Prince Rupert's Mercy

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

THE friendly precincts of the Club afford no fitting field for the splintering of lances. Yet I am tempted to run a course against no less a champion than Goldwin Smith, who in his thoughtful and scholarly essay on The Great Puritan has cast a slur on the honor of Cromwell’s chief antagonist, Prince Rupert. The accusation of barbarity against the valiant Royalist leader is one which has been heedlessly repeated by numberless historians, ever since it was first made in those Puritan pamphlets whose writers had seen the soldiers and standards of the “ Cause ” go down before Rupert’s invincible charge. In them the injustice was perhaps pardonable. Bred in a land which had grown unused to the harsh exactions and extremities of war, they saw ruthless cruelty in the inevitable demands of the soldiery, and felt the hardships of the time as so many deliberate inflictions. Rupert, their arch terror, Rupert, the king’s sword hand; he who had taught to English armies the secret of the charge with bare steel and who “put that spirit into the king’s army that all men seemed resolved,”—Rupert was naturally held accountable for every burned cottage, every wasted field, and for all those other more dreadful outrages which existed but in the frenzied imaginations of their narrators. Against the young foreign prince who had started up beside the Standard of King Charles like war incarnate were turned those pens which had been sharpened to vituperation in the Christian occupation of religious controversy. So much for those news-writers who sent out their fierce arraignments and warnings, while London citizens piled their earthworks in hourly expectation of Rupert’s onset, and Milton affixed to his house door his proud appeal against the despoilment he dreaded.

Surely it should be the privilege of later writers, whose pulses are unstirred by panic or conflict, to disregard such clamorous and unproven accusations. In this age we may see something of Prince Rupert’s very self, where his contemporaries saw often only the flash of his scarlet cloak, the whirl of dust about his horse’s hoofs. It is with much surprise, therefore, and even more regret, that I find Goldwin Smith, whose wide thought and lucid style have won him a place of such authority, echoing the cry of those far-away pamphleteers. Doubtless in his preoccupation with the character of Cromwell, the author allowed himself a certain carelessness in his passing allusion to Cromwell’s antagonist. Since the Protector, however, has the great voice of success to trumpet his virtues, and since the leader of the popular and progressive cause never lacks champions to acclaim him, it may not be amiss that here and there a voice should, with Whitman’s, give

or should at the least accord them justice.

Goldwin Smith points out, very reasonably, that the conditions of Ireland after the Rebellion there justified measures of great severity. He evidently regrets the stain cast on his hero’s memory by the massacre of Drogheda, and in regard to Cromwell’s share in it indulges in what, in an historian of less authority, might be criticised as special pleading: “Cromwell did not thank God for the massacre, as some who rave against him would have us think; he thanked God for the victory, and excused the slaughter on the ground of just retribution and necessary example.” The distinction is a subtle one, but may pass. What cannot pass is the following statement: “Cromwell’s proclamation on landing in Ireland, assuring all non-combatants of impunity and protection, was the first note of humanity heard in all those years. Its promise was strictly kept and sternly enforced against any attempt at outrage; whereas Rupert’s Cavaliers marauded at their will and sacked a captured city.”

Neither as history or logic is that passage quite worthy of its writer. It may be conceded that Cromwell was in the main a merciful man, though it needs a very stanch admirer to call on his Irish campaign as witness to the fact. The promise of impunity was scarcely kept to the priests at Drogheda or the Irish women at Wexford.

Putting aside that question, how can the proclamation which ushered in a campaign of uncommon harshness be regarded as the first note of humanity? From the beginning to the end of his English warfare, Rupert’s generosity to his foes is apparent, not in words only, as in Cromwell’s proclamation, but in deeds. In the fight of Powick Bridge, the first crossing of swords, in which Rupert’s charge scattered a force far superior in arms and numbers, the fiery young leader paused in the flush of his triumphs, to see that tendance was given to the Parliamentarian Colonel Sandys, who lay dying on the field. His chivalrous forbearance toward Mistress Purefoy and her little garrison, who had broken all the rules of war by defending an untenable position and causing needless bloodshed; the courtesy with which he left the brave Castellane unmolested in the house he had captured, are among the most gracious episodes of the time. The only occasion on which Rupert, always “a prince religious of his word,” failed to carry out a promise, was at the siege of Lichfield. The Parliamentarian soldiery had taken up a position in the close of the Cathedral, subjecting the noble building to much fanatical ill treatment; their commander had defied Prince Rupert in person, in terms unbefitting the courtesies of war; the garrison refused repeated summons, and ended by hanging one of the prince’s men on the battlements. In his fierce anger Rupert vowed that not a life should be spared among the defenders; but when after a terrible conflict a breach had been made and entered, and the town was at his mercy, he respected the valor of his foes, admitted them to quarter, and suffered them to march out with the honors of war. It is the only time on record when Prince Rupert failed to make good his word. As concerns plunder, it is certain that the Puritans were held in hand better than the Royalists. “The power of discipline,” it has been cynically said, “lies in the paymaster’s chest.” The Parliament held the wealth of London and the king’s confiscated revenues. Prince Rupert had an army to support with few resources; he plundered accordingly, kept his men fed and armed, and himself went penniless from England. Yet his depredations have been exaggerated; he saved Bristol from being fired during the Royalist attack on the city, and rode sword in hand on his own men to prevent outrage after its capture. And his life affords few instances of sack so thorough and cold-blooded as that of Basing House, — “ Loyalty House,” over which Cromwell presided, Bible in hand.

The only occasion on which Prince Rupert practiced deliberate severity toward the defenseless was after Parliament had passed an ordinance condemning to death all Irish soldiers in arms for the king, Essex began hanging his prisoners, accordingly, and Rupert retaliated by hanging thirteen Parliamentarians. The action put a stop to massacring, and his letter to Essex — unfortunately too long for quotation — sounds the note of humanity long before Cromwell’s equivocal Irish mercy. After demanding that “quarter and equall exchange” which he had always allowed to his prisoners, and threatening to exact life for life, the prince concludes: “And I do not in the least doubt but the bloud of those miserable men who shall so suffer by my Order, as well as those who shal be butchered by that Ordinance your Lordship mentions, shall be required at their hands who by their cruell examples impose a necessitie upon other men to observe the rules they lay down. And I cannot but expresse a great sense to your Lordship that by these prodigious resolutions expressed in your Lordship’s letter, the warre is like to be so managed that the English nation is in danger of destroying one another, or (which is a kind of extirpation) of degenerating into such an animositie and cruelty that all Elements of charity, compassion and brotherly love shall be extinguished!”

Cromwell is praised, and rightfully praised, for having in the main exercised humanity in war, yet Cromwell was a man matured in peaceful days, unaccustomed to the horrors of strife, fighting against his own countrymen, his kindred and former friends. Prince Rupert, on the other hand, was a soldier from his fourteenth year, and grew to manhood in the Germany of the Thirty Years’ War, where slaughter and pillage seared the senses into familiarity with horror. Even Professor Gardiner, a somewhat hostile critic, admits that the prince learned little of evil in that evil school. If we are all willing to respect the peacefully bred Englishman for forbearing harshness to neighbors and fellow countrymen, I for one am not less disposed to do honor to the foreign-bred soldier, confronting unknown opponents, in the first ardor of a fiery youth, who could yet justly claim, in the words of his “Declaration,” that he had throughout his warfare been guilty of no act of needless harshness or of license, no act “which might not become one of my quality and the son of a king.”