Cromwell

by Antonia Fraser

  In this see-saw which Cromwell now rode between public fame and private frustration, it is of course easier to discern manifestations of the former than of the latter. The Lord-General was greeted with hysterical glee on his return to London, with “vollies of great and small shot” to honour the conquering hero. More substantial acknowledgements of his triumph ranged from a suit of armour brought from Greenwich, to the use of Hampton Court Palace, now clawed back from the Commonwealth’s sales for his benefit; Parliament further voted him Ł4,000 a year, to which the estates of the Dowager Countess of Rutland and the Burghley and Newhall estates were devoted. With such affluence at his command, Cromwell proceeded to surrender his stipend as Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, a gesture in keeping with his general attitude to money: he had no intention of living in poverty, and considered his style a fair charge on the State. At the same time he had a sense of what was enough, and lacked altogether that less attractive instinct for unnecessary aggrandizement, that interest in money for money’s sake. Ludlow in his memoirs spoke of his “more stately behaviour” after Worcester, the choosing of new friends. But if Cromwell put on the prince, it was at least a Puritan prince. Foreign observers became understandably obsessed by Cromwell’s character after Worcester, as though comprehension of the leading man would inevitably clarify the complex English political scene they sought to report. The next year the Venetian Ambassador gave an evocative glimpse of Milton’s chief of men, whose “unpretending manner of life, remote from all display and pomp, so different from the former fashion of this kingdom” was winning him universal applause, even if he was not generally loved. In May Cromwell was described as having the first and last word in everything. A favourite comparison from foreigners was to William of Orange – “a man equally wicked and daring” – said one prejudiced source. But the feeling of a strong man, and a man at the same time of spartan simplicity, was there.2

  Within himself, however, Cromwell felt nothing like the same certainty that this picture of the strong man of the Commonwealth might imply. His early modesty, which drew commendation from the Tuscan Resident in October (“there cannot be discovered in him any ambition save for the public good”) was also the product of genuine confusion in switching from the stark atmosphere of battle to the Byzantine light of political intrigues. Peace’s victories might be no less renowned than those of war, but they were also a great deal less easy to interpret. The search for dispensations, signs of the Lord’s approval, which had so occupied not only Cromwell, but his intimates such as Owen and Ireton, would prove a much more complicated task in the future. The Resident went on to remark that Cromwell had “come to be honoured and esteemed (besides for his great valour) as a man commanded by Heaven to establish this republic by divine service”. But Heaven’s commands were now presenting him with a civilian battlefield criss-crossed with doubts and perplexities, as well as manned by more recalcitrant troops than the well-disciplined New Model Army. A month after Worcester, Cromwell was writing to his friend John Cotton, the pastor at Boston in New England, in full providentialist enthusiasm to search out the new paths of the Lord in England: “Surely, Sir, the Lord is greatly to be feared, as to be praised! We need your prayers in this as much as ever. How shall we behave ourselves after such mercies? What is the Lord a-doing? What prophecies are now fulfilling? Who is a God like ours? . . .” But by the next year to another correspondent, the strain of melancholy was back in the face of frustrations: “You absent; Fleetwood is gone; I am left alone – almost so – but not forsake. Lend me one shoulder. Pray for me.”3 Just as the whole of England, to say nothing of Scotland and Ireland, presented a morass of problems after the victory of Worcester, so Cromwell’s own state of mind presented a parallel picture of conflicting currents: a desire to follow the right, a sincere private uncertainty as to where that was to be found, and an increasing negative conviction concerning those forces that would definitely not help to bring it about.

  Of England’s problems, the easiest ones were the immediate ones, presented by the end of the war itself. Here the settlement was along deliberately merciful lines. Only a few grandees were executed, the Earl of Derby amongst them. And even Derby, Cromwell who did not believe in pointless executions, attempted to save; his lack of success showed incidentally how even immediately after Worcester his wishes were not necessarily paramount. As at the end of the Second Civil War, official anger was reserved more for the English than the Scots: finally clemency prevailed towards the Scottish leaders such as the Earl of Lauderdale, who was deliberately spared the death sentence imposed upon him and merely kept prisoner. So English Derby died and Scottish Lauderdale lived on, to spend his time profitably having an edifying spiritual correspondence with Richard Baxter, in glowing contrast to his subsequent profligate life. As for the lesser Scottish prisoners originally intended to go to Guinea to work as slaves, in the end happier fates awaited them: some went to Ireland, others to New England, where it seems from a report from John Cotton back to Cromwell they were characteristically well treated by the Puritan community. A thousand were taken by the Adventurers who were developing the Fens, where a provision was made that the organizers should pay a fee of Ł10 for every man who escaped, over and above what was considered a reasonable proportion of ten per cent. The rest of the Scots gradually made their way home after their fearful experience.

  But the despatch one way and another of their old foes was hardly a tithe of the problems now facing the Commonwealth. It was all very well for the writer and poet Payne Fisher to be commissioned by Parliament to write “the history of these times” :4 that was certainly an enterprising gesture full of self-confidence, although Payne Fisher never seems to have got much further than a journey to Scotland in the interests of research, and the delineation of a map of Dunbar – at any rate, if written, the book was never published. But of the two great issues which had long obsessed “these times”: the nature of a new Parliament (if the need was admitted), and the nature of the new national Church (if it was not to be on the Presbyterian pattern prescribed by the Covenant nor the old Anglican pattern) both remained to be settled. The Parliamentary issue was the more urgent of the two, since in this narrow purged remnant of the Long Parliament first elected in 1640, now at Westminster, there still resided what was constitutionally the sole source of authority in England, the Council of State being merely its deputed executive. A new Parliament following a dissolution had indeed been clamoured for so loudly by the Army in the late 1640s, and had been required in all their successive Agreements of the People, that it might at first sight seem surprising that exactly the same obstinate body still clung to office if not power at Westminster.

  But the issue of the new Parliament, or as it came to be known, “the new representative”, was in truth not quite so simple. First, if there was to be a dissolution, what would happen to the existing members of the Rump? It was not only that they wished to protect their own selfish interests, although some members clung to their seats for the good human reason that MPs were protected from arrest for debt, and in the chaos of the Civil War it was not only the extravagant who had managed to acquire demanding creditors. There was also a constitutional argument, which appealed to those like the politically minded Henry Marten, for preserving the link with the Long Parliament: that gathering at least had been elected legally. On the other hand, new elections brought quite a different set of problems: for if these were based on a wider franchise, what guarantee would there be that the new House of Commons would not be flooded with Presbyterians, Royalists and other beings not conspicuously dedicated to what Cromwell would have considered a godly settlement of the nation? Between these two poles, the fear of selfperpetuation by the existing Rump, and the exactly opposite danger of a new and hostile House of Commons, it will be clear that there could be many oscillations of contemporary opinion.

  Self-perpetuation in its extreme form would mean filling the empty seats by a form of by-election or “Recruiter” election under the control of th
e Rump: but this kind of House was hardly likely to commend itself to the Army which had so strongly disapproved of the narrow composition of the existing House in the first place. On the other hand in another section of opinion, it was the very shadow of the Army, and indeed Cromwell as Lord-General of the Army, over the elections, which aroused the fear that elections under military influence would hardly really be that much better. Cromwell of course had in the old days been counted among the political Independents, but now men like the younger Vane began to move away from his side. Clarendon analysed this change after Worcester: to Cromwell’s surprise, he did not find Parliament “so supple and so much to observe his orders as he expected they would have been”. And it was his former allies, headed by Vane, whose “jealousy” troubled him, for they began to think “his power and authority to be too great for a cornmonwealth, and that he and his army had not dependence enough upon or submission to the parliament”.5 So they began to turn back to the Presbyterians to form a new kind of alliance. Clarendon, if simplifying, nevertheless put his finger on Cromwell’s real and growing political problem after Worcester: supposing his real allies for the right establishment of England should prove to be the military as more representative of the people of England than corrupt politicians? Supposing peace’s victories, like those of war, should turn out to need achieving by the sword?

  The dissolution, that vexed question, was first debated on 17 September 1651, when a committee was set up for considering an election, to which Cromwell’s name was added (he had acted as teller for the Ayes in the voting). A bill for “the new representative” was first discussed in October. But by the next month, for all that Cromwell was elected head of the lists for the Council of State, no more was achieved towards an actual dissolution than setting a date three years ahead for the new Parliament – 3 November 1654. It was scarcely satisfactory progress from Cromwell’s point of view. Generally, there was much political uncertainty. Daniel Blagrave, MP for Reading, and one of those who had signed the King’s death warrant, was among the numerous prominent Puritan dignitaries, including Robert Overton, Hugh Peter, Rainsborough who were not above seeking supernatural instruction. On 3 November he sent a message to the astrologer Elias Ashmole asking whether Parliament would be broken up suddenly or not. On the nth he was evidently worried about his own future, for he gave Ashmole the exact time “when the message came from the Lord General to Mr Blagrave about whether he should be chosen] again in a new Parliament”. Although it has been tentatively suggested that the query came from Cromwell himself concerning his own position, Cromwell could hardly have been in genuine doubt as to whether he would actually be chosen for a new Parliament.6 The sense makes it clear that it was Blagrave’s own problems which perturbed him. The relation, possibly the brother, of another astrologer, Joseph Blagrave, he was already in touch with Ashmole; it was as natural for him to try to penetrate the mysteries of the future in a much confused political situation by this method, as it would have been unnatural for Cromwell.

  Cromwell’s next initiative took the form of a privately-summoned meeting at the house of the Speaker Lenthall for some MPs and officers of the Army, held at the beginning of December 1651. According to Whitelocke who was present and who reported it all extremely fully, his main point was that now the old King was dead and the young King defeated, it was necessary to come to “a Settlement of the Nation”. One of the planks of Cromwell’s philosophy had long been the responsibility on their shoulders consequent upon their triumphs, which they would be wrong to ignore. Speaker Lenthall now agreed with this point: they had certainly had “marvellous successes under Cromwell and if they did not improve upon them, they would be blameworthy”. To this Whitelocke put the pertinent question: what sort of settlement? Was it to be an absolute republic, or was there to be any admixture of monarchy? Cromwell in his turn accepted that this was indeed the vital issue: “Indeed it is my meaning that we should consider whether a republic or a mixed monarchical government will be best to be settled; and if anything monarchical, then in whom that power shall be placed.”7

  It was now the turn of Sir Thomas Widdrington, the former commissioner of the Great Seal who had now returned to the service of the Commonwealth as a member of the Council of State, to declare that “mixed monarchical” would be most suitable “for the laws and people of this nation”. He went on to suggest that the best course would be to adopt one of the sons of the late King (Henry Duke of Gloucester was still in the custody of the Commonwealth). In the general discussion that followed, Fleetwood and St John both pointed out the great difficulties involved in turning back to the Stuarts, and Whalley with justice raised the known hostility of the Princes concerned to Parliament. But there were those who advocated the use of the younger Gloucester, while Whitelocke himself believed that use could be made of either Charles or James Duke of York. But it is Cromwell’s reactions which are the most interesting. He spoke up for “a settlement of somewhat of monarchical power in it” which he believed would be “very effectual”; but he did not state precisely what form this mixture should take. It is not necessary to follow the charges later made against Cromwell of vile untrammelled ambition, desiring always the kingship for himself, to see in this cautious statement a distinct change of attitude on Cromwell’s part. Or rather, it was a reversion to the confusedly monarchical attitudes that he had held in late 1647 and 1648.

  It will be remembered that Cromwell had never shown himself a theoretical republican either at the time of the Army debates, nor a year later when the Army had proved still more hostile to the King. His whole approach to the kingship had been markedly pragmatic, and much influenced by the character of Charles I, whose weaknesses in his estimation had eventually driven him into the view that Providence required the cutting off of his head. He had also been one of those who had considered using Gloucester as a puppet in a form of Regency. Unlike Henry Marten and many of the Army officers, he had no particularly republican principles which would be betrayed by the return of any form of monarchy. He did have however extremely strong views on the return of the bad old days, as he might have put it, and it was this potential resurrection which would in his mind constitute the greatest betrayal of trust. In the summer of 1650 he had spoken with Ludlow of “a free and equal Commonwealth” as being the only probable means of keeping out “the old family and government from us”.8 Now, over a year later, he was as convinced as ever of the necessity of keeping out the old Government. But there is no reason to suppose that in December 1651 he did not consider fleetingly amongst other alternatives the old family, as represented by Gloucester.

  * * *

  One potent influence on Cromwell’s thinking had recently been removed by death. In November 1651 Henry Ireton, his friend, his son-in-law, the companion of his early struggles and who many contemporaries believed to be Cromwell’s eminence grise, died of plague in Ireland. “What is of this world will be found transitory,” wrote Cromwell to his sister, “a clear evidence whereof is my son Ireton’s death.” His body was shipped back to England, and his state funeral in March 1652 provided an interesting glimpse of the direction which the social customs of the new Commonwealth were now taking. Certainly times had changed. Ireton’s body lay first of all in state in Somerset House, as princes had done formerly, under a hatchment stating Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori – a noble motto which the naughty Cavaliers waggishly mistranslated as “It was good for his country that he should die”. The procession to Westminster Abbey was the occasion of much magnificence, whose contrast to Puritan austerity was much commented upon at the time. The marching mourners included Cromwell himself, his officers, and what the diarist John Evelyn rudely described as some of his “mock-parliament men”, meaning the MPs. Evelyn had just returned from the Continent and Ireton’s funeral, which made a great impression upon him, was one of the first sights he witnessed. John Owen was deputed to preach the sermon, for which he took a text from Daniel, in order to praise Ireton for having had like Danie
l both spiritual and civil wisdom. Above all, he singled out Ireton’s ability to see divine dispensations in earthly events, unlike the many more carnal members of society ‘who were unable or unwilling to trace them back to God, “like Swine following Acorns under the tree, not at all looking up to the tree from whence they fall . . .”9

  The sermon was later published, in answer, wrote Owen, to the request of those who loved “the Savour of that perfume” which was diffused by Ireton’s noble memory. But he dedicated it deliberately to Henry Cromwell rather than to “Her”, the widow, poor Bridget being still so swallowed up in sorrow that he feared to occasion a fresh relapse. Bridget was granted Ł2,000 a Year from Parliament out of the Duke of Buckingham’s estates to solace her, but before the year was out she received a more positive encouragement to cast off her widow’s weeds in the shape of courtship from Charles Fleetwood. Ireton’s death had of course left a gap in the administration of Ireland which it was generally expected Lambert would fill; in January 1652 he was duly appointed to the vacant Lord Deputyship. Lucy Hutchinson told a malicious story of Frances Lambert queening it over Bridget Ireton in consequence in St James’s Park that summer; Bridget, “notwithstanding her piety and humility” suffered some extremely human pangs.10 But the incident had some ironic results, being witnessed by Fleetwood, himself a recent widower, who took the immediate opportunity to pay his addresses to the bereaved and now slighted lady. Not only that, but Lambert’s whole Irish position now began to founder when Parliament proceeded to abolish the Lord-Lieutenantship, and with it of course the Deputyship also. Lambert, who had already laid out considerable expense for his new and splendid role, was understandably furious and declined the remaining more junior post of Commander-in-Chief and civil commissioner which then went to Charles Fleetwood. So it was Bridget who ended up by reigning once more in Ireland.