Principles of western civilisation

318 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

One of the most remarkable of recent contributions to our knowledge of the Cromwellian period in England has been made by Professor Gardiner, in bringing to light the single clue which, going deeper than any of the merely political interpretations of that period, underlies all the apparently conflicting policies and experiments in government undertaken by Cromwell. “ After the violent dissolution of the Long Parliament,” says Professor Gardiner, “ Cromwell in turn supported systems as opposed to one another as those of the Nominated Parliament, the Instrument of Government, arbitrary rule with the help of the majorgenerals, the new Parliamentary Constitution of the Humble Petition and Advice; and to all appearance would have rallied to yet another plan if his career had not been cut short by death.” Yet in all these acts one consistent aim and determination is traced by Professor Gardiner. To use his actual words: “In England the whole struggle against regal power had been carried on by a minority.” But in this struggle what appeared to Cromwell as the one thing necessary above all others, was that “the whole burden of government in the interest of the nation must be entrusted to a minority composed of the godly or honest people of the nation, in the hope that the broad views and beneficent actions of this minority would in time convert it into a majority. So far as I know, Cromwell never swerved from this view of the national requirements. To the end of his life he strove to maintain the ascendency of a Puritan oligarchy.”

1 «*Cromwell’s Constitutional Aims,” by S. R. Gardiner, Contemporary Review, No. 409.