England, Ireland, and Scotland. The Instrument or document which established the protectorate was read in Westminster hall with formal ceremonies, in presence of the council of officers, the lord-mayor and aldermen, the commissioners, and other officials.
By the Instrument of government Cromwell was to call parliaments every three years. He had also power to make war or peace; and he and his council could make laws which should be binding during the intervals of parliament. By these provisions the government resembled a monarchy. But no parliament could be dissolved until it had sat five months; and bills passed in parliament were to become law after a lapse of twenty days, even if not confirmed. By these provisions the government resembled a republic with a president. But inasmuch as Cromwell was commander-in-chief of the army, as well as first magistrate of the state, and the protectorship was elective—the real nature of the government was that of an elective autocracy with nominal limitations, which must infallibly be broken down and fall to the ground. Disputes could not fail to arise regarding the authority and jurisdiction of the various powers in the state, and hence another step was still necessary to place the Protector on the highest summit. This issue came in 1657. In April of that year a committee of parliament mooted the question of kingship and royal title. The republican officers, however, declared against the assumption, probably more from antipathy to the name than to the fact, which was already sufficiently established for all practical purposes. Cromwell declined the title on the pretext that "he could not with a good conscience accept the government under the title of king." Nevertheless his powers were enlarged by a new instrument called the Petition and Advice; an annual sum of £1,300,000 was allotted for the support of his government; he was empowered to create a second chamber or ostensible house of lords—which had only a brief existence, being dissolved by the Protector fourteen days after it met; and he was empowered to nominate his successor, the protectorship thereby ceasing to be elective, and his Highness becoming to all intents the autocrat of the realm, with powers which a good man might use well, but which in other hands would be nothing short of an atrocious tyranny, more dangerous to the state than the despotism of the Stuarts, and absolutely intolerable to the people of England. His government was not a monarchy in which the king reigns by law, with recognized rights and recognized limitations of prerogative, but a tyranny—a military tyranny converted into a constitutional autocracy by the powers that had been formally conferred or were immediately usurped, and which were used without reserve against the parliament and the courts of law.
The Protector, as a statesman, is one of the most remarkable studies ever submitted to the scrutiny of the politician or the student of history. He appeared to combine the elements of almost unlimited power with the elements of unlimited weakness. England under his own rule was unquestionably the strongest state in Europe, yet no sooner had he departed than it fell, as if by magic, into the utmost extremity of impotence. Its next monarch was a pensioner on the bounty of the magnificent Frenchman. In the field he was everywhere triumphant, yet no sooner was he gone, than the military operations of England became puerile and ludicrous. Oliver's flag, the red cross of St. George, swept from the ocean every hostile banner. France, Holland, and Spain, were humbled into maritime submission, and the Barbary corsairs were scourged into good behaviour—piracy was annihilated, and the naval supremacy of England was established as an unquestioned and indisputable fact. Yet Oliver gone—and the Dutch with impunity sail up the Thames and the Medway. He had the most moral court that had ever been known in the history of Europe, yet a few short years saw vice unblushingly enthroned, and the silken shoe of the courtezan treading the halls that had echoed to the jackboots of Oliver Cromwell and his pious Ironsides. In Oliver's time the judge sat in the magnificence of rectitude, and for the first time in the history of modern nations justice was administered in the fear of God. Yet Oliver gone, and Judge Jeffreys springs from the pandemonium of the corrupted English law. Everything seemed to decay and to ferment into corruption. As if the force of gravity had been removed from the terrestrial economy, no sooner was the iron-will of Oliver removed from the state of England, than chaos, confusion, and failure seemed to invade every department of the realm, and every operation of the body politic. Defeat, disgrace, and shame, took the places of victory, honour, and estimation, until the fury of England was once more roused, and the last Stuart, in ignominious flight, took refuge with the neighbour nation, whom Oliver would have bearded with the sword. The contrast between England in the time of the Protector, and England in the days of Charles and James, is one of the most remarkable that has been recorded on the page of history. Tragedy or comedy, it is the strangest drama that has been played in England since the Saxon dynasty died out at Hastings, and England became the heritage of the feudal and punctilious Norman.
Although the Protector failed to transmit a constitution to England, he taught the great lesson of his day—the greatest lesson that England or the world has ever learnt—that of religious toleration. This, in fact, was his grand achievement—the great and noble work, which will ever weave around the brow of Oliver a chaplet of unfading glory. Oliver Cromwell was the apostle of religious toleration.
The latter portion of the protectorate was a dreary experience of the pain and trouble which attend on those who govern factious men. It was another evidence that power is not happiness, and that the highest dignities of the world confer no lasting happiness, and can never satisfy the longings of an ardent spirit. Oliver did his duty after his own fashion, and according to his own understanding, forgetful that laws made by the common judgment of the nation are quite as essential as the individual inspirations of even the wisest rulers. If he did not die the death of a martyr, he in some sense lived the life of a martyr, and faced his difficulties with a heroic soul that would not acknowledge defeat.
The time came that Oliver must die, and this, perhaps, was the noblest scene of his eventful life. He had lived with England in his heart, and he died with England in his heart, praying, in the sublimity of death, that God would give his people consistency of judgment—one heart and mutual love—interceding, as it were, with him who had been his own protector for those who had not seen so clearly into the invisible world, and praying, as all good men should pray, that God would pardon those who desired to trample on his dust. So died the great Protector on the 3rd of September, 1658, the boldest and most successful man that England has ever seen—a man who stands alone in the history of his country—yet an enigma, a dark riddle, which all men guess at, yet none are agreed about the answer.
Cromwell was taken ill at Hampton court, on the 12th August, of a fever, partly brought on, perhaps, by his deep feeling of regret at the death of his favourite daughter, Mrs. Claypole. He removed to Whitehall, and there he died on the 3rd September, in the sixtieth year of his age, having held the title of Protector four years, eight months, and eighteen days. It was the anniversary of his two great victories at Dunbar and Worcester, and the same day happened the greatest storm of wind ever known in England. On the 23rd November the state funeral took place, with great pomp, in Henry VII.'s chapel, at Westminster abbey. The coffin containing the body had been privately deposited some time before in the abbey, and it was only the effigy that lay in state at Somerset-house, and to which the official and costly honours were paid.
In 1660 the Restoration took place, for which the English church to a recent period still gave thanks, as an "unspeakable mercy;" and on the 30th January, 1661, the bodies of Oliver Cromwell, Henry Ireton, and John Bradshaw, were drawn upon sledges to Tyburn. The account is thus given in the newspapers of the time—"When these three carcasses were at Tyburn, they were pulled out of their coffins, and hanged at the several angles of that triple tree, where they hung till the sun was set, after which they were taken down, their heads cut off, and their loathsome trunks thrown into a deep hole under the gallows. The heads of those three notorious regicides, Oliver Cromwell, John Bradshaw, and Henry Ireton, are set upon poles on the top of Westminister hall by the common hangman. Bradshaw is placed in the middle, Cromwell and his son-in-law, Ireton, on both sides of Bradshaw."
Cromwell left two sons and four daughters—Richard, who succeeded him; Henry, lord-lieutenant of Ireland; Bridget, married first to Ireton, afterwards to Fleetwood; Elizabeth, married to John Claypole, Esq., of Northamptonshire; Mary, married to Lord Fauconbridge; and Frances, married first to a grandson of Lord Hawick, and afterwards to Sir John Russell.
