Cromwell in Ireland
profuseness of prayer and preaching such as no age or nation had ever known.
In all this gigantic record of deception one question occurs to us: Did he deceive even himself? That question is unanswerable. It is possible that, having deceived everybody—enemies, friends, co-religionists, comrades—he had come at last to deceive himself: for let us remember that the world holds no such futility in its history as the English Civil War.
The Parliament fought the King, or the King fought the Parliament, for seven years, with the result that the King lost his head, and the Parliament lost every shred of privilege and liberty it had ever possessed. It, too, lost its life.
For another five or six years Cromwell ruled the land with heavy sword and booted foot. He flung to the winds every rule of justice, prescriptive right, every guarantee of freedom that had ever belonged to the Lords, Commons, and people of England. He shut up the Commons; he taxed without representation; he tried without jury; he ruled by martial law; he packed the Courts; he arrested counsel; he filled the prisons on false pretexts; he created conspiracies against himself, and hanged and disembowelled the dupes his agents had trepanned and entangled. What a ghastly list of victims is
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