Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1112 page)

The real victor in that battle was, however,
Oliver Cromwell, a Huntingdonshire squire,
forty-three years of age, who had never seen a shot fired until he began to raise the sturdy
Puritan farmers of the Eastern Counties for the Parliament. He trained them and led them till they became the “Ironsides,” the finest cavalry in the world. Look well at them, and think of them; for they are the direct forerunners of the cavalry regiments of our present gallant little army. Cromwell was no narrow-minded Puritan, and for
forms
of Church government he cared not a straw. But he held that
God spoke to each individual man’s soul and pointed out his path for him. He thought that all forms were just so many fetters on men’s souls, and that all churches, especially the
Roman and English, had laid on such fetters.
And he had been a strong opponent of the King in civil matters also. Moreover, he saw, as no one else saw, that “half-measures” would never finish the war. “If I met the King in the field, I would pistol him,” he said.

In 1645 a new Parliamentary army, better paid and better armed and more in earnest,
was raised under Fairfax and Cromwell, and it won, within three months, the great victory of
Naseby, which practically brought the Royalist cause to an end. A few gallant Highlanders under Montrose made a diversion for the King in Scotland, but Montrose too was beaten before the year was over. Charles had already called into England all the soldiers whom he had sent to put down the Irish rebels, and he tried to get the help of these same rebels themselves.
This, as you can imagine, did not make his cause more popular with his English Protestant subjects. He was in fact a very bad leader of a very good cause. Early in 1646 the King fled to the Scottish army and Oxford surren-

dered. The Scots, after trying to induce him to take the oath of the Covenant, sold him for
£400,000 to the English Parliament as a prisoner and went back home. The Parliament spent the years 1647 and 1648 in trying to make some sort of treaty with Charles so that the government of the country might continue under a king; Charles argued each point,
and was ready to promise, now this, now that,
but never anything sincerely. All the time he was trying to get help from France, or from
Scotland, or from Ireland

Meanwhile the Parliamentary leaders had to try to fulfil their treaty with the Scots. They could abolish bishops, sell all the lands of the
Church of England, turn out all the Royalist parsons, and forbid the use of the Prayer Book;
but they found it almost impossible to establish a Presbyterian Church in England. In reality few Englishmen wanted this. Even those who had most wanted to pull down bishops began to see that “ministers and elders” might try to force men’s consciences quite as much as bishops had done. No one felt this more than Cromwell; and, what Cromwell thought,
his Army, which had finished the war, thought also. This Army began to growl against its masters the Parliament. It also began to growl for the punishment of “Charles Stuart,that man of blood.” When Charles did at last persuade the Scots, who were by this time very cross with the Parliament, to come in again on his behalf, this growl became an open cry; the Army duly went and smashed the Scots at Preston, and then came back to
London resolved on the King’s death.

Cromwell hesitated long; he was a merciful man, and he saw what a terrible thing he had to do — to kill a King! But he believed that the Lord guided his mind, and that there could be no peace while Charles lived. Parliament was utterly horrified at this suggestion,
but it was at the mercy of the Army which it had created. Cromwell turned out over a hundred of its most moderate members and terrified the remainder. A sham court of justice was established to try and to condemn the King. Charles, of course, refused to acknowledge that any court had any power to try him; and he met his death on January 30, 1649,
with perfect serenity and courage. The very men who did the deed were terrified at what they were doing.

Charles was a martyr, a martyr for the English Church and its government by bishops,
a martyr for our beautiful and dear Prayer
Book. But the fact that he was a martyr did not make him a good king or a good man.

Yet, though Charles had often overridden the law, and, if he had got back to power, would have done so again, what had the Army and the dregs of the Long Parliament to put in his place? They confiscated and sold to new owners much of the land of those who had fought for the King. They set up a sort of
Republic which they called “The Commonwealth,” with a Council of State, and a single
House of Parliament, in fact the “Rump”
of the Long Parliament, as witty cavaliers called it. They abolished the House of Lords the day after they had murdered the King. In reality they had abolished Law, Order, and the old
natural
Constitution; and all their efforts for the next eleven years to put anything
artificial
in its place were hopeless failures.
The one real fact left in England was the Army;
this meant the rule of the Sword, the worst ;
of all conceivable tyrannies, however good the men may be who wield that Sword.

They were good men who wielded it. Cromwell was a man of the most lofty character,
and so were many of his associates. They were also great patriots and great Englishmen. But nineteen twentieths of Englishmen hated the whole thing heart and soul, looked upon Charles
I’s death as an abominable murder, and only prayed for Charles II to come and avenge it.

That young man, now nineteen years old,
had fled to the Continent. The Scots invited him to Scotland, made him take the Covenant
(which he hated), and prepared to fight for him.
But Cromwell and his Ironsides, after going across and stamping out the Irish rebellion with a great deal of cruelty, made short work of one
Scottish army at Dunbar in 1650, and of another, which had invaded England, at Worcester in 1651. The young King fought most gallantly at the latter battle, and had a series of hair-breadth escapes before he regained the
Continent; you have often heard, perhaps, of how he spent a day in hiding in the upper branches of a great oak tree in Shropshire —

While far below the Roundhead rode
And hummed a surly hymn.

That is why people wear oak ‘eaves on May
29, and why so many public houses still bear the sign of the “Royal Oak.”

Yet, if civil war was over, there was no civil peace in Britain; and in 1653 Cromwell was obliged to turn out the “Rump” of the Long
Parliament and to take on himself the government of England, Scotland, and Ireland as
“Protector,” a title which pleased his old friends little more than it pleased his old enemies.

He made experiment aiSr experiment in forms of government; tried sometimes with, and sometimes without, some sort of sham Parliament; once he even tried to create a sort of sham House of Lords. But all these things were only thin disguises for the rule of the
Sword and the Army. He was much pressed to take the title of king and to restore the old
Constitution, but from this he shrank. Except to Papists and to the beaten Church of England he was not intolerant; he believed in letting men’s consciences be free, and he strove to make people righteous and God-fearing. All that, however, was a dismal failure; it only disgusted all moderate people with the whole
Puritan creed.

Yet, in Oliver’s five years of rule, he accomplished what the Stuarts had not done in fortyfive. Not only had he subdued Scotland and
Ireland, but he even made them send thirty members apiece to a sort of united Parliament in England. And far more than this: he made the name of England once more dreaded and honoured abroad as it had not been since the death of Elizabeth. He wrung from the Dutch a heavy payment for some wrongs they had done our traders in the Far East; he won for us a share in that Far-Eastern trade. He fell upon the Spaniards in the true style of Drakeand Raleigh; he took their great plate fleet;
he tore Jamaica from them; he sent his Ironsides to France to aid France against Spain;
they were the first great English army seen abroad since the fifteenth century, and where they fought they swept all before them. He took up the great cause of Protestantism all over Europe When he died in 1658 England was again the first naval power and almost the first military power in the world.

But when his son Richard (“lazy Dick” or
“tumbledown Dick,” as people called him)
succeeded him as Protector, the whole unnatural arrangement crumbled away at once, because it did not suit the spirit of the English people.
There were eighteen months of anarchy; now some soldier, now the restored “Rump,” held power. At last, in January, 1660, General
Monck, an old soldier of Cromwell’s, who had the command in Scotland, made up his mind to restore the exiled King, Charles II.

And on his thirtieth birthday, the 29th of
May, 1660, that clever and unprincipled young gentleman rode into London amid the tears and shouts of a people gone mad with joy.
The reign of the Sword was over, the reign of the Law had begun. Unfortunately this reign of the Sword left on men’s minds an unreasonable hatred and fear, not only of this Puritanarmy, but of all armies and that hatred and fear have too often paralyzed the armo Eng and,
and is not wholly dead to-day. It has prevented men from seeing that to serve King and country in the Army is the second best profession for
Englishmen of all classes; to serve in the Navy,

suppose all admit, is the best. Charles

prudently kept up a few of the regiments of Cromwell’s old army, and even increased it a little during his reign. But he had often hard work to pay it, for his Parliaments were always jealous of a power that they knew had been their master once and might be so again.

CHAPTER IX

THE FALL OF THE STUARTS AND THE REVOLUTION, 1660-1688

The lessons of the “Great Rebellion” were by no means thrown away upon Charles II.
No king after 1660 ever attempted to raise a penny without consent of Parliament. Once,
but only once, at the end of his reign, Charles let four years go by without calling a Parliament. Once, but only for a moment, an unlawful court of justice was created by James
II; and there were hardly any other attempts at “strong government” of the Tudor type.
There were plenty of quarrels to come between kings and parliaments, but these were nearly always about religion or foreign wars.

As far as possible everything was restored in Great Britain and Ireland as it had existed just before the Civil War. The two houses of
Parliament, with all their old power, were restored. The Church of England, with Prayer
Book and bishops, was restored as in 1640.
It had suffered quite as much as the Crown,or the Cavaliers who had fought for the Crown.
A certain amount but by no means all of the land was restored to its rightful owners. The church livings had been almost all given away to Presbyterians and other Dissenters. During the Rebellion a whole crop of “ sects “ had arisen,
some of which, like the Congregationalists,
Baptists, and Quakers, are still with us. In
1660 all wished for nothing better than a peaceful life, and to conduct their worship in their own way. No one could complain when the church livings were given back to the Church of England; but it was a great mistake of
Parliament and Church to prevent the Dissenters from holding their public worship as they pleased. It was a lasting misfortune for
England that a series of laws was passed in the reign of Charles II to shut out both Catholics and Protestant Dissenters from all offices in the State, and even from offices in town councils.
Catholics were excluded from Parliament, for the Great Rebellion had left a hatred of popery greater than that which had existed before it.
These intolerant laws, though partly softened for Protestant Dissenters in 1690, and for
Catholics also in the reign of George III, were not abolished till 1828 and 1829. Of course,
no persons now suffered death for their religion
(and it was in Charles II’s reign that Queen

Mary’s laws for burning heretics were finally wiped out), but many Dissenters were imprisoned, among them John Bunyan, author of “Pilgrim’s Progress.”

In Scotland a similar restoration took place of the old Scottish Parliament, in which Lords and Commons had always sat in one house;
of Church government by bishops; of lands which had been confiscated. The extreme
Covenanters refused to recognize these changes,
and before long broke out into open rebellion in the south-west. Rebellion went on smouldering a good deal until 1688; much cruelty was exercised, and much more was wrongly believed to have been exercised in putting it down.
Charles’s English ministers would have liked to govern Scotland from London and to unite the two Parliaments, but the patriotic spirit of the smaller country was as yet entirely against this.