JOHN PYM.*
" BARREN as brick clay." Such was Carlyle's. verdict upon. the eminent Parliamentarian, the most eminent of what Strafford called " that generation of odd names and natures" who made the Civil War and unmade their Parliament in the' process. Pym is the key to the epoch, but his dreariness • John Pym. By C. E. Wade. London: Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons, Tia, 6d. net.]
bas sat heavily upon the souls 'of historians, save only the exuberant John Foreter. His speeches are inordinately dull, but because they happened to be deeds as well as words they tannot be neglected. There was no gleam of humour or romance in him ; he lacked altogether the moral elevation of many of his party ; he had not even the fire of the true fanatic. Mr. Wade belongs to that very modern school of biographers who seem to choose this subject, not from affection, but from dis- like. Pym is wholly antipathetic to him. His sympathy lies with Strafford and Hyde and Falkland in the great quarrel. But this lack of sympathy makes him judicial. He holds the scales evenly between royal and parliamentary prerogative, and when he condemns he is scrupulously careful to give the basis for his judgment. The book is admirably written, full of happy phrases and eloquent passages, so that this life of a very arid character is one of the most entertaining of recent biographies. The seventeenth century is gradually coming out of controversy into the clear light of history. Men may still differ according to their temperaments about various protagonists, but the world is substantially agreed upon the main question. We see the struggle as a war of rival half-truths and fanaticisms. The Stuart prerogative is balanced by the equally indefensible parliamentary prerogative. Charles and Laud strove to compel uniformity in religion ; so did the Scottish Covenanters and the English Parliament, though it was a different religion they favoured. There were wise men on both sides who saw the mistake ; but the leaders had no doubts, and their tolerance was about the same as that of an Afghan mullah It needed the iron hand of Cromwell to break both tyrannies and prepare the way, after many years, for free and popular government.
John Pym was born in Somerset four years before the Great Armada. He studied at Oxford, became a barrister of the Middle Temple, and at the age of thirty-seven entered Parliament as member for Caine. He first came into promi- nence with his three speeches on the grant of subsidies for the war in the Palatinate, in which he argued the familiar plea of supplies as contingent upon redress of grievances. When James demanded a copy of the speech, Pym with his usual courage offered to redeliver it in his Majesty's presence. These speeches showed him as marked out for leadership in the Commons, since he had the "faculty of appreciating the ideas and the prejudices of the ordinary man, and of trans- muting them into such a logical and attractive presentment that each of his bearers conl3c1 feel in them kinship if not paternity." Three years later came James's last Parliament, when the quarrel was less with the King than with Buckingham. Pym seems te have .been engaged in com- mittee work and private business, and the leadership of the popular party fell intoithe hands of Eliot. Of him Mr. Wade writes with truth : " Slick men . . , are the bane of the cause which they adopt. They are the plaything of subtle natures which exploit their sensibilities ; by incessant exaggeration they weaken the force of superlatives ; their brilliance destroys the infinite variations between black and white, and in the end they create only the tedium and the ridicule even of their victims." In contrast with Eliot, Pym's sagacity and homely good sense stood out in strong relief. We have no intention of following in detail the events of those confused years. Wentworth, Pym's old colleague in the fight for the liberties of Parliament, drew back when Parliament itself threatened a tyranny. There was a moment, had Charles been wise, when he could have enlisted both Pym and Wentworth, but with the blindness of his race he missed his market. The Petition of Right was the last statement of a moderate and legal resistance ; thereafter moderation and legality fled from the strife. Meantime Pym was busy in a private colonizing venture—the settlement of the Providence and Henrietta Islands in the Bahama group. Mr. Wade prints extracts from the Minutes of the Board, wherefrom it appears that one of the-chief exports to the new colony was ministers. This venture was useful to him, for it brought him into close touch with a number, of men like Fiennes, Hampden, Rich, and Warwick, who were to be his allies in the coming straggle. The King advanced deeper into the uneonstitutionel bog. Monopolies and, ship money on the one side and Land's ecolesiadieal policy on the other alienated his friends and gave weapons to.his..enemies. The Scottish rebellion 'narked the bursting of the storm, and Pym found in the Scots the Fillies he had long been seeking. The impeachment 'and death of Strafford, inWhieh Ppm' • was the moving apirit,-followed-A a bad business to any man who believed that judgel 0044 not manufacture, 'as they proceeded, the laws nnder whistt they condemned. Strafford saw, as Montrose saw, that the safest way of reform was to use the sanction of the monarchy', the existing sovereignty of England, and that reform without such sanction meant speedy anarchy and at the best a brief life. Pym and his like were no builders ; he refused office when it was offered him, for he had the wit to know hit true power. The Parliamentarians were now in the griP of religious intolerance. They were willing to agree with the Scots, who desired to establish a Presbyterian uniformity4 while they were putting to death Laud, whose real blunder had been the same kind of policy for Anglicanism. The Root and Branch Bill revealed the direction of the 'move, ment. Then came the Ten Propositions and the Grand Remonstrance, which latter showed the moderates that there was no place for them in Pym's following. The Irish Rebellion gave strength to the Puritan party, and it was religious iconoclasts rather than civil reformers of whom Pym was now the leader. "It (the Grand Remonstrance) proved to demonstration that no concession which Charles might make could purge 'his originil Offence." Too late the King tried the strong hand, and the result was the Ratio; of the Five Members. Eleven years later Cromwell was tio appear in the House on a similar errand with a very different result. Then war was declared, and for sixteen months Pym was virtual King in London. He had to raise money as Charles had raised it, and the levy was no more popular from one than from the other. His hope was the Scots, and he bought them with a Covenant. It was his last achievement, and he died on the eighth of December; 1643, to the dismay of the House of Commons, where he had ruled supreme. "Surely," cried Richard Baxter, "Pym is now a member of a more knowing, unerring, well-orderet right-aiming, self-denying, unanimous, honourable Senate than that from whence he was taken." As Mr. Wade says dryly; most people, looking to the state of the English Parliament at the time, will find it easy to agree with the author of The Saints' Everlasting Rest.
The motive power of this extraordinary career seems to have been a narrow but intense theological interest. Pym was no mystic like Cromwell, but he had the sectarian enthusiasm which characterized men like Argyll in Scotland. "It belong, to the duty of a Parliament," he said, "to establish true religion and to punish false"; and his conception of true religion was a relentless pursuit of Papists and Arminiens. His political reputation has sunk low with posterity, because he was too entirely successful Where he happened to be right, and failed too completely where he happened to be wrong. He had no political imagina- tion, and his doctrine of the supremacy of the Commons was no serious political creed, but a move in a revolutionary game. Like all true revolutionaries, he was an opportunist, and never saw beyond the next step.. Indeed, Cromwell, when he destroyed parliamentary government in England, only finished what Pym had begun. We need not judge him hardly. In that great transition to responsible government no man of his time had any clear sense of the road he wished to traveL The principles of the Revolution of 1688 evolved slowly through two generations of muddled thinking and more muddled practice. His abilities as a parliamentarian were of a high order, for he could interpret the ordinary member JO" himself and convince an audience that he was merely stating its views. He had indomitable courage and untiring industry. He was a shrewd judge of popular feeling, and played on it as he pleased. Without his religious prejudices it is " possible that his strong good sense and business aptitude might have made him a construe- tive statesmen, but it was • bis • leaderithip of 'religions bigotri that gave him his parliamentary pre eminence We agree with Mr. Wade 's verdict on Pym, though we are assured that we should differ Strongly from him in our judgment of othleif, Participants in the, strife. • We quote his conClhding where hie litnitstions are 'apparent' in his references be tinny* and Cromwell, but where his general conchision seethe to:tus inevitable
" The muddled mismanagement of Buckingham, the great opportunities which Charles was dinging away with both haucle., roused Wentivorth to opposition; it was iniperstitIon aid:idolatry
and the rags of Antichrist against which Pm first and foremost directed his great gifts. Nor did religion mean to him that quiet culture of the soul which irradiated the life of George Herbert at Bemerton ; it was not the heartfelt devotion to the unseen God of his imagining which gave immortality to the pathetic and ludicrous visions of Bunyan. In the sublime heights where Milton soars free from his Puritan bonds and Puritan venom, Pym and his like would have yawned. He is of the house and lineage of William Laud, whom of all men he most abhorred; he is definite, positive. But where the Archbishop must needs bow to the great cloud of wit- nesses, not always entirely harmonious, whom the Church has accepted for Fathers and teachers, the Puritan must rely upon himself and those few exponents of eternal verity to whom illumination had been granted in the sixteenth century of the Christian era. In the great corporation of faithful Churchmen there were saints like Andrewes, fighting men like Montagu. In the ranks of the Puritans there were seers like Milton, psalm- singers like Cromwell, for ever hewing Agags to the greater glory of God in the very words and spirit of the sheikhs of Palestine. Pym is none such, nor is Laud ; they stand midway, they are the embodiment of polities viewed in the light of a theory of religion. Hence they fail where either the fanatic or the politique would have succeeded. . . . And when at last the Revolution settlement finished the strife of which all were weary, it was the politiques and the Gallios who did it all. 'Here and here we are safe, for these be the works of men's hands t. said they ; 'and, for the rest, guess as you please.'"
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