Cromwell

by Antonia Fraser

  Naturally such a man had to defend himself against the charge of hypocrisy, particularly when circumstances turned out well for him. He himself had observed that none goes so high as he who knows not where he is going, but it is sometimes difficult to convince observers that such a successful Icarus has not been all along aiming at the sun. Oliver Cromwell was certainly not a hypocrite in the conventional deep-dyed meaning of the word, although like any man of affairs he had to be capable of keeping his own counsel. Henry Fletcher quoted at the beginning of The Perfect Politician, the seventeenth-century biography, the apt motto: “Qui nescit dissimulare, nescit Regnare” – who knows not how to dissimulate knows not how to rule. Baxter gave a careful verdict on the subject: “he thought Secrecy a Virtue, and Dissimulation no Vice, and Simulation, that is, in plain English, a lie or Perfidiousness, to be a tolerable fault in a Case of Necessity.” But the argument that the end justifies the means is one that very few rulers or even politicians can avoid their lifetime through.

  One quality which Cromwell possessed undoubtedly in large measure, and which assisted his rise, also laid him open afterwards to accusations of calculating forethought and that was his ability to understand his fellow creatures. Dr Bate wrote of him that “No man knew more of Men”, and it was a quality which contributed much to his animation of his soldiers, and the founding of the New Model Army. He could feel and inspire familiarity without sacrificing stature. Later he was well served in government, not only by men like Thurloe in the Council, but in Scotland also where he chose an excellent class of administrator, and generally by his choice of men like Broghill, Fauconberg and Lockhart, former Royalists but efficient. In a way this finesse in dealing with his fellow men was the properest expression of his intelligence. Cromwell was hardly by nature stupid: there are many references in the despatches of the foreign ambassadors set to watch him, to his “sagacity” and “wisdom”. Whitelocke, who had every reason to know, testified to his quickness and subtlety.43 Nevertheless he was not notably well read, and he seems to have had the engaging habit of those who read little but read deeply, of dwelling much on a particular book. But his intelligence did amount at best to a positive genius for feeling his way into a given situation which in turn meant identification with the minds and actions of those around him. As early as 1645 the soldier Sir William Waller commented on his ability to remain cautious in his own sayings, and yet draw out others to get to know their most intimate designs. The fact that he so quickly established good political relations as a young man in Parliament, easily formed part of a group, stood on committees and so forth- the ability to act the part of the good party man – was a more explicit proof of his native intelligence than many of his speeches. Fascinating as they are in their thunderous glimpses of the man behind the clouds, the mists of obscurity in what has come down to us are often too closely drawn for him to deserve the title of a great orator. In the same way his letters, which sometimes touch the heart with their directness and simplicity over a private grief, are in general too tortuously written to receive much particular acclaim as literature. The bent of his mind was at times mystical, but not intellectual.

  As for the corollary to the charge of hypocrisy, the accusation of unlimited and unlawful ambition, that is more difficult to answer. The point should be made that Cromwell, rare among future leaders who sometimes feel the mantle of greatness pressing too heavily upon them to submit, showed himself a skilled and agreeable second-in-command. He had none of the superbia which led others to throw off restraints, as witness his positive efforts to get Fairfax to accept the Scottish command. It is doubtful whether he would ever have engineered the quarrel with Manchester for other than military reasons. The feeling spread by his eulogists that he had been called out of a private station to his country’s service, was one for which a better case can be made, considering the late circumstances of his middle-aged rise, than the opposing view of a man ever bent on clawing his way to the top.

  Yet that Cromwell could be seized by some blinding sense of his own righteousness in a particular cause is self-evident from the vigour and concentration which he brought to the fighting of the Civil War. In seeking to bring about change – questing peace through war as his Latin motto had it - he displayed indeed a remarkable freedom from doubts, considering what a revolutionary notion it was in the context of the time to take up arms against the King in the first place, and how many other men shrank back from the prospect at first, and worried over it to the end. But it is precisely this which gives another momentous aspect, another paradox, to Cromwell’s career: having led the revolution as it were against the existing order, he then found himself in the reverse position of representing that order himself. There have been many revolutionaries in history, and many governments have proceeded out of circumstances of violent change: but to see the conflict from both sides of the barricades and survive as Cromwell did is a rare distinction.* ( * In our century, Lenin and Castro (at the time of writing) are two names that come to mind as having gone through the same experience, in their different ways. Trotsky, of course, did not survive.) So that into the basic dichotomy of his nature was introduced another discordant element of having to cope with those very problems which he himself had originally raised. More and more, as the shadows of the Protectorate lengthened, he found himself using those very expedients, financial or political, against which he had originally protested. Cromwell maintained his power by means that Charles I would have been delighted to use, if he had had them at his disposal, in the cause of what Cromwell had then termed arbitrary tryanny.

  This corruption then was not so much by absolute power as by the alternative corrupter, impossible circumstances. It never had the effect of healing the breaches within Cromwell’s own character, and making it easier to live with himself. He was renowned for his personal tolerance, and vigorous against the Church of King Charles before the war for that uniformity it sought to impose upon consciences; it was therefore a matter of distress to him to find at least something approaching censorship having to be imposed upon his own dissident minorities, because, as he believed, they would not respect the needs of law and order. Cromwell never ceased to emphasize in speech, in conversation, in pleading with the dissidents, the extent to which freedom of conscience did flourish under the Protectorate – greater than ever before in England, he said, and it has been shown to be a valid claim. Still that did not absolve him from the worries ever present in his own mind, the concern that such men could not respect the providences but were still prepared to struggle forward against him. It was Cromwell’s spiritual philosophy which was to cause him his greatest anguish as Protector, the very philosophy which had brought him most comfort in wartime. In war each victory had brought another sign that the Lord was on their side. Where were the similar signs of peace? Not surely in the disruptions of successive Parliaments, the clacking of the Quakers, the Royalist uprisings; only perhaps his foreign and colonial policy brought him something of the old comfort. So in the end the man of action proved to be at the mercy of the man of introspection. The one would not let the other rest.

  Yet it is not possible for us to say simply and conveniently that Cromwell possessed “Two Assistant Spirits, a good and a bad”. Only one true spirit dwelt in the man and in the end it is these very paradoxes and doubts which arouse the natural sympathy one feels for any tortured character. On a broader level, they contribute much to the legacy he left behind him after his death. It is possible with justice for both radical and conservative elements in British life to claim their descent from Oliver Cromwell the one from the enthusiastic soldier and early politician, the other from the old and tired Protector seeking to make the best of the status quo for the sake of law and order. Two bequests are most generally mentioned as those left behind by Oliver Cromwell: on the good side there is the strain of non-conformity in English life, that non-conformist conscience to which much of probity and integrity is owed; as Sir Charles Firth put it, under Cromwell’s rule, it had t
ime to take root and grow strong.44 On the bad side is most often quoted the hatred of military rule, bequeathed by the experiment of the Major-Generals in particular. But such legacies are notoriously hard to analyse, since the true legacy of a man’s career can sometimes be mightily negative. We can only hazard a guess as to the nature of the violent convulsion which might have shaken Britain’s structure later, had the gentler turnabout of the Civil Wars, ending in Oliver’s restorative rule, not intervened.

  It is more certain that Cromwell demonstrated how a man could rise from a modest inheritance and by his own extraordinary qualities live to defy the greatest in the world. It was this spectacle of challenge and success, allied to a general feeling that the man was worthy of the place – even if it was not rightfully his – which drew forth the admiration, however reluctantly, of Cromwell’s contemporaries. It was Sir John Reresby, a Royalist, who called him “one of the greatest and bravest men (had his cause been good) that the world ever produced”.45 The existence of such a great man in English public life and therefore in English history is in its own way as enduring a legacy as all the controversies which still surround his name. Cromwell attained a stature from which he could not only stretch out his hand towards the crown, so long the supreme symbol of authority in England, but also, final triumph, reject it and still retain his power.

  His sturdy and baleful countenance regards us across the ages, to the soldier a source of inspiration, to the revolutionary a source of magic confidence – the deed awaits to be done. More powerfully and in his later years, he speaks to us of hope, such men can and will exist. And with them comes vigilance for the morality of government, belief in the light of leadership, whatever the failures of practice and the dimming of the pristine glow in the ineluctable dust of care. So long then as the influence of individual persons on the course of history is thought worthy of examination, the character of Oliver Cromwell as an extreme example of the man who made his own destiny and so affected for better or for worse the destiny of his whole country, must always claim its place. Carlyle believed in Hero-worship as a precious fact and in the certainty of Heroes being sent us. A cooler age might deny Cromwell the epithet of Hero. But it cannot deny him his greatness, the one quality which no man who knew him, friend or foe, tried to wrest from him. With all Cromwell’s faults, his passions and his plans, it was John Maidston, his own servant, from a traditionally unheroic vantage-point, who spoke the final epitaph on the Protector: “A larger soul hath seldom dwelt in a house of clay.”

  References

  Authors and/or titles are given in the most convenient abbreviated form; full details will be found in the list of Reference Books, alphabetically according to the first letter of the abbreviation used. For newspapers, only the first date is given.

  1 BY BIRTH A GENTLEMAN

  1 C. S. P. Domestic, Addenda, 1625-49, P- xli, 755; Partridge; Sanford, Studies, p. 180; Brief Lives, I, p. 328.

  2 Sanford, Studies, p. 189 fn.

  3 Noble, I, p. 88; CarlyleLomas II, p. 596. n. 2. Vaughan , I, p. 81.

  4 Heath, Flagellum, p. 4.

  5 C. S. P. Venetian, 1653-4, P284; Noble, I, p. 86.

  6 Rye, Two Cromwellian Myths.

  7 Abbott, II, p. 410.

  8 D. N. B.; Flecknoe, p. 2; Abbott, in, p. 452.

  9 Gibb, Lilburne, p. 92.

  10 Heath, Flagellum, p. 3; Waylen, p. i et seq.

  11 Abbott, I, p. 36; Thomas, Religion, p. 399.

  12 Pugh, Prophecies.

  13 Llyfr Baglan, p. 127-8.

  14 Noble, I, p. 229 and p. 3.

  15 Noble, I, p. ii.

  16 Firth, Oliver, p. 3.

  17 Dowland; Noble, I, p. 41; Nicholls, Progresses, IV, p. 1046.

  18 Noble, I, p. 251.

  19 Mercurius Elencticus, 21 Feb. 1648.

  20 Abbott, I, p. 30.

  21 Noble, I, p. 92-4.

  22 Masson, Milton, IV, p. 603.

  23 Heath, Flagellum, p. 4.

  24 Beard, Theatre, p. 7; Paul, p. 24.

  25 Beard, Retractive, Dedication.

  26 Heath, Flagellum, p. 5.

  27 Burnet, History, I, p. 68; Carrington, p. 4.

  28 See Scott-Giles, Sidney Sussex.

  29 Scott-Giles, Sidney Sussex, p. 31.

  30 Heath, Flagellum, p. 7; Carrington, p. 3 and p. 344.

  31 Abbott, I, p. 31.

  2 HIS OWN FIELDS

  1 Fletcher, p. 2; Reliquiae, I, p. 98; Warwick, p. 249; Fletcher, p. 3.

  2 Heath, Flagellum, p. 8.

  3 Fletcher, p. 2; Portraiture, p. 8; Heath, Flagellum, p. 9; Carrington, p. 5

  4 Brunton and Pennington, p. 6; le Wright, Exact Character, p. 35.

  5 Newton, Colonizing, I, p. 65.

  6 Guildhall MSS, 6419/2.

  7 Court & Kitchen; Heath, Flagellum, p. 165.

  8 Nickolls, Letters, p. 40.

  9 Abbott, III, p. 478 and p. 31; Noble, I, p. 126; Court & Kitchen, p. 15; Hutchinson, p. 339.

  10 Abbott, II, p. 412 and p. 329; Rogers, Matritnoniall Honour, 179

  11 Gardiner, Commonwealth, II, p. 88 n. i.

  12 Abbott, I, p. 51.

  13 Hill, God’s Englishman, p. 42.

  14 Mathew, Charles I, p. 33.

  15 Jonson, Underwoods; Hutchinson, 3

  16 Gardiner, England, VI, p. 314.

  17 Zagorin, Court, p. 79.

  18 Chandos, p. 311; Abbott, I, p. 61; Whitelocke, I, p. 34.

  19 Porritt, I, p. 529.

  20 Gardiner, England, VII, p. 68; Ludlow, I, p. 10.

  21 Lewis, Dictionary, IV, p. 500; Sloan MSS, 2069 fol. 96 B.

  22 Warwick, p. 249; Symcotts, p. 76.

  23 Abbott, I, p. 97 and p. 96 fh. 93

  24 Paul, p. 27 and Appendix II, p.399

  25 Calvin, III, p. 438; Chandos, p.

  291; Burnet, History, p. 71.

  26 Simpson, p. 2; Zagorin, Court, p. 172; Reliquiae, I, p. 6; Zagorin, Court, p. 173, n. i.

  27 Paul, p. 41; Burnet, History, I, p.71

  28 Abbott, I, p. 68.

  29 C.S.P. Domestic, 1631-3, p. 23; Abbott, I, p. 69.

  30 Abbott, I, p. 70; Scotland and the Protectorate, p. 82; The Queen, 653.

  31 Brief Lives, II, p. 37; Gardiner, Commonwealth, II, p. 83.

  32 Carrington, Preface.

  33 Wedgwooxl, King’s Peace, p. 133.

  3 GROWING TO AUTHORITY

  1 Abbott, I, p. 77.

  2 Owen Correspondence, p. 7.

  3 Mathew, Charles I, p. 123; Hacket, II, p. 212; Heath, Flagellum, p. 14.

  4 Abbott, I, p. 80.

  5 Newton, Colonizing, p. 45 et seq.

  6 Story of the Embarkation; Magnolia, I, p. 23.

  7 Dugdale, p. 459; Bate, II, p.238; Heath, Flagellum, p. 16; Abbott, I, p. 82.

  8 Clarendon, I, p. 420; Newton, Colonizing, p. 179.

  9 Eccles. Archives Leiger Bk. EDC 2/4/2 ff94v-96v.

  10 Eccles. records, comm. XII a/7/ 162-177.

  11 NL Scotland MS. 546; Carlyle, I, 75

  12 See Darby, Draining, p. 27 et seq.

  13 See Albright, Entrepreneurs.

  14 Darby, Draining, p. 55, p. 49 and p. 42.

  15 Albright, Entrepreneurs, p. 57.

  16 Dugdale, p. 460; C.S.P. Domestic, 1637-8, p. 493; 1631-33, p. 501; Fen Archives, I, ffi48bi79.

  17 Firth, Oliver, p. 34.

  18 Lamont, Prynne, p. 39.

  19 Gardiner, England, VIII, p. 279.

  20 Donaldson, Scotland, p. 302 et seq.

  21 Gillespie, Dispute, 1637.

  22 Donaldson, Scotland, p. 311.

  23 Heath, Flagellum, p. 17

  24 Slingsby, p. ii.

  25 Clarendon, VI, p. 92; Abbott, I, p. 109.

  26 Abbott, I, p. 107.

  27 Account of Last Hours, p. n; Abbott, I, p. 287.

  28 Gardiner, England, IX, p. 101 and fh. 2.

  29 Abbott, I, p. 114.

  30 Whitelocke, I, p. 107; Evelyn, I, p. 15.

  31 Brunton and Pennington, p. xiii et
seq.

  32 Hutchinson, p. 308.

  33 Warwick, p. 247.

  34 Noble, I, p. 292; Piper, p. 30; Reliquiae, I, p. 90.

  35 Fleckno, p. 66; Carrington, p. 243

  36 Bulstrode, p. 192.

  4 GRAND REMONSTRANCE

  1 Abbott, I, p. 130.

  2 Clarendon, Life, I, p. 89.

  3 Abbott, I, p. 124.

  4 Nuttall, Lord Protector, p. 254; Yule, p. ii.

  5 Abbott, 1, p. 125.

  8 Dering, p. 62; Clarendon, I, p. 366; Rowe, Vane, p. 191.

  9 Abbott, I, p. 140 et seq.

  10 Abbott, I, p. 133.

  11 Gardiner, England, X, p. 23; Carte, I, p. 4

  12 Trevor-Roper, Religion, p. 304.

  13 Davies, Early Stuarts, p. 113.

  14 Love, Civil War, p. 62.

  15 Temple, p. 106; Prenderghast, p. 60; Clarendon, I, p. 439; Whitelocke, I, p. 138. 709

  16 Bate, I, p. 45; Hutchinson, p. 74; Bohn, I, p. 117 and II, p. rgo.

  17 D’Ewes, ed. Coates, p. 121; Staffs. R.O. Q/SR.T.I642, f. 61 and Q/SO.F. p. 132.