and moreover if he felt or fancied he had a call from Heaven to preach or teach the peculiar conclusions which he had come to from reading the Bible, he was as much entitled, in the opinion of his comrades and officers, to act as a preacher, as if he had studied at a university and taken orders from a bishop or a presbytery. Yet their toleration admitted the preaching of men who made religion a profession. Thus we are informed that "on Sunday the 27th Oct. 1650 there preached in the cathedral at Carlisle in the forenoon the Governor's chaplain, in the afternoon an officer of our army. "1 Cromwell would indeed take care with his wary eye "ne quid detrimenti respublica caperet," that no harm might come of any preacher unusually violent or mad in his notions; and he would for the most part be able to do that by first listening with an air of edification and then praying and preaching himself. It is clear that by this process such evils as are alleged to have befallen the Presbyterians could not have happened in Cromwell's army. Cromwell did his work by being really supreme in his army, by being at once king, priest, and prophet among his soldiers. He was not the man to permit any holy Mr. Blattergowl or gifted Gilfillan to stop his march or prevent him from fighting on a Sunday on the ground of saving the nation from the sin of Sabbathbreaking; or, under pretence of revelations obtained from Heaven by much wrestling with the Lord in prayer, to force him to fight against his own better judgment. Oliver could wrestle with the Lord in prayer himself, and he had his own revelations and his own signs and visions from on high, of which he knew the interpretation better than any 1 Letters from the Head-Quarters of our Army in Scotland, p. 323-published in Sir H. Slingsby's and Captain Hodgson's Memoirs, with notes by Sir T ordained interpreter of them all. And as Cromwell thus suffered himself to be controlled by no theocracy in the shape of a Kirk Commission, established at his headquarters, neither would he have marched as he did to uninterrupted victory, if he had submitted as Baillie did at Kilsyth, and Preston, and David Leslie at Dunbar,2 to be dictated to by the oligarchical members of the Committee of Estates. The Independents were also in their own opinion of themselves a peculiar and chosen people. For they too claimed a monopoly of God, and declared, like the Presbyterians, that their enemies were God's enemies. A favourite expression of Cromwell's was "to have the execution of," or "to be the executioners of the Lord's enemies." Nevertheless they were undoubtedly more tolerant towards other forms of Protestantism than the Presbyterians: and in some matters connected with toleration they evinced on several occasions a spirit very different from the Presbyterian. Thus Mr. Howard, the Sheriff of Cumberland, having applied to the Council of State for special assistance on the subject of witchcraft, is curtly informed that the Council can give him no directions concerning the discovery or punishment of witches, but refer him to the usual course of law.3 In estimating the character of fanatics an error, I apprehend, of some magnitude slips into the calculation by assuming that honest fanatics are necessarily honest men. Whereas, without professing to state the proportions with epigrammatic point at the cost of accuracy by saying that a man is half fanatic and half knave, we may say truly 1 See Lieut.-Gen. Baillie's "Vindication for his own part of Kilsyth, and Preston" in Principal Baillie's Letters and Journals, vol. ii. p. 420+. 2 See Baillie's Letters and Journals, vol. iii. p. 111. Edinburgh 1842. 3 Order Book of the Council of State, May 13, 1650. MS. State Paper Office. enough of some men that all of them that is not knave is fanatic, or that all of them that is not fanatic is knave. The keeping this in view will assist somewhat in furnishing a key to the character of such men as Cromwell, where the addition of other ingredients to the composition of the character will of course alter the above-stated proportions, but where the existence of pure or true fanaticism will be no guarantee for the existence of pure or true honesty. An honest man however, if he be a fanatic, will be an honest fanatic and not the less an honest man. But in the case of a knave, in consequence of the falsehood which is a part of his character, if he profess himself a fanatic, it will be always difficult to say how much of his fanaticism is real and how much pretended, for of course a knave is capable of being a fanatic, as he is capable of being a maniac; and in both cases he may pretend to be more than he is for a man who trades in falsehood may feign fanaticism as he may feign madness or anything else. Among the Independents as among the Presbyterians of that time there were undoubtedly many honest men, who were likewise honest fanatics. Those men were peculiarly liable to be deluded by men of their respective parties who, though they might be more or less honest in their fanaticism, were as regarded the other part of their nature actuated by motives of self-aggrandizement and worldly ambition. It was thus that Cromwell was able to deceive so long his old friends among the leaders of the Independents, and that the Covenanted Oligarchy of Scotland were able to delude still longer so many of the Scottish Presbyterians. To Cromwell and his parasites the "Good Old Cause" became a thing to sneer at. To Vane, to Scott, to Harrison, and to many more, it was a cause not to be repented of," though such adherence was the inevitable path to the scaffold and the grave. So, while to the Covenanted Oligarchy (for it were an abuse of language to call that knot of paltry tyrants an aristocracy) the "Covenant" was an instrument, drawn in legal form by that wretched Chancellor, not only to perpetuate their possession of the plunder they had already obtained, but to add to their spoil large slices of the fat lands of the English archbishops, bishops, deans and chapters, archdeacons and all other ecclesiastical officers, depending on that hierarchy,' who had anything worth taking; and to reduce those noble foundations for the encouragement of sound learning, the English Universities, to the miserable starved condition of the Scotch Universities; to many of the poor people of Scotland the "Covenant was a cause for which they were ready to suffer persecution, imprisonment, torture, and death. The Scottish Presbyterians being thus composed of two principal distinct parts or parties, we must be careful, as I have said, to assign to each party what belonged to it. On the side of the popular or democratical party there was in the laymen much sincerity and much ignorance; and in the clergy such pretensions as we have quoted, combined with much vehemence, a little learning, and mental faculties in such a state that, while their credulity was boundless in the matter of witches and hobgoblins,2 See the 1st and 2nd clauses of the "Solemn League and Covenant." These clauses were evidently drawn with care by lawyers, while most of the others savour strongly of the Presbyterian pulpit of that day. The words in the first clauses of the Instrument as agreed to by the English Parliament," according to the word of God" were inserted by Vane, and enabled the English Parliament to deny that they had sworn to adopt the Presbyterian form of Church govern ment. A remarkable example of this is afforded in the trial, in 1688, of Philip Standsfield for the murder of his father, Sir James Standsfield, of New Mills, in Scotland. One of the witnesses was Mr. John Bell, minister of they would have rejected Galileo's doctrine about the motion of the earth; and to them, as to the Pope and the Jesuits, "the starry Galileo, with his woes," would have appeared but an impious and blasphemous impostor. On the side of the oligarchical party there were pride, ferocity, rapacity, cruelty and fraud. It was the oligarchical party that roasted men alive to get possession of Church lands; that sold their king to his deadly enemies, and then turned round when it suited their purpose and in the name of that king's son tortured with iron boots and thumbscrews their old Presbyterian friends and allies. But though this oligarchy may have looked upon humanity, justice, and honesty as plebeian virtues, unworthy of their regard, there was one virtue which it was important to them that they should possess under the circumstances of those troubled times. I mean that quality to which the Romans principally applied the word virtue, and which may be called military virtue. And military virtue, which has been considered to belong especially to an the gospel, aged forty years. In his written declaration this clergyman, who was a guest in Sir James Standsfield's house on the night of the murder, says: "I declare that having slept but little, I was awakened in fear by a cry (as I supposed) and being waking I heard for a time a great din, and confused noise of several voices, and persons sometimes walking, which affrighted me (supposing them to be evil wicked spirits); and I apprehended the voices to be near the chamberdoor sometimes, or in the transe [passage], or stairs, and sometimes below, which put me to arise in the night and bolt the chamber door further, and to recommend myself by prayer, for protection and preservation, to the majesty of God and having gone again to bed, : I heard these voices continue. . . I could testify that Sir James was in his right reason at ten o'clock; wherefore I inclined to think it was a violent murder committed by wicked spirits." -Hargrave's State Trials, vol. iv. p. 283; and Howell's State Trials, vol. xi. p. 1403. The Presbyterian clergy also arrogated to themselves some of the powers of the Hebrew prophets. According to Wodrow, Mr. John Welsh had predicted that this Philip Standsfield would come to a public death by the hands of the hangman. "This was accomplished," says Wodrow, "and Mr. Standsfield acknowledged this in prison after he was condemned, and that God was about to accomplish what he had been warned of." |