Cromwell

by Antonia Fraser

  Simon had done extremely well in the time; although the speed at which it had all been rushed through led to a more carefully executed seal a year later, with the map details clearer and a change of date, the other seals now altered such as the Seal for the Court of the Common Bench, the Seal of the Duchy of Lancaster and Parliament’s Seal, all followed roughly the same pattern as the Great Seal. The mace was changed in due course, the King’s arms giving way to those of England and Ireland; for the crosses round its rim, oak trees were inserted which gave a Royalist newsletter an opportunity to observe bitterly that since Absalom had been hanged on a tree, the Commonwealth had certainly chosen a very proper emblem of rebellion. Even the new liveries of the watermen who plied the members of Parliament on the Thames had to be discussed, and on the barge cloths the Royal arms had to be taken out and those of the Commonwealth put in.2

  On a higher level there was the problem of the coinage, for money was one of the immediate necessities of the regime. An order of 13 February provided for a series of coins of some elegance, variations of a design which included the arms of England and Ireland, a palm and laurel branch, and the two inscriptions, The Commonwealth of England and God With Us. Some things took longer: it was not until February of the next year that orders were given to take down the King’s arms from all public places and substitute those of the Commonwealth, the work to be overseen by JPs and churchwardens. About the same time Parliament realized that the good ships Prince, Mary and Elizabeth must be re-christened if they were to serve fittingly as bastions of the Commonwealth’s defence. A new ship built later in 1649 by the Pett brothers was called less royally the President. Yet in general, the outward novelty came swiftly and remorselessly for all to see: by the summer Mercurius Pragmaticus was reflecting that “these new Christians have taken care, that old things must pass away, and all things become new, to maintain the new device of the Republic … by which means”, it continued sadly, “old England now is grown perfectly new, and we in another world”.3

  But there could be profit as well as pleasure in some aspects of the new iconoclasm. Charles Stuart had richly indulged his own taste for all that was most exquisite, most kingly in the arts; the appurtenances of his courtly style left behind were enough to provide a King’s ransom – or, as it was now hopefully suggested, to fill a Commonwealth’s treasury. That at least was the intention behind the elaborate sales which were now set in train of the dead King’s pictures, tapestries, books, jewels and medals. As Mercurius Elenticus wrote of the order of 20 February to bring this about “these covetous horse-leeches must now sell crown and all”. In an unpleasant pun, it suggested that they should have saved the “hangings” for themselves. But it was financial need, not furious Philistinism, which led to the breaking up of this incomparable royal collection. A team of trustees was appointed to locate, inventory, value and also secure from embezzlement the royal goods. Under even such dire circumstances, there were men who stood out for the preservation of the old values. In October 1651 John Dury was to issue a furious protest at the state of the former King’s library, books lying everywhere on the floor, a prey not only to rain and dust but also to rats and mice. Whitelocke claimed to be personally responsible for saving some of the books and medals from St James’s from being sold overseas; Milton later was entrusted with the task of sorting them.4

  Ironically enough, some rich objects owed their preservation to the gro wing self-confidence and taste for luxury of the new regime as the year wore on. Certain tapestries were excepted from sales and put to use decorating the official apartments of the members of the new Council. .Ł10,000 worth of the royal belongings had been designated as reserved for the service of the State. Of the King’s estates, quite a considerable list was kept for the Commonwealth’s use including St James’s Palace and Park and Windsor Castle. This enjoyment by the new rulers of England of the privileges endowed by the old should in truth be welcomed; however distasteful to the Royalists and whether inspired by genuine taste or mere self-importance, it had at least the effect of holding back some precious works of art from the otherwise cataclysmic sale. Cardinal Mazarin was said to be sniffing round the possibilities of artistic acquisition before even the King was buried. Certainly de Croulle, the humbler representative left behind by the departing French Ambassador, was soon busy buying for the Cardinal.5 Later much of the returning Ambassador Bordeaux’s time in the 1650s would be spent in the negotiations for such tasteful Gallic enrichment.

  The accumulation of such changes, and indeed the preoccupation of contemporary

  reports with details of seals and arms, all reveal the strange ad hoc nature of this new Commonwealth.* (* The word, originally meaning the public welfare or general good, had come by the beginning of the sixteenth century to mean the body politic or the State, especially viewed as a body in which the whole people had a voice or interest; by the seventeenth century it was also coming to designate a republic.6) It all had to be done quickly, and unlike the formation of the body of English Common Law, there was to be no looking back at precedents since every single thing performed was without precedent. The really radical changes such as the formal abolition of the monarchy, had to wait for 17 March. The Commonwealth itself was not formally enacted by Parliament until May, although there was no actual constitutional vacuum after the King’s death, since the Commons had officially made itself the highest authority in the land several weeks earlier. As it was, even the House of Lords was not abandoned without argument; many members of the Commons wanted to keep it as a purely advisory body, and Cromwell, according to Ludlow, followed up his earlier defence of its position by voting for its retention in at least some form. Ludlow, believing that Cromwell was already in close touch with many of the peers, assumed that he had some further use for them “in those designs he had resolved to carry on”. But Cromwell did not get his way. On 19 March the House of Lords was officially abolished, being described by the Commons as “a great inconvenience” with the negative voice the peers sought to exercise “over the people whom they did not at all represent”; its judicial functions were swept away at the same time.7

  Elimination was one thing. Substitution was another. The clearance had indeed been dynamic. The Privy Council had gone, there were no more Exchequer and Admiralty departments, no more Star Chamber, Court of Wards, the Courts of the King’s Prerogative, for that matter no more Lord Chancellor, Chancellor of the Exchequer or Secretaries of State. What remained out of this executive holocaust was Parliament itself in the shape of the Commons (or what remained of them since Pride’s Purge), with its Speaker thus raised up as the highest person in the land; but that in itself did not solve the problem of the executive government of the kingdom, since the Commons could scarcely govern as a whole. The solution was found in a new and powerful Council of State, set up by Act of Parliament, with wide executive powers. This Council would in turn give its orders to a series of committees, of which the most prominent were destined to be those for foreign affairs, the Army and Navy and Ireland; while as for the ever urgent need for raising money there were of course also already in existence those other committees established at different points during the war for sequestration of estates or the compounding of delinquency by fines which still worked, even if they were cumbersome and often inefficient.8

  After some discussion in the Commons, the final number of the Council of State was fixed at forty-one (suggestions had ranged as high as one hundred) and nine members were made a quorum. The first selection of members was made on 14 February, Cromwell being naturally among their number, and this selection remained virtually intact in the final list. The significant exception was Ireton, who was probably dismissed for his earlier efforts to secure a dissolution of Parliament. The first acting chairman was Cromwell (although a month later John Bradshaw was elected to occupy this position) and in the tricky discussions over the form of the oath or Engagement that all members should take, Cromwell played a conciliating role. As over the House of Lords,
he felt that this delicate new Commonwealth should be supported by the widest base possible in the circumstances – which was narrow enough in all conscience. The final form of the Engagement bound members merely to support the new form of government and carry out the wishes of Parliament, whereas in the first version, suggested by Ireton, they were compelled to support specifically the High Court of Justice and the execution of the King. The original concept of the Council of State seems to have owed something to those two previous committees set up in effect to govern, the Committee of Both Kingdoms and the subsequent Committee of Safety. Parliament put in a regulation limiting the Council of State’s life to one year, and it even began by sitting in the familiar surroundings of Derby House, until in May a move to Whitehall signified the rising power of the new body.

  In its turn the judiciary as well as the executive had to be reformed to fit in with the new ways. In February a committee was appointed, including Cromwell, to revise the list of Justices of the Peace throughout England and Wales. The name of the King’s Bench Court was changed to the Upper Bench, the King’s name being omitted from the oath. Not all members of the legal profession took Whitelocke’s line of least resistance: of the twelve Common Law judges, six accepted and six refused the new commissions. When it came to the trial of the secondary delinquents who still lingered in their gaols after their royal master’s death, it was found necessary to set up a special court once more, as in the case of Charles. This new High Court of Justice had no difficulty in finding the five prisoners – Hamilton, Lord Capel, the Earl of Holland, Lord Norwich (the former Lord Goring) and Sir John Owen – guilty for all their pleas in their own defence that they had been promised quarter on surrender. Lilburne described them as being carried through the streets “like twice conquered slaves”.9 Three of the slaves died. Hamilton was refused his particular plea of Scottish nationality, but died hoping that at least his blood might be the last that would be spilt. Capel made an especially brave death; Goring and Owen were reprieved, but it was notable that both Cromwell and Ireton had voted for their deaths. So the bloodshed of the Second Civil War was finally avenged.

  In the first months of the Commonwealth, in general deeds spoke louder than words: there was not much elaboration of new political arguments to back up the regime. The first expositions, such as that of the prosecution counsel John Cook who published King Charles His Case after the execution, rested on the familiar point that any man entrusted with a sword to protect his people, who abuses this trust, becomes a public enemy and is liable for extreme punishment. The man who was to be the most famous propagandist of the Commonwealth, John Milton, published his first blast in its defence on his own initiative on 13 February. This was a pamphlet entitled The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates: Proving that it is lawful, and Hath been Held so through All Ages, for Any, who Have the Power, to Call to Account a Tyrant or Wicked King, and after Due Conviction to Depose and put him to death. Milton had been infuriated by the attacks of the Presbyterian ministers during the trial of the King, and this was his revenge. The pamphlet concentrated on the many examples of heroic tyrannicide, from the Greeks and Romans down to precedents in English history, and referred not only to the divine right of a people to judge a tyrant, but also to the “majesty and grandeur” of the deed. This pamphlet had remarkable consequences outside its contents: the new Council of State obviously needed a secretariat, and Milton, on this clear evidence of his good intentions towards the Commonwealth, was approached to become “Secretary to Foreign Tongues”,* ( * Later he came to be known as the Latin Secretary, because although he could translate French, Italian, Spanish or Portuguese, he wrote back in Latin.) possibly on Bradshaw’s recommendation. Modestly endowed with the salary of 288 a year (as opposed to about 730 for a Chief Secretary) the greatest poet of his age thus joined the service of the State, and moved late in the year into apartments in Whitehall. His precise personal relationship with Cromwell remains tantalizingly obscure: by a perverse chance, there is no mention of Milton’s name in any of Cromwell’s letters or speeches. 20 March 1649 is reliably suggested as the date on which the two men must first have met, as Milton came to take up his appointment. But it was Milton who was set to answer the increasingly popular propaganda of the King’s own alleged account of his sufferings, Eikon Basilike; unfortunately, for all Milton’s memorable phrase on the subject that he had preferred “Queen Truth to King Charles”, his counterblast Eikonoklastes lacked both the success and the sympathetic vigour of the original.10

  New theories of political allegiance would have to wait for the growth of the new Government’s stability. As it was, the blow of the King’s death had produced a kind of apathy of horror in many Royalist quarters, and proper conspiratorial opposition would also have to await another day. Anne Lady Halkett, the daughter of Charles I’s secretary, wrote of the damper which had been put upon all the designs of the Royalist party by the execution – “they were for a time like those that dreamed”. William Sancroft, a future Archbishop of Canterbury, described the useless depression of such gatherings: “When we meet, it is but to consult to what foreign plantation we shall fly …” In this attitude can be seen already the shadow of that melancholy which was to haunt the Commonwealth, the ghost of time past, pointing with a spectral finger backwards, inspiring not to action but to inaction and sad withdrawal. Even a self-confessed Puritan like Ralph Josselin, the Vicar of Earl’s Colne, wrote in his Diary: “I was much troubled with the black providence of putting the King to death; my tears were not restrained at the passages about his death …” From quite a different angle John Lilburne himself confessed to the same feelings of apathetic resignation and contemplated going to Holland. “I was in a kind of deep Muse with myself, what to do with myself; being like an old weather-beaten ship that would fain be in some harbour of peace and rest.”11

  * * *

  Faced with such a universal spirit of withdrawal, it was no wonder that at first the new rulers found little practical opposition to their enthusiastic if at times fumbling attempts to make “all things become new”. Their own mood was very different. Cromwell and Ireton were displaying cheerful vigour at the time when Lilburne temporarily sank back in weariness. Typical of the kind of rough joviality Oliver displayed at this time was the story relayed with gleeful disgust by the highly hostile Mercurius Elenticus in which he was supposed to have offered to set up the young Duke of Gloucester as a shoemaker or a brewer, stroking his head the while; Princess Elizabeth was to be given one of his own sons or Colonel Pride’s boy as a husband. When the eight-year-old Duke replied with some spirit that he hoped Parliament would on the contrary allow him some means out of his dead father’s revenues, and not put him to be apprenticed like a slave, Cromwell rejoined: “Boy, you must be an apprentice, for all your father’s revenues will not make half satisfaction for the wrong he has done the kingdom.” And so, commented the newsletter infelicitously: “Nose [Cromwell] went blowing out.”

  But it seems more likely that the incident, related second hand, was a clumsy kind of joke or an attempt at badinage than a serious attempt at the humiliation of the Royal Family through its children. Cromwell was a man personally gentle and tender towards the young. The Duke of Gloucester had at times been mentioned as his candidate for a King ruling through a regency, and in fact the youthful captives were treated kindly. Although Parliament did issue instructions to Lady Leicester who had charge of them that they should be treated with no other ceremony than was normally used for the children of a nobleman, this in itself was not a particular hardship and scarcely justified the scandalized sighs of Mercurius Pragmaticus: “Did I not tell you, ere long it would come to be plain Betty and Harry?”12 It was their father’s death, not the diminution of their rank, which worried the poor prisoners.

  Of Cromwell’s cheerful undoubting spirit at this time, Whitelocke’s picture of 24 February is even more convincing, because more substantiated. With Ireton, Cromwell joined Whitelocke for supper after a meeting of the C
ouncil of State; both men were in jolly tempers and showed themselves “extremely well pleased” with the way matters were going. They chatted on till midnight, dwelling for Whitelocke’s benefit on all the “wonderful observations of God’s providence” they had seen, in the affairs of war, the business of the Army’s coming to London and the seizing of the Members of the House – “in all of which were miraculous passages”. A remarkable indication of Cromwell’s own view that the normal round could now be happily continued was the fact that he now resumed the most detailed negotiations for the long-delayed marriage of Richard Cromwell and Dorothy Mayor. There had been some disagreement over financial terms between the two fathers, but on i February, only two days after the King’s death, Oliver was writing once more to Richard Mayor the first of a series often letters on the subject, most of them very long, with detailed injunctions on the terms of the settlement as well as some suitable reflections on the married state in itself.13

  Indeed, quite apart from the natural desire of the parent to see his offspring settled, Oliver seems to have had a particular care over Richard, whom he suspected of being a somewhat weak vessel. Dorothy had originally attracted him not by her fortune but by “the gentlewoman’s worth” as he put it. He evidently felt it particularly necessary that Dick’s soft and pliant character should be bolstered up by a partner of stable virtue. Once the marriage was safely performed – at the end of April – he formed quite a sentimental attachment for his daughter-in-law, his “Doll” as he called her, one of those paternal relationships for a charming young woman for which he had an increasing penchant as he grew older. By July he was also displaying the doting qualities of a future grandfather; having heard that the young couple had found the leisure to go on a cherry-eating expedition, he pardoned Dorothy at least for what he hoped to be a pre-natal craving – “It’s very excusable in my daughter, I hope she may have a very good pretence for it .. ,”14 Richard Mayor, the earlier adversary of his financial hagglings, became a treasured friend and confidant.