CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Pardon such as desire to trample upon the dust of a
poor worm, for they are thy people too.
Last prayer of Oliver Cromwell
After the death of Oliver Cromwell, in private there were great cries of lamentation, in public only peace and quiescence in contrast. That evening the Privy Council met together and about eight o’clock at night went to Richard Cromwell’s lodgings ‘upon sure and certain knowledge’ that he had been designated his father’s successor during his lifetime. The changeover was accomplished with the minimum of confusion or indeed disturbance, although the precaution was taken of stopping the foreign posts for three days. No Royalists stirred, being apparently as much taken by surprise by the unthinkable sudden extinction of their great adversary as the rest of the world. Perhaps Sir George Downing at the Hague was right when he said that Oliver’s death came two months too soon for the foreign conspirators: the outward tranquillity in England and Scotland was certainly remarkable. Wrote Thurloe: ‘there is not a dogg that wags his tongue, so great a calm are we in’.1
In private the picture was very different. Thurloe himself was convulsed with grief, and in his letter to Henry Cromwell on the morrow of the death he cried: ‘I am not able to speak or write; this stroke is so sore, so unexpected, the providence of God in it so stupendous, considering the person that is fallen, the time and season wherein God took him away, with other circumstances, I can do nothing but put my mouth in the dust, and say, It is the Lord …’ Oliver had gone to heaven, embalmed with the tears of his people, and on the wings of the prayers of his saints. Others of his friends, resorting to the familiar Bible, were heard to say frequently and with desolation: A great man is fallen in Israel. Fleetwood saw in Oliver’s death not only, as might have been expected, a rebuke for sin, but also a tragic deprivation for the Army, losing not only a General and a Protector, but also ‘a dear and tender father’. A sermon in October by George Lawrence expanded both themes: first, it was their own sins which had hastened the removal of the Protector, ‘unthankfullness, pride, animosities, avarice, formality and licentiousness’, these were the ague fits which had expelled his breath. Secondly, the deprivation itself was appalling in its extent: ‘We have lost a Captain, a Shield, the Head, an Heir of Restraint, the Breath of our Nostrils, an Healer, a Shepherd, a Father and a Nursing Father, a Cornerstone, a Builder, a Watchman, an Eye, a Saviour, a Steersman and Rector, a Pilot and a Common Husband.’2
It was however the children of Oliver’s own blood, not those children of his sword, the soldiers – who would soon recover to scramble and intrigue for power once more – who showed understandably the greatest and most cruel sense of affliction. Five days after Oliver’s death Fauconberg wrote of Mary: ‘My poor wife, I know not what on earth to do with her; when seemingly quieted, she bursts out again into passion, that tears her very heart in pieces; nor can I blame her considering what she has lost.’ A month later she was still weeping so extremely, sitting beside him, as he penned his letter, that he could hardly write.3 The Lady Protectress, who had watched one daughter die beneath her eyes only a few weeks before and was also sustaining another bereaved child, poor Frances, widowed only a few months before, was now robbed once more by death, of the helpmate to whom she had been married with perfect lasting contentment for close on forty years. But to her the consolations of religion, the deep belief, helped on perhaps by her superior age, in the great wisdom of God in all his undertakings even those hardest to bear, brought restraint. She had lived, it seemed, too long with a man who had tried to endure all earthly sorrow through the strength of Christ for her stern self-discipline to break down now. It was the tears of ‘the little wenches’, those children of Oliver’s middle years, whom he had petted and spoiled, which now dewed the court of their brother.
Elsewhere the coincidence of the Protector’s death upon the double anniversary of Dunbar and Worcester was much remarked upon. A letter to Scotland, which began ‘Pardon my trembling quill, ready to stop at the first line, as dreading to be the unwelcome messenger of so fatal news …’ went on: ‘Yesterday the 3rd of September Death overcame his Highness (who overcame thousands upon that day of the month in the years 1650 and 1651).’ Mercurius Politicus turned the coincidence to neat if sententious advantage by making a play with Cromwell’s rejection of the kingship: ‘It pleased the Lord, on this day to take him to rest’ so ran the newsletter, ‘it having formerly been a day of labours to him … Thus it hath proved to him to be a day of triumph indeed, there being so much of Providence in it, that after so many glorious Crowns of victory placed on his head by God on this day, having neglected an Earthly Crown, he should now go to receive the Crown of Everlasting Life.’ And of course it gave a pleasant twist to that Faustian tale of the devil’s compact before Worcester: Cromwell, having been granted his victory, was duly taken away (presumably to the inferno) seven years to the day later.* 4
But above all it was the unbearable feeling of worldly transience that haunted those left behind, whether friend or foe. Wrote Marvell in his Ode of the next year on his death:
Oh humane glory, vain, oh death, oh wings
Oh worthless world, oh transitory things!
The pious and reflective Lady Ranelagh wrote back a long letter from Ireland where she now lived, beginning with how she could hardly hear of his death ‘unmovedly’. Yet when she considered it, was it not one more repetition of the old lesson of the vanity to be expected of those in high estate? The very person who just a few days before had shaken all Europe by his fame and forces was now himself shaken by fever, and shaken by it into the grave itself; nor could Cromwell, who ‘kept such a bustle in the world’, prevent himself in his turn from crumbling into dust. The hostile Lucy Hutchinson, with less philosophy, contemplated with frank amazement the fact that death had finally turned the tables on Oliver, had imprisoned him at last and ‘confin’d all his vast ambition, all his cruel designs into the narrow compass of a grave’.6
This last earthly confinement of Cromwell’s corpse seemed – at the time at least – a simple if splendid matter to arrange. According to the custom of the time for the great, the actual burial of the corpse in its coffin was distinguished from the more symbolic State funeral. During the State ceremonies however there would continue to be references to the ‘corpse’ and the ‘body’, confusing when accounts came to be disentangled but appropriate to the symbolic nature of the ceremony. There can be no absolute certainty as to the date when the body itself was interred in a vault in Westminster Abbey, at the east end of the Henry vii chapel, afterwards for many years known as Oliver’s Vault; for the event was not recorded in the muniment book there. A copper plate, doubly gilded, bearing the arms of the Commonwealth impaled with Cromwell’s own, was placed on the Protector’s breast within the coffin and was later discovered in excavations. On its reverse it bore this legend: OLIVARIUS PROTECTOR REPUBLICAE, ANGLIAE, SCOTIAE, ET HIBERNIAE NATUS 25 APRILIS ANNO 1599 INAUGURATUS 16 DECEMBRIS 1653. MORTUUS 3 SEPTEMBRIS ANNO 1658 hic situs est.
On balance of probabilities the interment must have taken place comparatively soon after the death, even before 20 September; it was on this date that the official coffin, a rich one apparently, adorned with gilded hinges and nails, but by now of course empty, was transferred by night to Somerset House for the lying-in-state in what Mercurius Politicus significantly described as ‘a private manner’. In any case it was customary at such ceremonies for the coffin to be stowed beneath the bed of state and ignored, as had happened in the case of King James I. But over Oliver’s obsequies the lack of regard paid to the coffin was so marked as to further support the theory that it was in fact empty.7
The reason was a cogent one. The embalming process to which the body had been subjected on the day after death, also according to custom, had evidently gone wrong. In his subsequent account Dr Bate gave a clear description of the autopsy performed on Cromwell’s body with its suppurating spleen. The organs were otherwise in good condition, only the lungs a little congested and the vessels of the brain a little ‘overcharged’. The corpse was therefore embalmed, hopefully filled with aromatic odours, and wrapped in two coffins of wood and lead. In spite of all these precautions however, the stench of the body from the rotting spleen could not be eliminated: ‘yet the filth broke through them all’. So, wrote Bate in May 1660, ‘it was prudent to bury him immediately which was done in as private a manner as possible’. James Heath repeated this: they were forced to bury him out of hand. The Venetian Ambassador, describing the official funeral at the end of November, referred also to ‘his actual body have been buried privately many weeks ago’. Since Bate had no particular motive to lie on this point of the hasty interment, the cause of which hardly resounded to his own medical credit, his evidence is to be preferred over the accounts that the body was buried secretly at seven a.m. on 10 November, marking the end of one stage of the lying-in-state.8 The one group of people who did have a motive to gloss over the swift private burial which had been found necessary were after all those in charge of the magnificent obsequies, worthy of a King indeed, which were now planned to commemorate Oliver’s passing. It is therefore not surprising that no official record was made of it.
The lying-in-state at Somerset House, to which the public were admitted from 18 October to 10 November, was to make up in a blaze of candle-lit glory for any conceivable note of summary despatch which was discernible in this hasty interment. Plans not only for this deliberate exhibition of the Protectoral power but also for the State funeral itself were the subject of anxious care and scrutiny. The actual model used, and comparisons between the two ceremonies show it to have been extremely closely consulted, was that of the last Stuart King dead in his bed, James i, for whose catafalque thirty-three years ago the designs of Inigo Jones had been used. That was ironic enough. But if Ludlow is to be trusted, Mr Kinnersley, the master of the wardrobe had even contemplated perpetrating a further piece of historical paradox by consulting at one point, being himself a secret Papist, the funeral arrangements for that great Catholic sovereign Philip ii of Spain!9 As it was, the crowning of Oliver Cromwell, so long delayed, was now at last performed with the utmost deliberation after his decease.
For the main feature of the great panorama of death at Somerset House, now solemnly prepared for the awe of the public, was a lifesize wax effigy of the former Lord Protector. This effigy in itself marked the continuation of a royal custom, the Kings and Queens of England having always had from time immemorial their funerals marked by these effigies at State funerals. Cromwell’s effigy was not only intended to represent his dead majesty, but was also a lifelike representation of his appearance, probably founded on a death-mask,* and made by Thomas Simon, his last great public work for the Protector. Within Somerset House itself, in the four great rooms laid aside for this august display, great shrouds of black velvet set off by liberal use of gold gave an impression at once melancholy and magnificent. There was black velvet on the walls, black velvet hangings – adorned with golden fringes and tassles – on the great catafalque or bed of state in the fourth room, and black velvet even on the railings placed round it to hold back a gaping public. The public would pass through the first three rooms, with the cloth and chairs of state at the head of the upper end of the first, and the walls thick with escutcheons and arms, the whole guarded as once the Protector had been guarded in life, till they reached the final impressive sight of the fourth room where the effigy itself lay in state.
‘The waxen picture’, as it was described, was initially to be found lying on its back.10 Like a huge monstrous doll, it wore an exact replica of the Protector’s most imperial clothes, a rich suit of black velvet, another robe of purple decorated with gold lace, ermine to adorn the kirtle (or coat) and finally an outer robe of purple velvet, once laced with gold and befurred with ermine. Round the waist of the kirtle was clasped an embroidered belt to which was fastened an impressively gilded and engraved sword. In the right hand of the effigy was clasped a sceptre, in the left ‘a globe’. The effigy’s head was covered with a purple velvet cap once more trimmed with ermine, beneath which the Protector’s waxen cheeks were painted, but the eyelids over the glass eyes were closed to simulate death. Behind the head was placed a gold-encrusted chair and on top of that, and placed high up ‘so the people could see it’, most remarkable of all, ‘an Imperial Crown’. To light this sombre yet august sight, eight silver candle-sticks were placed round the bed of state, five foot high, bearing white tapers a further three foot in height. And at each corner stood an upright pillar with carved lions and dragons holding streamers in their paws, while on both sides of the bed in sockets stood the four great standards of the Protector’s arms with Banners and Bannerols of War painted on taffeta. Outside the magic circle, men with their heads bared mourned.
Halfway through the lying-in-state the mood of the exhibition was changed. The effigy was stood up, its glass eyes were opened, and the Imperial Crown, taken from the golden chair, was placed on its head. This piece of symbolism, which was deliberately copied from the similar procedure accorded to King James I, was intended to represent the passage of the soul from Purgatory to the brightness of Heaven. Spectators who remembered Cromwell’s early attitude to ‘popish innovations’ within the English Church might have been pardoned for some surprise that his body should be subjected to such a routine: the doctrine of Purgatory was one he himself as a member of the already saved Elect would scarcely have approved, and Calvin had called it ‘a damnable invention of Satan’. As for the catafalque or bed, this ‘magnificent contrivance’, in Aubrey’s words, had differing but equally grand origins: Aubrey derived the word from the pyres of the former Roman Emperors, when a falconi or eagle would be released at the exact moment when the flames consumed the body.11
While the official corpse at least had thus reached a sort of halfway resting place between Whitehall and the Abbey, arrangements for the ultimate procession were still being planned. Already the last rites had been delayed beyond the original intention of the Government, possibly because of the illness of Thurloe. At last the tickets were ready, and on 23 November the procession was designed to wind its way through the streets of London in a last display of solemnity. Much care was taken in advance that matters should pass off smoothly. John Pell, for example, who had newly arrived from Switzerland, was told by the Council that he must send in the names of his servants beforehand to the Herald’s Office, and in any case they would not be admitted to the procession unless dressed in mourning. No coaches were to be allowed in the streets between Somerset House and Westminster throughout the day to mar the impact of the sorrowing marchers.12 Nevertheless human failure still managed to intrude upon the dignity of the occasion. At the start of the procession a fierce argument broke out between various Ambassadors concerning precedence, resulting in further delays. The cortège itself was led by the Marshal and his Deputy, and thirteen more men to clear the way. Then came the poor men of Westminster, two by two, in special mourning gowns. Then the servants, those of the people of quality who were attending the funeral, followed by the Protector’s own servants, down to his Bargemen and his Watermen. Last of all came the ‘grandees’ in heavy mourning. The wax effigy itself rode in an open chariot, draped in still more black velvet.
The journey took seven hours, the soldiers lining the streets, their brilliant red coats now faced in black, with black buttons, and their Ensigns wrapped in ‘Cypress’. Their role, a necessary one in such displays, was to ‘keep the spectators from crowding the actors’. It was a procession indeed of which men saw what they wanted to see. Oliver’s favourite musicians followed him, John Kingston, David Mell the violinist and those two boy singers who had been wont to sing Oliver’s favourite Latin motets, as well as half a dozen other prominent musicians, a suitable and touching tribute to a lifelong passion. One note of colour in the procession was provided by the presence of the ‘Horse of Honour’ (no wax effigy this) led by the Master of the Horse, as at the funeral of King James, gaily attired in crimson velvet trappings, with plumes of yellow, red and white. But John Evelyn, an unswerving Anglican and therefore never reconciled to the usurper, called it ‘the joyfullest funeral that I ever saw; for there was none that cried but dogs, which the soldiers hooted away with a barbarous noise, drinking and taking tobacco in the streets as they went’.13
The very extravagance of the display also brought affront to some tender spirits, as the cost annoyed others. The stupendous figure of £100,000, predicted by the Venetian Ambassador, was certainly not reached, and Heath’s £60,000 also much exaggerated; a more likely figure was that of £28,000 given in the Clarke papers (although the funeral of James I was said to have cost over £50,000). But that was in itself a heavy outlay to a nation in the throes of economic difficulties and over £19,000 of it was still owing by the following August. The Quakers meanwhile were outrightly shocked by the adornment of it all, and even a man like the poet Abraham Cowley exclaimed over the procession in disgust: ‘I found there had been much more cost bestowed than either the dead man, or even death itself could deserve. There was a mighty train of black assistants,’ he wrote, ‘the hearse was magnificent, the idol crowned. Briefly, a great show, and yet, after all this, an ill sight.’14
By the time the great show was arrived at the Abbey, the gathering darkness of a late November afternoon had brought gloom to the church, and a severe chill to its interior. There had been no arrangements for candles or heating. So the elaborate hearse – which was known to have cost £4000 – was merely installed in the Henry vii chapel without further ado, no rites, sermons or other orations. There the effigy continued to gaze impassively down on the throng of spectators which came to inspect it thereafter, as had in former times the effigies of the Kings and Queens of England. Three days later Sir Francis Throckmorton, the young Roman Catholic baronet up from the country, could not resist paying 2s. 6d. for a visit to this new sight in the ancient Abbey.15 Hearse and effigy remained in place for many months as an outward symbol of erstwhile splendour. Meanwhile below in Oliver’s Vault, the Lord Protector had been laid to his eternal rest. Or so it seemed at the time.
In death, however, as in life, the history of Oliver Cromwell was destined to confound expectations. The reign of Protector Richard – poor Tumbledown Dick – was brief indeed. The Council of the Army, the warring ambitious officers, the strident Commons of the new Parliament called in January 1659, these voices had only been quelled, never stilled by his great father. Meanwhile of Dick’s own qualities the very words of Milton in his attack on hereditary monarchy of 1649, Eikonoklastes, might have been written: ‘Indeed, if the race of kings were eminently the best of men, as the breed of Tutbury is of horses, it would in reason then be their part only to command, ours alway to obey. But Kings by generation no way excelling others …’ It was the vigorous actions of General Monk urging back the young King in 1660 which recalled the ability of Oliver to mount the horse of opportunity and ride it to the successful conclusion of the race. Barbara Slingsby, daughter of the dead Royalist, told her brother that the night Monk declared for ‘a free Parliament’ (the return of the Long Parliament) ‘there was the most universal joy throughout the town I ever saw; ’twas all the night as light as day with multiplicity of bonfires’. In the end Richard did choose to throw in his lot with the Army leaders, rather than with the recalled Long Parliament; but once again it was a gamble – unlike his father’s ploys with the aid of soldiers – which did not succeed. And his reported words that he would not have a drop of blood spilt to preserve his greatness ‘which is a burden to me’ were a further proof, if any were needed, of how far the father’s own blood had thinned down in its passage through the son’s veins.16
Richard’s last months in England were marked by an uncomfortable piece of bathos; it was the nightmare of debt which continued to plague him. Here there was an unfair lack of distinction between the debts of the Protectorate and his own. Although the Army finally got the former established as public responsibility, in July 1659 Parliament was obliged to grant Richard officially six months’ immunity from arrest. They also attempted to win from the Long Parliament some settlement for himself and his dependants. But even Richard’s departure from the palace of Whitehall at the moment of his retirement was ludicrously postponed by his reluctance to fall into the hands of his creditors in the harsh outside world. In April 1660 he told Monk that he had to lurk in secret hiding-places to avoid arrest. His pleas for help were made with his usual humility: ‘As I cannot but think myself unworthy of great things, so you will not think me worthy of utter destruction.’17 Some time that summer he was finally able to get abroad, to live there quietly under a number of assumed names including that of John Clarke (which he was to use exclusively on his eventual return to England). His melancholy touching figure was not there to spoil all the mad rejoicings of the capital when the rising sun of the Stuarts shone once more in England and on 29 May, 1660, his thirtieth birthday, King Charles II returned to his country at the invitation of General Monk. It was a true symbol of the times that the ship which brought him was actually the famous Naseby, but it was swiftly rechristened the Royal Charles.
On the Continent Richard passed his time reading and ‘drawing landscapes’. He bore his fate with dignity, although he was haunted by the possibility of assassination at the hands of some zealous Royalist. Debts continued to be a problem, and when English subjects resident in France were ordered home in 1666 at the time of the war, Dorothy Cromwell had to plead for his exemption, since his creditors were still waiting to seize the former Protector. So it was left to Dorothy to raise her young family alone at Hursley at least, as a contemporary poet put it, ‘freed from the incessant torments of the throne’. In about 1680, and after Dorothy’s death, Richard was able to return to England, and live, still under the name of Clarke, at Cheshunt in Hertfordshire. Here he was described as ‘a little and very neat old man with a most placid countenance’. But life still had one more humiliation in store for him in the shape of the quarrels of his three daughters with him over their mother’s property, there being apparently no Cordelia for this sad King Lear. However the judge in his cause was said to have treated him graciously, and to have been commended by Queen Anne for doing so – for had not the poor solitary old gentleman once been titular head of all England? As he wrote himself in 1690, for thirty years his strength and safety had been to be merely retired, quiet and silent.18 Richard died in 1712, over half a century since he had tumbled down from the great position to which he had been so ill-suited.
The treatment of the Cromwell family as a whole, like the entire Restoration settlement, was in its broad principles extremely humane. The Lady Protectress might have proved a vulnerable target, particularly in view of the fact that in the early days after Oliver’s death, like many another widow, she seems to have found it difficult to adapt to her altered circumstances. She moved into St James’s Palace in December, but in January the new Parliament were querying the authority by which she had been granted £20,000 a year for life, and had had extensive renovations done to her new apartments. She had never had a good press from the Royalists, lacking the glamorous greatness of her husband which always commanded their respect as well as their hatred. Her virtues were all private ones. As for the accusations that she had collected fees and perquisites from those seeking her husband’s favour, there is no proper evidence for it, except on the rather unfair principle of Qui s’excuse, s’accuse. Charged by the newspapers with selling the royal jewels and pictures at a fruiterers’ warehouse she responded with a pathetic petition to the King, even before his return, denying the slur, and asking, out of ‘princely goodness’, that he should grant her that ‘protection without which she cannot expect now in her old age, a safe retirement in any place in your Majesty’s dominions’.19 It is good to relate that the King, ever courteous to the female sex, suffered her to live without molestation. Just before his return she had thought it prudent to disappear with her daughter Frances, but later, possibly after visits to Wales and even Switzerland, she was able to end her days in peace at the home of her son-in-law, Bettie’s widower John Claypole, at North-borough Manor in Northamptonshire. There she died in 1665, to be buried in the local church.
The truth was that the Cromwell family, in the absence of their august head, were considered harmless. An anonymous merry piece of satire printed in August 1660 called The Case is Altered or Dreadful News in Hell purported to be a dialogue between the ghost of old Noll and his living wife ‘Joan’. The ghost’s purpose was to discover ‘what strange alterations have been here since I departed my late reprobate vale of tyranny’, and what had become of ‘my dear Imps the two Princes Richard and Henry’. When Joan expressed some fears for herself, that she might end up in the Tower or Bridewell, the dreaded prison for women, Noll’s ghost merely asked: ‘Why? You were never accessory to any of my horrid Vilainies, were ye?’ And the scornful phantom went even further in his dismissal of Richard, whose elevation is supposed to have surprised him: ‘Wear a Crown, wear a Halter, I never knew he was capable of it … he had more mind to his Dogs and Hawks than he had to be a Tyrannical Protector like me.’ Henry Cromwell was treated generously, allowed to keep his Irish lands (although lost in the next generation), and retiring eventually to Spinney Abbey in Cambridgeshire without troubles from the King, died there in 1674. Richard’s daughters having left no descendants, the descendants of Henry’s seven children provide many of those today who still enjoy the blood of the Lord Protector.
One member of the family was however not only tolerated but positively flourished. Mary Fauconberg lived robustly on, as the wife of a man who bounded easily from one regime into another, and as a great lady both of the Court and of her husband’s northern estates, received the Duke and Duchess of York at Newburgh in 1665 as they were escaping from the plague in London. Fauconberg became Ambassador Extraordinary to Venice in 1669, in 1679 still under Charles II he became a Privy Councillor, and was finally made an Earl by William III. He died full of years and honours – received from many different directions – in 1700. Mary herself, although childless, proved a busy and useful intercessionary on behalf of Cromwell nephews and nieces at Court; she retained to the end the masterful spirit which had led her as a child to match-make for her brother. An impertinent Cavalier who twitted her on having seen her father’s corpse hanging on the gibbet received the cold answer: ‘What then, Sir?’ ‘He stunk most abominably,’ was the reply. ‘I suppose he was dead then,’ retorted the great lady. ‘Yes.’ ‘I thought so or else I believe he would have made you stink worse.’ In the reign of Queen Anne observers at Court considered her ‘a great and curious piece of antiquity … fresh and gay though a great age’. And as an old lady Mary enjoyed the admiration of Dean Swift, who pronounced her extremely like the portraits of her father.20
Bridget Fleetwood however died soon after the Restoration. She left no descendants by Charles Fleetwood – one of their children was that little Anne (‘it was a child I particularly loved’ wrote Fleetwood at her untimely death) who had been buried in the Abbey to be exhumed at the Restoration. Fleetwood himself, freed from the extreme penalties paid by the regicides because he had taken no part in the trial of the King, lived to marry a third time, merely excluded from public offices of trust. But there are to be found descendants of Bridget’s first marriage to Ireton, through her daughters Jane and Elizabeth, unlike the offspring of Bettie and Claypole, who left no posterity. And Frances Rich married again, appropriately enough to Sir John Russell of Chippenham, heir to her father’s friend Sir Francis, and brother to Henry Cromwell’s wife. It is from the prolific family of her second marriage that so many of the remainder of the Lord Protector’s descendants spring. She herself provided the most remarkable example of all of longevity in this family of historic survivors: she lived until 1721, well into the reign of the Hanoverian dynasty which succeeded the ill-fated Stuarts, and over sixty years after the death of her father. With her sister Mary, she was buried at St Nicholas Church, Chiswick.
So the strain of the Cromwell blood spread backwards into those ranks from which it had come, of which Oliver had been proud to boast that he was ‘by birth a gentleman, living neither in any considerable height, nor yet in obscurity’. In a characteristic sonorous passage, the Reverend Noble, to whose researches on the subject in the eighteenth century much is owed, compared the Protectoral house of Cromwell to a river, rising in the mountains of Wales, gaining strength from the imperial Thames, rolling on north-east to Huntingdonshire, and there dividing into various branches. It was one of these which suddenly ‘swelled itself into a tremendous river, which not only swallowed up the main stream, but at length overflowed three mighty nations, and by its rapidity, and dreadful violence, spread the terror throughout the globe when it as silently, as suddenly returned to far less than its original limits; leaving, however, many noble branches behind it, instead of its former boundless current, it is now only admirable for the clearness and goodness of its stream’.21
Clearly, with the descendants of three children to draw on, it is possible for many to claim with truth that the blood of the former Lord Protector flows in their veins: the historian S. R. Gardiner was proud to do so. The marriage of Frances’s daughter Elizabeth Russell to Sir Thomas Frankland introduced the Cromwellian blood into many English families including that of the Worsleys, from whom descends HRH the Duchess of Kent – so that in the children of the Duke and Duchess of Kent flows the blood of both Charles I and Cromwell. It was from the marriage of Frances’s son Charles Russell to Mary Rivett, heiress of Chequers, that many of the Cromwelliana and portraits now in the official residence of British Prime Ministers have come down. On the whole it seems that this inheritance has been regarded with pride. In a nineteenth-century biography Frederick Harrison repeated a story told to him by a lady descended from Oliver how as children they were obliged to do penance on the anniversary of the death of King Charles I,to atone for the unfortunate descent.22 They were taught that an ancestral visitation hung over them ‘which would certainly overtake them in this world or the next’. But the present writer, despite enquiries among many living descendants of the Lord Protector, has not been able to trace either this tradition or the memory of it. It seems therefore that it was never widespread, and has in any case now vanished.*
It is however no longer possible in England for one bearing the actual name of Cromwell to claim descent from the Protector, the male line having died out in 1821 with the death of Oliver Cromwell of Cheshunt, great-grandson of Henry Cromwell, at the age of seventy-nine. There had been some attempt to get the Cromwell name transferred to his son-in-law, husband of his sole heiress Elizabeth Olivaria Cromwell. According to one tradition, King George III merely replied firmly: ‘No, no – no more Cromwells.’24 The present senior branch of the family, descendants of Elizabeth Olivaria, is that of Cromwell Bush, owners of many other Cromwellian pictures and relics (now chiefly on loan to the Cromwell Museum, Huntingdon). English Cromwells can however well descend from the numbers of collateral branches of the family, Oliver’s kin, or even from that earlier founder of their fortunes, Thomas Cromwell, from whom the surname was actually copied.
Is it possible that a genuine Protectoral branch, blood and surname and all, has survived in the New World? Unfortunately this has been demonstrated to be extremely unlikely. The names of Henry’s younger sons, Richard or William, grandsons of the Protector, have been canvassed: but they both died young. As for the possibility that Richard, son of Sir Philip Cromwell, emigrated to found at least a close collateral branch to the Protector, it has been shown that he left only daughters. So that American Cromwells can be remote cousins to Oliver at best. But there is a more affecting link between the late Protector and the Cromwellian name in the United States. A century ago James Waylen, who had been secretary to Thomas Carlyle, inspired by his employer’s work on the subject of the letters and speeches, made a study of the Protector’s descendants dedicated with permission to Carlyle, whose publication had ‘elevated our admiration of the Protector into love’. In the course of his researches he visited the States to try and trace any Protectoral Cromwells there. While failing, he found a touching testimony to the power of the Protectoral name. The Cromwells with whom he got in touch via commercial advertisements, in his own words turned out ‘not infrequently to belong to the coloured race’.25 They were the descendants of the slaves who upon emancipation had been allowed to desert the simple appellation of ‘Tom and Nick’, and choose their own surnames. One of the names thus chosen had been that of Cromwell. Waylen, with Victorian values, called it ‘innocent ambition’. A hundred years later we may see in the choice a genuine radical tribute.
There were a few significant exceptions to the policy of tolerance and lack of bloodshed for which the English Restoration has been rightly praised. Nor can King Charles II, by nature clement, be greatly blamed for wishing to pursue the men he regarded as the actual murderers of his father. The concentration was on the trial of the King, and now in their turn the regicides were put on trial. In the end, some were executed, some imprisoned for life. Lambert was one of those who languished in a prison to the end of his days, for all the devoted efforts of his wife Frances to extricate him. It was difficult to avoid the conclusion that with all his talents, his had been an unlucky life. As for Oliver Cromwell, one effigy of him had been burnt at Westminster on Restoration Day. Another, specifically stated to be that displayed formerly with so much pomp at Somerset House, was hung out of the window by the neck at Whitehall a few weeks later. The effigy apparently survived this unpleasant ordeal, since something remarkably like it was mentioned by Christian Huyghens in July 1663, and he saw the same lifelike image, like those of the former Kings and Queens, again in the Banqueting House as late as 1689. It may therefore be that same effigy of plaster which has rested in the Bargello Museum at Florence since 1738; alternatively the funeral effigy may have perished finally in the flames of the Banqueting House fire.26 The rich hearse in the Abbey was however destroyed speedily with eager hands. But such symbolic pieces of vengeance were not enough. Three men, it was decided, had managed to cheat the executioner in life. They should not cheat him in death. The Parliament of 1660 bayed for blood, even if it was blood now long congealed.
When the Bill of Attainder, introduced into the second session of the Convention Parliament against Cromwell and the other regicides, returned from the Lords on 4 December, it was suggested by a Captain Titus that the bodies of Cromwell himself, his son-in-law Henry Ireton (dead since 1652) and John Bradshaw, who had died in 1659, should be exhumed. There was also some suggestion of exhuming Colonel Pride, but since he had been buried in Surrey, in the end his corpse eluded its fate, due to the slackness of the Sheriff of Middlesex. Marvell, now an MP for Hull, reported the fact back to his constituents quite coolly: the victims were to be drawn ‘with what expedition possible upon an hurdle to Tyburn, there be hanged up for a while, and then buried under the gallows’.27But his lack of emotion, while contrasting with the heroic sentiments of the Death Ode written only a year previously, was perhaps characteristic of a man who now prudently had it cancelled, together with the Horatian Ode and the Ode on the First Anniversary, from all known editions of his works. But there were those to whom the fate seemed, in a way they could not quite analyse, curiously inappropriate, even vaguely shocking; Pepys confessed himself disquieted that a man of such courage should receive such dishonour ‘though otherwise he might deserve it well enough’. On 29 January then, the three corpses were solemnly exhumed from the Abbey by a mason named John Lewis, who was subsequently paid 17s. for his pains. It was at this point that the opportunity was taken to dig up other corpses of the Commonwealth, some to be moved to an adjacent spot by St Margaret’s, others to fall into a common pit.*
The grisly ritual was not without its own problems. Henry Ireton’s corpse had been duly embalmed before its long sea-voyage from Ireland, as had been that of Oliver Cromwell. But John Bradshaw’s embalmment had not been successful, and it was thus in a somewhat unpleasant state of repair after its year-long sojourn in the grave. The corpses of Cromwell and Ireton were then duly taken to an inn called the Red Lion, at Holborn, to lie there overnight guarded by soldiers (hence a tradition that Oliver’s ghost afterwards haunted the spot); but Bradshaw’s had to wait for the morning to join them. It was in fact at dawn the next day that ‘those odious carcases’, as Mercurius Politicus termed them, were dragged through the streets of London from Holborn to Tyburn (near the present site of Marble Arch) on open hurdles. The idea of the dawn start was to prevent the populace from pelting the hurdles with stones, brickbats and mud since the corpses were to be reserved for a more awful public fate. Even so it was watched by many, including Pepys’s wife – the great diarist was unfortunately by chance absent. ‘O the stupendous and inscrutable judgements of God,’ expostulated John Evelyn of the translation of the swaddled mummies to that nemesis of the common criminal, Tyburn itself, out of their ‘superb tombs’ at Westminster.28
About ten o’clock, or earlier according to one account, the hurdles had achieved the site of Tyburn and ‘that Triple Tree’. Here, still in their grave clothes – Cromwell and Ireton were in green cere-cloth, Bradshaw in white, but stained with the green of corruption – they were hung up in full gaze of the public, at angles to each other. It was significant of the emphasis on the trial of the King that it was Bradshaw, as President of the Court, not Cromwell as his successor, who occupied the central position. At four o’clock when the next ghoulish stage in the ceremony was due to take place, the corpses were taken down. The common hangman proceeded to hack off the heads. In the heavy muffling of the grave clothes round the neck, it took eight blows to get off Cromwell’s head, six to chop off that of Ireton. Nor was that the only incision now performed upon these inanimate unprotesting objects. It seems that fingers and toes were hacked off at the same time, and it is at this point that Cromwell’s skull may have lost an ear.29
The three headless trunks were now consigned into a deep pit dug beneath the gallows of Tyburn. But for the heads a further fate still was reserved. They were taken down to Westminster Hall, and five days later stuck solemnly up on its façade on poles of oak tipped with iron which had been driven through the centre. Here, now unswathed from their mummified protections, they remained to awe, impress, horrify and perhaps even sadden the public gaze. But the wags, struck by the coincidental presence of a tavern called Heaven near by, made some merry puns on the subject of Hell lying above Heaven. Here the heads mouldered in a state of gathering decomposition until at least 1684. The general theme of the fate of Oliver Cromwell’s remains was worthy of Milton, reflecting on God’s various treatment of man in Samson Agonistes:
Not only dost degrade them, or remit
To life obscured, which were a fair dismission
But throw’st them lower than thou didst exalt them high …
Oft leav’st them to the hostile sword
Of Heathen and prophane, their Carkases
To dogs and fowls a prey.
And yet one cannot bewail for Oliver Cromwell himself the treatment thus meted out. Had he not, with perhaps some dying prescience, forgiven the desecrators of his tomb in advance at the end of his last prayer – ‘Pardon such as desire to trample upon the dust of a poor worm, for they are thy people too’?30 Throughout his life, he had shown a curious indifference to appearances, to what he might have termed inessentials, a concentration on the spirit not the flesh. If therefore one cannot regard the accounts of these last grim ceremonies without a shudder, it is rather an instinctive recoil on behalf of human dignity against the coarseness of the perpetrators, not for any damage done to the Lord Protector. As he himself would have been the first to point out, with the spirit fled, therewas only his dust to trample upon. For this same reason, any of the various theories concerning possible alternative resting-places for his body which depend on the desire of the Protector, while still alive, to evade insults to his corpse, seem psychologically implausible. As has been seen, the prospect of death only became real to him a comparatively short time before his actual decease. The very full record of his last hours contains no such instructions or even train of thoughts; his thoughts were either on his religion, or when he touched on those he left behind, it was in terms of forgiveness.
Nevertheless such stories have grown up, perhaps because the legend is so often more alluring than the truth. One such tradition concerns the Protector’s last-minute instructions that he should be buried on the field of Naseby, ‘where he obtained the greatest victory and glory and as nigh the spot as could be guessed, where the heat of the action was …’ Transmitted to the regicide Colonel Barkstead, and from him to his son of fifteen, who lived to haunt the coffee-shops in the 1740s, it was handed on to John Banks, author of a popular biography of Cromwell of that period. According to this story, the hearse was taken to the field at midnight, interred in a prepared grave in great secrecy, and the whole field carefully ploughed thereafter and sewn with corn. A nineteenth-century vicar of Naseby, the Reverend W. Marshall, heard another version of the tale via the last male descendant of the Protector, Oliver Cromwell of Cheshunt. His mother, who lived till over a hundred, had heard the story at Cheshunt as a child from an old servant of Richard Cromwell; as a boy this servant remembered seeing the corpse brought first to Cheshunt, then to Huntingdon, and while he was left to hold the horses, it proceeded further to a mysterious destination.31 The place generally indicated is to the west of the battlefield, beyond Selby Hedges and the minor road now there.
Recently in a correspondence in The Times on the subject of Cromwell’s last resting-place, Mr Reginald Paget MP, supporting the Naseby theory, produced an even more remarkable link with history: his father told him that his grandfather had known an old man in Naseby whose great-uncle remembered as a boy the coach arriving in the night from London. Spades were collected; the coach then departed in the direction of the battlefield, and the next day a certain field had been freshly ploughed although it was not the ploughing season. Mr Paget’s father then pointed out to him the field. It is of such folk memories and links that much of the enjoyable spider’s web of historical tradition – as opposed to fact – is made. One might make the point that if Cromwell had indicated a battlefield where he might lie at rest, it is more likely to have been Worcester, ‘the crowning mercy’ to which he referred so often, than Naseby; but that is to meet speculation with speculation. Back in 1646, a year after the battle, at the gorgeous funeral of the Earl of Essex, it was predicted that Cromwell would one day want to be buried in the Henry VIII chapel, ‘with the immortal turf of Naseby under his head’: but that was many years, and many victories away from the date of his death. In truth, the whole Naseby story, like another story told to Banks by a lady who knew someone present of Oliver’s body being sunk in the Thames at midnight with two of his near relations and some trusty soldiers in attendance, to elude ‘the malice of the Cavaliers’, depends on a state of mind or a state of affairs which was not present in the Protector at the time of death.32
The same arguments may be used against any theory of the substitution of another corpse for that of Cromwell, if done at his command, that is to say immediately after his death. One of the more grotesque of such stories, that he had deliberately had his own body exchanged with that of CharlesI at Windsor to protect it, was given the lie when Charles’s tomb was opened in a later age and – not surprisingly – found to contain his own decapitated corpse. The most effective answer to all these suggestions was indeed given to Pepys himself by Jeremiah White, Oliver’s chaplain, who had after all known him intimately. Pepys heard from one who had been travelling abroad a rumour that Cromwell had had the tombs of Westminster Abbey opened up, so that the bodies could be swapped about for fear of later reprisals. Pepys checked the story with White, who replied instantly that he believed Cromwell ‘never had so poor a low thought in him to trouble himself about it’.33
If that retort may be thought conclusive concerning Oliver’s own dispositions, there is still the question of some later substitution or rescue, at the hands of his admirers or his children. Any such theory of substitution reformed after burial and before the Restoration has two factors to contend with. First, it was by no means easy to secure the secret opening of a vault, and no such opening is of course recorded in the Abbey muniments. Secondly, and more seriously, since it is incontrovertible that some corpse at least purporting to be that of Cromwell was dragged through the streets of London, exhibited at Tyburn, and finally had its head displayed for over twenty years on Westminster Hall, this theory demands the belief that a false Cromwell was thus dishonoured. Either his coffin was found to be empty at exhumation and a new corpse hastily acquired as F. J. Varley suggests, or perhaps a substitute corpse had already been interred there, and the Government was obliged to make do with what they found. A third possibility would be the substitution of a body at the Red Lion, by bribing the soldiers during the night it spent there. Yet we know that a mummified body – its appearance thus fully preserved for spectators – was shown on Tyburn. Even if the heads were not freed then from their clothes they were certainly freed at the time of execution in the evening, for an eye-witness, Samuel Sainthill, actually recognized the face of Bradshaw. They were then shown quite openly on Westminster Hall. Since Cromwell had been dead less than eighteen months, and previous to that time had been the most celebrated figure in Britain, it seems unlikely that the crowd would not have noticed a change in his physical appearance, had a substitution been attempted.34
There is more plausibility in the notion of a rescue later, at the hands of one of Cromwell’s children, after the grim ceremony of Tyburn was over. This rescue of course would involve only his decapitated body. Perhaps Mary Fauconberg did manage to bribe the soldiers at Tyburn, and secure her father’s headless corpse from immolation in the common pit. It has been suggested that having done so, she made haste with the body to the safer North, where at Newburgh, her husband’s property, a strange kiln-like tomb of brick is still to be seen, now lying between two floors owing to the rebuilding of the house’s levels, like a ghost which still walks on the level it has known in life. If this rescue took place, it is certainly more likely that the corpse was stored at Newburgh than in the Church of St Nicholas at Chiswick. This has been made another candidate for this controversial burial-place, on the grounds that Mary herself was buried there, and showed particular devotion to the church, endowing it with a peal of five bells. The church was rebuilt in 1882, when the legend was explored and dismissed: but the son of the vicar at the time revealed recently that his father had not in fact checked the chancel burial vaults.35 Glimpsing three coffins in Mary Fauconberg’s vault, two on the south side (her own and that of Frances) and the third opposite bearing signs of rough usage, he had feared the arrival of crowds of visitors to the church to ‘moralize’ over Cromwell. So the vicar, the builder and the clerk of the works, all three haters of Cromwell, had the vault built up again. Despite these entertaining details of Victorian attitudes to Cromwell, the Fauconbergs did not move to Sutton Court, Chiswick until the 1670s, which would involve Mary carrying the body first to Newburgh, then down again to Chiswick.
Of Newburgh Priory and its tomb one can only say that the case is not proven. The present owner of the Priory has understandably respected the wishes of his predecessor in not opening up the tomb – the latter having declined to do so even at the instigation of King Edward VII. It is true, that in this scientific age, when so much can be told from the merest bones, were the tomb to be opened, and were the headless skeleton of a seventeenth-century male of roughly sixty years old to be found, one would be tempted to subscribe fully to the legend of Newburgh Priory as Cromwell’s last resting-place. At the same time it is possible to have much sympathy for the opposing view that legends are legends, and should be left in the domain of romance where they belong and not subjected to examination, which after all, by discovering an empty tomb, might alternatively rob Newburgh of its aura altogether. In the meantime, in the absence of any definite proof elsewhere one must continue to suppose that Cromwell’s body lies in that deep pit under the old Tyburn – not the present marked site at Marble Arch itself where the plaque lies, but at the junction of Connaught Place and Connaught Square.
The fate of the head is more certain, since its subsequent history, if strange, has more substance to it. Last seen on top of Westminster Hall in the 1680s, the story goes that it was blown down in a monster gale towards the end of the reign of James ii. Falling at the feet of one of the sentinels, the skull was picked up by the man, who recognized it for what it was and took it home hidden under his cloak. The sentinel’s daughter sold it to a Cambridgeshire family, where it passed into the hands of a dissolute and drunken actor called Samuel Russell. At this point the skull re-emerges in the light of day, being seen about 1780 in Russell’s possession by one James Cox, proprietor of a museum, who later acquired it. He in turn sold it to three speculators for £230 and they exhibited it at the time of the French Revolution which was considered to be a fortunate republican coincidence. Finally it reached the possession of Josiah Wilkinson, and from him descended to Canon Wilkinson, who in turn left it at his death to Cromwell’s own college at Cambridge, Sidney Sussex.
But before the head attained this final academic resting-place, it had been the subject of various antiquarian and scientific inspections. In 1911 it was exhibited before the Royal Archaeological Institute; in the 1930s it was subject to an important scientific piece of investigation by two ‘cranial detectives’, Karl Pearson and Dr Morant. In a notable publication in Biometrika they showed the skull to have been trepanned after death – necessary for seventeenth-century embalming – and subsequently decapitated by a number of strokes.36 It is hardly necessary to stress how rare a decapitation after death must have been, let alone the combination with the trepanning. The head itself, of about six and seven-eighths size, with a fifteen hundred cubic centimetres brain capacity, fitted also with what was known of Cromwell’s physical appearance, even down to the depression for the wart over his eye. The skull was that of a male of about sixty years old. As an eminent surgeon considering the evidence of Morant and Pearson in a later paper wrote, that for all the gap in the provenance of the skull, it was out of the question that it could be a counterfeit: ‘To do this the forger would have had to know all the details of the seventeenth-century embalming, which are completely followed in Cromwell’s head. He would have had to have embalmed the whole body first and severed the head afterwards. He would have had to choose a corpse aged sixty, with a moustache and a small beard and a wart over his eye. The whole thing [i.e. a forgery] is impossible and does not bear considering.’37
That at any rate was the enlightened view taken by Sidney Sussex College, who decided to give the head at last its proper burial. The spot chosen was close by the chapel. But with a caution Oliver Cromwell had not showed at death, it was decided not to risk those depredations so feelingly described by Milton at the hands of future generations, whether light-hearted marauding undergraduates or more serious Royalists. So that the oval plaque chosen to mark the spot is merely placed to the left of the chapel entrance. It reads: ‘Near to this place was buried on 25 March 1960 the head of oliver cromwell Lord Protector of the Common-Wealth of England, Scotland and Ireland. Fellow Commoner of this College 1616–17.’ The exact whereabouts of the head remains a closely guarded secret. Nevertheless the precise location has been recorded by the College. So that the secret will not die out with those who attended this last discreet ceremony, over three hundred years after the Protector’s own death.
As Cromwell’s body did not settle easily, nor did his dust. It is doubtful indeed whether the clouds of controversy raised by such a redoubtable character will ever be permanently stilled, so many and various are the issues raised by his life-story. Virulence has not died away; nor has admiration. The historiography of Cromwell, the study of the historians who have studied him, provides in itself a subject of superb interest – albeit a separate one, and not strictly relevant here. Suffice it to say that the attitudes of succeeding generations to the burning topic of Oliver Cromwell have generally as much to teach one concerning the period in which they were written as about the man himself. One of the truest maxims on the subject of his reputation was propounded within the confines of his own century by Richard Baxter: ‘No (mere) man was better or worse spoken of than he; according as Mens Interests lead their judgements.’ As for the fascination of weighing up these conflicting estimates, a writer on the most recent works on Cromwell in 1938 began his essay with an observation of much truth: ‘If historiography may be permitted its romances, the study of Cromwell’s life claims a high place among them.’38 In particular the arrival of any kind of comparable historical situation – a personal rule, a tyranny, a dictatorship, or along other lines a civil war or a revolution – has focused attention anew on the parallels to be sought in seventeenth-century England in general and the career of Oliver Cromwell in particular. To each age comes its new slant, and it is natural that it should be so.
Leaving aside the pure study of history, Cromwell’s name has not failed to arouse reactions of the most venomous wrath even at a distance of several hundred years. In the nineteenth century a project to enhance the House of Commons with a series of statues of the sovereigns of England aroused ominous rumblings when the subject of Oliver Cromwell was raised. In the end the party of disgust triumphed: Oliver Cromwell should not take his place with the other rulers of the country within its precincts. Towards the end of the century, the project was revived in connexion with the tri-centenary in 1899 of Cromwell’s birth. At the last minute the Government was defeated on the subject by the Irish members of the House of Lords: a reaction of which the Prime Minister of the day Lord Rosebery aptly commented it might have been ‘more graceful and fair’ had it been expressed before the statue was completed and the pedestal actually erected.39 In the end the statue was placed just outside the House of Commons.
The ceremony of unveiling, performed by Lord Rosebery, was enhanced by the presence of three prominent Jews on the platform, Lord Rothschild, Sir Samuel Montagu and Mr Benjamin Cohen, to show their appreciation of the Lord Protector’s welcome to their race. In his speech, Lord Rosebery in his turn illuminated the values of late Victorian England when he spoke of Cromwell as ‘a raiser and maintainer of the power of the Empire of England’, English imperialism being ‘not the lust of dominion nor the pride of power, but rather the ideal of Oliver Cromwell … his faith would lie in God and in freedom, and in the influence of Great Britain as asserting both’. It was a judgement which the Lord Protector himself would have much appreciated. So that statue still stands today, a dominating figure of more than life size, facing out into Parliament Square. Unique in its site, it receives a great deal more prominence than the serried ranks of sovereigns, many of them forgotten, appropriately enough for one who was after all never a King, but none the less unique in our history.
The character of the man himself has so much of paradox in it that it is perhaps not surprising that 3 September, his death-day, as late as 1969 saw the insertion of two separate notices of commemoration in the personal column of The Times. One quoted the war-cry of Dunbar, from the Psalms: ‘Let God arise, let his enemies be scattered.’ The other read ‘Cromwell. To the eternal condemnation of Oliver. Seditionist, traitor, regicide, racialist, proto-fascist and blasphemous bigot. God save England from his like.’ This dichotomy spreads right through his career, even from the war days and before, down to the essential picture of Cromwell as a man of action. That he was a man of action can scarcely be doubted: one might go further and say that it was as a man of action that Cromwell’s most sublime moments were reached. It was the decisive quickness of his military judgements, the brilliant rapid concentration of his mind in battle, which brought him the well-deserved rise to fame, which in turn enhanced his position in the political world, and finally elevated him to the highest counsels of the country. As a politician, and later still in enjoyment of the supreme power, this same capacity for decision – which looked more like impulse in the life of peacetime – brought about the dissolution of the Rump, carried him on to the Protectoral throne, and held off assaults on his position by the quick avoiding actions he took to various assorted Parliaments.
It is this particular ‘Cromwellian’ quality which has presumably attracted other men interested in the realities of political action to make studies of his life; not only an English politician like John Morley, or Isaac Foot, but also a former American President like Theodore Roosevelt have studied Oliver Cromwell. On the other hand the portrait of Oliver Cromwell as a strong man of history, although true in itself, leaves out all the other subtle shadows of his portrait; above all it omits the lifelong dialogue he carried on with himself concerning the intentions of the Almighty, which led him at times to periods of indecision so prolonged and so painful that on the strength of them, he would hardly deserve the Man of Action title at all. His love of the Protestant interest, springing from his obsession with religious promulgation, his own care and concern for the spiritual welfare of the English people, these preoccupations constituted a whole other side to his nature; the part they played was quite as powerful, even if their effect was often to lead to indecision rather than to action. As the author of the account of his last hours, commenting on these obsessions, wrote: ‘one half of his worth as a great Christian and servant of God was not known to others’.40
Against the celebrated ruthlessness which he could show upon occasion must be put the other tenderer side to his nature, the clemency to the weak, concern for people, seen in many private instances, and also in an abstract care demonstrated as Protector that the lives of ordinary people should be improved, not brutalized by the deeds of the powers that ruled them. Milton, listing the qualities in 1654 which made him such an excellent figurehead for the nation, included his lack of personal boastfulness and arrogance about the past.41 And indeed it is true that even in private conversation, the evidence shows that it was to God, at one level, and the soldiers of God at another that Cromwell was wont to give the credit for triumphs gone by. He had a feeling for family relationships; his attitude to his children is notably appealing not so much because it is so perfect as because it is so human. He showed courtesy to women, and was prepared to include them in his friendships. To friendship itself he devoted much time and much art, and was rewarded by warmth and affection by men of many differing shades of opinion. Then there were his genuine feelings for England itself, the English countryside, English field sports, horses, dogs, hunting and hawking, all of which not only marked him as a rounded man, but also brought him closely in touch with many of the people over whom he ruled, because they shared these tastes. Such attributes, added up, came to the positive fact that Oliver Cromwell in private had much charm, and exercised it over nearly all those who met him.
This is not to deny the darker side to his nature, the manic rage which drove him into battle, which caused him to have cut down the Irish priests without regret, have the King killed and feel not the slightest tremor afterwards. But it was a fact generally admitted at the time that in contrast to many before or after him who would achieve a position of strength and have to maintain it, he was not a bloodthirsty man. In a sense, it is just because he set a high standard that he has not been judged in the same breath with tyrants and dictators, and the immensely superior fibre which he displayed sometimes passes unremarked. Of his attitude to his enemies it was said that ‘he did not use severity ordinarily towards them as others did of that kind, as was by some expected’.42 And these very rages contrasted with the great self-control which he could show on other occasions. His own explanation would have been simple: such passions were sent by God. A more complicated explanation might have been that by such sudden and daring acts Cromwell himself would on occasion cut the Gordian knot of his own nature, that perpetual weighing up the signs and dispensations which led for example to such delays before he cast in his lot with the avowed enemies of the King. It is this dual capacity for action and inaction which gives to his character its special patina of paradox.
Naturally such a man had to defend himself against the charge of hypocrisy, particularly when circumstances turned out well for him. He himself had observed that none goes so high as he who knows not where he is going, but it is sometimes difficult to convince observers that such a successful Icarus has not been all along aiming at the sun. Oliver Cromwell was certainly not a hypocrite in the conventional deep-dyed meaning of the word, although like any man of affairs he had to be capable of keeping his own counsel. Henry Fletcher quoted at the beginning of The Perfect Politician, the seventeenth-century biography, the apt motto ‘Qui nescit dissimulare, nescit Regnare’ – who knows not how to dissimulate knows not how to rule. Baxter gave a careful verdict on the subject: ‘he thought Secrecy a Virtue, and Dissimulation no Vice, and Simulation, that is, in plain English, a lie or Perfidiousness, to be a tolerable fault in a Case of Necessity’. But the argument that the end justifies the means is one that very few rulers or even politicians can avoid their lifetime through.
One quality which Cromwell possessed undoubtedly in large measure, and which assisted his rise, also laid him open afterwards to accusations of calculating forethought and that was his ability to understand his fellow creatures. Dr Bate wrote of him that ‘No man knew more of Men’, and it was a quality which contributed much to his animation of his soldiers, and the founding of the New Model Army. He could feel and inspire familiarity without sacrificing stature. Later he was well served in government, not only by men like Thurloe in the Council, but in Scotland also where he chose an excellent class of administrator, and generally by his choice of men like Broghill, Fauconberg and Lockhart, former Royalists but efficient. In a way this finesse in dealing with his fellow men was the properest expression of his intelligence. Cromwell was hardly by nature stupid: there are many references in the despatches of the foreign ambassadors set to watch him to his ‘sagacity’ and ‘wisdom’. Whitelocke, who had every reason to know, testified to his quickness and subtlety.43 Nevertheless he was not notably well read, and he seems to have had the engaging habit of those who read little but read deeply, of dwelling much on a particular book. But his intelligence did amount at best to a positive genius for feeling his way into a given situation which in turn meant identification with the minds and actions of those around him. As early as 1645 the soldier Sir William Waller commented on his ability to remain cautious in his own sayings, and yet draw out others to get to know their most intimate designs. The fact that he so quickly established good political relations as a young man in Parliament, easily formed part of a group, stood on committees and so forth – the ability to act the part of the good party man – was a more explicit proof of his native intelligence than many of his speeches. Fascinating as they are in their thunderous glimpses of the man behind the clouds, the mists of obscurity in what has come down to us are often too closely drawn for him to deserve the title of a great orator. In the same way his letters, which sometimes touch the heart with their directness and simplicity over a private grief, are in general too tortuously written to receive much particular acclaim as literature. The bent of his mind was at times mystical, but not intellectual.
As for the corollary to the charge of hypocrisy, the accusation of unlimited and unlawful ambition, that is more difficult to answer. The point should be made that Cromwell, rare among future leaders who sometimes feel the mantle of greatness pressing too heavily upon them to submit, showed himself a skilled and agreeable second-in-command. He had none of the superbia which led others to throw off restraints, as witness his positive efforts to get Fairfax to accept the Scottish command. It is doubtful whether he would ever have engineered the quarrel with Manchester for other than military reasons. The feeling spread by his eulogists that he had been called out of a private station to his country’s service was one for which a better case can be made, considering the late circumstances of his middle-aged rise, than the opposing view of a man ever bent on clawing his way to the top.
Yet that Cromwell could be seized by some blinding sense of his own righteousness in a particular cause is self-evident from the vigour and concentration which he brought to the fighting of the Civil War. In seeking to bring about change – questing peace through war as his Latin motto had it – he displayed indeed a remarkable freedom from doubts, considering what a revolutionary notion it was in the context of the time to take up arms against the King in the first place, and how many other men shrank back from the prospect at first, and worried over it to the end. But it is precisely this which gives another momentous aspect, another paradox, to Cromwell’s career: having led the revolution as it were against the existing order, he then found himself in the reverse position of representing that order himself. There have been many revolutionaries in history, and many governments have proceeded out of circumstances of violent change: but to see the conflict from both sides of the barricades and survive as Cromwell did is a rare distinction.* So that into the basic dichotomy of his nature was introduced another discordant element of having to cope with those very problems which he himself had originally raised. More and more, as the shadows of the Protectorate lengthened, he found himself using those very expedients, financial or political, against which he had originally protested. Cromwell maintained his power by means that Charles I would have been delighted to use, if he had had them at his disposal, in the cause of what Cromwell had then termed arbitrary tryanny.
This corruption then was not so much by absolute power as by the alternative corrupter, impossible circumstances. It never had the effect of healing the breaches within Cromwell’s own character, and making it easier to live with himself. He was renowned for his personal tolerance, and vigorous against the Church of King Charles before the war for that uniformity it sought to impose upon consciences; it was therefore a matter of distress to him to find at least something approaching censorship having to be imposed upon his own dissident minorities, because, as he believed, they would not respect the needs of law and order. Cromwell never ceased to emphasize in speech, in conversation, in pleading with the dissidents, the extent to which freedom of conscience did flourish under the Protectorate – greater than ever before in England, he said, and it has been shown to be a valid claim. Still that did not absolve him from the worries ever present in his own mind, the concern that such men could not respect the providences but were still prepared to struggle forward against him. It was Cromwell’s spiritual philosophy which was to cause him his greatest anguish as Protector, the very philosophy which had brought him most comfort in wartime. In war each victory had brought another sign that the Lord was on their side. Where were the similar signs of peace? Not surely in the disruptions of successive Parliaments, the clacking of the Quakers, the Royalist uprisings; only perhaps his foreign and colonial policy brought him something of the old comfort. So in the end the man of action proved to be at the mercy of the man of introspection. The one would not let the other rest.
Yet it is not possible for us to say simply and conveniently that Cromwell possessed ‘Two Assistant Spirits, a good and a bad’. Only one true spirit dwelt in the man and in the end it is these very paradoxes and doubts which arouse the natural sympathy one feels for any tortured character. On a broader level, they contribute much to the legacy he left behind him after his death. It is possible with justice for both radical and conservative elements in British life to claim their descent from Oliver Cromwell, the one from the enthusiastic soldier and early politician, the other from the old and tired Protector seeking to make the best of the status quo for the sake of law and order. Two bequests are most generally mentioned as those left behind by Oliver Cromwell: on the good side there is the strain of nonconformity in English life, that non-conformist conscience to which much of probity and integrity is owed; as Sir Charles Firth put it, under Cromwell’s rule, it had time to take root and grow strong.44 On the bad side is most often quoted the hatred of military rule, bequeathed by the experiment of the Major-Generals in particular. But such legacies are notoriously hard to analyse, since the true legacy of a man’s career can sometimes be mightily negative. We can only hazard a guess as to the nature of the violent convulsion which might have shaken Britain’s structure later, had the gentler turnabout of the Civil Wars, ending in Oliver’s restorative rule, not intervened.
It is more certain that Cromwell demonstrated how a man could rise from a modest inheritance and by his own extraordinary qualities live to defy the greatest in the world. It was this spectacle of challenge and success, allied to a general feeling that the man was worthy of the place – even if it was not rightfully his – which drew forth the admiration, however reluctantly, of Cromwell’s contemporaries. It was Sir John Reresby, a Royalist, who called him ‘one of the greatest and bravest men (had his cause been good) that the world ever produced’.45 The existence of such a great man in English public life and therefore in English history is in its own way as enduring a legacy as all the controversies which still surround his name. Cromwell attained a stature from which he could not only stretch out his hand towards the crown, so long the supreme symbol of authority in England, but also, final triumph, reject it and still retain his power.
His sturdy and baleful countenance regards us across the ages, to the soldier a source of inspiration, to the revolutionary a source of magic confidence – the deed awaits to be done. More powerfully and in his later years, he speaks to us of hope, such men can and will exist. And with them comes vigilance for the morality of government, belief in the light of leadership, whatever the failures of practice and the dimming of the pristine glow in the ineluctable dust of care. So long then as the influence of individual persons on the course of history is thought worthy of examination, the character of Oliver Cromwell as an extreme example of the man who made his own destiny and so affected for better or for worse the destiny of his whole country must always claim its place. Carlyle believed in Hero-worship as a precious fact and in the certainty of Heroes being sent us. A cooler age might deny Cromwell the epithet of Hero. But it cannot deny him his greatness, the one quality which no man who knew him, friend or foe, tried to wrest from him. With all Cromwell’s faults, his passions and his plans, it was John Maidstone, his own servant, from a traditionally unheroic vantage-point, who spoke the final epitaph on the Protector: ‘A larger soul hath seldom dwelt in a house of clay.’