Mr. Buchan's Oliver Cromwell
By PROFESSOR GEORGE M. TREVELYAN, O.M.
IT is a fortunate event that this year has seen the publication of Professor Neale's Elizabeth and Mr. Buchan's Cromwell.
There are now available for the public, in the form which it will consent to read, adequate and just accounts, up to date in historical knowledge, of the work and character of two of the very greatest figures in our history. There is, indeed, this difference between the two authors, that Professor Neale is devoting his life's work to the study of the subject he has epitomized, whereas Mr. Buchan, as we all know, has , had many other irons in his busy fires. But the relative authority of the two books is not so very different, because
Mr. Buchan has Gardiner and Sir Charles Firth as safe founda- tions upon which to build, besides adding considerable studies of his own especially on military and on Scottish matters. Of Elizabeth no one could safely have written without being a specialist. In the case of Cromwell, we have been allowed some references in footnotes, which is com- mendable.
Mr. Buchan has brought to his task invaluable qualities— familiar knowledge of military affairs ; sympathy with the best side of the Puritan religion ; shrewd understanding of men and their motives, both individually and in mass ; imaginative insight into the issues and personalities of the time, irrespective of party. He has written of Montrose and now of Cromwell and no admirer of either has cause to complain. This is partly because he knows that the right was not on one side in that great quarrel, partly because he has a natural turn for hero-worship, in the sane not the Carlylean sense, yet with a touch of the great Carlylean poetry in it. He would not address Cromwell in the words of his first and mightiest champion : "I confess I have an interest in this Mr. Cromwell ; and indeed, if truth must be said, in him alone. The rest are historical, dead to me ; but he is epic, still living. Hail to thee, thou strong one ; hail, across the long-drawn funeral aisle and night of time ! "
Mr. Buchan is not, like Carlyle, interested in "him alone," and he is keenly alive to Oliver's mistakes—the execution of the King, the Drogheda massacre, the manner of his dissolu- tion of the Rump, the brief experiment in government by Major-Generals—and their fatal consequences. Moreover, he connects these mistakes with the faults of his hero's character, the daemonic temper, which, usually latent under a strong restraint, was part of the secret of his power over men, but sometimes broke out in fatal eruption. On the other hand Mr. Buchan sees the many sides of Oliver which make him a more attractive person and a subtler and more complicated psychological study than Napoleon, Frederic, or any Carlylean super-man—his real humility of soul in presence of God ; his desire to establish the political liberty on which he was forced to tread ; the tenderness and pity which alter- nated with his iron moods (Scott first caught that in Woodstock); his humour, good fellowship and craving for quiet, domestic, country life ; his opportunism and distrust of hard theorists. It is these qualities that make him an
essentially English hero, though it was his fate to ride rough- shod over Englishmen.
Mr. Buchan follows out accurately the perplexing negotia- tions between King, Parliament and Army that followed the end of the first Civil War, and shows again that Oliver honestly and wisely and mercifully strove for an accommodation between the three parties, which the folly of Parliament and the duplicity of the King rendered impossible. The failure to find an agreed basis, and the determination of Parliament to persecute all religions save a narrow Presbyterianism
Oliver Cromwell. By John Buchan. (Hodder and Stoughton. 21s.)
that had no real hold on England, brought chaos and disrup- tion to the door. The Empire was dissolved and England herself was on the point of anarchy or foreign conquest Oliver saved her by the only weapon he had to his hand—the Army. The mistake—crime if you will—of the King's execution cannot blind us to the fact that he shouldered the weight of the hopeless situation created by others, saved the country, and raised her high when she seemed about to perish. His structures could not endure. The Restoration of 1600 was the only way back to law and liberty. But no such Restora- tion by national agreement was possible when Oliver took us in hand and saved us.
That is one of his great achievements for which England owes him debt. Another was that by winning the First Civil War—which but for him would have been lost, as Mr. Buchan clearly shows—he rendered despotic monarchy impossible in England. Owing to Oliver, the Restoration when it came was as much a restoration of Parliamentary as of Kingly power.
His third permanent achievement was that he saved the Puritan sects from destruction first from a persecuting Anglicanism, then from a persecuting Presbyterianism. This service was the more valuable because the one way of English religion lay by nature in "varieties of religious experience," for which Oliver consciously stood. English Puritanism was not, like the Presbyterianism of Scotland, essentially one religion, but many. That variety in the forms of Protestant religion was nursed by Oliver for ten years, and was therefore able to survive all later persecution.
As regards the kingship, which Oliver refused in spite of his alleged "ambition,' Mr. Buchan is perhaps right in supposing that he might have successfully made himself king while he was popular as the national saviour after Worcester, but that it was too late at the time of the formal offer a few months before his death. By that time nothing but a restoration of the ancient line could have given peace to the land. It is probable that Oliver's instinct to decline what reasonable and legal-minded men wished him to take, saved us from worse trouble and a dynastic dispute.
Mr. Buchan is equally good on the military side. He shows how Cromwell made the new type of soldier and the new army that won the First Civil War. And he shows how far more than a mere "cavalry leader" he became. The Preston, Dunbar and Worcester campaigns place him among the great captains of history, for they • show him as great in strategy as in tactics. Mr. Buchan does full justice to the genius of his action in crossing the Forth, occupy- ing Perth, to cut his enemies' northern communications and leave the southern route open, inciting them to invade England. It was the very thing from which a lesser man would have shrunk. But he knew England would not rise to aid the Scots; and then, having got them out of their fastnesses, he shepherded them into Worcester town. September 3rd—Dunbar, Worcester, the death of Oliver—. is a great date. in British history.
There is a great deal more in this excellent book than I have space even to mention in this article. The study of Cromwell is a mine, deep, ill-lighted, infinitely rich, and men in each new age fetch up from it something not found before. There is no .final word on him, even when all the available facts have been discovered, partly because human sympathict and prejudices are infinitely various, partly because his work touched so many sides of our 'national life ; and his own nature, unlike that of most great men of action, had so many sides to it and his mind so many facets: But this is the best book on him that our generation is likely to produce.
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