CHAPTER FIFTEEN
He proposed to them, That the old King being dead,
and his son being defeated, it was necessary to come
to a Settlement of the Nation.
Cromwell, reported by Whitelocke, in December 1651
‘Cromwell our chief of men’ – so Milton began his great sonnet to the Lord-General of May 1652, in which he first placed upon his head ‘Worcester’s laureate wreath’ before issuing a courteous caution: ‘yet much remains to conquer still: peace hath her victories no less renowned than war …’ But Cromwell, for all Milton’s dramatic salutation, had as yet no official title to the chieftainship. During the twenty-odd months that followed the victory of Worcester and preceded the expulsion of the Rump Parliament, Cromwell lived in a curious kind of limbo in which his national eminence should not obscure the undoubted restraints not only on his power but also on his influence. His theoretic position comprised the Captain-Generalship of the Army and membership of the Council of State. To this he was twice elected as first in line out of 118 members, but the elections were free and his immediate followers in 1651, Whitelocke and Vane, did not necessarily share all his preoccupations or views. Then there were the numerous committees on which he sat, echoing the far-off days of his first rise to political power: the Irish Committee, the Scottish Committee, the important Committee for Trade founded in 1650, and committees which affected the settlement of the peace, such as that for sending prisoners of war to the plantations. Cromwell in this period has thus been described as ‘the most powerful official of the government’.1Nevertheless it was an anomalous position, where success could not be guaranteed for the policies Cromwell wished to administer – the godly policies, as he saw it, for which they had by now fought a series of crippling wars. It is in the checks which existed to his domination, not so much in theory, but in the practical workings of the Commonwealth, that the clues to the mysterious workings of Cromwell’s mind during this period must be sought. For in the end, they would lead him in a hail of violence, to alter the balance radically in favour of the power of one individual – himself.
In this see-saw which Cromwell now rode between public fame and private frustration, it is of course easier to discern manifestations of the former than of the latter. The Lord-General was greeted with hysterical glee on his return to London, with ‘vollies of great and small shot’ to honour the conquering hero. More substantial acknowledgements of his triumph ranged from a suit of armour brought from Greenwich, to the use of Hampton Court Palace, now clawed back from the Commonwealth’s sales for his benefit; Parliament further voted him £4000 a year, to which the estates of the Dowager Countess of Rutland and the Burghley and Newhall estates were devoted. With such affluence at his command, Cromwell proceeded to surrender his stipend as Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, a gesture in keeping with his general attitude to money: he had no intention of living in poverty, and considered his style a fair charge on the State. At the same time he had a sense of what was enough, and lacked altogether that less attractive instinct for unnecessary aggrandizement, that interest in money for money’s sake. Ludlow in his memoirs spoke of his ‘more stately behaviour’ after Worcester, the choosing of new friends. But if Cromwell put on the prince, it was at least a Puritan prince. Foreign observers became understandably obsessed by Cromwell’s character after Worcester, as though comprehension of the leading man would inevitably clarify the complex English political sense they sought to report. The next year the Venetian Ambassador gave an evocative glimpse of Milton’s chief of men, whose ‘unpretending manner of life, remote from all display and pomp, so different from the former fashion of this kingdom’ was winning him universal applause, even if he was not generally loved. In May Cromwell was described as having the first and last word in everything. A favourite comparison from foreigners was to William of Orange – ‘a man equally wicked and daring’ said one prejudiced source. But the feeling of a strong man, and a man at the same time of spartan simplicity, was there.2
Within himself, however, Cromwell felt nothing like the same certainty that this picture of the strong man of the Commonwealth might imply. His early modesty, which drew commendation from the Tuscan Resident in October (‘there cannot be discovered in him any ambition save for the public good’), was also the product of genuine confusion in switching from the stark atmosphere of battle to the Byzantine light of political intrigues. Peace’s victories might be no less renowned than those of war, but they were also a great deal less easy to interpret. The search for dispensations, signs of the Lord’s approval, which had so occupied not only Cromwell but his intimates such as Owen and Ireton, would prove a much more complicated task in the future. The Resident went on to remark that Cromwell had ‘come to be honoured and esteemed (besides for his great valour) as a man commanded by Heaven to establish this republic by divine service’. But Heaven’s commands were now presenting him with a civilian battlefield criss-crossed with doubts and perplexities, as well as manned by more recalcitrant troops than the well-disciplined New Model Army. A month after Worcester, Cromwell was writing to his friend John Cotton, the pastor at Boston in New England, in full providentialist enthusiasm to search out the new paths of the Lord in England: ‘Surely, Sir, the Lord is greatly to be feared, as to be praised! We need your prayers in this as much as ever. How shall we behave ourselves after such mercies? What is the Lord a-doing? What prophecies are now fulfilling? Who is a God like ours? …’ But by the next year to another correspondent, the strain of melancholy was back in the face of frustrations: ‘You absent; Fleetwood is gone; I am left alone – almost so – but not forsake. Lend me one shoulder. Pray for me.’3 Just as the whole of England, to say nothing of Scotland and Ireland, presented a morass of problems after the victory of Worcester, so Cromwell’s own state of mind presented a parallel picture of conflicting currents: a desire to follow the right, a sincere private uncertainty as to where that was to be found, and an increasing negative conviction concerning those forces that would definitely not help to bring it about.
Of England’s problems, the easiest ones were the immediate ones, presented by the end of the war itself. Here the settlement was along deliberately merciful lines. Only a few grandees were executed, the Earl of Derby among them. And even Derby, Cromwell who did not believe in pointless executions attempted to save; his lack of success showed incidentally how even immediately after Worcester his wishes were not necessarily paramount. As at the end of the Second Civil War, official anger was reserved more for the English than the Scots: finally clemency prevailed towards the Scottish leaders such as the Earl of Lauderdale, who was deliberately spared the death sentence imposed upon him and merely kept prisoner. So English Derby died and Scottish Lauderdale lived on, to spend his time profitably having an edifying spiritual correspondence with Richard Baxter, in glowing contrast to his subsequent profligate life. As for the lesser Scottish prisoners originally intended to go to Guinea to work as slaves, in the end happier fates awaited them: some went to Ireland, others to New England, where it seems from a report from John Cotton back to Cromwell they were characteristically well treated by the Puritan community. A thousand were taken by the Adventurers who were developing the Fens, where a provision was made that the organizers should pay a fee of £10 for every man who escaped, over and above what was considered a reasonable proportion of ten per cent. The rest of the Scots gradually made their way home after their fearful experience.
But the despatch one way and another of their old foes was hardly a tithe of the problems now facing the Commonwealth. It was all very well for the writer and poet Payne Fisher to be commissioned by Parliament to write ‘the history of these times’:4 that was certainly an enterprising gesture full of self-confidence, although Payne Fisher never seems to have got much further than a journey to Scotland in the interests of research, and the delineation of a map of Dunbar – at any rate, if written, the book was never published. But of the two great issues which had long obsessed ‘these times’, the nature of a new Parliament (if the need was admitted) and the nature of the new national Church (if it was not to be on the Presbyterian pattern prescribed by the Covenant nor the old Anglican pattern), both remained to be settled. The Parliamentary issue was the more urgent of the two, since in this narrow purged remnant of the Long Parliament first elected in 1640, now at Westminster, there still resided what was constitutionally the sole source of authority in England, the Council of State being merely its deputed executive. A new Parliament following a dissolution had indeed been clamoured for so loudly by the Army in the late 1640s, and had been required in all their successive Agreements of the People, that it might at first sight seem surprising that exactly the same obstinate body still clung to office if not power at Westminster.
But the issue of the new Parliament, or as it came to be known, ‘the new representative’, was in truth not quite so simple. First, if there was to be a dissolution, what would happen to the existing members of the Rump? It was not only that they wished to protect their own selfish interests, although some members clung to their seats for the good human reason that MPs were protected from arrest for debt, and in the chaos of the Civil War it was not only the extravagant who had managed to acquire demanding creditors. There was also a constitutional argument, which appealed to those like the politically minded Henry Marten, for preserving the link with the Long Parliament: that gathering at least had been elected legally. On the other hand, new elections brought quite a different set of problems: for if these were based on a wider franchise, what guarantee would there be that the new House of Commons would not be flooded with Presbyterians, Royalists and other beings not conspicuously dedicated to what Cromwell would have considered a godly settlement of the nation? Between these two poles, the fear of self-perpetuation by the existing Rump, and the exactly opposite danger of a new and hostile House of Commons, it will be clear that there could be many oscillations of contemporary opinion.
Self-perpetuation in its extreme form would mean filling the empty seats by a form of by-election or ‘Recruiter’ election under the control of the Rump: but this kind of House was hardly likely to commend itself to the Army which had so strongly disapproved of the narrow composition of the existing House in the first place. On the other hand in another section of opinion, it was the very shadow of the Army, and indeed Cromwell as Lord-General of the Army, over the elections which aroused the fear that elections under military influence would hardly really be that much better. Cromwell of course had in the old days been counted among the political Independents, but now men like the younger Vane began to move away from his side. Clarendon analysed this change after Worcester: to Cromwell’s surprise, he did not find Parliament ‘so supple and so much to observe his orders as he expected they would have been’. And it was his former allies, headed by Vane, whose ‘jealousy’ troubled him, for they began to think ‘his power and authority to be too great for a Commonwealth, and that he and his army had not dependence enough upon or submission to the parliament’.5 So they began to turn back to the Presbyterians to form a new kind of alliance. Clarendon, if simplifying, nevertheless put his finger on Cromwell’s real and growing political problem after Worcester: supposing his real allies for the right establishment of England should prove to be the military as more representative of the people of England than corrupt politicians? Supposing peace’s victories, like those of war, should turn out to need achieving by the sword?
The dissolution, that vexed question, was first debated on 17 September 1651, when a committee was set up for considering an election, to which Cromwell’s name was added (he had acted as teller for the Ayes in the voting). A bill for ‘the new representative’ was first discussed in October. But by the next month, for all that Cromwell was elected head of the lists for the Council of State, no more was achieved towards an actual dissolution than setting a date three years ahead for the new parliament – 3 November 1654. It was scarcely satisfactory progress from Cromwell’s point of view. Generally, there was much political uncertainty. Daniel Blagrave, MP for Reading, and one of those who had signed the King’s death warrant, was among the numerous prominent Puritan dignitaries, including Robert Overton, Hugh Peter, Rainsborough, who were not above seeking supernatural instruction. On 3 November he sent a message to the astrologer Elias Ashmole asking whether Parliament would be broken up suddenly or not. On the 11th he was evidently worried about his own future, for he gave Ashmole the exact time ‘when the message came from the Lord General to Mr Blagrave about whether he should be ch[osen] again in a new Parliament’. Although it has been tentatively suggested that the query came from Cromwell himself concerning his own position, Cromwell could hardly have been in genuine doubt as to whether he would actually bechosen for a new Parliament.6 The sense makes it clear that it was Blagrave’s own problems which perturbed him. The relation, possibly the brother, of another astrologer, Joseph Blagrave, he was already in touch with Ashmole; it was as natural for him to try to penetrate the mysteries of the future in a much confused political situation by this method as it would have been unnatural for Cromwell.
Cromwell’s next initiative took the form of a privately-summoned meeting at the house of the Speaker Lenthall for some MPs and officers of the Army, held at the beginning of December 1651. According to Whitelocke who was present and who reported it all extremely fully, his main point was that now the old King was dead and the young King defeated, it was necessary to come to ‘a Settlement of the Nation’. One of the planks of Cromwell’s philosophy had long been the responsibility on their shoulders consequent upon their triumphs, which they would be wrong to ignore. Speaker Lenthall now agreed with this point: they had certainly had ‘marvellous successes under Cromwell and if they did not improve upon them, they would be blameworthy’. To this Whitelocke put the pertinent question: what sort of settlement? Was it to be an absolute republic, or was there to be any admixture of monarchy? Cromwell in his turn accepted that this was indeed the vital issue: ‘Indeed it is my meaning that we should consider whether a republic or a mixed monarchical government will be best to be settled; and if anything monarchical, then in whom that power shall be placed.’7
It was now the turn of Sir Thomas Widdrington, the former commissioner of the Great Seal who had now returned to the service of the Commonwealth as a member of the Council of State, to declare that ‘mixed monarchical’ would be most suitable ‘for the laws and people of this nation’. He went on to suggest that the best course would be to adopt one of the sons of the late King (Henry Duke of Gloucester was still in the custody of the Commonwealth). In the general discussion that followed, Fleetwood and St John both pointed out the great difficulties involved in turning back to the Stuarts, and Whalley with justice raised the known hostility of the Princes concerned to Parliament. But there were those who advocated the use of the younger Gloucester, while Whitelocke himself believed that use could be made of either Charles or James Duke of York. But it is Cromwell’s reactions which are the most interesting. He spoke up for ‘a settlement of somewhat of monarchical power in it’ which he believed would be ‘very effectual’; but he did not state precisely what form this mixture should take. It is not necessary to follow the charges later made against Cromwell of vile untrammelled ambition, desiring always the kingship for himself, to see in this cautious statement a distinct change of attitude on Cromwell’s part. Or rather, it was a reversion to the confusedly monarchical attitudes that he had held in late 1647 and 1648.
It will be remembered that Cromwell had never shown himself a theoretical republican either at the time of the Army debates, nor a year later when the Army had proved still more hostile to the King. His whole approach to the kingship had been markedly pragmatic, and much influenced by the character of Charles i, whose weaknesses in his estimation had eventually driven him into the view that Providence required the cutting off of his head. He had also been one of those who had considered using Gloucester as a puppet in a form of Regency. Unlike Henry Marten and many of the Army officers, he had no particularly republican principles which would be betrayed by the return of any form of monarchy. He did have however extremely strong views on the return of the bad old days, as he might have put it, and it was this potential resurrection which would in his mind constitute the greatest betrayal of trust. In the summer of 1650 he had spoken with Ludlow of ‘a free and equal Commonwealth’ as being the only probable means of keeping out ‘the old family and government from us’.8 Now, over a year later, he was as convinced as ever of the necessity of keeping out the old Government. But there is no reason to suppose that in December 1651 he did not consider fleetingly among other alternatives the old family, as represented by Gloucester.
One potent influence on Cromwell’s thinking had recently been removed by death. In November 1651 Henry Ireton, his friend, his son-in-law, the companion of his early struggles and who many contemporaries believed to be Cromwell’s éminence grise, died of plague in Ireland. ‘What is of this world will be found transitory,’ wrote Cromwell to his sister, ‘a clear evidence whereof is my son Ireton’s death.’ His body was shipped back to England, and his state funeral in March 1652 provided an interesting glimpse of the direction which the social customs of the new Commonwealth were now taking. Certainly times had changed. Ireton’s body lay first of all in state in Somerset House, as princes had done formerly, under a hatchment stating Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori – a noble motto which the naughty Cavaliers waggishly mistranslated as ‘It was good for his country that he should die’. The procession to Westminster Abbey was the occasion of much magnificence, whose contrast to Puritan austerity was much commented upon at the time. The marching mourners included Cromwell himself, his officers, and what the diarist John Evelyn rudely described as some of his ‘mock-parliament men’, meaning the MPs. Evelyn had just returned from the Continent and Ireton’s funeral, which made a great impression upon him, was one of the first sights he witnessed. John Owen was deputed to preach the sermon, for which he took a text from Daniel, in order to praise Ireton for having had like Daniel both spiritual and civil wisdom. Above all, he singled out Ireton’s ability to see divine dispensations in earthly events, unlike the many more carnal members of society who were unable or unwilling to trace them back to God, ‘like Swine following Acorns under the tree, not at all looking up to the tree from whence they fall …’9
The sermon was later published, in answer, wrote Owen, to the request of those who loved ‘the Savour of that perfume’ which was diffused by Ireton’s noble memory. But he dedicated it deliberately to Henry Cromwell rather than to ‘Her’, the widow, poor Bridget being still so swallowed up in sorrow that he feared to occasion a fresh relapse. Bridget was granted £2000 a year from Parliament out of the Duke of Buckingham’s estates to solace her, but before the year was out she received a more positive encouragement to cast off her widow’s weeds in the shape of courtship from Charles Fleetwood. Ireton’s death had of course left a gap in the administration of Ireland which it was generally expected Lambert would fill; in January 1652 he was duly appointed to the vacant Lord Deputyship. Lucy Hutchinson told a malicious story of Frances Lambert queening it over Bridget Ireton in consequence in St James’s Park that summer; Bridget, ‘notwithstanding her piety and humility’, suffered some extremely human pangs.10 But the incident had some ironic results, being witnessed by Fleetwood, himself a recent widower, who took the immediate opportunity to pay his addresses to the bereaved and now slighted lady. Not only that, but Lambert’s whole Irish position now began to founder when Parliament proceeded to abolish the Lord-Lieutenantship, and with it of course the Deputyship also. Lambert, who had already laid out considerable expense for his new and splendid role, was understandably furious and declined the remaining more junior post of Commander-in-Chief and civil commissioner which then went to Charles Fleetwood. So it was Bridget who ended up by reigning once more in Ireland.
The whole fracas, whose exact course remains obscure, had consequences beyond its immediate gossipy interest. Lambert at the time became still more disenchanted with Parliament and increasingly vocal in opposition to it. Later Cromwell was accused (as so often) of having engineered the whole incident to incite Lambert to get rid of Parliament for him; but this seems far-fetched. In fact Parliament’s actions were probably dictated by economy, Cromwell by sacrificing his Lord-Lieutenant’s salary to Ireton in the autumn having already pointed the way. Furthermore Cromwell showed his personal sympathy for Lambert by directing that a payment of £2000 should be made to him out of the remaining arrears of this pay, to help him bear the costs he had incurred in the expectations of stately life in Ireland. It was more likely that Parliament insisted on having its own way (even against Cromwell’s inclinations) than that Cromwell himself indulged in a particularly deep-laid plot. Nevertheless the exchange of Lambert for Fleetwood was surely not to the advantage of Ireland. Fleetwood was essentially a narrow-minded man, if a sincere and honourable Puritan: Lambert’s more outgoing and freer nature would have constituted a more congenial presiding spirit.
In England itself financial necessity continued to impose its own pattern on the settlement of the nation, and affect what otherwise might have been the more tolerant intentions of the Government. Cromwell was one of those who felt strongly on the subject of the State’s leniency: in the passing of the new Act of Oblivion – ‘that all Rancour and Evil will be occasioned by the late Differences may be buried in perpetual oblivion’ – in February 1652, he argued strongly on behalf of mercy. In fact the Act was intended to be all-encompassing, but by expecting all those who had committed High Treason, unless it was in words only, the way was left open for exacting continued financial penalties in the shape of confiscations from the Royalists, should that prove necessary. The same spirit of limited forgiveness could be seen in the repeal of the extreme penalties on the Roman Catholic recusants in September 1650. The intention to mould them further into the English State did exist: for although the Mass was still prohibited, it was no longer mandatory to attend an English church on Sundays. Records in 1652 and 1653 showed a decline in the people indicted for the practice of the Catholic faith. But at the same time the sequestrations of their estates remained one of the Government’s chief sources of money, not to be ignored in time of stress, or as one disillusioned rhyme put it:
For where there’s money to be got
I find this pardon pardons not …
In a country so recently torn by war, there was of course a crying need for a new kind of social policy, or indeed any kind of social policy at all which would take into account the rising problem of vagrants, coupled with the inevitable problems raised by the war such as disbanded and wounded soldiers. In theory the Puritans had always concerned themselves very seriously with the quality of the lives of ordinary people, although their early ideas on legislation were scarcely in keeping with the views of the majority of the populace. An Act of 1650 made adultery and incest punishable by death, although the reluctance of juries to convict meant that it fell into virtual desuetude; fornication received three months’ imprisonment; prostitutes were to be whipped, branded with B (for Bawd) and to serve in a house of correction for their first offence, put to death for their second. The Act of Oblivion also specifically excluded from pardon not only Royalists but those guilty of ‘the Detestable and abominable vice of Buggery with Mankind or Beast’ as well as ‘the carnal ravishment of women’ and bigamy. Drunkenness was taken extremely seriously as an offence, and unlike adultery much punished. Although a law that forbade the painting of faces, the wearing of patches and immodest dresses was not read a second time, carefully graded fines for swearing were enacted, in which the advantage for profanity went to women and the lowborn: whereas it cost a lord 30s. to swear, for a gentleman the fine sank to 6s. 8d., and below that 3s. 4d.; husbands were responsible for their wives’ oaths and fathers for their daughters’.
These provisions, whether or not they achieved a more clean-living or at least clean-tongued population (which is doubtful), had little to do with the kind of real problems that were facing ordinary people at the time. The increase of enclosures obviously put up the numbers of the out-of-work, and that in turn led to an increase in vagrancy. Ordinary people also found that their lot was often worsened with the change of ownership in the land consequent upon the confiscations, because the new owners were noticeably less humane than the established proprietors to whom the local inhabitants and their troubles were familiar of old. Gerard Winstanley the Leveller referred to ‘the new (more covetous) gentry’. A man like Richard Baxter felt justifiable anxiety for the dispossessed peasant ‘of public consequence and of spiritual and everlasting concernment’.11
It was an atmosphere in which Parliament was ever watchful of the rights of ownership and as such disinclined for example to protect the copyholders – those who held their land by immemorial usage but not outright – against the enclosers; it was no wonder that the more radical doctrines of the Levellers towards property flourished. The public mood was uneasy and disturbed, demonstrated by the expectant fearful attitude towards an impending eclipse of the sun in March 1652. The day itself was referred to in advance as Black Monday, and there were those who actually fled from London to avoid its consequences. As for its import, this was variously interpreted as the collapse of Scottish Presbyterianism (by William Lilly the astrologer) to the coming of the Fifth Monarchy (by those who were awaiting it). In the end the Council of State, having problems enough of their own on earth, were obliged to put out a paper stating that eclipses were natural events.
But of all the subjects in which the interests of the Rump or the Government generally showed themselves disjointed from those of the ordinary people, that of the reform of the law was the most glaring. The delays and abuses to which Englishmen were subject had been one of the most prominent grievances stressed on the eve of the Civil War; although some reforms of the highly unpopular Chancery had been carried out in 1649, it was still possible to refer to it as ‘a Mystery of Wickedness and a standing Cheat’ in a contemporary pamphlet (a later writer referred to a ‘hotch-potch of linsey-wolsey Laws!’). Shortly before Worcester, Cromwell in conversation with Edmund Ludlow had spoken of the need to reform the law as among the other crying necessities of this ‘free and equal Commonwealth’. Latin was also abolished as the official legal language in late 1650 in a gesture against obscurantism: English was now to be the sole language of the public records, and English what was more written ‘in an ordinary, usual and legible Hand and Character’.12 Yet for all the establishment of a committee in 1652 to discuss possible reforms, nothing further was achieved by the Rump beyond endless discussions.
The members of the Rump could hardly plead ignorance: more than half their members had attended an Inn of Court, and the converse – too many legal vested interests to carry through reforms – was more likely to be true. Yet the findings of the committee under the chairmanship of Matthew Hale, passed on to the Parliamentary Law Committee, there to be discussed and if necessary presented to Parliament, showed how many ‘Inconveniences in the Law’ existed to bedevil the lives of ordinary people. Sixteen bills were drafted by the committee ranging from the prevention of bribery by judges to the easier recovery of small debts and simpler methods for the registration of wills. There was also an effort to ameliorate the lot of those who suffered under the Criminal Law – the abolition of the fearful and still surviving peine forte et dure, by which those who refused to plead at all, no plea being considered a plea of guilty, could be pressed to death slowly.* Further mitigations were suggested: women who killed their husbands were to be hanged not burned, the goods of suicides were not to be forfeited, prisoners were to have counsel and witnesses to give evidence on oath. Some judicial ideas proposed even took into account the notion that a prisoner should be cured as well as punished, a theory of justice still not universally accepted many centuries later: it was suggested that a ‘godly and painful preacher’ should be installed in each city and county jail to pray helpfully to that end with the prisoners. The penalties for stealing involved the theory of restitution as well as punishment. Yet although in January 1653 Parliament spent two days reading the law book of Hale’s committee, none of these reforms got a statute book hearing within the lifetime of the Rump.
However while the Rump argued and talked and did little to win public popularity, the reconstitution of the organization of the English Church was a problem which fell into different and more energetic hands. In essence it was a situation which needed an executive solution: for while the Independents had once appeared as a minor sect threatening official Anglicanism, they were now the men in power, whose religion was in turn threatened by a multitude of minor sects. But at present there was no existing organization for choosing ministers, and if they were chosen, still less was there any way of paying them other than the previous system of tithes by which the local ministers received a proportion of the parish offerings, now denounced by so many of the sectaries. Parallel with the need for some kind of uniformity, if only to beat off the wilder extravagances of some of the sectaries, there existed then the hectic question of how this uniformity should be imposed, and if imposed, how paid. The ultimate casus belli of the Government against the sectaries came in February 1652 when a book was published advocating the doctrines of a sixteenth-century Italian named Socinius who not only proposed general rather than individual grace (appalling heresy to the Independents) but even denied the divinity of Christ.
In order to establish what might or might not be tenable under the Commonwealth, a committee was set up under John Owen, who by Cromwell’s friendship and patronage had become first Dean of Christ Church and then Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University (although he was said by Anthony Wood to annoy convocation by his dress, at once ornate and over-youthful).13 However where religion rather than dress was concerned, his stable opinions of the middle way, neither too Presbyterian nor too mystical, were felt to fit him for the task. Owen produced ‘Fifteen Fundamentals’, which proceeded from the general proposition that none who believed it possible to seek God’s will elsewhere than in the Scriptures should be allowed to propagate the gospel – thus ruling out the Fifth Monarchists, but including Congregationalists, Presbyterians and of course Independents. Two sets of commissioners were also set up to raise up an Established Church of sorts: Triers, who were to be a type of local committee, passing on those ministers thought suitable, and Ejectors, a national body to supervise and remove ministers (and incidentally also school-masters). But the payment of the ministers still could not be solved for the time being in any manner other than the application of the old tithes. This in itself caused great outrage to all those sectaries who had set their hearts against them.
Long before the Civil War, for decades, centuries even, the issue of tithes had been a controversial one, and there had been many disputes on the subject. Literally meaning a tenth or tithe of the produce and livestock of the parish, dedicated to the support of the local church, the tithe had come to symbolize a series of different – but equally emotive – things to different people. It was Monk who termed it ‘the issue of blood’. In many cases tithes had passed into the hands of temporal owners at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries and the maintenance of the system had become part of the powerful vested lay interests. From this it was an easy step to establish a close connexion between tithes and all other forms of property: there was a general if irrational feeling that if tithes were abolished, private property as such might be the next to go.14
On the other hand there was genuine doubt in many quarters as to the propriety of tithes as a form of stipend. Should the parishes in fact be responsible for their ministers, or should the Government handle the finances of the clergy themselves? In the general dislocation of the war, the people had often taken the opportunity to refuse to pay the tithes, and in the absence of the ecclesiastical courts, it was difficult to bring them to book. A more radical suggestion for the ministers’ support was that they themselves should labour. From 1647 onwards, the more extreme sects such as Levellers and Diggers, and lately the Fifth Monarchy Men, were taking what many thought to be an unhealthy interest in the abolition of tithes and including it in their programme. In a vicious circle, the identification of these sects with suspicious radicalism led in turn to greater conservative fear of the abolition of tithes.
In the debates on the new system, Cromwell took the opportunity to make his personal views clear. As in Ireland, he did not propose to concern himself with whatever feelings might lurk unheard within the hearts of men. The aim must be public tolerance. To Parliament he spoke up strongly against State persecution: he had no need of revelation, he said, ‘to discover unto me that man who endeavours to impose upon his brethren’. When he was asked for a persecuting Saul rather than an indifferent Galileo, Cromwell replied splendidly: ‘I had rather that Mahometanism were permitted amongst us than that one of God’s children should be persecuted.’ It was an outspoken statement by the standards of the time, if only because almost the first act of censorship by the Commonwealth in 1649 had been to seize an edition of the Koran printed in London.15 Obviously he hoped that the new system would be a loose net in which the consciences of godly men might flourish, and those who did not somehow adhere to the right way would nevertheless be allowed to live in peace – so long as, that was, they themselves also practised peaceful ways.
But over the question of the tithes, it was significant that Cromwell, with his sense of law and order and what was practicable, came down on the side of keeping them, for the time being until some other stipend could be worked out. On 29 April 1652 it seems that Cromwell was among those who voted for their contemporary but unlimited preservation. It was the occasion of much indignation for those who believed that he was committed to their withdrawal, prominent among them the Quaker George Fox, who subsequently spread a story that Cromwell had promised God to surrender the tithes in return for a victory at Dunbar.16 The tale was hardly likely to be true, but it did show the bitter new development in Cromwell’s relations with sectaries more extreme than himself.
Over the interesting if nebulous question of Cromwell’s own personal religion, that was of a more mystical turn than that of his friend Owen. It was demonstrated by his choice of chaplains. Peter Sterry, for example, who incurred later criticism for his mystical tendencies, impressed Cromwell sufficiently to be commanded by him to preach before him regularly on Sundays either at Hampton Court or Whitehall. Sterry was an attractive companion by any standards, loving poetry, music and painting, praising Virgil, Titian and Van Dyck. The rigid organization and methods of the Presbyterians, he declared, ‘laboured to hedge in the wind, and to bind up the sweet influence of the spirit’. Throughout Cromwell’s period of influence, Sterry certainly enjoyed much patronage being employed on various tasks such as an inventory of the State records and certification of the fitness of ministers; that he owed much to Cromwell’s support can be seen further by the fact that he fell out of favour when Cromwell died.17
Neither friendship – with Owen or with Sterry – can fully encase the measure of Cromwell’s religion. It was not only that he had an admirable and healthy passion for friendships where discussions could take place between two opposing points of view. Throughout Cromwell’s life, his religious views showed signs of being extremely subjective, and he had presumably chosen the Independent structure originally for the very reason that the looser bonds would give fuller play to his temperament, rejecting in turn Anglicanism and Presbyterianism. Certain facets remained sparkling in his beliefs, including his dislike for those who wanted to jacket their comrades’ spirits into uniformity, instead of fighting the common enemy. Two years later he was speaking with outright annoyance of the strange itch in the spirits of men: ‘Nothing will satisfy them unless they can put their finger upon their brethren’s consciences, to pinch them there.’18 That meant that the external forms which the practice of religion might take never meant as much to him as it did to many of his contemporaries.
By himself, he preferred to wrestle with the Scriptures on the one hand, and the other revelations of God’s will in the shape of his signs. In company his philosophy since earliest times was best summed up by a petition of some suffering Quakers at Horsham: ‘We hear that thou hast declared that none in this nation shall suffer for conscience sake.’ Law and order was another matter again, and his attitude to the sectaries (who were said to be obsessing him in October 1652) would shift to and fro in accordance with the nature of their resistance to the State. But it was significant that Cromwell was one of those Independents – who also included Ireton and Lambert – never actually associated with a particular ‘gathered church’. He was thus never in the modern sense a true Congregationalist, any more than those enthusiastic words he once wrote to Bridget on the love of Christ made him an actual member of the sect known as the Seekers: ‘Happy seeker, happy finder! Who ever tasted that the Lord is gracious, without some sense of self, vanity and badness? Who ever tasted that graciousness of His, and could go less in desire, and less in pressing after full enjoyment?’19 It was as a searcher himself, a perpetual pilgrim, that he wrote, not a sectary committed to any particular branch.* Indeed if any modern comparison can be made, he might have found a happy niche for himself in the present-day Church of England, attending some acknowledgedly ‘low’ congregation. The point has been well made that Cromwell might have been less spiritually lonely in his later years had he enjoyed the support of a particular ‘gathered church’. As it was, in his religious life he was thrust back to a marked degree on the perusal of divine dispensations.
Europe had not stood still while Commonwealth and Scots engaged each other with their horns like two stags. There the situation was equally disruptive, and whatever the first reaction of shock and disapproval, the killing of the King and the establishment of a republic could not disbar for ever a leading Protestant – and maritime – power from participation in the varied and complicated series of European alliances then current. And since neither the main Protestant block of Baltic powers, nor the Catholic block of France and Spain were united, there was room for much diplomatic manoeuvre as England became once more a force to be reckoned with. Soon a series of agents and representatives were percolating through to London, beginning with the minister (euphoniously named Haraldus Applebone) despatched by Sweden’s eccentric but engaging Queen Christina in December 1651. As a Protestant country which had a hereditary feud with its Protestant neighbour Denmark, Sweden had a vested interest in engaging Commonwealth sympathies first: soon Queen Christina was signing herself ‘vestra amica Christina’ in her correspondence.
Nevertheless the Commonwealth remained extremely touchy on the subject of its authority. An appeal from Elizabeth of Bohemia, sister of the dead King, for funds via the Netherlands was greeted with indignation because it referred to ‘Charles i’ – thus implying the existence of a Charles II. And the incoming Venetian envoy, Paulucci, had an unhappy experience because he arrived without the proper credentials from his Government. Sir Oliver Fleming acted as Master of Ceremonies, having performed the same office for Charles I – a remarkable example of neutralism. He did however complain to the Council that his salary was now much reduced from the old days, particularly as he was not allowed to accept gratuities, which were considered ‘dishonourable to the Commonwealth’, from the foreign envoys. He suggested artlessly that his pay should be increased, lest he should be under ‘the temptation of doing things dishonourable’. Fleming instructed Paulucci that the ‘Parliament of the Republic of England’ was the only correct mode of address. Fleming told Paulucci that since Venice was at the same time asking for English troops, their casualness had caused some affront: ‘Our esteem and her prudence entitled us to a different treatment at her hands.’ All this gave Paulucci an opportunity to report back to the Venetian Republic on the still militant spirit of the English people. Although in their hearts they now desired alliances, they still dissembled this outwardly: they scorned all titles and quoted the example of the Roman Republic which had ruled the whole world under the simple initials S.P.Q.R.21
Of the major countries, it might seem curious that it was Catholic Spain who was the first to send an accredited representative in the shape of Cardenas, and that despite the awkward murder of a Commonwealth agent in Spain, Anthony Ascham, as yet unpunished. But since Spain’s natural enemy was France, the relationship of the English Royal Family to the French King gave Spain an obvious interest in England. At the same time France herself presented a tempting target to Protestant hostilities of the Commonwealth, once they should be released from civil war within the British Isles.
The French Government, represented by the boy King Louis XIV and his omnipotent minister Cardinal Mazarin, were facing a revolt in the south, known under the name of the Fronde and led by the powerful Prince de Condé. To obviate the danger of England assisting their own rebels, apart from challenging Spain, it soon became obvious to France that she too must reach an agreement of sorts with England. Her Chargé de Croullé had been expelled over the perennial trouble of Catholic agents in London – allowing English nationals to hear Mass in the Embassy chapel. But the need for ‘some accommodation’, whatever the claims to sympathy of the widowed Henrietta Maria, was recognized soon after Worcester. By the end of 1652 Bordeaux, a member of a rich merchant family, and described by Saint-Simon as being extremely worldly ‘for a bourgeois’ (because he had a number of mistresses), was being instructed to make an English mission in the following spring.22
Of all the European powers however the one that presented the most forceful problem to the new Commonwealth was the Protestant Netherlands. The United Provinces, in their fight for liberty, in their institutions, in their many public virtues, in their own throwing off of the shackles of monarchy, had been the most admired model to freedom-loving Englishmen of different types for many years. Yet they were at one and the same time the chief and above all the successful rivals to England’s commercial interests. The tug-of-war between emotional Protestant sympathies and practical commercial necessities was one which would be fought out this way and that throughout the Interregnum. The commercial predominance of the Dutch was particularly marked at the end of the English internal wars since England’s colonies had seized the opportunity of the distracted attentions of the mother country to trade freely with the Dutch, and to use Dutch ships to convey their own goods to Europe. The Dutch carrying-trade menaced England, it was felt, while Dutch capital had also found its way into the happy grasp of newly prosperous English colonials.
For all these difficulties, the first instinct of the Commonwealth had been to draw close to its Protestant neighbour; it was the Dutch who had rejected a mission to this effect in the spring of 1651, headed by Oliver St John, with contumely. The first Navigation Act of October 1651, just after Worcester, was said to be the direct result of this rebuff; but it was also the product of another side to English thinking of the time, a hard-headed commercial decision at a time when English finances needed critical resuscitation. The produce of the colonies in America, Africa or Asia was forbidden to be brought in future in any ships other than those of the British or the territories concerned; the majority of crews on the ships were to be Commonwealth subjects; goods from Europe had either to come in English ‘bottoms’ or in those of the country of origin – thus hopefully putting an end to the profitable carrying-trade of the Dutch. Yet this law in itself would not have led to war between the two countries. It was the umbrageous Commonwealth demand to search Dutch ships on the high seas for the goods of other countries, particularly those of the French, which caused much offence. This right was in turn angrily resisted by the Dutch themselves, and it was in the various hot-headed incidents which resulted from the attempted implementation of this right to search, that the immediate genesis of the Anglo-Dutch War that broke out in the summer of 1652 was found. Soon throughout the Commonwealth, wrote Henry Fletcher, it was being widely studied ‘how to alter the natural verdure of the sea with the sanguine purple of human slaughter’.
The evidence for Cromwell’s attitude to the war has been described as ambiguous. He seems to have been confused enough in his own mind as to where the right course lay, to have been blown now in this direction, now in that. It was true that the one constant predilection he did display was in favour of amity with Protestants anywhere; that in turn obviously made him perturbed and reluctant over the prosecution of the Anglo-Dutch struggle, in contrast to the more commercially-minded members of Parliament or the Council of State. ‘I do not like the war and I commend your Christian admonition. I will do everything in my power to bring about peace,’ he is said to have replied to some Dutch expatriates petitioning Parliament to resume peace negotiations in July 1652.23
The belief in a Protestant Europe was something to which many Puritans had long subscribed. In a Fast Sermon of 1645 Hugh Peter had cried out apocalyptically: ‘Methinks I see Germany lifting up her lumpish shoulder, and the thin-cheeked Palatinate looking out, a prisoner of hope … Indeed, methinks all Protestant Europe seems to get new colour in her cheeks.’ The peasants of the Netherlands, France and even (at that date) Ireland were said to be studying their long-lost liberties. Cromwell himself was much under the spell of such heady visions of a Protestant crusade: the Venetian Ambassador in Spain reported that immediately after Dunbar he had written to Parliament suggesting that they should now think of helping other nations to throw off the yoke.24 Yet Cromwell knew little of finance or commerce, and in the case of the Dutch War at least, found his emotional preferences overruled by sterner counsels. It was as though the Dutch issue was for the time being too complicated for him to pursue, the dispensations too difficult to analyse.
In the meantime the Dutch War went on amain, not only with Cromwell’s tacit acquiescence but with his participation in its administration. The English Navy at least made rapid advances: thirty new frigates were ordered, at a cost of £300,000 and Cromwell with other magnates of the Commonwealth attended the launching at Deptford of the Diamond and the Raby, very much cheered at the time by the onlookers.25 The trouble was that the cost of running such a fleet amounted to nearly a million pounds a year: since under half a million was allotted to it by the Commonwealth, for all the benefits to the Navy, the Government’s unstable finances were exacerbated further by a mounting deficit while the war continued.
But there were fields of foreign action less complicated than the Netherlands and in those instances of which some evidence has survived, however obscure, relating to France, Cromwell always gave proof of the vigorous Protestant slant to his mind. In October 1651 a mission came from the Prince de Condé, received personally by Cromwell, asking for £100,000 and ten thousand men to assist him in his Frondeur struggles against Mazarin and the French King. Oliver was said to have called for a map of France and studied it, before refusing the plea. But his refusal took the form of a wry joke: the actual aid was a trifling matter – he would come in person, he said, with forty thousand foot and twelve thousand horse, if he could be assured that France would have the same happy end result in her government (i.e. the overthrow of her monarchy) as had taken place in England. The emissary was struck dumb by the sally and left the room. But an odd little incident concerning Vane, now re-dated to some time in the summer of 1652, seems to have had its origin in Cromwell’s desire to help the Frondeurs: Vane apparently made an undercover approach to the political leader of the Fronde, Cardinal de Retz.26 In the same way the visit of the former Army agitator Colonel Sexby to Condé’s brother, the Prince de Conti, was probably inspired by Cromwell. Unfortunately Sexby was an inept negotiator, and by arriving with a copy of the Army’sAgreement of the People as a possible manifesto for a new French constitution once the Frondeurs should be successful in their rebellion, he did not advance the cause either of England in French hearts, or of the Frondeurs in the French power struggle.
Yet another mission, in the spring of 1652, was connected more directly with Cromwell, although its ultimate aim still remains obscure. Cromwell’s emissary, a Colonel Fitzjames, entered negotiations with the French Governor of Dunkirk, Estrades, for the exchange of prisoners, in the course of which he arranged, as he thought, for Estrades actually to go further and betray the port to the English. This would have given England a Continental beachhead, from which Cromwell or any other General could have in theory mounted a military expedition to assist Condé. In the event Estrades changed his mind, the treacherous handover never took place and Dunkirk for the time being remained in French hands.27 Perhaps Cromwell did have a punitive crusade in mind, although if so the details were never worked out. But the idea of a Continental beachhead was certainly one which was to remain with him, and his obsession with it played a marked part in his Protectoral foreign policy. However all that can be stated with certainty about his attitudes to Europe during the eighteen months following Worcester, is that they were avidly coloured by enthusiasm for Protestantism and Protestant allies – this, despite the fact that his position at home did not as yet enable him to give these feelings full and powerful vent.
In domestic politics, by the summer of 1652 the tolerance of the Army towards the Rump was showing signs of reaching breaking-point: the efforts of the previous year to procure dissolution had been effectively put aside by the Army’s opponents. In August a petition was presented by various key officers, including Whalley, Okey and Worsley (who was in charge of Cromwell’s own regiment) urging the dissolution of Parliament. Although Cromwell’s name was officially kept out of it, the fact that the presenters counted many of his most faithful supporters among their number was not missed by observers. Contemporary newsletters spoke of conferences between Cromwell and the officers preceding the petition, and were not put off by the fact that the officers also demanded the abolition of tithes – a cause on which Cromwell remained cool. Whitelocke told Cromwell pointedly that it was a pity to allow the officers to petition with swords ‘lest in time it come home to himself’;28 but it was Lambert of course, still smarting from his failure to obtain the deputyship, who was for the time being the most prominent lobbyer.
Throughout October there was a series of meetings initiated by Cromwell between MPs and officers to discuss the Parliamentary possibilities. At the end of November the horrifying naval defeat endured by Blake in the Downs at the hands of the Dutch Admiral Tromp would blight those members of the Rump who constituted the war party, giving an edge to the pro-Cromwellians just at the vital moment of the new elections to the Council of State. Cromwell was once more elected top, but Vane, chairman of the Admiralty Committee, dropped to fourth place. It was at the beginning of November that a conversation of dynamic importance, on which much of the evidence for Cromwell’s new-mounting ambition rests, took place between Cromwell and Whitelocke on the subject of England’s political future. It happened to be a particularly agreeable autumn evening and Whitelocke was strolling in St James’s Park when he was accosted by the Lord-General.29 Cromwell, with courtesy beyond his usual practice, invited Whitelocke to stroll with him. The two men exchanged many mutual compliments, Cromwell the while taking care, said Whitelocke, to flatter him with extra skill. Cromwell then began a more serious discussion by returning to his familiar theme, the oft-expressed argument against the present Parliament, that it was their duty to make good what they had achieved. On no account must they ‘hazard all again by our private janglings, and bring those mischiefs upon ourselves which our enemies could never do’. To this, Whitelocke responded that the real question was how to keep the Army in peace. Cromwell agreed and commented further that the Army was beginning to have ‘a strange distaste against Parliament’, adding ‘I wish there was not too much cause of it’. He then mentioned the many popular grievances against the Rump, their delays, the perpetuation of their own powers, their scandalous lives, their injustice and partiality.
Whitelocke tried to defend the Rump. But Cromwell forced home the point: ‘There is little hopes of a good settlement to be made by them, really there is not … we all forget God, and God will forget us, and give us up to confusion.’ In short, the Rump had to be restrained. To this Whitelocke replied, reasonably enough, that they themselves had acknowledged Parliament as the supreme power: ‘and how to restrain and curb them after this, it will be hard to find at a way for it’. It was then that Cromwell asked the question which, on Whitelocke’s testimony, was to damn him thereafter in the minds of those who believed that he aimed starkly at the throne: ‘What if a man should take upon him to be king?’ To this Whitelocke replied: ‘I think that remedy would be worse than the disease.’ Cromwell proceeded to outline the legal uses of kingship. There was quite a cogent case for it, he said, since he had been assured by the lawyers that the servants of a de facto monarchy would be exempt from reprisals should there be any form of Restoration; then of course there was the traditional reverence paid in England to the concept of monarchy. Whitelocke’s answer to this ingenuous piece of pleading was scarcely encouraging: he pointed out that the concept of monarchy would on the one hand alienate all their friends who believed so firmly in the Commonwealth and on the other simply resolve the discussions on government into ‘Cromwell or Stuart’. Would it not therefore be better, if monarchy was really so beneficial, to negotiate with the humbled Charles II? But this eminently reasonable argument did not seem to please Cromwell; according to Whitelocke, the two men were never so intimate again, Cromwell seeming to avoid his former confidant, although he never voiced his displeasure publicly.
What can be fairly read into this momentous piece of dialogue? First and foremost, it must surely be accepted that such a conversation or some version of it did take place: for the length and detail make it impossible that Whitelocke could literally have imagined the whole encounter. Secondly, but not contradictorily, too much reliance should not be placed on the exact wording recorded by Whitelocke, the sole authority for the encounter. Even the most accurate and painstaking diarist can err by a phrase and Whitelocke’s record was almost certainly completed after the Restoration. That famous question ‘What if a man should take upon him to be king?’ may even have been posed much less crudely. But that posed it was, surely cannot be doubted. Indeed, what remains is interesting enough: a long conversation in which Cromwell openly considered the pros – no longer the cons – of monarchy, and mused aloud on the possibilities, if no more, of himself assuming the crown.
Cromwell’s inner thinking, it is suggested, now ran something along the following lines, put in a very simplified form: supposing all these amazing signal mercies, these victories brought about by God’s help under my leadership, supposing they are the divine method of pointing out to me that I should assume the crown? Why otherwise does this corrupt Parliament not reform itself, leaving the Army so obstinately bitter as a result, so that between them they make it impossible to reach a true settlement of the nation? Thus Cromwell mused aloud, as many another man has pondered understandably on his destiny, without the added spur of Cromwell’s extraordinary mystical streak. In both cases, a question asked aloud is very far as yet from being a considered plan. But when the Duke of Gloucester applied for permission to the Council of State to sail for the Continent early the next year, it was noticed that Cromwell did not attempt to gainsay it; although he had not initiated the Duke’s departure, it was thought by many that he was happy to see him go. Since the death of the Princess Elizabeth two years back, the Commonwealth had been upset by the accusations of poison which had attended her demise and in consequence nervous of the boy’s health. He was allowed £500 to aid his journey. To Cromwell his departure must have seemed yet another sign.*
The change in Cromwell’s philosophy of government which had occurred since the previous year was also symptomatic of the alteration in English political thinking as a whole which had occurred since 1649. Originally it had been the tendency of those in power in the new Commonwealth to explain their regime in terms of contract based on popular consent. It was suggested that by breaking the contract on which his authority was based by his misdeeds, the King had forfeited the consent of the people to his rule. A new form of government had then been set up consisting of Parliament – a single-chamber body – and its executive the Council of State. The authority of this body was that Act of January 1649 which had constituted the House of Commons the supreme source of power in the country, without King or House of Lords to check it. The supporters of the Commonwealth maintained that Parliament had now lawfully inherited the people’s consent to be ruled once possessed by the King. In 1651 in his First Defence of the People of England, Milton was still defending the Commonwealth as superior to the monarchy because it could not deteriorate into a tyranny. Throughout 1651 Mercurius Politicus was much concerned to point out the many imperfections of monarchies, whose subjects were compared to beasts cooped up in a den; people were said to be happier in a free state because there was less luxury, and where luxury dwelt, there was a natural tendency to tyranny.30
But for the majority of ordinary folk who were going to live, whether they liked it or not, under the Commonwealth, it was necessary to work out some new and more assimilable kind of justification for obedience to its rule than the doctrine of popular consent. For one thing Royalist or indeed Presbyterian, signatories to the Covenant, were hardly likely to be persuaded that the new regime rested on their own consent to it. Many had taken the oath of Engagement in the autumn of 1649 for the good reason that they had no alternative except ruin or flight. It was obvious that this spirit of gloomy acquiescence to the de facto regime would be greatly enhanced if some kind of de jure justification could be provided for it. While there would be those who preferred to regard the Engagement merely as an unpleasant providence to be digested, there would be others prepared to succumb to the arguments put forward by Francis Rous as early as April 1649, summed up by the claim that ‘though the change of a government were believed not to be lawful, yet it may be lawfully obeyed’. And he quoted St Paul to the Romans to show that every power in authority ought properly to be given obedience.31
This argument from the de facto to the de jure, which was what in essence it was, received its plainest expression in Marchamont Nedham’s pamphlet of 1650 which made the sword the foundation of the right to rule. Named ‘The Right of the Common Wealth stated’, it was subtitled ‘or the equity, utility, and necessity of a submission to the present government cleared’. And in his preface Nedham somewhat cynically addressed his reader to the situation he hoped to cure: ‘Perhaps thou art of an opinion contrary to what is here written; I confess that for a time I myself was so too, till some causes made me reflect with an impartial eye upon the affairs of the new government.’ Two years later, it was of course to receive its finest and purest form in the theories of Thomas Hobbes inLeviathan with their emphasis on civil order to hold off political anarchy. Hobbes posited quite simply that the justification of the civil authority was to be found in conquest, followed by the protection of the people that it subsequently afforded. This made the contract, only broken when the protection lapsed. Thus was order to be maintained. There was to be no nonsense concerning popular consent and that again suited the convenience of the Royalists who had no wish for such a dangerous doctrine to flourish. Nor for that matter was there to be that vague mantle of pointing providences, beloved of the less clear-minded philosophers who preceded Hobbes, who had in this manner often muddled up the two possible bases of power.*
Cromwell, in his thinking out loud to Whitelocke, had paralleled this development and this general atmosphere of change. He too was moving, in day-to-day terms, at least, away from the earlier notions which had once led him most surely to the death of the King – so many providences fitted together as in a jigsaw to produce the final execution scene. He now found himself in daily contact with what were in effect Hobbesian problems of civil protection, the lives of ordinary people, their social grievances. As his conversation with Whitelocke showed, Cromwell was beginning to doubt seriously whether the Rump would ever give the people this kind of protection which their Government should provide. He was moving clearly to the view that one man might perform the role better. It was a view shared incidentally by many observers at the time: just about the time of his talk with Whitelocke, the Venetian Ambassador was reporting that only Cromwell’s own ‘sagacity and influence’ could avert future troubles in England.32Moreover monarchy, as Cromwell had observed, was generally considered to have certain distinct legal advantages in the subsequent protections of its servants. At the same time though, in theory at least, he did not suspend his own personal search for signs.
As it was, the turn of the year into 1653 brought no apparent solution to the problems of a new Parliament, while the clamour of the Army for dissolution became understandably more ferocious when the soldiers’ pay had to be cut in favour of that of the sailors engaged in the expensive and so far not markedly successful Dutch War. In January the Army formed a committee to put forward its own demands, which included successive Parliaments, reform of the law and some liberty of conscience. But the franchise of the new electorate continued to be a matter for dispute, and the subject of the dissolution, in one form or another, was discussed in Parliament every Wednesday throughout February and March without any sort of real progress being made that would satisfy the suspicious soldiers. Moreover the more successful action of Blake against Tromp towards the end of February described by a London resident as ‘a huge crack of a sea victory’, transformed the humbler mood among the Rumpers into new martiality; Cromwell’s former ally and new opponent Vane, from the vantage point of the Admiralty committee, found his prestige enhanced.
In a way it was hardly surprising that the Army despaired of progress, and were as a result in an increasingly ugly mood. All those crucial questions concerning its future that had faced Parliament eighteen months back after Worcester still remained to be decided one way or the other. Although the franchise was agreed to be lowered to £200, specifically ‘to please the Army’, many of the Rumpers still clung to the notion of Recruitment and perpetuation of their own seats, which would keep the nature of the new assembly as firmly as ever in their own hands. Even if there was to be a dissolution, they were determined that it should be preceded by an adjournment first, up till early November, before the new Parliament met. This would still give them every chance of supervising the new elections, whatever the nature of the electorate.
It was understandable that both Cromwell personally and the Army generally wanted an immediate dissolution. In Cromwell’s case it was because his greatest dread was the emergence of ‘neuters’ in the new Parliament, uncaring of the work they had done to settle the nation along proper lines: such men the Rump might throw up, given the slightest opportunity. The Army had a less sophisticated interest in simply putting an end to the hated Rump, and were altogether vague in their plans for what should happen thereafter. But Cromwell and his associates, in hoping for a dissolution, did also apply some thought to what should replace it immediately. Obviously the country could hardly be left without government of any sort until the new Parliament: an interim council of a different complexion from the Rump was the best hope meantime. As in 1647 however, Cromwell seems to have tried to straddle both sides, not only in Parliament, where there were increasing divisions between pro- and anti-Cromwellians, but also in the Army. As a result by the beginning of April, his policy of negotiation was leading to some unpopularity with extremists. He was said to be ‘daily railed upon by the preaching party, who say they must have both a new Parliament and General before the work be done’. It was hardly surprising that the Venetian Ambassador described him as ‘much exasperated at bottom’.33
At some point, probably in early April, there was a meeting with some of the London clergy concerning the possible expulsion of the Rump. Here Edmund Calamy told Cromwell that popular opinion would not support him in such an action. Calamy was a distinguished Presbyterian divine and one of those who had preached against the killing of the King as being much against arbitrary government. ‘There will be nine in ten against you,’ he said. Cromwell responded, as so often in these days, with a question: ‘But what if I should disarm the nine, and put the sword into the tenth man’s hand; would that not do the business?’ It was not so much a cynical comment, as is sometimes suggested, as a suggestion that right must sometimes be brought about by force – as for example in wartime. The dialogue certainly illustrated that Cromwell’s mind was moving towards that point of view, even if the characteristic musing tone showed that he had not as yet fully made it up. To Whitelocke on 6 April he showed himself in a particular state of disgust when the usual discussion of the Bill of Elections was omitted by Parliament – ‘in distaste with Parliament and hastening their dissolution’. London buzzed with rumours as to what was happening, and Cromwell’s unwonted absence from Parliament and Council for about three weeks was interpreted by some as a sign that ‘something extraordinary was expected’. Monk’s biographer, Gumble, asserted later, but without further proof, that Cromwell had been ready to dissolve Parliament forcibly by 16 April, but wanted to be sure that Monk was on his side.34 The general picture, then, was of a man being inexorably driven towards a forcible – but not necessarily a violent – solution, and one who nevertheless still looked back at the more peaceful path of negotiation.
It was on Wednesday, 13 April that the Bill of Elections was discussed for the last time, before what was intended to be its final consideration the following week, on 20 April. If this bill of ‘the new representative’ had ever been passed in its existing format, the effect would have been the immediate adjournment of the House, although the new repository of power had not yet been decided upon. The House would then have met again six months later in order to make way ‘the new representative’ itself on 3 November. As to how that representative would have been elected, much obscurity has understandably attended the final stages of the decision on the franchise: after the Rump’s precipitate demise it was obviously in the interests of the new masters to cast as much opprobrium as possible on their last actions, if only to justify their ejection.
It has been suggested recently that, on balance of probabilities at least, even on the subject of the franchise, the Rump had been pushed into a situation of compromise. Despite continued pressures for Recruitment from some of their number, they had in fact agreed in theory to fresh elections following ‘a radical reduction and redistribution of parliamentary seats’ with Parliaments to sit for only two or three years, as was afterwards stated by Rumpers such as Henry Marten, St John and Thomas Scot.* But even this retreat on paper still left undecided the all-important question of the disposition of power in the Interregnum; while the intentions of the Rumpers themselves were still very much to the fore of the Army’s consideration, in view of the prolonged and wily nature of their opposition to what the Army considered progress. There was still no certain advantage in the Rump agreeing to a fresh electorate if they intended to see to it in the meantime, that by refusing a total dissolution, their power remained in the end as perpetuated as ever.
It was then the good faith of the Rump, a body the Army as a whole had learned to scorn and dislike, and their actual intentions towards the bill, which were as much at issue in these momentous days of rising tension as the terms of the bill itself. These intentions were indeed much discussed at a meeting of the officers held at the Cockpit in Whitehall on Tuesday, 19 April on the eve of what was expected to be the final meeting of the Rump on the subject. Cromwell reported when it was all over, in July, that the officers remained extremely perturbed on the question of the electorate, because whatever provisions were made, the Rump might still work out a method of controlling it. The officers told MPs present that they could not be sure ‘how it would be brought to pass, to send out an Act of Parliament into the Country, with such qualifications [as] to be a rule for electors and elected and not to know who should execute this’.35 There was still no guarantee against the feared emergence of Presbyterians and Neuters.
Everything now turned on the holding council to be left in power: probably some kind of committee system was envisaged and it is at this point that there is evidence that some kind of vital compromise was reached between Rumpers and officers. A council of forty seems to have been put forward. Certainly Cromwell was desperately anxious that power should pass once and for all out of the hands of the Rump to those who would make better use of it, and according to Heath he told the meeting that five or six men would do the Lord’s work better in one day than this Parliament had done in a hundred. But there is no reason to doubt Cromwell’s subsequent account of the way the meeting was left: after a prolonged series of discussions in which neither side was totally satisfied, ‘we desired they would devolve the trust over to persons of honour and integrity that were well known, men well affected to religion and the interest of the nation’. To this the Rumpers agreed in principle, or at least promised to discuss the question of the dissolution in their own terms in the meantime. ‘At the parting,’ said Cromwell later, ‘two or three of the chief ones, and very chiefest of them did tell us that they would endeavour to suspend further proceedings about the bill for a new representative until they had a further conference. And upon this we had great satisfaction, and we did acquiesce, and had hope, if our expedient would receive a loving debate, that the next day we should have some such issue thereof as would have given satisfaction to all.’36
The next morning, lulled into a sense of agreeable false security, the officer partook of a general conference in Cromwell’s own lodgings in Whitehall. The question of the interim council continued to be discussed among them. There was confidence in the word of the Rumpers that nothing would happen till the afternoon. Suddenly, and to the amazement of all, word came from the House of Commons that the chamber was packed – one hundred members present – and the bill was to be discussed immediately. Since nothing had been decided definitely concerning the interim council, clearly the resultant bill would deal with an adjournment not a dissolution. It will never be known with certainty who among the Rumpers was responsible for organizing this sudden rush, although suspicion points at Vane, if only to explain Cromwell’s extraordinary bitterness towards him in the subsequent scene. What is quite clear is that the news was a total surprise to Cromwell. Messengers went down to find out what was happening, and back came Colonel Ingoldsby with the horrific stunning news that the Rump despite its promises was once more discussing its own prolongation – ‘An Act which would occasion other Meetings of them again and prolong their sitting’. Then a second and third messenger panted up, with the news that the passage of the Act was nearly through.37
The effect upon Oliver was immediate. His next remark has the ring of absolute sincerity: ‘We did not believe persons of such a quality could do it.’ Whether or not he actually believed, or had been told erroneously, that they had reintroduced a Recruiter clause into the bill as well, is irrelevant to the great gust of disillusion that now swept over him concerning the Rump and all its works, giving way in its turn to hectic fury. So much for their offers of compromise, so much indeed for their honesty as individuals, so much for their whole corporate identity. They had promised not to discuss the bill for the time being, and now their word was broken. It could only mean that they were still prepared to use any means, fair or foul, to perpetuate their own miserable cowardly existence. It was a sign that their hour had struck. It was the breach of faith which triggered Cromwell’s insensate rage: ‘Thus, as we apprehended, would have been thrown away the liberties of the nation into the hands of those who had never fought for it,’ he cried bitterly afterwards.38
All of this was dramatic enough, but what was to follow showed that in Cromwell, the sleeping tiger, the man of action, was never so far relaxed that he could not spring into the fray once more, the moment his blood was up. Pausing merely to order up a party of soldiers, and not even bothering to change his clothes (the surprising informality of his dress struck contemporary witnesses: he had been in his own home and was wearing merely a plain black coat with grey worsted stockings), he rushed through Whitehall like a whirlwind. It was 11.15 a.m. by the dial in St James’s Park, so the industrious Ashmole discovered later,39 and it must have been only a few minutes later when this amazing apparition burst into the chamber of the House of Commons.
For what happened now the three main accounts,* although they differ like the synoptic gospels in details and order of events, together collate into an extraordinary picture of rising tempest. For a pregnant pause, Cromwell sat slumped in his place, listening to what was going on. Then standing up, he began to speak, battling still with the surging passions in his breast, for his first words, according to Sidney, were comparatively calm, and he still tried to commend Parliament for their pains and care of the public good. But even as he spoke, their treachery, the injustice of their behaviour started to well up within him, and his style began to change. Soon the rage was full upon him, beyond anyone’s control: he was talking in what Whitelocke called ‘a furious manner’, and what by Ludlow’s account must have been something almost demented, for he continued to speak ‘with so much passion and discomposure of mind as if he had been distracted …’, walking up and down the House like a madman, kicking the ground with his feet and shouting. His language in itself showed the extremes almost of paranoia as he strode about, pointing now at this man, now at that, singling out by his gestures if not by name his old enemies for condemnation; calling some of them ‘Whoremasters’ (he gazed at Marten and Sir Peter Wentworth), some drunkards, some corrupt and unjust men, and some scandalous to the profession of the Gospel. ‘Perhaps you think this is not parliamentary language,’ he bellowed. ‘I confess it is not, neither are you to expect any such from me … It is not fit that you should sit as a Parliament any longer. You have sat long enough unless you had done more good.’
At last Peter Wentworth, grandson of the Parliamentary leader of Queen Elizabeth’s day, had the guts to protest against Cromwell’s language of abuse, all the more horrible because it was coming from the man they had all ‘so highly trusted and obliged’. This was the last straw to Cromwell’s balance. ‘Come, come,’ he riposted savagely, ‘I will put an end to your prating. You are no Parliament. I say you are no Parliament. I will put an end to your sitting.’ Then he called to Thomas Harrison who was sitting on the other side of the House and shouted ‘Call them in’, or words to that effect. In rushed five or six files of musketeers from Cromwell’s own regiment of foot under Lieutenant-Colonel Worsley, making altogether between twenty and thirty soldiers. Cromwell pointed at the Speaker. ‘Fetch him down,’ he said grimly. Harrison, as told to Ludlow, remonstrated briefly with Cromwell – ‘the work is very great and dangerous’. But there was no gainsaying Oliver Cromwell at this point. Harrison duly pulled the Speaker down by his gown. Seeing the musketeers, it was Vane who called out: ‘This is not honest, yea it is against morality and common honesty.’ Cromwell turned on him like a snake and cried out in a loud voice: ‘O Sir Henry Vane, Sir Henry Vane, the Lord deliver me from Sir Henry Vane.’ And Sidney, who was sitting next to the Speaker and refused to obey orders to leave, was put out by threat of force from Harrison and Worsley.
Then Cromwell went to the table in front of the Speaker and looked at the mace, the symbol of the Speaker’s authority, lying there. ‘What shall we do with this bauble?’ he asked contemptuously. ‘Here take it away.’* So the mace was hurried out by the soldiers, and was subsequently stored carelessly for many days in the room of Worsley, in charge of the foot. The reference was to the jester’s cap and bells, his bauble, and this strange amalgamation of entertainment and dishonesty seems to have been much on Cromwell’s mind, for just as Vane was going out, he told him that he too was nothing but a juggler. Cromwell now turned to the eighty to a hundred members who must have been sitting aghast as they watched the ejection of their Speaker and the collapse of a whole style of procedure. ‘It is you that have forced me to do this,’ he cried with incredible bitterness, ‘for I have sought the Lord night and day, that he would rather slay me than put me upon the doing of this work.’ So saying he had the entire House cleared by the soldiers, but not before he had himself snatched up the paper containing the Act of Dissolution which was lying there waiting to be passed. He took the paper away with him and so it vanished from the sight of history. Thus its exact provisions will for ever remain a mystery. Perhaps Cromwell, on finding that it did not contain a new Recruiter clause, burnt it.42 The records of the House were also seized. By 11.40 a.m., according to Ashmole, it was all over: Parliament was extinguished, as lifeless as an old candle.
There was no official entry in the Commons’ Journal of the dissolution, but Mr Scobell, the clerk of the House, admitted at the Restoration to having written in his own handwriting and without being directed to do so: ‘This Day his Excellency the Lord General dissolved this Parliament: Which was done without Consent of Parliament.’ This entry was then officially expunged. At the time a wag with more wit than Scobell put up a poster outside: ‘This House is to be Lett; now unfurnished.’
Cromwell himself proceeded back to the Cockpit where he broke the news of what he had done to those officers who were not members of Parliament. It is significant that he referred to his action as being unpremeditated: he told the men that before he went down to the House he had not thought to have done this: ‘but perceiving the spirit of God so strong upon me, I would not consult flesh and blood’. In the afternoon Cromwell turned his attention to the Council of State, telling them that in future they could only meet together as private persons, since the Parliament of which they were the servants had been put to an end. It was then that John Bradshaw, not otherwise a particularly inspiring character, had his moment of greatness. ‘Sir,’ he replied courageously, ‘we have heard what you did at the House in the morning and before many hours all England will hear of it; but, Sir, you are mistaken to think that the Parliament is dissolved; for no power under heaven can dissolve them but themselves; therefore take you notice of that.’ Haselrig, Love and Scot made some more remarks to the same effect, but in the end, finding themselves ‘under the same violence’, departed.43
One thing emerges from this whole extraordinary episode with incontrovertible clarity, and that is that Cromwell acted in a fit of uncontrollable passion, the kind of sudden berserk fury of which his career provides a number of bouts, including the famous massacre of Drogheda. In each case, he felt himself suddenly assailed by some unlooked-for piece of aggression or doubledealing, and reacted accordingly. His language alone in Parliament, the accusations of whoremastering, to say nothing of the physical manifestations of his rage such as the kicking of the very floor of the House of Commons, point to some deep-seated disturbance beyond ordinary frustration or mere exasperation. It also seems clear that it was Ingoldsby’s message that provoked the storm, and by the same process of reasoning it must have been the sense of having been betrayed by the Rumpers which convinced Cromwell that nothing good could now ever come out of these men. It seems quite possible that the missing Act of Dissolution did show him, if he examined it later, that the Rump were proposing an Act based on a new electorate and had not inserted a Recruiter clause at the last minute. But it was the treachery of the sudden unplanned morning’s meeting, contrary to the previous night’s agreement, which had convinced him that the Rump all along had not changed its spots: perpetuation, under some form or other, was their aim. In this context the Act of Dissolution was less important to his motivation, since he only discovered it afterwards, than the brusque arrival of Ingoldsby’s message.
Afterwards of course Cromwell, like many another politician, justified what had been done in terms which owed a great deal to the prevailing atmosphere of the time, rather than to previous events. The specific Recruiter charge was comparatively slow to develop. Even the Army, in theirDeclaration made soon after the dissolution, only referred to the intentions of the Rump to ‘recruit the House with Persons of the same Spirit and Temper, thereby to perpetuate their own sitting’, not to their efforts to do so by law. Otherwise it laid heavy if generalized emphasis on the corruptions and jealousies of that body so that ‘this cause which the Lord hath so lately blessed, and bore witness to, must needs languish under their hands, and by degrees be wholly lost’. At the beginning of July, Cromwell described ‘the preposterous haste’ of the Rumpers as having been the last straw – but it was haste to get the bill through and thus keep their own control over the November elections, rather than haste to put in a Recruiter clause. These elections would have brought in ‘neuters or such as should impose upon their brethren, or such as had given testimony to the King’s party’.44 Only much later did the argument emerge that the Rumpers had deliberately introduced a new Recruiter clause into the Act of Dissolution.
At the time, one small but momentous decision on the part of the Rumpers, to continue the discussion of the bill and thus rush it through, turned Cromwell from his long-held policy of bridging the gap between MPs and officers to final permanent distrust of the MPs. His decisive temperament, coupled with his streaks of manic rage, did the rest and produced certainly the most amazing scene in English Parliamentary history. ‘Is this not a strange turn?’ wrote Dorothy Osborne wryly to her lover, William Temple: surely John Pym if he were alive might think that this was as great a breach of the privilege of Parliament as ever the demanding of the Five Members had been. To Europe later Nouvelles Ordinaires extended the old explanation of what had transpired: the Army had been led to this ‘par la necessité et par le providence’, beyond their design and beyond their previous thoughts.45 So they flung themselves upon the mercy of God, hoping for his blessing on what they had done.
Unfortunately for Cromwell personally, he could in future no longer hope for the blessing of those who condemned in toto military rule. By using his sword to cut the Gordian knot of the Rump Parliament, he had at the same time flourished it in the faces of all England. There could be no more glad confident morning again of Parliamentary government. The basis of his power had well and truly been shown to be the muskets of his soldiers. Yet curiously enough this result was in the final analysis the product of impulse rather than reflection. Perhaps there was no other way to get rid of the odious Rump except by force, of a sort: but force need not necessarily be identified with violence. It was violence which had now raised its hideous head in the House of Commons, in a manner never to be forgotten so that in British politics still, ‘Cromwellian solutions’ are sometimes identified with Draconian ones. Better for Cromwell then to have guarded the jewels of his passion, let his impetuous temper sparkle in private, and used it to inspire an equally masterful but less overtly brutal action in public.
The tragedy of Oliver Cromwell as a statesman was that those qualities that had raised him in war, qualities so natural to his character, decision, speed and dash in a critical situation, the ability to strike and strike hard, could in the far more ambiguous sphere of politics turn to something quite else. It was a point to be made later in the year by Cromwell’s enemies the Fifth Monarchists, who had a common saying among themselves that in the field the General was ‘the graciousest and most gallant man in the world, but one of the field and when he came home again to government, the worst’.46 The trouble was that these adapted qualities were not only less attractive but even in the long term less effective. It was patience, management, reserve and cunning which Milton’s chief of men needed to bring about the victories of peace.