CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
… Weeds and nettles, briers and thorns, have thriven under your shadow, dissettlement and division, discontentment and dissatisfaction, together with real dangers to the whole.
Cromwell’s speech dissolving the 1st Protectoral Parliament
‘Indefatigable Cromwell’, as Marvell called him, now set about to create those new conditions of the country for which Oliver at least had been so long desirous. He did so with the help of his colleagues in the Council only, for until a Parliament should be summoned both legislative and executive functions were to be performed by Protector and Council of State, without further check upon them. These important associates themselves consisted very much of names already known, for one reason or another, as solid Cromwell supporters. In the Protector’s own words, much had been learned from the lesson of the Barebones assembly, and the names of the members of the Council of State displayed a full grasp of the realities of power. Not necessarily from the elected Saints, but from men with a vested interest in the alliance could executive loyalty be expected.
Thus the Council included not only the expected soldiers such as Lambert, Desborough and Monk, and a divine such as John Owen, but some less predictable names of the middle ground. There was for example Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, a leading West Country magnate, who after the Restoration bid fair as 1st Earl of Shaftesbury to become the greatest politician of his age; but he had eschewed the King’s cause as early as 1644, and had taken the Engagement and had been officially pardoned for his delinquency by Parliament in March 1653. He was an excellent example of one who currently believed in supporting the de facto Government for the good of the country. Then there was Sir Gilbert Pickering, personally inclined to Oliver’s service, and Sir Charles Wolseley who had taken such a vocal part in the termination of Barebones. A significant appointment was that of Edward Montagu, son of Cromwell’s former rival Manchester who was made Admiral of the Fleet with the specific task of ridding the Navy of its disconcerting radicals. These were solid men, as the opposition to King Charles i had once consisted of established figures: there was nothing in them of the wild men who had later started to grow up like dandelions in the green fields of reform.
Above all there was the devoted and capable John Thurloe who had succeeded Walter Frost as Secretary to the Council early in 1652. The son of an Essex clergyman, and then aged thirty-six, he had early studied law, and after being recommended to Oliver St John, had become one of the secretaries to the Parliamentary commissioners at Uxbridge in 1648; he had also travelled with St John on his fruitless mission to Holland in 1651. Thurloe brought to Cromwell’s service not only the essential qualities of application and brains – he was, said Henry Cromwell, adept at picking the lock that led to the hearts of men – but also an intense loyalty to his master personally. At the same time, under his sway, an intelligence service was developed, which like invisible vine leaves was beginning to twine its acanthine way around nearly all the correspondence proceeding in or out of Britain at this time. At its height, monitoring mail and employing spies was rumoured to have cost £70,000 a year – so at least was Samuel Pepys’s belief. Heath wrote of £60,000 a year. Presumably both spoke with more awe at vanished glories than accuracy since the actual figure has been estimated as being more like £3000 a year. The average pay of Thurloe’s spies seems to have been about £10 a month. Nevertheless his employees were numerous, his interferences highly effective, and the exaggerated reports of a later age only pay further tribute to the impression he created. As for Thurloe’s open expenditure, with his own £800 a year, and numerous secretaries (including John Milton) messengers and clerks, this has been calculated to have come to well over £5000 a year.1
This team now proceeded to tackle with much industry all those reforms that had in their estimation been pending so long, due to the languid energies of the Rump and the ill-directed efforts of Barebones. It has been pointed out that between the December of the Protectoral inauguration, and the September of the following year when Parliament met, eighty-two ordinances were enacted, including the long-awaited reform of the law, and the reorganization of the State Church. Although the State papers show that Cromwell himself did not make a practice of attending the Council – in 1654 he attended only twenty-eight out of one hundred and sixty-four sittings – the impetus to these reforms was given by the Protector. As for Milton’s part, it has been conjectured that he received the gist of those messages he was to write either from Thurloe, or from the Council itself while in session. Perhaps even on occasion his instructions came from Cromwell himself although the point is questionable. Milton would then write, or cause to have written, the message in English; the next stage was to have the English version vetted either by Council or Protector. Finally the Latin draft was written out, or as his blindness deepened, dictated to his amanuensis.2
The law reforms were of particular importance because they had been so long nagged over.3 Puritanism-in-practice was in many ways far in advance of its times in humanity. Capital punishment for example was to be removed, except in cases of murder and treason, on the eminently reasonable grounds that ‘to hang for a trifle and acquit murder is the ministration of the law through ill framing of it’. In August an ordinance of the Council regulated the controversial Chancery Court; plaintiffs were to give securities for costs, in order to stop vexatious suits, and suits were in future to be held in order of setting-down. There was also to be a table of fees for lawyers, and they were explicitly forbidden to frame their cases in interminable sheaves of language, whose only effect was to increase the length of the case, and thus heighten their own fees. As for the treason penalties, although these were to be exacted against anyone who denounced the new Instrument of Government, it was typical of Oliver’s spirit that he came to apply this law against the Fifth Monarchists in a way that was theoretically arbitrary, practically merciful.
The language of these passionate folk lost nothing in its violence as the Protectorate proceeded, and they were soon in grave trouble over their maledictions. The Protectoral regime and even Oliver himself, in the view of some, could now claim from the Pope or Popery generally the doubtful honour of being the Anti-Christ, a constant title of execration, which had been applied to shifting objects of abuse down the centuries. Anna Trapnel, the strange Hackney prophetess, discerned in Cromwell the Little Horn, a horrible excrescence on the head of the Beast, as depicted in the Fifth Monarchists’ favourite book of Daniel. The numerological calculations of John More, a London apprentice, brought the total of Cromwell’s titles to a sinister six hundred and sixty-six – the number of the Beast.4 Since any denunciation of the Government constituted treason, inevitably such burning-tongued declaimers ended up in prison. But once incarcerated, Oliver refused to have them tried. The reason was simple. A trial would not fail to result in the imposition of the heavy treason penalties. Imprisonment without trial, for all its seeming tyranny, saved them from themselves.
Oliver also displayed a disconcerting leaning for arguing with such people. John Rogers, the Fifth Monarchist, had become one of his most fervent denigrators, one of those who came to identify him with the Anti-Christ, and had not only harangued him from the pulpit but had had a fulminatory pamphlet printed whose title recalled the famous words of warning given to Nebuchadnezzar: ‘Mene, Tekel, Perez’ – although in this case it was subtitled ‘a letter lamenting over Oliver, Lord Cromwel’. Rogers further proclaimed a day of solemn humiliation for the rulers’ failings, compared Whitehall unfavourably to Sodom, and demonstrated how Cromwell personally had broken at least eight Commandments. From the point of view of the Government, it was hardly surprising that Rogers ended up in prison, and almost any other potentate than Oliver Cromwell might well have left the excitable preacher there, where he could safely ignore his insults. Cromwell, however, either out of his genuine taste for discussion with those of contrary opinions or out of an inability to believe that he could not personally convince the Fifth Monarchists to a better way of thinking – and indeed the two qualities were probably closely allied in him – sent for Rogers from prison in February 1655.
The result was a verbal ding-dong battle in which neither side would give way.5 Oliver compared Rogers, with all his blasphemous denunciations, to the one little fly that could ruin a whole good box of ointment. He boasted that never before had there existed such liberty of conscience in England as at the present time. Rogers’s language in reply became high-flown and to the Protector increasingly incomprehensible, until at last he plunged into Latin. This was a language in which, as has been seen, the Protector did not feel noticeably at home. On this occasion, he interrupted Rogers sharply to ask: ‘What do you tell us of your Latin?’ To this Rogers replied impertinently but scoring the point: ‘Why, my Lord, you are Chancellor of Oxford, and can you not bear that language?’ So back Rogers went to prison again, and far from suspending his attacks, took to describing Cromwell as a serpent whose horns allowed him to look like a lamb. But the truth was that Cromwell had showed, and would continue to show, lamb-like restraint in his attitude to these demonstrative critics, which does him much credit in comparison with many other practitioners of supreme power.
Further examples of Oliver’s desire to soothe and conciliate, to weld the nation into some kind of contented unity under his fatherly care, were provided by his treatment of others who had officially fallen foul of the State. The laws against former Royalists or delinquents regarding their lands were of course still in force and the complicated administration of the process still continuing: two-thirds of their estates were to be sequestered from all those who had borne arms in the King’s cause. Catholics, whether they had borne arms or not, were subject to confiscation, although the penalties for mere recusants were lighter than for those who had thrown in delinquency as well. It was also possible under certain circumstances to compound or pay a fine of money to retain the estates. Obviously in the prolonged and detailed working out of these laws there were many opportunities for appeal and for evasion, and many properties slipped through the net; in particular there is evidence that Protestant or Roundhead agents or relations would hold land for their proscribed friends, for which purpose family solicitors were often used. As a result, although obviously there was some changeover in the ownership of land, the comparatively low figures of land restitution after the Restoration were to illustrate how surprisingly competent former landowners must have been in retaining their properties, and the financial needs of the Government would make the continuance of the process all too likely. Even so, seven hundred estates were sold by the acts of sale between 1651 and 1652.6
Cromwell’s attitude as Protector was however felt from the first to be sympathetic to the plight of those former Royalists who had now settled down to support by inaction the current regime. In 1654 the Government approved the leasing of the sequestered lands back to their original owners, which in itself helped restore the status quo, even if the former owners had to summon up the money for the rents. Edmund Ludlow in his Memoirs went further and actually accused Cromwell of instructing the judges on the circuits to show special favour to the Cavaliers. This is an exaggeration, nevertheless it indicates the prevalent impression that Oliver wished to live at peace with the former Royalists, as a first step to which they were to be treated less harshly. In certain cases of arbitrary confiscation initiated under the Commonwealth, proceedings were actually halted under the Protectorate. The further sale of the Craven estates for instance was halted; Lord Hatton’s estate was prevented from being sequestered for lack of proper evidence. As a result, it has been demonstrated with conviction that the condition of the lay Royalists gradually improved after Cromwell came to power.7
In the case of the Roman Catholics, whose sufferings were liable to be greater, because the presumption of delinquency was always so strong in members of the proscribed faith, Cromwell’s desire to help the law-abiding among the community was the more marked, because it was exceptional to his age. In fact Cromwell’s attitude to English Catholicism after he became Protector – in striking contrast to his behaviour towards the Irish variety – is the most forcible illustration of the way his mind was turning more and more away from doctrinal implications and towards such practical subjects as law and order. In the summer of 1654 he struck up a new friendship, quite as unconventional as his acquaintance with the Royalist Lady Dysart, with Sir Kenelm Digby, who was not only a Roman Catholic of standing, but had also been in the household of Queen Henrietta Maria. As with Bess, it seems to have been Digby’s idiosyncratic personal qualities which attracted the Protector. Digby was described by the Venetian Ambassador as ‘a man full of imagination and idle fancies [chimere]’. Some of these fancies were scientific, others wilder, for Digby was both extremely eccentric and a great talker. John Aubrey described him as ‘the most accomplished Cavalier of his time’, one who would command respect anywhere if he were to be dropped out of the clouds, although the Jesuits were said to have added the unkind rider that this high opinion would only apply if he stayed no longer than six weeks. Digby was a giant of a man, of much physical strength, with a great booming voice to match, his frame topped by a broad and beaming face, almost cherubic in its expression. He had originally been associated with the Army-Catholic talks of 1648, but had been banished the next year. His friendship with Cromwell began early in 1654 when he presented himself to the Council of State to ask for the return of his estates. To the fury of the rabidly anti-Catholic William Prynne, who called Digby with disgust Cromwell’s ‘particular favourite’ and accused him at one and the same time of seeking a Cardinal’s hat, Digby ended by going to reside at Whitehall.8
For the next two years or so the pair were much together, Digby hoping that Cromwell would favour the Catholics, Cromwell that the Catholics would settle down to favour him. When Digby received a pass to go abroad in October 1655, his protestation was effusive: ‘Whatsoever must be disliked by my Lord Protector and Council of State must be detested by me … I make it my business everywhere to have all the world take notice how highly I esteem myself obliged to his Highness, and how passionate I am for his service, and for his honour and interests, even to the expecting of my life for them.’ Of course the relationship between Cromwell and Digby was the kind where the supporters of each side suspected their own friend of being suborned by a cunning adversary. Nevertheless in other ways Cromwell did show an interesting predilection for clemency towards the Catholics. In the summer of 1654 when a wretched priest of seventy, Father John Southworth, was caught and under the harsh treason laws sentenced to the cruel and horrible fate of dismembering and quartering, Cromwell showed genuine distress. To observers he seemed much moved and ‘averse from such cruelty’, and declared himself in favour of freedom of conscience for all. Although on this occasion he did not prevail, and Southworth died, the possibility of toleration for peaceable Catholics obviously lingered in his mind. For the following summer he was instrumental in mounting a secret mission to Rome, the object of which would have been to secure an ‘engagement’ with the Pope. English Catholics would have been allowed to worship in private, in return for which the Pope would no longer have preached rebellion against the English Government. The official renewal of the laws against the Jesuits in April 1655 may even have been intended as a cover for these negotiations, since there is no evidence that further indictments followed them.9
Unfortunately the talks were unsuccessful. Of the two men principally involved, William Mettam, the scion of a distinguished Yorkshire family and probably the nephew of the martyred Jesuit Father Thomas Mettam, had been a former student at the English college in Rome. The other, Thomas Bayly, was of a difficult nature; it seems that the negotiations which were essentially of a highly delicate nature in view of the existing state of the English laws eventually broke down as a result of his personality rather than anything else. This abortive outcome did not prevent both hopes and fears being raised – the fears in this case being those of the exiled Royalists in the entourage of King Charles ii, who saw Cromwell in the process of stealing a march on their own sovereign. Hyde was disconsolate or outright indignant on the subject in his correspondence of the summer of 1655: ‘It would be very strange if after so much hypocrisy and juggling, Cromwell should gain credit at Rome,’ he wrote, ‘and be looked upon as a person who would perform any civil offices to the Catholics, when it is notoriously known that his interest and power is only in those persons who are irreconcilable to them.’ But the fact was that Cromwell had succeeded in signally embarrassing the exiles: it was only natural that the Catholics should now wonder what Charles ii would do for them, if in power. How could the King make any definite proposals, was Hyde’s angry response when, for one thing, he had no idea what Cromwell’s propositions might be? What was more, Charles was shown no ‘affection’ by the Pope.10
It was a tribute to Oliver’s intentions at least that the French Ambassador, Bordeaux, was of the considered opinion that the English Catholics fared better under the Protectorate than under any previous Government. The immediate consequence was not only relaxation but profusion. The records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, which had shown a mere 78 persons converted to the Catholic faith in the dark days of 1650– 1, reported 364 converts in its annual letter of 1654, rising to 416 in 1655.11 By October 1655 the Venetian Ambassador was having six Masses said every day in his spacious ambassadorial chapel, all packed with English people who were using this tacitly allowed loophole to practise their religion; on festivals, there were as many as ten Masses said. Although in later years, the ugly connexion between Catholic recusancy, profitable fines, and the financial problems of the Government would lead to the diminution of such a favourable atmosphere, the evidence remains that the name of Oliver Cromwell himself was one which English Catholics had no reason to curse and some reasons to bless.12
In some ways the plight of the dispossessed Anglican clergy was more grievous than that of the avowed heretics, for the Puritans were not capable of forgetting so fast their former disputes, and those years when the Anglicans had seen to the ejection of those suspected of Puritanism were not so far away. The efforts of the Triers for the removal or disqualification of unsuitable ministers got under way in March 1654. They included Baptists as well as moderate Presbyterians but were of course most strongly Independent. Nevertheless the people managed to retain a sufficient number of their old ministers, as in the changes of land ownership, for it to be necessary for the Government specifically to forbid this in the autumn of 1655. Yet even here Oliver showed himself hopefully on the side of conciliation. He never showed any particular sympathy for the Book of Common Prayer so dearly loved by the Anglicans, yet certain petitions for the preservation of Anglican ministers were successful. And when the sufferings of the ejected Anglicans (or episcopalians) were laid before him in a personal interview of January 1656 by the former Archbishop Ussher, the Protector suggested the subject should be laid down before the Council. That was, so long as the ministers in question declared their intentions of living quietly. Ussher died a short while later: Cromwell not only had his funeral in Westminster Abbey paid for out of State funds but also – an even more remarkable concession – did not prevent the Anglican burial service being used beside the grave.
One incident involving the Earl of Bridgewater, by now living retired from public causes, showed very clearly Oliver’s personal determination to smooth out differences where they could not be eliminated.* Oliver, by his own account in a long and positively ingratiating letter of explanation to Bridgewater of 9 May 1654, had made an order giving a living at Whitchurch in Shropshire to a certain Mr Porter, under the impression that Porter was desired by the parishioners. In the meantime a Dr Bernard had come forward, having been presented to the living by its patron, Bridgwater, and had tried to maintain that Porter had no right to the place, being ‘disaffected’ and having countenanced the enemy coming to Worcester. The ‘godliest and best affected Inhabitants were for his the Doctor’s coming in’. But on further examination, it turned out to be the Doctor himself who was ‘legally obnoxious’, and so Bernard had been ordered to forbear from taking Porter’s place until some further enquiries could be made. In all of this, wrote Oliver, he had been ‘without any purpose to prejudice your Lordships right of Presentation’. And although ‘I can find it in my heart to incline you to Mr Porter,’ said the Protector, ‘yet it is with this clearness, that I shall leave your Lordship most free to exercise your own Liberty.’13
These essentially placatory words – the letter ended ‘wherefore leaving the business wholly to your Lordships dispose’ – were met with an equally propitiatory reply on 28 June in which Bridgewater’s main regret seemed to be that the debts of his brother-in-law William Courteen, for whom his father had unfortunately engaged, and who had become bankrupt over the Dutch East India Company, were preventing him leaving his home to petition the Protector personally. Little had he realized the problems surrounding his presentation of Bernard, believing him ‘acceptable to both your Highness and the parish’. How difficult it was for him now to revoke the gift, even to show ‘that willing obedience which I am always ready to perform and desire to express towards your Highness’. Even so, he would accept another candidate, so long as the Protector did not insist on the insufferable Porter, whose bearing towards Bridgewater had throughout been intolerable, and whose choice would result in dreadful divisions within the parish itself.14 But in the event, Bridgewater did not have to endure either Porter or another imposed choice. On the contrary, on 23 August Oliver made an order cancelling his first initiative in the shape of Porter, and confirming Bridgewater’s own right of presentation.15 So this storm in a Shropshire clerical tea-cup ended with the Protectoral support firmly on the side of the old order and old privileges of the nobility.
Yet one of the planks of Porter’s platform had been that the sequestration of Bridgewater’s estate had robbed him of the right of presentation. In fact, over the circumstances of this sequestration, which were the subject of some argument between Bridgewater and the local authorities as represented later by Major-General Worsley, Oliver continued to take the side of conciliation – which was in effect the side of Bridgewater’s claim. There had been a complaint that the Bridgewater estates had never been properly sequestered despite the Earl’s Royalist affiliations for which Bridgewater was duly summoned by the Lancashire Commissioners.16 To this Bridgewater replied with a petition to the Protector ‘as the Fountain of all Justice in this Commonwealth’ to give him ‘such gracious relief as that he might be freed from the supposed contempt’.17 Oliver responded with an order staying the Commissioners and Worsley from further execution for the time being.18 The Commissioners duly protested, possibly influenced by local politics:19 Worsley came of a family, Worsleys of Booth, already known to be hostile to the Bridgewater Egertons. But on 22 March 1656 a letter came to the Commissioners written to His Highness’s command by Oliver’s secretary William Malyn supporting the general innocence of Bridgewater, who should never after all have been a candidate for seizure. In short there had been a mistake, and it was the Protector’s pleasure that the Earl’s estate should be freed. The whole incident was best summed up in the concluding words of this communication: ‘His Highness desires to be tender where Innocency appears.’20
There were however those in England to whom no gestures of reconciliation would ever alter the inexorable fact of Oliver Cromwell’s usurpation. For them no relaxation of regulations, no policy of withdrawal was temperamentally possible. One Anglican bishop Brian Duppa wrote of himself during this period as being secured ‘the same as a tortoise doth, by not going out of my shell’. But not all former Royalists – Anglicans or Catholics – could emulate the action of the tortoise. Although the precise moment of inception is in doubt, by 1654 a society for organized Royalist resistance known as the Sealed Knot* was already in existence in its early stages. The original six leaders, Lords Belasyse and Loughborough, Sir William Compton, Colonels John Russell and Edward Villiers and Sir Richard Willys, joined during the course of this year. But although all were men of good family, and Belasyse at least was a Catholic, it was noticeable that there was no really great magnate among their number: such men had far too much at stake in preserving their estates to abandon their own tortoise-like pose until the movement should have a real hope of success. As a result the Sealed Knot was characterized by a certain inanition in its early stages, an attempted rising of February 1654 being abandoned, which meant that rival plotters grew up beneath its branches, complicating the under-growth of Royalist intrigue still further.21
The first concerted attempt to upset the Government was planned for May 1654, led by John Gerard, a former Royalist Colonel and not in fact one of the Sealed Knot’s members. It aimed certainly at that area where the new Government was most vulnerable – the life of the Protector. At all times during the Protectorate indeed, Oliver must be regarded as subject to this constant threat. As with all controversial heads of State including tyrants and dictators, the wonder must be that it never succeeded. Even the stately procession made by Protector and Council of State in February 1654 to the City of London had been marred by such an attempt on the part of a Miss Granville. There had been much panoply: Oliver himself wore a ‘musk-coloured’ (reddish-brown) suit richly embroidered in gold, the church-bells of St Giles’, Cripplegate were rung (the only mention of such an acclaim throughout the Interregnum), the streets railed off in blue cloth and decorated with great flags and streamers bearing the names of City companies. At Temple Bar he was met by the Lord Mayor and Aldermen, sitting on horseback in their robes; Oliver himself then alighted from his coach and mounted a horse. At the subsequent banquet ‘Lord Henry Cromwell’, as he was now termed, sat on his father’s left.22 All precautions could not prevent an untoward incident on the return. A brick-bat was hurled at the Protectoral coach.
That was a crude enough assault. The problem was the attempts of those armed with more lethal weapons. Part of the protection which surrounded Oliver and preserved him, at any rate in the early years, was indeed the uncertainty of the Royalists as to what sort of situation his death would provoke. So long as there were signs of easement thanks to his usurpation, it might be unwise to exchange one bearable fate for a worse. Assassination was only a tempting weapon when Royalists could be convinced that Oliver’s death would result in Charles’s return; quite apart from the fact that Charles himself seems to have had ambivalent feelings on the subject of slaying, this restoration was by no means certain to follow in 1654. Nevertheless it was now plotted that Oliver should be seized by a company of thirty men, headed by Gerard, as he travelled between Whitehall and Hampton Court. Unfortunately for the Royalists, the plan was quickly and circumspectly terminated by the ever-efficient Thurloe, whose talent for surveillance extended to the penetration of as many such enterprises as he could manage. In this case, it was all over so quickly that one suspects some Government foreknowledge, to say nothing of the fact that Oliver changed his route to water at the last moment, foiling the original arrangement.
On Friday, 19 May Lambert was writing off from London to a connexion of his wife’s family in Yorkshire, John Bright, on the subject: ‘We have assurances of a very bloody attempt to have been acted upon the Lord Protector, but I hope the neck of it is broken …’ Yet the conspirators were not arrested till the next day, and the Council itself had only been informed two days previously.23 Although it is going too far to accuse Cromwell of actually instigating the plot, there is a compromise possibility – that the plot had been allowed to proceed, in order that the desired effect should be produced of popular disgust with the assassins, and renewed affection towards the Protector. It was a ploy well understood by Elizabethans such as Walsingham, and one which any Government faced with similar problems might profitably copy.
The penalties were public but not particularly widespread. There was a trial, and of the conspirators three were transported, and two executed. John Gerard died on 10 July, his behaviour to the last, said Mercurius Politicus, being ‘sprightly’ and the substance of the last discourse permitted to him to make before death ‘Cavalier-like’. But there were certain side effects. For one thing, an absurd fellow named the Baron de Baas despatched by Cardinal Mazarin from France to aid Bordeaux in his diplomatic negotiations had somehow managed to get himself implicated in Gerard’s plans. Baas had arrived in January and taken part in a few cordial conversations with the Protector in Latin, before each side relapsed into their own tongue. His status caused difficulties from the first, for Bordeaux was still intended to act as Ambassador, while Baas was merely a personal envoy; yet Baas, like Bordeaux, demanded the right to be covered in the Protector’s presence. A battle of protocol ensued, which Bordeaux sarcastically termed ‘cet important chapitre de châpeaux’. But Baas was a Gascon, and like his brother Charles who adopted their mother’s name of D’Artagnan to become the prototype of Dumas’ celebrated musketeer hero, had the qualities of brashness and over-confidence which were seen to better advantage in the pages of a historical novel than in delicate diplomatic intrigues. Betraying but little understanding of the country in which he now found himself, he decided that the regime could be easily overthrown, on the grounds that the soldiers who supported it were feeble and dissipated: in proof of which was the fact that the very sentinels wore nightcaps under their hats.24
But Baas could hardly hope that his overtures towards conspiracy would remain undiscovered. His contacts were blown. Cromwell, no longer smiling and friendly, gave the indiscreet envoy three days to get out, but not before he had also provided him with a grim demonstration of the imprudence of meddling in the internal concerns of a foreign land. For the Protector sent for Baas and in front of the Council asked him outright whether the assassination of his person, the uprising of his people, and the sowing of divisions in his Army, all of which Baas was known to want to bring about, were his idea solely or the profound aspirations of the French Government. Baas unwisely counterattacked with accusations concerning Oliver’s dealings with the Spaniards, jealousy of France for Spain playing already a major part in the Anglo-French discussions in progress. This put the Protector into an absolute fury. He demanded not only Baas’s ejection, but his further punishment by the Cardinal. It was only by degrees that the enraged Protector calmed down and allowed himself to be convinced, whether accurately or otherwise, for the sake of future relations, that King and Cardinal had been quite ignorant of their envoy’s pursuits.
Yet in May, after peace with the Dutch had at last been achieved on terms suitable to both countries, Oliver had been genuinely anxious to discuss French terms. Medals were struck at Amsterdam to commemorate this Anglo-Dutch treaty, known as the Peace of Westminster. On the one side they displayed the twin female allegorical figures of England (with the Irish Harp on her knees) and Holland (with the Belgic lion at her feet). The reverse showed two large warships side by side at sea with the optimistic inscription in Latin: ‘Commerce, tranquillized by the double alliance, flourishes on the sea, and the whole world receives the allies with pleasure.’ There were bonfires and city ceremonies in England, and much hospitality dispensed by the Dutch. This peace certainly established England anew in European minds as a power to be treated with careful reckoning in the future. It also left Oliver’s ever-questing mind free to consider more plans for further European adventure; typically, when in the midst of exchanging papers with the Dutch Ambassador, he had pointed to a copy of a Psalm and commented: ‘We have exchanged many Papers, but I think this is the best of them.’25 To Baas, before his disgrace, he had raised his own particular interests which might be considered in a future French alliance, including liberties for Huguenots and the position of the Prince de Condé (a sympathy which Baas failed to comprehend).
Future negotiations were put back into the more skilled hands of Bordeaux, a man whose feeling for the country of his mission extended to adding an English mistress ‘Marie Skipbourg’ (probably Mary Skippon), by whom he had an illegitimate daughter Bérénice, to those attachments already noted by Saint-Simon. Nor did Bordeaux display any of the linguistic superiority to her sometimes associated with the French, for when writing to his Mary he apologized for not being ‘more learned in this English tongue’. His subsequent assurance, that neither public nor private affairs nor indeed the views of his own wife would alter his ‘inclination’ towards her, was however perhaps carrying the obligations of an Anglo-French entente rather too far. Bordeaux also had money troubles. At the start of his mission, his wealthy father had refused him either a subsidy or his blessing. To this Bordeaux replied sharply that he might at least have spared him his blessing, since it would need a stronger faith than his own to convert it into money.26But for all such problems, Bordeaux continued to play an important mediatory role.
The brouhaha produced by Baas’s implication was a minor effect of the first open Sealed Knot activity and time would show it to be remediable. The problems brought to the organization itself by the collapse of the conspiracy were of more serious consequence. There was a split in the very heart of the Sealed Knot between Belasyse and Willys, for Willys believed that Belasyse had been responsible for betraying him to Lambert. Then there were the natural jealousies which existed between the old guard of royal retainers living on the Continent, and those who considered themselves to bear the brunt of affairs living in beleaguered England. To these complications was added the further division which now sprang up between those who wanted action at all costs, if necessary bringing in other disaffected groups such as the Presbyterians and some former Army officers, and those who wanted to wait until the atmosphere was more favourable, which meant in essence waiting on the possibility of Continental aid. In the event it was the activist party which was to take the stage early in the following year, but the character of their efforts was to be much debilitated by these divisions already sown in the general Royalist structure of resistance.
Not only England, but Ireland also needed a new future mapped out for her. There were two aspects to this. One was of unity: a total union of the two countries was conceived, the Irish Parliament being abolished in favour of Irish MPs at Westminster, as had already been seen in the Barebones assembly, and was to be further extended in the first Parliament of the Protectorate. There were to be no customs barriers between the two countries, a provision of much commercial benefit to the Irish. Unfortunately the other aspect was of disunity, of separation, and a vast changeover in the ownership of Irish acres, in the course of which it has been estimated that two-thirds of the land in Ireland changed hands for ever. It was this second transaction which under the name of the Cromwellian Settlement has of course characterized the rule of the Protectorate in Ireland. In September 1653 a new Act of Plantation was passed by which the English Government intended to reserve for itself Dublin, Cork, and the lands of fertile Kildare and Carlow; this area was for satisfying its own debts and meeting the claims of English Parliamentary notables. English towns were also given corporate grants and land, as the town of Gloucester received a grant, to assuage it for its sufferings in the cause of Parliament.27 Then there was the £360,000 now owing to the Adventurers to be met, and to this was apportioned the lands of Leinster, Munster and Ulster. Most of the rest of Ireland was given over to the officers and soldiers of the English Army to satisfy arrears of pay which now amounted to over one and a half million pounds, and other Commonwealth debts incurred over supplies. Lastly, the two barren provinces of Clare and Connaught, whose population geographically speaking it was possible to contain easily by the retention of a narrow English strip, were to be reserved for the native Irish.28
In this manner it was intended that Ireland for the future should consist of three types of area: the eastern quarter of Wicklow, Wexford, Kildare and Carlow was devised as totally English, with the whole of the Irish population removed, men, women, workers, down to the humblest Irish child. Nor were any Irish to be allowed in any of the towns. Then there was to be a mixed area of English and Irish – those Irish that is who could prove their right to stay, and even here there were to be no galling Irish names in the schools, no Dermots, no Macs or Os as prefixes. In Clare and Connaught of course, the third area, these prefixes could flourish at will. Obviously such a course presupposed a major transfer of virtually a whole population. In fact such a process of wholesale transplantation had already been envisaged by an Act of August 1652 which condemned all those Irish, or indeed Anglo-Irish, who could not prove a state of mind towards the forces of Parliament termed ‘Constant Good Affection’, to lose one-third of their estates, and have the remaining two-thirds of them accorded in the newly designated areas of transplantation. This was quite apart from the heavier punishments including confiscation of two-thirds of the estates belonging to those who had actually fought against Parliament. But the problem with this ominous term of ‘Constant Good Affection’ was that positive proof had to be given of what was essentially a negative process. It was also unfairly difficult for a landowner or peasant to prove Constant Good Affection to English rule in a country so torn by faction as Ireland had been for the last ten years, since it had undergone such a remarkable quantity of changes in alliance and leadership.
Guilt could also be acquired by association. An innocent man – innocent that is of anything save a desire to live at peace – might well have inhabited a town which had temporarily declared against the forces of the English Parliament. That would make him irremediably guilty, according to the Act, and subject to removal. In this way for example the inhabitants of Kinsale were deemed to have forfeited their claim of Constant Good Affection, although the town had been an English garrison for eight years, just because briefly in 1648 they had paid the taxes of Lord Inchiquin. The Cork garrison which had actually flung off its masters to go over to Cromwell’s side in 1649 would not have been counted as having shown Constant Good Affection, had not a special Act of Indemnity been passed on their behalf at Cromwell’s personal instigation. As a result unfortunate people who considered themselves positively English in their loyalties suffered along with those of a more stubbornly Celtic frame of mind. Lady Dunsany was turned out of her castle in Meath, for all the heroic words of her husband in 1641 that he would rather die a loyal subject of England than live ‘in the quiet possession of all the north of Ireland’. A man like Lord Roche of Fermoy, with his young daughters, was reduced to utter beggary.
The hideous hardship consequent upon any such major removal involving a lengthy and onerous journey to unknown territories was made still worse by the timing of the Act. It was necessary for the transplantation to be completed by those concerned before 1 May 1654 on pain of death. As a result, many not only had to travel in winter time, but were also unable to sow the fields of their new domains in time to assure the next year’s harvest. In the meantime the fruits of the previous year’s yield had to be abandoned to the incomers. It was no wonder that the offices from which the whole complicated process was being organized were choked with appeals for stay of execution, some on grounds of injustice, others of sheer humanity. It seemed from the tone of these appeals that as in some scene of a melancholy parable the lame, the halt and the blind were being cast out into highways and by-ways – and so indeed they were, except that they had to face in addition to their Biblical fate the mournful rigours of an Irish winter. For as the greedy new owners started to arrive at the properties, it was hardly likely that they would listen sympathetically to pleas of injustice which, if heard, would deny them the benefits of their acquisition.
The sufferings of the peasants should in theory at least have been even more cruel than those of their former masters, and indeed the fact that so many of the native Irish were too poor to employ the scriveners who might lodge appeals for them did contribute materially to their grievances. On the other hand paradoxically the very lowliness of their station often protected them from the worst consequences of removal. Quite simply, the land had to be worked by someone. Since English workers failed to arrive, for all the ardent Protestant hopes of the English Parliament, the new owners had perforce to make do with the old labourers. Thus the deliberate separation of nations envisaged by the Act broke down on a homely practical point. A monk, living in disguise in the household of the Governor of Limerick, overheard him laying down three good reasons for retaining the Irish peasants
in situ: first, deprived of their priests and their gentry, they would quickly be converted to Protestantism; secondly, they would prevent the English degenerating themselves into peasants, because, thirdly, they were so very useful. Nevertheless, for all this unintentional amelioration, the result of the transplantations has been described recently as ‘a transference of the sources of wealth and power from Catholics to Protestants. What it created was not a Protestant community but a Protestant upper class.’29
From the soldiers’ point of view too, the drawing of the lots to give them their new homes was by no means always satisfactory. For one thing, there were many different grades of Army arrears, including those of the men currently under arms, those who had been under Jones in Dublin and in Derry under Coote and Monk, and then the further arrears for English service before 1649, for which payment had also been staved off with promise of eventual satisfaction from Irish land. Lastly, there was the former Protestant army of Munster. Over the actual drawing of the lots human nature was not always seen at its best. Some of the Munster officers had helpfully declared themselves anxious to accept the will of God on the subject, i.e. the dictates of the lot, in that they would be far more content with a barren mountain sent by the Lord than with a fruit valley of their own choice. But when the Lord did send them a barren mountain, or at least an area of Kerry near the lakes of Killarney, they were furious, and in terms which no modern tourist would agree with, designated their selection as ‘a refuse country’. The Leinster and Ulster agents then had the satisfaction of reminding the officers of their previous pious utterances. Furthermore, so out of touch was London with what was actually going on in Ireland that the opportunities for injustice at the moment of handover were increased by sheer ignorance of Irish conditions. Sometimes when the soldiers arrived and found the previous occupants still inhabiting their dwellings, there was unpleasant violence. Indeed, one of the great arguments used to insist on the ejection of the Irish to a quite different quarter of the country by Colonel Richard Lawrence, a member of the Commission of Transplantation, was the bitterness that the sight of their former properties in alien hands would provoke in them. The English settlers would have to endure the curses of the Irish dispossessed every time they passed their old home, and the Irish were a famously tenacious race.30
Nevertheless for all these bitter concomitants, the settlement did proceed, if slowly. The method used was to exchange a lot, once drawn, for a soldier’s debenture which he would surrender. In return he received a certificate of satisfaction. In this method, under the auspices of Fleetwood, and later of Henry Cromwell, the settlement of the Army was achieved in three stages in September 1655 and July and November 1656. As Fleetwood put it in his official announcement on the subject: ‘And great is your mercy, that after all your hardships and difficulties you may sit down.’ It was in no sense a blemish upon their past services that they were now being disbanded: ‘Look upon it as of the Lord’s appointing.’
Unfortunately there were still further problems in the working out of the Lord’s appointing to be faced, including the fact that many of the officers had bought out their men’s debentures, either out of a desire to build up a body of land as an estate for themselves, or out of sheer helpfulness towards their subordinates in distress at lack of ready cash.* Some officers went further and cheated their men. And those who did enjoy the rewards of their labour were confronted with the problem of domestic bliss. As in Scotland, the English soldiers were forbidden to wed the girls of the country. But of course many did so, employing a series of ruses to circumvent this distasteful denial of local delights. Wives would be presented as Protestant converts, and the practice became so widespread that Ireton had to have the brides examined by a board of military Saints to make sure that the conversion had been on a sufficiently serious level. Soldiers who could be proved to have broken the law and wed an unashamedly Irish colleen could in their turn be sent to Connaught, brides and all.32
In all these hardships, there was more to be noted of English territorial rapacity and blindness to the sheer natural rights of the Irish than calculated oppression. And not every Englishman remained indifferent to the sufferings of those turned out of their homes and condemned to a new life in what was virtually a wilderness. In 1655 Vincent Gookin wrote his famous pamphlet The Great Case of Transplantation discussed by a wellwisher to the good of the Commonwealth of England. A man of admirable common sense, lacking any personal land hunger and with the quality, rare in English circles, of actually liking the Irish, Gookin pointed out the fatal dissensions which the English policy was sowing in the whole fabric of a country. Irish husbandry was being wrecked, the Irish (already explained to Europe by Nouvelles Ordinaires as Italian banditti) were being turned into brigands and all this because it was the only alternative they had to sheer starvation. As for those incarcerated in their native enclave of Connaught, their western coastline gave them ample opportunity to solicit seditious foreign aid. What indeed had the wretched Irish to lose by outright resistance to the forces of transplantation, so crudely were they administered? Many were reckoning that even if death were the penalty for refusal, they might as well die valiantly in the homes of their ancestors as woefully on the road to Clare or Connaught. ‘Can it be imagined,’ Gookin wrote, ‘that a whole nation will drive like geese at the hat upon a stick?’ And his final words were even more prescient: ‘The unsettling of a nation is easy work; the settling is not. It had been better if Ireland had been thrown into the sea before the first engagement in it, if it is never to be settled.’ But the response of the English Army was to convince themselves that Gookin must have been bribed.33
Oliver Cromwell himself, from whom this settlement derived its name, has not merited the consequent opprobrium. It was the whole attitude of the English to the Irish which lay at the root of the transplantations, certainly not the inspiration of one man. What was more, in this instance, Cromwell personally had little to do with the implementation of a policy which he had not instigated, and which was dictated so firmly by English financial considerations. The detailed lines of the settlement were also laid down before he became Protector. He persisted throughout the Protectorate in envisaging Ireland as a kind of glorified arena for future Protestant colonization, a prospect he had already toyed with in the 1640s when it was rumoured that he himself had considered emigrating. These dreams were of a somewhat visionary nature, and corresponded but little to the realities of storm and stress taking place within the country itself. But since Cromwell never visited Ireland again, he, like so many of his English contemporaries in the same happy position, never had to match dream to reality.
Thus Ireland’s Natural History, published in 1652 and dedicated jointly to Cromwell and Fleetwood, looked forward to the replanting of the country not only by Adventurers, but further Protestant settlers from Europe, possibly some exiled Bohemians or even some Dutch. That was just the sort of plan which commended itself to Cromwell’s imagination. In January 1655 there was an idea of planting the town of Sligo from New England, and land was set apart for those families who were thus expected to arrive; only a very few did finally turn up at Limerick in 1656. On the whole the feelings of the proposed settlers were best expressed by a communication from the people of New England to Cromwell as early as 1650. It referred to Oliver’s already formed desire that they should recolonize the island – ‘that desolate Ireland which hath been drenched and steeped in blood, may be moistened and soaked with the waters of the sanctuary’. Their response was on the surface dutiful: ‘hoping that as we came by a call of God to serve him here, so if the Lord’s mind shall clearly appear to give us a sufficient call to remove into Ireland, to serve him there, we shall cheerfully and thankfully embrace the same’. But their detailed demands were more difficult to satisfy; it was not only that they objected to the possible presence of native Irish among them (for that prerequisite would now be satisfied by Government policy) but their stipulations concerning their new situation were healthily worldly, including that ‘in regard we come from a pure air, we may have a place in the more healthful part of the country’.34 In the event, therefore, for all Cromwell’s visionary enthusiasm, it was decided that the call of God was not clear enough; so this interesting attempt to reverse the traditional crossing from Ireland to the New World never actually succeeded.
If Cromwell’s concern for Ireland was along such mystic lines of Protestant colonization, his practical interventions were all along the lines of mercy. It was not only towns like captured Fethard which were able to appeal to his clemency with success. Individuals too, who were fortunate enough to catch at his sympathies with their cases, could have their lot ameliorated. He protested strongly, although it seems vainly, on behalf of Richard Nugent, Earl of Westmeath whose articles of surrender as Irish commander of Leinster were being breached by the civil authorities – ‘being sensible how much the faith of the army and our own honour and justice is concerned in the just performance of the articles’. Where even Cromwell’s interventions failed to succeed, this again merely proved how strong the system was that was bringing about these miseries, and how little one individual could do to alter it, for better or for worse. Already the target for hundreds of private petitions for assistance in England, Cromwell now received the equivalent solicitations from Ireland. A typical case was that of William Spenser, grandson of the poet Edmund Spenser, but unlike his progenitor reared as a Catholic, who was trying to preserve his estate at Kilcolman on the Blackwater from the acquisitive grasp of the soldiers. Spenser’s own petition pointed out that he had only been seven years old at the time of the rebellion, and had moreover ‘utterly renounced the Popish religion since coming to the years of discretion’. To this Oliver added his own personal plea based on Spenser’s distinguished ancestry: this was the grandson of the man ‘who by his writings touching the reduction of the Irish to civility brought on him the odium of that nation’. Furthermore the gentleman concerned was ‘of a civil conversation’, and even his extremity had not brought him ‘to put upon indiscreet or evil practices for a livelihood’.35 Yet even this strong piece of pleading did not save Spenser’s lands since they had already been designated for the soldiers.
The case of the Catholic and Royalist Lord Ikerrin, turned out with his wife and child into utter poverty, was an even more striking example of Cromwell’s personally compassionate temperament, since here were no political arguments to his ancestry, only the sheer humanity of the issue. Lord Ikerrin had suffered fearful tribulations, including illness, in spite of which he was ordered to leave without delay. A personal appeal to the Protector got this pleading back on his behalf: ‘we being very sensible of the extreme poor and miserable condition in which his lordship now is, even to the want of sustenance to support his life; we could not but commiserate his sad and distressed condition by helping to a little relief … Indeed, he is a miserable object of pity, and therefore we desire that care be taken of him.’36 But by the Restoration, poor Lord Ikerrin was dead and his estate of Lismalin had gone to the soldiers: it is pleasant to record that in 1666 his son (described however as ‘an innocent Protestant’) got the estate back.
The most remarkable case of private mercy was that of Lady Ormonde, wife of the arch-Royalist General and heiress of the Desmond family, whose love match to Ormonde had united Butler and Desmond estates. She, of all ladies, might have been allowed to suffer. But in May 1653 she wrote off boldly to the Lord-General from Caen, the seat of her exile, ‘having by a very general fame received assurance of your Lordship’s inclinations to make use of your power for the obliging of such in general as stand in need of protection and assistance from it …’, and in August made a personal visit. Nor was she disappointed in her hopes, particularly as a leading Puritan in Dublin discoursed on her virtues. Cromwell decided that it was terrible that this worthy lady should ‘want bread’ for the bad luck of having ‘a delinquent lord’. So first she received back some property and money belonging to Ormonde to relieve her distress, and later some of her own, all merely on the condition that she would not use it to aid her husband. By 1655 she was able as a result to fetch her children from London. Even Ormonde’s mother, Lady Thurles, who was actually a Catholic, was also helped, for although she lost her dower lands, she avoided transplantation.37 As for Lady Ormonde, Cromwell evidently respected her persistence, like the judge and the importunate widow of the parable.
He was all the more infuriated therefore when a piece of Thurloe’s espionage gave him cause to believe that his patronage had been deliberately betrayed. To Lord Broghill, Oliver suddenly burst out in one of his sharp tempers on the subject of Lady Ormonde: ‘You have undertaken indeed for the quietness of a fine person,’ he said tauntingly, and after discoursing on Lady Ormonde’s ingratitude, coupled with his own generosity, he exclaimed, ‘But I find she is a wicked woman, and she shall not have a farthing of it.’ In the extremes of his rage, he even threatened to have the distinguished lady ‘carted [dragged at the cart-tail] besides’. Broghill, who knew his Protector, kept a cool head at all this frenzy and merely asked what were the grounds of his fury. He received the gruff reply: ‘Enough.’ Cromwell then proceeded to throw down a highly incriminating intercepted letter of Royalist intrigue, which started off with a series of endearments to Ormonde. At the sight Broghill merely smiled. The grounds were not enough. For the letter turned out to be in the hand of the wayward and extremely beautiful Lady Isabella Thynne, Ormonde’s mistress. At this piece of intelligence, Oliver’s anger turned to ‘a merry drollery’. Lady Ormonde’s reputation was saved (if that of Lady Isabella was sacrificed).38
How regrettable, then, that at a later date after the Penruddock rising, among those implicated were Lady Ormonde’s sons, Lord Ossory and Lord Richard Butler, Lord Ossory in particular having received favours from Cromwell at his mother’s instance. He was now put in the Tower, despite all Lady Ormonde’s pleas to the Protector. Nevertheless Oliver continued to display much courtesy towards his interlocutrix: when Lady Ormonde offered her own life in exchange for her son’s, he replied that he ‘begged to be excused in that respect’, adding that no one in the world frightened him more than Lady Ormonde. In reply Lady Ormonde enquired why she, who was so innocent, should be represented as someone who was so terrible. To this Cromwell responded with an elaborate piece of flattery: ‘No Madam, that is not the case; but your worth has gained you so great an influence upon all the commanders of our party, and we know so well your power over the other party, that it is in your Ladyship’s heart to act what you please.’ Lady Ormonde could only reply that she supposed his words must constitute a compliment. Nevertheless this gallant fencing was all she could get out of the Protector for some time, despite the care he took in escorting her to her chair or coach after audiences – very unlike other great persons, she noted. It was not until Ossory was gravely ill of plague that he was allowed to go abroad to Holland. At last Lady Ormonde could relax her vigilance and devote herself to ‘tillage and country life’ at Dunmore.39
Such incidents were of course far removed from the sufferings of the average Irish Catholic peasant or indeed landowner who had not been able to prove his Constant Good Affection – as far, it might be said, as Oliver’s projected island of busy Protestant Saints was from the actual reality of an island condemned to a future of strife by English legislation. Oliver was soon made personally responsible for every evicted family, and the attachment of the settlement to his own name finished off the process by which myth, through long usage, gets a mysterious substance of its own. As early as 1659 a book by Friar Morison, printed at Innsbruck, named Threnodia Hiberno-Catholica, described the sufferings of those involved, at the hands of the ‘Anglo-Calvinists’, as greater than those of the Israelites and Pharaoh or the innocents and Herod. He declared boldly that it was the ‘Arch-Tyrant’ Cromwell who was responsible. The real truth was contained in another phrase of his: the English showed themselves velut lup rapaces – rapacious as wolves.
It was true that the English intention to separate off the two nations was soon filtered away by the forbidden inter-marriage of soldiers and Irish girls. Many former soldiers became so Irishified that by the end of the century an English observer was reporting indignantly that the descendants of Cromwell’s army could speak no English. But this relaxation did nothing to alleviate the basic problem left behind by the Acts of Plantation, which nullified any other possible advantages of English rule in the mid-seventeenth century, such as the profitable customs union and the restoration of justice and order. These former soldiers were not rich men. They melded on the contrary into the lesser elements of the nation. As for the proscribed Catholic religion, that too lived on in the hearts of the poorer people, as a secret and sacred fire whose flames could be banked down for the sake of hiding, but whose burning heat would never be totally extinguished. Although it was a felony, punishable by death, to harbour a priest, among the poorer classes Franciscan and Capuchin monks could still travel, working by their side in the guise of shepherds, herdsmen and ploughmen: on quite a different level above their heads, the Protestant gentry began to lord it in the former Irish properties. So a basic distinction arose between landed and landless in Ireland, exacerbated by that of religion, to which so many of its later troubles were owed.
The first Parliament of the Protectorate was chosen by mid-July 1654, but did not in fact meet until the beginning of September; the intervening weeks were occupied by preparations of which one of the most important was the erection of a throne – the word was actually used – for Oliver in the Painted Chamber. In the end the ‘throne’ turned out to be ‘a very rich chair wrought and trimmed with gold’ elevated above the company by two steps, and with a table to stand in front of it. The procession towards Parliament down Whitehall also had regal overtones, with Oliver, Lambert and Henry Cromwell in ‘a very gorgeous coach’; it was noticed in addition that the Protector had chosen to wear civilian costume as though to underplay the possible military elements in his rise. The actual date was 3 September, a choice on Oliver’s part which Hobbes later referred to as ‘more than a little superstitious’, because it was so clearly intended to coincide with his two great victories of Dunbar and Worcester.40 Unfortunately, in the inconvenient way of anniversaries, 3 September that year fell on a Sunday, and the godly immediately made a fuss at this use of the Sabbath. So the day of the 3rd saw only a brief meeting and short address followed by a sermon in Westminster Abbey, before the main ceremonies of the Monday.
It was then on 4 September 1654 in a memorable speech of extraordinary length and not a little seeming obscurity that Oliver Cromwell gave vent to his own ideals as Lord Protector, joined in authority with Parliament. The length was deliberate and the speech was undoubtedly intended to weigh down on the consciousness of his audience as a result, like a majestic ship pressing down the billows of the ocean. The obscurity on the other hand may have gained something in the subsequent relation for two reasons: first, because Cromwell did not apparently keep notes of his speeches, reporters had to rely purely on the evidence of their own ears. Secondly, it has been plausibly suggested that a particular trick of his in oratory, a hesitation while he searched for the ideal phrase, led to further obscurity. It was a characteristic reported to Charles of Sweden by his emissary Bonde, that the Protector ‘piques himself on his good expression, he looks about for the most suitable word’.41 Thus an instinct for felicity at the time may well have led to accusations of confusion from critics of a later age. But in this speech Cromwell at least shows one thing clearly – how far his thinking had changed in the fourteen months since the Barebones Assembly. This is certainly a completely different orator from the optimistic Lord-General who had addressed the Saints in July 1653, and had hoped to hand over his authority in some manner to them. Here is a man not so much disillusioned – for bitterness, although it came rapidly, came later – as at last perfectly confident in his personal role. While there was still much room for doubt in the precise part to be played by Parliament, to say nothing of how the conjunction between Parliament and Protector was expected to work, Cromwell on this occasion displayed none of his earliermeanderings and meditations on his own position. He was equally confident in his analysis of society as something where order and acquiescence to government were to be preferred without hesitation to change and reform.
The result was a speech which began magnificently. ‘Gentlemen,’ he declaimed, ‘you are met here on the greatest occasion that, I believe, England ever saw, having upon your shoulders the interest of great nations, with the territories belonging to them. And truly, I believe I may say it without an hyperbole, you have upon your shoulders the interests of all the Christian people in the world.’ The Protector then swooped off in a series of lofty flights and turns of language, like a bird of prey in the sky pursuing its victim; only in this case it was the elusive truth of the past that had brought them together at this meeting which he wished to grasp in his claws for the benefit of his audience. He might, he said, have chosen to list to them ‘a series of the transactions not of men but of the providence of God’ which had led them into their present situation. But for three reasons the Protector preferred to address them in another way: first, the providences and dispensations of God were so stupendous that he could well spend all day relating them; secondly, they were surely written down in their own hearts as effectively as in any book; thirdly, such recounting of ‘remembered transactions’ instead of healing might ‘set the wound fresh a-bleeding’. It was the healing and settling of a nation which he intended to make the theme of his speech.
But such a pacific intention was in fact carried out in a speech of much passion, in which the dispensations of God certainly reappeared, and his audience were by implication castigated for having ignored them. What had been the condition of the nation, Cromwell demanded, when ‘this government’ i.e. the Protectorate, was undertaken? The answer was grievous: ‘Was not everything (almost) grown arbitrary? Who knew where, or how to have right, without some obstruction or other intervening? Indeed,’ he repeated, ‘we were almost grown arbitrary in everything.’ And all this despite the dispensations of God, ‘his terrible ones, he having met in the way of his judgement in a ten years’ civil war, a very sharp one, his merciful dispensations, they did not, they did not work upon us, but we had our humours and interests’. So that while Cromwell’s concern for law and order, a new concept to him, was made the foundation of his Protectoral doctrine, it was noticeable that he had not deserted the old theme of God’s dispensations, but found it a convenient additional stick with which to beat those who were said to have upset the social order.
And beat them, metaphorically, he now proceeded to do. It was the ‘Levelling principles’ which were now blamed for this near-arbitrary state, and their upholders were denounced for having tried to trample ‘the magistracy of the nation’ underfoot. Nothing showed more effectively how far Cromwell had travelled from the old days of his revolutionary opposition to King Charles than his now nostalgic references to ‘the ranks and orders of men, whereby England hath been known for hundreds of years’ – a nobleman, a gentleman, a yeoman. ‘That is a good interest of the nation,’ he declared, ‘and a great one.’ As for these Levelling principles, what did they amount to, ‘but to make the tenant as liberal a fortune as the landlord? Which, I think,’ he added scornfully, ‘if obtained, would not have lasted long.’ The men of that principle, after they had served their own turns, would have ‘cried up interest and property then fast enough’. Nor were the Levellers thereby ones to be denounced. One by one the awkward minorities were demolished, the Fifth Monarchists for believing themselves the sole guardians of God’s will, even the Jesuits who were said to be arriving from the Continent in droves to ferment England’s troubles. To such seditious aims, Oliver proceeded to contrast deliberately all the work which had been done recently to produce peace, and prosperous peace, in England, from domestic concerns such as the long-desired reform of the law and the regulation of the Church, to foreign treaties with Denmark and Portugal and even one projected with France. The financial burdens of the present, the taxes lying heavily on the people, he did not attempt to gloss over, but tried to present them in their true light, as consequent on the past, hopefully to be alleviated in the future.
Lastly, somewhat in the manner of a headmaster who graciously assures his school that each pupil is of as much innate importance to the structure as he himself, Cromwell spoke kindly to Parliament itself on the subject of its future task, and added: ‘I shall exercise plainness and freeness with you, in telling you that I have not spoken these things as one that assumes to himself dominion over you, but as one that doth resolve to be a fellow-servant with you, to the interest of these great affairs …’ Unfortunately Cromwell was not facing anything as pre-selected as a school, nor as controlled. One of the results of the new £200 franchise, on which basis this Parliament had been elected, had been to increase slightly the number of country seats over those in the boroughs; that in itself cut off the Government from control, since the borough members were easier to keep in their pockets through patronage. But in any case, the new Parliament was full of elements which were quite as inclined as Cromwell had stated himself to be to regard him as merely ‘a fellow-servant’ with themselves. It was the return of the old and stalwart republican element, men such as Thomas Scot and Sir Arthur Haselrig, which now threatened any notions Cromwell might have of interpreting the Instrument of Governmentin terms of the solitary power of the Protector over that of Parliament: for such men had spent much of their lives fighting off the concept of individual rule, and were scarcely likely to relax their prejudices now in Cromwell’s favour.
So from the very first this Parliament showed itself argumentative and stubborn, in a manner which hardly commended itself to the Protector with his dreams of a pliant and forward-looking legislative body, with ‘a sweet, gracious and holy understanding of one another’. First it was complained that a recent law against treason had hit at Parliament’s right of free speech, since it forbade public criticisms of the Government. Next, and ‘notwithstanding that Ordinance’, the House proceeded purposefully to debate the nature of the new Government. Furthermore, and in a way that had been specifically forbidden by the terms of the Instrument of Government, it attempted to alter its crucial clause which defined – or rather did not define – the nature of the relationship to exist between Protector and Parliament. For the vague phrase that government should reside in ‘one person and Parliament’ it was intended to substitute the much clearer words ‘in the Parliament of England, etc., and a single person, qualified with such instructions as Parliament should think fit’.42 And Parliament only should be able to legislate.
To all this the Protectoral ‘Court party’, as Cromwell’s clique now came to be known, were quick to rejoin with the resurrection of all the old bogeys of the Long Parliament and the Rump – for was not Parliament trying to establish its right to self-perpetuation? The whole nation, it was said, had agreed that the new constitution should not be tampered with – a point that it was indeed possible to maintain, if the Instrument of Government was accepted as the will of the whole nation, since by it all subsequent alteration had been forbidden. Lastly Cromwell would never consent to a diminution of the power to which he had been so clearly called by God. The Protector’s opponents were quick to pounce on this argument to providences, which they described with some truth as a two-edged sword. ‘God in his providence, doth often permit of that which he doth not approve’, they observed, pointing out that otherwise a thief would have a title to every purse he found lying in a highway. Bradshaw spoke for many when he said that if they were going to have government by one man, he would prefer Charles to Oliver. Such doctrines could hardly expect to flourish unchecked by the Protector, since if carried through, they would have ham-strung him so effectively that he could have carried through very little of those works he planned. That, at least, was the practical view he was bound to take.
On 11 September a motion was put forward in Parliament that ‘Government should be in the Parliament and a single person, limited and restrained as the Parliament should think fit’ and the next day Cromwell felt obliged to weigh in with another long disquisition.43 This time, in addition to the healing and settling theme, he dwelt at considerable length on his own position. Now he emphasized much more strongly his own calling from God, and his trust from the people, which he would not surrender unless asked by them to do so. He was particularly emphatic, with his customary use of hesitation, that he had not sought out his eminence: ‘I can say it in the simplicity of my soul, I love not, I love not (I declined it in my former speech) I say, I love not to rake into sores or to discover nakednesses. That which I drive at is this; I say to you, I hoped to have had leave to have retired to a private life [after Worcester].’ With rising passion, he recounted how he had only come to accept power at the entreaty of people of quality, at a time when he had the armies of three nations under his command. There were ‘clouds of witnesses’ to the fact that he had never sought it, and he listed them, the Army, the City of London, judges, other counties, ‘all the people in England … and many in Ireland and Scotland’. Finally he would make Parliament itself his witness.
Nevertheless, for all his reliance on providences in his appointment, Cromwell was unyielding in his assertion of the need for his solitary powers. Good government, he said, consisted of certain essentials, such as freedom of conscience, and the control of the militia by one person, otherwise there would be danger of the highly undesirable self-perpetuation of Parliament. So while repeating that the assembly was indeed a free Parliament, he in his turn subtly altered the wording of the Instrument of Government in his own favour, by referring to himself as ‘the authority that called you’, his own authority in turn being derived from God and man. But of course the Instrument had not posited that Parliament’s powers proceeded from the Protector, any more than it had declared that the Protector’s powers were qualified by Parliament. However a new Recognition was now drawn up, which in effect altered the Instrument, and signed within a week by about two hundred members. Still Parliament’s teeth were not drawn. A long nagging argument over the Protectoral veto of Parliamentary legislation summed up the two irreconcilable positions. Either this right was declared ‘to be’ in the Protector, or ‘it shall be’; the one, desired by his Court Party, inferred a natural right ex officio, the other that it had been granted subsequently by Parliament. When a vote was passed granting Cromwell the Protectorship for life, on the surface a victory for his party, the triumph was dissipated, and he himself was said to be disappointed when a further effort to make the office hereditary was defeated by his opponents. It was on the contrary to remain elective, and if Parliament was sitting at the time of the Protector’s death, that body rather than the Council should perform the election.
Many of the ensuing points of trouble between the Protector and his Parliament might have received wry recognition from that unhappy ghost of King Charles I now rumoured to be roaming Whitehall:44 they included taxation and the control of the militia. One of the greatest successes fought for by the recalcitrant anti-Protectoral members was the law that no new tax should be imposed without the consent of Parliament; since at the same time, the civil estimates were to be limited at £200,000 a year, the Protector was unlikely to be able to afford a lengthy personal rule without Parliament, particularly in view of the expansive nature of his foreign policy. Even freedom of conscience, the subject of all others on which Oliver felt so strongly, was temporarily threatened when it was voted that a bill should be introduced to root out ‘damnable heresies’ and to oblige people to come to church on Sundays. A committee to discuss the bill insisted on meeting the Protector, and in the end the legislation was fended off, while it was agreed that Oliver’s future consent should be necessary for laws ‘for the restraining of … tender consciences’. But Oliver could hardly fail to be led to the conclusion from such disputes that the Parliament he had called into being had not only less interest in the work of God, as he saw it, than he had himself as Protector, but might also actually frustrate it.
An ugly riding accident at the end of September in which the Protector was involved showed up the other side of the picture to Parliamentary checks: how much of the stability of England at that time depended on the continued existence of one man. It arose out of a presentation from the Count of Oldenbourg, who knowing of Oliver’s famous fondness for horses had hoped to please him with six grey Frieslands. Oliver could not resist trying out the team personally in Hyde Park, with himself driving the coach. But the result was a disaster. First Oliver tumbled down and was then jerked along with his foot caught in the reins for some distance, only saved when the Protectoral shoe fell off and released him. Furthermore the presence of the devoted Thurloe on the expedition nearly proved fatal to his master; he too fell out and the pistol he carried in his pocket went off, narrowly missing Oliver. In one sense it was the sort of incident that gave pleasure to both pro- and anti-Cromwellians. Naturally the Royalists were delighted, exclaiming sagely that ‘bad driving leads to bad ends’, while anonymous satirical requests were sent to the preachers asking them to pray for ‘an ill-advised coachman who had undertaken to manage three kingdoms’. A pseudo-elegy on the occasion was published which pretended to chide the horses, those ‘foreign ill-tutored jades’, for refusing a burden which ‘the mild Britons’ would have been happy to pull along personally. Puritans on the other hand were able to see in Oliver’s preservation a sign of miraculous favour. Parliament scurried forth with loyal addresses of congratulation and condolence. As the Venetian Ambassador commented, it could not be denied that fresh civil strife and immense confusion would have resulted from his death.45
The Protector was still very lame from his experiences by the beginning of November. And he had other causes of depression and irritability, quite apart from the controversies with Parliament, as a result of which he was reported to have exclaimed about this time that he ‘would rather keep sheep under a hedge than have to do with the government of men’. In November died old Mrs Cromwell, his mother, at the age of eighty-nine – ‘whose Saint-like Mother we did lately see Live out an Age, long as a pedigree’, wrote Marvell. Her health had, hardly surprisingly, been failing for some time, and just after the death of the King, Oliver had had to put off a visit to Richard Mayor since ‘truly my aged mother is in such a condition of illness that I could not leave her’. But her faculties were in no way impaired so that she was able to enjoy a close and loving relationship with her only son to the last days of her life, a fact much noted by contemporaries. Mrs Cromwell was indeed a woman of the most upright character. She was also of sufficient spirit to complain when she had been moved from Cockpit to Whitehall to mark the elevation to Protectoral grandeur; according to Ludlow she ‘was not so easily flattered by these temptations’. She also feared for her son’s life, trembling whenever she heard musket fire that it might be the assassin’s shot. Whatever her great age, the very length of their relationship could only add to the sorrow in a deserted son. Her last blessing was poignantly recorded by Thurloe: ‘The Lord cause his face to shine upon you, and comfort you in all your adversities, and enable you to do great things for the glory of your most high God, and to be a relief unto his people; my dear son, I leave my heart with thee, a good night.’46 She died shortly afterwards. Oliver was overcome with sorrow. According to observers, he betrayed his sense of loss acutely by his outward demeanour thereafter. And for all the departed lady’s strong views against grandeur, he accorded her a funeral in Westminster Abbey, of a Sunday evening, illuminated by hundreds of flickering torches. Having moved into the sphere of rulers, it was as though he wished to dignify his woe in a stately manner, whatever the faint motherly voice of Puritan protest from his past.
The feeling that the times were out of joint persisted. In January Cromwell was writing to his friend Lieutenant-General Wilks, complaining gloomily that he needed all of ‘what little faith and patience’ he possessed to cope with his difficulties – ‘so unwilling are men to be heard and atoned’.47In this context, the gesture of a man like that old soldier known as Theauro John, who had witnessed Oliver’s original recruiting at Huntingdon and now lived in a tent at Lambeth, could only be an additional annoyance. Theauro John lit a public bonfire, throwing on to it a Bible, a saddle, a sword and a pistol saying that these were the new Gods of England. He then departed for the doors of Parliament, where he laid about him with his own sword, before being hauled off to prison. But the regime, so outwardly unchallenged that in Puritan fashion on the Christmas Day of 1654 the House of Commons obediently sat through the erstwhile feast, was in fact menaced by more serious opponents than the flamboyant old soldier.
The Levellers, originally that party of dissent in the Army, had never ceased their opposition to any governmental moves that departed from the principles of the original Agreement of the People. The danger of the Levellers however was not in their principles as such, but in the converts they might make as opposition to Cromwell’s personal rule grew, and above all the allies they might seek. A Leveller–Royalist axis of rebellion could, after all, present the most serious challenge to the Protectoral regime. And then there were the disaffected republicans such as Haselrig, Bradshaw and Lord Grey of Groby who might well be in a mood to join with them. When therefore a petition was drawn up in November 1654 by certain of Cromwell’s old comrades, Colonels Okey, Alured and Saunders, on the unsatisfactory nature of the present Government, their action was held to be more menacing than its first appearance warranted. This petition had been actually drafted by that Leveller of long standing John Wildman; it called in question the basis of Cromwell’s power, and demanded ‘a full and free Parliament’ to reconsider those freedoms originally requested by the Agreement. The plan was to secure a multitude of Army signatures to the petition, and to distribute it as widely as possible, including Scotland. But the petition was rapidly seized, and the three Colonels court martialled, although they were subsequently cleared of treason. In Scotland, where a proper conspiracy seems to have been developed under Colonel Robert Overton, Monk acted with his characteristic despatch, imprisoned Overton and made sure that he, Monk, not Overton remained in command there. On 10 February, Wildman himself was seized, in the very act, ink wet, of dictating a rousing pamphlet against ‘the tyrant Oliver Cromwell’, and the Leveller conspiracy was at an end.
There is no evidence that the Levellers had any effective links with the Royalists whose own ill-timed attempt at throwing off the yoke was to come about slightly later.48 It was true that the Royalists always hoped for Leveller assistance, as a result of which individuals treated with each other – John Lilburne for example had negotiations with the Duke of Buckingham. On the other hand, what is clear is that Cromwell himself did believe in this union of the two forces of resistance in his speech of 22 January to Parliament. And this conviction certainly coloured his later attitude to the Levellers. In this connexion, the truth is less important than the nature of his own belief. For his relations with Parliament had not improved with the months, and in January 1655 finally reached their crisis over the passage of a militia bill. A man who was threatened with rebellion in his own army, and who feared that the rebels were joining up with his worst enemies at home and abroad, was hardly likely to approve a motion that ‘the militia of this Commonwealth ought not to be raised, formed, or made use of, but by common consent of the people assembled in Parliament’.
In the mood of one who sees spies under every bed, Cromwell was able to show his old quick decisive ruthlessness. The five months’ minimum period of Parliament’s sitting, which under the Instrument of Government would have made 5 February the first possible date of their dismissal, was suddenly discovered to apply to lunar as opposed to calendar months. On 22 January 1655, once more Cromwell faced his Parliament with what even he himself admitted to be ‘a long speech’, but this time it turned out to be a speech of dismissal.49 On this occasion however it was noticeable how much of his talk showed a positive dislike for the men who confronted him. There was no mention now of a historic role: this time it was the tone of a pedagogue gravely disappointed in his flock, who recalled that first ‘hopefullest day that ever mine eyes saw’ of the previous September, only to contrast it with his progressive frustrations since.
As Cromwell’s public disgust mounted, from time to time his anger led him to some picturesque phrases of his favourite Scriptural derivation, as when he outlined the results of the Protectoral Parliament’s efforts: ‘There be some trees that will not grow under the shadows of other trees. There be some that choose (a man may say so by way of allusion) to thrive under the shadow of other trees. I will tell you what hath thriven … Instead of the peace and settlement, instead of mercy and truth being brought together, righteousness and peace kissing each other, by reconciling the honest people of these nations, and settling the woeful distempers that are amongst us … weeds and nettles, briers and thorns, have thriven under your shadow, dissettlement and division, discontent and dissatisfaction, together with real dangers to the whole.’ And so that none could mistake his meaning, Cromwell repeated the analogy once more with evident satisfaction: ‘I say, the enemies of the peace of these nations abroad and at home, the discontented humours throughout these nations, which I think no man will grudge to call by that name or to make to allude to briers and thorns, have thriven under your shadow.’ Still later he came back to it again, talking of ‘these weeds, briers and thorns’ nourished by the enemies of the Commonwealth through opportunities given to them by this Parliament.
The Biblical allusion, as with that previous phrase which had captured Oliver’s imagination, the covenant with death and hell which the Irish (or alternatively the Scots) clergy were said to have made, was to the words of Isaiah. Indeed, in his use of the particular metaphor of ‘briers and thorns’ and his other references, there is much evidence to support the view that at times, Cromwell, unconsciously or otherwise, strongly identified himself with the prophet, another man much tried by the obstinate iniquities of his own generation. As Cromwell repeated it through his speech, so had Isaiah reiterated the words ‘briers and thorns’ in different forms, as an evocative term to conjure up the desolation to be expected by the people of Israel if they did not heed the counsels of the Lord.*
While they had occupied themselves with their unworthy transactions ‘that Cavalier party (I could wish some of them had thrust in here to have heard what I say)’ he interposed sarcastically, ‘the Cavalier party have been designing and preparing to put this nation in blood again …’ And he dropped those additional dark hints referred to earlier, of ‘the correspondency held with the interest of the Cavaliers, by that party of men called Levellers’. Cromwell concluded his analysis of Parliament’s imprudent activities by observing that he too was at liberty to walk abroad in the fields or take a journey, yet he would hardly consider it wise to do so when his own house was on fire. The meaning of this was clear. Those who had walked abroad would not be allowed to return to the House. So, in his next words, Cromwell proceeded to declare Parliament dismissed after appealing jointly to God and his duty to the people. Their presence, he said, was no longer for ‘the profit of these nations, nor for the common and public good’.
Yet for all Cromwell’s apprehensions at the way his Commonwealth was being undermined, the first open Royalist attempt to upset its structure, which followed closely on Parliament’s dismissal, only served to prove the steely strength of the Cromwell– Thurloe control. This is not to belittle Cromwell’s genuine ferocity at what he considered the foolhardy or even criminal risks taken by the Parliament. In any case he had some justice on his side in his reproaches, since the Army pay had been allowed to become badly in arrears, which was hardly the best way to maintain the security of the country. Had, as Cromwell suspected, Levellers really been joined to Royalists, the story of the frail but gallant Penruddock rising of the spring of 1655 might have read very differently. As it was, the whole enterprise was from the beginning marked by those deficiencies of planning, cohesion and plain direction which form such a dismal antiphon to all Royalist conspiracies of the Interregnum.50 The original concept was of six regional conspiracies, organized by the local associations under the general command of Lord Rochester who would land with the King’s orders from the Continent. Thus far the divided command of Glencairn and Middleton was avoided. But the wisest heads among the Royalists during this period were always well aware that the chances of an insurrection succeeding without foreign aid of some sort to promote or initiate it were minimal. And the consequences in the shape of future repression might be disastrous. Nevertheless, in the absence of any prospect of such aid, King Charles was still persuaded to give his agreement to a rising in mid-February.
It was typical of the organization that, although the speedy swoop on Wildman and the Levellers persuaded the Sealed Knot that their efforts should be postponed, not every conspirator was informed of the delay. So a pathetic little affray of its own, quickly quashed, took place in the West Country. In spite of these warning shots, the rising itself was scheduled to take place a month later in mid-March. But from the first, in every area save one, it was a fiasco. There were no signs of life at all in Leicestershire and Staffordshire; in the Midlands generally it was only considered necessary to ban football matches and race meetings to preserve the peace. In the North, there might at least have been a chance of something bolder, since considerable underground preparations had been made in Northumberland, Durham and Yorkshire. As it was the Royalist rendezvous at Marston Moor (a location which history should have taught them was not propitious) petered out in arrests, although the King’s agent Rochester at least was able to escape south disguised as a grazier.
It was only in the West that the rising showed any kind of bite, and that due to the heroic if misguided efforts of the former Royalist soldier who gave the rebellion his name – Colonel John Penruddock, who was in charge of the Wiltshire side of the Western Association. With the King’s emissary from overseas, Sir Joseph Wagstaffe, and his own cousin Edward Penruddock, he did at least show the flag of courage, although the odds were by now so heavily weighted against him that it would have been a miracle had he succeeded. The Government had lost no time in strengthening their resources, strengthening the Tower garrison, and bringing back troops from Ireland. The London militia had been called up under Skippon. The guard round Whitehall was also stiffened. Ignoring the omens, on the night of 12 March Penruddock and Wagstaffe entered Salisbury, opened up the jails to enlist the prisoners and arrested in their place the two judges and the sheriff. There was some suggestion of hanging them, but in the end it was agreed merely to take the sheriff hostage in his nightclothes. Four hundred men now marched out of Salisbury together.
This was however the high point of the rising. For now it seemed there were no more glories to be achieved commensurate with the seizure of the night-gowned sheriff. The Marquess of Hertford, who had arranged to join them, failed to arrive. There were hopeful but ultimately useless attempts at raising further troops in Dorset at Blandford and elsewhere. None of this prepared Penruddock’s little band for the arrival of the formidably equipped Desborough, who had been despatched hotly after them by the central Government. Penruddock in desperation had to turn towards Cornwall, traditional home of Royalism. But even here en route, the two major towns of Taunton and Exeter made it clear that they regarded the insurgents merely as unwelcome disturbers of the peace. It was at South Molton beyond Tiverton that a small group under Captain Croke of Colonel Berry’s regiment finally engaged them, with catastrophic results. Although Wagstaffe managed to escape, the rest of the captured force were taken back to Exeter.
So little a threat had the rising ever constituted that Cromwell felt himself able to deal with the offenders mercifully by the standards of the time. He even allowed trial by jury, although local juries had an unpleasant habit of acquitting local men. It seems that only thirty-nine men were condemned to death, of which not more than fifteen died. Penruddock himself was of their number, but he met death as he had lived, bravely; on the Government’s side he was spared the dreadful indignities of being drawn and quartered.
Cromwell and Thurloe, then, could well feel proud of the way their machine had met its first overt challenge, and Thurloe in particular could congratulate himself on the fact that one of his agents, Colonel John Bampfylde, was deeply integrated into Royalist conspiratorial circles in Paris, from where he had been able to supply much helpful information. Nor was the rapid manner in which five thousand volunteers had been raised for the London militia, and further volunteers in forces round the country including Gloucestershire and Bristol, less encouraging. Describing it all to John Pell, the Protectoral agent in Switzerland, afterwards, Thurloe reflected with satisfaction that Cromwell could have drawn on twenty thousand men within fourteen days, leaving out of account the Army: ‘So far are they mistaken who dream that the affections of this people are towards the House of Stuart.’51 England in the spring of 1655 appeared to lie in a clamp, and it was difficult indeed to see how the Royalists – or for that matter the Levellers still less the Fifth Monarchists – would be able to free it. At the same time, in the past twelve months of the Protectorate it had also enjoyed some measure of ‘well-regulated liberty’ as Milton had admiringly called it in his Second Defence. But Milton had been careful to defend this liberty, distinguishing it from other more obvious brands, as being the product of special circumstances – those troubles through which the nation had passed. That was the problem which now faced Cromwell: not to look back at the briers and thorns that had grown up under his Parliament’s shadow, but to work out some more successful formula for the future. The trouble was that the experience of the briers and thorns seemed to incline him, not towards loosening the well-regulated liberty, but towards tightening the clamp.