BOOKS OF THE DAY

Oliver Cromwell (Prof. Bonamy Dobree) . The Air Raid Menace (A. L. Rawlings) ..

Colonial Population (G. F. McCleary) .. Elizabethan Tourist (A. L. Rowse) Success to the Mayor (Christopher Hobhouse) Pilgrims Were They All (Rose Macaulay) . The Meaning of Hamlet (W. J. Lawrence)

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5o6 508 508 510 512 514 514 Robert Browning and Julia Wedgwood (Arthur Waugh) Unflinching (John Sparrow) .. .. .. ..

Dancing Round the World (Derek Verschoyle) • . •• Frontiers of Science (A. J. Ayer) .. .. ..

Journey to Turkestan (Christopher Sykes) ..

Fiction (Kate O'Brien) .. . • ..

Current Literature .. .. .. . • ..

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5i6 518 519 52o 52o 522 524

CROMWELL'S CONSERVATISM

By BONAMY DOBREE IT is a thousand pities that the Stracheyan method of writing biography has met with such a lugubrious eclipse. It was too " novelistic " for some tastes ; but then the novel, as Chamfort remarked, no doubt remembering his Aristotle, is more philoso- phic than history. That is, with the Stracheyan method you did at least get a point of view, you were aware that the men written about were objects worthy of love or hatred because they acted in this way or the other ; you got, no doubt, a little distortion, but then a strangeness in the proportion is necessary to art, and in the end you probably approach nearer to the truth with art than you do with science. One likes to toy with the idea of how Strachey would have treated a full biography of Cromwell. He would not have understood Cromwell, possibly, but then it is dangerous to understand one's enemies, and Cromwell stood for all that Strachey most steadfastly hated.

He would have " debunked " him, but that, after all, would seem to be the right way to deal with dictators, who are, almost by definition, comic figures, since they are always forced into excess, which is still, after over two thousand years, the butt of the comic muse. And Cromwell, apart from this general characteristic, offers so many opportunities for the use of comic irony. A confirmed royalist, liking more than a smack of the monarchic in the structure of the State, he killed his king : a convinced Parliamentarian, he smothered every parliament he had to deal with ; the creator of the New Model Army, he became its puppet ; standing as he did for freedom of thought and against taxation in opposition to Charles, he produced a more repressive tyranny, imposed more crushing taxation, than Charles had ever dreamed of. He was a Titan, no one will deny that ; he was nearly always able to impose his will. He was a brilliant soldier, and he made the name of England feared abroad—which would appear to have its advantages—but he was also a very unpleasant man indeed.

Mr. Ashley is careful not to make a point of any of these rather obvious things ; he subdues them so as to make way for his thesis that Cromwell was essentially conservative ; his book is a biographical history rather than a biography, so it is not to his purpose to make his figure too vivid. Nothing, to be sure, is glozed over (though some things are excused), but the only aspect brought into prominence is the conservatism of this dictator. He was unswerving in maintaining the sacred rights of property, he hated the Levellers, and he tried to make the new State as like the old, in its forms, as possible. True ; but Mr. Ashley too readily takes for granted that the Conserves" tive of those days held the same view as the Conservative of, shall we say, the nineteenth century. Cromwell, in his day; was revolutionary enough, for in the early seventeenth century it was by no means conservative to hold by the sacred rights of property, to believe that a man might do as he liked with his own. That was the advanced point of view. The conserva- tive point of view was the mediaeval one, that held by Laud and the King, which is now too well known, thanks chiefly to Professor R. H. Tawney, to need describing here.

Nor was he any more conservative in the matter of parlia- ments, those gatherings which had latterly taken to putting forward new-fangled ideas as to their relation with the royal prerogative. It is true that he dismissed them in the old-

Oliver Cromwell. The Conservative Dictator. By Ashley. (Capt. xas. 6d.) fashioned way, if to do as the Stuarts had done was to be old- fashioned ; but he did his best to rule through them. Here, however, Mr. Ashley has a point of view different from the usually accepted one. Whereas it is genera* 'agreed that Cromwell hankered after legality, called parliaments to make his position legal, and was careful to have all his decrees sanctioned by an Act, Mr. Ashley thinks that, like Charles, he only called parliaments because he wanted money. It is difficult to be certain, for the comic muse hovers so persist- ently over the dealings of Cromwell with Parliament that, after her wayward manner, she is apt to mislead : yet it would seem that he really wanted parliaments ; the difficulty was that even those Houses elected by the best contrived dictatorship methods would insist upon taking the bit between their teeth. Even Barebone's Parliament of Sainis shoWed itself startlingly practical, and very efficient. It had to go because it attacked vested interests. Cromwell's conservatism, Mr. Ashley would say : yes, but it attacked the new vested interests as well as the old.

The claim that Cromwell was conservative in religion is not one that Mr. Ashley makes, for not only was Cromwell an Independent and a Root and Branch man, but he also held to the revolutionary idea of toleration, for those sects, that is, that did not threaten the new structure of the State in any way, such as Prelatists, Papists and Quakers. But it is perilous to guess how far he was tolerant at heart : had he been a Presbyterian there might have been a different story to tell. For his intolerance towards Papists, even though it may have been exaggerated by fear, was little short of sadistic. Perhaps one might say of him as a whole that he was conservative of those ideas that had, a generation earlier, been revolutionary.

This book presents us with a somewhat formal portrait of the hypochondriac man-of-action-mystic, whose inner wrestlings with the spirit, whose public prayerful exhortations, whose tears and whose rages, seemed invariably to lead to the materialistically practical: Mr. Ashley does not share Mr. Belloc's notion of the man unwilling to take power who had power forced upon him, but sees ambition, however subcon- scious, in all his actions. It is another difficult point, for God's private instructions to Cromwell seemed always to lead him towards power, so that, in common with all dictators, Cromwell soon came to feel that he was the only man able to save the country, though probably not one of them has ever been quite so sure as he was that God had divinely appointed him. But when God and the army struggled over him, the army usually won, except where the T..evellers were concerned. The dishes, the struggles between factions desirous of power, are well set out by Mr. Ashley, who does not, however, reveal that curve, attaining its summit in Barebone's Parliament, which Professor A. S. Turberville made so plain in his book on Commonwealth and Restoration ; yet, as we read him, so clear does he make the issues, we become uncomfortably aware that all true history, as he reminds us Croce has said, is contemporary history. - And as, in our lading,: our distaste grows for dictatoiships,. of whatever colour, with their tricks and suppressions, their spies and their agents provocateurs, we find ourselves sighing the old familiar sigh, " Why will not human beings be more reasonable ? " and sadly remember another quotation, this Maurice time from Hegel, that " history teaches that history teaches mankind nothing," - -