CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Old Oliver, New Ideas

New hands shall learn to work, forget to steal New legs shall go to Church, new knees shall kneel.

Poem on the reclamation of the Fens

In the summer of 1657 ‘old Oliver’, as he was now often termed by friends as well as enemies, was compelled to bow his head further before the combined onslaughts of age and ill-health. His signature – OLIVER P – on both official documents and private letters began to look positively shaky in marked contrast to the firm letters of a year or two back. Much of August was spent at salubrious Hampton Court seeking recovery; there were some medicinal waters not far distant which were held to be beneficial to a series of painful catarrhs from which he had recently been suffering. The connexion between his new weakness and his recent experiences was the subject of contemporary comment: this Samson was gradually losing his strength and ‘surely he hath not wanted Delilahs to deprive him of it’ – meaning the Army officers. A letter of Richard Cromwell’s in June expressed a mood of depression: ‘the Publique Peace is tumbled and tossed as if it were nothing to break the veins of one another to a deadly gasping … wisdom hath tooken the wings of the morning and I fear left us’.¹ The grandeur of the new Protectoral Investiture could not cloak over altogether the plain facts of a situation in which attempts at a more satisfactory constitutional settlement had failed. The nation was now ruled precariously by the authority of one ageing and none too robust man.

Yet for all the perfume of sadness which haunted Cromwell personally, there was much of interest still to be discerned in his rule in the tender young shoots of experiment, social and administrative. It is these which give to the Interregnum in England its unique and seminal character. It was true that many of the ideas which pushed up their heads from under the turf in the newly fertile atmosphere were trampled upon at the Restoration, as a result of which their traces are sometimes hard to discern, and equally difficult to analyse with positive certainty. Nevertheless the mere fact that the experiments which now flourished were sometimes as much as two or three hundred years away from fulfilment – and some not fulfilled yet – demonstrates the excitement of an age when at least in theory new solutions were believed possible to old problems.

Education was a prime example. It had been a natural subject of Puritan interest for some time, and a special concern of the two immigrant pundits, Samuel Hartlib and John Dury, who exercised much influence in the Protectoral circle. Hartlib was originally a Polish Prussian from Elbing who moved to London in 1630; he was a great believer both in ‘useful knowledge’ and in spreading it about, or as John Evelyn said of him later, he was ‘honest and learned … a public spirited and ingenious person, who has propagated many useful things and arts’. Back in 1641 he had outlined his own ideal kingdom in a book entitled Macaria, a paradise where the wealth of the country would be perfectly distributed having originally been wisely husbanded, and where education would incidentally be the concern of the State. Dury, also from Elbing, and the son of an exiled Scottish minister, had landed up in England after some peregrinations round Europe; here he worked on the idea of a Protestant Union.²

Both Hartlib and Dury were much impressed by the plans of Comenius for the synthesization of all education, the idea of a Pansophic College, and it was at their insistence that Comenius had been invited to England by the Long Parliament in 1641. Hartlib and Dury continued to believe in the need for both common and mechanical schools as an important weapon in building an ideal State, and had put forward proposals to this effect to the Barebones Parliament. The common schools should teach reading, writing, maths, geography, history, reasoning and law; later the ‘mechanical’ schools should follow with vocational training. On the sensible grounds that an educational system changes the face of a country quicker than anything else, they believed that this double programme would ensure that English commoners would shortly be superior to all others.

Such ideas abounded: William Petty for example believed in the need to establish ‘literary workhouses’ for poor children. The minister William Dell demanded State-maintained universities at London, York, Bristol, Exeter, Norwich and so forth. The interest and belief in the properties of science extended through the ranks of thinking society, as George Fox suggested that laboratory analysis would establish whether bread and wine could really turn to the body and blood of Christ, while Gerard Winstanley, the Leveller, suggested that lectures on natural science might replace the Sunday sermon. The Leveller Richard Overton advocated a method for testing the immortality of the soul by scientific experiment.³ Jonathan Goddard, the physician later associated with the foundation of the Royal Society, who had accompanied Cromwell to both Ireland and Scotland, who had been a member of the Council of State and had been chosen to help out Oliver over his duties as Chancellor of Oxford University, probably owed his appointment as Professor of Physic at Gresham College in 1655 to the Protector’s influence. It was true that the emphasis of Hartlib and Dury on the need to make science part of the general system of education was eventually quelled at Oxford in favour of the opposite view, that it was a subject only suited to more mature scholars.^* Thus scientific knowledge became the pride of the few – the aristocrats – and not as it might conceivably have been, the possession of the many – the people. But this is to look forward into the future. At least such energetic ideas were part of the intellectual climate of Oliver’s time.

Nor were they cut off from mere practice. The actual ordinances of the Protectorate about education showed its persistent concern for the subject.⁴ Visitors for schools and universities were subjected to scrutiny. The rules for the ejection of scandalous schoolmasters (part of the ordinances to control preachers similarly) were continuously applied. Much enthusiasm was displayed in ridding the young from the tutelage of those who either disseminated the wrong opinions or had unworthy private lives. Possible unworthinesses ranged from adultery to the undue haunting of alehouses, or for that matter tolerating such deviations in their pupils. In June 1657 the original Act that had made these provisions was continued for a further three years, and it was suggested that the work of purgation should be done with ‘renewed diligence’. At the same time the Government showed general enlightenment in the matter of financial grants for the upkeep of schools and the support of school masters. In June 1657 in the case of the special assessment for the Spanish War, the salaries of masters, fellows and scholars of any university college, Eton or Westminster, or any of the free schools were specifically exempted. If, then, the Protectoral Government did not apply the conclusions of Hartlib and Dury to the last letter, it showed itself at least benevolently inclined.

What was more, Oliver himself displayed the influence of their thinking, which fitted neatly into his own hopes for the dissemination of Protestantism through the use of good ministers, on at least two specific occasions. He drafted a plan for a new college at Oxford to be named St Mary’s Hall, with voluntary subscriptions to be raised to endow it; £1000 was to be paid out of the college revenue to ten men who were to make ‘a generall synopsis of the true reformed Protestant Christian Religion proposed in this commonwealth’. It was further proposed ‘that into this college shall be received and there maintained poor Protestant Ministers and scholars being Foreigners and strangers borne, who shall reside in the said College and apply themselves principally to the study of Divinity’. But it was not only the needs of world Protestantism which encouraged him to promote educational projects. His support of an educational establishment at Durham, which, it has been suggested, might have played the same role as Trinity College, Dublin, in Elizabethan Ireland, was once again rooted in a desire to provide a good body of suitable ministers.⁵

On the level of sheer regional enhancement, a northern centre of sorts was not a new idea. In 1640 there had been a petition to found a university at Manchester, and in 1647 at York. The appropriated lands and money of the deans and chapter of Durham Cathedral would, it was then felt, provide the ideal financial backing for a college or university there, and by April 1650 matters had got to the stage where the gentlemen, free-holders and inhabitants of Durham joined together to petition Parliament on the subject. It was in the March of 1651 that Oliver, then in Edinburgh, was moved to intervene on their behalf, possibly as a result of a visit from some of those concerned. At any rate, in a letter of endorsement to the Speaker, he wrote ‘Truly it seems to me a matter of great concernment and importance as that which, by the blessing of God, may much conduce to the promoting of learning and piety in those poor and ignorant parts.’ So much for the ministry. But he spared a thought too, to the North itself, adding ‘there being also many concurring advantages to this place, as pleasantness and aptness of situation, healthful air, and plenty of provisions, which seem to plead for their desires therein’. If the work was set on foot, not only might it ‘suit with God’s present dispensations’, but there was a chance of unforeseen but glorious fruits in the future.⁶

Nevertheless the pressure of other affairs held off the further development of Durham’s plans until the spring of 1656. Then Lilburne wrote to Thurloe pointing out a further advantage of accepting a new petition on the subject – it would gain ‘northern affection’ (at a time after all when the Government was in need of all the loyalty it could muster), as well as of course adding to Oliver’s renown. Finally in May 1657 letters patent were granted, on the petition of Durham, Newcastle and Northumberland. The point should however be made that there was no mention yet of a university; the letters patent referred strictly to a ‘College’, Eton or Winchester being apparently the model rather than Oxford or Cambridge.

The aim of the new college was said to be ‘the better Advancement of Learning and Religion in those parts’ and Hartlib’s name was among those on the committee to set it up. But the list of Visitors, many of whom were intimately connected with Cromwell or the Protectoral regime, showed that this advancement was intended not only to be made within their sphere of influence, but also to extend that sphere on a further solid base in the North itself. Thus Durham College was to be part of a two-way process in the strengthening of both religion and the central Government, with Speaker Widdrington, Rush-worth, Walter Strickland, Fauconberg, Sir Christopher Packe and Lambert (this was two months before his retirement) among those listed. The names of those selected to be the first office-holders were similarly interwoven into prominent Protectoral circles. One Professor was to be the mathematician Robert Wood, a Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford; he had been employed in Ireland in the spring of 1657 by Henry Cromwell, and enjoyed the patronage of Lady Ranelagh, in a letter to whom he greeted his appointment with a modest surprise: ‘My call seems to be clearly providential,’ he wrote, ‘because I had not the least hand in it from first to last.’⁷

Wood’s mind was certainly open to new ideas: having studied under the mathematician William Oughtred a year or so previously, he had actually advocated a coherent system of decimal coinage in a tract called Ten to One. Recognizing the value of logarithms being generally acclaimed in Europe at the time, he realized the advantages of decimalization in applying logarithms to monetary calculations. If the monetary system rested on the principle of mathematics, it was argued, merchants would find accountancy ‘turn’d to a delightful recreation’. It was suggested that the pound should be the main unit, followed by tenths (invested with Oliver’s image) and hunds or hundreds, otherwise twopence.^* Hartlib had extended his patronage to Wood, and arranged an informal debate on the subject in March 1656. While Wood reported that his ideas had been well received at Oxford, he was also welcomed by William Petty and Benjamin Worsley, secretary of the Commonwealth Council of Trade.⁸

However Wood’s association with Durham proved to be somewhat less happy: for all his initial enthusiasm, it seems that Wood never actually made the adventurous journey to the North. That was one difficulty of distance not lending enchantment which one must believe would have been overcome had Durham College lasted longer. But from the first the college encountered two bodies of objection. The Quakers were enraged by the prospect of a college presuming to educate a ministry, a function which smacked too much of State control for their taste. Much ridicule was poured by them in consequence on its officials ‘called of men Masters, proud Pharisee-like, with rings, white boothose tops, ribbons and wearing of gold, poor men’s sons perked up in pride’. George Fox paid the place a visit and came away sarcastically comparing it to the Tower of Babel, on the ground that the new ministers were to learn Hebrew, Greek and Latin, whereas ‘Peter and John, that could not read letters, preached the Word Christ Jesus, which was in the beginning before Babel was’.⁹

Quaker opposition, if as always uncomfortable in its manifestations, was not disastrous. More serious was the hostility of the ancient universities, particularly as the ambitions of Durham grew and a patent for granting degrees – which would effect the transformation from college to university – had actually been drawn up before it was cut off by Oliver’s death. Oxford had already taken the line that a precedent of some danger was being set, and that by multiplying universities, the ‘main end of them would be quite destroyed’. In vain the new men now petitioned Richard Cromwell, referring to their body as a tender infant still in its swaddling clothes. The infant was finally smothered, the death of Oliver having proved fatal to its prospects, and it was left to another age, another inspiration, to provide a permanent university at Durham.^* At least in its short life, Durham had proved the capacity of the Protector to build in some way on the experimental ideas of men such as Hartlib and Dury.

In another area, that of finance, the picture was somewhat different. Here new ideas were put into practice less at the inspiration of the theorists than as a result of the desperate need of the Government for new solutions to old problems. For Cromwell, no more than Charles I, nor for that matter many other leaders both ancient and modern, found no ideal or even ready answer to the conflicting claims of defence and foreign policy on the one hand (to keep England safe and make her great) and lower taxation on the other (to keep her people happy and make them prosperous). It is doubtful whether any such ideal solution did exist within this period. First of all it was essentially in financial terms an age of transition from the old concept of the mediaeval King who had to ‘live of his own’, find money from his own resources for his policies, to that of Parliamentary control of taxation, and so by degrees of policies too. Secondly this transitional age was also further bedevilled by the financial wreckage inevitably left by the Civil Wars.

Of course certain of Cromwell’s actions did contribute to his economic troubles. The point has rightly been made by one authority (who is also one of his advocates) that Cromwell was ‘no financier’, while his critics have concentrated with justice on the chill relations which he allowed to exist between himself, certain merchants, and the City of London. It was a dangerous climate in an age without banks in the modern sense (although banks of a sort existed), when it was exactly with such bodies that loans had to be negotiated when necessary: the fact that they were being refused in the last twelve months of Cromwell’s life greatly added to his already mounting financial difficulties. At the same time it is profitless to point in the abstract to any possible solution to the critical Protectoral finances which does not take into account the ruling philosophy of the times. As has been seen, this was an age when the role which Cromwell caused England to play in world affairs was popular rather than the reverse with the majority of the nation. Furthermore the expensive magnificence with which he acted abroad also helped to underpin his own position by isolating King Charles II, just as the costly array of troops quartered in England, Ireland and Scotland curtailed the Royalist menace.

The actual details of Cromwell’s financial policy are still debated – experts disagree, as did his contemporaries, on whether or not he inherited a sound economic situation from the Long Parliament.^* But it is incontrovertible that he assumed office at a most critical moment, economically speaking, when the full effects of the Dutch War were just beginning to be felt, whatever the previous solvency. At the same time the effect of the frequent land sales, as a result of the Royalist confiscations, on the economy of the country was equally unsettling because it tended to lock up capital unduly. The Civil Wars had themselves left financial chaos, where new expedients jostled with old-established taxes. Even so, the cost of keeping armies in both Scotland and Ireland, and the additional general cost of the Union with Scotland, was not met by the assessments designated to cover it. Furthermore, English trade was subject to additional depressions and fluctuations not necessarily of the Government’s making. Yet all these looming phantoms surrounded a man, one of whose foremost hopes as Protector in 1654 was actually to reduce the unpopular monthly assessments, in accordance with popular desire.

These assessments, much disliked since their first initiation by Fairfax’s army in 1645, had spread into a nationwide organization handled by the new country committees. Land-ownership was the basis of the charges with personalty also included, and the money originally all paid to the Army treasurers at the Guildhall. Land property continued to be the basis on which the assessment was made throughout, despite an effort on the part of Whalley to establish a monetary levy of sixpence in the pound. However as the number of soldiers declined, the Treasury commissioners took to indicating where else the assessment might be used. But from the end of the Civil War onwards, the huge sum of £120,000 a month was demanded: it was hardly surprising that there were vociferous complaints both from the people and in the 1654 Parliament. As a result, Cromwell took it upon himself to reduce it in two steps down to £60,000. This was certainly in accordance with the general wishes and his own beliefs, but financially speaking only thrust the Protector back onto other sources.

Of these, some, like the use of the customs, were ancient and therefore generally tolerated; others, like the excise, were new with the wars and consequently much disliked. Excise, first suggested by Pym in 1643 and used subsequently by both sides in the Civil War, had the unpleasant tang of an unlooked-for novelty in the popular mind. It consisted of a tax paid by manufacturers on goods made at home, and by foreign manufacturers on goods at the ports, in the same manner as customs. Both ale and beer were subject to it, although bread was traditionally thought to be exempt as the staple diet; it had the obvious effect of causing price rises, and on occasions there were excise riots. In the end it was discovered to be most profitably handled by being farmed out to private individuals. By selling the excise revenue of one class of goods for a fixed sum forward in advance, the Government had the advantage of much-needed cash. If the individual concerned could garner more than he paid – and obviously the object of the exercise from his point of view was so to do – he kept the difference. The receipts do show that large profits must have been made by the farmers: nevertheless the fact that the Government still preferred to sell shows that the problem was not simple. The Government itself could rake in much less on its own account. The individual paid the Government more, but also took a large profit. As it was, a man like the ubiquitous Martin Noell gradually acquired whole groups of goods, and also bought other enterprises for cash. Noell acquired the salt contract for amounts varying between twenty and thirty thousand pounds a year, the contract for draperies, silks and linen at fifty-six thousand pounds a year, and finally in 1657 a multiple contract for five years covering many different goods. Over the Post Office, which had been founded in the age of Charles i for twopence per letter per eighty miles, with post horses hired out additionally, he acted as Thurloe’s agent in the collection of monies. Thurloe needed control of the system for the murky concerns of his intelligence.¹¹

Despite this, figures quoted by Dr Ashley show that there was a constant and vast gap between revenue and expenditure throughout the Protectorate, with the revenue always beneath the two million mark, and the expenditure always in excess of it. As a result the gap itself was nearly always over a million pounds; in 1657 it had risen to one and a half million pounds, and in 1658, the year of his death, was still one million five hundred thousand. These figures explain not only why sources of immediate cash like the farming out of the customs and excise were attractive, but also how recourse had to be made to other forms of concealed borrowing – debentures for soldiers’ wages for example, and ‘public faith’ bonds. Even so, other loans were necessary, personal ones perhaps from Noell or his fellow merchant Vyner, and hopefully loans from the City. It has been plausibly suggested that some of Cromwell’s warmth for men like these – and for that matter the Jews – may have rooted in his financial troubles and the icy reactions of the City.¹²

It was true that the Humble Petition and Advice had proffered Cromwell a revenue of one million three hundred thousand pounds over the business of the kingship in 1657. But there were problems in this: first in itself this was not sufficient and it later had to be raised another six hundred thousand pounds. Secondly, it was hard to know where the actual money, not the postulated figures, was to come from, as Cromwell himself ruefully admitted to his Parliament of 1658: although ‘we have been as good husbands thereof as we could … some supplies designed by you for public service, that of the buildings, hath not come in as expected’.¹³ In this last period of his life, Cromwell needed a further five hundred thousand pounds for the Spanish War, an assessment to last three months only; he also, as has been seen, turned to an expedient already tried out by James i and Charles i, a tax on new London buildings. All those houses built in London since 1620 were to pay a year’s rent, and those actually built since September 1657 were to pay a fine of £120 a month from then on. But here again not so much money was raised as had been expected.

Gathering financial troubles not only put Cromwell from time to time in check to a Parliament of sorts, an ordeal one must believe that he might by now have preferred to avoid altogether, but also touched on other aspects of his idealized policy. For example the position of the English Catholics was one which touched delicately on Anglo-French relations. In the middle of the decade Oliver had allowed a liberal de facto situation to become established, but Bordeaux was naturally under explicit instructions from Mazarin to press for some kind of de jure toleration. Now Parliament demanded the return of the harsh old recusancy laws to pay for the Spanish War: in theory Catholics were either to take an oath of abjuration or forfeit two-thirds of their estates. Despite Oliver’s objections, such a bill was passed in June and he had perforce to accept it (although the bill was probably never enforced). He was left still soothing Bordeaux with promises that the implementation of the laws would continue to be soft rather than hard, promises which Bordeaux, at any rate, thought that he intended to keep.

The heart of the matter of course lay in the frightening expense of the Army and Navy, expenditure for the Army alone estimated by Dr Ashley as totalling over seven million pounds during the period of the Protectorate. It was certainly not in Court expenditure, as some Royalists and Republicans suggested. Cromwell, no patron of the arts as had been King Charles I, was also no waster of the nation’s monies in this respect. The actual expenses of Army and Navy and civil ordnance probably came to within two to three million a year. Under the circumstances it is easy to understand the despairing conversation with the Protector on the subject of his finances reported by Bordeaux to France: Oliver was professing poverty, and his inability to help France further than already committed on their joint military projects. To the Ambassador he admitted general helplessness over his finances: for although his revenue was considerable, his expenses ‘by land and by sea’ had absorbed a great part of it. We may believe that these professions were sincere, as did Bordeaux himself.¹⁴

The theorists were not wanting in trying to provide solutions, not only concerning the nation’s finances, but also with regard to the allied subject of trade. Hartlib and his friends, for example, were enthusiastic believers in the value of increased productivity in a predominantly agricultural country: four and a half million of England’s five-million-odd population were said to be sustained by the land. Productivity could be enhanced by the compulsory plantation of fruit trees, or such worthy measures as increased bee-keeping: but it was a premise of such views that waste land must be fatal to the common good. Hence the enclosures, so much resented by the common people, and such complicated extensions of the enclosure system as the draining of the Fens, which the Levellers had criticized so furiously earlier, came within the schemes of Hartlib and his circle, as being godly works, and in his Legacy of Husbandry of 1655, Hartlib spoke approvingly of Fen drainage.¹⁵ Cromwell’s own change of attitude to the whole subject of the Fens was a perfect illustration of the influence such theories were having upon Puritans at the time.

Back in the faraway 1630s he had seen the Fen issue as a simple one of the sufferings of the common people. By June 1653, Sir William Killigrew was reporting of his reaction to the draining of the South Holland Fen that Cromwell (then Lord-General) considered it a good work in principle, only that the drainers had done too well for themselves and ‘that the poor were not enough provided for’. The last stage came when Cromwell permitted orders to be made against those who had assembled together in a riotous manner to protest against the drainage. Whatever the worthiness of their cause, the men of the Fens were disturbers of the peace, and they had now become a law and order problem. Edmund Drury of Swaffham, for example, suspected leader of the protesters, was said to have threatened to take on two or three thousand soldiers ‘for they were as well armed as they’. As a poem on the subject expressed it:

I sing Floods muzzled and the Ocean tamed

Luxurious Rivers governed and reclaimed …

New hands shall learn to work, forget to steal

New legs shall go to Church, new knees shall kneel.

The battle of the Fens was over. The reply had come back to the protesters from the centre, in the words of the Parliamentary committee on the subject: ‘It is and ought to be the care of the supreme power to provide for the good of the whole.’¹⁶

One area where Puritan theory of bygone days might have clashed with established practice was that of the various chartered companies set up for trade abroad. No topics had received more vigorous lashings from the Puritan opposition before the war than the domestic monopolies. Did not such companies as the Merchant Adventurers, the Muscovy Company, the East India Company and so forth, constitute in themselves monopolies? In general however the companies enjoyed the Protector’s support. He showed himself helpful to the Muscovy Company, and intervened for the Merchant Adventurers at Hamburg, where Richard Bradshaw incidentally was both the Government’s representative as Resident and Deputy of the company. It is true that he showed himself at least aware of the difficulty. One letter from the Protector to the Council of February 1655, written in his own hand, referred to the petition of George Sanderson to have letters patent to export coal exclusively from Newcastle to France. The Council should consider whether this ‘be not a monopoly, and so prejudicial to the liberties of the people, or whether it may not lawfully be granted, to the advancement of the public revenues upon the reasons and grounds annexed’. The Merchant Adventurers endured in fact considerable criticism for their exclusive right to export undressed cloths to the Continent, particularly from the cloth manufacturers. Finally in January 1657 the Parliamentary committee on trade voted against the continuance of the practice, despite one previous favourable vote, and in the teeth, too, of the opposition of one of their members, Sir Christopher Packe, who as master of the company used his double position to charge into the debate ‘like a horse’.¹⁷ Nevertheless it seems that finally the company got their privileges back. In general, it was left to the Levellers and the Quakers to pursue the obvious case to be made against the companies by the opponents of monopolies.

On the subject of trade generally, the establishment of a Council of Trade in 1650 had represented at least a valiant attempt to deal with the problems of an age where no one quite understood how commercial trends, subject to so many incalculable outside influences, could be best harnessed; while at the same time other outside events, such as wars, loss of shipping and bad harvests, further complicated the issue. The Protectoral trade committee which followed was at least an effort in the direction of central control, although only one report of the committee actually became the basis of an Act of Parliament for the exportation of ‘several commodities of the Breed, Growth & Manufacture of this Commonwealth’.¹⁸ But various of its reports suggested the need to prohibit the export of wool abroad, and to allow goods such as beef, pork, bacon and cheese to be exported with only slight duties, or on another occasion the abolition of the export of rawhide and leather altogether – even if there were few tangible results. Even these tentative attempts at State control were in keeping with the advanced theories of the time, as those of Thomas Violet, author of a thoughtful piece of economic thinking, in which he advocated much greater vigilance of the Government over trade, similar to that of the Dutch Government, which he believed to be ideal.

The coal industry had already been the subject of propositions for State control in the reign of King Charles I, by means of royal ownership. A new version of this plan was submitted to Oliver Protector in 1655.¹⁹ Since the price of coal represented an anguished subject for the inhabitants of the South – Londoners in particular had suffered from three hundred per cent price rises during the Dutch War – this notion of State ownership, known as the Battalion Plan, was at least discussed in vague terms. Under Charles’s government interest in mines, with municipalities to replace retailers as traders, had been suggested. Under Cromwell, it was proposed only that shipments at sea should be controlled by the Government. A group of agents were to be appointed to buy coal at fixed prices in summer and winter, paying an annual rent of £50 or £60,000 a year to the State; however since this well-intentioned scheme would in fact have allowed the agents to fix an extremely high price to the public with impunity, it was perhaps just as well it fell through.

In one sphere at least Cromwell’s own religious predilections did fit neatly into economic theories of the time. His own belief in the need to allow the immigration of Protestant strangers was fully echoed by a man like Violet, who as a free-trader expressed the view that a good Dutch merchant within the English community was as valuable as a good Dutch cow. It was easy for Oliver to accept the notion that the wealth of the country would be enhanced by allowing such men to settle when his religious instincts were already so prominently engaged in inviting forlorn Protestants to settle. Way back in his days as Lord General, Jean Despaigne, a distinguished Huguenot divine who had fled to England after the death of Henry iv, had been one of those who enjoyed his protection. In 1652 Despaigne dedicated a tract to ‘Messire Olivier Cromwell, General des Armées de la Republique d’Angleterre’; it was with Cromwell’s help that Despaigne secured new quarters for his church in Somerset House. When thanks were officially given for this benevolence by Despaigne, Cromwell responded with a most gracious speech at the ceremony, which made a profound impression on his hearers at the time: ‘Words we shall never forget,’ wrote Despaigne. They may also be fairly held to sum up Cromwell’s emotional attitude to the subject. ‘I love strangers,’ he declared; ‘but principally those who are of our religion.’²⁰

Thus London and Norwich colonies of Protestant immigrants got permission to trade freely under his Protectoral rule despite inevitable local opposition. Over two hundred and fifty foreigners were granted letters of naturalization under the Protectorate, a record number, far in excess of that allowed under James i or Charles. And Oliver himself continued to show much cordial patronage to strangers, from Theophilus de Garencières, domestic physician to the French Ambassador who became a member of the English college of physicians at his insistence, to Peter Vasson who became Bachelor of Physic at Oxford as a result of the same kindly intervention: the Chancellor of the University (Cromwell) declared himself as having received a good report concerning Vasson, his sufferings for religion, his success (through the blessing of God) in his practice and ‘the unblameableness of his conversation’. To an address by the minister of the French church in London shortly after he became Protector, he responded with equal warmth: ‘he desired our prayers for him’ wrote an eye-witness, in his work for God’s people.²¹

Many of the most acute problems of the Protector would have been ameliorated by the existence of a bank, such as the Dutch enjoyed at Amsterdam; it was a perquisite which English merchants much envied them, because they themselves suffered from a very high rate of interest over their loans which, as they pointed out, crippled their trade. The notion of a State bank was actually suggested as early as 1648, in the shape of two banks, one to be a ‘bank of trade’ and in 1650 there were proposals for a bank of exchange. Generally, it began to be felt that a bank must benefit the community. In England’s Safety of 1652 Henry Robinson urged the accumulation of gold and silver inside England in large amounts, while essentials like food and raw materials should never be exported, and luxuries never imported. It was this pamphlet that Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper recommended to the Protector soon after his accession, that Robinson’s proposals should have ‘speedy consideration’. Another pamphlet by S. Lambe was on the subject of the manifold advantages of a bank, including an increase in the national capital and a reduction in the rate of interest for the merchants, views which he subsequently expressed in a petition to Parliament, although once again nothing definite came of it. As it was, Lambe’s views were left for a later age to put into practice, and reap the fruit.²²

The controversy over Cromwell’s finances reaches an acute form over the situation immediately after his death, when the country undoubtedly underwent a bleak period of near bankruptcy with Richard’s wavering hand at the helm. Was this a situation inherited from Cromwell – who certainly left a large State debt at his death, part of his general gap between revenue and expenditure – or was it something particular produced by his untimely decease? It is of course impossible for the most enlightened economist to give an answer beyond the realms of doubt to this question. What would have happened had Cromwell not died can never be more than a matter of guesswork. Nevertheless the experience of history does suggest that Cromwell would have weathered the financial storm, had he lived. This is not to minimize the problems he was facing. But the crisis of confidence at the departure of a strong man, aggravated by external troubles of economic depression in 1659, not of his making, did combine to produce an appalling situation which would not have obtained had he lived. The further recall of Parliament for monetary reasons can easily be envisaged, and was in fact being discussed in the summer before his death. What concessions would have flowed from that can only be imagined, not known. But it has been pointed out with justice that the French Government across the Channel struggled on with a vast deficit in the seventeenth century. As a going concern, then, Cromwell’s finances were probably capable of remaining such, whatever his difficulties: once moribund, the corpse rapidly began to stink.

For this reason, judgement on his financial handlings should not be too harsh. Nor did Cromwell attempt to rise splendidly above his economic troubles with indifference, even if he did not understand them. The efforts to subsidize the Western Design and indeed domestic policies by the acquisition of Spanish treasure, fruitless as they turned out to be, had at least the possibilities of success; the Decimation Tax to pay for the Major-Generals, equally unsuccessful, showed a desire to cope with the problem of administration coupled with that of finance. As it is, one is compelled to sympathize with Cromwell, stumbling gallantly forward, grappling with difficulties which had not been assuaged before him and would not be assuaged for long after his death. His inadequate hold on economics may have amounted to a blind-spot: nevertheless he was also dramatically unlucky in the period with which he had to cope.

With regard to his social conscience, Oliver Cromwell never lacked compassion for ordinary, poor, depressed people, whether poor soldiers needing their money, poor oppressed Christians, or simply the poor – whose lot he had hoped to see ameliorated when he first came to power. At the same time, in social theory, as in finance, he was the child of his own times, not an innovator; as a result he was in no position to halt the trend in Puritan thinking which gradually came to identify poverty with lack of moral worth, self-help being the mark of God’s Elect, even though his instincts might have been against it. Nor for that matter did his embroglios with Parliament on other subjects ever leave the power and freedom in respect to that institution to push through the series of reforms that had once been the aim of those interested in the settlement of the nation. So the Protectorate continued its course as a time of experiment and suggestion, rather than fulfilment.

The Parliament of September 1656 continued for example the discussion of legal reforms, and measures were put forward such as local offices for wills, or courts of law and equity at York, which if carried would have affected the lives of ordinary people significantly. But these bills were successfully obstructed by the mass of lawyers within the House, and since by this time the reform of the law and the seizure of private property had become fatally connected in conservative minds – due to the fact that too many of the same people preached both – so the possibilities of reform fizzled away. Even Chancery never quite got abolished, although the returned Rump continued to mull over the law after Oliver’s death.

In the case of the administration of the country as a whole, it is more difficult to discern the intentions either of the Protector or his associates with any certainty, due to the twin effects of the chaos left by the Civil War and the sweeping away of the changes of the Interregnum after the Restoration. There are however traces of efforts at some sort of centralization, and a feeling that had the Protector lived longer, and been less hampered by other problems during his actual period of power, he might have desired to divide off politics and government in some manner in the case of administration. But there is one area, Scotland, where the personal aims of the Protector, although different, can be seen more clearly, because they stand out against the native horizon.

Here Oliver was duly proclaimed Lord Protector at the Canongate in Edinburgh and at Leith in mid-July 1657 with appropriate trumpets. Nicoll in his Diary spoke of ‘all tokens of joy’, but a newsletter revealed that out of five or six thousand Scots who witnessed the ceremony, not one opened his mouth to cry ‘God bless my Lord Protector’. Curiously enough this particular proclamation only just post-dated the actual passing of the Act of Union between England and Scotland by Parliament by a matter of months; the Union, planned after Dunbar and passed by Council of State and Protector as long ago as April 1654, had been held up for three years for official approval from Parliament, due to Oliver’s other troubles there. Even in the final debates some objections were raised to the Union by members, including, interestingly enough, the idea that Ireland should be given the preference in this matter ‘as the better country and being chiefly inhabited by the English’, Scotland of course being regarded as no colony but a land of foreigners. But this official delay did not prevent Scotland being represented in both Protectoral Parliaments, while four Scottish members were designated for the future Second Chamber. The trouble was that since the same disenfranchisement of much of the population appertained in Scotland as in Ireland – all those who had helped the King since the Engagement were disqualified unless they could prove that vaunted ‘Good Affection’ – members naturally tended to be Government nominees, and as such included a large number of English officials and English officers, rather than true representatives of Scotland. In 1656 for example, the English military Governor of Inverness was elected member for that city; Lockhart, a Cromwellian supporter, was elected for Lanark; and Broghill for Edinburgh. Elections were not attended by any particular enthusiasm: an English officer at Aberdeen, Robert Baynes, reported the apathetic scene at one election there, where the local population were only too anxious to point out how few of them, if any, were qualified to vote by the new rules.²³

Nevertheless plans for the welfare of Scotland went forward. In May 1655 the Council of State for Scotland was constituted under Lord Broghill as President, and provided £100 to buy a mace for the new body. The English military commander left behind by Cromwell after Dunbar, General Monk, was also included, and under his firm but beneficent rule a period of law and order was at long last enjoyed by war-torn Scotland. Monk was a character of much interest, even if he was not precisely ‘your honest General Monk who is a simple hearted man’ as Oliver described him in a letter about this time. John Aubrey termed him originally a strong, lusty, well-set up young fellow; it was his wife, formerly a seamstress, who incurred the laughing scorn of Dorothy Osborne at Court – ‘she will suit well enough with the rest of the great ladies of the times’ she wrote. But Monk was either the most successful turncoat of his age, or put more kindly, he showed at every point of his career an intelligent appreciation of what action would best suit that particular situation at that particular time. Perhaps it was a help, as Clarendon put it, that he lacked what inspired so many men of his own time – he had ‘no fumes of religion which turned his head’. Yet he was far too cautious to parade this lack, as the fumes themselves were so often paraded: at the beginning of his stay in Scotland William Clarke wrote back enthusiastically to Speaker Lenthall that Monk was ‘a very precious instrument’. But Clarke pointed also to Monk’s real value for employment in Scotland: no one could order the Scots as ‘handsomely’ as Monk – ‘he carries things with such a grace and rigid gentleness’.²⁴

This rigid gentleness was expressed by Monk in two ways. In the first place he was determined to tolerate no endless series of subversive campaigns and attacks from the Scots in either Highlands or Lowlands, in which cause he much supported the building of the five great Cromwellian fortresses of Leith, Perth, Ayr, Inverlochy and Inverness. By this means he believed, and rightly, that Scotland could be controlled by the minimum of troops, thus enabling the soaring costs of the military occupation to be held down. Perth, Ayr and Leith were all praised as structures by contemporaries: Leith for example was described by John Ray in 1661 as ‘passing fair and sumptuous’, and he estimated that each fortress had cost £100,000 to build. Inverlochy was a lonely spot in the north-west at the other end of the Great Glen from Inverness, close by the present site of Fort William. It was considered sufficiently unpleasant for its English garrisons to be limited to a year’s tour, and how the letters home of the English soldiers complained of the cold and the bleakness, as they sent off desperately for such palliative luxuries as Russian leather, chairs, pewter goods, a warm violet-coloured gown of ‘shagg’ against the weather, and plants of cherries and apricots to make the Highlands flower! The fortress at Inverness was built on a promontory at the head of the river Ness, where the two firths of Moray and Beauly met; local labour was used for digging, with skilled workers imported for the rest. In the same way some oak planks and beams came up from England, but neighbouring timber was also employed: the minister at Kirkhill, James Fraser, who kept a diary, recorded that Hugh Fraser of Struy received thirty thousand marks at one go for selling his woods.²⁵ Other materials had a less agreeable source: the best hewn stone came from the local churches and abbeys, including St Mary’s, Inverness and Beauly Priory.

The result, costing between fifty and eighty thousand pounds, and completed in 1657, was termed ‘a fabulous citadel’ by one local; the minister of Kirkhill called it ‘a most stately scene’. The Governor, Major-General Deane, was also said to have employed a vessel on Loch Ness to police it. The effects were more than military: even the minister admitted that the English soldiers civilized and enriched the place.^* Under the circumstances it was regrettable perhaps that after the Restoration the structure was pulled down and virtually obliterated in reaction against English rule: it was however a fate which must have given gloomy satisfaction to the minister from Kirkhill, since he had predicted it from the use of ecclesiastical materials (‘it was a sacrilegious structure and therefore could not stand’).

Nevertheless at the time, these fortresses over which waved the English flags with words on them in gold like Ebenezer and Emmanuel amply justified their use. It was generally agreed by the Scots themselves that the consequent peace which fell upon a land in which focal points could control any guerrilla action was remarkable and virtually without precedent. The system of justice introduced by the English, originally to break down the power of the Scottish magnates, was at least free to the people who enjoyed it, and for that reason popular. Burnet made an oft-quoted judgement, ‘At no time the Highlands were kept in better order than during the usurpation’, and Burton in his Diary recorded a view which has received equal prominence that ‘a man may ride all Scotland over with a switch in his hand and a hundred pounds in his pocket which he could not have done these five hundred years’. There was said to be not one robbery in the Inverlochy district in 1658. But Monk justified his reputation from Aubrey – ‘well-beloved by his soldiers in Scotland and even by that country (for an enemy)’ – as much by the second half of his policy. Here he was concerned to heal wherever possible, and to soothe down all those roughened patches of Anglo-Scottish relations to mutual benefit. He was wise enough to see the advantage of allowing many of the Scots to go abroad to serve in foreign regiments, for as he wrote, ‘the people here being generally so poor and idle … they cannot live unless they be in arms’.²⁶ Magnates such as Glencairn and Atholl were allowed the privilege of raising their own regiments abroad and so departed. It might be another step forward in the perpetual process of the expatriation of the talented and energetic, the curse of Scotland’s national identity, but from Monk’s point of view it certainly made sense, and at the time it was greeted by the Scots themselves with relief.

At home Highland and Border landowners were also allowed to maintain armed men for their defence, a valuable privilege considering the nature of the terrain, so long as chiefs were responsible for their clansmen. When the English system of Justices of the Peace was introduced, burghs were allowed to elect their own magistrates; the ministers were no longer penalized for praying for King Charles, as a result of which they obligingly left off doing it in public, although many continued in private. Monk’s aim was order, seen for example in rigorous scrutiny of passes between districts. But in bringing about order, he was also the instrument of Cromwell who from the vantage point of London seems to have had a more elevated plan for changing the face of Scotland radically from the land once dominated by ministers and nobles into an inspiring country where the ‘middle sort’ of people flourished. It was natural that Monk in consequence had his troubles with the centre, either trying to obtain payment for his troops, or complaining when he heard that Oliver had granted some concessions with regard to Perth and Stirling and other places to men he feared would be unworthy, through the Government’s ignorance: Monk in Scotland referred pointedly to ‘the great wrongs that is done through want of a right information in this business’.²⁷

For all such traditional disputes between the man on the spot and the man in Whitehall, Oliver’s plans for Scotland did show quite a coherent aim:^* he wanted toleration – and the mere fact that the ghastly Scottish witch-hunts, a feature of seventeenth-century Scottish history, were much reduced in numbers during this period was on the credit side. English men like William Clarke, in effect Monk’s secretary, were indeed sufficiently shocked by the procedure of these trials to compare them to that classic horror story of the seventeenth century, the Dutch massacre of the English settlers in 1621, calling them ‘this Amboyna kind of usage’. Oliver also wanted to boost the middle classes, and preserve not only peace, but also hopefully construct a new and righteous society. One speech on the subject of the Union in the 1656 Parliament probably appealed to him, when the speaker referred to the many previous civil wars of Scotland due to the unlimited power of the nobility. A great work was now being done there ‘which none of their Kings could ever compass, reserved by the mercy of God to you’.²⁸ This policy was particularly evident in Oliver’s attitude to education in Scotland, where he was eager to see schools and universities as sharp weapons in the battle for the souls of the people. In 1658 £1200 was granted to the Scottish Council of State for the special project of education in the Highlands, because of the general lack there. The universities were the subject of support throughout the Protectorate, on the basis of a general ordinance on the subject in August 1654. Both Glasgow and Aberdeen were to be given ‘a liberal annuity’ for helping the poor students, and there were attempts also to help Edinburgh with grants of Church lands.

This philanthropy was intended to be a two-way process. The universities, if manned by men favourable to the Protector’s aims, would also constitute future citadels as valuable in their way as the five military fortresses. The whole business fitted into the Protector’s courtship of the former Remonstrants in Scotland, those stricter adherents to the Covenant, as opposed to the Resolutioners who had been driven in contrast to ally with the Royalists. While Broghill wooed the Resolutioners, a former Remonstrant, Patrick Gillespie, became Vice-Chancellor of Glasgow University against Resolutioner opposition, and the Cromwellian influence could be seen from the fact that Thurloe was duly made Chancellor. A visit to London by Gillespie at the Protector’s invitation was paralleled by other invitations to former Remonstrants including John Livingstone and John Menzies (who accepted) and Robert Blair (who did not). Menzies subsequently became Professor of Divinity at Marischal College at Aberdeen; ‘Gillespie’s Charter’, by giving the lands of Scottish bishoprics to the Scottish universities, enabled further building at Glasgow, and at Aberdeen.^*Jaffray, who was as has been seen the Provost of Aberdeen, served in one of Cromwell’s Parliaments.

These were efforts to strengthen Protectoral influence in Scotland. The other half of Cromwell’s plans for that country, the welding of it together with England under a central control, can be discerned in such gestures as his treatment of the Scottish coal industry. Here the avoidance of the impositions placed upon English coal had enabled the Scots to build up a flourishing concern. But the Union logically brought Scottish coal into the English system of customs and excise. Cromwell sent his agent Thomas Tucker on an exploratory tour of Scotland to see how this could be best and most profitably achieved. As a result, in 1657 a tax of 4s. per ton on Scottish coal in native ships and 8s. a ton in foreign vessels was imposed. The Scottish colliery owners were naturally indignant, and a mission of protest to Oliver and Noell (to whom the tax was farmed) was led by the Earl of Wemyss. Despite the hostile attitude of the Protector the tax was brought down by nearly half in each case, and at the Restoration was eliminated altogether.²⁹ But the episode in general showed that the Union of England and Scotland posed more questions than were readily answered by Oliver’s policy, under the benevolent umbrella of Monk’s artificially induced peace. The mere fact that this peace itself was so expensive demonstrated the acute balancing-act always necessary over Scottish prosperity. The country was assessed at about £10,000 a month, of which not more than £8500 was found, the English having to find the extra as well as pay for the construction of the six great fortresses. Perhaps the ‘middle sort’ of people were now faring better and no doubt they deserved to do so. But no one could be greatly prosperous in a poor country, further crippled by the imposition of assessments to pay for the soldiers of occupation.

Nevertheless, for all that it was only the bleached bones of Oliver’s Scottish policies that survived the Restoration for the inspection of a later age, it was in Scotland that could be seen most clearly the kind of work Oliver might have carried out elsewhere as an administrator, given time and opportunity. For in Scotland he tackled what was in effect a conquered country yet, unlike Ireland, not one already mortgaged with claims and counter-claims, many of them dating ten years back. The Scots were in addition a people towards whom he felt warmth and interest, again in contrast to the native Irish Catholics. Oliver’s English-style centralization, his Justices of the Peace, his Scottish members of an English Parliament, coupled with his desire for toleration to be spread by Independent ministers on the English model, and the consequent growth of both liberalism and Protectoral influence, may all have amounted to a pipe-dream. Yet the material is of interest in giving clues to things much more overlaid or hidden away in the general morass of his administration in England.

In late 1657 the Court, household and family of old Oliver began to relax visibly as an old man retired from work begins to stretch out easily before the fire. It was not necessarily a new extravagant mode of life which was practised, although the £16,000 per quarter originally allowed for the expenses of his household had proved inadequate; in October 1657, in consequence, he was given £100,000 for the year, on condition that the Protector himself now bore the cost of repairing the palaces, the money to be paid at a rate of roughly £2000 a week from the customs, considered the most reliable source. But everywhere costs were rising as the households of other great magnates showed: the Earl of Bedford, for example, spent £540 on provisions in 1658 for which he had spent a maximum of £310 before. Nevertheless there was a different spirit abroad. It was in November 1657 that Bordeaux noted that the old ways – the dances, fêtes and the like – were coming back, the melancholy preachers were retiring.³⁰

With regard to the dancing in particular, it would be unfair to separate it from the influence of Mary and Frances Cromwell, whose approaching nuptials in their different ways were both destined to mark a significant departure from previous Protectoral custom. A marriage after all presents an ideal opportunity for reconciliation, as for the winning of additional support. It was a point recognized by the Protector not only in his courting of Fauconberg, but also, ironically enough, in his great indignation at the prospect of another important match being made outside his own family about the same period: that of Fairfax’s daughter Mary and the young Duke of Buckingham, once considered as a groom for Frances. Even the Protector’s protests could not prevent the marriage being celebrated, and it took place on 7 September. But the soldiers despatched after the pair did at least have the effect of separating them: the bold bridegroom was forced to flee. By October the poor young bride was said to be ‘transcendently pensive’ at her single state; with her mother she paid several visits to Whitehall to try to secure the intercession of the Cromwell ladies in her cause. But these latter were ill inclined to help those who had once scorned them. According to Sir William Dugdale, their somewhat regrettable reaction was to observe: ‘Proud tits! Are their stomaches now come down?’³¹

Frances’s marriage, for all its false starts, took place under happier auspices. Thurloe, with Desborough and Philip Jones, had finally concluded satisfactory terms with the Earl of Warwick. On 11 November, Mr Scobell, a Justice of the Peace, ‘tied the knot’ after a godly prayer by one of Cromwell’s chaplains, according to the prevailing rules of civil marriage. The next day the wedding feast in Whitehall scaled new heights of magnificence: not only were there forty-eight violins and fifty trumpets to be seen and heard, but there was also ‘mixt dancing’, a thing hitherto accounted ‘profane’, and that went on until five o’clock in the morning. The presents called forth general remark for their splendour: the Countess of Devonshire, the groom’s maternal grandmother (and mother of that Royalist colonel, Sir Charles Cavendish, killed so long ago at Gainsborough) gave £2000 worth of gold plate, including one called the pièce royal, ‘a tray such as a waiter would carry a glass on’. Bettie Claypole on this distaff side gave two sconces worth £100 each; Sir William Dugdale heard that somebody else had presented a good quantity of Barbary wine. The celebrations in general were noted for the presence of Royalists, such as the Earl of Newport, who was seen dancing with Lady Claypole. The rejoicings then moved from Whitehall to Lord Warwick’s house, to be continued for seven days. Poor Frances! She had only a bare three months to enjoy the company of the man on whom she had so long set her heart, for the gallant Robert Rich died of consumption in February of the next year. He lay in state at Warwick House, so recently the scene of his gorgeous nuptials. But he was mourned for in purple for three days ‘as they used to do for the great in the old days’ wrote a contemporary, so that at least he died as a prince.³²

As Bettie Claypole had employed the friendly services of another Royalist, Sir John Southcote, who had gone into exile after Naseby, to buy damask beds and dress material for her in Paris (as a result of which he got some of his son’s horses back), so the social fabric of the times was being gradually re-knit in many directions. It was hardly surprising to find three offices of the former royal Court being restored at the end of the year – Master-Cofferer, Substitute-Comptroller and Master of the Green Cloth – nor for that matter to find that Richard Cromwell took the oath as member of the Privy Council about the same time. The crown might not rest on the Protector’s head, but he was surrounded by all its trappings.

Mary’s wedding shortly after that of Frances was in one way a complete contrast since it took place in private at Hampton Court. Yet the fact that Fauconberg insisted on an Anglican service, and apparently got his way, was an even more remarkable instance of the spirit of conciliation now animating his new father-in-law. The ceremony was said to have been performed by the known Anglican Dr Hewett and out of the Book of Common Prayer itself. Nevertheless Oliver had been determined to secure Fauconberg to his side, paying £15,000 in dowry, and this despite some eyebrow-lifting on the subject of his suitability as a groom for Mary or indeed any other bride. In this case it was not a reprobate reputation, as in the case of Rich, which caused Oliver’s chaplain, Dr Jeremiah White, to take his master aside, but rather the lack of it. White, a waggish man, twitted the Protector on the subject of the match: ‘Why I think he will never make your Highness a grandfather! … I speak in confidence to your Highness, there are certain effects in Lord Fauconberg that will always prevent him making you a grandfather, let him do what he can.’³³

The matter was not left there, for Oliver chose to repeat the remark to Fauconberg himself, as a joke. The consequence was that Fauconberg fell into a rage, trapped White in his room, and beat him about with his cane. Even so White kept his wits: ‘My lord,’ he squeaked, ‘you are too angry for me to hope for mercy, but surely you can never be too angry to forget justice; only prove by getting [i.e. begetting] a child that I told the Protector wrong.’ And he also advised Fauconberg to exercise his cane in future by beating the indiscreet Protector about the shoulders. As to the truth, it is hard to choose between White and Fauconberg on this delicate matter. Fauconberg was a widower, and had certainly never had any children by his first marriage. In a sense White’s warning was proved correct since Fauconberg also left no children by Mary. On the other hand a letter of his in early 1658 referred to ‘my dame, whose condition makes it … dangerous’, and this same letter had to be broken off abruptly: ‘I am just now called to my poor wife’s succour.’ That seems to indicate that Mary at least fancied herself pregnant on one occasion, and may have miscarried subsequently.

There was no public demonstration at Mary’s wedding: some said that Fauconberg wanted to avoid the waste of money, preferring to employ it more usefully. But there was at least that hallmark of the Court of King Charles I, a mask. It included two pastorals written by Andrew Marvell, by now at last secure in his State appointment.³⁴ One of these was a musical dialogue between Cynthia the moon goddess and Endymion her lover, in which Oliver himself may have played the non-singing part of Jove, coming on at the end with the final chorus with some suitable fatherly gesture and general benevolence. The second had a country lass, Phillis, in conversation with two rustically named bumpkins, Tomalin and Hobbinol, on the subject of the wedding of Marina and Damon. Here once again Oliver probably appeared as Menalcas, father of Marina, and a shepherd; he was certainly alluded to as such in the text, the name deriving appropriately from the combined Greek for spirit and courage which had already been employed for pastorals by both Virgil and Herrick. Indeed the text contained many playful allusions – to Fauconberg as ‘the Northern Shepheard’s son’, a reference to his Yorkshire estates, Mary as Menalcas’s daughter, Rich as Anchises, ‘a shepheard too’ sporting with her younger sister in the shade. There was even a coy allusion to Oliver’s alleged rejection of the young King as a bridegroom:

For he did never love to pair

His progeny above the Air

as well as one of Marvell’s characteristic references to Oliver’s own pastoral youth, contrasted with his late rise to fame:

… at Menalcas’ hall

There are bays enough for all

He, when young as we, did graze

But when old he planted bays.

Such graceful festivities illustrate the increasingly pleasurable aspect of the Protectoral Court, by no means as unpopular as later ages would wish to make out. Raffishness being sometimes more glamorous in the description than in the experience, those were not wanting in the colourful times of King Charles II who regretted the disappearance of the earlier more seemly manners. Thomas Povey, having known the Court of Oliver, would criticize that of Charles: here was now ‘no faith, no truth, no love, nor any agreementbetween man and wife, no friends’. Dr Bate, the Protector’s physician, who turned himself in general into an extremely hostile witness against his former master, gave his Court at least his approbation for exactly the same reasons of moral rectitude: ‘here [was] no Drunkard, no Whoremonger, nor any guilty of bribery’. Nor was the Court necessarily so dull: Heath, while calling it a Court of Beggars and suchlike mean people (for its financial troubles), nevertheless described it as ‘very gay and jocund’ particularly at the news of such successes as the capture of Jamaica, and Heath was writing only a few years after the Restoration, when the Court of Oliver Cromwell was still a living memory.³⁵ Perhaps some of this gaiety was not quite to the taste of the most elegant: the man who had once larked with the aid of a full cream-tub with his troops before Dunbar had not lost, it seems, his taste for a practical joke; in any case the closeted lives of royalties or quasiroyalties have often positively encouraged such childish manifestations among their number as a relief from tension.

Fletcher in his biography described one such typical ‘Frolick’, as he called it, of the Protector, who would have a drum beaten suddenly at dinner, before the guests had half finished their food. In would come his footguards, with permission to grab anything eatable they could spy upon the table. At other times Oliver would enjoy teasing the nobility, relating to them with circumstantial detail exactly what company they had lately kept, when and where they had drunk the King’s health and that of the Royal Family – ‘bidding them when they did it again to do it more privately’. Although that type of joke could sometimes have a grim lining to it: according to Ludlow one particular gentleman who had been given leave to travel on condition that he did not visit the King, betrayed his trust; his visit was reported by one of Thurloe’s spies, giving Oliver the opportunity to greet him on his return to Court with the ominous question: ‘Who was it that put out the candles when you spoke to Charles Stuart?’ And he was sent to the Tower. The muse of comedy was served in a more extreme form at Frances’s palatial wedding, when the Protector felt sufficiently carried away by the occasion to throw sack-posset (a particularly sweet and sticky drink) over the women’s dresses, and with equal sense of fun to place ‘wet sweetmeats’ on the seats, all of which the great ladies present had to pretend to take as a favour.³⁶ If such practical jokes belonged to some other monarch of a later Hanoverian age, or even perhaps Edward VII, at least the august mockery of the nobles resembled that sovereign Oliver and his age so much admired, Queen Elizabeth.

Not all Oliver’s pleasures were so boisterous: the deep and constant love of music remained and flourished, and Whitelocke tells us too of his pleasing literary recreations with his friends. It might be at one of those informal moments when he would call for tobacco and pipes, those friendly convivial occasions at which Thurloe, Sir Charles Wolseley, Lord Broghill and Pierrepont were typical of those who might be present. Then, wrote Whitelocke, ‘he would sometimes be very cheerful with us, and laying aside his greatness, he would be exceeding familiar with us, and by way of diversion would make verses with us, and everyone must try his fancy’.³⁷ A gift for friendship – as Marvell called him, ‘so loose an enemy, so fast a friend’ – be it with chaplains, Puritans, preachers, Catholics, women, soldiers, Royalists, was not the least attractive of Oliver Cromwell’s traits.

Much time had been spent since the Protectoral Investiture of June 1657 in selecting suitable members for ‘the Other House’ as the projected Second Chamber was for the time being most conveniently termed. Writs of summons were finally sent out at the end of the year, to coincide with the next session of Parliament planned for January 1658. Inevitably many of the names put forward were intimately connected with Cromwell’s own extended family circle, including his two sons, three sons-in-law (Fleetwood, Claypole and the newest recruit Fauconberg), and three brothers-in-law; in fact one way and another eighteen of this new type of lord were related to the Protector. The establishment of this clique recalled the old days of the Puritan opposition in Parliament when Oliver had first joined it in 1628, when so many members belonged to the same loose but effective network of kinship. Otherwise those chosen fell into three main categories: there were Army officers, a total of twenty-one Colonels, government officials such as Whitelocke and Widdrington as Commissioners of the Seal, and finally suitable members of the old peerage. These latter included Robert Rich’s grandfather Lord Warwick, Cromwell’s old friend Lord Wharton, Manchester, Viscount Saye, Lord Broghill and Cassilis, a Scottish hereditary peer, as well as Lord Lisle, eldest son of the hereditary Earl of Leicester. But it seems clear that Cromwell both drew and intended to draw some distinction between the new lords and these old-style hereditary peers. For in July 1657 he had deliberately created the former captain of his guard Charles Howard, Viscount Howard of Morpeth; and he made two other attempts at creating separate hereditary peerages, although both foundered. Whitelocke was offered a viscountcy in a bill just before Cromwell’s death, but recorded the fact that he did not think it ‘convenient’ to accept. Edmund Dunch was made Baron Burnell of East Wittenham about the same period, in a charter whose seal provided one of the most remarkable encroachments of Cromwell upon the royal seal, since it showed him actually wearing the ermine-lined robe of the Kingship which he had in fact abandoned.

Unfortunately the feelings of these peers for this novel second chamber were not reciprocally warm. Of the sixty-three lords (as they were generally known) summoned, forty-two accepted, and thirty-seven came to the first meeting. Those conspicuous by their absence were those already in possession of peerages, who were frightened that their ancient rights might be prejudiced by acceptance. As Bordeaux wrote, they did not want by choice what formerly had been theirs by birth, and which they now could not pass on to their children. Fauconberg or Broghill might appear, for they had both thrown in their lot too thoroughly with the Protectoral order to turn back now: Fauconberg had recently been assigned Lambert’s former regiment. But it is significant that a senior magnate like the Earl of Warwick, a man who only seven months previously had been found carrying the sword at the Investiture, to say nothing of the very recent nuptials of his grandson, jibbed at this particular fence. Afterwards the reluctance of the hereditary peers was ascribed by men like Ludlow to mere social snobbery – Warwick, he said, would not condescend to sit between Colonels Hewson and Pride, one of whom had been a shoemaker and the other a drayman in civilian life. These lords, said Dr Bate later, were ‘the dregs of society’, and it was suggested that Hewson should have an awl as his ensign. But this was to smear as frivolous objections which were in fact deeply rooted in the peers’ own concept of their ancient rights – rights, it must be said, which were amply backed up by English history.

Saye’s letter to Wharton, dissuading him from accepting, was an eloquent plea for the former House of Lords: ‘they have been as the beam keeping both scales, King and People, in an even posture … long experience hath made it manifest that they have preserved the just rights and liberties of the people against the tyrannical usurpation of Kings, and have also, as steps and stairs, upheld the crown from falling upon the floor, by the insolence of the multitude …’ All of this would be thrown away if they, as peers, by taking their seats, acknowledged the pretensions of this new body. Saye begged Wharton not to make of himself ‘a felo-de-se’. And so the old guard did not turn up, leaving of course an unnatural balance towards the military among the remaining Lords.³⁸

The new session of Parliament opened on 20 January 1658. It was a sign of the times that preparations for the new House of Lords were ordered to be as cheap as possible, whether chairs, carpets or hangings of ‘baize striped stuff’ – not noticeably luxurious – for the six rooms set aside. Cromwell on the other hand proceeded in the now familiar state to Westminster, once more by water and then by coach, with horses in gold and jewelled trappings to attend him. But a heavy snowfall kept the crowds away and the public reaction was disappointing. There was indeed a chill of winter over the whole occasion. Oliver’s speech reiterated many of his old themes, including references to his favourite eighty-fifth Psalm, but in general its tone was depressed and at one point he told the listening members,³⁹ ‘I have been under some infirmity, therefore dare not speak further to you …’, a confession of physical weakness which he repeated to them at the end. Otherwise there were the customary exhortations to Parliament to carry out the divine will: ‘if God should bless you in this work, and make this meeting happy upon this account, you shall all be called the blessed of the Lord; the generations to come will bless us. You shall be the repairers of breaches, and the restorers of paths to dwell in; and if there be any work that mortals can attain to in the world, beyond this, I acknowledge my ignorance.’ Above all it was the cry of an old man, old Oliver, who as the old do, prized peace above many other virtues: ‘The greatest demonstration of his [God’s] favour and love appears to us in this, that he hath given us peace, and the blessings of peace, to wit the enjoyments of our liberties, civil and spiritual.’

But this newly met Parliament showed itself from the first in a captious mood and peace was the last quality likely to emerge from it. No guards had been placed at the entrance, so that all those elected members who were prepared to take the oath were admitted; it was apparent as a result that many of the old republicans who had so strenuously opposed Cromwell’s personal rule were now back in style, in contrast to their exclusion in September 1656. These included Sir Arthur Haselrig, who had never made any secret of his opposition to what he considered Cromwell’s usurpation, and had in addition recently declined the writ as a new lord; for one who was sometimes accused of undue self-aggrandizement as Governor of Newcastle, his refusal was equally frank: ‘I will not take the Bishops’ seat,’ he said, ‘because I know not how long after I shall keep the Bishops’ lands.’ As a result of this republican influence, the subject of the Second Chamber was subjected to immediate contentious scrutiny in the Commons. The optimistic words of Lord Fiennes, a Commissioner of the Great Seal, spoken on the subject of the constitutional advantage – ‘if anything inconvenient should chance to slip out at one door, must it not pass two more?’⁴⁰ – were not generally accepted. For one thing there was sharp dispute on the actual status of the new chamber, symbolized by the arguments over its name (although it was generally accepted that the members themselves should be termed Lords). Should it be called the Other House, thus only claiming the powers recently accorded to it in the Humble Petition and Advice? Or should it be named the House of Lords, in which case might it not be able to claim all the old powers of that body, including its judicial position?

Men such as Haselrig and Thomas Scot greeted the possibility of the return of the old Lords with horror, comparing it to the bondage of the Jews in Egypt. Had not the people been set free in 1649 by its abolition, from any form of ‘negative’, and was this ‘negative’ now to be reintroduced among them? At the same time there were others who attacked this Other House with equal rancour from exactly the opposite point of view, that these new jumped-up men had no stake in the country, unlike the former territorial magnates, and as such could claim to represent ‘not the forty thousandth part of England’. Sir John Northcote, a man of Cromwell’s own age, who had been an MP in the Long Parliament and had served in both Parliaments of 1654 and 1656, criticized the new chamber on this unlanded score because the present House ‘ventured their lives but not their fortunes. The other house did venture both and that they should be excluded and these advanced, is not just nor reasonable.’ The former Lords-Lieutenant, he said, had been great lovers of the people, because they had been financially independent: ‘These [the new Lords] are mean people and must be paid by you …’⁴¹ These powerful arguments showed how deeply the concept of a nominated chamber had outraged the deepest social instincts of the time. On the other hand, in favour of the new chamber, it was the lawyers who postulated the need for a balance against the over-hasty passing of laws by the Commons. And the soldiers in their turn waxed indignant at these public slights on the composition of the new body. They particularly resented the notion that it lacked weight, so that ‘they [the members] are not a balance as the old lords were’.

Five days later, as these wrangles continued unresolved, Oliver spoke again to both Houses, a discourse which he described as unprepared, and reproached them generally for their lack of solidarity: they were playing, he said, the game of the King of Scots.⁴² In addition he touched on various less narrow points such as the dangers of Popery abroad, how they ought to have ‘a brotherly fellow-feeling of the interest of all the Protestant Christians in the world’, and in general justified his foreign policy, at this moment aimed principally at the completion of the Peace of Roskilde in the Baltic. To obstreperous merchants he demanded: ‘If they can shut us out of the Baltic sea, and make themselves masters of that, where is your trade?’ He gave them a bold argument against isolationism: ‘You have accounted yourselves happy in being environed with a great ditch from all the world beside. Truly you will not be able to keep your ditch, nor your shipping, unless you turn your ships and your shipping into troops of horse and companies of foot, and fight to defend yourselves in terra firma.’ But in the throes of such sentiments, waving aside the squabbles of both Republicans and merchants, it was perhaps typical of the Protector’s domestic situation that he actually forgot to give the House that account of public monies which he had planned to pass on to them, and had to write a rapid note to the Speaker afterwards to that effect.

Cromwell’s reference to the ‘game’ of the King of Scots was not without its application to the current activities of the Royalists in England. It was true that a younger generation of Cavaliers had grown up, children at the time of Charles i’s death, boys maybe orphaned by their fathers’ deaths in the wars, and keen for action. But this phenomenon was not in itself any guarantee of the kind of unity which had so long eluded the protagonists of the Sealed Knot. On the contrary, to the dissensions between those abroad and those at home was now added the traditional antagonism of those who had lived through much and grown tired, and those who had lived through little and were therefore doubly energetic; in short, of old and young. It was to soothe over these difficulties that Ormonde paid a personal visit to London in January 1658, having landed secretly near Colchester. In the capital he lodged first at a Catholic chirurgeon’s, and then with a French tailor near Blackfriars, and it was of course necessary to adopt a strict disguise. Part of this consisted of dyeing the famous blond poll of James the White black, the dyeing proving a painful and difficult experience in the course of which Ormonde not only scalded himself, but also emerged halfway through with a head of many colours. Even with tinting successfully accomplished, his problems of concealment were not over, in view of the fact that the entire Sealed Knot organization was, unbeknownst to itself, at the mercy of the activities of its treacherous member, Sir Richard Willys.

While Ormonde was discovering that there was little he could do to bind together the disunified Sealed Knot, Willys was carefully keeping Thurloe in touch as to its movements. It is just possible that he only betrayed Ormonde’s hiding-places after he had left them, thus keeping his word to Thurloe without imperilling his comrade. But the fact that it was Cromwell who now dropped a heavy hint in Broghill’s direction concerning Ormonde’s arrival suggests that it was the Protector, not Willys, who decided that it would be impolitic to have the famous Royalist publicly arrested. Cromwell told Broghill pointedly that there was ‘a great friend of his’ in town, and supplied him with the date. At this Broghill duly warned Ormonde, who was able to make his escape, back to France. It is easy to see how from the Protector’s point of view the arrest, trial and subsequent possible death sentence of such a man would have served a much less healing purpose than his effective disappearance abroad, particularly as Willys could be relied on to report any further developments in that direction.⁴³

Nevertheless it was the existence of such Royalist capers that now provided Oliver with a nice excuse to pounce on his contentious Parliament as a cat irritated out of sleep lunges at a body of squeaking mice. The criticism of the ‘Other House’ was far from being dropped by Haselrig and his fellow republicans. On the contrary they were now busy organizing a monster petition on the subject, which would deny the Second Chamber any of the rights of the old House of Lords.^* In the process, the republicans were actively wooing support from other factions, the officers and the preachers. The growth of such organized opposition in his own Parliament was far more immediately dangerous to Oliver than any suborned Royalist conspiracies, and it has been seen that of old, he always maintained the most vigorous dislike and suspicion of any opposition with two separate groups of dissidents joining together. In the past, he had always taken care to strike and strike swiftly on such occasions, and old as he might be and sick, the events of the dissolution of Parliament on 4 February were to show that he had still not lost his capacity for a decisive move.

There is indeed much circumstantial evidence for the suddenness of his action. It was related subsequently in a letter from one MP, possibly Jenkins, the member for Wells, to an excluded comrade, starting with the dramatic events of the night of 3 February.⁴⁴ As the republican petition began to snowball dangerously in the Commons, this member went down to Whitehall with a letter recommending the Protector strongly to come down to the House on the morrow ‘to do service for the Army and Nation’. Thurloe received the letter and handed it to Maidstone, Oliver’s valet. Maidstone however demurred that the Protector had retired and was ‘very close shut up’. In the end he was persuaded to knock hard. ‘Who’s there?’ called out Cromwell angrily. Thurloe had a letter for him ‘of great concernment’, replied Maidstone. At this the Protector received the letter, perused it shortly, and immediately sent for Whalley and Desborough and those others who were on watch, to ask if they had any news. They answered no. So he asked them again whether they had not heard of a petition. Once again, they answered no. The Protector then ordered them to proceed to Westminster, and order the guard there up to Whitehall, exchanging it with the Westminster guard. On the way however these high-ranking officers overheard some of the Westminster soldiers talking among themselves of how their posterity would be held in thrall even if they themselves lived well for a while. So the officers turned back and reported this to the Protector. He then told them to go to the Mews and order up that guard instead for security’s sake, exchanging it with that at Whitehall. This done, Oliver relaxed till morning.

His first action then was to tell Thurloe that he intended to go down to the House, which kept the Secretary amazed at the suddenness of it all, particularly as Oliver gave no reason, but merely announced that he had taken a resolution to do so. He also wrote a letter to the City which seemed to trouble him somewhat. His dinner he ordered up and consumed before nine o’clock, unwontedly early. After dinner, the Protector withdrew intending apparently to go quietly up the backway – via the river – to Westminster. But here he encountered an unexpected obstacle over which even his determination could not prevail. The winter of 1657–8, as we know from John Evelyn’s diary, was ‘the severest … that any man alive had known in England’, where the very crows’ feet had frozen to their prey, and islands of ice had been known to enclose not only fish and fowl, but also people rowing in their boats. On this particular morning the ice made it impossible for Oliver to take to the Thames. Instantly he turned and rushed back to the land-side of the palace, where the coaches were, and seized the first coach available. In spite of the fact that it had only two horses to it, and there were not more than five or six guards, a considerable depletion of the usual Protectoral magnificence, Cromwell ordered it towards Westminster. There he went first to what was known as the Lords’ House, a retiring room, and strengthened himself with a cup of ale and a piece of toast, while the Lords in attendance were broken the news that he intended to dissolve Parliament. When Fleetwood remonstrated, Oliver turned on him with all his habitual vigour, and exclaimed: ‘You are a milksop, by the living God I will dissolve the house.’^*

His actual speech of dissolution was as violent in tone as many of his earliest utterances, showing that for better or for worse the old Adam certainly still persisted in old Oliver. He gave a valiant and ferocious defence of the concept of a nominated Second Chamber:⁴⁶ ‘You granted that I should name another House,’ he cried, ‘and I named it with integrity, I did. I named it out of men that can meet you wheresoever you go, and shake hands with you, and tell you that it is not titles, it is not lordship, it is not this or that that they value, but a Christian and English interest. Men of your own rank and quality, and men that I approved my heart to God in choosing … loving the same things that you love, whilst you love England and whilst you love religion.’ And above all he threatened them with the army of Charles Stuart, described vividly if inaccurately as being ‘at the waterside, drawn down towards the waterside, ready to be shipped for England’. What could not be expected of ‘blood and confusion’ if they were threatened by such a force, when the very effect of their recent efforts in Parliament had been merely to strengthen the King’s hand? ‘If this, I say, be the effect of your sitting …’ said the Protector finally, ‘I think it high time that an end be put to your sitting and I do declare to you here that I do dissolve this Parliament.’ He ended his speech on a note which was not so much violent as sombre: ‘Let God judge between you and me.’ But there were at least enough republicans present in the House for a few hearty ‘Amens’ to spoil the effect of even that solemn appeal to divine judgement.

That Cromwell’s immediate target was the Parliamentary opposition rather than the Royalists whom he accused them of helping at least by default is shown by one of his surviving pieces of correspondence on that momentous day. Part of his morning’s plan had been to send orders to the Lieutenant of the Tower of London, to secure certain ministers for fear of trouble. But a letter written by Cromwell on 4 February itself to Colonel Cox of the Hertfordshire militia, although it did warn him against ‘the old Cavalier party’, also dilated at length on the real causes which had led him to the day’s dissolution.⁴⁷ Cromwell’s tone was exasperated towards the abandoned assembly, which had done nothing in fourteen days, he said, but debate whether they should acknowledge the system of government outlined in the Humble Petition and Advice. It was a system which not only had they already invited him to accept, and sworn him to it, but they themselves had taken an oath to support it before entering the House. Such behaviour, thought Cromwell, had very dangerous consequences for the peace of the nation and might result in loosening all the bonds of government. Despairing of obtaining the supplies of money from such people needed to cope with ‘the exigencies of the Nation’, Cromwell had ‘thought it of absolute necessity to dissolve this present Parliament; which I have done this day’. In this context, it is perfectly possible, as the Venetian Ambassador had indeed heard, that Parliament were also plotting tighter control of taxation under their own authority, as well as protesting against the return of the House of Lords, which involved a general criticism of the Humble Petition. Another suggestion, that Cromwell by the dissolution further planned to avoid receiving a separate petition of two thousand names against his personal dictatorship, also fits into this general picture of a man acting fast and hard to defuse a situation, where the potentially explosive material might be expected to gather rather than dissipate with the days.⁴⁸

Cromwell in May had referred to the English people lightly as ‘children’ who might be diverted or pleased by his assumption of the crown, as by a toy. But in truth his situation had changed when he harangued the Parliament of 1654 as a pedagogue to his pupils. Now his real problems were with his colleagues, rather than with his ‘children’. Try as he might, the wrong sort of people – or the right sort of people with the wrong ideas – kept creeping into his Parliaments. So for the third time he had perforce to dismiss his staff abruptly. In the spring of 1658 England was yet again in the position of a school which had a high master, the Lord Protector, but once again no delegates of his authority in the shape of members of Parliament.