OLIVER CROMWELL AND THE PROTECTORATE. BY DANIEL WILSON, F.S.A. Scor. England! the time is come when thou should'st wean The truth should now be better understood; Old things have been unsettled; we have seen Fair seed-time, better harvest might have been WORDSWORTH. LONDON: THOMAS NELSON, PATERNOSTER ROW; AND EDINBURGH. MDCCCXLVIIL PREFACE. THE period appears to have arrived when the principles of their first Revolution are to become generally understood by Englishmen, and when the characters of those great men who were the leaders of the people during that struggle for our rights, shall be drawn anew, with a juster appreciation of them than heretofore;— it has arrived, or is arriving. That such justice, however, is still no unchallenged fact, becomes sufficiently apparent, when we remember that a royal commission, composed of men most eminent for station, rank, or literary fame, and nominated for the fit adornment of her Majesty's Palace of Westminster, (as the New Houses of Parliament are styled,) still sits, and-weighing the claims of the noble dead,-has conceded to Hampden a niche among England's patriots, but has refused to Cromwell his place among her kings. Cromwell can well afford to wait for the revision of that sentence, as of all others. His virtues are mostly so far above those of the great majority of England's hereditary kings, that the injustice, which excludes the greatest of all her rulers from that vacant niche between the two Charles Stuarts, is a wrong done far more to us than to him. The present century has witnessed several attempts to do justice to the memory of Cromwell. Dr. Vaughan's Essay on the Character of Cromwell and his Times, was published in 1838. It is an impartial, and, upon the whole, a just, though guarded estimate of Cromwell's character. It failed to produce any extensive change in the general appreciation of Cromwell, mainly because its appearance in the form of an essay, rendered it more an expression of opinion than an argument, and so left its effect-depending as it did on the value previously attached to its author's views, to be developed chiefly among the class of thoughtful nonconformists, whose bias was already strongly in favour of the Puritan King. It helped, however, to lessen the influence of that able analysis of Cromwell's character, that the author permitted his anxiety to preserve the strict limits of candour and truth, to betray him into some timidity and inconsistency in forming his estimate of Cromwell. He acknowledges his religion to have been genuine, his emotions healthy and pure, and his ideas of toleration beyond those of the most enlightened Puritans of his age. Yet he admits the charge of dissimulation to be just. "Cromwell," says he, "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!" The same year in which Dr. Vaughan's "Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell" appeared, Forster published, as one of his admirable series of "Lives of Eminent British Statesmen," a life of Cromwell. It is characterised by his wonted laborious research, and his no less attractive style of biographical narrative. But he was already pledged to "the statesmen of the Commonwealth," and seems to have found it impossible to reconcile his admiration of the great men of the Long Parliament, with any commendation of the policy of the Protectorate. As by far the most candid and impartial of Cromwell's biographers, who have adhered to what may be styled the hypocritical theory of Cromwell's character, I have quoted largely from him, in maintaining an opposite view. As a writer who is as far as possible removed from the prejudices of Cromwell's royalist defamers, Forster's opinions well merit our careful study, and have carried the more weight with them that they are not put forward as mere opinions, but in the form of conclusions deduced from the evidence he produces. The reader having now the opportunity of comparing them with others, must judge for himself. |