CHAPTER TWO
For neither didst thou from the first apply
Thy sober Spirit unto things too High
But in thine own Fields exercisedst long
A healthful Mind within a Body strong
Andrew Marvell on Oliver Cromwell
At the age of eighteen, for all his friendship with Dr Thomas Beard, Oliver Cromwell did not present himself upon the stage of the world as a fully fledged Puritan, at least in the sense we understand the word today. To the years following his father’s death belong the widespread tales of Oliver’s early debaucheries. The report is too general to be ignored. Henry Fletcher in The Perfect Politician, an honest attempt at biography rather than hagiography first printed in 1660, gave the measured opinion that this period of Cromwell’s life was certainly ‘not altogether free from the wildnesses and follies incident to youthful age’. Richard Baxter, although several years younger than Oliver, had heard the story that he was ‘Prodigal in youth’ and repeated it in his autobiography. The Royalist Sir Philip Warwick related that ‘the first years of his manhood were spent in a dissolute course of life in good fellowship and gaming which afterwards he seemed sensible of and sorrowful for’. Fletcher confirms the idea of Oliver as a gamester – there was one Mr Calton to whom he later insisted on repaying £30 he had won in the old days, since he now considered he had obtained it by unlawful means and ‘it would be a sin in him to detain it any longer’.1
Predictably James Heath gives the most colourful account of the youthful carnival of this latterday St Augustine: to him Oliver behaved as ‘a young Tarquin’ who delighted in accosting decent women in the streets in order to ‘perforce ravish a kiss, or some lewder satisfaction upon them’. He also set about decent men with his quarter staff, and when neither opportunity was available took refuge in generally ‘tippling’, as a result of which he became the terror of the local alehouses, whose proprietresses would call out when they saw him approaching: ‘Here comes young Cromwell, shut up your doors!’2 At all events little was omitted from this category of the typical vices of a rake at his progress, including drink, women, gambling and personal violence. But about the same time Oliver was granted his first sight of a wider world than that of Huntingdon, whether its High Street or its alehouses. Whether or not it was part of his mother’s plan to cure him of his dissipation as Heath suggested – and perhaps there was some connexion between the young man’s reputation and his removal – between 1617 and 1620 Cromwell went to London and continued his studies at one of the Inns of Court.
The episode is surrounded with irritating obscurity since there is no actual documentary record in the Black Books of Cromwell’s attendance at the Inn of Court generally associated with his name by his early biographers – Lincoln’s Inn. These authorities included not only Henry Fletcher cited above, but the author of an earlier work (possibly Henry Daubeny) The Portraiture of His Royal Highness Oliver, late Lord Protector published just after Cromwell’s death, and also James Heath who added, with unintentional irony in view of the problems of later historians: ‘It is some kind of good luck for that honourable Society that he hath left us small and so innocent a memorial of his Membership therein.’ It is true that Carrington for example does not actually name Lincoln’s Inn (while noting nevertheless that ‘his Parents designed him to the study of the Civill Law’). But not only Oliver’s father, grandfather and two of his uncles had attended Lincoln’s Inn, he also sent his own son Richard there in 1647: there seems therefore no real reason to doubt the authenticity of an incident referred to so frequently in the earliest personal memorials of Oliver’s life.*3
The Inns of Court were not then as now a specialized series of institutions destined to equip a body of young men for the law and nothing but the law. They were, on the contrary, regarded as an honourable supplement to a young gentleman’s upbringing: to repair to London to study the law was, whatever the views of Oliver’s mother, as conventional a development in the life of a young man of his station as all the other steps his education had so far taken. Of the members of Parliament between 1640 and 1642 over three hundred had been to one of the Inns of Court, including names to become famous in the turbulent years to follow, such as Denzil Holles, John Lambert, John Bradshaw and Sir Thomas Fairfax. Once more here tradition in the shape of Thomas Le Wright in 1658 (another early eulogist who mentions Lincoln’s Inn) speaks of Cromwell ‘more reading of men than on the book, as being naturally more inclined and affecting the pratick part, than the theorick’.4 London in 1618 or so was a pleasant place to exercise the burgeoning curiosity of youth, and the Inns of Court themselves were then situated in a positively sylvan area between the City of London and the rising city of Westminster, surrounded by green fields as yet untouched by building speculators. It was the great Thames, a more effective highway than any rutted thoroughfare, which linked the two centres, ‘those twin-sister cities as joined by one street so watered by one stream’ as Thomas Heywood romantically called them in Porta Pietas, ‘the first, a breeder of grave magistrates, the second, the burial place of great monarchs’. And it was among ‘the grave magistrates’ of the City of London as well as among his own cousinage, that Cromwell found his associates. For on 22 August 1620, a few months after he came of age, Oliver Cromwell married Elizabeth Bourchier, daughter of a City magnate, Sir James Bourchier.
Association with one group may have led him to a union within the other, since it has been suggested that it may have been at the house of Oliver’s aunt, Joan Barrington, daughter of old Sir Henry Cromwell, who was a neighbour of Sir James Bourchier in the country, that he first met his future wife.5 The Bourchiers were in fact a family much like Oliver’s own, if they lacked his original Welsh streak, and Sir James’s country house was at Little Stambridge, Essex. The move from city to country had been made in the previous generation by Sir James’s father, as Stewards and even Cromwells had originally moved from the City, but in this case the connexions were tightly preserved: Sir James in his City life was a prosperous fur-dealer and leather-dresser, who had been knighted in 1610. He had married a Suffolk lady, Frances Crane, and Elizabeth, at twenty-three two years older than Oliver himself, was the eldest of their six children. It was a secure background – probably more financially secure than Oliver’s own, a fact which certainly gives the lie to Heath’s wilder stories, since from a vantage point of superior affluence Sir James Bourchier would hardly have allowed his daughter to marry an unrepentant reprobate.
In his marriage jointure, suitable for such a lady of established wealth, Oliver engaged to give his wife property which, with all the tithes included, came to about £40 a year; there was a heavy penalty for non-performance, the witness to the contract being another leather-seller, Thomas Morley, probably a relation of his wife’s on her mother’s side. The marriage took place at St Giles’ Church, Cripplegate, which lay within the City walls near the west end of London Wall and was the local church of the Bourchiers’ town house. The Marriage Register recording the ceremony is still in existence (although now deposited in the City Records Office at the Guildhall Library)6 and the church itself – where incidentally the poet John Milton was to be buried half a century after this quiet marriage – is still visible in a much restored state.
Elizabeth Cromwell was then young, rounded and pretty. She must have been an appealing creature, and not merely because, as the mother of Dorothy Osborne, that witty Royalist young lady, was fond of observing, there is a beauty that everyone ‘that was not deformed’ has once in their lives before the bloom is off. The miniature of Elizabeth by Samuel Cooper, painted when this bloom was long since gone, still shows an attractive, rather plump little face, with prettiness of a sort much apparent. The eyes are huge, wide apart, and engagingly drooping; there are still dimples in the cheeks; the mouth is faintly humorous and a little resigned. The whole expression has a kind of intelligent secret amusement, while the features in themselves are almost faun-like. It is surely no coincidence that Oliver’s favourite daughter Bettie was also the child who looked most like her mother.
Later as Protectress Joan, as the satirists nicknamed her,* she was the subject of much unkind mockery. On a minor scale, her character received the same opprobrious attentions from the scandalmongers as that of her husband. Leaving aside the more ferocious accusations (‘drunkenness and gallantry’) which are quite unproved, the commonest complaint made against her was that she was totally limited to the conventional attitudes of the housewife, and a cheese-paring one at that. Heath for example accused her of unnecessary stinginess as Lady Protectress: she would ‘nicely and finickally tax the expensive unthriftiness (as she said) of the Other Woman who lived there before her’.7 But while the allusion to the extravagances of Queen Henrietta Maria certainly points to a careful soul who believed economy, even in Royalty, to be a necessary virtue, there was more to Mrs Cromwell than mere household management.
For one thing she was also capable of managing her husband upon occasion, like any other wife of a busy – perhaps over-busy – man. In 1650, when Cromwell was absent in Scotland, she wrote him a firm letter beginning ‘My Dearest’, wondering how he could blame her for not corresponding more often ‘when I have sent three for one: I cannot but think they are miscarried’ she added, with a gentle hint of irony. There were touching words of love which followed, a tribute to over thirty years of close marriage; how she submitted herself to the providence of God which separated them, and yet wistfully: ‘Truly my life is but half a life in your absence …’ The final note was somewhat tarter. Mrs Cromwell suggested that her husband should at least find some time to write to his friend the Lord Chief Justice ‘of whom I have often put you in mind’, the Speaker of the House, the President of the Council of State, and other useful grandees: ‘Indeed, my dear, you cannot think the wrong you do yourself in the want of a letter, though it were but seldom.’ And so she signed herself, in all faithfulness, ‘Eliz. Cromwell’.8 Clearly the lady had spirit, as well as shrewdness.
As for her lack of dignity, it is true that Lucy Hutchinson, that sharp-eyed female observer who could never quite resist the greatness of Oliver, remained contemptuous of his wife. But the other side to Elizabeth Cromwell’s character, the dreamier less practical streak, consisted in fact of a rather endearing naïveté. She collected portraits of foreign Royalties, and wondered if Queen Christina of Sweden might not do as a second wife for Oliver – if anything happened to her. She was even said to have hankerings after the dispossessed Royal Family of England, and fear for her own children in the high position they could not sustain. All this was nothing if not sympathetic and pointed to an old-fashioned, even romantic disposition. Later, as her husband’s position improved, she was described as having, unlike her more adaptable daughters, no taste in dress. Her hood for example was clapped on like a hat, without any art to it, no ‘ensconcing and entrenching it double and single in redoubts and horn-works’. But Oliver had hardly married her for her knowledge of such fashionable refinements, being himself notoriously indifferent to the details of dress. Most important of all, her domestication, her frugality, her preoccupation with hearth and home conceived as a Christian duty to God and her husband, were not in themselves qualities which the husbands concerned have ever found markedly unpleasant. The onlookers who derided such an insignificant woman only saw half the game. It was Oliver Cromwell who enjoyed the loving loyalty, the dedicated personal support, and more tangibly – but none the less agreeably – the comforts of a well-ordered household. It was his enemies who called her Joan, and likened her to an ‘ape in scarlet’.9
Undoubtedly Oliver loved his wife devotedly both in principle and in practice for the whole of their long years of married life. In principle as a Christian husband, in Thomas Le Wright’s words he ‘was always exceeding loving towards her that had the Honour of his Bed’. In practice, he still hastened to write to her after they had been married for thirty-one years for the most loverlike of reasons: ‘My Dearest, I could not satisfy to omit this post, although I have not much to write; yet indeed I love to write to my dear, who is very much in my heart.’ Immediately after his greatest victory at Dunbar, Oliver wrote to Elizabeth: ‘Thou art dearer to me than any creature’ and there is no reason to doubt his word. It was one of the maxims of a popular Puritan handbook of the time on family life – Daniel Rogers’s Matrimoniall Honour – that ‘the benefit of the Bed’ was one of the chief practical advantages to be expected from marriage because it resulted in ‘fitness of body and mind thereby purchased, freely to walk with God and to discharge duties of calling without distraction and annoyance’.10 Elizabeth, by presenting Oliver with this benefit, as also with unshatterable serenity in his most intimate life, certainly left him free to pursue his public life without the distractions and annoyances which might have been supplied by a showier but also a more egocentric helpmate. It is hard to conclude that Oliver really made such a bad bargain.
A further importance is given to the date of Oliver Cromwell’s marriage by the fact that there is no further evidence for his ‘prodigalities’.* This in turn makes it easier to evaluate these earlier indulgences which can have had only shallow roots since they were so easily pulled up with the arrival of family responsibility. Youthful intemperance being neither particularly uncommon nor particularly culpable, one might profitably compare Oliver’s situation in this respect to that of John Bunyan who exclaimed: ‘Until I came to the state of marriage, I was the very ring-leader in all manner of vice and ungodliness’ – referring mainly to swearing and merry-making.11 Neither Bunyan’s nor Cromwell’s early ‘ungodliness’ would probably have achieved much status in the category of any true debauchee.
It was the quiet life of a country town, a town so close to the fields that it merged into the life of a country-dweller, that Oliver and Elizabeth Cromwell led on their return to Huntingdon. This life was enhanced by the birth of their first child, Robert, the following year, in October 1621. To the firstborn was added in quick succession Oliver, born in February 1623, Bridget in August 1624, Richard in October 1626, Henry in January 1628 and Elizabeth in July 1629. Presumably Oliver was now discovering, as his biographer Flecknoe put it, that the government of a family has ‘a certain analogy with the government of a Commonwealth’.
It is in fact to the baptism of Richard that we owe the first surviving letter of Oliver Cromwell, dated 14 October 1626: it is a request to a Cambridge friend, a man a little older than himself, Henry Downhall, who had been a Fellow at St John’s College when Oliver was at Sidney Sussex, to act as godfather. Downhall was now a clergyman, rector at Tofts in Cambridgeshire. ‘Loving Sir’ wrote Oliver, apologizing for being too busy to ride over with the invitation himself, ‘The day of your trouble is Thursday next. Let me entreat your company on Wednesday.’ Cromwell continues that he is only too well aware that he is further encroaching upon his friend for new favours by the request, rather than repaying him for ‘the love he has already found’. Nevertheless he is confident that Downhall’s patience and goodness cannot be exhausted by his ‘friend and servant Oliver Cromwell’.12 This letter, written in the neatly flowing but tightly spaced handwriting which Cromwell preserved for most of the rest of his life until ill-health intervened, besides showing him up as a conscientious father, also demonstrates already something of the elaborate care which he was to take over his friendships in later life, with its deliberate balance of Downhall’s goodness and Cromwell’s indebtedness. But by the time the nest was cosily completed by the birth of the last of the six children of Cromwell’s ‘first family’ – precious Bettie who was to be his pet – Oliver’s circumstances had changed. Not only that but England itself had changed. It was time for Cromwell’s career to follow that of his country more closely.
In 1625 the death of the old Scottish King, James I – that unlikely product of the union between Mary Queen of Scots and Lord Darnley – was followed by the accession of a very different-natured ruler. It was not to be the glamorous and admired Henry Prince of Wales, the elder son whose accession it had once been thought would bring about a golden age, but the boy that Prince Henry himself had once jokingly nicknamed ‘the archbishop’. The new King, Charles I of England, Scotland and Ireland, was now aged twenty-four, small, earnest, dignified, passionate for the monarchy as his father had been, but with a new kind of royal passion, bred in an English Court not amid the power struggles of the sixteenth-century Scottish nobility which had educated James. His unhappy, turbulent upbringing, his transference to alien England at the age of thirty-six, had all endowed James with plentiful opportunities for observing the workings of men’s minds. Whatever his own theories, James had profited from the experience; James, in the Scottish phrase, was canny. King Charles on the other hand was definitely not canny.
Time would show that his philosophy of monarchy stood like a rock in the waters of others’ arguments: when the waves receded, the rock still remained, unaltered in position. In the meantime even his coronation was perhaps rather unfairly but certainly presciently marked by an earthquake; and shortly after his coronation the former ‘archbishop’ married a French princess, Henrietta Maria, sister of King Louis XIII. Although the real period of influence of this vivacious, loving, managing little Queen lay ahead, her religion – she was a Roman Catholic – already caused disquiet among Charles’s many subjects who dreaded the spread of ‘Popery’.
By 1628 the immense financial demands of the new King’s foreign policy, at this moment taking the form of an expensive quarrel with France as well as an existing war with Spain, were already compelling him to summon the third Parliament of his reign. The two previous ones had solved neither the problem of his supplies for himself and his favourite-cum-minister, Buckingham, nor the problem of his exactions for his subjects. For this Parliament Oliver Cromwell, now aged nearly twenty-nine, was elected one of the two ‘burgesses’ or members for the town of Huntingdon. The other was James Montagu, son of the Earl of Manchester, and a member of that family which had in fact quite recently acquired Hinchingbrooke from Sir Oliver Cromwell. Among the witnesses to the ‘Parliamentary Indenture’ as the document (now in the Borough Records) which attested the election was known, was once more the Puritan schoolmaster Dr Thomas Beard.
It was not Cromwell’s first recorded participation in Parliamentary affairs: before his marriage in 1620 he had been witness to another ‘Indenture’ for returning the burgesses of Huntingdon. Indeed in no outward sense did his election to Parliament appear a revolutionary step for the sober country gentleman Cromwell had now become: ‘living reserv’d, austere, as if his highest plot to plant the bergamot’ as Andrew Marvell later described it. One might even go further, and say that Cromwell’s return to Parliament was positively predictable, in view of the amazing number of close relations – estimated at nine cousins13 – he was to find beside him on the benches of the House of Commons, on his first arrival there in March 1628, including Wallers, Whalleys, Hammonds, Waltons and Ingoldsbys. But if the existence of a familial network made the atmosphere of the House of Commons seem in one sense friendly, in every other sense the air was charged with electric currents of violence and hostility.
Abroad, the Dutch revolt against their Spanish overlords had kindled the imaginations of many connoisseurs of political liberty, the effects being felt particularly in England not only because the shores of the Netherlands were so close, but also because there were close links between English and Dutch Protestants. The fortunes of the Protestant League, under the great Swedish military hero-prince Gustavus Adolphus, were followed in Britain with eager enthusiasm. At home however the situation if undeniably stormy was not outwardly revolutionary. For most of his subjects Charles Stuart was the one distinctive ruler of the state, marked out from all other claimants to rule by the unique possession of his kingship. The Bishop of Bath and Wells raised the subject in a sermon before Charles’s first Parliament – ‘for though there be many “pillars”, yet there is but unusRex, one King, one great and centre Pillar; and all the rest in a kingdom do but “bear up under him and about him”’.14 Such a concept of monarchy had something mystical about it; the extent and nature of this mysticism would be disputed as it increased.
It was however at this point the royal prerogative, those special powers of the King beyond his powers when acting together with Parliament, which was the bone of contention, rather than the more extreme theory of Divine Right. This theory, which claimed for the King the right to make laws alone without Parliament, only seems to have been held effectively by James i: the general Royalist point of view under his son was considerably less audacious, and postulated merely that since in every government there must be some power above the law, in a monarchy such supremacy clearly lay with the King. As a result he was free to use his prerogative or special powers in certain prescribed respects, as well as more vaguely when the general welfare of the kingdom demanded it. The justification of any extraordinary new expedients to raise money, then, lay with the past and long-established usage. They were merely additional taxes to be applied when the kingdom was in danger, much as the Tudors had imposed such taxes. Charles would admit nothing innovatory about them in theory.
But to others, the whole idea of the royal prerogative was obscurely dangerous, to be regarded with open suspicion. It was all very well for the King’s prerogative to give him special rights in the Common-Law courts, rights as head of State including the making of war and peace, supremacy over the Church and jurisdiction in the conciliar courts like the Star Chamber. The trouble lay with the further undefined area of the prerogative, mentioned above, which gave the King the opportunity to judge for himself when the national situation might require extra (royal) measures, and to apply those measures without recourse to Parliament. Such a practical denigration of the role of Parliament, only too visible in King Charles’s actions in the first years of his reign, occurred at a moment when Parliament itself was flexing its muscles after the more passive years of the sixteenth century. But by 1628 no official theory of opposition to the King had been worked out. Like the King himself, the Parliamentary opposers clung in theory to the past: while the King claimed to be acting exactly as his ancestors had done, Parliament opposed him on the grounds that such practices had not been seen in England before. It is therefore one of the paradoxes of this revolutionary period in English history that both sides began by appealing to ‘the good old days’ for justification.
It is important to emphasize, returning closer to home to the great sprawling palace of Westminster, when Oliver Cromwell first reached it in March 1628, that whatever the traditional loyalties of many of King Charles’s subjects, Cromwell himself stepped immediately and naturally into an already formed – if still shapeless – group of those critical of the monarchy, by reason of his family connexions. In the previous year certain members of Parliament had suffered imprisonment rather than subscribe to one of the King’s financial expedients – a forced loan – and these prisoners had included six of Cromwell’s relations. Two of them, Oliver St John and John Hampden, were to be closely associated with him in future fame. Oliver Cromwell had therefore every opportunity to hear from his natural intimates both the causes of the opposition to the King, and the desperate need for it: indeed his first public impressions of Charles I can hardly have been reassuring.
Later many of the Court poets and writers were to paint a falsely rosy picture of this period, in contrast to the later holocaust. Ben Jonson, for example, in an Anniversary Ode of 1629, dismissed such discontents as there might be as being the distasteful products of idleness:
O Times! O Manners! Surfet bred of ease
That truly epidemicall disease …
Lucy Hutchinson was closer to the truth when she looked back with more cynical nostalgia to that vanished time when the land had been at peace: ‘If that quietness may be call’d peace, which was rather like the calm and smoothe surface of the sea, whose dark womb is already impregnated of a horrid tempest.’15 It would never have been possible for Cromwell, coming into politics as he did at such a critical moment, by birth falling straightaway into the heart of the protesting caucus, to hold the view that England’s troubles could be attributed to ‘surfet bred of ease’. For him there were already in practice two divergent points of view – one basically Royal and one critical of it – which may for convenience’ sake be termed Parliamentary, and are sometimes alternatively described as those of Court and Country.* These two points of view were effectively expressed only three months after he first sat in Parliament, in June 1628, by the Petition of Right.
This famous document demanded the redress of certain notable grievances, principally the arbitrary arrest of subjects without trial, and arbitrary taxation; unlike earlier bills, which Charles had rejected, it did at least take the form of a petition, or request, although attempts were made within it to define the rights of subjects under the law. It was significant that John Pym, the great Parliamentary leader, looked back to the past and ancient rights, as he discoursed of the laws suggested in the Petition: ‘There are plain footsteps of those Laws in the Government of the Saxons. They were of that vigour and force as to overlive the Conquest; nay, to give bounds and limits to the Conqueror.’16 And the past lay not in the sixteenth century, nor even in the age of Magna Carta, but in the far-distant days before the Norman Conquest, it being a popular maxim of certain Parliamentarians and political theorists at this date that ‘a Norman yoke’ had been placed over free Saxon heads in 1066. Charles i was by this argument merely the latest descendant of a line of ‘Norman conquerors’ conspiring to deprive good erst-while Saxons of their liberties. Such liberties had never been forgotten and were now being revived in the Petition of Right.
In accepting the Petition – because his desperate financial situation left him no choice – the King was careful to accept the appeal to the past although on his own terms. He refused to accept the accompanying Remonstrance, and prorogued (or temporarily suspended) Parliament a few days later. Although he did agree to redress the named grievances, in doing so, he declared, he was merely confirming ‘the ancient liberties’ of his subject. There was no ‘entrenchment’ upon his prerogative. Even more firmly he asserted that he owed an account of his actions to God alone, nor had the Houses of Parliament any right to make a law without his consent. The battle was certainly joined, politically speaking, before Cromwell’s eyes, long before the first fascinating novelty of the House of Commons can have worn off sufficiently to have blunted the very keen impression he must have received from the whole dramatic episode.
Politics and money were not the only topics on which there was opposition to the King. Religion was another burr under the saddle of many of Charles’s subjects. It was on the matter of those dangerous innovations, verging on ‘Popery’, which many considered were staining the white garment of the Church of England, and the general tolerance of laxity leading even to the tolerance of ‘Popery’ itself, that Cromwell made his first recorded pronouncement in the House of Commons in February 1629. In November the King had issued a Declaration on the subject of religion which was prefixed to the Book of Common Prayer, in which it was generally felt by the Puritan element that the ‘papistical’ views of his rising favourite, the Archbishop Laud, were to be discerned. To Laud however it was Puritanism not ‘Popery’ which was the slow powerful menace threatening the state Church. Puritan tendencies were to be checked. Above all individual conscience was not to be regarded as the guide towards the definition of doctrine, which was the duty of the Church. Thus all were bidden to continue in ‘the uniform profession’ of the articles of the Church of England, ‘prohibiting the least difference’.
The answer of the House of Commons to this challenge was to set up a Committee of the House on Religion. These committees were by their very nature anti-monarchical devices, developed since the beginning of the century. A committee of the whole, for example – a deliberate ruse to declare the entire House of Commons members of one committee – evaded the authority of the Speaker, in those days acting as a Royal nominee, because it meant that the House could elect its own chairman for the committee. It could thus sit as long as it liked, and members could speak more than once. Other lesser committees followed, and the King himself acknowledged angrily how the practice was spreading when he observed a few months later in 1629: ‘We are not ignorant, how much the House hath of late years endeavoured to extend their Privileges, by setting up general Committees for Religion, for Courts of Justice, for Trade, and the like …’17 Of this particular Committee on Religion Oliver Cromwell was made a member. If we are to believe Milton, the spring of 1629 was exceptionally fine, when ‘the wanton earth’ offered herself up to the sun’s caress. The hot spring weather was spent by Cromwell in vehement and indignant outpourings against the tolerance of ‘Popery’ in high places, in which cause he declared himself personally informed and inspired by Dr Thomas Beard.
There was a certain Manwaring, he announced, who continued to enjoy status as a preacher, despite the fact that he had been censored for his ‘papist’ sermons by Parliament. Roger Manwaring had in fact previously acted as one of King Charles’s chaplains in which capacity he had preached in 1627 a notable sermon on the Divine Right of the King, whose powers he discovered to lie not in consent, not in grace, not in law or even custom, but simply and immediately in their investment from God. Now he had been preferred to a rich living. All this accorded well with the story told to Cromwell by Beard of a certain Dr Alablaster, preaching ‘flat Popery’ in a sermon at Paul’s Cross. At the end of it all he was defended from attack by Beard (who intended to contradict his thesis) by the Bishop of Winchester, who charged Beard to desist, all this despite the manifest encouragement given to Beard by the Bishop of Ely. This tale of religious chicanery and the smell of incense – if not brimstone – in high places was evidently delivered with an impressive passion, since at least three people present, including Bulstrode Whitelocke, made a note of the speech.*18In fact the Committee ended by condemning Manwaring, compelled Charles to withdraw his sermon, and protested strongly against the ‘extraordinary growth of Popery’ even in England, to say nothing of Scotland and Ireland. Once more Oliver had found himself in opposition to the King, and on this occasion there is evidence of his practical involvement.
The protesting nature of this, the period of his first entry into public life, is only confirmed by the final turbulent scenes of Parliament in the spring of 1629. On 2 March Cromwell was among those who refused to adjourn at the King’s command until the resolution of Sir John Eliot condemning Popery and illegal subsidies not granted by Parliament was passed. The Speaker of the House, Sir John Finch, was actually held down in his place by Denzil Holles and Benjamin Valentine while the resolution was read. ‘God’s wounds!’ bellowed Holles. ‘You shall sit till we please to rise.’ By the time King Charles succeeded in dissolving Parliament, thus drawing to an end Parliamentary government in England for the next eleven years, the damage was done and the resolutions had been read. Perhaps it was Oliver’s first sight of a short sharp physical action in a righteous cause. Whatever the significant impressions left by the incident relevant to his future career, by the time Cromwell returned to his own fields at Huntingdon, he had certainly witnessed excitement enough, at Westminster. Edmund Ludlow wrote in his memoirs of the scene in the House with the Speaker that King Charles ‘might have observed the pulse of the nation beating high towards liberty’.20 Oliver Cromwell too formed part of that pulse.
As in his childhood, Cromwell’s roughness was melded with spiritual resource. The story of his early years in London and the short violent affray into Parliament displays the same contrast between outward straightforward action and some inner whirlpool of deeper more melancholy waters. It is known from the records of Sir Theodore Mayerne, a distinguished doctor then practising in London, that Oliver Cromwell visited him on 19 September 1628 – six months after his first election to Parliament. Mayerne, now a man in his fifties and enormously rich and successful, the son of a famous French Protestant, had in the past doctored King Henry IV of France and would in the future number King Charles and Queen Henrietta Maria among his regular patients. Owing to his huge girth he seldom went out, preferring to record at home his patients’ histories in a case-book, awaiting their next visit. Cromwell had apparently been drinking the medicinal waters of Wellingborough (in Northamptonshire) which were sufficiently esteemed at the time for the King and Queen to have spent a season there, two years previously, in order to quaff them. But this had only aggravated Cromwell’s condition. Otherwise, Cromwell’s flesh was very dry and withered, he had a recurrent pain in his stomach three hours after meals which had not so far yielded to any remedy, and a persistent pain in his left side. Above all, the great doctor wrote ominously of ‘Monsr. Cromwell’ that he found him ‘valde melancholicus’ – extremely melancholy.21
This was not the only indication that the energetic protester who witnessed the manhandling of the Speaker of the House had another less outgoing side to his nature. Oliver’s own family physician was that Dr Simcott who later recorded in his case-book how Cromwell had taken ‘Mithridate’ (a poison antidote) to ward off the plague, and in doing so ‘cured his pimpled face’. Here he less succinctly but more evocatively described to Sir Philip Warwick certain incidents that occurred about the same date, and certainly before the death of Oliver’s uncle, Sir Thomas Steward, in 1636. Cromwell, said Simcott, would sometimes lie in his bed ‘all melancholy’; at other times he would send for Simcott at midnight and ‘such unseasonable hours’ because he felt himself to be dying; on other occasions still he had strange ‘fancies’ about the large cross standing in the centre of the town of Huntingdon. A further ‘fancy’ which seized Oliver was that he should be ‘the greatest man in this kingdom’ (the word King was not mentioned).22 Simcott’s revelations, picturesque but also pathetic, bear all the marks of what would in modern language be termed a nervous breakdown. It does not matter whether he was ‘splenetic’ as Simcott suggested (then meaning gloomy or moody) or ‘melancholicus’ as Mayerne observed – he may well, as many people undoubtedly are, in such a state, have been both by turns. While an exact medical diagnosis is obviously impossible across three hundred years, nevertheless the evidence for some severe crisis both at Huntingdon and in London, sufficiently serious to lead Cromwell to consult the leading doctor of the day, clearly exists.
It is Simcott’s testimony which suggests how much Oliver’s sufferings at this time lay on the mental, rather than the physical plane. There is no mention here of the low fevers, probably malarial, which were to trouble him later. Even the vision of future leadership (which of course took on a sinister connotation to a Royalist writing much later with hindsight) falls into a believable pattern of a man in the throes of some sort of personal agony, who feels at times that he has not long to live, at times that great things lie in store for him, at times simply that he is too depressed and apathetic even to leave his bed. Such an experience, it has been suggested above, might be referred to in our own terminology loosely as a nervous breakdown; it might also, in the language of the mystic, be described as the ‘dark night of the soul’ when the aspirant after God is suddenly, fearfully, deprived of all knowledge and contact with God’s wishes. Thirdly, in the Puritan language of the time, such an attack might be related to the essential conversion, the choice by God, which every soul must go through before it can find grace. It is to Oliver’s self-acknowledged – but not precisely dated – conversion that it is suggested that these torments must be linked.
Considerably later, in 1638, Oliver Cromwell wrote a fascinating letter of mixed ecstasy and self-abasement on the subject of his conversion, to his ‘beloved cousin’ Mrs St John, the daughter of his uncle Henry Cromwell. While modestly rebutting her compliments to his own talents, Cromwell was nevertheless very willing to
honour my God by declaring what He hath done for my soul … Truly no poor creature hath more cause to put forth himself in the cause of his God than I … The Lord accept me in His son, and give me to walk in the light, and give us to walk in the light, as He is the light. He it is that enlighteneth our blackness, our darkness. I dare not say, He hideth His face from me. He giveth me to see light in His light. One beam in a dark place hath exceeding much refreshment in it. Blessed be His Name for shining upon so dark a heart as mine! You know what my manner of life hath been. Oh, I have lived in and loved darkness and hated the light. I was a chief, the chief of sinners. This is true; I hated godliness, yet God had mercy on me. O the riches of His mercy! Praise Him for me, that He hath begun a good work should perfect it to the day of Christ …23
Here indeed is the authentic language of the convert, of one touched by grace and feeling the workings of Christ within himself. It is also incidentally the first true revelation in Oliver’s surviving letters of that high religious, almost manic strain of language, densely interwoven with Biblical and semi-Biblical phrases to be displayed later so prominently in his communications, ranging from battle reports to harangues inside Parliament. The Biblical influence was of course through his life intensely strong. The King James’s Bible as it was known, the great Authorized Version, had been first published in 1611 when he was a boy of twelve, and may be said to be by far the most dominating literary presence in all his letters and speeches, although it has been pointed out that there are also traces of knowledge of the Genevan Version, which would have been used during his school-days by Beard, for example in this particular letter. No doubt Cromwell remembered such phrases from his childhood.24 It is important to stress the nature of the language because it is not suggested that Oliver is here regretting such offences as he may have committed before his marriage, then nearly twenty years away, although this conclusion has sometimes been drawn from the last few lines of the letter quoted in order to back up the Royalist stories of debauchery prolonged long after youth. A strict distinction must be drawn between these youthful vices and the ‘darkness’ to which Cromwell is here referring.
This type of darkness, the darkness which envelops the spirit before its conversion, was an important concept in Puritan thought of the time. To the Puritan – or one might say to the Calvinist, since this was a doctrine originating from the precepts of Calvin a century earlier – the conversion, the calling by God, was all-important. As Calvin put it in his Institutes, ‘the covenant of life’ was not ‘preached equally to all men’, and again ‘he [God] gives to some what he refuses to others’. Yet without grace, no one could be saved. The Elect, as these fortunate possessors of grace were known to themselves, or ‘the Saints’, were not born with this grace. And unlike the Roman Catholics, for example, they did not believe that they could obtain grace by means of an outward sacrament such as baptism (which redeemed Catholics from the stain of original sin). The Calvinists and their descendants believed on the contrary that the vital grace came only through God’s choice of the individual, who now felt Christ working in him. For God donated his Son to the Elect to support them: as John Preston put it in a sermon roughly contemporary with Oliver’s conversion: ‘When God calleth you to come unto Christ, he promiseth that the virtue of Christ’s death shall kill sin in you, and that the virtue of Christ’s Resurrection shall raise you up to the newness of life.’ And once granted, this grace would never be withdrawn. Bishop Burnet wrote in his History of Oliver himself: ‘His beloved notion was, once a child of God, always a child of God.’25 The Saints could not fall from grace. For these two reasons, conversion or acknowledgement of the workings of grace was liable to appear an epoch-making spiritual event in the life of any member of the Elect.
In what did these conversions consist? One authority has aptly written that the root of the matter was always a new birth. The experience was nearly always in itself climactic. Thomas Goodwin for example compared himself vividly to a traitor whom the King had pardoned and then raised to the position of friend and favourite. There was generally much that was vivid about such conversions: a Yorkshire gentleman, Thomas Bourchier, wrote touchingly of his own experience that ‘in the beginning of my conversion my soul was so abundantly ravished with the beauty of the Lamb, that truly I was scarce well when my tongue was not speaking of the infiniteness of that mercy to me, so unworthy a wretch’. One member of the Elect who could not date his conversion very precisely, beyond the reading of a particular book when he was fifteen – Richard Baxter – was always worried by his lack of exact knowledge. John Winthrop, on the other hand, the leader of the Puritan flight to the New World, was careful to note in his autobiography, written nineteen years later, that his own conversion came to him at the age of thirty.26 Oliver’s own letter, with its colourful phrases, its references to the Scriptures in an earlier passage, its shuddering allusion to a hideous past now swallowed up in a godly present, exhibits the classic symptoms of such an experience. Indeed, if the tumultuous meaning of a conversion to Puritans is borne in mind, it is hardly a wonder that the years preceding it should be remembered as steeped in ‘darkness’.
If it is accepted that it was Oliver’s spiritual conversion, rather than his transformation from a roué, which was at the root of his self-doubts and mysterious illnesses, with their suggestion of the psychosomatic, then it remains to try and establish the date of this cataclysmic event in his early life. It seems evident that this only occurred after Cromwell’s return to Huntingdon some time after the prorogation of Parliament in 1629 and before his move to St Ives in 1631, since the process of self-analysis was clearly in full swing during his visit to London, when the appointment with Sir Theodore Mayerne which can only have been as a result of extreme stress was sought in September 1628. It is true that Dr Beard recommended Oliver for Parliament in 1628 which, it has been argued, he would scarcely have agreed to do had Oliver not already undergone his spiritual ‘rebirth’. But this is to identify too closely Oliver’s inner cogitations with the outward excesses of earlier years: it was after all perfectly possible to lead an upright life without being a member of the Elect, and this we must assume that Oliver did from 1620 onwards, even if his inward darkness was not as yet formally lightened. It was generally agreed that once the rebirth had taken place Oliver led not only a good life but a sternly religious one. Bishop Burnet, having had the opportunity to pick up the story from Cromwell’s contemporaries, recorded that he ‘led a very strict life for about eight years before the war’. Since Burnet, a Scot, dated the end of peace from 1638 when the Scottish war broke out, this produces a credible date around 1630.27
Undoubtedly there was a change in Oliver’s manner of conduct around this date: future years will show a more formed resolution in his management of affairs, as though self-examination had been canalized into consultation with the Almighty, a dialogue in which God furnished at least some answers in the shape of signs and ‘providences’ as opposed to the previous torturing unhappy monologue of the soul in anguish. A change of worldly residence also lay ahead. But even before Cromwell left Huntingdon, he had become further involved in embattled local politics, as though the stimulating but restless-making drug of politics, once entered into his veins, would not allow him to rest from further action. The two issues which occupied him on his return to his native town both illustrated certain regrettable aspects of the contemporary scene. One concerned local government: Cromwell was among the leaders of a body who protested vociferously in the course of 1630 against proposed changes in the structure of the government of Huntingdon. The question was whether the bailiffs and burgesses of Huntingdon should be allowed, as they desired, a new charter for the administration of the Corporation. By this a body of Aldermen and a Recorder chosen for life, with only a Mayor chosen annually, would replace the old body of two bailiffs and a common council of twenty-four freely elected year by year. The bailiffs eventually had their way, and the process of transforming Huntingdon to what was in effect a ‘rotten borough’ was not stayed.
But victory was not achieved before the Lord Privy Seal had been obliged to issue a report on the affair, not least of the violent manner in which Cromwell and his comrades had conducted their opposition. The basis of it was the fact that the new arrangement enabled the Mayor and Aldermen to deprive the burgesses of their rights in the common lands, and also to levy large fines. ‘Disgraceful and unseemly speeches’ had been used by Mr Cromwell of Huntingdon against the Mayor of Huntingdon and a counsellor-at-law (barrister) named Bernard. It was true that the Lord Privy Seal now reported peace to be made: ‘as they [Cromwell’s speeches] were ill, so they are acknowledged to be spoken in heat and passion, and desired to be forgotten; and I found Mr Cromwell very willing to hold friendship with Mr Bernard, who, with a good will, remitting the unkind passages past, entertained the same.’28 Cromwell’s early capacity for impetuous self-expression is one lesson to be learned for the future from the incident; his spirited sympathy with local grievances is another.
The second protest touched on one of the broader issues which had concerned him at Westminster – the sinister means used by the Crown to raise money. A rule had been set up by which any freeholder whose estate was worth more than £40 a year was compelled either to attend the King’s coronation and have the expensive honour of knighthood thrust upon him, or pay a fine or ‘composition’ for his absence. Oliver fell into the fairly large category of those who had ignored the obligation at the coronation of King Charles in 1625, and had neither been knighted nor paid up. When commissioners were appointed to chase up defaulters locally, in order to ameliorate the royal finances, Oliver’s name appeared on their black list of those who must first make their composition and then take the tally of their payment to the commissioners of the Exchequer. The penalty of refusal was to be summoned before the Court of Exchequer for contempt. But in the first instance Oliver still declined to make payment. Even when the composition was finally made in April 1631, the manuscript of the records shows that Cromwell’s name was added subsequently to the list of those who had recanted, so that it is even possible, as has been suggested, that the fine was paid by somebody else.29 Although Cromwell did not therefore in the end suffer for his refusal to bend before the royal will, there is clearly a connexion between his preliminary refusal to take part in this financial charade and what he had witnessed in years previously at Westminster.
About the same date as the final composition was made, Oliver wrote to a Warwickshire gentleman, John Newdigate, about a more personal matter – a stray hawk which Newdigate had taken in and identified by its ‘varvell’ or ring as being Cromwell’s own. Oliver apologized to Newdigate for the delay in seeing to the whole matter (‘I do confess that I have neglected you in that I have received two letters from you without sending any answer’), and explained that the hawk was not his (‘This poor man, the owner of the hawk, living in the same town with me, made use of my varvells’). Oliver’s love of hawking was to become well known as he himself rose to power and news of this personal predilection reached international circles: would-be flatterers fawned upon him with gifts of hawks and falcons. Robert Lilburne, one of his commanders in Scotland who wrote in 1654 enquiring about his chances of future advancement, was careful to end his letter with an offer of hawks for the great man’s diversion. From the opposite angle, one satirist of the Interregnum wrote bitterly: ‘Do you not hawk? Why mayn’t we have a play?’30 As for Oliver himself in late life, a taste for hawking in a man continued to attract his friendship, even in a Royalist. According to Aubrey, Oliver the Protector ‘fell in love’ with the company of Sir James Long, having first met him hawking on Hounslow Heath. He commanded Long to ‘wear his sword, and to meet him a hawkeing’ – all of which caused the stricter Cavaliers to raise their eyebrows. And he actually stopped off to hawk in the fields near Aylesbury on his way back from the great victory of Worcester.31
This kind of deep-held English country taste, allied to Cromwell’s constant enjoyment of hunting and equally abiding love of horses, later to receive friendly foreign attention as tempting equine gifts emanated from many obscure corners of Europe, combined to make Oliver in many outward ways the pattern of the English country gentleman. The fact that fame and responsibility did not remove these tastes but only quickened the pleasure of the relaxation is in itself very typical of the style of many English political leaders who have clung sincerely to their early love of ‘country matters’ and in doing so certainly increased, rather than decreased, their links with the people whom they govern. But although Marvell and later eulogists seized on this pleasing bucolic streak in Oliver – ‘his delight in horse fierce, wild deer …’ – and praised it, and the essential Englishness of Cromwell has been commented on by many writers, it would be a mistake to suppose that in his early thirties, Oliver Cromwell still believed that his ‘own fields’ literally consisted of the flat green fertile meadows of Cambridgeshire on which he could hawk and hunt so agreeably. There was considerable later emphasis on the rural secrecy of his early development: Carrington’s comparison to David lying ‘dormant tending his flocks until his country needed him’ is a typical example.32 Nevertheless this polarization between early and late owes too much to the demands of literary effect to be totally acceptable.
By the age of thirty-two Cromwell had taken three great steps forward. Firstly he had married happily by good fortune or good judgement, and set himself on that path of domestic tranquillity which was to prove the least winding of all his routes. It was a momentous decision which should not be overlooked simply because the results were on the whole negative, and because it is inevitably easier to consider a marriage from outside in the breach rather than in the observance. Secondly, Cromwell had been through a profound spiritual crisis, had suffered enormously in the course of it but, like Bunyan’s Pilgrim, had derived strength from his adversities. Thirdly, Cromwell had tasted national politics at Westminster, and had taken part in the culmination of the most important constitutional struggle in England for a century – the presentation of the Petition of Right, showing in his first speech how far his own sympathies lay from the established authority of the time, whether King or Church. This political passion once roused had not been stifled by the suspension of Parliament, but had manifested itself in a persistent championship of local rights. In the fermenting state of England in the 1630s, as one historian has described it, with too many subjects ‘united … in the same resentments and the same fears’,33 there was much indeed for Huntingdon’s Village David to ponder as he tended his flocks, both political and pastoral.