Cromwell

by Antonia Fraser

  Both Hewett and Slingsby protested against the illegalities of the High Court of Justice, much as King Charles had done, dwelling on their lack of counsel, and the fact that the commissioners acted as both judge and jury. But it was with no shame that the President of the court confirmed the issue to Dr Hewett, telling him “this is the Grand Jury, the Petty Jury, and your Judge.” Slingsby in addition took a stand upon the fact that he could not be judged guilty of treason under a law to which he had not assented: he had been a prisoner in 1656 when it was passed. “I am (my lord) of an opinion (though you may account it a Paradox),” he exclaimed, “that I cannot trespass against your laws, because I did not submit to them.” It was in vain that the President appealed to Slingsby to regard the manifold providences which surely proved the rightness of Cromwell’s rule: what would have become of the whole Protestant interest if Charles Stuart had returned? The notorious Popery of the Stuart family would have threatened them anew with the prospect of civil war. But Slingsby refused to be convinced, exhibiting a fanatical loyalty to the principle of the monarchy which was in exact reverse to the cautious loyalty to the acting Government which so many were showing.

  Slingsby and Hewett being condemned to death (although Mordaunt was acquitted), many efforts were made on their behalf to save them. They were spared the hideous fate of disembowelment which was the traditional punishment for treason, an amelioration which was said to have taken place at the instance of Bettie Claypole. According to Clarendon, Mary also pleaded for Hewett. In addition the Fauconbergs exercised complicated wiles to try and save Slingsby: they even asked Bordeaux if Cardinal Mazarin would not intervene on his behalf.12 But for all the lobbyings of Cromwell’s family to the Protector, Hewett and Slingsby were finally beheaded. It was not to be tolerated that the surface of the Government’s control should be cracked with impunity: the scaffold speeches of the unfortunate pair were torn up, and were not printed except in malicious and garbled versions. After this example, however, the work of the new High Court somewhat declined. Several men arraigned were acquitted, for lack of evidence, possibly with Government connivance, and when the list had been dealt with, the High Court itself was adjourned from July until November.

  It was a season of portents, except not everyone was in a position to interpret them correctly. When a ship was launched called the Richard, the horses drawing Richard Cromwell’s coach, which also contained his father, ran away and tore it to pieces. No one was hurt, except the Protector’s accident-prone son, who received some nasty wounds. On 5 June a young whale was sighted in the Thames near Greenwich and killed, “many porpoises being seen to rise that day above the bridge”. The event was produced by a storm and sea as cold as winter: “after a horrid groan” the whale ran on shore and died. John Evelyn who inspected it marvelled at its dimensions; it was nearly sixty foot long with a mouth so wide that several men could have stood up in it; its skin he said was black “like coach leather”. Although after Oliver’s death, the death of the whale, “the fall of a Leviathan”, was seen clearly to indicate the impending death of a great man, as celebrated in verse by Dryden, it must be recorded that the contemporary reaction was somewhat different. Even Carrington thought the captivity and death of the whale, the King of the Sea, signified that Cromwell was himself absolute master of “that terrible element”.13 In general it was supposed at the time that one Leviathan was merely coming to do homage to another – Oliver Cromwell.

  * * *

  So the last summer wound on. On 10 July Oliver went down to Hampton Court for a period of refreshment accompanied by his Council. Thereafter it was decided in principle that the Council should meet on Tuesday in London and on Thursdays in the country. There was after all little to keep him in London, the return visit of Mancini and the Due de Crequi having been successfully accomplished under the skilful management of Fauconberg. They lodged in Brooke House, Holborn, from which vantage point they issued out either for a gracious reception from the Protector standing under the cloth of State (at which they paid many flowery French compliments to all members of the Cromwell family, Oliver downwards), or to enjoy such English delights as hunting near Hampton Court. The Master of Ceremonies was requested by Cromwell to visit the distinguished emissaries every day to make sure that everything was to their liking. It was ah1 voted a great success, even if Fauconberg professed himself privately afterwards as absolutely exhausted, having had no time to himself even to write a letter, dancing attendance “both nights as well as days” upon the “Monsieurs”.14

  But there was a blight on the family spirits for all this gracious dalliance and despite the fact that the Fauconbergs as a couple continued to shine. Half Royalist, half Cromwellian as they were they created exactly the right conciliatory impression that Mary’s father must have hoped to achieve by the alliance in the first place, and in July they went on a triumphal tour of the Fauconbergs’ native North. Nevertheless death was beginning to stalk Oliver’s intimate circle and bring some of its most loved members into its sights. Thurloe, the minister Oliver was said to have loved before all others, had been gravely ill in the spring although now recovered. His old friend of thirty years, the Earl of Warwick, died shortly after the institution of the new second chamber that he refused to grace. In June baby Oliver Claypole, the youngest of Bettie’s little family, died at the age of a year. Above all, Bettie was seriously and painfully ill; and it was that illness, thought by some to have been exacerbated by the death of Hewett at her father’s hands but surely in truth more affected by the untimely loss of her child, which was now beginning to obsess the little community at Hampton Court.

  Poor Bettie’s sufferings already had a considerable history, all too explicable in view of the fact that the modern diagnosis of her ailment is cancer, either of the womb or stomach. At the time Dr Bate, Oliver’s physician, described her as suffering from “an inward imposthume of her loins” which caused her great agony, while Heath described it as an ulcer of the intestines, which drove her specially frantic by the stopping of her menstrual terms; Clarendon confirmed that the doctors did not know how to treat it. Four years earlier she had been gravely ill, sufferings which had at least deepened her spiritually, for as she told Sir John Reynolds, she had seen “much of God in this late visitation”. Little Oliver, her fourth living child, had been born in June 1657, just after the Protectoral Investiture, and it seemed that experience had taken much out of her, for she was still much shaken by her ordeal at the time of her sisters’ weddings in November. By June of 1658, her only known letter, written in her own hand, apologizes pathetically to Henry’s wife for not having written more but “in earnest I have bin so extreme sickly of late that it has made me unfitt for anything”.15 She was now taken down to Hampton Court with her father to see if country air, or perhaps the medicinal waters of Tunbridge, which the Countess of Devonshire stated had done miraculous cures, especially with young children, would help her towards recovery. But the administering of the waters, if they were beneficial to the Protector, only caused poor Bettie additional agonies.

  At Hampton Court Bettie had been given three rooms as nurseries for herself and her little family – Cromwell, Henry and Martha, who as the daughter of his favourite inherited the special love of her grandfather. One of these rooms had been occupied by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, one led to the tennis court, another had been part of the armoury; they were now pleasantly decorated with tapestry hangings of the story of Artimesia and Orlando, Persian and Turkey carpets, and chairs, couches and stools generally covered in sky-blue taffeta and embroidered in silk and gold. So the Protector had been able to enjoy the company of his grandchildren about him, together with Bettie’s own coveted presence. The closeness of this father and daughter relationship was poignantly attested by Marvell: how

  .... She with Smiles serene and Words discreet

  His hidden Soul at ev’ry turn could meet. . .

  Doubling that knot which Destiny had ty’d . . .

  With h
er each day the pleasing Hours he shares,

  And at her Aspect calms his growing Cares;

  Or with a Grandsire’s joy her Children sees

  Hanging about her neck or at his knees.

  Even at this distance of time, it is easy to understand the charms of Bettie’s company. First she had a sweet forthcoming nature, a natural warmth which enabled her to combine “the elevation of mind, and dignity of deportment, of one born of royal stem” as one contemporary put it “with all the affability and goodness of the more humble”. In short she acted “the part of a princess very naturally”. At the same time this grace and vivacity was evidently accompanied by an attractive streak of compassion applied not only to her nearest and dearest but to the stricken in general.

  Perhaps it was those pains she had had to bear intermittently from an early age (even now she was only twenty-nine) which had deepened her from a somewhat wilful young girl whose predilection for “carnal vanities” had disturbed her father, to one who would identify herself more widely with the suffering lot of humanity. There had been earlier stories too of her haughtiness to women of lesser rank, so that perhaps her head had been a little turned by her youthful importance. Marvell commented on how “with riper years her virtue grew” and in 1659, in his biography of her father, Carrington wrote lyrically of her desire for intercession. “How many of the royalist prisoners got she not freed? How many did she not save from death whom the laws had condemned? . . . She employed her prayers even with tears to spare such men whose ill fortune had designed them to suffer.”* ( * It was a measure of the Royalists’ appreciation of Bettie’s efforts in this respect that she was actually supposed to have harangued her father on the subject on her deathbed “like another mad Cassandra” – a story not otherwise corroborated.16) So the Protector, able to refuse her nothing, would find “his sword falling out of his hand, his arms only served to lift her up from those knees on which she had cast herself to wipe off her tears and to embrace her”. The same picture was built up, if more informally, by Toland in his life of Harrington, where he described her as effecting the release of Sir John Southcote, guilty of visiting his ladylove unlawfully, by going to her father “in a huff”.17 Bettie, the petted favourite of Oliver’s Court, was one of those happy beings in whom the possession of influence brought out not arrogance but a desire to succour and assist the needy. It was hardly surprising that after her death this golden girl received favourable obituaries from friend and enemy alike.

  But now Oliver her father was about to be subjected to that terrible corollary to any great loving relationship – the prospect of the loved one’s sufferings, with ever hanging over him the dreaded shadow of her ultimate loss. The July of 1658 was hot and dry, in contrast to the piercing cold of the winter. Throughout the month the unfortunate girl twisted in anguish with her pains, unable to gain any relief at the hands of the desperate and helpless doctors. “The truth is, It’s believed the physicians do not understand their case,” Fleetwood told Henry in Ireland, although with the benefit of modern knowledge one can realize that there was by now little chance of Bettie surviving the onslaughts of the cancer which was slowly killing her.18 Around her, prayers were sent up. Above all, Oliver was determined to give her his own personal care and watch (although he himself was failing). Surely the great strength he had once had could sustain his child now! Marvell gives an unforgettable picture of the heroism of the dying girl, trying to stifle her pains so as not to alarm her father, while the father in turn tried to hide his own anguish so as not to hurt her further:

  She lest He grieve hides what She can her pains

  And He to lessen Hers his Sorrow feigns…

  But it was all useless. Father and daughter knew each other too well for concealment. And the vain effort at suppression only left them both further exhausted and hopeless:

  Yet both perceiv’d, yet both concealed their Skills,

  And, so diminishing, increast their ills …

  By the beginning of August Bettie was desperately sick. Often Oliver watched all night. The course of her illness cast a total gloom over Council as well as Court, and official business became reduced to a minimum. When the Dutch Ambassador Nieupoort made a State visit to London at the end of July, Marvell was deputed to entertain him in Oliver’s absence. He offered him “a public reception with barges and coaches” such as was normally given on such occasions. But Nieupoort tactfully refused, knowing the whole Court to be in heavy distress for “the mortal distemper of lady Claypole”. In the end, he had a meeting in private with the Protector, who came up from Hampton Court briefly the next day, apologizing for his preoccupation with his personal affairs. It was hardly likely that Bettie could survive long, if the fact was apparent to all around her save the Protector.

  Years later, long after her own death and that of her father, a law-suit between an apothecary named Phelps, who delivered all medicines to the Protectoral household, and Bettie’s widower John Claypole, on the subject of medicines still unpaid for, showed the amount of potions which had been tried in hope and discarded in despair. Then she was granted that little respite which sometimes comes to the dying. She rallied slightly. It was at this point that the Quaker George Fox visited the sick woman secretly, and read her an improving dissertation, beginning: “Friend, be still and cool in thy own mind and spirit from thy own thoughts . . .” Once turned in her own mind to God, then would Bettie receive God’s strength and power “to allay ah1 blustering storms and tempests”. She was said to be strengthened by this message. Indeed in general Bettie’s spiritual conduct was above reproach, beginning with the self-abnegation which she had shown in trying to spare her father the extreme display of her sufferings. It was Carrington who wrote fittingly of her “Amazonian” endurance of her trials.19

  The release of Bettie by death came finally in the early hours of the morning of 6 August. Her father collapsed completely. By the date of her funeral, four days later, he was still in a state of sufficient prostration to be watched over by his wife and Mary Fauconberg, neither of whom were thus able to attend (although Richard Cromwell and Fauconberg himself were present). The part of chief mourner at the funeral was played by Cromwell’s sister, Robina Wilkins. The ceremony itself had a strange Arthurian quality about it. It took place at night in Westminster Abbey and beforehand the body of the dead girl was borne solemnly by barge from Hampton Court, through the late twilight of the August evening. A flotilla of boats, filled with silent courtiers, accompanied it on its mournful journey down the Thames. The barge reached Westminster Stairs at eleven o’clock, where the body was carried to the Painted Chamber, and there rested an hour on “a stately hearse”. At midnight the procession wound on to the Abbey, and there the last rites were performed in the Henry vn Chapel; Bettie’s coffin was subsequently interred there, to join those of her grandmother, one of her aunts, and other dignitaries of the Commonwealth. Alone of them all however, Bettie was not disturbed in the crueller climate of the Restoration: her resting-place had vanished, and was not discovered until 1725, when workmen making alterations in the chapel for the installations of the Knights of Bath came upon it.*20 ( * Today it is marked, but only by a very small incision in a tile near the pkce, scarcely visible to those who do not search it out.) The dean of the day had the silver plate marking her coffin which they had removed replaced, and so Bettie Claypole, alone of Cromwell’s family, continues to lie in state in Westminster Abbey. It was as though the great love that the Lord Protector had borne for her in life, still exercised its watchful care after her death.

  * * *

  Oliver never recovered from Bettie’s death. It was a fact recognized by his contemporaries, from Marvell who spoke of “the dear Image gone” and so “the Mirror broke”, to Richard Cromwell who chose another comparison of a mighty tree threatened with extinction in describing the days following his sister’s decease: “It is one thing to have the greatest bough lopt off, but when the axe is laid to the root then there is no hope remainin
g; such was our real fear.” Carrington carried the comparison of the tree further, and in doing so laid his finger on the especial tormenting grief of the parent who lives to bury his own child, because it is against nature for the old to mourn the young. “Even as branches of Trees being cut and lopped in an ill season, do first draw away sap from the tree … In like manner, during the declining age of his late Highness,” he wrote, “it was an ill season, in which men usually do as it were reap all their consolation from the youth and vigour of their children” that he should thus be deprived and weakened.21

  Subsequently Oliver had the Bible read much aloud to him, including that great passage from the fourth chapter of St Paul to the Philippians, which he described as having saved him so long ago when the death of Robert, his first-born, had gone like a dagger to his heart.22 “Not that I speak in respect of want: for I have learned in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: every where, and in all things, I am instructed, both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need. I can do all things through Christ which strengthened me.” When the reading was over, he repeated the words of the Scriptures again to himself from memory, dwelling particularly on the thirteenth verse: “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.” But then for a moment he would protest against his sorrows, comparing himself to Paul: how much the weaker creature of the two he was: “You have learnt this, and attained to this measure of grace, but what shall I do? Ah poor creature, it is a hard lesson for me to take out, I find it so!” But then again his faith would begin to work, and as he praised Paul’s submission to the divine will, he too would begin to find new sustenance in himself. He would talk thus to himself: “He that was Paul’s Christ is my Christ too …” And so the old man in his loss gradually drew comfort and support from the thought of “the well of salvation” and Christ’s “covenant of Grace”.