[Footnote: Published in the _Contemporary Review_ as a reply to Mr. Matthew Arnold's Essay on Falkland.]
We have the most unfeigned respect for the memory of Falkland. Carlyle's sneer at him has always seemed to us about the most painful thing in the writings of Carlyle. Our knowledge of his public life is meagre, and is derived mainly from a writer under whose personal influence he acted, who is specially responsible for the most questionable step that he took, and on whose veracity, with regard to this portion of the history not much reliance can be placed. But we cannot doubt his title to our admiration and our love. Of his character as a friend, as a host, and as the centre of a literary circle, we have a picture almost peerless in social history. He seems to have presented in a very attractive form the combination--rare now, though not rare in that age, especially among the great Puritan chiefs--of practical activity and military valour with high culture and a serious interest in great questions. Of his fine feelings as a man of honour we have more than one proof. We have proof equally strong of his self-sacrificing devotion to his country; though in this he stood not alone: with his blood on the field of Newbury mingled that of many an English yeoman, whose cheeks were as wet when he left his Puritan home to die for the religion and liberties of England as were those of Lord Falkland when he left the "lime-trees and violets" of Great Tew.
Of political moderation, if it means merely steering a middle course between two extremes, the praise is cheap, and would be shared by Falkland with many weak and with many dishonest men. It may, without disparagement, be remarked of him that his rank as a nobleman was almost sufficient in itself, without any special soundness of understanding or calmness of temperament, to prevent him from throwing himself headlong either into an absolutist reaction which was identified with the ascendency of upstart favourites, and contemners of the old nobility, or into a popular revolution which soon disclosed its tendency to come into collision with the privileged order, and which ended its parricidal career by leaving England, during some of the most glorious years of her history, destitute of a House of Lords. But as an adherent, and no doubt a deliberate adherent, of Constitutional Monarchy, Falkland was in that which in the upshot proved to be the right line of English progress, though by no means the right line of progress for the whole world. The Commonwealth is the ideal of America, where it is practicable, and it alone. Constitutional Monarchy, as Falkland rightly judged, was the highest attainable ideal for England, at any rate in that day. Of attaining that ideal, of doing anything considerable towards its attainment, or towards its defence against the powers of absolutist reaction whose triumph would have rendered its attainment for ever impossible, he was no more capable than he was of performing the labours of Hercules.
In this he bears some resemblance to a man of incomparably greater intellect than his. The fame of Bacon as a philosopher has eclipsed his importance as a politician. But his ideal of an enlightened monarchy, invested with plenary power, but always using its power in conformity with law, and having a Verulam at its right hand, not only is grand and worthy of the majestic intelligence from which it sprang, but is entitled to a good deal of sympathy, when we consider how wanting in enlightenment, how rough, how uncertain, how provoking to a trained and instructed statesman the action of parliaments composed of country gentlemen and meeting at long intervals, in an age when there were no political newspapers or other general organs of political information, could not fail sometimes to be. But Bacon, hampered by enfeebling selfishness, as Falkland was by more generous defects, was incapable of taking a single step toward the realization of his august vision, and the result was, a miserable fall from the ethereal height to the feet of a Somerset and a Buckingham.
As a theologian, Falkland appears to have been a Chillingworth on a very small scale. It does not seem to us that Principal Tulloch, in his interesting chapter on him, succeeds in putting him higher. But he shared, with Chillingworth and Hales, the spirit of liberality and toleration, for which both were nobly conspicuous, though Hales did not show himself a very uncompromising champion of his principles when he accepted preferment from the hands of their arch-enemy, Laud. The learned men and religious philosophers whom Falkland gathered round him at Tew, were among the best and foremost thinkers of their age: the beauty of the group is marred, perhaps, only by the sinister intrusion of Sheldon.
Mr. Matthew Arnold, in the very graceful sketch of Falkland's life published by him in aid of the Falkland Memorial, has endowed his favourite character with gifts far rarer and more memorable than those of which we have spoken; with an extraordinary largeness and lucidity of mind, with almost divine superiority to party narrowness and bias, with conceptions anticipative of the most advanced philosophy of modern times. He quotes the Dean of Westminster as affirming that "Falkland is the founder, or nearly the founder, of the best and most enlightening tendencies of the Church of England"--a statement which breeds reflection as to the character of the Church of England during the previous century, in the course of which its creed and liturgy were formed. The evidence of these transactions lies wide; much of it is still in the British Museum; and it may be possible to produce something sufficient to sustain Falkland on the pinnacle on which Mr. Arnold and the Dean of Westminster have placed him. But we cannot help surmising that he has in some measure undergone the process which, in an age prolific in historic fancies as well as pre-eminent in historic research, has been undergone by almost every character in history--that of being transmuted by a loving biographer, and converted into a sort of ventriloquial apparatus through which the biographer preaches to the present from the pulpit of the past. The philosophy ascribed to Falkland is, we suspect, partly that of a teacher who was then in the womb of time. We should not be extreme to mark this, if the praise of Falkland had not been turned to the dispraise and even to the vilification of men who are at least as much entitled to reverent treatment at the hands of Englishmen as he is, and at the same time of a large body of English citizens at the present day, who are the objects, we venture to think, of a somewhat fanciful and somewhat unmeasured antipathy. Those who subscribe to the Falkland Testimonial are collectively set down by Mr. Arnold as the "amiable"--those who do not subscribe as the "unamiable." Few, we trust, would be so careful of their money and so careless of their reputation for moral beauty as to refuse to pay a guinea for a certificate of amiability countersigned by Mr. Matthew Arnold. Yet even the amiable might hesitate to take part in erecting a monument to the honour of Falkland, if it was at the same time to be a monument to the dishonour, of Luther, Gustavus, Walsingham, Sir John Eliot, Pym, Hampden, Cromwell, Vane, and Milton. As to the Nonconformists, their contributions are probably not desired: otherwise, accustomed to not very courteous treatment though they are, it would still be imprudent to warn them that their own "hideousness" was to be carved in the same marble with the beauty of Lord Falkland.
On Luther, Hampden, and Cromwell, Mr. Arnold expressly bestows the name of "Philistine," and if he bestows it on these he can hardly abstain from bestowing it on the rest of those we have named. Milton, at all events, has identified himself with Cromwell as thoroughly as one man ever identified himself with another, and whatever aspersion is cast on "Worcester's laureate wreath" must fall equally on the intermingling bays. We may say this without pretending to know what the exact meaning of "Philistine" now is. Originally, no doubt, it pointed to some specific defect on the part of those with regard to whom it was used, and possibly also on the part of those who used it. But with the fate which usually attends the cant phrase of a clique, it seems to be degenerating, by lavish application, into something which irritates without conveying any definite instruction. As Luther did not live under the same conditions as Heinrich Heine, perfect ethical identity was hardly to be expected. "Simpleton" and "savage" have the advantage of being intelligible to all, and when introduced into discussion with grace, perhaps they may be urbane.
It is useless to attempt, without authentic materials, to fill in the faint outline of an historic figure. But judging from such indications as we have, we should be inclined to say that Falkland, instead of being a man of extraordinarily serene and well-balanced mind, was rather excitable and impulsive. His tones and gestures are vehement; where another man would be content to protest against what he thought an undeserved act of homage by simply keeping his hat on, Falkland rams his down upon his head with both his hands. He goes most ardently with the popular party through the early stages of the revolution; then he somewhat abruptly breaks away from it, disgusted with its defects, though they certainly did not exceed those of other parties under the same circumstances, and feeling in himself no power to control it and keep it in the right path. He is under the influence of others, first of Hampden and then of Hyde, to an extent hardly compatible with the possession of a mind of first-rate power. When he is taxed with inconsistency for going round upon the Bill for removing the Bishops from Parliament, his plea is that at the time when he voted for the Bill "he had been persuaded by that worthy gentleman (Hampden) to believe many things which he had since found to be untrue, and therefore he had changed his opinion in many particulars as well to things as persons." Hampden himself would hardly have been led by anybody's persuasions on the great question of the day. Clarendon tells us that his friend, from his experience of the Short Parliament, "contracted such a reverence for Parliaments that he thought it really impossible they could ever produce mischief or inconvenience to the kingdom." We always regard with some suspicion Clarendon's artful touches, otherwise we should say that there is a pretty brusque change from this unbounded reverence for the Short Parliament to an appearance in arms against its successor, especially as the leader and soul of both Parliaments was Pym.
In the prosecution of Strafford, Falkland showed such ardour that, as Clarendon intimates, those who knew him not ascribed his behaviour to personal resentment. His lips formulated the very doctrine so fatal to the great accused, that a number of acts severally not amounting to high treason might cumulatively support the charge. "How many haires' breadths makes a tall man and how many makes a little man, noe man can well say, yet we know a tall man when we see him from a low man; soe 'tis in this,--how many illegal acts make a treason is not certainly well known, but we well know it when we see." Mr. Arnold says that "alone amongst his party Falkland raised his voice against pressing forward Strafford's impeachment with unfair or vindictive haste." That is to say, when Pym proposed to the House, sitting with closed doors, at once to carry up the impeachment to the Lords and demand the arrest of Strafford without delay, Falkland, moved by his great, and, in all ordinary cases, laudable respect for regularity of proceeding, proposed first to have the charges formally drawn up by a committee. Falkland's proposal was almost fatuous; it proves that the grand difference between him and Pym was that Pym was a great man of action and that he was not. It would have been about as rational to suggest that the lighted match should not be taken out of the hand of Guy Fawkes till a committee had formally reported on the probable effects of gunpowder if ignited in large quantities beneath the chamber in which the Parliament was sitting. Strafford would not have respected forms in the midst of what he must have well known was a revolution. He would probably have struck at the Commons if they had not struck at him; certainly he would have placed himself beyond their reach; and the promptness of Pym's decision saved the party and the country. No practical injustice was done by wresting the sword out of Strafford's hand and putting him in safe keeping till the charges could be drawn up in form, as they immediately were. Falkland himself in proposing a committee avowed his conviction that the grounds for the impeachment were perfectly sufficient. His name does not appear among the Straffordians; and had he opposed the Bill of Attainder it seems morally certain that Clarendon would have told us so. The strength of this presumption is not impaired by any vague words of Baxter coupling the name of Falkland with that of Digby as a seceder from the party on the occasion of the Bill. Had Falkland voted with Digby, his name would have appeared in the same list. That he felt qualms and wavered at the last is very likely; but it is almost certain that he voted for the Bill. There is some reason for believing that he took the sterner, though probably more constitutional, line, on the question of allowing the accused to be heard by counsel. But the evidence is meagre and doubtful; and the difficulty of reading it aright has been increased by the discovery that Pym and Hampden themselves were against proceeding by Bill, and in favour of demanding judgment on the impeachment. It seems certain, however, that Falkland pleaded against extending the consequences of the Act of Attainder to Strafford's children, and in this he showed himself a true gentleman.
Again, in the case of Laud, Mr. Arnold wishes to draw a strong line between the conduct of his favourite and that of the savage "Puritans." He says that Falkland "refused to concur in Laud's impeachment." If he did, we must say he acted very inconsistently, for in his speech in favour of the Bishops' Bill he violently denounced Laud as a participator in Strafford's treason:--
"We shall find both of them to have kindled and blown the common fire of both nations, to have both sent and maintained that book (of Canons) of which the author, no doubt, hath long since wished with Nero, _Utinam nescissem literas!_ and of which more than one kingdom hath cause to wish that when he wrote that he had rather burned a library, though of the value of Ptolemy's. We shall find them to have been the first and principal cause of the breach, I will not say of, but since, the pacification of Berwick. We shall find them to have been the almost sole abettors of my Lord Strafford, whilst he was practising upon another kingdom that manner of government which he intended to settle in this; where he committed so many mighty and so manifest enormities and oppressions as the like have not been committed by any governor in any government since Verras left Sicily; and after they had called him over from being Deputy of Ireland to be in a manner Deputy of England (all things here being goverend by a junctillo and the junctillo goverend by him) to have assisted him in the giving such counsels and the pursuing such courses, as it is a hard and measuring cost whether they were more unwise, more unjust, or more unfortunate, and which had infallibly been our destruction if by the grace of God their share had not been a small in the subtilty of serpents as in the innocency of doves."
We are not aware, however, of the existence of any positive proof that Falkland did "refuse to concur" in the impeachment of Laud. There is nothing, we believe, but the general statement of Clarendon that his friend regarded with horror the storm gathering against the archbishop, which the words of Falkland himself, just quoted, seem sufficient to disprove. Mr. Arnold tells us that "Falkland disliked Laud; he had a natural antipathy to his heat, fussiness, and arbitrary temper." He had an antipathy to a good deal more in Laud than this, and expressed his dislike in language which showed that he was himself not deficient in heat when his religious feelings were aroused. He accused Laud and the ecclesiastics of his party of having "destroyed unity under pretence of uniformity;" of having "brought in Superstition and Scandal under the titles of Reverence and Decency;" of having "defiled the Church by adorning the churches," of having "destroyed as much of the Gospel as they could without themselves being destroyed by the law." He compared them to the hen in AEsop, fed too fat to lay eggs, and to dogs in the manger, who would neither preach nor let others preach. He charged them with checking instruction in order to introduce that religion which accounts ignorance the mother of devotion. He endorsed the common belief that one of them was a Papist at heart, and that only regard for his salary prevented him from going over to Rome. All this uttered to a Parliament in such a mood would hardly be in favour of gentle dealing with the archbishop. But Pym and Hampden, as Clarendon himself admits, never intended to proceed to extremities against the old man; they were satisfied with having put him in safe keeping and removed him from the councils of the King. When they were gone, the Presbyterians, to whom the leadership of the Revolution then passed, took up the impeachment and brought Laud to the block.
The parts were distributed among the leaders. To Falkland was entrusted the prosecution of the Lord Keeper Finch; and this part he performed in a style which thoroughly identifies him with the other leaders, and with the general spirit of the movement at this stage of the Revolution. No man, so far as we can see, did more to set the stone rolling; it was not likely that, with his slender force, he would be able to stop it at once in mid career.
In contrasting Falkland's line of conduct with that of the "Puritans," on the question of the Bishops' Bill and of the impeachment of Laud, Mr. Arnold indicates his impression that all Puritans were on principle enemies, and as a matter of course fanatical enemies, of Episcopacy. But he will find that at this time many Puritans were Low Church Episcopalians, wishing only to moderate the pretensions and curb the authority of the Bishops. Episcopacy is not one of the grievances protested against in the Millenary Petition Sir John Eliot appears to have been as strong an Erastian as Mr. Arnold could desire.
It seems to us hardly possible to draw a sharp line of distinction in any respect, except that of practical ability, between Falkland and Hampden. Falkland failed to understand, while Hampden understood, the character of the King and the full peril of the situation; that was the real difference between the two men. The political and ecclesiastical ideal of both in all probability was pretty much the same. Mr. Arnold chooses to describe Hampden as "seeking the Lord about militia or ship- money," and he undertakes to represent Jesus as "whispering to him with benign disdain." Sceptics, to disprove the objective reality of the Deity, allege that every man makes God in his own image. They might perhaps find an indirect confirmation of their remark in the numerous lives and portraitures of Christ which have appeared of late years, each entirely different from the rest, and each stamped clearly enough with the impress of an individual mind. But where has Hampden spoken of himself as "seeking the Lord about militia or ship-money?" He appears to have been a highly-educated man of the world. In one of his few remaining letters there are recommendations to a friend, who had consulted him about the education of his sons, which seem to blend regard for religion with enlightened liberality of view. If he prayed for support and guidance in his undertakings, surely he did no more than Mr. Arnold himself practically recommends people to do when he urges them to join the Established Church of England. Even should Mr. Arnold light on an authentic instance of Scripture phraseology used by Hampden, or any other Puritan chief, in a way which would now be against good taste, his critical and historical sense will readily make allowance for the difference between the present time and the time when the Bible was a newly-recovered book, and when its language, on the believer's lips and to the believer's ears, was still fresh as the dew of the morning.
It would be even more difficult to separate Falkland's general character from that of Pym, of whose existence Mr. Arnold has shown himself conscious by once mentioning his name. The political philosophy of Pym's speeches is most distinctly constitutional, and we do not see that in point of breadth or dignity they leave much to be desired, while they unquestionably express, in the fullest manner, the mind of a leader of the Puritan party.
Whoever contrasts Falkland with the Puritans will have to encounter the somewhat untoward fact that in his speech against the High Church Bishops, Falkland, if he does not actually call himself a Puritan, twice identifies the Puritan cause with his own. Among the bad objects which he accuses the clergy of advocating in their sermons is "the demolishing of Puritanism and propriety" Again he cries--
"Alas! they whose ancestors in the darkest times excommunicated the breakers of Magna Charta do now by themselves, and their adherents, both write, preach, plot, and act against it, by encouraging Dr. Beale, by preferring Dr. Mainwaring, appearing forward for monopolies and ship- money, and if any were slow and backward to comply, blasting both them and their preferment with the utmost expression of their hatred--the title of Puritans."
These words may help to make Mr. Arnold aware, when he mows down the Puritan party with some trenchant epithet, how wide the sweep of his scythe is, and the same thing will be still more distinctively brought before him by a perusal (if he has not already perused it) of the chapter on the subject in Mr. Sandford's "Studies and Illustrations of the Great Rebellion." It can hardly be necessary to remind him, or any one else, of the portrait of one who was a most undoubted Puritan, drawn by Lucy Hutchinson. If this portrait betrays the hand of a wife, Clarendon's portrait of Falkland betrays the hand of a friend, and even a beloved husband is not more likely to be the object of exaggerated, though sincere praise, than the social head and the habitual host of a circle of literary men. At all events Lucy Hutchinson is painting what she thought a perfect Puritan would be; and her picture presents to us, not a coarse, crop-eared, and snuffling fanatic, but a highly accomplished, refined, gallant, and most "amiable," though religious and seriously-minded gentleman. The Spencerian school of sentiment seems to Mr. Arnold very lovely compared with the men of the New Model Army and their ways. In the general of the New Model Army, Sir Thomas Fairfax, he has a distinct, and we venture to say very worthy, pupil of that school.
Over the most questionable as well as the most momentous passage in Falkland's public life, his admirer passes with a graceful literary movement. Falkland was sworn in as a Privy Councillor three days before, and as Secretary of State, four days after, the attempt of the King to seize the Five Members. He was thus, in outward appearance at least, brought into calamitous connection with an act which, as Clarendon sees, was the signal for civil war. Clarendon vehemently disclaims for himself and his two friends any knowledge of the King's design. So far as the more violent part of the proceeding is concerned, we can easily believe him; a woman mad with vindictive arrogance inspired it, and nobody except a madman would have been privy to it; but it is not so easy to believe him with regard to the impeachment, which was in fact an attempt to take the lives of the King's enemies by arraigning them before a political tribunal, hostile to them and favourable to their accuser, instead of bringing them to a fair and legal trial before a jury. By accepting the Secretaryship, Falkland at all events assumed a certain measure of responsibility after the fact for a proceeding which, we repeat, rendered civil war inevitable, because it must have convinced the popular leaders that to put faith in Charles with such councillors as he had about him would be insanity; and that if they allowed Parliament to rise and the Kong to resume the power of the sword, not only would all their work of reform be undone, but the fate of Sir John Eliot would be theirs. Clarendon owns that Hampden's carriage from that day was changed, implying that up to that day it had been temperate; and the insinuation that, beneath the cloak of apparent moderation, Hampden had been secretly breathing counsels of violence into the minds of others deserves no attention, when it comes from a hostile source. Of the purity of Falkland's motives we entertain not the shadow of a doubt; but we venture to think that it is very questionable whether he did right, and this not only on grounds of technical constitutionalism, which in the present day would render imperative the retirement of a Minister whose advice had been so flagrantly disregarded, but on grounds of the most broadly practical kind. He forfeited for ever, not only any influence which he might have retained over the popular leaders, and any access which he might have had to them in their more pacific mood, but probably all real control over the King. Charles was the very last man whom you could afford to allow in the slightest degree to tamper with your honour. It is surely conceivable that the recollection of an unfortunate step, and the sense of a false position, may have mingled with the sorrow caused by the public calamities in the melancholy which drove Falkland to cast away his life.
In the Civil War Falkland was always "ingeminating _Peace, Peace_". Our hearts are with him, but it was of no use. It is an unhappy part of civil wars that there can be no real peace till one party has succumbed: compromise only leads to a renewal of the conflict. There is sense as well as dignity in the deliberate though mournful acceptance of necessity, and the determination to play out the part which could not be declined, expressed in the letter written at the outbreak of the conflict by the Parliamentarian, Sir William Waller, to a personal friend in the other camp:
"My affections to you are so unchangeable that hostility itself cannot violate my friendship to your person; but I must be true to the cause wherein I serve. The great God, who is the searcher of my heart, knows with what reluctance I go upon this service, and with what perfect hatred I look upon a war without an enemy. The God of peace, in His good time, sent us peace, and in the meantime fit us to receive it! We are both on the stage, and we must act the parts that are assigned us in this tragedy. Let us do it in a way of honour, and without personal animosities."
A man in this frame of mind, we submit, was likely to get to the end of a civil war more speedily than a man in the mood, amiable as it was, of Falkland.
Perhaps, after all, the failure, the inevitable failure of Falkland's passionate pleadings for peace may have saved him from a worse doom than death on the field even of civil war. In the case of the Five Members, the King had shown how little regard he had, at least how little regard the mistress of his councils had, for the honour of his advisers. The pair might have used Falkland to lure by the pledge of his high character the leaders of the Parliament into the acceptance of a treaty? which the King, with his notions of divine right, and the Queen with her passionate love of absolute power, would, there can be little doubt, have violated as soon as the army of the Parliament had been disbanded, and the power of the sword had returned into the King's hands. Falkland might have even seen the scaffold erected, through the prostitution of his own honour, for the men whose ardent associate he had been in the overthrow of government by prerogative and in the impeachment of Strafford.
Flinging epithets at Cromwell is a very harmless indulgence of sentiment. His memory has passed unscathed even through the burning eloquence which, from the pulpit of the Restoration, denounced him as "wearing a bad hat, and that not paid for." Since research has placed him before us as he really was, the opinion has been gaining ground that he was about the greatest human force ever directed to a moral purpose; and in that sense, about the greatest man, take him all in all, that ever trod the scene of history. If his entire devotion to his cause, his valour, his magnanimity, his clemency, his fidelity to the public service, his domestic excellence and tenderness are not "conduct," all we can say is, so much the worse for "conduct." The type to which his character belonged, in common with the whole series of historic types, had in it something that was special and transitory, combined with much that, so far as we see, was universal and will endure for ever. It is in failing to note the special and transitory element, and the limitations which it imposed on the hero's greatness, that Carlyle's noble biography runs into poetry, and departs from historic truth. To supply this defect is the proper work of rational criticism; but the criticism which begins with "Philistine" is not likely to be very rational.
The objection urged by Bolingbroke against Cromwell's foreign policy, on the ground that to unite with France, which was gaining strength, against Spain, which was beginning to decline, was not the way to maintain the balance of power in Europe, is once more reproduced as though it had not been often brought forward and answered. Cromwell was not bound to trouble his head about such a figment of a special diplomacy as the balance of power any more than Shakespeare was bound to trouble his head about Voltaire's rules for the drama. He was the chief and the defender of Protestantism, and as such he was naturally led to ally himself with France, which was comparatively liberal, against Spain, which was the great organ of the Catholic reaction. An alliance with Spain was a thing impossible for a Puritan. Looking to the narrower interest of England, much more was to be gained by a war with Spain than by a war with France, because by a war with Spain an entrance was forced for English enterprise through the barriers which Spanish monopoly had raised against commercial enterprise in America. The security of England appears, in Cromwell's judgment, to have depended on her intrinsic strength, which no one can doubt that, under extraordinary disadvantages, he immensely increased, rather than on the maintenance of a European equilibrium which, as the number of the powers increased, became palpably impracticable. It may be added, that the incipient decline of the double-headed House of Austria, if it is visible to our eyes as we trace back the course of events, can hardly have been visible to any eye at that time, and, what is still more to the purpose, that the dangerous ascendency of Louis XIV. resulted in great measure from the betrayal of England by Charles II., and would have been impossible had, we will not say a second Cromwell, but a Protestant or patriotic monarch, sat on the Protector's throne.
Bolingbroke suggests, and Mr. Arnold embraces the suggestion, that Charles I., by making war on France, showed himself more sagacious with regard to foreign policy than Cromwell. But Mr. Arnold, in recommending Bolingbroke's philosophy to a generation which he thinks has too much neglected it, has discreetly warned us to let his history alone. Charles I., or rather Buckingham, in whose hands Charles was a puppet, made war on Spain, though in the most incapable manner, and with a most ignominious result: he at one time lent the French Government English ships to be used against the Protestants of Rochelle, whose resistance, apart from the religious question, was the one great obstacle to the concentration of the French power; and though he subsequently quarrelled with France, few will believe--assuredly Clarendon did not believe--that among the motives for the change, policy of any kind predominated over the passions and the vanity of the favourite. That Cromwell would have lent a steady and effective support to the Protestants, and thus have prevented the concentration of the French power, is as certain as any unfulfilled contingency can be.
Mr. Arnold is evidently anxious to bring Bolingbroke into fashion. "Hear Bolingbroke upon the success of Puritanism." Hear Lovelace on Dr. Johnson; one critic would be about as edifying as the other. Bolingbroke, a sceptical writer and a scoffer at Anglican doctrine, to say nothing about his morals, allied himself for party purposes with the fanatical clergy of the Anglican Establishment, well represented by Sacheverel, and, to gratify his allies, passed as Minister persecuting laws, about the last of the series, against Nonconformists. This, perhaps, is a proof in a certain way, of philosophic largeness of view. But if Bolingbroke is to be commended to ingenuous youth as a guide superior to party narrowness or bias, it may be well to remember the passage of his letter to Sir William Wyndham, in which he very frankly describes his own aims, and those of his confederates on their accession to office, admitting that "the principal spring of their actions was to have the government of the State in their hands, and that their principal views were the conservation of this power, great employments to themselves, and great opportunities of rewarding those who had helped to raise them, and of hurting those who stood in opposition to them;" though he has the grace to add that with these considerations of party and private interest were intermingled some which had for their object the public good. In another place he avows that he and his party designed "to fill the employments of the kingdom down to the meanest with Tories," by which they would have anticipated, and, indeed, by anticipation outdone, the vilest and most noxious proceeding of the coarsest demagogue who ever climbed to power on the shoulders of faction in the United States. It may be instructive to compare with this the principles upon which public employments were distributed by Cromwell.
It would be out of place to discuss the whole question of the Protector's administration by way of reply to a passing thrust of antipathy. But when judgment is pronounced on his external policy, his critics ought not to leave out of consideration the Union of Scotland and Ireland with England, successfully accomplished by him, repealed by the Restoration, and, like not a few of his other measures, revived and ratified by posterity, after a delay fraught with calamitous consequences in both cases, and which, in the case of Ireland, may perhaps even yet prove fatal.
We cannot help remarking, however, that the ecclesiastical policy of the Protectorate was one which it would be most inconsistent on the part of Mr. Arnold and those who hold the same view with him to decry. It was a national church (to prevent the hasty abolition of which, seems to have been Cromwell's main reason for dissolving the Barebones Parliament) with the largest possible measure of comprehension. To us the weak points of such a policy appear manifest enough, but by Mr. Arnold and those of his way of thinking it ought, if we mistake not, to be respected as an anticipation of their own deal.
Of one great and irretrievable error Cromwell was guilty--he died before his hour. That his government was taking root is clear from the bearing of Mazarin and Don Lewis De Haro, sufficiently cool judges, towards the Stuart Pretender. The Restoration was a reaction not against the Protectorate but against the military anarchy which ensued. Had Cromwell lived ten years longer, or had his marshals been true to his successor, to his cause, and to their own fortunes, there would have been an end of the struggle against Stuart prerogative, the spirit of Laud would have been laid for ever; the temporal power of ecclesiastics would have troubled no more; the Union with Scotland and Ireland would have remained unbroken; and the genuine representation of the people embodied in the Instrument of Government would have continued to exist, in the place of rotten boroughs, the sources of oligarchy and corruption, of class government and class wars. Let us philosophize about general causes as much as we will, untoward accidents occur: the loss of Pym and Hampden in the early part of the Revolution, and that of Cromwell at its close, may be fairly reckoned as accidents, and they were untoward in the highest degree.
No doubt, while Falkland fits perfectly into the line of English progress and takes his place with obvious propriety among the Saints of Constitutionalism in the vestibule of the House of Commons, while even Hampden finds admission as the opponent of ship-money, the kind veil of oblivion being drawn over the part he played as a leader in the Revolution, Cromwell, though his hold over the hearts of the English people is growing all the time, remains in an uncovenanted condition. The problem of his statue is still, and, so far as England is concerned, seems likely long to be, unsolved. Put him high or low, in the line of kings or out of it, he is hopelessly incongruous, incommensurable, and out of place. He is in fact the man of the New World; his institutions in the main embody the organic principles of New World society: at Washington, not at Westminster should be his statue.
What Puritanism did for England, and what credit is due to it as an element of English character, are questions which cannot be settled by mere assertion, on our side at least. In its highest development, and at the period of its greatest men, it was militant, and everything militant is sure to bear evil traces of the battle. For that reason Christianity has always been in favour of peace and goodwill; let the Regius Professor of Theology at Oxford, in his Christian philosophy of war, be as ingenious and as admirable as he may. But sometimes it is necessary to accept the arbitrament of the sword. It was necessary at Marathon, on the plain of Tours, on the waters which bore the Armada, at Lutzen, at Marston, at Leipsic, at Gettysburg. Darius, the Moors, Philip II., Wallenstein, Prince Rupert, Bonaparte, the Slave-owners, did not offer you the opportunity which you would so gladly have embraced, of a tranquil and amicable discussion among lime-trees and violets. On each occasion the cause of human progress drew along with it plenty of mud and slime, nevertheless it was the cause of human progress. On each occasion the wrong side no doubt had its Falklands, nevertheless it was the wrong side.
In the beginning of the seventeenth century the Reformation was brought to the verge of destruction. When Wallenstein sat down before Stralsund everything was gone but England, Holland, Sweden, and some cantons of Switzerland. In England the stream of reaction was running strong; Holland could not have stood by herself; Sweden was nothing as a power, though it turned out that she had a man. Fortunately the Lambeth Popedom and the Royal Supremacy prevented the English division of the army of Reaction from getting into line with the other divisions and compelled it to accept decisive battle on a separate field against the most formidable soldiers of the Reformation. These soldiers saved Protestantism, which was their first object, and they saved English liberty into the bargain. We who have come after can stand by the battlefield, pouncet-box in hand, and sniff and sneer as much as we will.
Great Tew was an anticipation, for ever beautiful and memorable, of the time when all swords shall be sheathed, and the world shall have entered into final peace. But in its philosophy there were, as the world then was, two defects; it did not reach the people, and it was incapable of protecting its own existence. Laud himself did not care to crush it; he was an ecclesiastical despot rather than a theological bigot; he had a genuine respect for learned men; he preferred winning them by gracious words and preferment to coercing them with the pillory and the shears. But had Laud's system prevailed, there would soon have been an end of the philosophy of Great Tew. Mr. Arnold points to the free thought of Bacon. Nobody in those days scented mischief in the inductive philosophy, while in politics and religion Bacon was scrupulously orthodox. Cromwell's faith was a narrower and coarser thing by far than that of the inmates of the "college in a purer air;" but it brought religion and morality--not the most genial or rational morality, but still morality--into the cottage as well as into the manor-house, and it was able to protect its own existence When it had mounted to power in the person of its chief, the opinions of Great Tew, and all opinions that would abstain from trying to overthrow the Government and restore the tyranny, enjoyed practically larger and more assured liberty than they had ever enjoyed in England before or were destined to enjoy for many a year to come. Falkland, says Mr. Arnold, was in the grasp of _fatality, hence the transcendent interest that attaches to him_. Cromwell, happily for his cause and for his country, was, or felt himself to be, not in the grasp of fatality but in the hand of God.
Might we not have done just as well without Puritanism? Might not some other way have been found of preserving the serious element in English character and saving English liberty from those who were conspiring for its destruction? Such questions as these may be asked without end, and they may be answered by any one who is endowed with a knowledge of men who were never born, and of events that have never happened. Might not a way have been found of rescuing the great interests of humanity without Greek resistance to Persian invasion, or German resistance to the tyranny of Bonaparte? Suppose in place of the Puritan chiefs there had been raised up by miracle a set of men at once consummate soldiers and perfect philosophers, who would have fought and won the battle without being heated by the conflict. Suppose, to prevent the necessity of any conflict at all, Charles, Strafford, and Laud had voluntarily abandoned their designs. As it was, Puritanism did, and alone could do, the work. What the Renaissance would have been without Puritan morality we can pretty well guess from the experience of Italy. It would have probably been like the life of Lorenzo--vice, filthy vice, decorated with art and with elegant philosophy; an academy under the same roof with a brothel. There were ages before morality, and there have been ages between the moralities. There was, in England, an age between the decline of the Catholic morality and the rise of the Puritan, marked by a laxity of conduct, public and private, which was partly redeemed but not neutralized by Elizabethan genius and enterprise. No doubt when the revival came, there was a High Church as well as a Puritan morality, and that fact ought always to be borne in mind; but the High Church morality was inextricably bound up with sacerdotal superstition and with absolute government; it had no hold on the people; and it found itself suspiciously at home in the Court of James, in the households of Somerset and Buckingham, and in the tribunal which lent itself to the divorce of Essex.
That the Puritan Revolution was followed by a sacerdotal and sensualist reaction is too true: all revolutions are followed by reactions; it is one great reason for avoiding them. But let it be remembered, first, that the disbanded soldiers of the Commonwealth and the other relics of the Puritan party still remained the most moral and respectable element in the country; and secondly, that the period of lassitude which follows great efforts, whether of men or nations, is not altogether the condemnation of the effort, but partly the weakness of humanity. Nations as well as men, if they aim high, must sometimes overstrain themselves, and weariness must ensue. Nor did the Commonwealth of England come to nothing, though in a society not half emancipated from feudalism it was premature, and therefore, at the time, a failure. It opened a glimpse of a new order of things: it was the first example of a great national republic, the republics of antiquity having been at once city republics and republics of slave-owners: it not only heralded but, to some extent, prepared the American and even the French Revolution. In its sublime death-song, chanted by the great Puritan poet, our ears catch the accents of a hope that did not die.
The Restoration was the end of the Puritan party, which thenceforth separated into two portions, the high political element taking the form of Whiggism, while the more religious element was represented in subsequent history by the Nonconformists. Under the Marian reaction Protestantism had been saved, and the errors which it had committed in its hour of ascendency had been redeemed by the champions, drawn mostly from the humbler classes, who suffered for it at the stake. Under the Restoration it was again saved, and the errors which it had once more committed in the hour of political triumph were once more redeemed by martyrs of the same class, whose sufferings in the noisome and pestilential prisons of that day were probably not much less severe than the pangs of those who died by fire. Both in the Marian and in the Restoration martyrs of Protestantism there was no doubt much that was irrational and unattractive; yet the record of their services to humanity remains, and will remain; let the free-thought of modern times, for which their self-devoting loyalty to such truth as they knew made way, be grateful or ungrateful to them as it will.
The relations of Nonconformity, with which we must couple Scotch Presbyterianism, its partner in fundamental doctrine, its constant ally in the conflict, and fellow-sufferer in the hour of adversity, to English religion, morality, industry, education, philanthropy, science, and to the English civilization in general, would be a most important and instructive chapter in English history, but we are hardly called upon to attempt to write it in refutation of jocose charges of "hideousness" and "immense ennui." A sufficient answer to such quips and cranks will be found, we believe, within the same covers with Mr. Arnold's "Falkland," in the shape of an article on the Pulpit, by Mr. Baldwin Brown, which in tone and culture appears to us a fit companion for any other paper in the journal.
That Nonconformity has been political is true. Fortunately for the liberties of England it has had to struggle for civil right in order to obtain religious freedom. No doubt in the course of the conflict it has contracted a certain gloominess of character, and shown an unamiable side. Treat men with persistent and insolent injustice, strip them of their rights as citizens, put on them a social brand, compel them to pay for the maintenance of the pulpits from which their religion is assailed, and you will run a very great risk of souring their tempers. But without rehearsing disagreeable details, we may say generally that whoever should undertake to prove that the Established Church had not been, from the hour of her birth down to the last general election, at least as political as the Free Churches, and at least as responsible for the evils which political religion has brought upon the nation, would show considerable confidence in his powers of dealing with history. Could he find a parallel on the side of the Established Church to the magnanimous loyalty to national interests shown by Nonconformists, in rejecting the bribe offered them by James II., and supporting their persecutors against an illegal toleration? Could he find a parallel on the side of the Nonconformists to the conduct of the Established Church, in turning round, the moment the victory had been won by Nonconformist aid, and recommencing the persecution of the Nonconformists?
We fully agree with Mr. Arnold, however, in thinking that political Nonconformity is an evil. There are two known modes of getting rid of it--the Spanish Inquisition and religious equality. Mr. Arnold seems to think that there is yet a third--general submission, in matters theological and ecclesiastical, to the gentle sway of Beau Nash.
Religious equality in the United States may not be perfect unity, it may not be the height of culture or of grace, but at all events it is peace. Ultramontanism there, as everywhere else, is aggressive, and a source of disturbance; and, on the other hand, in the struggle against slavery, political and religious elements were inevitably intermingled, but as a rule politics are kept perfectly clear of religion. Saving in the case of Roman Catholicism, we cannot call to mind a single instance of a serious appeal in an election to sectarian feeling. Much as we have heard of the two candidates for the Presidency, we could not at this moment tell to what Church either of them belongs. Where no Church is privileged, there can be no cause for jealousy. The Churches dwell side by side, without disturbing the State with any quarrels; they are all alike loyal to the government; they unite in supporting a system of popular education which generally includes a certain element of unsectarian religion, they combine for social and philanthropic objects; they testify, by their common celebration of national thanksgivings and fasts their unity at all events as portions of the same Christian nation. So far as we know, controversy between them is very rare; there is more of it within the several Churches between their own more orthodox and more liberal members. In none does it rage more violently than in the Episcopal Church, though, under religious equality, irreconcilable disagreement on religious questions leads to seccession, not to mutual lawsuits and imprisonments.
Mr. Arnold says in praise of Falkland that "he was profoundly serious." We presume he means not only that Falkland treated great questions in a serious way, without unseasonable quizzing, but that he was, in the words quoted from Clarendon in the next sentence, "a precise lover of truth, and superior to all possible temptations for its violation." The temptations, we presume, would have included those of taste or fancy, as well as those of the more obvious kind; and Falkland's paramount regard for truth would have extended to all his fellow-men as well as to himself and his own intellectual circle. He would never, we are confident, have advised any human being to separate religion from truth, he would never have suffered himself to intimate that truth was the property of a select circle, while "poetry" was good enough for the common people, he would never have encouraged thousands of clergymen, educated men with sensitive consciences, to go on preaching to their flocks from the pulpit, on grounds of social convenience, doctrines which they repudiated in the study, and derided in the company of cultivated men, he would never have exhorted people to enter from aesthetic considerations a spiritual society of which, in the same breath, he proclaimed the creeds to be figments, the priesthood to be an illusion, the sacred narratives to be myths, and the Triune God to be a caricature of Lord Shaftesbury multiplied by three. If he had done so, and if his propagandism had been successful, we suspect he would soon have produced an anarchy, not only religious but social, compared with which the most chaotic periods of the Revolution would have been harmony and order. In the days of the Antonines, to which Gibbon looks back so wistfully, opinion had little influence; the organic forces of society were of a more primitive and a coarser kind. In modern times if a writer could succeed in separating truth from religion, he would shake the pillars of the moral and social as well as the intellectual world.
That religion is inseparable from truth is the strong and special tradition of the Nonconformists. Their history has been a long struggle for the rights of conscience against spurious authority, an authority which we believe Mr. Arnold holds to be spurious as well as they. This is not altogether a bad start in the pursuit of the truth for which the world now craves, and which, we cordially admit, lies beyond the existing creed of any particular Church. At all events, it would seem improvident to merge such an element of religious inquiry in that of which the tradition is submission to spurious authority, whatever advantages the latter may have in social, literary, and aesthetic respects. Not a generation has yet passed since the admission of Nonconformists to the Universities; and more than a generation is needed in order to attain the highest culture. Give the Free Churches time, and let us see whether they have not something better to give us in return than "hideousness" and "immense ennui."
[The end]
Goldwin Smith's essay: Falkland And The Puritans