CHARACTER OF BUCKINGHAM.

iii

of Manwaring, the path of preferment."* This being the earliest mention of Cromwell as a speaker in our parliamentary history, a historian bitterly hostile to his memory, has remarked, "it is amusing to observe the first words of this fanatical hypocrite correspond so exactly to his character."+ What proof either of fanaticism or hypocrisy can be fairly extracted from the above language, is left to the candour of the reader. It is more to our purpose to observe, that Cromwell was already governed by dispositions in two important particulars, which never ceased to be prominent in his character-viz. by an ardent attachment to the protestant religion as professed by the puritans, and a fixed repugnance to the political dogmas which the divines above named had distinguished themselves by promulgating.

At this juncture, the affairs of the court and the government, were under the direction of the Duke of Buckingham. The graceful person of that favourite first recommended him to the late king; and his accomplishments as a courtier, which confirmed him in his ascendancy over the weak mind of James I., gave him a similar influence over the more steady discernment and better nature of his successor. But even as a courtier-the capacity in which he displayed his only ability-Buckingham was deficient in the first requisite of his vocation-command of temper, and, in consequence, was always surrounding himself with opposition and difficulty, which a little management would have sufficed to preclude. That the fabric of his fortune was not demolished from this cause almost as suddenly as it was reared, was owing mainly to the pusillanimity of James, and to that peculiarity of temperament in Charles, which so often

Rushworth, I. 655.

Hume, History of England.

disqualified him for acting from his own resources, and which especially led his young mind, while exposed to so much vexation from the conduct of his parliaments and his queen, to make a sort of refuge of his favourite. The duke conformed himself to the comparative decency of the new court after having pandered to the worst vices of the old. But so little effort did he make to conceal his generally vicious inclinations, that actions which might have borne the appearance of virtue in other men, were sure not to be so regarded in his instance. Charles appears to have been the only man in his kingdom who failed to see in this minion a headstrong upstart; whose pride of commanding all the subjects of the realm, had taught him to set the aids both of prudence and intrigue at nought; whose profuse liberality, and furious resentments, were only different modes of indulging the same towering passions; and who could never meddle with any affair of war or policy without betraying a total want of capacity and principle. It is to the circumstance that this man, personally so destitute of everything that could make him an object of confidence or fear, was the functionary at whose disposal all the monies voted by parliament would have been placed, and to whose management every enterprise sanctioned by that assembly would have been entrusted, that we must look for the main cause of the reluctance shewn by the commons to meet the demands that were made upon them in the early part of the reign of Charles I.

As Cromwell entered fully into the views of the popular party in the lower house, it is not difficult to judge of his sentiments when the king dissolved his third parliament ; committed a number of its leading members to prison; and addressed himself to the perilous enterprise of governing the people of England without the aid of such assemblies.

OF CHARLES THE FIRST TO 1629.

Clarendon states that he was well acquainted with the proceedings of the three parliaments assembled by Charles previous to the spring of 1629, when the last was dissolved, and expresses his wonder at the courses which were pursued at that juncture by the government. "It is not to be denied," he adds, "that there were in all those parliaments, especially in that of the fourth year, several passages and distempered speeches of particular persons, not fit for the dignity and honour of those places, and unsuitable to the reverence due to his Majesty and his councils. But I do not know any formed act of either house, (for neither the remonstrance nor the votes of the last day were such) that was not agreeable to the wisdom and justice of great courts, upon those extraordinary occasions. And whoever considers the acts of power and injustice, in the intervals of parliament, will not be much scandalized at the warmth and vivacity of those meetings."* These are the admissions of an enemy. And, indeed, so far were the leaders of the popular party from having passed the boundary of the constitution to entrench on the prerogative, that they had not yet proceeded to the extent of claiming the whole of the safeguards which the law of the land would have authorized them to demand. They claimed no more security in any case, either for their persons or possessions, than the unrepealed statutes of the realm had awarded to them; and had they prayed now for the abolition of the court of star-chamber, as they prayed in the last reign for the abolition of the court of high commission; and had they further insisted that the times for the meeting of parliament should be determined by enactment, and not left to the pleasure of the crown; it would have been possible for

* History of the Rebellion, I. 8, 9.

them to have shewn, not only that such measures were of paramount importance, if their chartered liberties were to be more real than imaginary, but that they were in harmony with the most venerable forms of the constitution. But the people were not prepared at that time for such bold enterprises. To bring them up to that point, it was required that there should be the twelve years of misrule which followed.

During those years, extending from the spring of 1629 to nearly the close of 1640, Charles looked for the supply of his wants to the ingenuity of his council, in the place of the authority of parliament; and to judge correctly with regard to the conduct of Cromwell and his coadjutors subsequent to that period, it is necessary to look with some attention to the character of the men by whom the country had been governed for a long time before, and to the general complexion of their proceedings. Charles ascended the throne early in 1625, Buckingham was assassinated in August 1628, and during that space the favourite made, and unmade, and made again, almost at pleasure. At his decease, the power which had thus centred in himself, fell in a greater degree into the hands of his dependants, and was further distributed, after a while, among certain new men who were called to the direction of public affairs. Among the persons into whose hands the reins of government then passed, the first place should perhaps be given to Sir Richard Weston,— not that his ability or his worth exceeded those of the rest, but, on account of the superiority to which he aspired, and which he in some degree obtained.

Weston was a person of good family, and from his youth made court preferment the object of his ambition. In his education, his travels, and his subsequent attendance at court in the hope of employment, he spent the greater part

SIR RICHARD WESTON.

vii

of his patrimony, and was often obliged to avail himself of the assistance of persons who regarded the probabilities of his fortune as sufficiently promising to lend money upon them. Men who look with such a temper towards advancement in the slippery places of a court, are not likely to prove very scrupulous about the moral complexion of the work assigned to them. Weston's first employment was upon an embassy on the affairs of the Palatinate. On his return he was raised to the office of chancellor of the exchequer; and afterwards, through the influence of Buckingham, he became lord treasurer. When the tide set in against the favourite, Weston sympathized more strongly with the resentment of his patron than the great caution of his previous history had led men to expect. He had now pursued his long-chosen course of studying to please everybody from whom the slightest service might possibly be obtained, with a good degree of success; and he appears to have resolved from this time to seek his aggrandizement at court, at the hazard of being denounced as the great enemy of the constitution, and of the public weal elsewhere. The royal treasury, accordingly, was freely replenished from the most illegal sources. But his own affairs, partly from his fondness for display, and partly from his restless appetite for L power, were always in embarrassment, and exposing him to inquietude. In his impeachment, commenced in the parliament of 1628, he was described as the man who had set himself to act on the policy of Buckingham, and as not less an enemy to the religion and liberties of the kingdom. Nor would he have retained office or footing in England during the few years of life which awaited him, had he not been protected against the hostility of his opponents in the commons by the suspension of parliaments which followed. Many of his family were catholics, and he was charged with