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Books: Lectures and Essays

G >> Goldwin Smith >> Lectures and Essays







FALKLAND AND THE PURITANS

[Footnote: Published in the _Contemporary Review_ as a reply to Mr.
Matthew Arnold's Essay on Falkland.]


We have the most unfeigned respect for the memory of Falkland. Carlyle's
sneer at him has always seemed to us about the most painful thing in the
writings of Carlyle. Our knowledge of his public life is meagre, and is
derived mainly from a writer under whose personal influence he acted,
who is specially responsible for the most questionable step that he
took, and on whose veracity, with regard to this portion of the history
not much reliance can be placed. But we cannot doubt his title to our
admiration and our love. Of his character as a friend, as a host, and as
the centre of a literary circle, we have a picture almost peerless in
social history. He seems to have presented in a very attractive form the
combination--rare now, though not rare in that age, especially among the
great Puritan chiefs--of practical activity and military valour with
high culture and a serious interest in great questions. Of his fine
feelings as a man of honour we have more than one proof. We have proof
equally strong of his self-sacrificing devotion to his country; though
in this he stood not alone: with his blood on the field of Newbury
mingled that of many an English yeoman, whose cheeks were as wet when he
left his Puritan home to die for the religion and liberties of England
as were those of Lord Falkland when he left the "lime-trees and violets"
of Great Tew.

Of political moderation, if it means merely steering a middle course
between two extremes, the praise is cheap, and would be shared by
Falkland with many weak and with many dishonest men. It may, without
disparagement, be remarked of him that his rank as a nobleman was almost
sufficient in itself, without any special soundness of understanding or
calmness of temperament, to prevent him from throwing himself headlong
either into an absolutist reaction which was identified with the
ascendency of upstart favourites, and contemners of the old nobility, or
into a popular revolution which soon disclosed its tendency to come into
collision with the privileged order, and which ended its parricidal
career by leaving England, during some of the most glorious years of her
history, destitute of a House of Lords. But as an adherent, and no doubt
a deliberate adherent, of Constitutional Monarchy, Falkland was in that
which in the upshot proved to be the right line of English progress,
though by no means the right line of progress for the whole world. The
Commonwealth is the ideal of America, where it is practicable, and it
alone. Constitutional Monarchy, as Falkland rightly judged, was the
highest attainable ideal for England, at any rate in that day. Of
attaining that ideal, of doing anything considerable towards its
attainment, or towards its defence against the powers of absolutist
reaction whose triumph would have rendered its attainment for ever
impossible, he was no more capable than he was of performing the labours
of Hercules.

In this he bears some resemblance to a man of incomparably greater
intellect than his. The fame of Bacon as a philosopher has eclipsed his
importance as a politician. But his ideal of an enlightened monarchy,
invested with plenary power, but always using its power in conformity
with law, and having a Verulam at its right hand, not only is grand and
worthy of the majestic intelligence from which it sprang, but is
entitled to a good deal of sympathy, when we consider how wanting in
enlightenment, how rough, how uncertain, how provoking to a trained and
instructed statesman the action of parliaments composed of country
gentlemen and meeting at long intervals, in an age when there were no
political newspapers or other general organs of political information,
could not fail sometimes to be. But Bacon, hampered by enfeebling
selfishness, as Falkland was by more generous defects, was incapable of
taking a single step toward the realization of his august vision, and
the result was, a miserable fall from the ethereal height to the feet of
a Somerset and a Buckingham.

As a theologian, Falkland appears to have been a Chillingworth on a very
small scale. It does not seem to us that Principal Tulloch, in his
interesting chapter on him, succeeds in putting him higher. But he
shared, with Chillingworth and Hales, the spirit of liberality and
toleration, for which both were nobly conspicuous, though Hales did not
show himself a very uncompromising champion of his principles when he
accepted preferment from the hands of their arch-enemy, Laud. The
learned men and religious philosophers whom Falkland gathered round him
at Tew, were among the best and foremost thinkers of their age: the
beauty of the group is marred, perhaps, only by the sinister intrusion
of Sheldon.

Mr. Matthew Arnold, in the very graceful sketch of Falkland's life
published by him in aid of the Falkland Memorial, has endowed his
favourite character with gifts far rarer and more memorable than those
of which we have spoken; with an extraordinary largeness and lucidity of
mind, with almost divine superiority to party narrowness and bias, with
conceptions anticipative of the most advanced philosophy of modern
times. He quotes the Dean of Westminster as affirming that "Falkland is
the founder, or nearly the founder, of the best and most enlightening
tendencies of the Church of England"--a statement which breeds
reflection as to the character of the Church of England during the
previous century, in the course of which its creed and liturgy were
formed. The evidence of these transactions lies wide; much of it is
still in the British Museum; and it may be possible to produce something
sufficient to sustain Falkland on the pinnacle on which Mr. Arnold and
the Dean of Westminster have placed him. But we cannot help surmising
that he has in some measure undergone the process which, in an age
prolific in historic fancies as well as pre-eminent in historic
research, has been undergone by almost every character in history--that
of being transmuted by a loving biographer, and converted into a sort of
ventriloquial apparatus through which the biographer preaches to the
present from the pulpit of the past. The philosophy ascribed to Falkland
is, we suspect, partly that of a teacher who was then in the womb of
time. We should not be extreme to mark this, if the praise of Falkland
had not been turned to the dispraise and even to the vilification of men
who are at least as much entitled to reverent treatment at the hands of
Englishmen as he is, and at the same time of a large body of English
citizens at the present day, who are the objects, we venture to think,
of a somewhat fanciful and somewhat unmeasured antipathy. Those who
subscribe to the Falkland Testimonial are collectively set down by Mr.
Arnold as the "amiable"--those who do not subscribe as the "unamiable."
Few, we trust, would be so careful of their money and so careless of
their reputation for moral beauty as to refuse to pay a guinea for a
certificate of amiability countersigned by Mr. Matthew Arnold. Yet even
the amiable might hesitate to take part in erecting a monument to the
honour of Falkland, if it was at the same time to be a monument to the
dishonour, of Luther, Gustavus, Walsingham, Sir John Eliot, Pym,
Hampden, Cromwell, Vane, and Milton. As to the Nonconformists, their
contributions are probably not desired: otherwise, accustomed to not
very courteous treatment though they are, it would still be imprudent to
warn them that their own "hideousness" was to be carved in the same
marble with the beauty of Lord Falkland.

On Luther, Hampden, and Cromwell, Mr. Arnold expressly bestows the name
of "Philistine," and if he bestows it on these he can hardly abstain
from bestowing it on the rest of those we have named. Milton, at all
events, has identified himself with Cromwell as thoroughly as one man
ever identified himself with another, and whatever aspersion is cast on
"Worcester's laureate wreath" must fall equally on the intermingling
bays. We may say this without pretending to know what the exact meaning
of "Philistine" now is. Originally, no doubt, it pointed to some
specific defect on the part of those with regard to whom it was used,
and possibly also on the part of those who used it. But with the fate
which usually attends the cant phrase of a clique, it seems to be
degenerating, by lavish application, into something which irritates
without conveying any definite instruction. As Luther did not live under
the same conditions as Heinrich Heine, perfect ethical identity was
hardly to be expected. "Simpleton" and "savage" have the advantage of
being intelligible to all, and when introduced into discussion with
grace, perhaps they may be urbane.

It is useless to attempt, without authentic materials, to fill in the
faint outline of an historic figure. But judging from such indications
as we have, we should be inclined to say that Falkland, instead of being
a man of extraordinarily serene and well-balanced mind, was rather
excitable and impulsive. His tones and gestures are vehement; where
another man would be content to protest against what he thought an
undeserved act of homage by simply keeping his hat on, Falkland rams his
down upon his head with both his hands. He goes most ardently with the
popular party through the early stages of the revolution; then he
somewhat abruptly breaks away from it, disgusted with its defects,
though they certainly did not exceed those of other parties under the
same circumstances, and feeling in himself no power to control it and
keep it in the right path. He is under the influence of others, first of
Hampden and then of Hyde, to an extent hardly compatible with the
possession of a mind of first-rate power. When he is taxed with
inconsistency for going round upon the Bill for removing the Bishops
from Parliament, his plea is that at the time when he voted for the Bill
"he had been persuaded by that worthy gentleman (Hampden) to believe
many things which he had since found to be untrue, and therefore he had
changed his opinion in many particulars as well to things as persons."
Hampden himself would hardly have been led by anybody's persuasions on
the great question of the day. Clarendon tells us that his friend, from
his experience of the Short Parliament, "contracted such a reverence for
Parliaments that he thought it really impossible they could ever produce
mischief or inconvenience to the kingdom." We always regard with some
suspicion Clarendon's artful touches, otherwise we should say that there
is a pretty brusque change from this unbounded reverence for the Short
Parliament to an appearance in arms against its successor, especially as
the leader and soul of both Parliaments was Pym.

In the prosecution of Strafford, Falkland showed such ardour that, as
Clarendon intimates, those who knew him not ascribed his behaviour to
personal resentment. His lips formulated the very doctrine so fatal to
the great accused, that a number of acts severally not amounting to high
treason might cumulatively support the charge. "How many haires'
breadths makes a tall man and how many makes a little man, noe man can
well say, yet we know a tall man when we see him from a low man; soe
'tis in this,--how many illegal acts make a treason is not certainly
well known, but we well know it when we see." Mr. Arnold says that
"alone amongst his party Falkland raised his voice against pressing
forward Strafford's impeachment with unfair or vindictive haste." That
is to say, when Pym proposed to the House, sitting with closed doors, at
once to carry up the impeachment to the Lords and demand the arrest of
Strafford without delay, Falkland, moved by his great, and, in all
ordinary cases, laudable respect for regularity of proceeding, proposed
first to have the charges formally drawn up by a committee. Falkland's
proposal was almost fatuous; it proves that the grand difference between
him and Pym was that Pym was a great man of action and that he was not.
It would have been about as rational to suggest that the lighted match
should not be taken out of the hand of Guy Fawkes till a committee had
formally reported on the probable effects of gunpowder if ignited in
large quantities beneath the chamber in which the Parliament was
sitting. Strafford would not have respected forms in the midst of what
he must have well known was a revolution. He would probably have struck
at the Commons if they had not struck at him; certainly he would have
placed himself beyond their reach; and the promptness of Pym's decision
saved the party and the country. No practical injustice was done by
wresting the sword out of Strafford's hand and putting him in safe
keeping till the charges could be drawn up in form, as they immediately
were. Falkland himself in proposing a committee avowed his conviction
that the grounds for the impeachment were perfectly sufficient. His name
does not appear among the Straffordians; and had he opposed the Bill of
Attainder it seems morally certain that Clarendon would have told us so.
The strength of this presumption is not impaired by any vague words of
Baxter coupling the name of Falkland with that of Digby as a seceder
from the party on the occasion of the Bill. Had Falkland voted with
Digby, his name would have appeared in the same list. That he felt
qualms and wavered at the last is very likely; but it is almost certain
that he voted for the Bill. There is some reason for believing that he
took the sterner, though probably more constitutional, line, on the
question of allowing the accused to be heard by counsel. But the
evidence is meagre and doubtful; and the difficulty of reading it aright
has been increased by the discovery that Pym and Hampden themselves were
against proceeding by Bill, and in favour of demanding judgment on the
impeachment. It seems certain, however, that Falkland pleaded against
extending the consequences of the Act of Attainder to Strafford's
children, and in this he showed himself a true gentleman.

Again, in the case of Laud, Mr. Arnold wishes to draw a strong line
between the conduct of his favourite and that of the savage "Puritans."
He says that Falkland "refused to concur in Laud's impeachment." If he
did, we must say he acted very inconsistently, for in his speech in
favour of the Bishops' Bill he violently denounced Laud as a
participator in Strafford's treason:--

"We shall find both of them to have kindled and blown the common fire of
both nations, to have both sent and maintained that book (of Canons) of
which the author, no doubt, hath long since wished with Nero, _Utinam
nescissem literas!_ and of which more than one kingdom hath cause to
wish that when he wrote that he had rather burned a library, though of
the value of Ptolemy's. We shall find them to have been the first and
principal cause of the breach, I will not say of, but since, the
pacification of Berwick. We shall find them to have been the almost sole
abettors of my Lord Strafford, whilst he was practising upon another
kingdom that manner of government which he intended to settle in this;
where he committed so many mighty and so manifest enormities and
oppressions as the like have not been committed by any governor in any
government since Verras left Sicily; and after they had called him over
from being Deputy of Ireland to be in a manner Deputy of England (all
things here being goverend by a junctillo and the junctillo goverend by
him) to have assisted him in the giving such counsels and the pursuing
such courses, as it is a hard and measuring cost whether they were more
unwise, more unjust, or more unfortunate, and which had infallibly been
our destruction if by the grace of God their share had not been a small
in the subtilty of serpents as in the innocency of doves."

We are not aware, however, of the existence of any positive proof that
Falkland did "refuse to concur" in the impeachment of Laud. There is
nothing, we believe, but the general statement of Clarendon that his
friend regarded with horror the storm gathering against the archbishop,
which the words of Falkland himself, just quoted, seem sufficient to
disprove. Mr. Arnold tells us that "Falkland disliked Laud; he had a
natural antipathy to his heat, fussiness, and arbitrary temper." He had
an antipathy to a good deal more in Laud than this, and expressed his
dislike in language which showed that he was himself not deficient in
heat when his religious feelings were aroused. He accused Laud and the
ecclesiastics of his party of having "destroyed unity under pretence of
uniformity;" of having "brought in Superstition and Scandal under the
titles of Reverence and Decency;" of having "defiled the Church by
adorning the churches," of having "destroyed as much of the Gospel as
they could without themselves being destroyed by the law." He compared
them to the hen in AEsop, fed too fat to lay eggs, and to dogs in the
manger, who would neither preach nor let others preach. He charged them
with checking instruction in order to introduce that religion which
accounts ignorance the mother of devotion. He endorsed the common belief
that one of them was a Papist at heart, and that only regard for his
salary prevented him from going over to Rome. All this uttered to a
Parliament in such a mood would hardly be in favour of gentle dealing
with the archbishop. But Pym and Hampden, as Clarendon himself admits,
never intended to proceed to extremities against the old man; they were
satisfied with having put him in safe keeping and removed him from the
councils of the King. When they were gone, the Presbyterians, to whom
the leadership of the Revolution then passed, took up the impeachment
and brought Laud to the block.

The parts were distributed among the leaders. To Falkland was entrusted
the prosecution of the Lord Keeper Finch; and this part he performed in
a style which thoroughly identifies him with the other leaders, and with
the general spirit of the movement at this stage of the Revolution. No
man, so far as we can see, did more to set the stone rolling; it was not
likely that, with his slender force, he would be able to stop it at once
in mid career.

In contrasting Falkland's line of conduct with that of the "Puritans,"
on the question of the Bishops' Bill and of the impeachment of Laud, Mr.
Arnold indicates his impression that all Puritans were on principle
enemies, and as a matter of course fanatical enemies, of Episcopacy. But
he will find that at this time many Puritans were Low Church
Episcopalians, wishing only to moderate the pretensions and curb the
authority of the Bishops. Episcopacy is not one of the grievances
protested against in the Millenary Petition Sir John Eliot appears to
have been as strong an Erastian as Mr. Arnold could desire.

It seems to us hardly possible to draw a sharp line of distinction in
any respect, except that of practical ability, between Falkland and
Hampden. Falkland failed to understand, while Hampden understood, the
character of the King and the full peril of the situation; that was the
real difference between the two men. The political and ecclesiastical
ideal of both in all probability was pretty much the same. Mr. Arnold
chooses to describe Hampden as "seeking the Lord about militia or ship-
money," and he undertakes to represent Jesus as "whispering to him with
benign disdain." Sceptics, to disprove the objective reality of the
Deity, allege that every man makes God in his own image. They might
perhaps find an indirect confirmation of their remark in the numerous
lives and portraitures of Christ which have appeared of late years, each
entirely different from the rest, and each stamped clearly enough with
the impress of an individual mind. But where has Hampden spoken of
himself as "seeking the Lord about militia or ship-money?" He appears to
have been a highly-educated man of the world. In one of his few
remaining letters there are recommendations to a friend, who had
consulted him about the education of his sons, which seem to blend
regard for religion with enlightened liberality of view. If he prayed
for support and guidance in his undertakings, surely he did no more than
Mr. Arnold himself practically recommends people to do when he urges
them to join the Established Church of England. Even should Mr. Arnold
light on an authentic instance of Scripture phraseology used by Hampden,
or any other Puritan chief, in a way which would now be against good
taste, his critical and historical sense will readily make allowance for
the difference between the present time and the time when the Bible was
a newly-recovered book, and when its language, on the believer's lips
and to the believer's ears, was still fresh as the dew of the morning.

It would be even more difficult to separate Falkland's general character
from that of Pym, of whose existence Mr. Arnold has shown himself
conscious by once mentioning his name. The political philosophy of Pym's
speeches is most distinctly constitutional, and we do not see that in
point of breadth or dignity they leave much to be desired, while they
unquestionably express, in the fullest manner, the mind of a leader of
the Puritan party.

Whoever contrasts Falkland with the Puritans will have to encounter the
somewhat untoward fact that in his speech against the High Church
Bishops, Falkland, if he does not actually call himself a Puritan, twice
identifies the Puritan cause with his own. Among the bad objects which
he accuses the clergy of advocating in their sermons is "the demolishing
of Puritanism and propriety" Again he cries--

"Alas! they whose ancestors in the darkest times excommunicated the
breakers of Magna Charta do now by themselves, and their adherents, both
write, preach, plot, and act against it, by encouraging Dr. Beale, by
preferring Dr. Mainwaring, appearing forward for monopolies and ship-
money, and if any were slow and backward to comply, blasting both them
and their preferment with the utmost expression of their hatred--the
title of Puritans."

These words may help to make Mr. Arnold aware, when he mows down the
Puritan party with some trenchant epithet, how wide the sweep of his
scythe is, and the same thing will be still more distinctively brought
before him by a perusal (if he has not already perused it) of the
chapter on the subject in Mr. Sandford's "Studies and Illustrations of
the Great Rebellion." It can hardly be necessary to remind him, or any
one else, of the portrait of one who was a most undoubted Puritan, drawn
by Lucy Hutchinson. If this portrait betrays the hand of a wife,
Clarendon's portrait of Falkland betrays the hand of a friend, and even
a beloved husband is not more likely to be the object of exaggerated,
though sincere praise, than the social head and the habitual host of a
circle of literary men. At all events Lucy Hutchinson is painting what
she thought a perfect Puritan would be; and her picture presents to us,
not a coarse, crop-eared, and snuffling fanatic, but a highly
accomplished, refined, gallant, and most "amiable," though religious and
seriously-minded gentleman. The Spencerian school of sentiment seems to
Mr. Arnold very lovely compared with the men of the New Model Army and
their ways. In the general of the New Model Army, Sir Thomas Fairfax, he
has a distinct, and we venture to say very worthy, pupil of that school.

Over the most questionable as well as the most momentous passage in
Falkland's public life, his admirer passes with a graceful literary
movement. Falkland was sworn in as a Privy Councillor three days before,
and as Secretary of State, four days after, the attempt of the King to
seize the Five Members. He was thus, in outward appearance at least,
brought into calamitous connection with an act which, as Clarendon sees,
was the signal for civil war. Clarendon vehemently disclaims for himself
and his two friends any knowledge of the King's design. So far as the
more violent part of the proceeding is concerned, we can easily believe
him; a woman mad with vindictive arrogance inspired it, and nobody
except a madman would have been privy to it; but it is not so easy to
believe him with regard to the impeachment, which was in fact an attempt
to take the lives of the King's enemies by arraigning them before a
political tribunal, hostile to them and favourable to their accuser,
instead of bringing them to a fair and legal trial before a jury. By
accepting the Secretaryship, Falkland at all events assumed a certain
measure of responsibility after the fact for a proceeding which, we
repeat, rendered civil war inevitable, because it must have convinced
the popular leaders that to put faith in Charles with such councillors
as he had about him would be insanity; and that if they allowed
Parliament to rise and the Kong to resume the power of the sword, not
only would all their work of reform be undone, but the fate of Sir John
Eliot would be theirs. Clarendon owns that Hampden's carriage from that
day was changed, implying that up to that day it had been temperate; and
the insinuation that, beneath the cloak of apparent moderation, Hampden
had been secretly breathing counsels of violence into the minds of
others deserves no attention, when it comes from a hostile source. Of
the purity of Falkland's motives we entertain not the shadow of a doubt;
but we venture to think that it is very questionable whether he did
right, and this not only on grounds of technical constitutionalism,
which in the present day would render imperative the retirement of a
Minister whose advice had been so flagrantly disregarded, but on grounds
of the most broadly practical kind. He forfeited for ever, not only any
influence which he might have retained over the popular leaders, and any
access which he might have had to them in their more pacific mood, but
probably all real control over the King. Charles was the very last man
whom you could afford to allow in the slightest degree to tamper with
your honour. It is surely conceivable that the recollection of an
unfortunate step, and the sense of a false position, may have mingled
with the sorrow caused by the public calamities in the melancholy which
drove Falkland to cast away his life.