PART TWO
Pax Quaeritur Bello – Let Peace be sought through War
Oliver Cromwell’s personal motto
CHAPTER FIVE
I had rather have a plain russet-coated captain that
knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows,
than that which you call a gentleman and is nothing
else. I honour a gentleman that is so indeed.
Oliver Cromwell in August 1643
Cromwell’s first action after the King had officially opened the war by raising the standard at Nottingham was characteristic of his whole approach to the early phases of the Civil War – vigorous, effective and brisk. On 29 August he mustered a troop of horse at Huntingdon, probably made up of volunteers from Huntingdonshire and Cambridgeshire; his name was among the eighty Captains paid £1104 each by Parliament for such a task, and his brother-in-law John Desborough was named as his Quartermaster. The cavalry at this date was raised customarily in single troops, not regiments, their numbers varying considerably, but averaging about a hundred men. Cromwell’s approach was essentially blunt, showing that he at least was not suffering the agonies of those who could not quite accept that it would ever be lawful to fight the King. It was in deference to such feelings that Parliament’s commission to raise a troop read, with undoubted possibilities of confusion, that the men should be ready to fight ‘for King and Parliament’. Parliamentary loyalties were still nailed to the old mast of ancient liberties, the status quo of Britain as it had long existed, in which it was assumed that the person of the King was somehow attacking the institution of a properly controlled monarchy. According to Clarendon, however, Cromwell assured his hearers at Huntingdon that he would neither deceive nor woo them by ‘this perplexed and cozened expression’. Therefore if the King happened to be in the midst of the ranks of the enemy as they charged, he, Cromwell, would discharge his pistol as at any other private individual. And if their consciences would not permit them to do likewise, then he advised them not to enlist in his troop or under his command.
Much later when Cromwell was Lord Protector, one who called himself ‘Theauro John’ challenged him to make good the oath he had heard him swear on that occasion: ‘You sought not ours but us and our welfare, and to stand with us for the liberty of the gospel and the laws of the land.’1However it was now the military means of standing for these worthy ends which constituted the problem, rather than the nature of these ends themselves. It was a problem which applied equally to both sides in a land singularly unprepared for war, let alone civil war. It was true that a number of English commanders, including Sir Thomas Fairfax, the Earl of Essex and George Monk, had served in the Dutch armies and in the Thirty Years War, thus deriving some experience of professional soldiery. This applied more particularly to the Scots, a number of whose officers had served abroad in the great tradition of Scottish soldiers of fortune. But it is worth emphasizing that Oliver Cromwell belonged on the contrary to the far larger proportion of those who would now take up arms in earnest for the first time.
It was true that military magazines such as The Swedish Intelligencer and The Swedish Soldier giving news of Gustavus’s exploits were in common currency in England in the thirties and it has been suggested that Cromwell may have studied them to absorb a knowledge of military principles and military tactics as a substitute for personal experience. But it is a commonplace of military training that a few weeks of firsthand experience at war are worth many months of theoretical training. As Cromwell was now a man of forty-three he must be allowed to be one of the rare military geniuses who were born not made: even the tradition which tries to ascribe to him an early quite undocumented visit to the Low Countries, where he might have been employed as a mercenary, is merely an unwilling tribute to the immense natural aptitude which he displayed.*2
In 1642 indeed there was no such thing in England as a standing army as we should understand it, and the only permanent forces were the Royal Bodyguards and companies garrisoning the forts. For the various forays of his foreign or Irish policy, the sovereign was accustomed, as has been seen, to raise an army and attempt to get Parliament to pay for it. For the defence of the kingdom in general, should the need occur, reliance was placed upon the militia, or the ‘trained bands’, to be raised by the Lords-Lieutenant and their deputies and trained by them in pike and musket drill once a month. In fact reality was very far from theory, and with the exception of London where the trained bands did prove to have some meaning as a force, both training and attendance were unsatisfactorily scanty. Every excuse being used to put off attendance, the arms kept were often old and unserviceable and it was a commonly held view that the bands when they were assembled trained for drinking rather than any more martial occupation. Indeed Cromwell’s whole concern for the private habits of his troops, whether they drank or cursed, can only be understood against the slovenly reputation of those soldiers already known to their compatriots.
Of the troops themselves, those of the foot soldiers divided into pikemen, armed with an enormous and cumbersome weapon between sixteen and eighteen foot long, and musketeers. The latter’s weapons, mainly matchlocks which fired up to a hundred paces, were equally hard to manoeuvre since they involved a complicated loading procedure, battle or no battle, and the ultimate use of a lighted cord or ‘match’ to set off the charge. There were endless possibilities of failure in the firing of a musket, not the least being the danger that the glowing match might warn the enemy of an impending attack, and it was a measure of the inadequacies of ‘firepower’ in the middle of the seventeenth century that people still sometimes called for the return of the longbow.3
In the absence of bayonets, not yet invented, or the later more manageable flintlocks and wheel-locks, the wretched musketeers were extremely vulnerable against any assault once they had fired; about their only protection apart from helmets or ‘pots’ were so-called Swedish feathers, iron posts with spiked ends which they drove into the ground to ward off a cavalry charge. Evidently they needed to be combined with the pikemen for effective use. Equally, the use of two such clumsily accoutred categories of fighter demanded much skill, and this skill was to be found in a complicated procedure of drill, allowing the musketeers to reload and the pikemen to surge forward without either body meeting with catastrophe either at the enemy’s hands or their own. But drill and training – one pre-war manual, Ward’s Animadversions of War of 1639, listed fifty-six words of command for a musketeer’s drill – were exactly what was in short supply. Once again the admirable daring of some of Cromwell’s early manoeuvres can only be understood against a background of the complicated routines generally considered necessary to execute any movement at all.4
Cromwell was of course originally a cavalry leader, but it was not as if contemporary attitudes towards the cavalry were any more relaxed. Although cavalry armour had been lightened to about twenty-five pounds, including a ‘pot’, ‘back’ and ‘breast’, much emphasis was laid on the graceful ritualistic but essentially unmilitary practices of the manège or training for ‘great horses’, as laid down by many noble exponents of the art, including the Royalist commander, William Earl of Newcastle. Indeed Charles I himself was an accomplished manège rider. The training of a troop horse was in theory a long-drawn-out business. John Cruso’s Militarie Instructions for the Cavall’rie of 1632, besides confirming the importance of the role of the Captain of horse as a valorous leader of men, was full of elaborate rules for the training of horses in advance to make them suitable for battle.5 Grooms should be prepared to dress them in armour from time to time, and even feed them their oats from a drumhead. Of course as some were already beginning to realize by the start of the war, the future lay with quite a different sort of horse, a small tough horse, of the type used by the country gentlemen for hunting, very unlike the grotesquely overbent horses of the manège. Before the Civil War, it was customary for the cavalry to be trained to fire with pistols and then withdraw in order to reload at a gracious pace without further engagement. The whole movement was planned and slow. Already Gustavus Adolphus had urged his cavalry to push with their swords after firing their pistols. Cromwell increased this trend and in his hands the cavalry charge became not a graceful dance of advance and retreat, but a lethal onslaught which plunged to the kill.
At the beginning of the war it was much to the advantage of Prince Rupert that so many of these hunting gentlemen were Royalists. It was equally to the immense advantage of Cromwell as a cavalry leader that he had what amounted to an obsession about horses, their procurement and their care once they were procured. His early energies were much devoted to this problem, especially to the obtaining by fair means or foul of suitable horses for the Parliamentary cause. On the whole he seems to have preferred fair means, at any rate where ‘non-malignants’ were concerned: we find him writing a postscript to the Suffolk Committee in 1643 apologizing for the seizure of a particular horse from one Mr Goldsmith at Wilby if he turned out not to be a malignant or Royalist. He offered either to return the captured animal, or pay the price of it – ‘Not that I would, for ten thousand horse, have the horse to my own private benefit, saving to make use of him for the Public’ he was careful to add.6 Clearly even a horse could bother Cromwell’s lively conscience: for he ended by saying that he would rest ‘very unsatisfied’ and the horse would be a burden to him, unless the matter was sorted out.
Such elaborate enquiries were the measure of the importance he attached to the subject. Suitable horses cost between £5 and £10: they would incidentally, in the virtual absence of the Arab or the Barb strain, not introduced till later, have looked both oddly small, underfed and heavy to our eyes, fifteen hands being average for a cavalry horse. As the war progressed it was obviously easier to confiscate than to pay, a situation later legalized by Parliament’s sequestration order. Cromwell however was as aware of the need to care for his horses as to pay his troops. Both before Winceby and Newbury, he protested against the employment of exhausted horses, on the second occasion telling Manchester angrily: ‘they will fall down under their riders if you thus command them; you may have their skins, but you can have no service’.7
At the outset of the war, unwieldy drills which in any case were but imperfectly understood, stately cavalry incapable of retaliation, and above all the very local nature of the troops raised, all combined to give any offensive a purely temporary nature. Where troops were so inherently anxious not to leave their native area, clearly the emphasis would be on defensive warfare after any given battle, rather than on a pushing fight to the finish. It was easy to understand the point of view of these local men; in conditions where pay and provisions were short they were both reluctant to leave behind home comforts and disinclined to supply ‘foreigners’ – in this case their neighbours, rather than the enemy – with supplies. Sir William Brereton spotlighted this chauvinism when he described how the garrison at Shrewsbury, although heavily undermanned, was nevertheless anxious to rid themselves of reinforcements sent by nearby Stafford because they were full of mutinous language and reviling expressions and they could not rely on them when danger came.8 Under the circumstances it is easy to understand how volunteers never proved adequate in the Civil War and both sides had to turn to impressment. As for provisions, ‘free quarter’, one solution by which an army had the right to food and drink from the country folk on deferred terms, was to prove a vexed topic in coming years.
In the first famous battle of the Civil War, that of Edgehill near Kineton in Warwickshire on 23 October 1642, many of the current theories of warfare were already found to be wanting. The intention of King Charles was to reach London. That of the Parliamentary forces under the Earl of Essex, son of Queen Elizabeth’s ill-fated favourite, who had been appointed their General in July, was to head the King off. However, the Royalist forces under Charles’s newly appointed General of the Horse, his nephew Rupert, began the battle by deserting their strong position on a huge escarpment a few miles from Kineton, the Edge Hill. Thus they forfeited the element of surprise and the undoubted advantage of a slope whose gradient was almost one in three. Meanwhile the Parliamentary forces lay in the plain below, with the village of Radway in between. Rupert’s first action was successful. With his horse, he ‘then charged the rebels … so furiously that we cannot own the honour of a battle but of an execution’, as a Royalist eyewitness wrote afterwards.9 Nevertheless at the end of what might well have been a successful rout of Parliament, his horse thundered on to Kineton and the Parliamentary foot were able to counter-attack successfully while the Royalists busily plundered the baggage of Hampden’s men.
On the eve of the battle the Royalist Sir Jacob Astley had uttered the prayer of a pious warrior: ‘O Lord, if I forget Thee this day, do not Thou forget me.’ Now as many lay in the icy fields after the battle, including Edmund Ludlow who had nothing but his cloak to protect himself against the autumn frosts, they must have wondered in misery and confusion whether such a prayer had been heard. William Harvey, the scientist, who read a book under a hedge until a bullet grazed the ground, literally showed sangfroid by pulling a dead body over him for warmth against the cold clear weather of that freezing night. Two hundred of Essex’s maimed and unhappy soldiers told a Royalist that they had been tricked into believing that the King was not personally present in the opposing army. Some Welsh soldiers who had taken up arms for Parliament were said to be particularly doleful, and a crude if mournful ditty was later quoted: ‘The guns did so fart, Made poor Taffy start, O Taffy, O Taffy … In Kineton Green, Poor Taffy was seen, O Taffy, O Taffy …’10 Such bewilderments were characteristic of the scene after Edgehill. But Essex now withdrew to Warwick, before travelling on to London, and the King to Oxford, with both sides claiming the victory.*
Further uncertainty surrounds Oliver Cromwell’s own part in the battle. The evidence is complicated by the presence of another Oliver Cromwell in the field, his eldest surviving son, a Cornet in Oliver St John’s regiment. On 13 September Captain Cromwell, with Captains Austin and Draper, had been ordered to muster his troop of horse and join Essex’s army. There were seventy-five troops of horse under the command of the Earl of Bedford whose silver banner, diapered and fringed in black, shone before the regiment. Cromwell’s was numbered sixty-seven, and he was certainly present at the end of the battle. But it seems probable that, like Captain Austin and his troop, he only arrived at the scene of action in order to take part in the later counter-attack against the Royalists, having been quartered in a nearby village. Nathaniel Fiennes the Puritan MP, now in charge of one of Essex’s troop of horse, described how in attempting to check the Parliamentary rout, he gathered ‘a pretty body’ on a hill. He found himself joined at length by troops including that of Captain Cromwell; together they then marched on Kineton.11
One need pay no serious attention to the smear spread by Denzil Holles in his Memoirs, written some time after the battle when he was Cromwell’s declared enemy, that Oliver had deliberately avoided the conflict out of cowardice, particularly as Holles made no mention of it in his report of the battle written at the time. Cromwell’s own explanation – ‘he had been all that day seeking the army and place of fight’ – which Holles castigated as impudent and ridiculous because he should have been guided by the sound of the artillery, may well have contained the kernel of the truth. Then there was the gleeful story of the Royalist Sir William Dugdale in which Cromwell played the part of an absurd poltroon, first climbing up a church steeple in order to avoid the battle (traditionally that of Durton Bassett) and then swinging away on a bell-rope on seeing both Parliamentary wings routed through a perspective-glass. It has been suggested that this story too might contain a germ of reality and that Cromwell, having arrived late, did climb up the church in order to get a good view, his motive being to join the battle rather than to avoid it.12 The field at Edgehill was both diffused and confused; what is certain is that a charge of personal cowardice in battle against Oliver Cromwell is simply not believable at this or at any other juncture in his military career.
For all his late entry, the battle made a profound impression on Cromwell. Two things caught his attention: the acid darting personality of the fast-flying commander Prince Rupert, the bee who could sting with his cavalry but only sting once, because he could not rally them after the first charge, and the superior quality of these same fighters. Years later he revealed a conversation he had had on the subject immediately after the battle with his cousin John Hampden (Cromwell’s opening words, incidentally, confirm the supposition that he only arrived half-way through):13 ‘At my first going into this engagement, I saw our men were beaten at every hand.’ For this reason there should be some additions to Essex’s men of ‘some new regiments’. Cromwell offered himself to take part in this process because he believed that he would be able to bring into play what was so evidently lacking at Edgehill, the right sort of man, with the right sort of temperament for the work. ‘Your troopers,’ he said to Hampden, ‘are most of them old decayed servingmen and tapsters and such kind of fellows; and their troopers [the Royalists] are gentlemen’s sons, younger sons and persons of quality; do you think that the spirits of such base and mean fellows will be ever able to encounter gentlemen that have honour and courage and resolution in them?’
Cromwell knew what his own solution would be: ‘You must get men of spirit.’ Urging Hampden not to take his words amiss, because after all what he was suggesting was somewhat bizarre to seventeenth-century ears, he continued that these new soldiers must be ‘of a spirit that is likely to go on as far as a gentlemen will go, or else I am sure you will be beaten still’. At the time Hampden, wise and worthy person as he was, rejected the idea as a good notion but an impracticable one. But time was to show that the scheme, which sprang from Cromwell’s most deeply held conviction of the potential superiority of the godly in terms of worldly success as well as spiritual salvation, was both good and practicable.
The ghosts of Edgehill continued to haunt the King, as the memory of the defeat haunted Cromwell. Shortly after the battle local shepherds heard once more the sound of the trumpet and the drum, then the awful groans of the dying; spectral horsemen in the sky re-enacted the conflict. The manifestations became sufficiently frequent for the King to send emissaries from Oxford to investigate them and subsequently each side drew their own conclusions from them in printed pamphlets: the Royalists prophesied that the evil rebellion against the King would soon draw to a close, and the Parliamentarians that the King would soon put aside his equally evil counsellors.14
Cromwell, however, far removed from such supernatural visitations, had now arrived back in London, probably accompanying Essex, and here he remained for the next few months. He combined his previous role of member of Parliament with that of a Captain of a troop. The ambivalence of Edgehill as a victory and the lack of confidence among many Parliamentarians was shown by the fact that the King now felt strong enough to reject overtures for peace negotiations. A peace party under Denzil Holles, worried among other things by the successes of the two Royalist commanders, the Earl of Newcastle in the North and Sir Ralph Hopton in the West, began to develop within the Commons to combat the war party under Pym. The Venetian Ambassador heard that many of the Parliamentary leaders were sending gold abroad as a reinsurance against flight. Even when Essex blocked the King from reaching London at the battle of Turnham Green in November, he showed no killer instinct to extinguish the military strength of the sovereign. As Whitelocke put it, it was ‘honour and safety enough’ to Parliament that the King had retreated.15
Cromwell remained resolutely of Pym’s party; he acted as teller for the Noes when an Act of Oblivion was mooted which would have given the King’s supporters the prospect of indemnity. And from the very first, he was involved in the formation of the Eastern Counties Association and the Midlands Association authorized by Parliament towards the end of 1642 with a view to raising more troops and supplies. He was named a member of the local committees of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire whose task was to make a weekly assessment to help finance the war. This was to be done in every county and city of the Kingdom under control of Parliament, a principle not unlike the old use of ship-money, and the amounts to be paid were indeed based on the old ship-money lists.
Back once more at Cambridge, while in London the House of Commons writhed irresolutely, Cromwell at least continued to show an iron fist in a none too velvet glove. On the way down his troops had seized the high-sheriff of Hertfordshire and despite furious local opposition bundled him off to prison in London for the crime of proclaiming Essex and his adherents traitors. Nor were old scores forgotten. His troops also paid a threatening visit to Cromwell’s old Huntingdon enemy, Robert Bernard, now a member of the Midland Counties Association, acting on information that Bernard was not quite so well affected to the Parliamentary cause as he might be. When Bernard protested at the insult, Cromwell came back coolly, without a hint of apology and with more than a suggestion of menace:
It’s most true, my Lieutenant with some other soldiers of my troop were at your house … the reason was, I heard you reported active against the proceedings of Parliament, and for those also that disturb the peace of this county and this kingdom … It’s true, Sir, I know you have been wary in your carriages: be not too confident thereof. Subtlety may deceive you [i.e. let you down]. Integrity never will.
Cromwell ended by declaring that he had not come in order ‘to hurt any man; nor shall I you. I hope you will give no cause. If you do, I must be pardoned what my relation to the public calls for.’16
It was in the spring of 1643, with peace negotiations with the King once more at a standstill, that Cromwell began that extension of his own troop into a regiment, which was to culminate in the formation of a positive army, the New Model. By the end of January he had risen to the rank of Colonel, probably receiving his commission from Lord Grey of Wark, whom Essex had made Commander-in-Chief of the forces of the Eastern Association. ‘Noble and active Colonel Cromwell’ John Vicars called him at this period, adding: ‘Thus we see how God infuses and inflames into the hearts of his people, to show themselves ready and cheerful to come forth to help the Lord against the mighty Nimrods and hunting Furies of our time …’17 Certainly Cromwell’s activity was immense, and in all his efforts to raise and equip a fighting force to hold back the Royalist tide he was marked by a noble determination to put into practice those ‘good but impracticable’ principles he had described to Hampden after Edgehill.
The evidence for Cromwell’s early persistence in this innovatory method of recruitment comes from many different sources. Whitelocke described his men as being mostly freeholders and freeholders’ sons, who had engaged in this quarrel ‘upon a matter of conscience … And thus being well armed within, by the satisfaction of their consciences, and without by good iron arms, they would as one man stand firmly and charge desperately.’ Manchester confirmed the story: in raising his regiment, Cromwell chose for officers ‘not such as were soldiers or men of estate, but such as were common men, poor and of mean parentage, only he would give them the title of godly, precious men … I have heard him often times say that it must not be soldiers nor Scots that must do this work, but it must be the godly to this purpose.’ Richard Baxter described how from the first ‘he had a special care to get religious men into his troop’ because these were the sort of men he esteemed and loved; and although this was his original motive, naturally from this happy and worthy choice flowed ‘the avoidings of those disorders, mutinies, plunderings and grievances of the country whose debased men in armies are commonly guilty of’.18
In such a regiment the actual practice of religion was of the utmost importance and steps were taken to secure chaplains. These could sometimes combine the role with that of fighting men: Hugh Peter, the formidable Independent divine with a nice touch in both money-raising and rabble-rousing, was later to be seen with a Bible in one hand and a pistol in the other. It was a common saying of the time that ‘the Saints should have the praises of God in their mouths and a two-edged sword in their hands’. It was Richard Baxter once again who related how he was invited to become pastor to the officers of Cromwell’s troop; they intended to turn themselves into ‘a gathered church’.19 Although this incident has been advanced as evidence of the Congregational nature of Cromwell’s own churchmanship, i.e. his adherence to a particular ‘gathered body’ rather than some looser form of Independency, Baxter actually attributed the invitation to James Berry. Formerly a clerk in a Shropshire iron works, Berry was now Captain-Lieutenant of Cromwell’s own troop. It seems therefore too isolated a reference upon which to build any firm conclusions concerning Cromwell himself. In the event Baxter declined, and the name of the subsequent choice is not known for certain, although it was possibly William Sedgewick.20
But from the first the discipline of troops in their private habits was in marked contrast to the general run of military custom. In April at Huntingdon, two troopers who tried to desert were whipped in the market place. By May the Parliamentarian newspaperSpecial Passages recorded with approval that Colonel Cromwell had ‘2,000 brave men, well disciplined; no man swears but he pays his twelve pence; if he be drunk he is set in the stocks, or worse, if one calls the other “Roundhead” he is cashiered; in so much that the countries where they come leap for joy of them, and come in and join with them’. The very new nature of such demands upon the soldiery, traditionally in all ages if not exactly brutal and licentious at least drinking and cursing, may be judged from the last pious hope expressed in Special Passages: ‘How happy it were if all the forces were thus disciplined!’ The five troops which made up Cromwell’s first regiment were complete as early as March 1643. No doubt with the certainty of godliness in mind, he had drawn heavily on his own family for his officers, not only Desborough but his cousin Edward Whalley, his nephew the young Valentine Walton and his own son Oliver. By September it had swollen to ten troops, and when fully completed, in April 1644, Cromwell’s regiment was apparently a double one with a full fourteen troops in a total of about 1400 men.21
The first success of this disciplined and godly force was seen at the skirmish outside Grantham in Lincolnshire in May 1643. Cromwell had already taken part in the successful but not particularly noteworthy siege of Croyland just north of Peterborough, where some eighty Royalists under the command of one of his own Cromwell cousins had dug themselves in with some hostages. The idea of the Grantham campaign was to attack the prominent Royalist stronghold of Newark, north-east of Nottingham, a pre-emptive strike against the Royalists themselves issuing forth to lambast the eastern counties. Cromwell was ordered north to join Lord Grey of Groby at Stamford, but Grey, to Cromwell’s outspoken disgust, failed to keep the rendezvous on the grounds that he would thus leave Leicester unprotected. By 9 May Cromwell’s troops, together with those of Lord Willoughby of Parham and Sir John Hotham, had gathered at Sleaford, on the road between Peterborough and Lincoln, preparatory to the attack. On 11 May they marched across the country west towards Grantham and late in the evening on 13 May found themselves confronted by the enemy at Belton, just outside the town. Cromwell wrote afterwards that his opponents had about twenty-one troops of horse and three or four of dragoons – mounted infantry, armed with musket and short swords like the foot soldiers, who would dismount to fire while each tenth man held the horses. He had only twelve troops, ‘some of them so poor and broken that you shall seldom see worse’. Some musket-fire was exchanged. Half an hour passed. Still the enemy, for all its superior force, did not advance. Cromwell decided to take the initiative himself. With his troops, he came on fast ‘at a pretty round trot’ and as the enemy stood firm to receive them, charged fiercely forward. The unexpected ploy succeeded. The enemy were routed, and pursued by Cromwell’s victorious horse for two or three miles. Only two of their men were killed, to nearly one hundred of the enemy.
Parliament showed its gratitude and appreciation of the value of Cromwell’s work in blocking the Royalist advance on eastern England, ever the gateway to London, by ordering that the £3000 already levied in the Associated Counties and sent to Cambridge should be paid to Colonel Cromwell for the support of his forces. And in his report of his triumph, Cromwell set a precedent for the future by ascribing his success to the workings of divine Providence. ‘God hath given us, this evening, a glorious victory over our enemies’ he wrote that very night from Syston Park to a fellow commander. It was with a mere handful of men that it had ‘pleased God to cast the scale’.22
Ironically enough, it was as Cromwell’s reputation for military discipline rose with his own side that his character as an undisciplined vandal was being set up by the Royalist pamphleteers. Their attack concentrated on an area where all soldiers are vulnerable, and the Puritan troops particularly so. It is to these early years of the war and the Irish campaign that the evidence for Cromwell the iconoclast, such as it is, belongs. From these sparse stories have sprung the much more formidable body of legends and folklore on the subject which surround and tarnish his name.* The whole subject of iconoclasm, literally the destruction of images, is obviously an emotive one. There is no safer way to blacken a person’s reputation in the estimate of following generations than to attribute a wanton holocaust of wasted beauty to him. Very many of the pieces of vandalism now popularly attributed to Oliver Cromwell, whether castles knocked down, churches defiled, statues broken, are on examination so ludicrously misdated or occur in areas so far from any point he personally visited as to be hardly worth repetition, although one example of the former case may be cited – Cromwell is sometimes credited with knocking down the tower and transept of Ely Cathedral presumably on the grounds that he undeniably once lived there and the tower is undoubtedly fallen. In fact, as has been pointed out earlier, it fell down in the fourteenth century.
The process of general iconoclastic identification has been accelerated by the unfortunate coincidence of Oliver’s kinsman Thomas Cromwell having been also associated with destruction, in this case of the monasteries. The Royalist clergyman writing of the depredations against Peterborough Cathedral at Cromwell’s hands, at the end of the seventeenth century, thought it worth giving an aside on the subject of the Cromwell name – ‘as fatal now to ministers as once it had been to monasteries’. By the eighteenth century in a tour of the Midlands, a Colonel Byng noted that many countrymen were puzzled about ‘the two Cromwells, the destroyer of the monasteries, and the destroyer of castles’.23 The truth is that as the folklore grows, one Cromwell is much like another. Assuredly in many instances Oliver has taken the responsibility in the popular imagination for the crimes of Thomas.
Then there are the stories of the general malevolence of the Parliamentary troops, at a period when Cromwell was far from being in general command, which have somehow adhered to his reputation. For reasons of his subsequent eminence, his is the name which has come to personify all such outrages. Of those charges specifically made at the time against him, the majority of them come from two Royalist newspapers of the period, Mercurius Aulicus which had a long run and many issues, and the short-lived Mercurius Rusticus. The references to Cromwell, which come of course from among a plethora of attacks on the Parliamentarians, include ‘most miserably defacing’ Peterborough Cathedral, its organs and glass windows at the end of April 1643.
‘There were more outrages than the Goths in the sack of Rome, and similar to those committed by the Turks on a Christian city’, fulminated Mercurius Rusticus, and the story was given wider circulation in the Reverend Simon Gunston’s history of Peterborough printed in 1688. ‘Down with the throne of Anti-Christ, down with it even to the ground’ was the ‘black-mouthed cry’ of the soldiers as they wrecked the pulpit. The soldiers played lascivious jigs upon the organ before pulling it down, while their companions danced in surplices. When bystanders appealed to Cromwell to stop this mayhem, he replied that the soldiers were doing God good service; he himself was said to have spied a surviving crucifix high up and pulled it down personally. The prayer books were as usual a target for attack, but one book which did survive was the ledger book, for which the precentor paid 10s. to a soldier in the troop of Cromwell’s son young Oliver to save it from obliteration. The soldier concerned duly inscribed it: ‘I pray let this scripture book alone, for he hath paid me for it … By me Henry Topcliffe, soldier under Captain Cromwell, Colonel Cromwell’s son. Therefore I pray you let it alone, April 22 1643.’24
Cromwell’s men were accused of profanations at Lincoln Cathedral, not only pulling down tombs and carvings but allowing their horses to be stabled there. There were the natural consequences of animal filth: it was suggested that Lord Kimbolton would sack his groom for letting even his stable become as dirty as Cromwell had made the house of God. At Cambridge also, in the spring of 1644, Cromwell was stated to have encouraged the tearing up of the Book of Common Prayer in the faces of the University clergy, and to have caused some beautiful carved structure which ‘had not one whit of imagery about it’ to be demolished.25
The most believable incident of them all in that Cromwell emerges from it as we know him in his later years, is that which occurred at Ely Cathedral in January 1644. There is also more documentary support for it than the mere enraged tattlings of the Royalist newspapers. Cromwell, like his fellow Puritans, found the practice of a choir-service ‘unedifying and offensive’. This was not based on any objection to music or singing as such. The attitude to the choir, like the attitude to the organs so often pulled down in the churches, was based on an objection to such practices in the house of God. It did not apply to music or even organs in the home, and Cromwell who was himself passionately fond of music, as Protector installed an organ at Hampton Court. Even so, despite his rooted hostility to Church music, Cromwell as Governor of Ely did not immediately react. On the contrary he warned Mr Hitch, the clergyman concerned, in a letter that his soldiers were likely to attempt the reformation of his cathedral in a tumultuous or disorderly way if the choir-service continued. Far better, in Cromwell’s view, if the Reverend Mr Hitch catechized the people, read and expounded the Scriptures; if he ignored this advice, and above all gave more frequent subversive sermons, subsequent troubles would be Hitch’s own responsibility.
But Hitch ignored the warning. Whereupon Cromwell arrived in the middle of a choir-service with his hat on and addressed Hitch thus: ‘I am a man under authority and am commanded to dismiss this assembly.’ Hitch, clearly a man of heroic obstinacy, ignored even this interruption and continued the service. At this Cromwell returned in a fury, and laying his hand on his sword, bade Hitch leave off his fooling and come down. In a great passion, he then proceeded to drive out the whole congregation.26 This was a Cromwell, first firm but reasonable, subsequently provoked into violent precipitate action which members of the Rump Parliament would have recognized.
The total evidence for Cromwell as an iconoclast is neither particularly extensive nor particularly impressive: in subsequent years his temperament certainly turned very much against such disorderly outrages, and Dean Stanley in his History of Westminster Abbeythought it worth pointing out that the monuments in the Abbey, which suffered so cruelly under Henry VIII, remained uninjured under Cromwell. Even in this early period, Cromwell was dismayed by the dismantling of Nottingham Castle and told Colonel Hutchinson that he would have voted against it. At the same time the Cavalier Prince Rupert was actually nicknamed the ‘Prince Robber’, and burnt Cirencester and Marlborough with gusto.
In other ways, the Royalists by no means emerged from the war with stainless reputations: on the hoary subjects of horses stabled in churches, of which the Parliamentarians are so often indignantly accused, it must be said that even that great Christian gentleman Montrose did this at Udney in Aberdeenshire. And as for the sanctity of the churches, both Lichfield and Hereford Cathedrals were fortified by the Royalists as instruments of war. Armour, powder and shot were frequently stored there, and both sides used churches to house prisoners, which often resulted in considerable damage to the interiors. Cranborne Manor House, for example, where according to the accounts of the Salisbury family Cromwell and his followers did burn up the gates and ‘a little house in the orchard’ in the course of a military campaign in October 1645, had already suffered at the hands of the Royalists earlier. It might be fairest to accept the verdict of John Evelyn who noted in his diary that ‘it is impossible to avoid the doing of very unhandsome things in war’ – and then slipped away abroad for the rest of the hostilities.27
Yet there is a distinction to be seen between the mere aimless wrecking common to all soldiers in wartime, and the deliberate policy of iconoclasm pursued by the Puritans, which was after all backed up by orders of Parliament. One Puritan writer claimed ingeniously that it was worse for the Royalists to defile churches in the course of war than it was for his own side, because the Royalists actually believed such objects to be sacred. His point was valid only if careless destruction was really more reprehensible than that caused by a deliberate campaign: it is arguably less so. There was after all an official tradition of image-breaking in England since the time of Edward VI. One authority has pointed out that the iconoclasm of the seventeenth-century Puritans can only be understood as part of a long sequence in our history of nearly one hundred years and not ‘as is so often the case, as if it were a strange insensate fury, utterly divorced from its historical context’. The methods of the Parliamentary soldiers did not differ much from those laid down by the statute of Edward vi for breaking images.28
The enormous symbolic importance attached by the Puritans to the hated outward signs of ‘Popery’ – communion rails, crosses and the like – has already been stressed. The deliberate immolation of these objects was an expression of their doctrinal revolt. Such tendencies were seen long before the war: early in 1641 for example the communion rails and table at Wolverhampton were chopped up by a body of local people of quite low standing, including braziers and ironmongers, and two women. All admitted to the charge, and despite a fine, one of the braziers spoke up boldly to the magistrate and said that the table had been ‘made an Idoll of’ and he would gladly chop it up again ‘if it were to do’. The war only increased the opportunity for such stalwarts, the desire was already there. A satirical ballad first put into print in 1646 tried to pour scorn on the Puritan soldiery by claiming these lines as their motto:
Whate’er the Popish hands have built
Our hammers shall undo:
We’ll break their pipes and burn their copes
And pull down churches too.
But the reference to the ‘Popish hands’29 was a shaft which went home. Cromwell, in such iconoclastic activities as he indulged before the need for an utterly disciplined professional force became paramount, was animated more by feelings of genuine doctrinal revulsion than by the coarser dictates of ordinary military brutality. Of this he showed little evidence in the years following.
After the Grantham victory of May 1643, the rest of the high summer months were spent by Oliver in a variety of smaller engagements in and around the eastern counties, including the capture of Stamford and the defence of Peterborough from a Royalist attack issuing forth from perennially dangerous Newark. Oliver’s single-minded consistency in desiring to prosecute the war with all the supplies he could obtain and all the troops available was not however matched by all his so-called allies. By 13 June he was complaining to the Association at Cambridge about the delay of Sir John Palgrave, Deputy-Lieutenant of Norfolk, in joining him in the field for what seemed to Cromwell a series of inadequate excuses: ‘Let him not keep a volunteer at Wisbeach – I beseech you, do not … This is not a time to pick and choose for pleasure. Service must be done. Command, you, and be obeyed!’30
As unsatisfactory as the behaviour of the vacillating Sir John, and rather more treacherous, was that of John Hotham, a wild young man who had laid waste the countryside and when reproached by Colonel Hutchinson replied proudly that since he was fighting for liberty he expected to enjoy it ‘in all things’. He was said to have acted contemptuously towards Cromwell and Lord Grey of Groby and in the course of a little local dispute over some oats turned his cannon on them. In the end complaints were laid before the Committee of Safety and Hotham was arrested and imprisoned in Nottingham Castle. But even here his impudence was not ended, for he contrived to escape and wrote to the Speaker of the House of Commons complaining of the low social status and sectarian religion of Cromwell’s new force: Cromwell had employed an ‘Anabaptist’* against him, while another of his creatures, Colonel White, had been only lately ‘but a yeoman’.
On 24 July Cromwell led the successful siege of Burghley House near Stamford in Northamptonshire, the sumptuous pile built in the Elizabethan age by the Queen’s great servant; it was now defended by the widowed Countess of Exeter on behalf of her little son. The Royalists refused at first to parley until three squadrons of musketeers, following the attempts of the Parliamentary ordnance to blast down the house, persuaded them to change their minds. By the rules of war this original defiance gave their attackers the right to kill. But Cromwell, despite their first peremptory refusal, forbade his own troops to slaughter another man among the defenders on pain of their own death; as a result the house was taken virtually with no loss of life and two hundred Cavalier prisoners were sent off to Cambridge. Furthermore, Cromwell was even supposed to have presented the Countess with a portrait of himself by Robert Walker (still at Burghley House, see illustration) as a souvenir of this rather grim occasion.
Cromwell’s next military encounter – the relief of Gainsborough, where the Parliamentarians in turn were hard pressed by a Royalist siege – gave him an opportunity to show both the decision of Grantham and the prudence of Burghley House. By 28 July Cromwell had joined up with the forces of Lord Willoughby at a general rendezvous, which gave them a total of nineteen or twenty troops of horse, and three or four troops of dragoons. The main difficulty of the assault on the enemy was that in the course of their siege of the town, they had entrenched themselves at one end on an extremely steep hill. It was also highly treacherous ground, being a rabbit warren. And they were present in considerable numbers – ‘a fair body’ Cromwell called it later – and had in addition a reserve of six or seven troops. Despite the extremely favourable stance of the enemy, it was decided to attack them from below. Cromwell led the right wing. His men first struggled up the hill in columns, and then somehow formed themselves into battle lines at the end of it. When Cromwell’s men were within musket-shot, the enemy proceeded to charge them – downhill. Cromwell’s men did not cease their advance, so that both sides were now charging each other. The result was virtually a hand-to-hand battle, or ‘horse to horse’ as Cromwell described it, a tense contest for a considerable time to see which side would end by breaking the other.32 In fact it was the Parliamentarians who managed just that additional pressure, and the enemy began shrinking back just a little. The tiny advantage was enough. The Parliamentarians now resolutely pressed it home and broke up the whole body.
It was Cromwell who did much to demolish the enemy’s reserve, falling on Colonel Sir Charles Cavendish’s rear with three troops of horse while Willoughby’s Lincolnshire troops attacked frontally. The reserve were forced into a quagmire, still known today as Cavendish Bog, and Cromwell’s Captain-Lieutenant, Berry, wounded Cavendish mortally with a thrust under the ribs.33 With the enemy in flight Cromwell’s men enjoyed themselves in pursuit. It was not however for long. Cromwell was no Rupert, and had appreciated the chief weakness of the successful cavalry charge, the problem of rallying the men afterwards. Somehow his troops were not totally dissipated. Cromwell’s knowledge of this difficult art was particularly timely. For just as the Parliamentarians were setting about the business for which they were ordained, the provision of fresh supplies and ammunition for the town of Gainsborough, they found that the army of the Royalist Earl of Newcastle, whose approach had been so long dreaded, had drawn up outside the town on the other side. It was now besieging Gainsborough once more in earnest.
There was no question now of Cromwell’s horse and Willoughby’s foot holding the town against this far more massive force. Furthermore the men were exhausted by the recent fray, to say nothing of the fact, characteristically noted by Cromwell, that their horses were tired too. Willoughby and his foot retreated in fear into the town, but Cromwell appreciated how disastrous it would be to lock up his horse there too, either to be immobilized or captured. He decided to retreat, despite the fact that his weary horse were now being plagued by the enemy, and at their first charge, sank back, not being able to brave it in their distressed condition. But as Cromwell himself described it, somehow the impossible was achieved: ‘With some difficulty we got our horse into a body, and with them faced the enemy and retreated in such order that though the enemy followed hard, yet they were not able to disorder us, but we got them off safe to Lincoln …’ The flat battle report concealed a masterly piece of military tactics and a flexibility particularly impressive in view of the inflexible drill of the day. A professional soldier discussing Cromwell’s campaigns has observed that there is no problem more difficult for a cavalry leader than that of attacking an enemy already drawn up for an encounter, unless it be that of withdrawing tired in the face of a fresh and superior foe. At Gainsborough Cromwell succeeded in doing both.34
Back in Huntingdon after Gainsborough, Cromwell received the news that on 28 July Parliament had made him Governor of the Isle of Ely. He was also named as one of the four Colonels to Manchester, now commander in the eastern counties. But if he looked about him, Cromwell might see how underlying dangerous was the general military situation of the Parliamentary cause, which he was now serving so assiduously and so effectively. The skirmish of Chalgrove Field near Oxford on 18 June had ended badly for Parliament with the victory of Rupert’s speedy cavalry, the death of John Hampden thereafter of wounds received in the field, and the abandonment by Essex of any future plans to besiege Oxford where the King had his headquarters. During the engagement Prince Rupert had shown conspicuous personal courage. Meanwhile, as has been seen, the Earl of Newcastle had moved down from the North to menace the eastern counties: speedily swallowing up Gainsborough, he had annulled that small triumph and now moved on to Lincoln. It was no wonder that Cromwell’s letters became almost frantic in his appeals for troops, money, reinforcements, anything rather than let the noble venture begun by Parliament peter out in a Royalist victory for sheer lack of Parliamentary efficiency. As his mother, the ageing but ever vigilant matriarch Mrs Cromwell, wrote indignantly to a cousin in July on Oliver’s behalf: ‘I wish there might be care to spare some monies for my son who hath I fear been too long and much neglected.’ And this same relative was asked to deliver over £50 of her own money which happened to be in his hands.35
Army pay in theory ranged from 2s. per day for an ordinary trooper of horse, out of which he had to find all his provisions, clothes, equipment and provender for his horse (as opposed to 7d. a day for a foot soldier), up to £1. 19s. a day for a Captain of a troop. Higher ranking officers were paid according to a system by which they received a total of all the pays due to them in their respective roles – for instance a Colonel who was also a Captain of horse could total £3. 9s. per day. The problem was not the actual amounts which were quite generous, but laying hands on them. Money, money, money, the theme is constant in Cromwell’s letters of the late summer and autumn months. Sometimes it is a tart reminder to the Deputy-Lieutenants of Essex that he has paid for the shoes, stockings, shirts and billet-money of the troops of Essex county out of his own pocket, for which he intends to be repaid: ‘for I think it is not expected that I should pay your soldiers out of my own purse’. Sometimes it is a more generalized – and more passionate – letter to the Commissioners at Cambridge: ‘The money I brought with me is so poor a pittance when it comes to be distributed amongst all my troops that, considering their necessity, it will not half clothe them, they were so far behind. If we have not more money speedily they will be exceedingly discouraged. I am sorry you put me to it to write thus often. It makes it seem a needless importunity in me; whereas, in truth, it is a constant neglect of those that should provide for us. Gentlemen, make them able to live and subsist that are willing to spend their blood for you.’36
On 11 September he made a desperate personal appeal on behalf of ‘his lovely company’, as he called them, to his cousin Oliver St John in London, which began: ‘Of all men I should not trouble you with money matters, did not the heavy necessities my troops are in, press me beyond measure. I am neglected exceedingly!’ It was no wonder, said Cromwell, that he wrote to the House of Commons in bitterness, for after all he was asking help not for himself, but for his soldiers; unfortunately he had too little money of his own to supplement their needs, and what he had, had diminished rapidly in the public cause. ‘My estate is little. I tell you, the business of Ireland and England hath had of me, in money, between eleven and twelve hundred pounds; therefore my private purse can do little to help the public.’ He concluded sadly that although they had had his money, he still had his skin which he desired to venture; moreover his soldiers desired to venture theirs. ‘Lay weight upon their patience; but break it not.’ And in case the force of such a letter was not sufficient, Cromwell added a yet more urgent postscript about the general lack of care exhibited in maintaining Manchester’s vital army: ‘The force will fail if some help not. Weak counsels and weak actings undo all. Send at once or some or all will be lost, if God help not. Remember who tells you.’37
Under the circumstances then, how touching, how shaming to their elders, were the reactions of some unnamed ‘bachelors and maids’ who with adolescent enthusiasm offered the money which went partly at least to equip Cromwell’s 11th troop. Cromwell thoroughly approved the project, especially if the men chosen were to be honest and godly, and he also thanked God ‘for stirring up the youth to cast in their mite’. For the use of the money ‘my advice is that you would employ your twelve-score Pounds to buy pistols and saddles and will provide Four-score Horses; for £400 will not raise a troop of horse’. On the other hand when Cromwell joined up with Fairfax at Boston and found no money from Parliament waiting there for his men, according to one account he broke down and wept out of sheer despair and frustration.38
In the autumn however the general Parliamentary situation seemed once again more favourable, although Cromwell’s money troubles were not effectively solved until the beginning of the next year. Then, in common with the whole of Manchester’s army, his pay was established on a more regular basis, his men receiving as much – or as little – as was currently available to the rest of the Parliamentary forces. In the west, the Parliamentary fortress of Gloucester was relieved after a long siege; at Newbury on 18 September Essex survived the hard-fought battle to push through to Reading, and thus prevent the King reaching London. With the arrival of the Scots Commissioners in London in answer to an appeal from John Pym, there was hope of Scottish assistance even if the Commissioners brought a rather dour form of olive-branch in their beaks in the shape of their own National Covenant to be signed. Cromwell himself was directed northwards to meet the Parliamentarian commander, Sir Thomas Fairfax.
It was his first meeting with the man who was later to be his chief. Fairfax was some twelve years younger than Cromwell, scion of an old landed Yorkshire family in which area he had mainly raised his troops. He was an interesting romantic character, black-eyed and with luxuriant dark hair (he too like Strafford was nicknamed Black Tom), and rather inclined to ruminative silence in public. He inspired much love and admiration among his contemporaries, including Cromwell, for the unusual combination of the sweetness of his temperament with the steel of his military prowess. In battle, wrote Joshua Sprigge, he was transformed out of his habitual silence into an angel – not the kind of comparison, quite frankly, that one can imagine even the most fervent of Cromwell’s admirers applying to him. Milton wrote that Fairfax, like Scipio Africanus, conquered not the enemy alone, but also ambition.39 But this self-disciplined man did bow to at least one outside influence: Fairfax was believed to be much under the influence of his wife and she, born Lady Anne Vere and brought up in the Low Countries, was extremely strict in her religious observances, becoming a Presbyterian about 1647.
Their first collaboration was auspicious. On 10 October an engagement took place at Winceby, only a few miles away from the coast north-east of Boston. Manchester and Cromwell combined with Fairfax to check the Royalist Governor of Newark, Sir John Henderson, who had intended to relieve Bolingbroke Castle. Despite the superior Royalist numbers and the weary condition of some of the Parliamentary forces, it was too dangerous to allow the spread of Royalist supremacy in this vital area, and in any case Manchester’s troops, if fewer, were better equipped than those of Henderson. The battle was opened by the dragoons, followed by the horse, of which Cromwell himself led the first charge. According to an eye-witness, the shrill singing of the Psalms rose in the air, a metrical chant which was to become a familiar background sound to the battles of the Civil War, sung not only by Roundheads but on occasion also by Cavaliers.40 During the first volley of musketry, Cromwell had his horse killed under him. Scrambling to his feet, he was knocked down once more, whereupon he found another inferior horse in a soldier’s hands and bravely remounted once again. It was left to Fairfax with the second charge to put the enemy finally to flight after only half an hour’s fighting.
Much of Cromwell’s autumn was otherwise spent at Ely with his family. Here Henry Ireton, a bachelor of thirty-two from Nottinghamshire who had been a major in Colonel Thornhaugh’s horse at Gainsborough, now joined Cromwell as Deputy-Governor. Ireton was by nature reserved, religious-minded, stubborn and clever. The Royalists later rudely described his appearance as that of ‘a tall, black thief with bushy curled hair, a meagre envious face, sunk hollow eyes’.41 But Ireton was above all a man of desperate seriousness, an intellectual who arrived at action only after due employment of thought, and in accordance with the conclusions he had reached. In this he was very different from Cromwell, who might think and who might act, but the two processes were not always so closely connected: some spontaneous spark might in the end strike the flame of action. The two men became fast friends, as often happens when there is sufficient identification of aim and difference of character between a couple of allies. The friendship was further sealed by Ireton’s courtship of Cromwell’s eldest daughter, nineteen-year-old Bridget.
By the end of the year Cromwell was generally speaking back at Westminster; in November he had been placed on a Committee for Plantations under the Earl of Warwick as chairman, to consider affairs in the rising colonies of the New World. It was a tricky period politically. The price of Scottish aid – a promise of 21,000 men to come down into England – was the signing of their Solemn League and Covenant, which Pym himself had signed at the end of September. Already the difficulties implicit in this document for those of a more tolerant persuasion than strict Presbyterianism had been shown by the manoeuvres of Sir Henry Vane the younger to alter its English wording. The promised reformation of the Church was now intended to be ‘according to the word of God’, a much vaguer term than that of the Scots and capable of a different interpretation. It has been suggested that the emergence at Westminster of the Independents as a political group, as distinct from the purely religious Independents, can be dated from this incident.
The first mention of the Independents in this role occurs in 1643. From the first they were much identified with the ‘war party’ while the death of John Pym on 18 December removed from the political scene the one man strong enough to control the Scots. It also allowed the natural rise to power of the younger Independents in the party, such as Vane, and thus widened the gap in the Parliamentary front between those orientated towards Scottish Presbyterianism, and those preferring a Separatist view. Vane, now aged thirty, was the son of that senior politician of the same name who had been Charles i’s Secretary of State before being dismissed by him in 1641. The younger Vane was a dedicated Puritan from the time of a youthful conversion, a man of both intellect and force who exerted a strong influence over his contemporaries. Of Vane’s appearance, Clarendon pronounced that he had ‘an unusual aspect’ despite the fact that neither of his parents had been particularly good-looking, which made people think that there was ‘somewhat in him of extraordinary: and his whole life made good that imagination’. Vane was now rapidly coming to be regarded in the House of Commons as the political equivalent of Oliver Cromwell in the field.42
These squabbles of the Parliamentarians were not soothed by the understandable attempts of King Charles to treat with any individual he believed might represent a weak link in the chain of opposition. Cromwell was among those appointed to consider the delicate matter of a letter from the King to Vane proposing liberty of conscience. Vane had kept it secret in order to ferret out more concerning the King’s true intentions, but Essex interpreted the concealment as directed against himself. However when the Committee of Both Kingdoms (England and Scotland) was formed in February it was noticeable that among the twenty-one members there were now many who might be considered Independents. This replaced the old Committee of Safety formed by Parliament to have charge of the detailed administration of the war. Cromwell’s name was prominent. Other members included both Vanes, Oliver St John, and Sir Arthur Haselrig, as well as Warwick among the peers.
For all this in-fighting, Cromwell’s main preoccupation at this period was still the war. When he spoke in the House on 22 January, it was to deliver a furious attack on Lord Willoughby of Parham for his inept behaviour after the battle of Gainsborough, as a result of which not only Gainsborough but also subsequently Lincoln with all its weapons, including seven pieces of ordnance, had been lost. His crimes were not purely tactical. One part of Willoughby’s offence in Cromwell’s view was that he had ‘very loose and profane commanders under him’ and Cromwell gave an instance of some unseemly piece of behaviour.43 In some quarters, there was disgust at Cromwell casting dirt on one ‘who had so well deserved’, but Cromwell did succeed in getting Lincolnshire joined to the other counties under Manchester’s command, while Willoughby’s case was referred to a special committee. On the same day as his speech against Willoughby, 22 January 1644, Cromwell rose in rank from being a mere Colonel to become Lieutenant-General of horse and foot and Manchester’s second-in-command. His pay rose to £5 per day as a result, but he also of course continued to receive pay both as Colonel and Captain of the horse, at a further 42s. a day, to include allowances for horses. And on 5 February, the last day permissible, Cromwell signed the Covenant, without which he would not have been able to have assumed his command.
Cromwell’s opprobrious remarks concerning Willoughby’s commanders show that he was far from abandoning his first principle that military strength was to be sought among the godly. At the end of August from Cambridge he had pointed out the practical advantages of choosing reputable Captains of horse in the first place: other honest men would follow them, and they would be careful only to mount such. In a passage which has rightly become famous as an expression of his personal philosophy towards the hosts of war, Cromwell declared: ‘I had rather have a plain russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than that which you call a gentleman and is nothing else. I honour a gentleman that is so indeed.’ It was true that there might be material disadvantages for the men themselves in such a policy of self-control, as Cromwell pointed out to Sir Thomas Barrington in the course of one of his many appeals for money: ‘many who can plunder and pillage; they suffer no want …’ while his own men depended on their pay which was weeks behind. For all that, how great were the advantages of discipline! ‘Truly mine (though some have stigmatized them with the name of Anabaptists) are honest men, such as fear God, I am confident the freest from unjust practices of any in England, seek the soldiers where you can.’ At times Cromwell preached the doctrine along the lines of necessity: replying to the criticism of men such as Hotham at the end of September, and denying again that his men were Anabaptists, he pointed out in defence of the so-called plain men who had been made Captains of horse: ‘It had been well that men of honour and birth had entered into these employments, but why do they not appear? Who would have hindered them?’ Seeing it was necessary the work must go on, better plain men than none. Yet Cromwell’s true feelings were seen in his conclusion: it was not only needful but actually better to use such men ‘patient of wants, faithful and conscientious in the employment’.44
As will be seen, throughout 1643, Cromwell was still strongly denying that his troops were in any way contaminated by those feared and despised bogymen, the Anabaptists. There were many exaggerated tales told of this sect, emanating from Continental rumours. In fact their outward practices such as adult baptism were matched by an inward principle that it was the right of any man to seek God’s truth for himself in the Scriptures. This primacy given to individual judgement led on in turn to the belief that should a crisis arise between Church and State, obedience to the State should not extend beyond conscience. Although the Baptists also believed that they should endure peacefully any punishments inflicted upon them by the State as a result, the fears of anarchy which such a doctrine could arouse in the seventeenth-century breasts may be imagined. It was in the spring of 1644 that the origins of the quarrel between Cromwell and Manchester that was to explode at the end of the year began to spark off in the disputes between Cromwell and Manchester’s Major-General, Lawrence Crawford. Crawford, a strict Scottish Presbyterian, not only considered that Anabaptism itself was heinous, as most men did at that time, but believed in addition that through its own leniency, Independency itself was naturally prone to such abuses. And the growth of the power of the Independents in the Army, which was of course at the bottom of the dispute, was already being noted in the spring by the Scottish Presbyterian divine, Robert Baillie.45
The two men came into contact after the establishment of the Committee of Both Kingdoms, while Manchester’s army was holding some sway in the debatable lands between Charles’s capital of Oxford and the counties of the Eastern Association. Cromwell led a practical expedition which went so far as to drive away the cattle from outside the very walls of Oxford. He stormed the Royalist outpost, Hillesden House, about five miles from Buckingham, half-way between Oxford and Newport Pagnell, held for Parliament by its Governor, Sir Samuel Luke. When orders came from the Committee to prevent the King joining up with his General, Hopton, Cromwell was already engaged in trying to do so. Fresh troops were to be summoned with speed from the Eastern Association: on 8 March, Cromwell wrote to Luke asking him to send on to Bedford from Newport Pagnell any troops which might arrive from Cambridge with all convenient speed; here they should await Cromwell at the Swan Inn. In his postscript, Cromwell showed that like a good Puritan he also believed in self-help towards self-preservation: he asked Luke to remind Colonel Aylife that he had promised Cromwell his own coat of mail.46
It was at this point that Crawford incurred Cromwell’s wrath by arresting a certain Lieutenant William Packer, known to be a Baptist, for some offence which was presumably religious. Packer complained to Cromwell and Cromwell sent back an emissary to Crawford that Packer was a ‘godly man’ and he should be left unmolested. Then Crawford’s own Lieutenant-Colonel, Henry Warner, refused to sign the Covenant on the grounds of his Baptist convictions, and was as a result sent to Manchester. Cromwell fairly exploded on the subject in a long letter back to Crawford from Cambridge, urging him forcibly not to turn away one so faithful to ‘the Cause’ and eager to serve Crawford. Did Crawford really prefer a man notorious for wickedness, drinking and oaths to one that ‘fears to sin’? Of course the nub of the problem was not that Warner feared to sin, but that he chose to avoid sin by allegedly Anabaptist methods. Cromwell, who six months earlier had denied the possibility that there might be any Anabaptists among their army, now at one stroke both admitted the likelihood and dismissed it as being quite irrelevant to the conduct of the war: ‘Ay, but the man is an Anabaptist. Are you sure of that? Admit he be, shall that render him incapable to serve the public … Sir, the State, in choosing men to serve them, takes no notice of their opinions, if they be willing faithfully to serve them, that satisfies. I advised you formerly to bear with men of different minds from yourself; if you had done when I advised you to it, I think you would not have had so many stumbling blocks in your way …’ Naturally if there was any military charge against Warner that was a different matter and must be dealt with judicially. Nevertheless Crawford should ‘take heed of being sharp, or too easily sharpened by others, against those to whom you can object little but they square not with you in every opinion concerning religion’.47 Yet in this case Crawford was the professional soldier with experience abroad, it was Cromwell who was here reacting as the purely military man. At this point he saw himself neither as the committed enemy of the Presbyterians, nor indeed as a totally convinced Independent, since he was not sparing the time to mull over such problems: but Cromwell did see himself as a man committed to bring about a victory in the field, whatever the niceties of his troops’ religious observances.
There is no licence which frees a soldier altogether from the cares of private life, even when, like Cromwell in the spring of 1644, he was campaigning hard on the one hand, and trying to combat Crawford’s inquisition on the other. The household at Ely had to be maintained and could not live on air: in April Cromwell signed an order for some of the money due to him to be paid out to his wife at a rate of £5 a week, an incident which Manchester later tried to blow up into evidence of Cromwell’s peculation. And the Cromwell family was once more depleted by the death of young Oliver at the age of twenty-one, of smallpox, while serving in the Army at the garrison of Newport Pagnell. The soft-natured Richard was now the elder surviving son of the Cromwells. Young Oliver vanishes from history, as five years earlier Robert had vanished, and little is known of him except that he was described after his death as having been ‘a civil young gentleman and the joy of his father’. However a surviving letter of his, written six months earlier when he was at Peterborough with his father, complains of a knave or two who had been admitted to his troop. Young Oliver looked on them as ‘dishonourers of God’s cause and high displeasers of my father, myself and the whole regiment’; so that it seems while he lived the boy was at least something of a chip off the old Cromwellian block.48
But for his father, private agonies had now to be put aside. The sonorous noise of war had rolled towards the North. Here, Sir Thomas Fairfax and his father Ferdinando Lord Fairfax had captured Selby, and the Scots under Leven having finally arrived over the border in January were installed as far south as Durham. The result of this successful squeezing movement on Lord Newcastle (created a Marquis by the King in the previous autumn) was to pen him, together with a considerable force of five thousand horse and six thousand foot, within the city of York itself; although he did subsequently send out most of his horse under Lord Goring to join the hoped-for relieving force. The siege of York began on 22 April. The prospects for Parliament were extremely good, so long as Prince Rupert could be held off from coming to the relief of Newcastle. In the first stages of the siege Lord Manchester and Cromwell stayed near Belvoir Castle in Lincolnshire, lest Rupert should in fact turn south; and while Cromwell held off Goring, Lord Manchester stormed Lincoln. Then, with the eastern Midlands temporarily in the safe hands of Parliament, Manchester and Cromwell headed north to join the Fairfaxes and the Scots in front of York. There was no particular unity of spirit among the various Parliamentary commanders now joined together there; they included the gentle Manchester, ever ready to listen to more experienced men, the Fairfaxes who were very much on their home ground, and the veteran leader of the Scots, Alexander Leslie, Earl of Leven who had fought under Wallenstein and Gustavus Adolphus. But they were emphatically agreed that it would be fatal to allow Rupert’s army to join up with that of Newcastle. At the same time York itself could not be taken despite a rash and ill-organized attempt by Crawford to do so.
When the news came that Rupert, a sweeping victory at Newark under his belt, had relieved the gallant Countess of Derby in her defence at Lathom House, and was even now at Knaresborough, it was clear that the unthinkable had indeed to be thought of – Rupert was in a prime position to relieve York and join up with Newcastle’s army. With Rupert scudding northwards like an angry wind it was clearly too late for the Parliamentary army to receive the expected reinforcements from Sir John Meldrum sent to secure the town of Manchester, or from the Earl of Denbigh. Since the Parliamentarians believed that Rupert had eighteen thousand men (in fact he probably had no more than fourteen thousand) it was decided to withdraw from York itself, even if it meant jettisoning valuable siege materials. They would concentrate on staving off his advance from the fatal conjunction with the further forces of Newcastle. It was therefore decided to straddle the main Knaresborough–York road, in a position just by Long Marston. Rupert also took into account the size of his opponents’ armies, and he therefore decided on a circling manoeuvre of great spirit and extraordinary speed, or, as Whitelocke put it, ‘fetching a compass about with his arms’,49 to relieve York from the north-west, instead of advancing up the main road. The venture was a success. While Parliament waited in some confusion as to Rupert’s whereabouts, York was relieved and Newcastle’s men in a position to join those of Rupert.
But Rupert had not finished with Parliament with this highly successful coup. Taking advantage of a rather ambiguous despatch from the King, which discussed York being relieved in the same sentence as beating the rebels’ armies, although the latter venture was not necessarily intended to follow on the former, Rupert decided to interpret his orders precisely as if it were.50 With scarcely a pause from the relief of the city, and urging Newcastle on, he decided to pursue the Parliamentary armies now falling back south to Tadcaster. As yet unaware of what had transpired, the Parliamentary army in the shape of its rearguard under Cromwell, Fairfax and Leslie, found itself within sight of Rupert’s advance guard of horse. The intentions of the Parliamentary rearguard had been to cover the retreat of Leven and the foot who were by now nearing Tadcaster. But clearly Rupert presented no idle threat. An anguished message was sent to Leven to turn and come back. By four o’clock in the afternoon Leven and the foot were drawn up with the rest of the Parliamentary forces. On the other side, the Royalist order of battle also was complete. The two sides faced each other across the moor of Long Marston.
Of the many rivalries which existed between the two sides, Roundhead and Cavalier, there was one interesting one to be determined between the two redoubtable cavalry leaders, Rupert and Lieutenant-General Cromwell. The contrast between the two men could hardly have been greater. Rupert, twenty years Cromwell’s junior, was not only ‘very sparkish’ in his dress, a true Cavalier in the romantic sense of the word, but also in the prime of his fame, the victor of Powick Bridge, Cirencester, Chalgrove Field, Bristol and only recently Newark; his recent daring tactics only enhanced his glamour. Cromwell at forty-five was, true enough, as yet unbeaten as a cavalry leader, but had taken part in no colossal engagement and his men, chosen by his unorthodox methods, were still largely an unknown quantity. Yet among his Puritan contemporaries his victories had already been marked as a sign of divine favour: ‘It was observed God was with him,’ wrote Joshua Sprigge, ‘and he began to be renowned.’ And his military reputation had already excited the imagination of Rupert himself. ‘Is Cromwell there?’ he enquired eagerly, before the battle, of a captured trooper from the Eastern Association. The man was later released and told the story to his own side.51
‘By God’s grace he shall have fighting enough’ was Cromwell’s grim comment when he was told of Rupert’s interest. It remained to be seen whether at Marston Moor God’s grace – or its more worldly manifestations such as the new training of the army of the Eastern Association – would enable Parliament to fight off the reckless but brilliant Rupert.