Cromwell

by Antonia Fraser

  The English had plenty of contact with the unfortunate settlers in Ireland from which to derive first-hand horror stories. In the English House of Commons of 1641, most of the members had “friends and kindred” in Ireland, as D’Ewes wrote in his diary, and there were those who sat for English constituencies but had homes in Ireland, as well as those who had interests in the Londonderry or Ulster plantations. On a lower social level the tale of distress also spread to fill the minds of the English with sympathy – and prejudice. One Alice Stonier from Leek, Staffordshire, granted eightpence a week by the local magistrates for the upkeep of herself and her family (three could be placed in “good service” but two were too young “to do anything but beg”) must have been typical of many. Having followed her drover husband to Ireland, she had found herself robbed, her house burned around her ears, and expelled with nothing to cover herself except a ragged woollen cloak; the Stonier family had had to lie out in the chilly autumnal fields of Ireland until they reached Dublin. Here their troubles only increased, for Thomas Stonier was pressed into the Army, where he was subsequently killed, and poor Alice left with no option but to return to her native land for succour.17

  In all these accounts, much emphasis was laid on two particular aspects of the rising. In the first place, the sheer barbarity of the crimes struck a genuine chill of horror into the hearts of the English: could such a people who had roasted men and eaten them alive, sent women out to sea in leaky boats to drown, murdered children in a disgusting manner before their parents’ eyes, held competitions as to who could hack deepest into a living body, really hold any pretensions towards civilization, or indeed the consideration due from one civilized people to another? And this was to say nothing of the comparatively minor horrors of women ravished, English prisoners fed on garbage and offal, and the outraged sensitivities of one English Protestant woman, compelled against her will to listen to the Mass. It was a point that was to be of importance in eight years’ time when such consideration might have been given – but was not – by the English to the Irish people.

  Secondly, the role of the Roman Catholic priests in the rising, far from being underplayed, was heavily underlined, together with their “superstitious practices”, which it was felt enabled them to spur on the murderers still further. Stories were told of priests telling their flocks it was a mortal sin to shelter an English man and that the death of a Protestant was a meritorious action which would spare them future sufferings in Purgatory. With these horrible lurking shadows across the memory of the recent past, it was cruelly understandable how Oliver Cromwell, on his first arrival in Dublin in August 1649, should refer to “the barbarous and blood-thirsty Irish” in his first public speech. And it was understandable too how this same speech should have been described as “sweet and plausible” by the many English and Anglo-Irish gathered round him with his soldiers., to cheer.18

  A more immediate consequence of the news of the Irish rising of 1641 reaching England was its effect on the presentation of those Parliamentary grievances known as the Grand Remonstrance. This enormous and wideranging attack on the position of the monarchy as a whole, was about to be discussed by the Commons on i November, the very day on which the story of the massacre reached them. Pym was thus presented with a new opportunity to cast doubts on the credit of the King. Could the man be trusted with an army who only the year before had been plotting to use the Irish army against his English subjects? The see-saw of popularity began to weight back once more towards the side of Parliament, the connexion of Charles and the Irish, in the minds of men at least, being too cruelly close to be ignored. The Grand Remonstrance, to be passed by the Commons on 22 November was a bone chewed over fiercely by Puritan and Royalist dogs alike. In the breadth and detail of its demands to the King it was a truly amazing document, ranging from controversial but smaller topics such as the Fens once more and the abuse of the Commission of Sewers (Cromwell was named to “farther explain the Commission of Sewers”) to the thoroughly innovatory claim that the King should only choose such advisers as were approved by Parliament.19

  Cromwell, caught up in the excitement of something which was clearly revolutionary in spirit, even if the appeal to former liberties remained constantly on the lips of its exponents, was as a result sufficiently cut off from popular opinion not to appreciate the clamorous discussions such a document would provoke. When the opponents of the bill asked for a delay to consider its charges further, Cromwell was amongst those who were irritated at it being granted, and asked Lord Falkland on 20 November why the decision was being put off- “for that day would quickly have determined it”. When Falkland replied that there would not have been time enough, since there would certainly be a prolonged debate, Cromwell’s answer was to predict that the debate would be “a very sorry one” since he was convinced that few would oppose the petition.20

  Cromwell was not an accurate political prophet. The opposition to the petition was long-drawn-out and bitter; and particular clauses such as that concerning the choosing of the King’s advisers turned some wavering Episcopalians into Royalists. The House of Lords, many of whose members, either bishops or Catholics, were themselves attacked by it, were now gone over convincingly to the side of the King. When Hampden brought forward a motion – which was finally passed – to print the text of the Grand Remonstrance, and thus in effect appeal to the country, it seemed to many hitherto undecided the ultimate denial of the King’s ancient rights. It was on the occasion of the passing of this motion, however, that Cromwell whispered his famous aside to Falkland on the subject of emigration alluded to earlier: “if the Remonstrance had been rejected he would have sold all he had the next morning, and never have seen England more; and he knew there were many other honest men of the same resolution”. Falkland reported that the remark was made with some solemnity. It certainly showed the measure of Cromwell’s own passionate involvement in the Grand Remonstrance.

  On the King’s return from Scotland on 25 November he showed that he well understood where his best weapons against Pym lay. While the Remonstrance was already “abroad in print” – a remarkable departure from practice – the King also appealed to the people by promising reform of the Church, including an investigation of the presence of bishops in the House of Lords; but he declined to surrender his “natural liberty” in choosing his own advisers. The last months of 1641 were lived out in political ferment as King and Parliament indulged in a tug-of-war for popular support, the results of which were by no means a foregone conclusion. The City of London, for example, long believed to have been hostile to Charles from the start, has recently been shown to have held relatively favourable opinions, granting him useful loans in 1640 and 1641. The vital City elections in which the “new men” of the Parliamentary party gained power, and thus handed the City’s allegiance over to Pym, only took place in January 1642.21

  Cromwell’s part in all this jockeying was to nose out individual cases where peers or bishops were abusing their privileges to help the King, and call them to the attention of the House. One instance was the case of Lord Arundel who had written a letter to the borough of Arundel for the election of a new burgess there. He was following an immemorial custom, if not a right, but his action was now made the subject of a Parliamentary committee on which Cromwell sat with Pym, Hyde, Falkland and others, as a result of which an order was brought to stop this and other similar elections. In particular Cromwell revealed himself as one in whom the fear of the appeal to force – by the King, and probably via Ireland – was ever present. In a debate at the end of December he joined in a general request to remove the Earl of Bristol from the Council on the grounds that in “the late Army Plot” Bristol had persuaded the King to put the Army into a state of dangerous readiness, “a posture which could have no ordinary meaning in it, because the said army was then in its due posture of standing still”. The next day Cromwell pursued the matter of a certain Owen O’Connell, who had warned Dublin of the intended rising, and as a result had been rewa
rded by Parliament with a promise of a place in command of a company of Dragoons; the place had not materialized, and Cromwell was among the two members named to go to the Lord Lieutenant and find out why not.22

  It was a few days after this, on 4 January 1642, that the King’s patience snapped and he made his historic attempt to surprise those Five Members whom he considered the ringleaders in these prolonged and treasonous attempts to wrench away his royal authority and thus overthrow the monarchy. The Five Members were John Pym, John Hampden, Sir Arthur Haselrig, Denzil Holies and William Strode. Holies had been one of those who had held down the Speaker in 1629 and did not allow the fact that he had been Strafford’s brother-in-law to prevent him becoming a vigorous speaker against abuses of the constitution. Strode had been imprisoned from 1629 until 1640 for his part in the same incident over the Speaker, after which he refused to answer to the Star Chamber for words spoken in Parliament. His sufferings had made him “a firebrand” according to D’Ewes, and “one of the fiercest men of the party” according to Clarendon. Having instructed the Attorney-General to impeach the Five Members of treason, Charles himself rode in a flurry down to the House in order to demand their arrest. Without accompaniment save for his nephew the Elector Palatine, he walked forward to the Chamber only to find that the five birds had been warned of his approach and had fled to the City. It was now to his King, seated in his own Chair, that Mr Speaker Lenthall, asked for some sign of the missing Members, gave the momentous reply, a mixture of reverence and defiance: “May it pleasure your Majesty, I have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place but as the House is pleased to direct me, whose servant I am here…”23

  * * *

  Thus the King departed from the House of Commons and then from London itself, never to return until the time of his death. To the committed Parliamentarians such as Cromwell the personal battle with Charles was already engaged, although eight months were to run before the raising of the King’s standard at Nottingham and certain negotiations between King and Parliament still continued. In the meantime both sides desperately searched about for the materials of war, should it break out, in a country singularly unprepared – and on the whole unwilling – to provide such combustibles. There is no more vivid proof of the violent attitudes adopted by Pym and his party than the tenor of a sermon preached by Pym’s friend, Stephen Marshall, before Parliament on 23 February 1642, the first of that series which was to be combined with a fast on the last Wednesday of the month for the next seven years.24 Throughout the seventeenth century there had been a build-up in the violence of the preachers’ sermons, as spiritual conflict gradually became confused with physical engagement. Stephen Marshall’s call was for war, as his hearers could hardly fail to appreciate, and it was the “neuters”, those who would not engage themselves, who bore the brunt of his denunciation. His outburst, later printed under the apt title Meroz Cursed, was preached in the same form up and down the country, to become a famous set-piece of the period. It took its theme from a verse of the Book of Judges: “Curse ye, Meroz, said the angel of the Lord, curse ye bitterly the inhabitants thereof; because they came not to the help of the Lord, To the help of the Lord against the Mighty.” The crime of the people of Meroz had been to fail to join in a particular Old Testament battle, but in general Marshall’s message could be summed up simply enough in the text: “Cursed is everyone that withholds his hands from shedding of blood.” A blessed woman on the contrary, in Marshall’s view, was Jael, the slayer of Sisera, ready with her hammer to smite the enemy through the temples. In view of the language, and the clear call to force, it was hardly surprising that Clarendon later indicted these preachers of Marshall’s school for being “the only trumpets of war and incendiaries towards rebellion” instead of messengers of peace, as should have been their function.25

  Cromwell however was one of those who had no need of the trumpet of war to awaken his sleeping senses. It was he who on 14 January, in response to a demand by Pym that the House should go into committee on the state of the kingdom, on the pretext that there was danger from papists, added further that there should be a committee to consider means for putting the kingdom in a posture of defence. This was duly ordered. At the same time the House ordered that the sheriffs should secure all arms and suppress all unlawful assemblies. When the King refused to give up control of the militia, the Tower of London and the forts, the Commons countered with an Act for “the better raising and levying of soldiers for the present defence of the kingdoms of England and Ireland”. At the news of the King’s refusal, Cromwell was amongst those who offered money for defence, in his case Ł300 for the succour of Dublin. On 24 February, the day after Queen Henrietta Maria left for the Continent with the royal jewels in the hopes of raising support for her beleaguered husband, the Committee of the House for Irish Affairs set up fourteen members to be commissioners for the speeding and despatching of Irish affairs. Pym, Holies, Sir Henry Vane the younger were all included in this body, and so was Oliver Cromwell.

  Even if Clarendon’s bitter verdict on the Parliamentary party is not accepted – that “they fell to raising moneys under pretence of the relief of Ireland” – undoubtedly the organization of this allegedly Irish-orientated venture, the need to raise money and troops, gave them an excellent opportunity to make their own preparations for the conflict. The theory of it however was still the old one of diluting the menace of Catholicism in Ireland by good healthy English Protestant settlement, or as The Declaration of Both Houses put it, “the country will be replanted with many noble families of this nation, and of the protestant religion”. A group of Adventurers were set up to forward this, the suggestion coming in February 1642 from a group of London merchants who approached the House of Commons with a scheme by which the Irish rebellion would be put down by troops financed by themselves, at the end of which “they may have such satisfaction out of the rebels’ estates… as shall be thought reasonable”.26

  The members of the House of Commons were not slow to contribute to this promising scheme, which seemed likely to combine spiritual good works (the extirpation of the wicked Catholic faith) with material welfare (Irish land in return for their money). And the Oath of Kilkenny, instituted by the heads of the Catholic Church in Ireland in May 1642 to draw all the Irish into a league whose main object was to restore the Catholic faith in that country, merely underlined the necessity for such a project. The whole business had a decidedly Parliamentary slant, with Royalists accounting for only just under nine per cent, and it was also significant that the future Independents contributed twice as heavily as the Presbyterians.

  In fact the point has been made that the largeness of their subscriptions hardly supports the theory that their resistance to the Crown was based on their declining fortunes. Cromwell himself was right in the thick of it: he paid a total of just over .Ł2,000, a handsome sum by seventeenthcentury values, in three instalments, two of Ł600 in April and one of Ł850 in July.27 In return he was granted land in the barony of English. For many members of the House of Commons, an initial reaction to Irish horrors was now joined by the rather different emotions produced by having a financial stake in the land settlement. Nevertheless, despite both these aspects of the raising of the Irish relief, there was still something to be said for Clarendon’s point of view that it was all ultimately aimed at an English army: on 30 July the treasurers of the fund were asked to hand over Ł100,000 by the Commons, which was never repaid.

  As the restless months of 1642 wore on, as the Lords-Lieutenant and the Justices of the Peace began impressment, and the militia was called out for drill and exercise, many hearts became heavy. “Oh that the sweet Parliament would come with the olive branch in its mouth… We are so many frighted people” wrote his cousin Mrs Eure to the MP Ralph Verney. But Verney replied sternly: “Peace and our liberties are the only thing we aim at; till we have peace I am sure we can enjoy no liberties, and without our liberties I shall not heartily desire peace.”28 It was an attitude Cromwell c
ertainly shared, and his point of view was probably even closer to that of Marshall: to avoid the shedding of blood might actually be negligent towards the Lord. And yet it would be a dangerous over-simplification to suggest that Oliver Cromwell, any more than the rest of his associates, had any clear, formulated notion of what they really wanted from the war, should war ensue.