Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847

CROMWELL

Mr Carlyle's services to history in collecting and editing these letters¹ and speeches of Cromwell, all men will readily and gratefully acknowledge. A work more valuable as a guide to the study of the singular and complex character of our pious revolutionist, our religious demagogue, our preaching and praying warrior and usurper, has not been produced. There is another portion of Mr Carlyle's labours which will not meet so unanimous an approbation. As editor, Mr Carlyle has given us a valuable work; as commentator, the view which he would teach us to take of English Puritanism is, to our thinking, simply the most paradoxical, absurd, unintelligible, mad business we ever encountered in our lives.

Our Hero-worshipper, it must be allowed, has been more fortunate this time in the selection of his object of devotion than when he shouted to the skies his Mirabeaus and Dantons. But he makes an unfortunate species of compensation. In proportion as his hero is more within the bounds of humanity has his worship become more extravagant and outrageous. He out-puritans the Puritans; he is more fanatic than his idol; he has chosen to express himself with such a righteous truculence, such a sanguinary zeal, such a pious contempt for human virtue and human sympathies, as would have startled Old Noll himself. It is a bad religion this hero-worship—at least as practised by Mr Carlyle. Here is our amiable countryman rendered by it, in turn, a terrorist and a fanatic. All his own intellectual culture he throws down and abandons. Such dire transformation ensues as reminds us of a certain hero-worship which Milton has celebrated:

 
"Horror on him falls,
And horrid sympathy; for what he sees
He feels himself, now changing; down his arms,
Down falls the spear and shield; down he as fast;
And the dire hiss renews, and the dire form,
Catched by contagion."
 

But to our task—which is no light one; for in our survey of this book we have to keep in view both hero and hero-worshipper, Cromwell and Carlyle, both somewhat slippery personages, abnormal, enigmatical.

The speeches of Oliver Cromwell have a formidable reputation for prolixity, confusion, and excessive tediousness; yet we have not, for our own part, found these volumes to be of the dry and scarce readable description which their title foreboded; and we would caution others not to be deterred by any fears of this nature from their perusal. They will find an interest grow upon them as they proceed, and the last volume to be more attractive than the first. As the work advances, the letters and speeches of Cromwell become more intimately connected with the great transactions of the period, and the editor himself more frequently favours us with some specimen of his happier manner, where concentration of style, a spirit of humour and reflection, and a power of vivid portraiture, have not degenerated into mere quaintness, into a species of slang, into Carlylisms, into vague generalities about infinitudes and eternities. At all times the interspersed commentary—written in that peculiar, fantastic, jingling manner which, illegitimate as it is, disorderly and scandalous to all lovers of propriety in style and diction, is at all events the very opposite to dulness—forms perhaps the most fortunate contrast that could have been devised with the Cromwellian period, so arid and colourless, so lengthy and so tortuous, tinged often with such a dismal obscurity, and valuable in fact only as showing the man, utterly valueless as an exposition of thought. Perhaps, as models of style, a critic would be as little disposed to applaud the writing of Mr Carlyle as the compositions of Cromwell, but they form here all admirable relief the one to the other; taken together, one can consume a considerable quantity of both. Your dry bread is weary mastication, and your potted anchovies have a somewhat too stinging flavour; but taken together, sandwich-fashion, as they are here, the consumption may go on rapidly enough.

But, whether dry or not, the letters and speeches of Cromwell should be read by every one desirous of obtaining an insight into the character of not the least extraordinary, nor the least misrepresented personage in history. If there is any one who still believes that Cromwell was a thorough hypocrite, that his religion was a systematic feint to cover his ambitious designs, the perusal of these volumes will entirely undeceive him. We look upon this hypothesis, this Machiavelian explanation of Cromwell's character, as henceforth entirely dismissed from all candid and intelligent minds. It was quite natural that such a view should be taken of their terrible enemy by the royalists of the Restoration, hating his memory with a most cordial hatred, and accustomed, in their blinding licentiousness, to look upon all religion as little better than cant and hypocrisy. It was quite natural that such a portrait of him should be drawn by the men who unearthed his bones, and vented their rage upon a senseless corpse. We see it was quite inevitable that some such coarse caricature should be thus limned and transmitted to us. But it has lasted long enough. We believe, indeed, that by most persons it has already been dismissed and disowned. It may now be torn into shreds, and cast aside as utterly faithless.

Cromwell was a genuine Puritan. There is no doubt of that. He was no youth when the war broke out, nor a man who had yet to seek his religious party or principles. As the farmer of St Ives, we see him, as distinctly as if he still lived upon the earth, the man of fierce sectarian piety, in natural temper not unamiable, somewhat gloomy and hypochondriacal, but, above all, distinguished by whatsoever of good or ill the sort of Calvinistic divinity prevalent at the time could infuse into its professors. Such the war found him, and such he continued to be; throughout his whole career we never for a moment lose sight of "the saint," the title which, then as now, the profane world gave to this class of men.

Was Cromwell, then, always sincere in his utterances? was there no cant, no hypocrisy? Did he never conceal the ambition and domineering spirit of the soldier under the humility of the saint? Another matter quite. Because a man is religious in the main, it follows not that he is incapable of occasionally practising hypocrisy: he may lapse as well into this, as into any crime of the decalogue. Although we might find it difficult to put our finger exactly upon the spot, and say, Here speaks the hypocrite, we are not without suspicion that Cromwell was at times practising dissimulation. But if he dissembled, if he used with artifice the language of religion, it was no new and foreign disguise that he put on. He had but to draw the folds a little higher over his face of a robe that he had long worn in all times and seasons, and which was verily his own.

In common with almost all men who in times of civil broil have risen from a lowly station to great power, Cromwell had occasion, no doubt, at times for dissimulation. His religion, genuine as it was, would no more prevent him from the practice of this necessary craft than from the sanguinary deeds not more necessary to the triumph of his cause. Nay, it was precisely of that enthusiastic order which, in the most liberal manner, justifies the means for the end. Now, at a period when the saints were in the ascendant, dissimulation would unavoidably take a religious form, and when most deceiving men, or most faithfully addressing them, he would still colour all his language with the same hue of piety. As, in an age of chivalry, the dissembler would have the boast of honour and the parade of knightly courtesy for ever on his lips, so in these times of saintship he would lull the suspicions of men by a gross emblazonry of religion. It might well happen, therefore, that such a man as Cromwell, working his way upward to the highest post of authority, would deal in much insincerity of phrase, and yet have "the root of the matter" in him. Indeed, nothing is more common in the world than this combination of genuine feelings of piety with a great abundance of cant, habitual or designed. It would betray a very slender knowledge of mankind, and none at all of what is called the religious world, to conclude that a man is destitute of sincere piety because he sometimes makes use of the language of religion for ulterior purposes not peculiarly pious.

It is to be observed, moreover, that to readers unfamiliar with the peculiarities of professing Christians, whether Puritans or of other denomination, the expressions of humility and self-abasement which Cromwell frequently makes use of have appeared to be plain symptoms of hypocrisy. They are nothing but the habits of the sect. Such expressions are supposed to have been employed to blind men to his ambitious projects, to shelter him from the jealous scrutiny of rivals and superiors. Such a purpose they may have sometimes answered, and been intended to answer; but in the main they are nothing more nor less than the dialect of the tribe. Because is a Christian virtue, certain religious people have thought fit to indulge in a false vituperation of themselves. Striving avariciously after all virtues, however incompatible the one with the other, they counterfeit vice and meanness, that, good men as they are, they may have abundance of contrition. How far there can be Christianity or piety in an abuse and degradation of ourselves, when that abuse and degradation must be felt all along to be untrue—if any reflection whatever accompanies such language—we leave such people to settle amongst themselves. Certain it is that the Puritans excelled in this as in every other kindred extravagance. The elect of the Lord were fond of describing themselves as the most contemptible of sinners; the salt of the earth as being rottenness and corruption. It is to this habit of unmeaning self-disparagement that we are to attribute many of those phrases which have been thought in Cromwell to be studied artifices to cloak ambitious designs.

They are rife on all occasions, and their frequency and energy bear no relation to the supposed exigencies of his political career. Take the following instance. No man surely knew better than he, that at the conclusion of the civil war the army had become paramount. He could sometimes speak of this army with the natural pride of a soldier, with the full consciousness of the power it possessed, and had conferred on him; and yet, at other times, he would talk of this terrible force in the puling strain, in more than the drawl and drivel of the conventicle. As Lord High Protector, addressing his first parliament, he says:—"I had the approbation of the officers of the army, in the three nations of England, Scotland, and Ireland. I say of the officers: I had that by their express remonstrances, and under signature. But there went along with that express consent of theirs, an implied consent also of a body of persons who had had somewhat to do in the world; who had been instrumental, by God, to fight down the enemies of God, and his people, in the three nations. And truly, until my hands were bound, and I was limited, (to my own great satisfaction, as many can bear me witness,) while I had in my hands so great a power and arbitrariness—the soldiery were a very considerable part of these nations, especially all government being dissolved. I say, when all government was thus dissolved, and nothing to keep things in order but the sword!" There can be no doubt of it—the soldiery were a very considerable part of the nation. But the Lord High Protector, in a speech he makes to his second parliament, referring to the very same period, narrating the very same events, can talk of this army as "a company of poor men," "your poor army," "those poor contemptible men." To attempt to detect any political motive for this absurd phraseology, would be a very idle speculation, mere waste of ingenuity: he was simply more in the puritanic vein in the one case than the other.

In his letters to the parliament, giving an account of his successes in the war, he generally concludes with some expression of this strained evangelical modesty, and seems very much afraid lest Speaker Lenthall and other honourable members should attribute the victories he announces, in any measure to the army and the general who won them. He might be very sure, however, that, notwithstanding these self-renunciations, the parliament knew very well who was fighting their battles. Such a mode of speech would not endanger his reputation, nor diminish from his claims; might perhaps—though we will not say this was present to his thoughts—induce the parliament to presume that he would not insist on any very egregious reward for services he was so anxious to disclaim. We will quote one instance of this self-denying style; and perhaps the following passage contains altogether as much of a certain fanatical mode of reasoning as could be well found in so short a compass. Prince Rupert, then at Worcester, had sent two thousand men across the country, to his majesty at Oxford, to convoy his majesty's person and the artillery over to him at Worcester. Cromwell attacked and routed this convoy; he also took Bletchington House. After giving an account of the transaction, he continues:—"This was the mercy of God; and nothing is more due than a real acknowledgment. And though I have had greater mercies, yet none clearer: because, in the first place, God brought them to our hands when we looked not for them; and delivered them out of our hands, when we laid a reasonable design to surprise them, and which we carefully endeavoured. His mercy appears in this also, that I did much doubt the storming of the house, it being strong and well manned, and I having few dragoons, and this being not my business; and yet we got it. I hope you will pardon me if I say, God is not enough owned. We look too much to men and visible helps: this hath much hindered our success." This from Oliver, who so well knew how "to keep his powder dry!" from Oliver, who, enthusiast himself, could yet shrewdly calculate on the military efficacy of enthusiasm, and set it down amongst the ways and means! Cant or not, it is sad stuff.

But, Puritan as he was, we can admire Cromwell. Every great man, in whatever times, or in whatever part of the world he has made his appearance, has earned his title to fame and distinction, not by qualities peculiar to the sect or religion to which he may have belonged, but qualities which, though connected with his own especial faith or tenets, are recognised as the common property of mankind; he has been great not as Catholic, as Puritan, as Pagan, as Mahometan, but as man; he has been great, because he was pious, brave, patriotic, sagacious, resolute, and has achieved great enterprises on the theatre of life. The greatness of Cromwell was indeed allied to Puritanism, inasmuch as his mind grew up under this peculiar form of religion; but what we, and all posterity must admire in Cromwell, is by no means the puritan. His steadiness of purpose, his unshaken resolution, his military prowess, his eminent talent to govern and command, and his religious sense of duty to the Supreme, might all have existed under other modes of religion. In our admiration we entirely separate these qualities from that least gainly and least wholesome of the forms of Christian piety with which they are here found connected. History gives us examples of every kind of virtue, and every kind of talent, united with every species of fanaticism that has afflicted civilised life. It follows not that we applaud the fanaticism. The early caliphs were several of them distinguished by exalted virtues, temperance, self-denial, justice, patriotism: we praise these virtues, we acknowledge, too, that they are here linked with the profession of the faith of Islam; but for all this we do not admire the religion of Mahomet, nor that fanaticism which writ its texts upon the sword.

We insist upon this obvious distinction, because, whilst agreeing—to a certain extent—in Mr Carlyle's view of the character of Cromwell, we beg not to be implicated in that esteem and reverence which he professes to entertain for Puritanism, or the Puritans as a body. And this brings us to the extraordinary part of Mr Carlyle's performance—his ardent sympathy, nay his acquiescence with, and adherence to the Puritans, to that point that he adopts their convictions, their feelings, and even some of their most grotesque reasonings. Their violence and ferocity, we were prepared to see Mr Carlyle, in his own sardonic fashion, abet and encourage; his sympathy is always with the party who strikes; but that he should identify himself with their mumming thoughts, their "plentiful reasons," their gloomiest superstitions, was what no one could have anticipated. On this subject we must quote his own words; our own would not be credited; they would seem to any one who had not read his work to be scandalous misrepresentations. The extravagance runs through the whole book, but we have it perhaps more concentrated in the Introduction.

This Introduction, which we sat down to with keen expectations, disappointed us extremely, at least in those parts where any general views are taken. We feel, and have elsewhere ungrudgingly expressed, a certain admiration for the talents of Mr Carlyle. We shall never forget the surprise and pleasure with which we read the "Sartor Resartus," as it one day burst suddenly and accidentally upon us; and no one who has once read his graphic and passionate history of the French Revolution, can ever forget the vivid pictures that were there presented to him. We opened this book, therefore, with a sort of anticipatory relish. But we found very little of his genius, and very much of his extravagance; less of the one and more of the other, than we thought could possibly have been brought together. Metaphors and allusions, already worn thread-bare, are introduced as stock phrases, as if he had inserted them in his dictionary of the English language. All his vices of manner are exaggerated, while the freshness of thought, which half excused them, is departed. These strange metaphors, these glaring colours, which are ready spread out upon his palette, he transfers with hasty profusion to his canvass, till—(as it has been said of Mr Turner's, pictures)—the canvass and the palette-plate very nearly resemble. But were it otherwise, were there all and more than the wit, and humour, and sarcasm, and pungent phrase, and graphic power, which may be found scattered through Mr Carlyle's best performances, there is here a substratum of sheer and violent absurdity, which all these together would fail to disguise or compensate. Certainly there are pages of writing in this Introduction which contain such an amount of extravagant assertion, uttered in such fantastic jargon, as we think could nowhere be paralleled. Dulness could never have attained to any thing so extraordinary; and surely genius never before condescended to such workmanship.

"What and how great," thus commences the book, "are the interests which connect themselves with the hope that England may yet attain to some, practical belief and understanding of its history during the seventeenth century, need not be insisted on at present, such hope being still very distant, very uncertain. We have wandered far away from the ideas which guided us in that century, and indeed which had guided us in all preceding centuries, but of which that century was the ultimate manifestation. We have wandered very far, and must endeavour to return and connect ourselves therewith again! It is with other feelings than those of poor peddling dilettantism, other aims than the writing of successful or unsuccessful publications, that an earnest man occupies himself in those dreary provinces of the dead and buried. The last glimpse of the godlike vanishing from this England; conviction and veracity giving place to hollow cant and formalism—antique 'Reign of God,' which all true men in their several dialects and modes have always striven for, giving place to the modern reign of the No-God, whom men name devil; this, in its multitudinous meanings and results, is a sight to create reflections in the earnest man! One wishes there were a history of English Puritanism, the last of all our heroisms, but sees small prospect of such a thing at present."

Then, beginning to quote himself, as his manner is, changing his voice and adopting another key, as if by this thin disguise to obtain somewhat more license for the wildness and vehemence of his speech—an artifice surely not necessary here—he thus continues:—

"'Few nobler heroisms,' says a well-known writer, long occupied on this subject, 'at bottom, perhaps, no nobler heroism, ever transacted itself on this earth; and it lies as good as lost to us, overwhelmed under such an avalanche of human stupidities as no heroism before ever did. Intrinsically and extrinsically it may be considered inaccessible to these generations. Intrinsically, the spiritual purport of it has become inconceivable, incredible to the modern mind. Extrinsically, the documents and records of it, scattered waste as a shoreless chaos, are not legible. They lie there printed, written, to the extent of tons of square miles, as shot-rubbish; unedited, unsorted, not so much as indexed; full of every conceivable confusion; yielding light to very few; yielding darkness, in several sorts, to very many.' …

"'This, then,' continues our impatient friend, 'is the Elysium we English have provided for our heroes! The Rushworthian Elysium. Dreariest continent of shot-rubbish the eye ever saw. Confusion piled on confusion to your utmost horizon's edge; obscure in lurid twilight as of the shadow of death; trackless, without index, without finger-post, or mark of any human foregoer; where your human footstep, if you are still human, echoes bodeful through the gaunt solitude, peopled only by somnambulant pedants, dilettants, and doleful creatures, by phantasms, errors, inconceivabilities, by nightmares, pasteboard norroys, griffins, wiverns, and chimeras dire! There, all vanquished, overwhelmed under such waste lumber mountains, the wreck and dead ashes of some six unbelieving generations, does the age of Cromwell and his Puritans lie hidden from us. This is what we, for our share, have been able to accomplish towards keeping our heroic ones in memory.'"

After some further diatribe against all preceding historians, collectors, and editors, he drops his ventriloquism, and, resuming a somewhat more natural voice, he proceeds:—

"Nay, in addition to the sad state of our historical books, and what indeed is fundamentally the cause and origin of that, our common spiritual notions, if any notion of ours may still deserve to be called spiritual, are fatal to a right understanding of that seventeenth century. The Christian doctrines, which then dwelt alive in every heart, have now in a manner died out of all hearts—very mournful to behold—and are not the guidance of this world any more. Nay, worse still, the cant of them does yet dwell alive with us, little doubting that it is cant, in which fatal intermediate state the eternal sacredness of this universe itself, of this human life itself, has fallen dark to the most of us, and we think that, too, a cant and a creed."

So!—as our honest German friend would exclaim, puffing from his mouth at the same time a huge volume of symbolic smoke. We have withdrawn it seems, from the path of light ever since the reign of the army and its godly officers established a.d. 1649. We must return and connect ourselves therewith; it is our only salvation; though, indeed, if Puritanism was the manifestation of the ideas of all preceding centuries—if the same current of thought can be traced from William the Conqueror to Oliver the conqueror—a very little ingenuity would suffice to trace the same ideas, the same current of thought, somewhat farther still. But this reign of the puritanical army was really "the last glimpse of the godlike!"—it was "the reign of God!" and we live under the reign of –, psha! Why, he does not even give us a substantial devil, but coins a strange personification of a negative. Such was not the devil, by the way, at the time of "the noblest heroism ever transacted on the earth." Such a definition of the "roaring lion," would, in those days of light and happiness, have procured its author, at the very least, a trip to Barbadoes. Even Cromwell himself would have Barbadoesed him.

"This last of our heroisms!" God grant it is the last! It is only out of another religious war that another such heroism can arise. If church and dissent should take up arms, and, instead of controversies carried on in pamphlets, upon tradition and white surplices, should blow out each other's brains with gunpowder, then Mr Carlyle would see his "heroic ones" revive upon the earth.

"The Christian doctrines which then dwelt alive in every heart, have now in a manner died out of all hearts." Only the cant of them dwells alive with us. The same clear-sighted author, who sees the Christian doctrines so beautifully and pre-eminently developed in the Ironsides of Cromwell, in the troopers of Lambert and Harrison, sacking, pillaging, slaughtering, and in all that tribe of men who ever shed blood the readier after prayer-time—men who had dropped from their memory Christ's own preaching, to fill their mouths with the curses which the Hebrew prophets had been permitted, under a past dispensation, to denounce against the enemies of Judea, who had constructed their theology out of the darkest parts of the New, and the most fearful portion of the Old Testament;—this same author, opening his eyes and ears upon his own day and generation, finds that Christianity has died out of all hearts, and its phraseology, as he expresses himself elsewhere, "become mournful to him when spouted as frothy cant from Exeter Hall." If Mr Carlyle would visit Exeter Hall, and carry there one tithe of the determination to approve, that he exhibits in favour of the Puritan, he would find a Christian piety as sincere, as genuine, and far more humane, than his heroes of Naseby, or Dunbar, or Drogheda were acquainted with. He would see the descendants of his Puritans, relieved, at least we may say, from the necessity of raising their psalm on the battle-field, indulging in none of the ferocities of our nature, assembling in numerous but peaceful meetings, raising annually, by a quiet but no contemptible sacrifice, their millions for the dissemination of Gospel truth. But Mr Carlyle would call this cant; he sees nothing good, or generous, or high-minded in any portion of the world in which he lives; he reserves his sympathies for the past—for the men of buckram and broad-sword, who, on a question of church government, were always ready "to hew Agag to pieces," let Agag stand for who, or what number it might.

If there is one spectacle more odious than another of all which history presents to us, whether it take place amongst Mahometan or Christian, Catholic or Protestant, it is this:—to see men practising all the terrible brutalities of war, treading down their enemies, doing all that rage and the worst passions prompt, and doing all amidst exclamations of piety, devout acknowledgments of submission to Divine will, and professions of gratitude to God. Other religious factions have committed far greater atrocities than the Puritans, but nowhere in history is this same spectacle exhibited with more distasteful and sickening accompaniments. The Moslem thanked God upon his sword in at least a somewhat soldierly manner; and the Catholic, by the very pomp with which he chants his Te Deum, somewhat conceals the meaning of his act, and, keeping God a little out of sight, makes his mass express the natural feeling of a human triumph. But the sleek Puritan, at once grovelling and presumptuous, mingles with his sanguinary mood all the morbid sickly conceit, all the crawling affected humility of the conventicle. All his bloodsheds are "mercies," and they are granted in answer to his long and miserable prayers—prayers which, to a man of rational piety, sound very much like blasphemies. He carries with him to the battle-field, to the siege, to the massacre, not one even of those generous feelings which war itself permits towards a foe. He chooses to call his enemy the enemy of God, and kneels before he fights, that the inexpressible mercy may be granted of cutting his throat!

"That the sense of difference between right and wrong," says Mr Carlyle, "had filled all time and all space for man, and bodied itself forth into a heaven and hell for him,—this constitutes the grand feature of those Puritan, old-Christian ages; this is the element which stamps them as heroic, and has rendered their works great, manlike, fruitful to all generations." Quite on the contrary. The sense of right and wrong was obscured, confused, lost sight of, in the promptings of a presumptuous enthusiasm; and it is exactly this which constitutes the perilous characteristic of such men as the Puritans and Cameronians, and similar sectaries. How can the sense of right and wrong keep its footing in an enthusiasm which has brought itself to believe that all its successes are a direct answer to its prayers? Success becomes the very measure of right and wrong. The two extremes of Atheism and Fanaticism have met; they may both dispense with conscience, and make the event the criterion of the deed. Hear how the pious heroes of Mr Carlyle reason on one of the most solemn occasions of the civil war. The army is remonstrating with the Parliament because it appeared slow to shed the blood of their conquered and captured King, and it actually speaks of the death of Charles "as appeasing the wrath of God" against that sovereign! and bids the Parliament "sadly to consider, as men accountable to the Highest," how far an accommodation with the King, "when God hath given him so clearly into your power to do justice, can be just before God or good men." The power to do the act is full authority, is absolute command to do it. What other doctrine could a Cæsar Borgia, or an Eccelino, the tyrant of Padua, desire to be governed, or rather to be manumitted by from all government?