Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 13.djvu/172

 prepare for the impending war by uniting all sections of the popular party. For that purpose he moved and spoke in the House of Commons, and endeavoured to arrange an agreement with the city (, p. 83). With the same object he procured conferences between the leaders of the independent and presbyterian parties, and between the ‘grandees’ and the ‘commonwealthsmen’ (, Memoirs, p. 92). The commonwealthsmen declared openly for a republic but Cromwell declined to pledge himself; not, as he explained to Ludlow, because he did not think it desirable, but because he did not think it feasible. What troubled him still more than the failure of these conferences was the distrust with which so many of his old friends had come to regard him. On 19 Jan. 1648 John Lilburn, at the bar of the House of Commons, had accused him of apostasy, and denounced his underhand dealings with the king (, vii. 969;, An Impeachment of High Treason against Oliver Cromwell). These charges bore fruit in the jealousy and suspicion of which he so bitterly complained to Ludlow, and must have confirmed him in the resolve to make no terms with the king (, Memoirs, p. 95). The outbreak of a second civil war in consequence of the king's alliance with the presbyterians converted this resolve into a determination to punish the king for his faithlessness. In the three days’ prayer-meeting which took place at Windsor in April 1648 Cromwell took a leading part. The army leaders reviewed their past political action and decided that ‘those cursed carnal conferences with the king’ were the cause of their present perplexities. They resolved ‘that it was their duty, if ever the Lord brought them back in place, to call Charles Stuart, that man of blood, to account for all the blood he had shed and the mischief he had done’ (, Faithful Memorial, &c.; Somers Tracts, vi. 501). A few days later (1 May 1648) Cromwell was despatched by Fairfax to subdue the insurrection in Wales; on 11 May he captured the town of Chepstow, and, leaving a regiment to besiege the castle, established himself before Pembroke on 21 May. For six weeks Pembroke held out, and it was not till the beginning of August that he was able to join the little corps with which Lambert disputed the advance of the great Scotch army under Hamilton. Marching across the Yorkshire hills, and down the valley of the Ribble, Cromwell fell on the flank of the Scots as they marched carelessly through Lancashire, and in a three days’ battle routed them, with the loss of more than half their number (17–19 Aug.) Then be turned north to recover the border fortresses, expel Hamilton’s rearguard from English soil, and take measures for the prevention of future invasions. In this task he was much aided by an internal revolution in Scotland which placed the Argyll party in power. To assist them Cromwell marched into Scotland, and obtained without difficulty the restoration of Carlisle and Berwick, and the exclusion from power of those who had taken part in the late invasion (October 1648). Then he returned to Yorkshire to besiege Pontefract. like the army which he commanded, Cromwell came back highly exasperated against all who had taken part in this second war. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is a more prodigious treason than any that had been perfected before; because the former quarrel was that Englishmen might rule over one another; this to vassalise us to a foreign nation. And their fault that appeared m this summer’s business is certainly double to theirs who were in the first, because it is the repetition of the same offence against all the witnesses that God has borne’ (, Letter lxxxii.) ‘Take courage,’ he wrote to the parliament after Preston, ‘to do the work of the Lord in fulfilling the end of your magistracy, in seeking the peace and welfare of the land—that all that will live peaceably may have countenance from you, and that they that are incapable and will not leave troubling the land may speedily be destroyed out of the land’ (ib. lxiv.) But several weeks before this letter was written parliament had reopened negotiations with the king, and when Cromwell re-entered England the treaty of Newport was in progress. Moreover, the House of Lords had favourably received, and recorded for future use, a series of charges against Cromwell, which a late subordinate of his had laid before them (Lords’ Journals, 2 Aug. 1648; Major Huntingdon’s Reasons for laying down his Commission). His recent victories had now removed the personal danger, but there still remained the danger of seeing those victories made useless by the surrender of all he had fought for. In his letter to Hammond, Cromwell describes the Newport treaty as ‘this ruining hypocritical agreement,’ and asks if ‘the whole fruit of the war is not like to be frustrated, and all most like to turn to what it was, and worse’ (, Letter lxxxv.) He refers to it again in a later speech as ‘the treaty that was endeavoured with the king whereby they would have put into his hands all that we had engaged for, and all our security should have been a little bit of paper’ (ib. Speech i.) Accordingly, Cromwell expressed his entire concurrence with the