulation; and it is not to be denied that his character in this respect is by no means invulnerable. The object of his labour was to bring order out of chaos; and that he might attemper the elements about him to his purpose, he sometimes conformed himself to them as no man governed by a lofty or refined sense of the morally proper would have done. But as he looked to the magnitude of the end, he became reconciled to the doubtful character of the means which seemed to promise its accomplishment. It was not his manner to dissemble, any more than to shed blood, for the mere pleasure of doing it. It should ever be remembered that he was not an hereditary sovereign, with a people grown up around him in habits of deference to his authority. Men crossed his path at all points who were prepared to deny him their allegiance, even to his face; and the rest were rather to be humoured as equals, than treated as those who were born to obey. Kings-and kings sometimes highly praised for their general excellence of character-have assured us, that the man who knows not how to dissemble knows not how to reign; and if we look to the general circumstances of the order of persons who are born to sovereignty, and to those of Cromwell as Protector of the English commonwealth, the former must be regarded as scarcely knowing what a temptation to dissemble means, if compared with the latter. Yet how few who have reigned long, especially in difficult times, if weighed with fairness in this respect against Cromwell, would be found to place him at disadvantage. The dissimulation, indeed, of persons who have been nursed in courts, does not often assume the garb of puritanism, nor is it usual with such persons to adapt themselves, when engaged in this part of their vocation, to the defective taste of the guard-room or of the multitude. But we demur strongly to the maxim which affirms that vice loses half its evil by losing something of its grossness, It is, in all cases, what it is, independently of the mere HOW IT SHOULD BE JUDGED. cxvii circumstance of adaptation to the conventional notions of propriety which prevail in one circle or another. Cromwell dissembled in the fashion to be expected from him, viewed in the circumstances of his origin and history. The great difference between him, in this respect, and the martyr king against whom he drew his sword, was, not that he felt less scruple than his illustrious opponent in yielding to this truly odious tendency, but that it sometimes betrayed itself, in his case, in a manner which is as much at variance with our taste as with our ideas of rectitude; and, unhappily, the majority of polite people inform us, in a thousand ways, that they are less disturbed by an offence against morals, than by an offence against refinement-so much so as to make it almost appear, that, in their esteem, a man is scarcely to be deemed a sinner at all, so long as he is careful to sin with the air of a courtier. Do we mean by these observations to extenuate the guilt of hypocrisy? Not in the least. Their object is rather to detect and expose that subtle vice where least suspected; particularly in men who, inasmuch as they speak loftily concerning their philosophy, ought not to be regarded as innocent in putting their tastes, after this manner, in the place of their principles, and in affecting, as the consequence, to see moral differences in the great characters of past times, which they must know to be in a great degree imaginary, and adopted for the purpose of making a dishonest use of vulgar prejudice.* Dr. Harris has collected a series of testimonies on the old subject of Cromwell's hypocrisy, (III. 93-103.) The declamation from Cowley, and from the tract intitled Killing no Murder, he might have omitted as of small value. Nor do we attach much more weight to the invectives of Lord Hollis. The anecdote from Burnet, on the authority of Sir Harbottle Grimstone, is deserving of more attention; but it is so imperfect as to leave the degree of insincerity proved by it uncer |