It is worth while to continue the narrative a little further. We adopt Mr Carlyle's words. "At London, matters are coming rapidly to a crisis. The resumed debate, 'shall the army remonstrance be taken into consideration?' does not come out affirmative; on the contrary, on Thursday the 31st, it comes out negative, by a majority of ninety. 'No, we will not take it into consideration.' 'No?' The army at Windsor thereupon spends again 'a day in prayer.' The army at Windsor has decided on the morrow, that it will march to London; marches, arrives accordingly, on Saturday, December 2d; quarters itself in Whitehall, in St James's, 'and other great vacant houses in the skirts of the city and villages about, no offence being given any where.' In the drama of modern history, one knows not any graver, more note-worthy scene; earnest as very death and judgment. They have decided to have justice, these men; to see God's justice done, and his judgments executed on this earth."
Adjutant Allen and Mr Carlyle are both of the same mind,—take the same views of public matters, political and religious. But the Adjutant himself would open great eyes at the sentence which next follows:—
"The abysses where the thunders and splendours are bred—the reader sees them again laid bare and black. Madness lying close to the wisdom which is brightest and highest;—and owls and godless men who hate the lightning and the light, and love the mephitic dusk and darkness, are no judges of the actions of heroes! Shedders of blood? Yes, blood is occasionally shed. The healing surgeon, the sacrificial priest, the august judge, pronouncer of God's oracles to man, these and the atrocious murderer are alike shedders of blood; and it is an owl's eye, that, except for the dresses they wear, discerns no difference in these! Let us leave the owl to his hootings; let us get on with our chronology and swift course of events."
By forcibly expelling more than one hundred of the members of Parliament, and thus converting a minority into a majority, these "sacrificial priests" contrived to accomplish their very righteous act. In the face of raving such as this, it would be absurd to enter seriously upon any consideration, moral or political, touching the King's death. We would rather that Mr Carlyle occupied the field alone. We saw him just now dealing with his "abysses," and his "lightning;" we quote his concluding comment on this event, which will present a specimen of his more facetious style of eloquence, and the singular taste he is capable of displaying:—
"This action of the English regicides did in effect strike a damp like death through the heart of flunkeyism universally in this world. Whereof flunkeyism, cant, cloth-worship, or whatever ugly name it have, has gone about incurably sick ever since; and is now at length, in these generations, very rapidly dying. The like of which action will not be needed for a thousand years again. Needed, alas! not till a new genuine hero-worship has arisen, has perfected itself; and had time to degenerate into a flunkeyism and cloth-worship again! which I take to be a very long date indeed.
"Thus ends the second civil war: in regicide, in a Commonwealth, and keepers of the liberties of England: In punishment of delinquents, in abolition of cobwebs;—if it be possible, in a government of Heroism and veracity; at lowest of anti-flunkeyism, anti-cant, and the endeavour after heroism and veracity."
Flunkeyism! Such is the title which our many-sided man thinks fit to bestow on the loyalty of England! But serious indignation would be out of place. A buffoon expression has this advantage, it is unanswerable. Yet will we venture to say, that it is a losing game this which you are playing, Mr Carlyle, this defiance of all common sense and all good taste. There is a respectability other than that which, in the unwearying love of one poor jest, you delight to call "gig respectability," a respectability based on intelligence and not on "Long-Acre springs," whose disesteem it cannot be wise to provoke, nor very pleasant to endure.
The Commonwealth is proclaimed by sound of trumpet. The king and the lords are cashiered and dismissed. A house of representatives and a council of state form the constitution of England. Cromwell is one of the council. But for the present the war in Ireland carries him away from the scene of politics.
On this Irish campaign, Mr Carlyle breaks out, as may be supposed, in a strain of exultation. He always warms at blood and battle. His piety, or his poetry—not admirable whichever it may be—glows here to a red heat. We are as little disposed perhaps as himself, to stand "shrieking out" over the military severities of this campaign, but if we could bring ourselves to believe that Mr Carlyle is really serious in what he writes, we should say that the most impracticable maudlin of peace societies, or "Rousseau-sentimentalism," were wisdom itself compared to his own outrageous and fanatical strain. If the apologist of Cromwell will be content to rest his case on the plain ground open to all generals and captains on whom has devolved the task of subjecting a rebellious and insurrectionary country—on the plain ground that the object is to be more speedily effected, and with less bloodshed and misery to the inhabitants, by carrying on the war at the commencement with the utmost severity, (thus breaking down at once the spirit of insurrection,) than by prolonging the contest through an exercise of leniency and forbearance—we are not aware that any decisive answer can be given to him. It is an awful piece of surgery to contemplate—one may be excused, if one shudders both at it and the operator—but, nevertheless, it may have been the wisest course to pursue. As a general rule, every one will admit that—if war there must be—it is better that it should be short and violent, than long and indecisive; for there is nothing so mischievous, so destructive of the industry and moral character of a people, as a war which, so to speak, domesticates itself amongst them. Put aside "the saint" entirely,—let us see only the soldier,—and Cromwell's campaign in Ireland may present nothing more terrible than what elsewhere, and in the campaigns of other generals, we are accustomed to regard as the necessary evils of war; nothing more than what a Turenne, a Condé, or a Frederic of Prussia, might have applauded or practised. But this is precisely the last thing our editor would be disposed to do; any so common-place, and commonsense view of the matter, would have been utterly distasteful: he does bring the saint very prominently upon the field, and we are to recognise in Cromwell—"an armed soldier, terrible as Death, relentless as Doom; doing God's judgments on the enemies of God!"
"It is a phenomenon," he continues, "not of joyful nature; no, but of awful, to be looked at with pious terror and awe. Not a phenomenon which you are taught to recognise with bright smiles, and fall in love with at sight:—thou, art thou worthy to love such a thing; worthy to do other than hate it, and shriek over it? Darest thou wed the Heaven's lightning, then; and say to it, Godlike One? Is thy own life beautiful and terrible to thee; steeped in the eternal depths, in the eternal plendours?"—(Vol. ii. p. 53.)
In the despatch which Cromwell addresses to the Speaker, Lenthall, after the storm of Tredah, otherwise Drogheda, we observe that the Puritan is as strong as ever, but that the Soldier and the great Captain speak out with increased boldness. Our sectarian farmer of St Ives, who brooded, by the dark waters of the Ouse, over the wickedness of surpliced prelacy, whose unemployed spirit sank at times into hypochondria, and was afflicted with "strange fancies about the town-cross," has been moving for some time in the very busiest scene the world could furnish him, and has become the great general of his age. The spirit of the "big wars" has entered, and grown up side by side with his Puritanism. The ardour of the battle fully possesses him; he is the conqueror always in the tremendous charge he makes at the head of his Ironsides; and he lets appear, notwithstanding his self-denying style, a consciousness and a triumph in his own skill as a tactician. He is still the genuine Puritan; but the arduous life, the administrative duties of a soldier and a general, have also been busy in modifying his character, and calling forth and exercising that self-confidence, which he will by and by recognise as "faith" and the leading of Providence, when he assumes the place of dictator of his country.
From one passage in this despatch it would appear that his severity at the storm of Drogheda was not wholly the result of predetermined policy, but rose, in part, from the natural passion which the sword, and the desperate struggle for life, call forth.
"Divers of the enemy retreated into the Mill-Mount, a place very strong and of difficult access. The Governor, Sir Arthur Ashton, and divers considerable officers being there, our men getting up to them, were ordered by me to put them all to the sword. And, indeed, being in the heat of action, I forbade them to spare any that were in arms in the town; and, I think, that night they put to the sword about 2000 men: divers of the officers and soldiers being fled over the bridge into the other part of the town, where about 100 of them possessed St Peter's church steeple, some the west gate, and others a strong round tower next the gate called St Sunday's. These being summoned to yield to mercy, refused; whereupon I ordered the steeple of St Peter's church to be fired, when one of them was heard to say in the midst of the flames, 'God damn me, God confound me! I burn, I burn.'"
In the same despatch there is rather a noticeable passage, which illustrates the manner in which the Puritan general was accustomed to regard the Roman Catholics and their worship. There may be some who have been so far deceived by the frequent use of the terms "religious toleration" in conjunction with the name of Cromwell, as to attribute to him a portion of that liberal spirit which is the greatest boast of cultivated minds in the present century. His religious toleration extended only to the small circle of sects whose Christian doctrine, whose preaching, and whose forms of worship were almost identical; it was just the same toleration that a Baptist dissenter of our day may be supposed to extend towards an Independent dissenter, or a member of the Countess of Huntingdon's connexion. The Independents differed from the Presbyterians in no one definite article of creed, with this exception—that they set no value upon ordination, and violently objected to the restraining any good man from public preaching, or any of the ministrations of a pastor, because he wanted this authorisation of a visible church. For this point of "religious freedom" (an expression which in their mouths has little other than this narrow signification) they had to contend with the Presbyterians. The sect which has to resist oppression, or the restraints of power, uses, of course, the language of toleration. The Independents used it in their controversy with the Presbyterians, just as the latter had employed it in their controversy with Episcopacy. But Independents and Presbyterians were alike intolerant of the Episcopalian or the Roman Catholic. All sects of that age preached toleration when a powerful adversary was to be deprecated—preached it then, and then only. The Independents coming last upon the field, preached it last; but they have no title beyond others to the spirit of toleration. Cromwell put down the mass as he would put down a rebellion—as openly, as decidedly, as rigorously.
"It is remarkable," continued the despatch, "that these people, at the first, set up the mass in some places of the town that had been monasteries; but afterwards grew so insolent, that, the last Lord's day before the storm, the Protestants were thrust out of the great church called St Peter's, and they had public mass there; and in this very place near 1000 of them (the Catholics—a clear judgment) were put to the sword, fleeing thither for safety. I believe all their friars were knocked on the head promiscuously but two; the one of which was Father Peter Taaff, brother to the Lord Taaff, whom the soldiers took the next day and made an end of. The other was taken in the Round Tower, under the repute, (the disguise) of a lieutenant, and when he understood that the officers in that tower had no quarter, he confessed he was a friar; but that did not save him."
Ireland was no sooner subjected by this unflinching and terrific severity, than the presence of the great general of the Commonwealth was needed in Scotland. The Scots had no predilection for a republic, no desire whatever for it; they were bent solely on their covenant, their covenant and a Stuart king. It was a combination very difficult to achieve. Nevertheless they took their oath to both, and marched into England to establish them both over the United Kingdom. Here was sufficient enthusiasm at all events; sufficient, and of the proper kind, one would think, to earn the sympathies of our editor. And he does look upon the Scots at this time as an "heroic nation." But, unfortunately, it is precisely the heroic nation that his own great hero is about to combat and subdue. He is compelled, therefore, upon his part, as the faithful bard and minstrel of his chosen champion, to give them up—them, and their covenant, and Stuart king—to merciless sarcasm. Indeed, he tells us, that the great, the sole fault of the Scots, was precisely this—that they did not produce a Cromwell. "With Oliver born Scotch," he says or sings, "one sees not but the whole world might have become Puritan!"
However, he launches his Puritan hero against the godly and heroic nation with full sound of trumpet, not unmixed with a certain vague and solemn voice of prophecy.
"In such spirit goes Oliver to the wars—a god-intoxicated man, as Novalis elsewhere phrases it. I have asked myself, if any where in modern European history, or even in ancient Asiatic, there was found a man practising this mean world's affairs with a heart more filled by the idea of the Highest? Bathed in the eternal splendours—it is so he walks our dim earth: this man is one of few. He is projected with a terrible force out of the Eternities, and in the Times and their arenas there is nothing that can withstand him. It is great; to us it is tragic; a thing that should strike us dumb! My brave one, thy noble prophecy is divine; older than Hebrew David; old as the origin of man; and shall, though in wider ways than those supposed, be fulfilled."—(P. 172.)
We feel no disposition to follow Cromwell to the Scottish wars, though "bathed in the eternal splendours." We hardly know of any thing in history to our taste more odious than this war between the Scottish Covenanter and the English Puritan; the one praying clamorously for victory against "a blaspheming general and a sectarian army;" the other animating his battle with a psalm, and charging with a "Lord, arise! and let thy enemies be scattered," or some such exclamation. Both generals, in the intervals of actual war, sermonise each other, and with much the same spirit that they fight. Their diplomacy is a tangled preachment, and texts are their war-cries. Meanwhile, both are fighting for the gospel of Christ! only one will have it with, the other without the covenant! Such "eternal splendours" are not inviting to us. We will step on at once to the battle of Worcester, which concluded both the Scottish war, and all hopes for the present of the royalist party.
This last of his battles and his victories dismisses the great Puritan from the wars. It is a striking despatch he writes from the field of Worcester. He is still the unmitigated Puritan; he still preaches to Speaker Lenthall, but he preaches somewhat more dogmatically. There is an air of authority in the sermon. We all know that godly exhortation may be made to express almost every shade of human passion; as what son and what wife has not felt who has lived under the dominion and discourse of one of these "rulers in Israel." The Parliament felt, no doubt, the difference between the sermons of their general and those of their chaplain.