CHAPTER THREE
Yet as he grew to place and authority, his parts seemed
to be renewed, as if he had concealed faculties till he
had the occasion to use them.
Clarendon on Cromwell in his History of the Great Rebellion
The next stage in the life of Oliver Cromwell had the appearance at least of a decline in his worldly fortunes. The dispute at Huntingdon and Cromwell’s immoderate language in the course of it could not fail to affect his political future there, even if the quarrel had subsequently been patched up. For example Cromwell’s chances of being elected as a burgess there in the future must have been considerably diminished by his outspoken attack on the very Corporation responsible for the administration of such an election. Perhaps social relationships in Huntingdon were likewise impaired. In 1631 the freehold house at Huntingdon in which he had been born was sold and Cromwell became merely the tenant of a farm at St Ives, another similar small Huntingdonshire town about five miles away.
St Ives is pleasantly situated on the Ouse, with a narrow bridge spanning the meandering river; around it lie meadows, green and lush in summer, grey, watery and swept by the wind in winter. Cromwell’s lands were grouped to the south-east of the town where tradition still associates Cromwell’s Barn with his residence there. Although much like Huntingdon, St Ives was still more of a backwater, being not even the chief town of the tiny county. But here Cromwell was to live for the next five years, farming his cattle, bringing up his family, and also showing himself a solid local man by his activities in the election of a keeper for the ‘green’, the ‘street’ or the ‘highways’ of St Ives. And if these were of a somewhat tamer nature than those formerly within his scope as a freeholder, burgess and justice of the peace at Huntingdon, at least the records show that Cromwell participated in them with his usual energy.*1
This social decline was not paralleled by a diminution in Cromwell’s spiritual progress. On the contrary, during these outwardly quiet years at St Ives, Cromwell’s inner religious interests much deepened following the earlier traumatic experience of his conversion: in which connexion it must be noted that his old friend from Cambridge, Henry Downhall, godfather to his son Richard, became vicar of St Ives about the time that Cromwell moved there, so that he certainly did not lack companions to discuss spiritual matters. The 1630s were a crucial time to those of Puritan persuasion. In 1633, at the age of sixty, William Laud was made Archbishop of Canterbury by the King who, on hearing of the death of his predecessor, broke the first news of his appointment to Laud with the following gracious words: ‘My lord of Canterbury, you are very welcome.’ It was not a sentiment echoed by the Puritans, who feared that Laud’s appointment concealed a deep-laid plan to reintroduce Roman Catholicism into England, of which the fact that Queen Henrietta Maria was a practising Catholic, with her own priests, Masses and chapel, was regarded as an ominous harbinger. The words ‘popish’ and ‘papistical’, so often applied by Puritans in this period to what they regarded as extravagant innovations in the ritual of the Church of England, were an expression of this fear. The practice of Roman Catholicism itself was against the law, severe penalties remained on the statute books for those who did not actually subscribe to the practices of the Church of England, while a Catholic priest discovered in England was liable to be put to death for treason. Nevertheless in certain ‘Arminian’ tendencies within the national Church, the Puritans discerned the fearful possibility of ‘popish’ corruption. The word was taken originally from a Dutch theologian, known as Arminius, who had much attacked such Calvinist concepts as predestination, but it had come to be associated with certain elaborations and ornamentations of churches and their services. The battle therefore tended to be joined on certain specific usages within the Church or related to religious worship, which taken one by one and in a very different climate of opinion might seem to be of only minor importance.
Sabbath-day sports were one issue on which the Puritans immediately clashed with Laud: on this delicate subject of the ‘defilement’ of the Lord’s Day, as they put it, where the Puritans certainly did not command the sympathies of the ordinary people of England, there had been instances of the Puritans calling Sunday roisterers to account. The Book of Sports of James I, which defined the control of the State over such pastimes, was reissued in 1633. Laud forbade these punishments to take place in the future: and here the public spectacle of Queen Henrietta Maria enjoying herself at Court on Sunday only rubbed the unpleasant message home. With her innocent Gallic desire to dance and play generally, she even watched the very theatricals the Puritans so much disliked. The position and ornamentation of the Communion Table was another vexed issue – candles and rich tapestries were already held to be signs of incipient ‘Popery’ by the Puritans. Bowing at the name of Jesus, the use of the sign of the cross, especially at the baptismal service, were others. John Owen, subsequently chaplain to Cromwell, once said in a sermon to Parliament that all such ‘paintings, crossings, crucifixes, bowings, cringings, altars, tapers, wafers, organs, anthems, litany rails, images, copes, vestments’ were to be regarded as mere ‘Roman varnish’ on the English religion.2
The attitude of Laud himself and those clergy who followed him, the number of Arminians naturally increasing after his appointment to Archbishop, was not calculated to defuse this potentially inflammatory situation. Nor did Puritan intolerance meet with Anglican tolerance. Laud, seeing in these practices merely rituals belonging since ancient times to the Church of England, met the protests with an equally fierce determination to root out the protesters’ own habits of worship. Uniformity was to be the watchword, and it should be made clear once and for all that the Church of England, not the individual (Puritan) conscience, was the body authorized to lay down in what such uniformity should consist. Had King Charles appointed an archbishop of a less legalistic nature, showing something of the spirit of ‘pray and let pray’, some kind of working compromise such as occurs in the Church of England today, based on local variations according to the feeling of the people and their minister, might have persisted. As it was, the spirit of Laud and that of the Puritans were irrevocably opposed to each other.
One detail of religious custom which acquired great significance in such an atmosphere of agitation was the weekly sermon in the local church, which everyone in England was compelled to attend by law. The Puritans felt and continued to feel extremely strongly on the subject of preaching. The enthusiasm which was one marked characteristic of their cause found its natural expression in the sermon, both as it animated their leaders and reached out to the common people. The style varied. There was the East Anglian Dr Bedell, for example, whose ‘voice was low, his action little; but the gravity of his aspect very great and the reverence of his behaviour such as was more affecting to the hearers than the greater eloquence and more pompous pronunciation of others’. The preacher John Rogers on the other hand had a habit of taking hold of the canopy of his pulpit and ‘roaring hideously to represent the torments of the damned’, a performance which one can well believe, in the words of a Dedham clothier who witnessed it, had ‘an awakening force’. Cromwell himself certainly had a strong streak of the predicant in him expressed in lay sermons, for as his kinsman Bishop Williams of Lincoln told Charles I later, Oliver had acted as a ‘common spokesman for the sectaries, and had maintained their part with great stubbornness’. Heath alleged that as the decade wore on Cromwell ‘more frequently and publickly owned himself a Teacher, and did preach in other mens as well as his own house, according as the brotherhood agreed and appointed’.3
Clearly such men would hardly be inclined to the passive acceptance of sermons whose doctrines were inimical to them. But the congregations were not completely powerless in their choice of preacher, particularly since ministerial stipends were often so meagre. This provided the opportunity for members of the congregation to club together either to increase the stipend of a minister of whose theology they approved, or employ ‘a lecturer’ from outside. The financial arrangements for such lectureships varied considerably: it became a recognized good work for groups of London merchants to subscribe to the payment of a lecturer in some outlying district, and in other areas, the lecturer was chosen – and paid – by the Corporation, although the assent of the bishop was still needed. The significance of these lectureships as a method of spreading unorthodox teachings was of course appreciated quite as much by Laud and the King as by those groups who hopefully employed them. Even if not all lectureships were necessarily subversive, the question of the future of a particular lectureship was often bitterly fought out between King and local authorities. The Corporation of Huntingdon had selected Dr Beard as their lecturer; in 1633 when he died, his lectureship was declared suppressed, and when the Mercers’ Company of London indignantly set up a new lecturer in the town, reserving to themselves the right to get rid of him if they so desired, without reference to the bishop, this preacher too was dismissed after Laud had appealed to the King.
It was obvious where Cromwell’s sympathies would lie in such a debate, but in fact his correspondence shows that he went further than mere sympathy, and addressed a personal exhortation to those in a position to support these lectureships. In a letter of January 1635 to his ‘very loving friend’ Mr Storie, perhaps to get this same Huntingdon lecturer reinstated, he demonstrated the importance he already attached to the nourishment of the soul. He urged Storie to remember that the ‘Building of hospitals provides for men’s bodies; to build material temples is judged a work of piety; but they that procure spiritual food, they that build up spiritual temples, they are the men truly charitable, truly pious. Such a work as this was your erecting the lecture in our country [i.e. county].’ Cromwell went on encouragingly: ‘It only remains now that He who first moved you to this, put you forward to the continuance thereof: it was the Lord and therefore to Him lift we up our hearts that He would perfect it.’ He also drew attention to the vital importance of such endowments at precisely the present time when they were being attacked from on high: ‘And surely, Mr Storie, it were a piteous thing to see a lecture fall … in these times, wherein we see they are suppressed, with too much haste and violence by the enemies of God his truth.’ The conclusion was practical: ‘You know, Mr Storie, to withdraw the pay is to let fall the lecture: for who goeth to warfare at his own cost? I beseech you therefore in the bowels of Christ Jesus put it forward, and let the good man have his pay. The souls of God his children will bless you for it; and so shall I.’4
Despite the fervour of such proselytizers as Cromwell and the finances of Mr Storie and his ilk (it is to be hoped he listened to this earnest appeal and gave ‘the good man’ his pay), the unhappiness of the Puritan situation was not alleviated as the decade wore on. Cromwell touched on one aspect of it with his reference to the suppressions carried out all too often by the enemies of God his truth – the bishops. The mood of the whole country was quiescent but bitter: in 1630 and 1631 harvests were bad, poverty rife. The political opposition, so vociferous while Parliament was in session, was now during its long official silence not so much in abeyance as temporarily unheard. It is not surprising that the eyes of the Elect were turned increasingly towards a New World across the seas where conscience might flourish, prosperity would follow, and the frustrations of royal or episcopal control could be forgotten in the establishment of a godly kingdom. Cromwell himself seems to have seriously considered emigrating with his family to North America in the early 1630s.
Emigration to the New World was connected during this period more closely with the political opposition to King Charles I than was indicated by the mere fact that both were symptoms of sad dissatisfaction with the state of England. The organization of the companies formed to colonize certain areas on the other side of the Atlantic served as one method by which the political opponents of the King were able to keep loosely affiliated during the prolonged absence of Parliament. The men responsible for the foundation of the New Providence Company, in particular, including the Earl of Warwick, Lord Saye and Sele, Sir Nathaniel Rich and the Earl of Holland, were prominent Puritans who had also earlier formed part of the opposition party to the Court. Later their numbers were swelled by men such as John Pym, Oliver St John and Sir Thomas Barrington. It was his deprivation of office in 1629 which had in fact incited John Winthrop to secure the charter for the Massachusetts Bay Company, and there on the east coast of America, build up his own godly kingdom; and although the destinies of the two companies – New Providence and Massachusetts Bay – were very different, one to turn into a privateering company interested in purloining the wealth of the Spaniards, the other into the basis of a theocratic state, their origins were similar.5
In the case of Oliver Cromwell’s projected emigration, it will not have escaped notice that some of the names associated with the New Providence Company were connected to him by blood. According to a story repeated by one of Cromwell’s early Royalist biographers, and adapted by eighteenth-century historians on both sides of the Atlantic, it was in 1638 that Cromwell embarked on a ship lying in the Thames all ready to sail, together with two other future Parliamentary leaders, Arthur Haselrig and John Hempden. At the last minute the Council refused to grant permission for departure. Although in the end the order was rescinded, somehow during the delay the ‘Three Famous Persons, whom I suppose their adversaries would not have so studiously detained at Home, if they had foreseen events’ as Cotton Mather wrote in 1702, had filed down the gangplank again.6 Thus, according to the point of view of the writer, America was either spared much trouble or some unrealized greatness: the dramatic possibilities of Oliver Cromwell’s career in the New World rather than the Old certainly make an interesting subject of speculation.
But in spite of the persistence of the story, a projected departure in 1638 is too late to fit with what else we know of Cromwell’s mood and movements at this period. The true story of the emigration belongs earlier and has a more profound genesis. There is no reason to doubt it because the Royalists tried inaccurately to link it to a quite separate later incident, suggesting that Cromwell wanted to flee because he had wasted his patrimony (a disparagement effectively contradicted by the fact that Sir Thomas Steward, Oliver’s maternal uncle, died in 1636, leaving him his main heir).7 We know that the idea of the Puritan New World attracted Cromwell throughout his life: his correspondence shows a continued warm interest in those adventurers who had sailed forth on the great quest for conscience’ sake. His speeches as Lord Protector, and many aspects of his foreign policy, exhibit a positively romantic conception of the colonial ideal – to find or found the godly life. The idea of making the leap himself lingered in his mind after the 1630s: according to Clarendon, in 1641, when the Grand Remonstrance was presented to the King, Cromwell whispered in the ear of Falkland that if it had not gone forward, he had made up his mind to emigrate. Emigration, although in certain senses a gesture of despair with England, was not considered an exceptional nor a particularly reckless gesture in the circles in which Cromwell moved, where the return of John Winthrop the younger from Massachusetts about this time must have enabled many Puritans to hear first-hand accounts of life in the colony. Lord Warwick and Lord Brooke both considered the step at the blackest period for the Puritans; a man such as Sir Mathew Boynton, later instead an MP in the Long Parliament, wrote to Winthrop in Massachusetts about arrangements for a house ‘against my coming over’.8
But Cromwell himself by 1638 was a man of property, and a man whose life had taken another turn, with other engagements, other responsibilities. He may even have regarded the death of Sir Thomas and the legacy as a special providence, the sign from God he had been seeking as to whether he should emigrate or not. Such a view would be very much in keeping with his reverence for similar dispensations in the 1640s and later. Sir Thomas’s will was drawn up shortly after his wife’s death in January 1636, thus giving the lie to another Royalist scandal that Cromwell had tried to take his uncle’s property in advance by proving him insane. By it Oliver inherited an estate which Heath thought must have been worth four or five hundred a year, as well as considerable local status at Ely. It was an indication that Cromwell at least was intending to stay in England, for the time being. So Cromwell’s dalliance with the notion of emigration, far from having any connexion with dissipation or ruin, was in fact a highly serious attempt to find some solution to the spiritual and moral crisis facing so many Puritans. There was certainly no shame in the project, as later writers tried to make out; it merely placed Cromwell among the concourse of honourable but unhappy men who at the same period were trying to decide exactly where their proper future lay, in terms of the work of God to be done in the world.
The Cromwell family now moved to Ely, to the house in which Oliver’s mother, Sir Thomas’s sister, had been born. Sir Thomas had been childless and the will, a generous one, made Oliver his main legatee with the exception of an income for Oliver’s mother and a few trifling legacies such as £5 to Oliver’s eldest son. The estate consisted of varied properties around Ely and in the town itself, mainly held on lease from the deans and chapter of Ely. It included ninety acres of glebe land in the common fields of Ely, eight acres of pasture on the Isle of Ely, and Bartin in Ely with its houses, barns and lands. There was also the tithe and glebe land of the Rectory of Holy Trinity (the Cathedral), the church of St Mary in Ely, the chapel of Chettisham, the Sextry Barn – the second greatest barn in England according to the inhabitants of Ely – excepting all tithes of the chapelry of Stuntney, the churchyards of the cathedral and St Mary’s, and all profits from marriages, churchings and burials in both places.* The rents payable quarterly to the deans and chapter as rectors were £48 plus £20 with five quarters of the ‘best wheat well sufficiently dressed, half at Christmas and half at Lady Day’, although the exact amount of the ‘relief’ which Cromwell would have also paid for actually taking over the lease is not known.10
The new home of Oliver Cromwell and his family was in the town of Ely itself, which lay on a slight eminence on the west bank of the river Ouse and was, according to Bede, named for the eels in the river. Around stretched that flat area of Cambridgeshire known as the Isle of Ely; in more primitive but equally political days, it had been associated with the last struggles of the Saxon hero Hereward the Wake against the Norman invaders. The Cromwells’ house lay on the edge of a pleasing green, dominated by the sight of great Ely Cathedral. Although Carlyle later chose to describe it as ‘two gunshots away from the cathedral’, such a measurement was in fact singularly unsuitable to the essentially tranquil nature of the cathedral town.* The only flaw might be that the cathedral itself would seem altogether too dominating to Cromwell in his modest black and white half-timbered house. For all that its tower with its exquisite central octagon and Gothic dome had fallen down generations back and had not been replaced, it represented the architecture of four centuries. Certainly no one living so close could be indifferent to the significance of such a lofty symbol of the established Church, and Cromwell’s subsequent interruption (after due warning) of an Anglican service there may have originated in long-held resentment as well as spontaneous disgust.
If the cathedral could induce a feeling of claustrophobia, the surrounding country – the vast level isolated land of the Fens – could only expand the mind to reflection and self-reliance. Ely lay on the watery frontiers of the Fens, an area extending for thirteen hundred square miles in eastern England inwards from the sea, north to the Wash and King’s Lynn, east to Cambridge and Peterborough, with other detached Fen districts towards Lincoln. This land, lying only a little above sea-level, flooded regularly in winter; when the waters receded in summer, rich if ephemeral pastures appeared on which the inhabitants grazed their cattle and made their hay on land held in common, by long-established right, from the lord of the Manor. Here, from olden times, there were no hedges to mark the map, nor were there any really great houses such as Hinchingbrooke to overlay the spirit of the Fendwellers. As Isaac Casaubon wrote poetically in 1611 the ‘solitary bittern and the imitative dotterel’ (a small heron and a plover respectively) gave their booming call and their sharp plaintive cries undisturbed.12
Grappling with the hard, but not impossible, geographical conditions outlined above, facing winds in addition which in winter came virtually unchecked from Russia, the people of the Fens concentrated their remaining energies on leading a life which was in many ways more similar to that of their ancient British ancestors, fishing and fowling for survival, than the life pattern now led in the rising English cities. The rest of England was not disposed to look kindly upon these rough diamonds and their problems, regarding them scornfully as Camden wrote in Britannia as ‘a kind of people according to the nature of the place where they dwell, rude uncivill, and envious to all others whom they called “Upland-men”’. Yet as it happened, by the 1630s the people of the Fens were facing a crisis, involving a huge alteration in their way of life, for which this inarticulate community had much need of general sympathy, the indulgence of the central authority, or at worst an articulate spokesman of their own.
It was a question of the drainage of the Fens by means of ambitious engineering works and dykes, to provide from the former marshes some land actually dry enough for tillage (nothing had hitherto been arable in the Fens) and to secure the rest sufficiently from flooding to make usable all the year round as pasture. The trouble was that such a movement towards the more intensive use of land, part of the general attack on fens and marshes throughout western Europe, clearly presupposed a large unit of enterprise to make it workable at all.13 The land could neither be drained piecemeal, nor could an individual support the expense of draining the essential larger unit. The solution was a series of companies, whose participants were known as ‘Adventurers’ and which were granted charters from the Crown (at royal profit) for various Fen districts known as Levels. Cromwell’s area for example was known as the Great Level, and the particular company formed to drain and develop it was under the leadership of the Earl of Bedford. In return for their investment, the Adventurers received a portion of the newly drained land for the company at the completion of the work, the amount varying, but averaging about one-third of the total.
However the lands with which the companies were concerned were themselves held variously, perhaps by a community as common grazing ground, perhaps by a lord of the Manor, and granted to his tenants under the ancient Statute of Merton, for their common pasture. Therefore special measures were needed to weld together profitably what had once been so greatly segmented. The ancient Court of Sewers was invoked, which had the right to fine any community which it thought ‘hurtfully surrounded’ (by uncleared marsh) and so compel a particular community to sell by first taxing it and then declaring the tax in arrears and the land forfeit if the community could not pay. Not every jury was amenable to the principle involved. When one jury of a Court of Sewers in Lincolnshire tried to find that a particular area had not in fact been ‘hurtfully surrounded’, the King, who felt both financially and personally involved in the draining, wrote angrily to the local commissioners of the Court, telling them to proceed with the sale none the less, and threatening to use his royal prerogative in case of further opposition.
Once the drainage was complete, the position of the lord of the Manor was not necessarily so unfavourable. He after all enjoyed the fruits of the undoubted improvement of his land. The benefit to the poor commoners was a good deal more difficult for them to discern. Their land for common grazing was reduced by a third and sometimes more, their opportunity to fish and fowl, so important to their winter food supply, ended.
Behold the great design, which they do now determine
Will make our bodies pine, a prey to crows and vermin
cried Powte in his Complaint. Not for the commoners after all the new delights of arable land, the flax, and hemp which it was confidently predicted would be grown on the reclaimed acres available to the lord of the Manor. Under the circumstances it was understandable if ‘the meaner sort of people’ chose to ignore the abstract ideal of agricultural progress in favour of their own grievances. Some protested indignantly that drainage was contrary to the Christian religion because it interfered with the works of nature: ‘Fens were made fens and must ever continue such.’ By the 1630s there was considerable local opposition to the drainage projects, or as a traveller reported in 1634, ‘we perceived that the Town and Country thereabouts much murmured’ – the towns such as Cambridge fearing for the loss of their inland navigation routes as the people feared for their pastures.14
The critical moment arose not so much during the actual process of draining, when there might be a boom in local employment, but when the drainers, like the dwarf Rumpelstiltskin in the fairy story, returned to claim their promised prize – in this case cutting off the allotted portion of land for their own profit by ditches. There were ugly scenes of riot and physical protest against what could not be mentally accepted. It is impossible not to sympathize with the deprived and helpless commoners in their desperate reactions to the inevitable. Their resentment is particularly understandable since although as one authority has wisely observed ‘a degree of coercion is inseparable from projects of this kind’,15 nevertheless much less coercion would have been needed in this instance if the commoners had been given more generous terms to compensate for their changed situation. This at any rate was the line taken by Cromwell – who in 1637 allowed himself to be identified as the spokesman of these people, coming from a very different class from himself.
It was the more evident that Cromwell’s sympathetic action was initiated by his social conscience rather than by any true objection to the drainage as such, because the Cromwell family had of old been staunch upholders both of the process and of the means by which it was carried out. Both his father and his uncle had acted as Commissioners for Sewers, although it was true that his maternal uncle Sir Thomas Steward had opposed the Adventurers, and had in fact obtained the reduction of their proportion from one-half to one-quarter. Perhaps Oliver’s protests on behalf of the commoners also fitted into the wider pattern of resistance to the encroachment of the royal prerogative. As Sir William Dugdale put it, from the hostile viewpoint, Cromwell was ‘especially made choice of by those who ever endeavoured the undermining of Regal Authority to be their Orator …’ At all events in the summer of 1637, the State Papers record one rough incident that occurred when one of the overseers of the division dikes in the Great Level attempted to drive the people’s cattle off Holme Fen, Huntingdon, with a view to enclosing it. A local Justice of the Peace, Mr Castle, obstructed the overseer with his men, while a crowd of men and women armed with scythes and pitchforks uttered fierce threats against anyone who tried to drive their cattle off the fens. At the same time it was generally reported among the commoners in Ely Fens, and the Fens adjoining, that ‘Mr Cromwell of Ely had undertaken, they paying him a groat for every cow they had upon the common, to hold the drainers in suit of law for five years, and that in the meantime they should enjoy every foot of their common.’16
The following year there were further riots in many parts of the Great Level, and one JP, Sir Miles Sandys, who was also a prominent Adventurer, actually feared for a general rebellion of all the Fen towns. As a result there was a change of central policy and the Commoners were allowed to keep their lands for the time being where they could prove these lands had not been generally bettered by the drainers. Before the situation could be further sorted out, a much wider rebellion of the whole English people had swallowed up this possible limited revolt of the Fen towns, and absorbed the energies of the Fen people: the whole question of the future of the Levels lay in abeyance during the Civil War.
But the significance of Cromwell’s irruption into the realm of popular leadership was not so easily forgotten. At the time the poor commoners of the Fens did not present a particularly elevated cause to the rest of England: later indeed Cromwell’s enemies were to refer to him as the ‘Lord of the Fens’, a title which may have romantic connotations to us, but at the time was intended to be applied with ridicule.* Yet it is possible to see in the whole episode not only the stirrings of Cromwell’s social conscience, but also the foundations for the powerful influence he was to exert later upon these same people in creating an army in time of war. It was noticeable that both Huntingdon, where Cromwell had attempted to block the establishment of a rotten borough, and the Fens, where he tried to put the case of the deprived commoners, fell within the territorial sweep of the Eastern Association, Cromwell’s future area of military recruitment.17
Meanwhile, in London, issues of a more obviously striking nature were obsessing the attention of Oliver’s contemporaries and relations. In the summer of 1637 the trial and sentence of three Puritan writers – the lawyer William Prynne, Dr John Bastwick and a clergyman named Henry Burton – for the production of a pamphlet News from Ipswich, was a focus for popular alarm and fury. Prynne, a powerful maniacal character described as having ‘the countenance of a witch’, had been driven to national politics by fear of Popery and Jesuitical plots. Three years earlier he had been condemned to be fined, pilloried and have his ears ‘cropped’ or cut off for a violent printed attack on the Queen and her court theatricals, Histriomastix. Now all three defendants were sentenced to have their ears cropped (the Puritans decided that the Lord must have caused Prynne’s ears to grow again, but a more likely explanation would be that they had only been half cut off the first time). Prynne suffered an additional refinement of cruelty with the letters ‘S L’ branded on his cheek for Seditious Libeller: he himself with sardonic wit observed that they stood for Stigma of Laud.
The incident left a profound effect on the multitude of spectators. It appeared that adversity was merely a stimulant to the Puritans in the stalwart expression of their opinions. It was easy for the watchers to believe the words spoken out bravely by Prynne for all his ordeal: ‘The more I am beat down, the more am I lift up.’ A woman from the crowd answered: ‘There are many hundreds which by God’s assistance would willingly suffer for the cause you suffered this day.’18
On a material level, one particular financial expedient of the Crown – the levy of a tax known as ship-money – was causing furious resentment since its continued employment showed that it was likely to be regarded as a permanent source of revenue. In theory ship-money was not innovatory: it provided for the naval defence of the coastal towns, and as such had been levied intermittently without protest. It was the extension of the tax to all England and the regularity of its use which now aroused suspicion. When Cromwell’s cousin John Hampden refused on principle to pay his 20s. assessment for Buckinghamshire, a test case was brought against him in November 1637 in which another Cromwellian cousin, Oliver St John, pleaded for Hampden. In the end the judges found for the King, and Hampden went to prison. It was however the extension of the claims made for the royal prerogative by Sir Robert Berkeley, one of the judges who argued the case for the Crown, which was responsible for the particular dread which the verdict aroused. ‘Rex is Lex,’ argued Sir Robert, the King is the Law, ‘for he is lex loquens, a living, a speaking, an acting law.’19 What might be the role of Parliament in the government of this living and speaking law? For the present, the royal case stood on the King’s right to tax his subjects in time of national danger, and himself decide when that state had occurred; but the precedent for the future was dangerous, and obviously dangerous.
By 1638 the King, ultimately responsible for such mutilations and imprisonments of his subjects in London, had other troubles among his more northern satellites. The Scots, that people over whom his ancestors had ruled exclusively until his father’s fateful journey south to the English throne in 1603, were now in a state of religious revolt. For all his Stuart blood, Charles I had never either understood or liked Scotland, a country he first visited at the age of thirty-three. The feeling appears to have been mutual. A policy of heavy taxation towards the Scots – nearly £150,000 between 1635 and 1636, although before 1625 the sum had only once exceeded £50,000 – cast an unfortunate gloss on his expensive coronation there.20 Nor was the Scottish position of repugnance to such rich ceremonies animated solely by a spirit of economy; it was on the contrary part of a very deeply and long-held attitude of austerity towards all outward ornamentations of divine worship.
The gold copes of the five bishops at Charles’s coronation and the rich tapestry behind the communion table with its ‘curiously wrought crucifix’ all represented the innovations most feared by the Scots, much as Prynne had feared the Queen’s theatricals, and English Puritans kept a watch for immoderate crossings and bowings at the name of Jesus. In this context it seemed exacerbating that much of the money raised by taxes should be spent on lavish church buildings, while the Arminian reaction among some Scottish clergy to the advent of Laud only served to stiffen the necks of the determined Calvinists. Their language did not lack colour. Their Church, wrote George Gillespie in 1637, now contained ‘the rotten dregs of Popery, which were never purged away from England and Ireland, and having once been spewed out with detestation, are licked up again in Scotland … Her comely countenance is miscoloured with the farding lustre of the mother of Harlots. Her shamefast forehead hath received the mark of the beast. Her lovely-locks are frizzled with the crispins of Anti-Christ fashions. Her chaste Ears are made to listen to the friends of the great Whore …’21
The publication of a new liturgy for Scotland in 1637, with a prefix asserting that its use was demanded by the royal prerogative alone, provoked a solemn rebuttal – the National Covenant drawn up by Alexander Henderson and Archibald Johnston and revised by three Scottish nobles, Rothes, Loudoun and Balmerino, in February 1638. Although there was much Messianic feeling in Scotland at the time, the Covenant itself was not an emotional document, even if it was a call to national action. Framed by lawyers, it appealed essentially to the rule of law, reminded the King of his coronation oath and asserted the supremacy of Parliament in appealing to the statutes. Into these dry bones the people of Scotland breathed their own vigour in their desire for a national crusade, while the Scottish aristocracy, with their own causes to quarrel with southern domination, provided readily enough the natural leaders.22 When the National Assembly of the Church of Scotland rebutted the new Prayer Book and endorsed the Covenant, despite the King’s protests, Charles was obliged to try to enforce it upon the Scots by military action, in the so-called First Bishops’ War.
It was not a popular cause with the English Puritans for obvious reasons, nor indeed with the bulk of the English people. Bulstrode Whitelocke, another cousin of Hampden’s, a lawyer and an established MP, who was to play an important part in the coming struggle, put in his diary: ‘The discourses of the Scottish war were very various: those who favoured the popish and prelatical ways did sufficiently inveigh against the covenanters, but generally the rest of the people favoured and approved their proceedings …’ If Heath is to be believed once more, Cromwell was certainly no better ‘affected’ or disposed to the Scottish war than he had been to ship-money. According to Heath’s story, Cromwell made clear his disapproval of the King’s action to some of the commanders of the English army who were quartered in his house on their way north to engage the Scots. While he drew suspicion on himself from the army for these ‘discourses’ Cromwell became all the more popular in his own neighbourhood for his outspokenness, since it was ‘generally infected with Puritanism’.23 Although this first war was concluded by the Treaty of Berwick in 1639, there was still no compromise to be had, since neither Scots nor King could subsequently agree on the intention of the treaty. The Scots’ Assembly then went ahead and abolished episcopacy.
As the year 1640 approached, the feeling in England was one of gloom. War had already touched the North with its depredatory fingers and would surely soon touch it again. Sir Henry Slingsby, a Yorkshire gentleman later to fight for the King, probably spoke for many when he described the sight of the light horse being trained on Bramham Moor in January 1639 during the first Scottish war as ‘our publick death’. ‘These are strange, strange spectacles,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘to see this nation that have lived thus long peacably, without noise of shot and drum and after we have stood neutrals and in peace when all the world besides hath been in arms and wasted with it, it is I say a thing most horrible that we should engage ourself in a war with one another, and with our own venom grow and consume ourself.’ At such a time there was no need to go to the theatre, and try to understand by fabulous representation the tragic revolutions of human fortune: ‘ourselves shall be the actors’.24
Early in 1640 the King was compelled partly by the wastage of money in the Scottish war, and partly by the need to bring Parliament to his aid in future clashes with the Scots, to summon Parliament once more. That assembly was later known as the Short Parliament. Much had changed in the eleven years of Parliamentary hush: for one thing the dark-avised Thomas Wentworth Earl of Strafford, the ablest of the King’s aides, would shortly return to his side, fresh from Ireland and bringing with him, it was feared by many, the threat of an Irish army which would crush the King’s opponents, both Scots and English. Into this Parliament came Oliver Cromwell once more. He was not however elected for his old seat of Huntingdon, but as one of the two burgesses for Cambridge, the other being Thomas Meautys, Clerk of the Privy Council, a Government nominee whom Lord Keeper Finch had apparently urged forward. A few months before his election Cromwell had duly become a ‘freeman of the town’ of Cambridge by payment of one penny to the poor. Together with some sort of token lodgings in the town, traditionally assigned to a site now the yard of the White Bull Inn in Bridge Street, this was an essential qualification for election.
The adoption of Cromwell by Cambridge points once again to his local renown, that general growing to ‘place and authority’ in which ‘his parts seemed to be raised as if he had concealed faculties till he had the occasion to use them’, on which Clarendon commented as a feature of his early development. Quite apart from his relationship to the heroic Hampden, Cromwell had many connexions in and around the east Midlands area: for example the returning Mayor of the Cambridge election, Thomas French, was probably related to his sister Robina’s future husband, Dr Peter French.25 But it was no longer a case for one particular piece of influence securing the seat. Cromwell already had stature and some position; he was included in the counsels of the opposition party, dominated – although not of course officially led in the modern sense – by John Pym. His London lodgings were in Long Acre, near Covent Garden and the Strand, in that enclave where so many of the Parliamentary leaders, including Pym in Gray’s Inn Lane, found their dwellings. It was his expected right to enter the Short Parliament.
Before Cromwell left for London, his family had both multiplied, diversified, and suffered loss. His mother and youngest sister Robina now lived with Oliver, Elizabeth and their six children in the house at Ely. One of Oliver’s sisters, Jane, married John Desborough in June 1636, bringing within his circle another future Parliamentary colleague and military leader. Later rudely satirized by Butler in Hudibras as ‘the grim giant Desborough’ and mocked in Royalist pamphlets for his countrified origins, Desborough was in point of fact an eligible bridegroom for Jane Cromwell. He was of good Cambridgeshire stock, the younger son of the lord of the Manor of Eltisley, and having earlier trained for the law, now farmed near by. Oliver’s immediate family was increased, nearly eight years after Bettie, by the birth in February 1637 of Mary, who was taken back to St John’s Huntingdon to be baptized. In 1638 however, Frances, the last child to be born to Oliver and Elizabeth Cromwell, was christened at St Mary’s in Ely.
There were now eight surviving children in Oliver’s own family, four sons and four daughters. In the early thirties, this family, like all families at the time, had not escaped the raids of death on newborn children, and Elizabeth had probably borne two babies who had died at birth. The growing family was not destined to remain in its present form unaltered. In May 1639 young Robert Cromwell, Oliver’s eldest son then aged seventeen, who with his brothers had been sent to Felsted school, near the house of his grandfather Sir James Bourchier, died there of some unknown fever or accident. He was buried in Felsted Parish Church. The Latin entry in the parish register refers to Robert briefly as a boy of exceptional promise, fearing God above all things.26 But the memory of the fierce grief he experienced in losing this beloved child remained with Cromwell to the end of his life.
Twenty years later, stricken down once more by the death of Bettie and himself failing, he called for the Bible and read aloud a particular text from St Paul ending: ‘I have learnt in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content; I know both how to be debased, and how to abound … I can do all things through Christ that strengtheneth me.’ Then he added: ‘This Scripture did once save my life, when my eldest son died, which went as a dagger to my heart …’ And he repeated the text again: ‘I can do all things through Christ that strengtheneth me.’ The dagger to the heart, as Cromwell simply and terribly described the loss of his child, left no outward effect on the course of his life. But Cromwell, already a tender man to his own children, and sisters, retained thereafter a special affection towards those who had, like him, seen their children snatched from them: his famous letter to his brother-in-law Valentine Walton breaking the news of the death of his son after Marston Moor still stirs the emotions with its directness and its understanding. ‘Sir, you know my trials this way …’ wrote Cromwell, ‘… there is your precious child full of glory, to know sin nor sorrow any more.’27
Politics the following year provided the solace of action rather than the deeper solace of satisfaction. The Short Parliament was marked by a demand by John Pym, firm but moderate in tone, for a new consideration of the rights of Parliament. The great parliamentary lion was now a veteran of fifty-five. In a speech of exceptional length for the times (nearly two hours) Pym called in the House of Commons for a general redress of grievances both religious and political, by the King. His speech began with the inspiring words: ‘the powers of Parliament are to the body politic as the rational faculties of the soul to man’. He ended by asking for annual Parliaments, whose present long intermittent sessions were ‘contrary to the two statutes yet in force’. When he sat down, the feeling of the House was clear, when ‘all cried out: “A good oration!”’ For all the good oration, Parliament was dissolved a few weeks later, the King hardly accepting Pym’s view of the body politic.28
Charles however was unable to patch up his differences with the Scots, and by the summer was once more engaged in military action against them in the shape of the Second Bishops’ War. In such an atmosphere of financial distress and suspicion, the absence of Parliament could not be maintained. In the autumn a new Parliament was summoned, and for this Oliver Cromwell was once more elected for Cambridge. This time however he was in tandem with a more Puritan-minded fellow member, for John Lowry, a local man and a member of the common council of twenty-four, defeated Meautys, the Government nominee. As a tiny detail, it may be seen as significant of the enormous importance attached by the party of opposition to the Court to the returns in this particular election.29
On 3 November this crucial gathering, known to history as the Long Parliament, met for the first time. The date was the anniversary of that parliament of Henry VIII in which Wolsey fell and the abbeys were dissolved, and some members tried to persuade Archbishop Laud that the date should be altered in view of the ominous coincidence. Laud, putting his trust in princes perhaps as Wolsey had once done, refused. The actual composition of the Parliament which now faced the King was obviously to be of vital importance. Recent research has produced some interesting statistics by which the typicality – or otherwise – of Cromwell in this gathering can be judged: he was after all the man who was to emerge at the end of this assembly – ‘that long, ungrateful, foolish and fatal Parliament’ as John Evelyn called it – an unbelievable thirteen years away, as the undisputed ruler of England.30 The first thing to note is that Cromwell certainly cannot be counted among the Young Turks of the assembly. Cromwell was now a man of forty-one, which put him at least in the senior half of the members, half of whom were under forty. It was true that time would show that the average age of the Royalist MPs was considerably lower than that of their opponents – thirty-five to forty-one respectively – but the point remains that by 1640 Cromwell already fell into the category of an established politician. He was among those two-hundred-odd members for example who had already sat in a previous Parliament, and the fact that these experienced men were to prove quite predominantly Parliamentarian – one hundred and twenty-eight to seventy-five Royalists – was certainly a valuable strength to their leaders.31
The main interest represented on both sides was landed, with lawyers and merchants following as the next most popular categories. Another aspect of English society demonstrated by the Long Parliament was its connected ramifications; an immense number of the members were related to each other, and no faction more so than that of Pym, to which, it has been stressed, Cromwell already belonged. With his educational record at the university and the law courts – about one hundred and fifty members like Cromwell had attended both – his membership of a political clique based on family alliance and geographical grouping, Cromwell was then in many ways at the outset a very typical member of this climactic Parliament, not a tyro, but not a leader.
His first public outburst there was however more pregnant of future significance. Cromwell had chosen to take up the cause of a certain John Lilburne, ironically enough to be one of his most inveterate opponents in years to come, but now appearing to him in the guise of a martyr. Lilburne, a former cloth merchant’s apprentice, had been sentenced to be fined, whipped, pilloried and then imprisoned for distributing some unlicensed pamphlets, including one of William Prynne’s. In prison Lilburne showed something of his future mettle and justified one description of him as ‘a turbulent-spirited man that was never quiet in anything’ by writing an account of his sufferings entitled The Work of the Beast which was then smuggled out. The atmosphere of the times may be judged by the fact that Bastwick, Burton and Prynne had returned recently to London ‘like three Conquering Caesars on horseback’ as a contemporary pamphlet put it. Cromwell’s indignation burned at the idea that this young man Lilburne should have suffered such savage penalties and still lie in prison to expiate his guilt, all for the mere distribution of unlicensed writing. He became a member of the committee of the House of Commons, including Pym, Hampden and St John, which considered the affair.32
By dramatic chance Sir Philip Warwick, a Royalist who was both a politician and a historian, was an eye-witness of Cromwell’s speech to the committee and left an account of it in his memoirs for posterity. Going down to the House of Commons one day, he found a gentleman speaking who was a stranger to him. To Sir Philip, who was himself, as he was careful to note, ‘well clad’, the unknown’s appearance was not prepossessing. Although he was of good enough build, he was very ordinarily dressed in a plain cloth suit, which appeared to have been made by a bad country tailor. In addition his linen was plain, and not very clean; and there was even a speck or two of blood upon his neck-band, which was not much larger than his collar; the general carelessness of the outfit was completed by the fact that the hat was without a hat band. But the House of Commons, unlike Sir Philip, was apparently laudably indifferent to these sartorial details. The speaker’s eloquence, for all that his ‘countenance was swollen and reddish, his voice sharp and untunable’, was undeniably full of fervour.33
Here, adding from other sources, we have a physical picture of Cromwell as he appeared then at the age of forty-one, and was to remain unchanged in most respects till late middle age. The first version of his portrait – by Robert Walker – dates certainly from 1649 although there are probably earlier versions of 1643 and 1646 (see illustration), but that again shows little difference in essentials from the finer work of Cooper and Lely during the Protectorate. There was general agreement on the subject of Cromwell’s ruddy complexion. An unkind later commentator who may have been Samuel Butler talked of his face being ‘naturally buff’ so that he needed no armour (‘his skin may furnish him with a rusty coat of mail’) and compared him to a piece of wood or an unblanched almond. Richard Baxter, with more charity, merely described his complexion as being sanguine.34
The Walker portrait however shows a face which was certainly not handsome, but equally by no means repulsive. Here was a man of middle height – say about five feet six inches or seven inches by the standards of the time – ‘rather well set than tall’ wrote Flecknoe. He was ‘strong and robustuous of constitution, of visage leonine, the true physiognomy’ added the biographer approvingly ‘of all great and martial men’. It is a high-cheek-boned face, framed by chestnut-brown hair which would grey a little as the years passed and slip back a little from the lofty domed forehead, but was still worn longish and not cropped. The mouth is curly and well formed. The famous warts, to be delineated most carefully by Cooper, were in the left eye-socket, beneath the lower lip and, most prominently of all, above the left eye-brow. As for the nose, later the target of satirists, it is indeed a fine big nose, bony across the bridge and undeniably long. But the impression it gives is perfectly felicitous, far from the evil proboscis of the caricaturists’ imagination. In fact it gives a good balance to a face which was, as Carrington pointed out, essentially masculine.35
It is however the eyes not the nose which are the most remarkable feature of this face, those heavy-lidded eyes, the colour between green and grey, whose ‘piercing sweetness’ Marvell praised, eyes which were indeed in their own right beautiful. There is a nervous, almost apprehensive expression about the Walker portrait, quite at contrast with Flecknoe’s ‘great and martial’ physiognomy. It is the melancholy introvert look of the pilgrim soul which looks out of these eyes, for all the surrounding paraphernalia of the bold and confident warrior, the sash, the armour, the baton and the sword. Oliver Cromwell in his prime was essentially a man of stature, a man of dignity, a man whose very indifference to the details of appearance (for he never lost much of the carelessness noted by Sir Philip Warwick) bred in observers a reluctant admiration and a sneaking suspicion that such niceties were not after all so important. Already in 1640 he looked a person of consequence, someone to catch the eye of an inquisitive fellow MP. On the other hand, through some vein of simplicity, uncertainty even, near the heart of his own nature, there was also quite a different sort of attraction about him. It was this strange charm, felt by those who were his intimates during his own lifetime, compounded of a mixture of authority and humility, which is so difficult for later generations to grasp, because they are inevitably influenced by the wealth of Royalist vilification both then and after the Restoration.
At the beginning of the Long Parliament, it was not only his appearance, it was also his arguments which were beginning to attract attention. As Cromwell outlined the injustice done to Lilburne, in Warwick’s jaundiced words, ‘he aggravated the imprisonment of this man by the Council Table into the height, that one would have believed the very Government itself had been in danger by it’. Although Warwick ended by reporting that his own respect for the committee had been greatly lessened by the whole incident, it is more to the point that he admitted that Cromwell had been ‘very much harkened unto’. And such a passionate plea for justice, sufficient to elevate the cause of Lilburne to such a height that Warwick could mock at its absurdity, did not fail to leave its mark on Cromwell’s contemporaries.
About the same time, and very probably just after the delivery of this same speech, Sir Richard Bulstrode observed an incident which he too related in his memoirs. Lord Digby, one of Hampden’s supporters, had noticed Hampden making after Cromwell as he lumbered down the steps of the House of Commons. Digby, who also seems to have criticized Cromwell’s untidy appearance, evidently asked Hampden who the man was, ending: ‘For I see he is of our side, by his speaking so warmly this day.’ ‘That slovenly fellow which you see before us,’ replied Hampden, ‘who hath no ornament in his speech; I say that sloven if we should come to have a breach with the King (which God forbid) in such case will be one of the greatest men in England.’36 It was a prophecy which bore witness to the vision of John Hampden as well as to the growing authority of Oliver Cromwell.