Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 13.djvu/173

 petitious of the northern army against the treaty, which he forwarded to Fairfax, and approved the stronger measures adopted by the southern army (, vii. 1399). ‘We have read your declaration hero,’ he wrote to Fairfax, ‘and see in it nothing but what is honest and becoming honest men to say and offer’ (Engl. Historical Review, ii. 149). To Hammond he wrote that the northern army could have wished that the southern army would have delayed their remonstrance till after the treaty had been completed, but seeing that it had been presented they thought it right to support it (, Letter lxxxv.)

The arguments by which Cromwell justified the action of the army in putting force upon the parliament are fully stated in the long letter in which he attempted to convince the wavering Hammond; ‘Fleshly reasonings’ convinced him that if resistance was lawful at all, it was as lawful to oppose the parliament as the king, ‘one name of authority as well as another,’ since it was the cause alone which made the quarrel just. But he laid more stress on higher considerations, on those ‘outward dispensations’ of which he elsewhere owns he was inclined to make too much (ib. Letter lxvii.) Every battle was, in his eyes, an ‘appeal to God’—indeed he many times uses that phrase as a synonym for fighting—and each victory was a judgment of God in his favour. ‘Providences so constant, clear, and unclouded’ as his successes could not have been designed to end in the sacrifice of God’s people and God’s cause. In the army’s determination to intervene to prevent this he imagined that he saw ‘God disposing their hearts,’ as in the war He had ‘framed their actions.’ ‘I verily think, and am persuaded, they are things which God puts into our hearts,’ and he was convinced not merely of the lawfulness but of the duty of obeying this belief (Letters lxxxiii–lxxxv.)

The southern army took the lead in its acts as it had done in its petitions, nor did Cromwell arrive in London until Pride had already begun the work of purging the House of Commons (6 Dec.) He snowed his approval of that act by taking his seat in the house the next day, and was then thanked by it for his ‘very great and eminently faithful services’ (Commons’ Journals, 7 Dec. 1648). What share he took in the proceedings of the next few days is uncertain, but he seems to have been more active outside parliament than within it. With Whitelocke and other lawyers he discussed in several conferences the future settlement of the kingdom, and with the council of war revised the constitutional proposals known as the Agreement of the People (, ff. 362–4;, Legal and Fundamental Liberties, p. 38). Walker represents Cromwell as saying, when the trial of the king was first moved in the commons, that if any man had designed this he should think him the greatest traitor in the world, but since Providence and necessity had cast them upon it he should pray God to bless their counsel (, History of Independency, ii. 54).

When the trial was once commenced, no one was more active in its prosecution. The stories told at the trial of the regicides are hardly trustworthy, but Algernon Sidney states in one of his letters that, having himself urged that neither the high court of justice nor any other court would try the king, he was answered by Cromwell, ‘I tell you we will cut off his head with the crown upon it’ (, Sidney Papers, p. 237). Burnet describes Cromwell as arguing with the Scotch commissioners on the justice of the king’s trial, showing from Mariana and Buchanan that kings ought to be punished for breach of their trusts, proving that it was in accordance with the spirit of the covenant, and getting the better of them with their own weapons and upon their own principles (, Own Time, i. 72, ed. 1823). On one occasion only does Cromwell himself afterwards refer to the king’s execution, and he then speaks of it in a strain of stern satisfaction. ‘The civil authority, or that part of it which remained faithful to their trust and true to the ends of the covenant, did, in answer to their consciences, turn out a tyrant, in a way which the christians in aftertimes will mention with honour, and all tyrants in the world look at with fear’ (, Letter cxlviii.) Yet, though untroubled by scruples himself, Cromwell was willing to make allowances for those of others, and anxious to rally the doubters to the support of the new government. As temporary president of the council of state he appears to have originated the modification of the ‘engagement’ by which those who refused to approve of the king’s sentence were enabled to sit side by side with those who had taken part in it (Parliamentary History, xix. 38). It was more difficult to secure the support of the extreme section of his own followers. For Lilburn and a great party in the army the scheme of constitutional reform set forth in the agreement of the people was not sufficiently democratic, nor were they content to await its gradual realisation. They published a programme of their own under the same name, demanded the immediate execution of its provisions, and prepared to impose it by arms. They printed a series of virulent attacks on Crom-