History of Western Philosophy - Bertrand Russell [342]
The conflict between King and Parliament in the Civil War gave Englishmen, once for all, a love of compromise and moderation, and a fear of pushing any theory to its logical conclusion, which has dominated them down to the present time. The principles for which the Long Parliament contended had, at first, the support of a large majority. They wished to abolish the king's right to grant trade monopolies, and to make him acknowledge the exclusive right of Parliament to impose taxes. They desired liberty within the Church of England for opinions and practices which were persecuted by Archbishop Laud. They held that Parliament should meet at stated intervals, and should not be convoked only on rare occasions when the king found its collaboration indispensable. They objected to arbitrary arrest and to the subservience of the judges to the royal wishes. But many, while prepared to agitate for these ends, were not prepared to levy war against the king, which appeared to them an act of treason and impiety. As soon as actual war broke out, the division of forces became more nearly equal.
The political development from the outbreak of the Civil War to the establishment of Cromwell as Lord Protector followed the course which has now become familiar but was then unprecedented. The Parliamentary party consisted of two factions, the Presbyterians and the Independents; the Presbyterians desired to preserve a State Church, but to abolish bishops; the Independents agreed with them about bishops, but held that each congregation should be free to choose its own theology, without the interference of any central ecclesiastical government. The Presbyterians, in the main, were of a higher social class than the Independents, and their political opinions were more moderate. They wished to come to terms with the king as soon as defeat had made him conciliatory. Their policy, however, was rendered impossible by two circumstances: first, the king developed a martyr's stubbornness about bishops; second, the defeat of the king proved difficult, and was only achieved by Cromwell's New Model Army, which consisted of Independents. Consequently, when the king's military resistance was broken, he could still not be induced to make a treaty, and the Presbyterians had lost the preponderance of armed force in the Parliamentary armies. The defence of democracy had thrown power into the hands of a minority, and it used its power with a complete disregard for democracy and parliamentary government. When Charles I had attempted to arrest the five members, there had been a universal outcry, and his failure had made him ridiculous. But Cromwell had no such difficulties. By Pride's Purge, he dismissed about a hundred Presbyterian members, and obtained for a time a subservient majority. When, finally, he decided to dismiss Parliament altogether, 'not a dog barked'—war had made only military force seem important, and had produced a contempt for constitutional forms. For the rest of Cromwell's life, the government of England was a military tyranny, hated by an increasing majority of the nation, but impossible to shake off while his partisans alone were armed.
Charles II, after hiding in oak trees and living as a refugee in Holland, determined, at the Restoration, that he would not again set out on his travels. This imposed a certain moderation. He claimed no power to impose taxes not sanctioned by Parliament. He assented to the Habeas Corpus Act, which deprived the Crown of the power of arbitrary arrest. On occasion he could flout the fiscal power of Parliament by means of subsidies from Louis XIV, but in the main he was a constitutional monarch. Most of the limitations of royal power originally desired by the opponents of Charles I were conceded at the Restoration, and were respected by Charles II because it had been shown that kings could be made to suffer at the hands of their subjects.
James II, unlike his brother, was totally destitute of subtlety and finesse. By his bigoted Catholicism he united against himself the Anglicans and Nonconformists,