For over a century and a half after his death the memory of the greatest Englishman of the seventeenth century was looked upon with horror by the leaders of English thought, political and literary; the very men who were carrying to fruition Cromwell’s tremendous policies being often utterly ignorant that they were following in his footsteps. At last the scales began to drop from the most far-seeing eyes. Macaulay, with his eminently sane and wholesome spirit, held Cromwell and the social forces

King Charles’s theory was that Parliament had met to grant him the money he needed. The Parliament’s conviction was that it had come together to hold the King and his servants to accountability for what they had done, and to provide safeguards against a repetition of the tyranny of the last eleven years. Parliament held the whip hand, for the King dared not dissolve it until the Scots were paid, lest their army should march at once upon London. The King had many courtiers who hated popular gover

When the stout old Royalist, Sir Jacob Astley, was overcome and surrendered, he exclaimed, as he gave up his sword: “Now you have done your work and may go play, unless you fall out among yourselves!” It very soon became evident that the victors would fall out among themselves. Any revolutionary movement must be carried through by parties whose aims are so different, or whose feelings and interests are so divergent, that there is great difficulty in the victors coming to a working agreement to c

The successful Revolutionary party now enacted that the people of England and of all the dominions and territories thereunto belonging were constituted and established as a Commonwealth, or Free State, to be governed by the representatives of the people in Parliament and by whomsoever the Parliament should appoint as officers and ministers; the King and the House of Lords being both abolished. No provision was at first made by which any man should lawfully be recognized as chief in the new Commo

After the battle of Worcester, the authority of the Commonwealth was supreme throughout the British Islands. This authority as yet reposed, wholly in form, largely in substance, with the remnant of the Long Parliament. This remnant, derisively called the “rump,” differed as widely in power and capacity from the Parliament led by Pym and Hampden, as the Continental Congress that saw the outgoing of the Revolutionary War differed from that which saw its incoming. Defections and purgings, exclusion

When Cromwell, in January, 1655, dismissed the first Protectorate Parliament, he left himself nothing to do but to establish his own personal rule; in other words, he became a tyrant. Of course the word cannot be used in the sense we use it in describing Ivan the Terrible, or Agathokles. As each country must, sooner or later, obtain exactly that measure of political freedom to which it is entitled, so, when it falls under a tyranny, the tyranny must be strictly conditioned by the character of th