parties by which it was made, though they formed a vast majority of the three nations, were filled with mutual antipathies; the Catholics of Ireland had no faith in the Scottish Presbyterians; and these in their turn were full of distrust of the English cavaliers. They feared each other as much as they feared the commons. There could, therefore, be no concert of opposition; the insurrections, which, had they been made unitedly, would probably have been successful, were not simultaneous. The strength of the Independents lay in a small but well-disciplined army; the celerity and military genius of Cromwell ensured to them unity of counsels and promptness of action; they conquered their adversaries in detail; and the massacre of Drogheda, the field of Dunbar, and the victory of Worcester, destroyed the present hopes of the friends of monarchy.

The lustre of Cromwell's victories ennobled the crimes of his ambition. When the forces of the insurgents had been beaten down, there remained but two powers in the state-the Long Parliament and the army. To submit to a military despotism was inconsistent with the genius of the people of England; and yet the Long Parliament, now containing but a fraction of its original members, could not be recognised as the rightful sovereign of the country, and possessed only the shadow of executive power. Public confidence rested on Cromwell alone. The few true republicans had no party in the nation; a dissolution of the parliament would have led to anarchy; a reconciliation with Charles II., whose father had just been executed, was impossible; a standing army, it was argued, required to be balanced by a standing parliament; and the house of commons, the mother of the commonwealth, insisted on nursing the institutions which it had established. But the public mind reasoned differently; the virtual power rested with the army; men dreaded confusion, and yearned for peace; and they were pleased with the retributive justice that the parliament, which had destroyed the English king, should itself be subverted by one of its members.

Thus the effort at absolute monarchy on the part of Charles I. yielded to a constitutional, true English parliament; the control of parliament passed from the constitutional royalists to the Presbyterians, or representatives of a part of the

t

aristocracy opposed to Episcopacy; from the Presbyterians to the Independents, the enthusiasts for popular liberty; and, when the course of the revolution had outstripped public opinion, a powerful reaction gave the supreme authority to Cromwell. Sovereignty had escaped from the king to the parliament, from the parliament to the commons, from the commons to the army, and from the army to its successful commander. Each revolution was a natural and necessary consequence of its predecessor.

Cromwell was one whom even his enemies cannot name without acknowledging his greatness. The farmer of Huntingdon, accustomed only to rural occupations, unnoticed till he was more than forty years old, engaged in no higher plots than how to improve the returns of his land and fill his orchard with choice fruit, of a sudden became the best officer in the British army, and the greatest statesman of his time; overturned the English constitution, which had been the work of centuries; held in his own grasp the liberties which formed a part of the nature of the English people, and cast the kingdoms into a new mould. Religious peace, such as England till now has never again seen, flourished under his calm mediation; justice found its way even among the remotest Highlands of Scotland; commerce filled the English marts with prosperous activity; his fleets rode triumphant in the West Indies; Nova Scotia submitted to his orders without a struggle; the Dutch begged of him for peace as for a boon; Louis XIV. was humiliated; the Protestants of Piedmont breathed their prayers in security. His squadron made sure of Jamaica; he had strong thoughts of Hispaniola and Cuba; and, to use his own words, resolved "to strive with the Spaniard for the mastery of all those seas." The glory of the English was spread throughout the world: "Under the tropic was their language spoke."

And yet his career was but an attempt to conciliate a union between his power and permanent public order; and the attempt was always unavailing, from the inherent impossibility growing out of the origin of his power. It was derived from the submission, not from the will, of the people; it came by the sword, not from the nation, nor from national usages.

Cromwell saw the impracticability of a republic, and offered no excuse for his usurpations but the right of the strongest to restore tranquillity-the plea of tyrants and oppressors from the beginning of the world. He had made use of the enthusiasm of liberty for his advancement; he sought to sustain himself by conciliating the most opposite sects. For the republicans, he had apologies: "The sons of Zeruiah, the lawyers, and the men of wealth, are too strong for us. If we speak of reform, they cry out that we design to destroy all property." To the witness of the young Quaker against priestcraft and war, he replied: "It is very good; it is truth; if THOU and I were but an hour of a day together, we should be nearer one to the other." From the field of Dunbar he had charged the Long Parliament "to reform abuses, and not to multiply poor men for the benefit of the rich." Presently he appealed to the moneyed men and the lawyers: "he alone could save them from the levellers, men more ready to destroy than to reform." Did the sincere levellers, the true commonwealth's men, make their way into his presence, he assured them "he preferred a shepherd's crook to the office of protector; he would resign all power so soon as God should reveal his definite will;" and then he would invite them to pray. "For," said he one day to the poet Waller, "I must talk to these people in their own style." Did the passion for political equality blaze up in the breasts of the yeomanry, who constituted his bravest troops, it was checked by the terrors of a military execution. The Scotch Presbyterians could not be cajoled: he resolved to bow their pride; and did it in the only way in which it could be done, by wielding against their bigotry the great conception of the age, the doctrine of Roger Williams and Descartes, freedom of conscience. "Approbation," said he, as I believe, with sincerity of conviction, "is an act of conveniency, not of necessity. Does a man speak foolishly, suffer him gladly, for ye are wise. Does he speak erroneously, stop such a man's mouth with sound words, that cannot be gainsaid. Does he speak truly, rejoice in the truth." To win the royalists, he obtained an act of amnesty, a pledge of future favor to such of them as would submit. He courted the nation by exciting and gratifying national pride, by able

negotiations, by victory and conquest. He sought to enlist in his favor the religious sympathies of the people, by assuming for England a guardianship over the interests of Protestant Christendom.

Seldom was there a less scrupulous or more gifted politician than Cromwell. But he was no longer a leader of a party. He had no party. A party cannot exist except by the force of common principles; it is truth, and truth only, that of itself rallies men together. Cromwell, the oppressor of the Independents, had ceased to respect principles; his object was the advancement of his family; his hold on opinion went no farther than the dread of anarchy, and the strong desire for order. If moderate and disinterested men consented to his power, it was to his power as high constable, engaged to preserve the public peace. He could not confer on his country a fixed form of government, for that required a concert with the national affections, which he was never able to gain. He had clear notions of public liberty, and he understood how much the English people are disposed to honor their representatives. Thrice did he attempt to connect his usurpation with the forms of representative government, and always without success. His first parliament, convened in 1653, by special writ, and mainly composed of the members of the party by which he had been advanced, represented the movement in the English mind which had been the cause of the revolution. It indulged in pious ecstasies, laid claim to the enjoyment of the presence of Jesus Christ, and spent whole days in exhortations and prayers. But the delirium of mysticism was not incompatible with clear notions of policy; and, amid the hyperboles of Oriental diction, they prepared to overthrow despotic power by using the power a despo: had conceded. The objects of this assemby were all democratic: it labored to effect a most radical reform; to codify English law, by reducing the huge volumes of the common law into a few simple English axioms; to abolish tithes; and to establish an absolute religious freedom, such as the United States now enjoy. This parliament has for ages been the theme of unsparing ridicule. Historians, with little generosity toward a defeated party, have sided against

the levellers; and the misfortune of failure in action has doomed them to censure and contempt. Yet they only demanded what had often been promised, and what, on the immutable principles of freedom, was right. They did but remember the truths which Cromwell had professed, and had forgotten. Fearing their influence, and finding the republicans too honest to become the dupes of his ambition, he induced such members of the house of commons as were his creatures to resign, and scattered the rest with his troops. The public looked on with much indifference, for the parliament, from the mode of its convocation, was unpopular; the royalists, the army, and the Presbyterians, alike dreaded its activity. With it expired the last feeble hope of a commonwealth. The successful soldier, at once and openly, pleading the necessity of the moment, assumed supreme power, as the highest peace-officer in the realm.

Cromwell next attempted an alliance with the property of the country. Affecting contempt for the regicide republicans, who, as his accomplices, could not forego his protection, he prepared to espouse the cause of the lawyers, the clergy, and the moneyed interest. Here, too, he was equally unsuccessful. The moneyed interest loves to exercise dominion, but submits to it reluctantly; and his second parliament, chosen, in 1654, on such principles of reform as rejected the rotten boroughs, and, limiting the elective franchise to men of considerable estate, made the house a representation of the wealth of the country, was equally animated by a spirit of stubborn defiance. It first resisted the decisions of the council of Cromwell on the validity of its elections, next vindicated freedom of debate, and, at its third sitting, called in question the basis of Cromwell's authority. "Have we cut down tyranny in one person, and shall the nation be shackled by another?" cried a republican. "Hast thou, like Ahab, killed and taken possession?" exclaimed a royalist. At the opening of this assembly, Cromwell, hoping for a majority, declared "the meeting more precious to him than life." The majority favored the Presbyterians, and secretly desired the restoration of the Stuarts. The protector dissolved them, saying: "The mighty things done among us are the revolutions of Christ