WILLS venue CROMWELL.
MR. WILLS'S drama of Charles I. was, thanks in great part to Mr. Irving. a remarkable success. By making Cromwell appear a vulgar and canting ruffian, and Charles L as not only a hero and a martyr, but also a modern gentleman, with superior manners and a melancholy smile, a contrast is produced which gives rise to some exceedingly dramatic situa- tions. This method of treatment was admirably adapted for the respectable audiences which wept nightly over the kingly griefs, and when to the emotions of sentimental loyalty were added those of the domestic hearth caused by the farewell scene between Charles and his children, the triumph of the dramatist was complete. Nor was the triumph an illegitimate one. From the days when Sophocles and Euripides moulded the popular legends to suit their own views of dramatic necessity, the dramatist, like the novelist, has always been allowed a poetic licence in dealing with the personages and events of legend and history. So long as the main features are preserved, so long as Achilles is "impiger, iracundas, inexora- bilis, acer," and so long as Medea is fierce and Orestes sad, no one can complain. Nor, so long as there is some traditional authority for a particular dramatic view of people and things historical, can the historian object.
Now, there is no denying that there is a traditional view of Charles and Cromwell which justifies Mr. Wills's treatment. It is the view of the Restoration and the historian of the time of the third George, suited to the prejudices and passions of the period in which it was put together. But when Mr. Wills is brought to book, and contends not merely that he was justified as a dramatist in the method of treatment he adopted, but that he was right historically, he leaves himself at the mercy of hostile criticism. In a long letter to the Times, last week, he was impelled by some evil genius to leave the fortress of dramatic fitness and venture out into the open field of historic fact, and to give chapter and verse in support of his contention. As the character of Cromwell does, in fact, involve more or less that of the great bulk of the English nation at that time, it is just as well to show that the series of libels put forward by Mr. Wills are not, as he alleges in his defence, true in substance and in fact.
The greater part of the references given by him may be at once dismissed. Hallam, Godwin, and Mr. Jesse are only second- hand authorities, whose opinions mast be taken for what they are worth, and would be easily out-balanced by quotations from Carlyle or Gardiner, or Mr. J. A. Picton, Cromwell's latest biographer. They deal mainly with such points as Cromwell's, hypocrisy and tyranny. Of the latter, the only instances cited are the establishment of the Major-Generals, and a general com- plaint by that staunch Republican, Ludlow. Now, the division of the country into Major-Generalsbips undoubtedly showed that it was on the brink of military despotism. But it is to be noted that the civil authorities were not superseded, that the Generals were sent out for purely military purposes, namely, to repress any further attempts at Royalist risings like the very serious one which they had just put down, and that they had no general powers of government. Still, no doubt, the measure was wholly "unconstitutional," and was justifiable solely as a means of stopping, as it did stop, further civil war. But a measure taken in time of revolution which is unconstitu- tional is not necessarily tyrannical. "Tyranny," in English, whatever it may have done in Greek, implies cruelty, unneces- sary cruelty, unnecessary arbitrariness and harshness. No one has contended that, in England at least, Cromwell's govern- ment was cruel, and the general acquiescence in it, and Crom- well's many attempts to put it and keep it on a constitutional footing, are sufficient evidence that it was not unnecessarily harsh, nor, in intention at least, wholly arbitrary.
The charge of hypocrisy is one which it is only less difficult to disprove than to prove. It is chiefly founded on the fact that Cromwell was given to praying, that he gave thanks to God for his victories, and generally "made Him his journeyman." But this is common, especially in times of fighting. Even at the outbreak of the Franco-German war, both the Emperor and the King appealed to the God of Battles, and Te Dams are a recognised method of celebrating victories. Moreover, if the frequent use of prayer and the name of God is a proof of hypocrisy, then was Charles equally a hypocrite. Witness Sir Philip Warwick, whom Mr. Wills has himself put into the
box :—" His exercises of religion were most exemplary Every morning and evening he spent some time in private meditation, and through the whole week never failed
before he sat down to dinner to have part of the Liturgy read unto him and his menial servants, were he never so hungry, or so late in, &e At all events, it must be allowed in Cromwell's favour that he began to be pious before his piety could have began to be useful, when he was tithe-lessee to the Dean and Chapter of Ely ; and that his piety once led him, according to another of Mr. Wills's witnesses, Heath, to return £20 which he had won at play in his less pious days.
But the main charge against Cromwell (which is made a turn- ing-point in the play) is that he negotiated with the King to be made Earl of Essex, and on the King's refusal vowed his death. The sole authority for this is a statement by Mr. Jesse that there " is a well-known tradition" to that effect, and a quota- tion from James Heath, on which, of course, that tradition is founded. This personage is the author of what Carlyle calls "a little, brown, lying book," or pamphlet, entitled " Flagellum," published in 1663, when the " White Terror " and the gallows were in full swing, and judicial murders, like that of Sir Henry Vane, were being daily perpetrated; while the ignoble vengeance of the Stuarts and their hangers-on vented itself even on the dead,—not only on the dead bodies of Crom- well and Ireton and the hero Blake, but even on the dead body of Cromwell's poor old mother.- This " Flagellum " has never been publicly and thoroughly flagellated as it deserves to be. It is a tissue of ludicrous lies and palpable absurdities, and it would be about as rational to adopt the story told by a "drunk and incapable" of the conduct of the policeman who took him up, as it would to believe its evidence against Cromwell. Here is a sketch of Cromwell's early life, gathered from its veracious pages. He was a notorious "apple dragon," or robber of orchards, as a boy; " from this he passed into another more manly theft, the robbing of dove-houses." He was whipped, by iris father's order, for dreaming he should be King of England. -" There was none so infamed for drinking, wenching, and the like outrages, as this young Tarquin." He was accordingly sent to Lincoln's Inn, " under pretence of his studying the law" (a pretence which a good many other young squires before and since have been under), but there "found law so contrary to his loose and libertine spirit that he spent his time in an inward spight, which for that space exceeded the enormous .extravagance of his former vitiousnesse." Then he became pious (of course, hypocritically), and when he set up farming, used to "continue prayers with the farm labourers so long, that it was nine o'clock in the morning before -they began their work." The effect of this was remarkable. "The ploughmen, seeing this zeal of their master, which dispensed with the profit- able and most commodious part of the day for their labour, thought they might borrow the other part of it for their plea- sure, and therefore they commonly went to the plough with a pack of cards in their pockets, and having turned up two or three furrows, set themselves down to game till • dinner-time, when they returned to the second part of their devotion," with the result that " scarce half a crop ever reared itself upon his grounds ;" and so forth. Surely, Mr. Wills can never have looked inside the book he quotes, or be would not in cold-blood cite the " banalities " of " Carrion " Heath as an authority. How well he deserves the epithet of -" Carrion," we cannot soil these pages by showing. Suffice it to refer to the passage where the young Oliver is ducked for misbehaviour at his uncle's house, and his details of old Oliver's death, when his body was " so full of corruption " that they were -" forced to bury him out of hand," and the grand lying-in-state which he describes was, in consequence, that of a sham corpse. But we may reject at once and for ever a tradition which is taken from such a polluted hand as that of Mr. James Heath, sometime student (to his shame be it spoken) of Christ Church, Oxford.
The other chief instance of treachery and duplicity towards Charles urged by Mr. Wills is found in " his cruel wiles to lure away the King to Carisbrook detailed in Sir Philip Warwick's Memoirs of the reign, 1702 " Now, again, one is tempted to ask whether Mr. Wills has ever read the book he refers to, because, if so, he must have been in a trance with his eyes not open, but shut. Sir Philip, who, though a vehement Royalist, is at least a -gentleman, does not give the smallest countenance to the story that Charles was lured to Carisbrooke by Cromwell. He does, indeed, imply that Cromwell frightened him away from Hampton Court, by pretending (what after events proved to be the fact)
that he could not "withstand the torrent of the agitators," who "were like to seize upon his Majestie and murder him." But he distinctly says, "It came not within my knowledge who gave the counsell for his flight, or what was resolved about it," though he was told of the project before it was executed ; but " I could not concur for his making a mean (since it was like to be a dangerous) flight." But "being carried off by Mr. John Ashburnham, Sir John Berkeley, and Mr. William Legg onely, the next wee heard of him was that he was in Carisbrook Castle." The King himself told him he did not think he bad. been betrayed, and Warwick says:—"If it be lawfull to conjecture
the choosing this place did not arise from a beleife either of the King or Mr. Ashburnham in the Governour, but from the failing of some ship there [viz., at Southampton] expected.
His Majesty like a sick man, was willing to ohange his bed, and see whether it would better his condition. But that, when he was out of their hands, he should freely put himself into their power again, this, as it has heretofore bin my amazement, now requires my silence." Berkeley and Ashburnham, in their respective accounts of the episode, try to throw the blame on each other ; but neither says that the other was a traitor, and Lord Clarendon comes to the conclusion that they were both honest, and says that the King never thought there was any treachery about it. He hints, indeed, that the King and his servants were outwitted by Cromwell, though how that could be he does not attempt to show, nor is it easy to see how Cromwell could have been benefited by the King's flight, nor what security he could have had that it would not end in the King's getting away altogether. There is, on the other hand, no doubt that Charles was then playing a double, or rather a treble game, trying to play off the Army against Parliament, and the Scots against both, and this flight was probably the gamester's throw to get rid of all three.
There is not space to follow Mr. Wills into his other charger, of bravado, of cruelty, of vandalism, and even of avarice. The last is quite a novel accusation, and is easily refuted. The true story of the Marquis of Worcester's estates is that Cromwell was voted a sum of money amounting to 21,680 a year out of them, in recognition of his services, and in a few months after- wards he gave £1,000 a year of it to Parliament, for the war in Ireland. If he shared the Duke of Buckingham's estates, he shared them with Lord Fairfax, who became the Duke's father-in-law, and equally should share the charge of rapacity. But it is the same throughout. What Cromwell did was done also by Fairfax, up to the King's execution. It is impossible to suppose that the friend of Hampden and of Fairfax was a mere canting vulgarian, or that such a character would ever have commanded the confidence and respect of the party and the majority of the nation. Those who fix this character on Crom- well do so by looking to after-events, and fall into the logical fallacy of post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Because Cromwell was driven by circumstances to assist in the execution of Charles, and afterwards to take his place on the throne, it is assumed that he always had these objects before him. But in real life, and especially in times of revolution, people do not form these deep designs. They meet the needs of the moment, and are
thankful if they can keep their own heads above water. That Cromwell was an enthusiast no one can doubt, and that, like
many men, enthusiasts and others than enthusiasts, he thought his own views, and perhaps his own interests, coincided with those of God and Fatherland, may perhaps be conceded. But it is time that all sensible people gave the go-by to " Carrion " Heath, and his foolish slanders.
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