ment to the Scotch; it was in the highest | ginal Covenant was, if not discarded, at degree desirable that this inducement least retained for exclusive use in Scotshould not be a promise to import Scotch land. A new instrument, the distinction Presbyterianism, pure and simple, into between which and the preceding has, I England. Clarendon, with the page of think, been much overlooked by historisucceeding history spread before him, did ans, entitled The Solemn League and not realize that, at the time of the nego- Covenant, formed the basis of the new tiation, that page was sealed from the eye treaty. It provided for the establishment of Vane. It is so difficult for historians in England, not of the system of the Scotto remember that what is to them a blaze tish church, but of a system in harmony of light was thick darkness to the actors with "the Word of God" and the pracof whom they speak! True of all times, tice of "the best Reformed Churches." it is pre-eminently true of times of revo- It contained stipulations for the preserlution, that men know only the foot of vation of the monarchy and the safety of land on which their own feet rest. Great the monarch. The cunning and duplicity men have done much to make history attributed by Clarendon to Vane are supand to shape the course of events; but I posed to have played their part in the indoubt whether the greatest practical gen- sertion of expressions which would pracius that ever lived could, in revolutionary tically leave the whole question between times, predict his own career for six Presbyterians and Independents, and bemonths. "Is thy servant a dog that he tween Monarchists and anti-Monarchists, should do this thing?" He did it. The open. The reference to "the Word of squeamish and tender-hearted advocate of God" was intended, it is said, to give inArras, so fearful of blood that he must definite scope to ecclesiastical diverresign his judicial post rather than con- gence; and the reference to "laws" and demn a man to death, and whose one pas- liberties" prepared for the suggestion sion is limitless and consuming love for that the preservation of these might be mankind, becomes the Robespierre of the more important than keeping the King's Reign of Terror. Oliver Cromwell's con- crown on his head or even his head on temporaries, when they saw how things his shoulders. But both parties were fell out, exclaimed, "Look, the vile trai- bent upon getting to work; the essential tor, he planned the whole affair that he thing was to arrange a basis for present might make a throne for himself!" And action; and the Scots may have thought they called up spectres, apparitions, as well as Vane that it would be time to witch-women, to show how it had been all cross the bridge when they reached the foreseen and expected. The moderns river. Vane and Cromwell signed the rushed full cry after the Ludlows and Solemn League and Covenant, and both Catherine Macaulays, quite clear that maintained to their last breath that, in its Cromwell had wakened the Puritan vol- true meaning, in strict accordance with cano with a view to warming his own its spirit and not in express contradiction hands. Clarendon makes essentially the to its letter, they kept it. At all events same mistake when he writes of Vane's Vane accomplished the object of his misnegotiation with the Scots in 1643, as if |sion. The war was to be conducted unVane had foreseen the subsequent rup- der the supervision of a Committee of ture between the Independents and the Both Kingdoms, sitting in London. In Presbyterians. To speak the truth, no January, 1644, marching through kneecozening was required. The Scots were deep snow, twenty-one thousand Blue fully convinced that, if Charles triumphed Bonnets, led by Alexander Leslie, an old over the English Puritans, he would take soldier of Gustavus Adolphus, famous for fiery vengeance upon the Scotch Cove- having held Stralsund against the utmost nanters. They stipulated with Vane for efforts of Wallenstein, crossed the borwhat, to Cromwell, Milton, and himself, der. Acting in conjunction with the still appeared the most reasonable ar- Puritan forces in the East, Leslie was rangement that could be made, the estab- able to coop up Newcastle in York; and lishment in England of an ecclesiastical when Prince Rupert relieved him and ofsystem corresponding to that of Scotland. fered the Roundheads battle, Manchester, An identical system they did not want. Leslie, and Cromwell annihilated the comHenderson, Argyle and their other lead- bined army of the Royalists, and won the ers were too large-minded for such a de- first decisive victory of the Parliament, on sign. And the treaty they concluded Marston Moor. It was fought on a July with Vane, unfortunate as was the issue, evening, 1644. The Parliament was does discredit to neither party. The ori- henceforward able to deal with the King, and the Scots soon began to find that they | Milton apostrophizes the allied nations were no longer wanted. One of the first could never have been addressed to them to let his opinion to this effect be known so appropriately as when Pym, Vane, and was Oliver Cromwell, and in closest sym- Cromwell were putting their hands to pathy with Cromwell was Vane. the Solemn League and Covenant, and No one who has looked into the early the Parliament of Scotland was calling pamphlets of Milton, or who gives due out all the fencible men of the realm to consideration to some of the most im- march to the help of the Commons of portant public transactions of the time, England. "Go on both hand in hand, O will fail to realize that English Presbyte- nations, never to be disunited; be the rianism had a strong root and an exten- praise and the heroic song of all postersive growth in England, independently of ity; merit this, but seek only virtue, not any influence from Scotland. A large to extend your limits; (for what needs to majority of the Puritan party in the Long win a fading triumphant laurel out of the Parliament at its commencement were tears of wretched men ?) but to settle the Presbyterians; active steps for the abo- pure worship of God in His Church, and lition of Episcopacy were taken in 1641; justice in the State: then shall the hardwhat is now universally characterized as est difficulties smooth out themselves bethe Scotch version of the Psalms was the fore ye; envy shall sink to hell, craft and work of the English M.P. for Truro, who, malice be confounded, whether it be so far as I know, was never in Scotland; home-bred mischief or outlandish cunand the Westminster Assembly of Di- ning: yea, other nations will then covet vines, which drew up the formularies that to serve ye, for lordship and victory are have since defined the doctrine, worship but the pages of justice and virtue. Comand discipline of the Presbyterian Church-mit securely to true wisdom the vanquishes of Scotland and America was a thoroughly English Congress. The circumstance that Pym was appointed a member of the Westminster Assembly is one among many such which evidence and illustrate the close union in this Revolution of political and religious impulses. I could not undertake to say which impulse was the stronger in Pym. He could have died either for the constitutional liberties or for the religious liberties of England; and he did die, not on the battle-field, but worn out by civic toil, in what was with him a struggle for both. Pym lived to set his name, along with every other member sitting in the Long Parliament, to the Covenant, in September, 1643; Hampton had fallen in Chalgrove field in the preceding June. Those splendours of morning hope which encompass all revolutions never shone more brilliantly on the Puritan Revolution than at the moment when, through the energy, tact, and eloquence of Vane, the Parliament of England and the people of Scotland found themselves linked together in a league of amity and mutual defence. The enthusiasm of the period burns in Milton's two books on Reformation in England with an intensity which, to adapt his own imagery to the occasion, like the light, flashed from a mirror of diamond, pierces and almost pains the unimpassioned eyeballs of a coldly scientific generation. That work was written before Vane went to Scotland, but the magnificent words in which ing and uncasing of craft and subtlety, which are but her two runagates; join your invincible might to do worthy and godlike deeds; and then he that seeks to break your union, a cleaving curse be his inheritance to all generations!" The prospect was soon overcast ; the estrangement between Presbyterians and Independents, at first a rift within the lute so slight that even the eye of Pym, as he sank overwearied and died in the end of 1643, may not have detected it, changed the music of Puritan harmony into loud discord; and the ancient hatred between Scot and Englishman, which, since the days of Elizabeth, had been softening, and at this point passed for a moment into the ardour of friendship, became once more as rancorous as it had been in those darkest days of Scottish history between the death of Wallace and the rise of Bruce. English Presbyterianism, which, in 1643, was intellectually more imposing and numerically stronger than any Presbyterianism in the world, and which furnished the constitutional machinery of Churches numbering at this hour twenty or thirty millions of adherents, vanished from history. I make this statement advisedly, although I know that it requires qualification. The native Presbyteranism of England has continued to live, but in an unrecognizable and invisible state. Its rare intellectual quality has been attested by such recruits to the clerical ranks of the Establishment as Bishop Butler, and, in a different line, by a suc cession of strenuous and original thinkers | not excluding those of the French Revofrom Priestley to Martineau. But even lution, but only the base and brainless when the Presbyterian name was clung spawn of Jacobinism now infesting the to with reverent fondness, the old machinery of Church sessions, Presbyteries, and. Synods, and the formularies drawn up at Westminster, were abandoned. The English Presbyterian Church of to-day has both the constitutional framework and the doctrinal standards of old English Presbyterianism, is entirely independent of any Church beyond the English frontier, and is a vigorous and promising institution. It is English in every sense in which a Dunbar potato, growing vigorously in Surrey, is English. Historically it is not English. capitals of Europe, Vane held liberty to be identical with right law. If I were asked to specify one thing which, more than any other, distinguished this Puritan Revolutionist, I should say it was a speculative passion for law. Absolute submission to the law of Christ we found to be his conception of perfect liberty both for Church and State. Many voluble persons will be ready to pronounce this a theory of slavishness rather than a theory of freedom. But Vane would not have agreed with Dr. Strauss that the expression, "the service of God," is insulting to humanity, and Calvinistic thinkers have not been alone in holding that rational and possible liberty is the same thing with rational and willing submission to necessity. The highest liberty for Vane was intelligent and willing submission to the law of God, as the highest liberty for Mr. Huxley, Mr. Spencer, and Mr. Bain is intelligent submission to the law of Evolution. The ordinances of the universe are contemplated, alike in both cases, as unalterable by man. Vane, however, held expressly that "God is in His being the highest reason." These are his words, quoted from his treatise, "Concerning Eternal Life." If it is the blasphemy of blasphemies, as Vane would have affirmed, to deny that the Almighty must, by necessity of nature, proceed “in such manner as is exactly consistent with the wisdom and justice of a most holy God," the greatest happiness of the greatest number throughout the universe seems likely enough to be brought about by His government. The will of the Infinite Reason must be reasonable, of the Infinite Justice just, of the Infinite Love loving. If, as has been maintained by some, Vane held the theory of universal salvation as held by Origen, no theory of the universe could have been either more sublime or more joyous than his; but I have seen no evidence under his own hand or from his own lip to this effect, and I have seen It may seem surprising to modern read-writing of his which appears to be inconers, but it was exquisitely characteristic sistent with Origen's opinion. Like the of Vane, that, with all this latitude of rest of the Puritans, he was over-shadview, he had absolutely no sympathy with owed, in his entire mental structure, in anarchy, and to the last resented it as a his entire speculative activity, by the misrepresentation that he was willing to reigning idea of the age that it is irrevertolerate "sectaries." By this word I take ent and sinful in the finite being to scan, him to have meant those who were tainted with frank, honest, open intelligence, the with such licentious notions as pass for laws purporting to be given him by the doctrines of liberty now-a-days. Like the Creator. Those laws, Vane and his Puriheroes and martyrs of freedom in all ages, | tan contemporaries believed, had been in The reason which Cromwell and Vane assigned for obstructing Presbyterian ascendency was that, as they alleged, the Presbyterians insisted upon erecting a system of persecuting intolerance hardly less objectionable than that of Laud. Cromwell, a great field preacher (in more senses than one), could not reconcile himself to an ecclesiastical discipline which permitted no man to exercise his gifts, at the head of his regiment or elsewhere, unless he had been ordained to the office of the ministry. Vane, who went as directly to first principles in matters of speculation as Cromwell in matters of practice, had made his way to the doctrine that Church forms are comparatively of small consequence, and declared that all the Churches of his time agreed in overvaluing them as compared with the spirit and the life. Papists, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, were of one mind, said Vane, in "preferring the Church in name, show, and outward order, before what it is in spirit and truth as it is the living body of Christ." A man who held this doctrine which belongs to the nineteenth rather than the seventeenth century, was likely to be a thorn in the side of any ecclesiastical party whose conception of toleration embraced, as one of its inseparable ingredients, power to refuse toleration to every one else. fallibly revealed, and had been summed retirement. "This," he says, referring up in the Bible. If we discard this belief, we shall find a good deal in the thinking of Vane which is obsolete and untenable; but if we want to understand our ancestors, we must guard against substituting the inferences and prepossessions of modernism for what they thought and felt. Discipline strict as that of Sparta was, to their minds, consistent with liberty, but license they deemed as unlike it as a drunk Helot was unlike Leonidas. The mutinous fool, who fancied himself an apostle of liberty and proceeded to act on the persuasion, had a pistol bullet through his head. to the violation, "made me forbear to come to the Parliament for the space of ten weeks (to wit, from the 3rd of December, 1648, till towards the middle of February following) or to meddle in any public transactions." He expressly adds, "neither had I, in the least, any consent in, or approbation to," the death of the king; "but on the contrary, when required by the Parliament to take an oath to give my approbation ex post facto to what was done, I utterly refused and would not accept of sitting in the Council of State upon these terms, but occasioned a new oath to be drawn, wherein that was omitted." During his absence Charles was beheaded. In the business of remodelling the army, Vane acted with Cromwell, and when the king got his finishing defeat at Vane's temporary withdrawal from pubNaseby, and throughout the tiresome and lic life at this crisis was characteristic. fruitless negotiations between Charles He was, as he said, "tender of blood." and the Parliament, the two friends con- He was intensely regardful of constitutinued of one mind. What sealed the tional regularity. Speculatively he had doom of Charles, as we saw in treating of gone step for step with Cromwell, and Cromwell, was that, after Montrose's now the question had been whether a Highlanders had been cut to pieces by Parliamentary majority should be allowed David Leslie's horsemen at Philipaugh, to sacrifice, or at least to imperil, all that after Alexander Leslie's army had re- Cromwell had won in internecine quarrel crossed the Tweed, when the Parliament at the pike-point with that very party of anxiously desired to come to terms with Presbyterian Royalists with which the the King, and Cromwell was willing to Presbyterians of the House were believed undertake what would have been even for | by Vane as well as Cromwell to be in him the difficult problem of securing the sympathy. There are Revolutions and consent of the army to the arrangement, Revolutions. Those of the highest order Charles deliberately ordered the veins of have in all countries a revolutionary England to be opened for new blood-let- method; and Cromwell perceived that ting. When Cromwell returned victo- the necessity which legitimizes the revorious from the campaign of Preston, he lutionary method had in this instance and his army were inflexibly resolved that arisen. Even if we pronounce Vane right Charles should die. They were not care-in withdrawing from the House when he ful to answer the Presbyterians as to the political consequences of their act, but they were certain that it was their duty to execute the Lord's vengeance on this man. The Presbyterian majority in Parliament stood fast by the King, demanding that the interminable treatying should be resumed. Vane headed the minority and tried hard to get a vote, not that Charles should be brought to trial, but that the Parliament should no longer negotiate with him. Vane was defeated. Then he paused, for his imperious in-rate man. stincts of constitutionalism and order Let us, however, avoid the mistake of forbade him to quell by the sword the representatives of the people. Cromwell did not pause. About a hundred members were violently excluded from the House. Vane long after described this as a "great violation of privileges." He did not resist or protest, but he could not approve. He flitted off into temporary caught sight of Pride's musqueteers, we shall have made out for him but half an apology. Had he stood on the defensive; had he proclaimed to England that, though he had opposed the Presbyterian members to the utmost, he would join them in vindicating the privileges of Parliament; his conduct would have been consistent and bold. But to flit away in the hour of peril and difficulty, and to flit back when the central agony was past, must be pronounced the part of a second supposing that because a man is not ab- 66 was when the scuppers spouted Dutch blood shed by the guns of Blake. words on the subject are explicit. "That which I have had in my eye hath been to preserve the ancient, well-constituted gov- Mr. Carlyle has an exceedingly clever ernment of England on its own basis and sketch of Vane, executed on the principrimitive righteous foundations." Pow-ple uniformly observed by that great liter, he held, resides primarily in the whole erary artist, of throwing every other figpeople; by the constitution of England ure on his canvas into shade and subthis power is vested in three estates, King, Lords, Commons: "when these cannot agree, but break one from another, the Commons in Parliament assembled are ex officio the keepers of the liberties of the nation." Accordingly, "when, by the inordinate fire of the times, two of the three estates were for a season melted down, they did but retire into their root, and were not thereby destroyed but rather preserved." He thought it his duty to preserve the Government, at least in its root, whatever changes and alterations it might be exposed unto in its branches." After an interval which he variously describes as of six weeks and of ten weeks duration, he returned to his place in Parliament, and became a member of the Council of State under the Commonwealth. ordination, as compared with his hero. The perfect justice of Shakespearian art, in which the Brutus is not exalted at the expense of the Cæsar, or the Cæsar at the expense of the Brutus,-the perfect beauty of Turnerian art of which the highest light is white, and the shade, says Mr. Ruskin, is not black, but crimson have not been attained by Mr. Carlyle. His sketch of Vane is just in attributing to him exquisite intellectual subtlety, and denying him the regal strength of Cromwell; it is unjust in leaving the final impression that Vane was but a thin intellectualist, capable of nothing better than splitting dialectical hairs. "I want twisted cordage." And could not Blake have mentioned a kind of cordage not spun from moonshine, which Vane understood the twisting of? "A man of It was now the spring of 1649, and endless virtues, and of endless intellect; nearly three eventful years were still to but you must not very specially ask, pass before the sword of civil war was How or Where? Vane was the 'friend sheathed. The first was the year of Tre- of Milton: that is almost the only andah and Wexford, the second the year of swer that can be given." Vane's life for Dunbar, the third the year of Worcester. ten years was a continual doing of things During this time we are to conceive which only one man in a thousand could Vane as incomparable in administrative have done; specifically take three items energy and in financial resource. We in answer to the How or Where? He picture him also as of antique heroism in managed the negotiations with the King refusing to be enriched for his public as the Parliamentary head of that party services, and of a beautiful Christian ten- which was in concert with Cromwell; he derness in dealing with delinquents. formed the alliance which brought the The sure way to provoke his opposition Scots into England in 1644 and saved to any scheme was to attempt to bribe the cause on Marston Moor; and he him. Any hint of such a thing put him made the navy invincible under Blake. on his guard, and he was likely to be a True, he was Milton's friend; and the far more dangerous opponent than he man to whom Milton addressed a sonnet might otherwise have been. The inter- was likely to be something more than ested and rapacious members and "an amiable, devoutly zealous, very there were several such-had no more pretty man : " but Vane was for fifteen formidable antagonist. When a mean or years, and such years as Mr. Carlyle harsh thing was attempted he rushed to knows, the friend of another besides Milthe front to defeat the cruelty or to baf- ton, to wit, Oliver Cromwell. fle the job. He was consummate, now one rather finds, of light fibre this Sir and afterwards, in the discharge of every Harry Vane." On the eve of the battle Parliamentary and administrative duty. of Dunbar, at the darkest moment he had All writers admit that it was his superla-ever experienced, Cromwell wrote aptive management of naval affairs that prising Sir Arthur Haselrig of his extaught Van Tromp, "the best captain in the world," says exultant Algernon Sydney, to take down from his mast-head the broom with which he had been metaphorically sweeping the English Channel, and to use it for sweeping his own decks 66 A man, treme peril. He named one man in Parliament, and but one to whom the gravity of the situation was to be laid bare. "Let H. Vane know what I write." The man of whom Oliver Cromwell wrote this, on the 2nd of September, 1650, was |