第54章

An English historian has said that the most influential, the most unescapable years in English history are those of the Protectorate.That is a strong saying.They were brief years.There were many factors in them.Oliver Cromwell was only one, but he was chief of all.He was not chief in the councils which resulted in the beheading of Charles I.on that 30th of January, 1649, though he took part in them.Increasingly in the movementswhich led to that event and which followed it he was growing into prominence.After Marston Moor, Prince Rupert named him Ironsides, and his regiment of picked men, picked for their spirit, went always into battle singing psalms, "and were never beaten." As he rode out to the field at Naseby (1645) he knew he faced the flower of the loyalist army, while with him were only untrained men; yet he smiled, as he said afterward, in the "assurance that God would, by things that are not, bring to naught things that are." Then he adds, "God did it." Never did he raise his flag but in the interests of the liberty of the people, and back of every movement of his army there was his confidence in the Bible, which was his mainstay.They offered him the throne; he would not have it.He dissolved the Parliament which had dragged on until the patience of the people was exhausted.He called another to serve their need.The evening before it met he spent in meditation on the One hundred and third Psalm.The evening before the second Parliament of his Protectorate he brooded on the Eighty- fifth Psalm, and opened the Parliament next day with an exposition of it.The man was saturated with Scripture.Yes, the times were rude.It was an Old Testament age, and in right Old Testament spirit did Cromwell work.And it seemed that his work failed.There was no one to succeed him, and soon after his death came the Restoration and the return of Charles II., of which we have already spoken, in which occurred that hint of the real sentiment of the English people which a wise man had better have taken.Yet, recall what actually happened.Misunderstanding the spirit of the English people, which Cromwell had helped to form, but which in turn had made Cromwell possible, the servile courtiers of the false king unearthed the Protector's body, three years buried, hanged it on a gallows in Tyburn for a day, beheaded it, and threw the trunk into a pit.His head they mockingly set on a pinnacle of the Parliament Hall, whence for some weeks it looked over the city which he had served.Then, during a great storm, it came clattering down, only a poor dried skull, and disappeared no one knows where.But when you stand opposite the great Parliament buildings in London to-day, the most beautiful buildings for their purpose in the world, the buildings where the liberties of the English express themselves year after year, whose is the one statue that finds place withinthe inclosure, near the spot where that poor skull came rattling down? Not Charles II.--you shall look in vain for him.Not George Monk, who brought back the King--you shall not find him there.The one statue which England has cared to plant beside its Parliament buildings is that of Oliver Cromwell, its Lord Protector.There he stands, warning kings in the interests of liberty.John Morley makes no ideal of him.He thinks he rather closed the medieval period than opened the modern period; but he will not have Cromwell compared to Frederick the Great, who spoke with a sneer of mankind.Cromwell "belonged to the rarer and nobler type of governing men, who see the golden side, who count faith, piety, hope among the counsels of practical wisdom, and who for political power must ever seek a moral base." That is a rare and noble type of men, whether they govern or not.But no man of that type governs without red blood in his veins; and the iron that made this man's blood run red came from the English Bible.