Oliver Cromwell
As the first of the great modern dictators, Oliver Cromwell interests us more to-day than perhaps any other historical figure. He tried what is being tried in many countries at the present, and, although he was a man of exceptional abilities, he failed. Nor were the conditions absolutely different. The story of his rise to power and his conduct of the Protectorate is filled with suggestive parallels and implications. Like other dictators since, he gained controlling power in troubled times by forging that irresistible weapon, disciplined fanaticism. Intensely earnest, but confused in his thinking, he found himself, under the pressure of circumstances, compelled to abrogate the very liberties which he had set out to defend, and, having substituted his will for the law, he left in chaos the country which he wished to save.
Among contemporary writers it would be difficult to find anyone more competent to write a biography of Cromwell than John Buchan (Houghton Mifflin, $4.50): his career as an historian, Member of Parliament. and student of military affairs has particularly trained him to understand the complex and intricate issues involved in the English civil war, and his skill as a writer enables him to present, them to us lucidly.
His book, however, is far more than a history; it is chiefly a biography, in which he has striven, as he says, quoting Edmund Gosse, to give ‘a faithful portrait of a soul in its adventures through life.’ Nor does one feel that the admiration for the Protector which is so obvious in the portrait detracts from its faithfulness, for there was much in Cromwell that was admirable, such as his humility, his freedom from personal ambition, his courage, whether manifested in the field or the government, his ability to act in an emergency, — against the Scots or the Rump,—his practical common sense, his intelligent opportunism, and above all his earnest desire to bring about a government by the best. All of these qualities are feelingly displayed and convincingly illustrated, but the book is a portrait and not a panegyric; Mr. Buchan remembers Cromwell’s injunction to Lely to paint his moles and warts and shows us his fanaticism, muddled thinking, slow-wittedness, indecision, melancholia, cruelty, ill temper, rustic cunning, and ill-timed buffoonery.
Although he sees Oliver as ‘primarily a statesman to whom war was an incident in policy,’the author is compelled to devote the major portion of the book to a consideration of battles and campaigns, for this particular ‘incident’ occupied the greater part of his public life. Mr. Buchan’s descriptions of the placement of the various troops, the contours and problems of the ground and the part played by chance and personal valor, are so engrossing that the reader, soaked in current pacifism, finds to his amazement that his pulses quicken as the Ironsides thunder up in the nick of time.
It is a good book, a solid, substantial book in which the author gives his sources and does not intrude his own suppositions as matters of fact. It is a long book, too, and what’s more one which, once taken up by the fire on a winter’s night, you will be glad is a long book.
Hilaire Belloc (Cromwell, Lippincott, $4.00) sees in Cromwell the statesman, the strategist, the man of iron will, merely the misinterpretations of a skillful cavalry commander upon whom greatness was forced.
Although he praises the purity of Oliver’s private life and motives, Mr. Belloc is frankly partisan in his political judgments. His ridicule of the Puritans is incessant and witty, but hardly discreet, for it serves repeatedly to remind us that one so little able to understand the Puritan spirit is hardly fitted to produce an understanding study of one of its greatest exponents.
In insisting that the student of English history must always bear in mind the existence of a widespread latent Catholic sympathy in England during the first half of the seventeenth century, Mr. Belloc is justly stressing what has not perhaps hitherto received sufficient consideration. But to add, as he does, that Oliver had no guide in his foreign policy except his ‘violent religious motive,’ and that Drogheda constitutes his most permanent claim to fame, is to overshoot the mark. Surely the fact that the victims of Drogheda were human beings gives them as much claim upon our sympathies as that they were Catholics, and if our humanity is shocked by the account of their sufferings it is also shocked by the ill-timed jocosity with which the author paraphrases Milton’s sonnet on the massacre of Protestants in Piedmont.
Mr. Belloc attaches such importance to Cromwell’s connivance at Charles’s flight to the Isle of Wight that the reader may wish that his ultimate proof (heralded through a score of anticipatory pages) rested upon something more substantial than that Whalley ‘cannot but have known’ of Ashburnham’s preparations to aid the king. One who would challenge conclusions as carefully weighed as Sir Charles Firth’s must support his allegations with something more solid than an ’as we shall see hereafter.’ Especially when we do not always see thereafter.
As a study in character the work fails to be convincing, though it is an interesting exposition of Mr. Belloc’s conviction that it is ’only custom, the effect of time, and that sanctity wherewith time clothes institutions, which make rational and orderly government possible.
BERGEN EVANS