ABSTRACT
THE First Civil War is the decisive event in English history. Probable The defeat of the King's armies alone enabled Parliamen-outcome tary institutions to triumph. or a royal
For if Charles had won, those who could keep alive resis-VIctOry tance to Anglican and royal absolutism must have sailed for America. The men who formed the strength of the antimonarchical and the Puritan part of the community, were always contemplating emigration. England sent enough of these elements to found a new world; but if the war had gone differently, she would have sent out enough to ruin herself. The most adventurous merchants, the most skilled artisans, the Lords and gentlemen who took counsel for the liberties of their country, the ploughmen who saw visions, the tinkers who dreamed dreams, were perpetually thinking of New England, whither twenty thousand Puritans had already gone. The Roundhead armies were raised by men of the merchant class, and were led by landed gentlemen of the type of Cromwell, who were not, like the Cavaliers, deeply attached to the soil, who regarded their estates merely as assets in the money market, who had here no rest for the spirit or home for the heart, who so long as they were sojourners upon earth, lived • in Mesheck which they say signifies Prolonging; in Kedar which signifieth Blackness '.1 Such men would have emigrated rather than live under the military despotism of an Anglican King. Thus defeat in the field would have ruined forever the cause of Parliament and would have driven the Puritans out of England. Freedom in politics and religion would never have been evolved by the balance of parties, for one party would
have left the land. Without its leadership, the mass of Englishmen, indifferent as they showed themselves to the result of the Civil War, would never again have risen in revolt against a royal Church and a royal State. The current of European thought and practice, running hard towards despotism, would have caught England into the stream. America, strengthened by the influx of all who could change their country but not their religion, might perhaps have proved unconquerable and gone on her way alone. But England would then have become a mere outlying portion of the State system of Europe, had she not, by the campaign of Naseby, acquired her independent position between the old world and the new, and planted freedom in the deep fruitful soil of antiquity. The flowers of genius and the fruits of life that have since flourished upon that tree, could not have shown their heads under the shadow of tyranny, nor could they have so quickly bloomed to perfection in the thin soil of a newer land.
