[1653 A.D.]

Hallam on Cromwell's Usurpation

It can admit of no doubt that the despotism of a wise man is more tolerable than that of political or religious fanatics; and it rarely happens that there is any better remedy in revolutions which have given the latter an ascendant. Cromwell's assumption, therefore, of the title of protector was a necessary and wholesome usurpation, however he may have caused the necessity; it secured the nation from the mischievous lunacy of the Anabaptists, and from the more cool-blooded tyranny of that little oligarchy which arrogated to itself the name of commonwealth's men. Though a gross and glaring evidence of the omnipotence of the army, the instrument under which he took his title accorded to him no unnecessary executive authority. The sovereignty still resided in the parliament; he had no negative voice on their laws. Until the meeting of the next parliament a power was given him of making temporary ordinances but this was not, as Hume, s on the authority of Clarendon and Warwick," has supposed, and as his conduct, if that were any proof of the law, might lead us to infer, designed to exist in future intervals of the legislature. In the ascent of this bold usurper to greatness he had successively employed and thrown away several of the powerful factions who distracted the nation. He had encouraged the levellers and persecuted them; he had flattered the Long Parliament and betrayed it; he had made use of the sectaries to crush the commonwealth; he had spurned the sectaries in his last advance to power. These, with the royalists and the Presbyterians, forming in effect the whole people, though too disunited for such a coalition as must have overthrown him, were the perpetual, irreconcilable enemies of his administration. Master of his army, which he knew well how to manage, surrounded by a few deep and experienced counsellors, furnished by his spies with the completest intelligence of all designs against him, he had no great cause of alarm from open resistance. But he was bound by the instrument of government to call a parliament; and in any parliament his adversaries must be formidable.n

CHAPTER V

CROMWELL AS PROTECTOR

[1653-1658 A.D.]

Cromwell at the head of the army had conquered and crushed king, lords, and commons. As opposed to the constitution of the kingdom he seemed to be a great destroyer. But further than this he would not budge. The instant his partisans inclined to threaten civil institutions and the social structure they found him their most potent enemy. In the wreckage of all authority, political or churchly, Cromwell rose the champion of the social fabric of property, of civil rights, and the lower clergy. It was in this spirit that he grasped the supreme power-and with the approval of a large part of the public. Both lawyers and clergymen had seen their very existence endangered by the destructive enactments of the Independents. Cromwell was their deliverer; to them the full meaning of the word was implied by his title, protector. - VON RANKE.

IT cannot be supposed that this elevation of Cromwell to the supreme power was viewed with satisfaction by any other class of men than his brethren in arms, who considered his greatness their own work, and expected from his gratitude their merited reward. But the nation was surfeited with revolutions. They readily acquiesced in any change which promised the return of tranquillity in the place of solicitude, danger, and misery. The protector, however, did not neglect the means of consolidating his own authority. Availing himself of the powers entrusted to him by the "instrument," he gave the chief commands in the army to men in whom he could confide; quartered the troops in the manner best calculated to put down any insurrection; and, among the multitude of ordinances which he published, was careful to repeal the acts enforcing the Engagement; to forbid all meetings on racecourses or at cockpits, to explain what offences should be deemed treason against his government; and to establish a high court of justice for the trial of those who might be charged with such offences.

[1653 A.D.]

He could not, however, be ignorant that, even among the former companions of his fortunes, the men who had fought and bled by his side, there were several who, much as they revered the general, looked on the protector with the most cordial abhorrence. They scrupled not, both in public companies, and from the pulpit, to pronounce him "a dissembling perjured villain"; and they openly threatened him with "a worse fate than had befallen the last tyrant." If it was necessary to silence these declaimers, it was also dangerous to treat them with severity. He proceeded with caution, and modified his displeasure by circumstances. Some he removed from their commissions in the army and their ministry in the church; others he did not permit to go at large till they had given security for their subsequent behaviour; and those who proved less tractable, or appeared more dangerous, he incarcerated in the Tower. Among the last were Harrison, formerly his fellow-labourer in the dissolution of the Long Parliament, now his most implacable enemy; and Feakes and Powell, the Anabaptist preachers, who had braved his resentment during the last parliament. Symson, their colleague, shared their imprisonment, but procured his liberty by submission.

To the royalists, as he feared them less, he showed less forbearance. Charles, who still resided in Paris, maintained a constant correspondence with the friends of his family in England. Among the agents whom he employed were men who betrayed his secrets, or pretended secrets, to his enemies, or who seduced his adherents into imaginary plots, that by the discovery they might earn the gratitude of the protector. Of the latter class was an individual named Henshaw, who had repaired to Paris, and been refused what he solicited-admission to the royal presence. On his return, he detailed to certain royalists a plan by which the protector might be assassinated on his way to Hampton Court, the guards at Whitehall overpowered, the town surprised, and the royal exile proclaimed. When a sufficient number were entangled in the toil, forty were apprehended and examined. Of these, three were selected for trial before the high court of justice. Fox pleaded guilty and obtained his pardon. Vowell, a schoolmaster, and Gerard, a young gentleman two-and-twenty years of age, received judgment of death. On the same scaffold, but an hour later, perished a foreign nobleman, only nineteen years old, Dom Pantaleon Sa, brother to Guimaraes, the Portuguese ambassador. Six months before, he and Gerard, whose execution we have just noticed, had quarrelled in the New Exchange. Pantaleon, the next evening, repaired to the same place with a body of armed followers; a fray ensued; Greenway, a person unconcerned in the dispute, was killed by accident or mistake; and the Portuguese fled to the house of the ambassador, whence they were conducted to prison by the military. The people, taking up the affair as a national quarrel, loudly demanded the blood of the reputed murderers. On behalf of Pantaleon it was argued that he was an ambassador, and therefore answerable to no one but his master; but the instrument which he produced in proof of the first allegation was no more than a written promise that he should succeed his brother in office. He was sacrificed, if we believe one of them, to the clamour of the people, whose feelings were so excited, that when his head fell on the scaffold, the spectators proclaimed their joy by the most savage yells of exultation. It was the very day on which his brother, perhaps to propitiate the protector, had signed the treaty between the two nations.

These executions had been preceded by one of a very different description. Colonel Worseley had apprehended a Catholic clergyman, of the name of Southworth, who, thirty-seven years before, had been convicted at Lan

H. W.- VOL. XX. L