Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847

"This last of our heroisms!" God grant it is the last! It is only out of another religious war that another such heroism can arise. If church and dissent should take up arms, and, instead of controversies carried on in pamphlets, upon tradition and white surplices, should blow out each other's brains with gunpowder, then Mr Carlyle would see his "heroic ones" revive upon the earth.

"The Christian doctrines which then dwelt alive in every heart, have now in a manner died out of all hearts." Only the cant of them dwells alive with us. The same clear-sighted author, who sees the Christian doctrines so beautifully and pre-eminently developed in the Ironsides of Cromwell, in the troopers of Lambert and Harrison, sacking, pillaging, slaughtering, and in all that tribe of men who ever shed blood the readier after prayer-time—men who had dropped from their memory Christ's own preaching, to fill their mouths with the curses which the Hebrew prophets had been permitted, under a past dispensation, to denounce against the enemies of Judea, who had constructed their theology out of the darkest parts of the New, and the most fearful portion of the Old Testament;—this same author, opening his eyes and ears upon his own day and generation, finds that Christianity has died out of all hearts, and its phraseology, as he expresses himself elsewhere, "become mournful to him when spouted as frothy cant from Exeter Hall." If Mr Carlyle would visit Exeter Hall, and carry there one tithe of the determination to approve, that he exhibits in favour of the Puritan, he would find a Christian piety as sincere, as genuine, and far more humane, than his heroes of Naseby, or Dunbar, or Drogheda were acquainted with. He would see the descendants of his Puritans, relieved, at least we may say, from the necessity of raising their psalm on the battle-field, indulging in none of the ferocities of our nature, assembling in numerous but peaceful meetings, raising annually, by a quiet but no contemptible sacrifice, their millions for the dissemination of Gospel truth. But Mr Carlyle would call this cant; he sees nothing good, or generous, or high-minded in any portion of the world in which he lives; he reserves his sympathies for the past—for the men of buckram and broad-sword, who, on a question of church government, were always ready "to hew Agag to pieces," let Agag stand for who, or what number it might.

If there is one spectacle more odious than another of all which history presents to us, whether it take place amongst Mahometan or Christian, Catholic or Protestant, it is this:—to see men practising all the terrible brutalities of war, treading down their enemies, doing all that rage and the worst passions prompt, and doing all amidst exclamations of piety, devout acknowledgments of submission to Divine will, and professions of gratitude to God. Other religious factions have committed far greater atrocities than the Puritans, but nowhere in history is this same spectacle exhibited with more distasteful and sickening accompaniments. The Moslem thanked God upon his sword in at least a somewhat soldierly manner; and the Catholic, by the very pomp with which he chants his Te Deum, somewhat conceals the meaning of his act, and, keeping God a little out of sight, makes his mass express the natural feeling of a human triumph. But the sleek Puritan, at once grovelling and presumptuous, mingles with his sanguinary mood all the morbid sickly conceit, all the crawling affected humility of the conventicle. All his bloodsheds are "mercies," and they are granted in answer to his long and miserable prayers—prayers which, to a man of rational piety, sound very much like blasphemies. He carries with him to the battle-field, to the siege, to the massacre, not one even of those generous feelings which war itself permits towards a foe. He chooses to call his enemy the enemy of God, and kneels before he fights, that the inexpressible mercy may be granted of cutting his throat!

"That the sense of difference between right and wrong," says Mr Carlyle, "had filled all time and all space for man, and bodied itself forth into a heaven and hell for him,—this constitutes the grand feature of those Puritan, old-Christian ages; this is the element which stamps them as heroic, and has rendered their works great, manlike, fruitful to all generations." Quite on the contrary. The sense of right and wrong was obscured, confused, lost sight of, in the promptings of a presumptuous enthusiasm; and it is exactly this which constitutes the perilous characteristic of such men as the Puritans and Cameronians, and similar sectaries. How can the sense of right and wrong keep its footing in an enthusiasm which has brought itself to believe that all its successes are a direct answer to its prayers? Success becomes the very measure of right and wrong. The two extremes of Atheism and Fanaticism have met; they may both dispense with conscience, and make the event the criterion of the deed. Hear how the pious heroes of Mr Carlyle reason on one of the most solemn occasions of the civil war. The army is remonstrating with the Parliament because it appeared slow to shed the blood of their conquered and captured King, and it actually speaks of the death of Charles "as appeasing the wrath of God" against that sovereign! and bids the Parliament "sadly to consider, as men accountable to the Highest," how far an accommodation with the King, "when God hath given him so clearly into your power to do justice, can be just before God or good men." The power to do the act is full authority, is absolute command to do it. What other doctrine could a Cæsar Borgia, or an Eccelino, the tyrant of Padua, desire to be governed, or rather to be manumitted by from all government?

The argument drawn from the success given to their cause, is perpetually in the mouth of Cromwell and of his Puritans. It establishes, without a doubt, that they have used the sword justly, and are still further to use it. Every "mercy" of this kind is in answer to prayer. Basing-House, a private residence, cannot be sacked and plundered, and the inhabitants put to the sword, but the pious historian of the feat, Mr Peters, adds, that it, and the like triumphs, were "answers to the prayers and trophies of the faith of some of God's servants." When Greek meets Greek, when the Scottish Covenanter encounters the English Puritan, and the former, being worsted, finds out "that he had not so learned Christ as to hang the equity of a cause upon events," Cromwell answers, "Did not you solemnly appeal and pray? Did not we do so too? And ought not you and we to think, with fear and trembling, of the hand of the Great God, in this mighty and strange appearance of His, instead of slightly calling it an 'event'? Were not both your and our expectations renewed from time to time, whilst we waited upon God, to see which way He would manifest himself upon our appeals? And shall we, after all these our prayers, fastings, tears, expectations, and solemn appeals, call these bare 'events'? The Lord pity you."

Men prayed in those days! says Mr Carlyle, "actually prayed! It was a capability old London and its preachers and populations had; to us the incredibilest." Beyond a doubt the Puritans and the Covenanters prayed, and in such a manner and at such a length, that the strange doctrine on which Southey has founded his "Curse of Kehama," of the essential and irresistible force of prayer, seems to have got mixed up with their Christianity.2 But we do not think that the voice of prayer has quite died out amongst us. It is curious to observe what a vivid perception this author has for the historical past, and what a voluntary blindness and deafness for the actually present. It is a fact! he frequently exclaims, with all the energy of a discoverer,—a fact! that men in these ages prayed, and had a religious faith. Our churches and chapels are not facts. The control—none the worse for being exercised without pike or musket—which the religious public, meeting in that very Exeter Hall, have over the measures of government, and all political transactions,—is not a fact. Were he writing, some centuries hence, the history of this our age, he would detect these facts. What facts, indeed, might he not detect, and what exaggerated significance might he not give to them! Why, in those days, he might exclaim, in his enthusiasm, the very beggars in the street, in asking charity, poured God's blessing on you! It was a credible thing, in those days, God's blessing!—and men gave their money for it!

A passage in one of Cromwell's letters instances, in rather a touching manner, what school of piety this army of saints must have proved. At the battle of Marston Moor a Colonel Walton had lost his son. "He was a gallant young man, exceedingly gracious," and Cromwell, giving an account of his death, in his consolatory letter to the father, writes thus,—"A little after, he said, one thing lay upon his spirit. I asked him what that was. He told me it was that God had not suffered him to be any more the executioner of his enemies!"

But nothing disturbs the equanimity of our editor, or interrupts his flow of rapture over the fanaticism of these times, especially when expressed in the letters of Cromwell. Over the theological effusions which the general of the Puritan army addresses, from his camp, to the Edinburgh clergy, Mr Carlyle thus expatiates:—"Dryasdust, carrying his learned eye over these, and the like letters, finds them, of course, full of 'hypocrisy,' &c. Unfortunate Dryasdust! they are corruscations terrible as lightning, and beautiful as lightning, from the innermost temple of the human soul; intimations, still credible, of what a human soul does mean when it believes in the Highest—a thing poor Dryasdust never did, nor will do. The hapless generation that now reads these words ought to hold its peace when it has read them, and sink into unutterable reflections, not unmixed with tears, and some substitute for 'sackcloth and ashes,' if it liked. In its poor canting, sniffling, flimsy vocabulary, there is no word that can make any response to them. This man has a living God-inspired soul in him, not an enchanted artificial 'substitute for salt,' as our fashion is. They that have human eyes can look at him; they that have only owl-eyes need not."

And then follows something upon light and lightning. "As lightning is to light, so is a Cromwell to a Shakspere. The light is beautifuller. Ah, yes; but, until by lightning and other fierce labour your foul chaos has become a world, you cannot have any light, or the smallest chance for any!… The melodious speaker is great, but the melodious worker is greater than he. Our Time cannot speak at all, but only cant and sneer, and argumentatively jargon and recite the multiplication-table: neither, as yet, can it work, except at mere railroads and cotton-spinning. It will, apparently, return to chaos soon, and then more lightnings will be needed, lightning enough,—to which Cromwell's was but a mild matter,—to be followed by light, we may hope!"—by another Shakspeare, as the tenor of the passage would imply.

Strange jumble this of Cromwell and Shakspeare, of light and lightning! There is one species of light which we are often reminded of here; a certain fitful, flickering beam, which partakes indeed of a luminous nature, but which chooses its path for ever over bottomless bog.

The sincerity of Oliver Cromwell, in these his letters and speeches, has been questioned and discussed; the sincerity of their present editor may become a question at least as difficult and perplexing. Is there any genuine conviction at the bottom of all this rant and raving? Our extravagant worshipper of the "old heathen" Goëthe, stands forth the champion and admirer of certain harsh, narrow-thoughted, impetuous sectaries, proclaims them the only "Reformers" of the world; descends to their lowest prejudices, to their saddest bigotries, to their gloomy puerilities; arguing with them solemnly against the sinfulness of drinking healths, and quite fraternising with them in all their animosity against Popery and Prelacy. What does he mean? Is it a case of conversion? Is it an outpouring merely, by a strange vent, of certain acrid humours? Is he honest, and in earnest? or is he making sport of those hapless Englishmen whom he pronounces "in human stupidity to have no fellow?"

Observers of a curious and speculative turn might, perhaps, explain it thus:—Mr Carlyle is evidently a writer of strong religious feelings. Marry, when he would exhibit them to the world, he is under the necessity of borrowing a creed from some one else. His own philosophy has nothing palpable enough for ordinary vision; nothing, as we remember, but vague infinities and eternities, with an "everlasting yes," and an "everlasting no." As the choice lay quite open to him, there was no reason why he should not select the very hottest creed he could any where find lying about in our history. From contemporaries it was not likely that he should borrow: he loves nothing, praises nothing, esteems nothing of this poor visible present; but it was an additional recommendation to the Puritanic piety, that it had left a detestable memory behind it, and was in declared hostility with all contemporaneous ways of thinking. What could he better do, therefore, than borrow this old volcanic crater of Puritanism, and pour out from it his religion and his anger upon a graceless world?

Others, not given to such refinements, would explain the phenomenon upon more ordinary principles, and reduce the enigma to a case merely of literary monomania. Mr Carlyle, they would say, has been striving to understand these Puritans till he has grown, for the time, to resemble them. In the effort to project his mind into their mind, he has overshot the mark; he has not been able yet to get his own mind back again. It is a case, they would say, of mere imagination. Could you bring Mr Carlyle into contact with a live Puritan, the charm would be instantly dispelled. If one of Harrison's troopers would but ask him to step aside with him, under a hedge, to wrestle for a blessing, or would kindly undertake to catechise him on some point of divinity,—on that notion of his, for instance, of "Right and Wrong bodying themselves into Hell and Heaven,"—the alliance would be dissolved, not, perhaps, without violent rupture.

For ourselves, we sometimes think that Mr Carlyle is in earnest. Men should be honest. One who talks so loudly about faith, ought to be sincere in his utterances to the public. At other times, the mummery becomes too violent, grows too "fast and furious," to permit us to believe that what we witness is the sane carriage of a sane man. At all events, we can but look on with calm surprise. If our philosopher will tuck his robe high up about his loins, and play the merry-andrew, if he will grimace, and paint thick, and hold dialogue with himself, who shall hinder him?—only we would rather not wear, on such an occasion, the docile aspect of admiring pupils; we prefer to stand aside, and look on with Mr Dryasdust.

It is worthy of note, that however Mr Carlyle extols his "Heroic Ones" in a body, Cromwell is the only individual that finds a good word throughout the work. Every one else, Hampden not excepted, is spoken of with slight and disparagement. Amongst all the "godlike," there is but one who finds favour in his sight,—him, however, he never deserts,—and the very parties who have before been applauded, in general terms, become the subjects of ridicule or castigation the moment they are seen in opposition to Cromwell.

To Cromwell, then, let us turn our attention. Him we also can admire. We admire his great practical sagacity, his eminent talents for war and for government, the moderation and the conscientiousness which, though a usurper and a zealot, he displayed in the use of power. He was, as we have said, a genuine Puritan. This must be understood, or no intelligible view of his character can be taken. It is not only hostility to his memory which has attributed to him a studied hypocrisy; the love of the marvellous has lent its aid. Such a supposition was thought to magnify his talents and his genius. It was more dramatic to make him the "honest Iago" of the piece. A French writer, M. Villemain, in his History of Cromwell, expresses this feeling very naïvely, and speaks of an hypocrisy "que l'histoire atteste, et qu'on ne saurait mettre en doute sans ôter quelque chose à l'idée de son génie; car les hommes verront toujours moins de grandeur dans un fanatique de bonne foi, que dans une ambition qui fait des enthusiastes. Cromwell mena les hommes par la prise qu'ils lui donnaient sur eux. L'ambition seule lui inspira des crimes, qu'il fit executer par le fanatisme des autres." That he thus employed the spirit of the age without sharing it, is a theory which will not stand the light for a moment. Besides, it is not in this manner that history is transacted: we may all be puppets, if you will, upon the scene, but it is not in this fashion that any one man gets hold of the wires. The supposition, whatever honour it may do the genius of Cromwell, will do very little honour to the speculative genius of any writer who adopts it. But this is evident, that to whatever extent Cromwell shared the distempered feelings of a sectarian party, nothing ever clouded his penetration upon any affair of conduct, any question of means to an end. The hour never came that found him wanting. At every phase of the revolution he is there to lead, or control, or predominate over it.

Starting from this point of view—understanding him, in the first place, as the conscientious zealous Puritan, and endeavouring to estimate, as the history proceeds, the modifications which the soldier and the general, and finally the Protector, would induce upon this original substratum—the character of Cromwell becomes intelligible, and his conduct, in a measure, consistent. Whilst yet a private man, he had warmly espoused the extreme opinions of that religious party who looked on Popery as antichrist, and the Church of England as little better than Popery in disguise, as the same scarlet lady in a somewhat more modest attire. He was one of a class occasionally met with in the most quiet walks of life, men who torment their spirit on some public question till it becomes a personal grievance, or rather a corroding passion. What were bishops personally to him? He might have prayed, and expounded, and walked meditative in his fields, and left a public question to be decided by the movements, necessarily slow, of public opinion. But no; he was constituted quite otherwise. From a spiritual jurisdiction, claimed though not exercised over him, his soul revolted. And this hatred to prelacy, to any spiritual authority over him or his—this determination to be his own priest—is, if not the strongest, certainly the steadiest and most constant feeling that he manifests. We trace it throughout his whole career. The first thing we hear of him in the House of Commons is a protest, a sort of ominous growl, against the promotion of some Arminian or semi-Popish divine. "If these are the steps to church preferment, what are we to expect!" Almost the first glimpse we catch of him when he has taken arms, is as the captain of a troop entering some cathedral church, and bidding the surpliced priest, who was reading the liturgy, "to cease his fooling, and come down!" And throughout the letters which he addresses to the Speaker from the seat of war, he rarely omits the opportunity of hinting, that the soldiers are worthy of that religious liberty for which they have fought so well. "We pray you, own His people more and more; for they are the chariots and horsemen of Israel." And in one of his latest speeches, he describes it as the great "extremity" of past times, that men were not permitted to preach in public unless they were ordained.

A rooted animosity to prelatical or other spiritual domination, is the key-note of this "melodious worker," as Mr Carlyle calls him. Cromwell entered the civil war provided with no theory or plan of civil government, animated with no republican zeal; it was not patriotism in any ordinary sense of the word, it was his controversy with the church of England that brought him on the field of battle. After fighting against episcopacy, he fought with equal zeal against presbyterianism; but against monarchy, or for the republic, he can hardly be said to have drawn the sword. We all applaud the sagacity which saw at once that the strongest antagonist to the honour and fidelity of the royalist, was to be found in the passion of the zealot. He enlisted his praying regiment. From that time the battle was won. But the cause was lost. What hope could there be for the cause of civil freedom, of constitutional rights, when the champion who won its victories was fanatical zeal, and the rage of theological controversy?

It is the glaring defect in Cromwell—a defect which he had in common with many others of his time—that he threw himself into a revolution having for its first object to remodel the civil government, animated only with the passions of the collateral controversy upon ecclesiastical government. He fought the battle which was to destroy the monarchy, without any fixed idea or desire for the republican government which must be its substitute. This was not the subject that had engaged his thoughts or inflamed his ardour. When, therefore, the royalists had been conquered, it is not at all surprising that he should have seen nothing but the difficulties in the way of forming a republic. At this point of his history some excuse for him may be drawn from the very defect we are noticing. His mind had dwelt on no theory of civil government—to the cause of the commonwealth his heart had never been pledged—and we can hardly call him, with justice, as Godwin does, a traitor to the republic. But, on the other hand, what a gap, what a void, does this disclose in the mind of our hero? What should we say of one who had plunged heart and soul into the French Revolution, conducted only by his rage against the Roman Catholic hierarchy? Such a one, had he risen to take a leading part in that drama, might have acted with greater wisdom and moderation than ardent and patriotic men; the very absence of any political opinion or passion might have enabled him to see more clearly than others the position which they all occupied; but this would not justify or palliate the original error, the rash, exclusive, self-blinding zeal which had brought him into that position.

To the ecclesiastical controversy, Cromwell clings throughout with an utter recklessness of the fate of civil government. When episcopacy had been vanquished, and presbyterianism threatened to take its place, he was quite as willing to plunge the whole kingdom into confusion and anarchy in his opposition to this new enemy, as to the old. Those who would defend him from the charge of personal ambition—all who excuse his conduct at this period of the history, put this plea upon record,—and without a doubt his hostility to presbyterianism was a very great and leading motive with him in his opposition to the Parliament, and his determination to prevent a reconciliation between the House and the King. When Charles was a prisoner at the Isle of Wight, it is well known that the Parliament were anxious to come to some terms of reconcilement, and the concessions which he then made were voted to be "a sufficient ground for the future settlement of the kingdom." Why did Cromwell interfere at this juncture between the two parties, in such a way as entirely to destroy both? His best public ground is his hostility to presbyterianism. And what was the presbytery, that to him it should be so distasteful, and an object of so great animosity? Its forms of worship, the doctrines preached by its divines, were exactly those he himself practised and approved. There were no altars here, no surplices, no traditions, no sympathies with Rome, no stealthy approximations to her detested idolatries. But there was a claim put forward to ecclesiastical supremacy, to ordain, and authorise, and control public preachers, which he could not tolerate; and if no other motive had existed, he was ready to oppose every settlement, at every risk, having for its object to establish a claim of this description.

We will open the Letters and Speeches of Cromwell at this period of the history, and present our readers with a specimen of his epistolary style, and one which will go far to show how little his mind was influenced, even at this great crisis, by any thing which we should describe as political reasoning. Cromwell was a great administrator, but he had no vocation for speculative politics, and little attachment to forms of government. Framers of constitutions are not in repute at present; they have not covered themselves with applause, rather with confusion; and this defect in Cromwell's mind will probably be looked upon with great indulgence. Nevertheless, people who go to war to demolish an existing government, ought to have taken thought for a substitute; on them it is incumbent to have a political creed, and a constitution to set up. At this very moment when the question is no less, than whether the king should be put to death, and monarchy rooted out of the land—ay, and the Parliament coerced, in order to effect these objects—our Puritan general reasons—like a Puritan and nothing better.