Civil War: The History of England Volume III (50 page)

The condition of England was enough to cause dismay. The late wars had badly injured trade, with a consequent steep increase in unemployment; bands of beggars roamed the land in numbers not seen since the last century. The country gentry and other landlords were devastated by the various taxes imposed upon them; those who favoured the royalist cause found their lands in danger of confiscation or sale. The prisons were filled with debtors. The Church was in confusion, with radical sectaries and orthodox believers still engaged in recrimination and complaint. Episcopacy had been abolished but no other form of national Church government had taken its place; it was said that the mass of the people could not find ministers to serve them. Many called, without success, for legislation to abolish burdensome taxes, to simplify and improve the judicial process, to ease the public debt and to lower the cost of living.

One evening in the autumn of 1652, Cromwell was walking in St James’s Park with a member of the council of state, Bulstrode Whitelocke. Cromwell asked his companion for his counsel on the present condition of affairs, remarking of the Rump Parliament that ‘there is little hope of a good settlement to be made by them, really
there is not’. Whitelocke then replied that ‘we ourselves have acknowledged them the supreme power’.

Cromwell:
What if a man should take upon him to be king?

Whitelocke:
I think that remedy would be worse than the disease.

Cromwell:
Why do you think so?

Whitelocke:
As to your own person the title of king would be of no advantage, because you have the full kingly power in you already, concerning the militia, and you are general.

Cromwell went on to reflect, at least according to Whitelocke’s diary, that ‘the power of a king is so great and so high’, that ‘the title of it might indemnify in a great measure those that act under it’; it would in particular be useful in curbing ‘the insolences and extravagances of those whom the present powers cannot control’. It is possible that the conversation sprang from hindsight on the part of Whitelocke but its purport is confirmed by Cromwell’s remark in an earlier meeting of officers and parliamentarians that ‘somewhat of a monarchical government would be most effectual, if it could be established with safety to the liberties of the people’. Certainly he believed that his military victories had been delivered to him by God. Why should his destiny now be in the hands of a Rump? He could have waited patiently for a sign but ambition and a sense of mission (they are not to be distinguished) soon drove him forward.

The army had already presented a petition of complaint to parliament in which it was recommended that miscreants in positions of authority should be replaced by ‘men of truth, fearing God and hating covetousness’. This was a standard preamble based on Exodus 18:21. They listed many necessary reforms that needed ‘speedy and effectual’ redress. The members of the Rump promised to take such matters ‘under consideration’.

Cromwell attempted to mediate between the officers and parliamentarians, although he believed that the Rump was in general guided by pride and self-seeking. He told a colleague that he was being pushed to action, the consideration of which ‘makes my hair stand on end’. His practice was always to withdraw into
himself, in a process of self-communing, before taking swift and decisive action.

The officers of the New Model Army had devoted the first week of 1653 to prayer and fasting, seeking for God’s counsel. From this time forward the members of the Rump feared some form of military intervention. It was rumoured that parliament was preparing a bill for new elections, vetted by its own members, that would destroy the army’s expectations of godly reformation; it was also claimed that parliament was about to remove Cromwell from the leadership of the army.

On 20 April Cromwell came into the chamber of the House of Commons, dressed in plain black, and took his seat; he had left a file of musketeers at the door of the chamber and in the lobby. He took off his hat and rose to his feet. He first commended the Commons for their early efforts at reform but then reproached them for their subsequent delays and obfuscations; he roamed down the middle of the chamber and signalled various individual members as ‘whoremaster’ and ‘drunkard’ and ‘juggler’. He declared more than once that ‘it is you that have forced me to do this, for I have sought the Lord night and day that he would rather slay me than put me upon the doing of this work’. He spoke, according to one observer, ‘with so much passion and discomposure of mind as if he had been distracted’; he shouted, and kicked the floor with his foot.

In conclusion he called out, ‘You are no parliament. I will put an end to your sitting.’ He then called for the musketeers and pointed to the parliamentary mace lying on the table. ‘What shall be done with this bauble? Here. Take it away.’ He said later that he had not planned or premeditated his intervention and that ‘the spirit was so upon him, that he was overruled by it; and he consulted not with flesh and blood at all’. This is perhaps too convenient an explanation to be altogether true. He had dissolved a parliament that, in one form or another, had endured for almost thirteen years. The Long Parliament, of which the Rump was the final appendage, had witnessed Charles I’s attempt to seize five of its members and then the whole course of the civil wars; it had seen some of its members purged and driven away. It was not a ruin, but a ruin of that ruin. It ended in ignominy, unwanted and unlamented.

Cromwell remarked later that, at its dissolution, not even a dog barked. On the following day a large placard was placed upon the door of the chamber. ‘This House to be let, unfurnished.’

32

Fear and trembling

The most powerful image of the age, after the demise of the Tudor line, was that of a society without divine sanction. In the early decades of the seventeenth century Jacobean tragedy, as we have seen, assumed a world without God where men and women struggle for survival. The civic broils of the 1640s had rendered the prospect of chaos only more acute. Out of that fear and insecurity came a book that has been described as the only masterpiece of political philosophy in the English language.

Thomas Hobbes had shown no signs of greatness. After a conventional humanist education at Oxford he became tutor and companion to William Cavendish, second son of the 1st earl of Devonshire; with that gentleman he undertook the almost obligatory European tour. On a subsequent journey, to Geneva, he experienced his moment of awakening. He happened to open a copy of Euclid’s
Elements of Geometry
and was immediately impressed by the Greek mathematician’s reliance on deduction through definitions and axioms; it was the method, not the matter, that inspired him. In that spirit he began to brood on the nature of human society.

He began work on
Leviathan, or the Matter, Form and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiastical and Civil
in the late 1640s, the volume eventually being published in 1651. It was begun at a time, therefore, of chaotic civil war; its writing continued through the trial and
execution of a king; it was completed in a period when the political experiment of the Rump Parliament was being challenged by various sects and interests. Where was certainty, or safety, to be found? Hobbes was in any case of a timorous and fearful nature. He wrote, at the age of eighty-four, that ‘fear and I were born twins’.

So
Leviathan
emerged from the very conditions of the time, or what he called ‘the seditious roaring of a troubled nation’. He did not read other political or philosophical accounts; he believed ‘that there can be nothing so absurd, but may be found in the books of philosophers’. He followed his own bright line of thought through all of its logical consequences. He would ponder and ruminate, then jot down the phrases and conclusions that came to him. One axiom would lead to another, and then to the next, so that he was inexorably guided towards his own vision of the world.

His clarity of purpose, and his rigorous method, allowed him to cut through all the political cant of the period; his was a thorough scepticism that pierced the pious platitudes and false generalizations, the truisms and solecisms, that always attend political discourse. He would proceed only upon first principles maintained by firm definition and vigorous argument. He stated that ‘words are wise men’s counters, they do but reckon by them; but they are the money of fools’.

So his argument opened. Stripped of order and security, men are at enmity one with another in ‘a perpetual contention for honour, riches and authority’. The goad for action and conflict is preeminently ‘a perpetual and restless desire for power’. The strength of one man is more or less equal to that of another, leading to an eternal war of all against all. Once the dire predicament is understood, a solution may be found amid the discord. The fear of death encourages prudence and the desire for self-preservation; the principles of reason might therefore be applied to the quest for peace, and for life rather than death. A form of contract might be agreed whereby each man is ‘contented with so much liberty against other men as he would allow other men against himself’. Each man agrees that he will not do to another what he would not have done to himself.

This instinct for self-preservation then becomes the key element in what might be described as Hobbes’s metaphysic whereby ‘man
which looks too far before him, in the care of future time, has his heart all the day long gnawed on by fear of death, poverty, or other calamity, and has no repose, nor pause of his anxiety, but in sleep’. This is the foundation of his theory of the state.

The contract between men is the beginning of wisdom. How is it to be maintained? It cannot be entrusted to the individuals themselves. It must be transferred to ‘a common power set over them both, with right and force sufficient to compel performance’. There must be an authority that can enforce the contract in perpetuity; supreme authority demands supreme power and, as Hobbes puts it, ‘covenants, without the sword, are but words’. To escape from fear and trembling, therefore, men must agree among themselves to create a system of such powerful control that no deviation or dissension, no unrest or cause of unrest, will be tolerated. They transfer their own prudence and reason to this other thing, this living absolutism that he names as ‘great Leviathan’. This act of authorization is the mutual surrender of the natural rights of each man in order to create the sovereign power which will guide and protect them.

Leviathan will impose the religion of the state, thus avoiding the divisions that Hobbes saw all around. There will be no such thing as liberty of conscience, which simply created confusion and, in the case of England, bloodshed. Justice and truth are to be determined by civil authority rather than individual choice. Justice is simply what the law demands.

It did not matter whether this omnipotent authority was king, or conquering invader, or magistrate; it was only important that it existed, and that it was authorized to act and to will in place of individual action and private will. Only thus could true order be maintained. That is why some critics accused him of complying with the doctrine of the divine right of kings, while others attacked him for compounding with Cromwell’s commonwealth.

In his preface to the Latin translation of his treatise he wrote that ‘this great Leviathan, which is called the State, is a work of art; it is an artificial man made for the protection and salvation of the natural man, to whom it is superior in grandeur and power’. By the rigorous argument from first principles, Hobbes believed that he had uncovered the true imperatives of civil society. He was also
convinced that he had written for the benefit of mankind, and in the last sentence of the work he concludes ironically that ‘such truth, as opposeth no man’s profit, nor pleasure, is to all men welcome’.

Leviathan
created a sensation at the time, and it has been said that it inspired universal horror. The Commons proposed to burn the book, and one bishop suggested that Hobbes himself should be tied to the stake. It was so exact, so convincing in its logic, so simple in its argument, that it was difficult to repudiate without relying upon the political pieties and the cant that Hobbes had already attacked.

Nevertheless he was denounced as an atheist and as a materialist. Clearly he had no very great confidence in human nature, and described the character of anyman’s heart as ‘blotted and confounded . . . with dissembling, lying, counterfeiting and erroneous doctrines’. He stated that ‘the value, or WORTH of a man, is as of all other things, his price; that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his power’. He added that ‘to obey, is to honour, because no man obeys them whom they think have no power to help or hurt them’. His clarity of judgement is sometimes terrible; he has the savagery of the true moral philosopher, and
Leviathan
must rank as one of the central statements of the seventeenth century.