Cromwell

by Antonia Fraser

  Association with one group may have led him to a union within the other, since it has been suggested that it may have been at the house of Oliver’s aunt, Joan Barrington, daughter of old Sir Henry Cromwell, who was a neighbour of Sir James Bourchier in the country, that he first met his future wife.5 The Bourchiers were in fact a family much like Oliver’s own, if they lacked his original Welsh streak, and Sir James’s country house was at Little Stambridge, Essex. The move from city to country had been made in the previous generation by Sir James’s father, as Stewards and even Cromwells had originally moved from the City, but in this case the connexions were tightly preserved: Sir James in his City life was a prosperous fur-dealer and leather-dresser, who had been knighted in 1610. He had married a Suffolk lady, Frances Crane, and Elizabeth, at twenty-three two years older than Oliver himself, was the eldest of their six children. It was a secure background – probably more financially secure than Oliver’s own, a fact which certainly gives the lie to Heath’s wilder stories, since from a vantage point of superior affluence Sir James Bourchier would hardly have allowed his daughter to marry an unrepentant reprobate.

  In his marriage jointure, suitable for such a lady of established wealth, Oliver engaged to give his wife property which, with all the tithes included, came to about .Ł40 a year; there was a heavy penalty for nonperformance, the witness to the contract being another leather-seller, Thomas Morley, probably a relation of his wife’s on her mother’s side. The marriage took place at St Giles’s Church, Cripplegate, which lay within the City walls near the west end of London Wall and was the local church of the Bourchiers’ town house. The Marriage Register recording the ceremony is still in existence (although now deposited in the City Records Office at the Guildhall Library) 6 and the church itself – where incidentally the poet John Milton was to be buried half a century after this quiet marriage – is still visible in a much restored state.

  Elizabeth Cromwell was then young, rounded and pretty. She must have been an appealing creature, and not merely because, as the mother of Dorothy Osborne, that witty Royalist young lady, was fond of observing, there is a beauty that everyone “that was not deformed” has once in their lives before the bloom is off. The miniature of Elizabeth by Samuel Cooper, painted when this bloom was long since gone, still shows an attractive, rather plump little face, with prettiness of a sort much apparent. The eyes are huge, wide apart, and engagingly drooping; there are still dimples in the cheeks; the mouth is faintly humorous and a little resigned. The whole expression has a kind of intelligent secret amusement, while the features in themselves are almost faun-like. It is surely no coincidence that Oliver’s favourite daughter Bettie was also the child who looked most like her mother.

  Later as Protectress Joan, as the satirists nicknamed her,* (* By the mid-seventeenth century the name Joan was intended as an insult; for although earlier ladies of class had borne it, such as Oliver’s aunt, Joan Barrington, and his sister who died as a baby, about this time the name was coming to be used as the generic name for a type of female rustic – witness Shakespeare’s reference to “greasy Joan” keeling her pot.) she was the subject of much unkind mockery. On a minor scale, her character received the same opprobrious attentions from the scandalmongers as that of her husband. Leaving aside the more ferocious accusations (“drunkenness and gallantry”) which are quite unproved, the commonest complaint made against her was that she was totally limited to the conventional attitudes of the housewife, and a cheese-paring one at that. Heath for example accused her of unnecessary stinginess as Lady Protectress: she would “nicely and finickally tax the expensive unthriftiness (as she said) of the Other Woman who lived there before her”.7 But while the allusion to the extravagances of Queen Henrietta Maria certainly points to a careful soul who believed economy, even in Royalty, to be a necessary virtue, there was more to Mrs Cromwell than mere household management.

  For one thing she was also capable of managing her husband upon occasion, like any other wife of a busy – perhaps over-busy – man. In 1650, when Cromwell was absent in Scotland, she wrote him a firm letter beginning “My Dearest”, wondering how he could blame her for not corresponding more often “when I have sent three for one: I cannot but think they are miscarried” she added, with a gentle hint of irony. There were touching words of love which followed, a tribute to over thirty years of close marriage; how she submitted herself to the providence of God which separated them, and yet wistfully: “Truly my life is but half a life in your absence …’ The final note was somewhat tarter. Mrs Cromwell suggested that her husband should at least find some time to write to his friend the Lord Chief Justice “of whom I have often put you in mind”, the Speaker of the House, the President of the Council of State, ’” and other useful grandees: “Indeed, my dear, you cannot think the wrong you do yourself in the want of a letter, though it were but seldom.” And so she signed herself, in all faithfulness, “Eliz. Cromwell”.8 Clearly the lady had spirit, as well as shrewdness.

  As for her lack of dignity, it is true that Lucy Hutchinson, that sharpeyed female observer who could never quite resist the greatness of Oliver, remained contemptuous of his wife. But the other side to Elizabeth Cromwell’s character, the dreamier less practical streak, consisted in fact of a rather endearing naivete. She collected portraits of foreign Royalties, and wondered if Queen Christina of Sweden might not do as a second wife for Oliver – if anything happened to her. She was even said to have hankerings after the dispossessed Royal Family of England, and fear for her own children in the high position they could not sustain. All this was nothing if not sympathetic and pointed to an old-fashioned, even romantic disposition. Later, as her husband’s position improved, she was described as having, unlike her more adaptable daughters, no taste in dress. Her hood for example was clapped on like a hat, without any art to it, no “ensconcing and entrenching it double and single in redoubts and hornworks”. But Oliver had hardly married her for her knowledge of such fashionable refinements, being himself notoriously indifferent to the details of dress. Most important of all, her domestication, her frugality, her preoccupation with hearth and home conceived as a Christian duty to God and her husband, were not in themselves qualities which the husbands concerned have ever found markedly unpleasant. The onlookers who derided such an insignificant woman only saw half the game. It was Oliver Cromwell who enjoyed the loving loyalty, the dedicated personal support, and more tangibly – but none the less agreeably – the comforts of a well-ordered household. It was his enemies who called her Joan, and likened her to an “ape in scarlet”.9

  Undoubtedly Oliver loved his wife devotedly both in principle and in practice for the whole of their long years of married life. In principle as a Christian husband, in Thomas le Wright’s words he “was always exceeding loving towards her that had the Honour of his Bed”. In practice, he still hastened to write to her after they had been married for thirty-one years for the most loverlike of reasons: “My Dearest, I could not satisfy to omit this post, although I have not much to write; yet indeed I love to write to my dear, who is very much in my heart.” Immediately after his greatest victory at Dunbar, Oliver wrote to Elizabeth: “Thou art dearer to me than any creature” and there is no reason to doubt his word. It was one of the maxims of a popular Puritan handbook of the time on family life – Daniel Rogers’s Matrimoniall Honour that “the benefit of the Bed” was one of the chief practical advantages to be expected from marriage because it resulted in “fitness of body and mind thereby purchased, freely to walk with God and to discharge duties of calling without distraction and annoyance”.10 Elizabeth, by presenting Oliver with this benefit, as also with unshatterable serenity in his most intimate life, certainly left him free to pursue his public life without the distractions and annoyances which might have been supplied by a showier but also a more egocentric helpmate. It is hard to conclude that Oliver really made such a bad bargain.

  A further importance is given to the date of Oliver Cromwell’s marriage by the f
act that there is no further evidence for his “prodigalities”.* (* Two entries in the Register of St John’s Church, Huntingdon, dated 1621 and 1628, in which Cromwell was rebuked for ill-doing and did penance for it have been shown to be later entries in another hand. Even if (as S. R. Gardiner believed) they represent some authentic local tradition, they are just as likely to concern some tithing misdemeanour as a personal one. The nature of the wrong is not specified.) This in turn makes it easier to evaluate these earlier indulgences which can have had only shallow roots since they were so easily pulled up with the arrival of family responsibility. Youthful intemperance being neither particularly uncommon nor particularly culpable, one might profitably compare Oliver’s situation in this respect to that of John Bunyan who exclaimed: “Until I came to the state of marriage, I was the very ringleader in all manner of vice and ungodliness” – referring mainly to swearing and merry-making.11 Neither Bunyan’s nor Cromwell’s early “ungodliness” would probably have achieved much status in the category of any true debauchee.

  It was the quiet life of a country town, a town so close to the fields that it merged into the life of a country-dweller, that Oliver and Elizabeth Cromwell led on their return to Huntingdon. This life was enhanced by the birth of their first child, Robert, the following year, in October 1621. To the firstborn was added in quick succession Oliver, born in February 1623, Bridget in August 1624, Richard in October 1626, Henry in January 1628 and Elizabeth in July 1629. Presumably Oliver was now discovering, as his biographer Flecknoe put it, that the government of a family has “a certain analogy with the government of a Commonwealth”. It is in fact to the baptism of Richard that we owe the first surviving letter of Oliver Cromwell, dated 14 October 1626: it is a request to a Cambridge friend, a man a little older than himself, Henry Downhall, who had been a Fellow at St John’s College when Oliver was at Sidney Sussex, to act as godfather. Downhall was now a clergyman, rector at Tofts in Cambridgeshire. “Loving Sir” wrote Oliver, apologizing for being too busy to ride over with the invitation himself, “The day of your trouble is Thursday next. Let me entreat your company on Wednesday.” Cromwell continues that he is only too well aware that he is further encroaching upon his friend for new favours by the request, rather than repaying him for “the love he has already found”. Nevertheless he is confident that Downhall’s patience and goodness cannot be exhausted by his “friend and servant Oliver Cromwell”.12 This letter, written in the neatly flowing but tightly spaced hand-writing which Cromwell preserved for most of the rest of his life until ill-health intervened, besides showing him up as a conscientious father, also demonstrates already something of the elaborate care which he was to take over his friendships in later life, with its deliberate balance of Downhall’s goodness and Cromwell’s indebtedness. But by the time the nest was cosily completed by the birth of the last of the six children of Cromwell’s “first family” precious Bettie who was to be his pet – Oliver’s circumstances had changed. Not only that but England itself had changed. It was time for Cromwell’s career to follow that of his country more closely.

  * * *

  In 1625 the death of the old Scottish King, James i – that unlikely product of the union between Mary Queen of Scots and Lord Darnley – was followed by the accession of a very different-natured ruler. It was not to be the glamorous and admired Henry Prince of Wales, the elder son whose accession it had once been thought would bring about a golden age, but the boy that Prince Henry himself had once jokingly nicknamed “the archbishop”. The new King, Charles I of England, Scotland and Ireland, was now aged twenty-four, small, earnest, dignified, passionate for the monarchy as his father had been, but with a new kind of royal passion, bred in an English Court, not amidst the power struggles of the sixteenthcentury Scottish nobility which had educated James. His unhappy, turbulent upbringing, his transference to alien England at the age of thirty-six had all endowed James with plentiful opportunities for observing the workings of men’s minds. Whatever his own theories, James had profited from the experience; James, in the Scottish phrase, was canny. King Charles on the other hand was definitely not canny.

  Time would show that his philosophy of monarchy stood like a rock in the waters of others’ arguments: when the waves receded, the rock still remained, unaltered in position. In the meantime even his coronation was perhaps rather unfairly but certainly presciently marked by an earthquake; and shortly after his coronation the former “archbishop” married a French princess, Henrietta Maria, sister of King Louis xin. Although the real period of influence of this vivacious, loving, managing little Queen lay ahead, her religion – she was a Roman Catholic – already caused disquiet among Charles’s many subjects who dreaded the spread of “Popery”.

  By 1628 the immense financial demands of the new King’s foreign policy, at this moment taking the form of an expensive quarrel with France as well as an existing war with Spain, were already compelling him to summon the third Parliament of his reign. The two previous ones had solved neither the problem of his supplies for himself and his favouritecum-minister, Buckingham, nor the problem of his exactions for his subjects. For this Parliament Oliver Cromwell, now aged nearly twentynine, was elected one of the two “burgesses” or members for the town of Huntingdon. The other was James Montagu, son of the Earl of Manchester, and a member of that family which had in fact quite recently acquired Hinchingbrooke from Sir Oliver Cromwell. Among the witnesses to the “Parliamentary Indenture” as the document (now in the Borough Records) which attested the election was known, was once more the Puritan schoolmaster Dr Thomas Beard.

  It was not Cromwell’s first recorded participation in Parliamentary affairs: before his marriage in 1620 he had been witness to another “Indenture” for returning the burgesses of Huntingdon. Indeed in no outward sense did his election to Parliament appear a revolutionary step for the sober country gentleman Cromwell had now become: “living reserv’d, austere, as if his highest plot to plant the bergamot” as Andrew Marvell later described it. One might even go further and say that Cromwell’s return to Parliament was positively predictable, in view of the amazing number of close relations – estimated at nine cousins 13 – he was to find beside him on the benches of the House of Commons, on his first arrival there in March 1628, including Wallers, Whalleys, Hammonds, Waltons and Ingoldsbys. But if the existence of a familial network made the atmosphere of the House of Commons seem in one sense friendly, in every other sense the air was charged with electric currents of violence and hostility.

  Abroad, the Dutch revolt against their Spanish overlords had kindled the imaginations of many connoisseurs of political liberty, the effects being felt particularly in England not only because the shores of the Netherlands were so close, but also because there were close links between English and Dutch Protestants. The fortunes of the Protestant League, under the great Swedish military hero-prince Gustavus Adolphus, were followed in Britain with eager enthusiasm. At home however the situation if undeniably stormy was not outwardly revolutionary. For most of his subjects Charles Stuart was the one distinctive ruler of the state, marked out from all other claimants to rule by the unique possession of his kingship. The Bishop of Bath and Wells raised the subject in a sermon before Charles’s first Parliament- “for though there be many ‘pillars’, yet there is but unu: Rex, one King, one great and centre Pillar; and all the rest in a kingdom do but ‘bear up under and about him’.”14 Such a concept of monarchy had something mystical about it; the extent and nature of this mysticism would be disputed as it increased.

  It was however at this point the royal prerogative, those special powers of the King beyond his powers when acting together with Parliament, which was the bone of contention, rather than the more extreme theory of Divine Right. This theory, which claimed for the King the right to make laws alone without Parliament, only seems to have been held effectively by James i: the general Royalist point of view under his son was considerably less audacious, and postulated merely that since in every gov
ernment there must be some power above the law, in a monarchy such supremacy clearly lay with the King. As a result he was free to use his prerogative or special powers in certain prescribed respects, as well as more vaguely when the general welfare of the kingdom demanded it. The justification of any extraordinary new expedients to raise money, then, lay with the past and long-established usage. They were merely additional taxes to be applied when the kingdom was in danger, much as the Tudors had imposed such taxes. Charles would admit nothing innovatory about them in theory.

  But to others, the whole idea of the royal prerogative was obscurely dangerous, to be regarded with open suspicion. It was all very well for the King’s prerogative to give him special rights in the Common-Law courts, rights as head of State including the making of war and peace, supremacy over the Church and jurisdiction in the conciliar courts like the Star Chamber. The trouble lay with the further undefined area of the prerogative, mentioned above, which gave the King the opportunity to judge for himself when the national situation might require extra (royal) measures, and to apply those measures without recourse to Parliament. Such a practical denigration of the role of Parliament, only too visible in King Charles’s actions in the first years of his reign, occurred at a moment when Parliament itself was flexing its muscles after the more passive years of the sixteenth century. But by 1628 no official theory of opposition to the King had been worked out. Like the King himself, the Parliamentary opposers clung in theory to the past: while the King claimed to be acting exactly as his ancestors had done, Parliament opposed him on the grounds that such practices had not been seen in England before. It is therefore one of the paradoxes of this revolutionary period in English history that both sides began by appealing to “the good old days” for justification.