Cromwell, the Lord Protector

by Antonia Fraser

  The first mention of the Independents in this role occurs in 1643. From the first they were much identified with the “war party” while the death of John Pym on 18 December removed from the political scene the one man strong enough to control the Scots. It also allowed the natural rise to power of the younger Independents in the party, such as Vane, and thus widened the gap in the Parliamentary front between those orientated towards Scottish Presbyterianism, and those preferring a Separatist view. Vane, now aged thirty, was the son of that senior politician of the same name who had been Charles I’s Secretary of State before being dismissed by him in 1641. The younger Vane was a dedicated Puritan from the time of a youthful conversion, a man of both intellect and force who exerted a strong influence over his contemporaries. Of Vane’s appearance, Clarendon pronounced that he had “an unusual aspect” despite the fact that neither of his parents had been particularly good-looking, which made people think that there was “somewhat in him of extraordinary: and his whole life made good that imagination”. Vane was now rapidly coming to be regarded in the House of Commons as the political equivalent of Oliver Cromwell in the field.42

  These squabbles of the Parliamentarians were not soothed by the understandable attempts of King Charles to treat with any individual he believed might represent a weak link in the chain of opposition. Cromwell was among those appointed to consider the delicate matter of a letter from the King to Vane proposing liberty of conscience. Vane had kept it secret in order to ferret out more concerning the King’s true intentions, but Essex interpreted the concealment as directed against himself. However when the Committee of Both Kingdoms (England and Scotland) was formed in February it was noticeable that among the twenty-one members there were now many who might be considered Independents. This replaced the old Committee of Safety formed by Parliament to have charge of the detailed administration of the war. Cromwell’s name was prominent. Other members included both Vanes, Oliver St John, and Sir Arthur Haselrig, as well as Warwick among the peers.

  For all this in-fighting, Cromwell’s main preoccupation at this period was still the war. When he spoke in the House on 22 January, it was to deliver a furious attack on Lord Willoughby of Parham for his inept behaviour after the battle of Gainsborough, as a result of which not only Gainsborough but also subsequently Lincoln with all its weapons, including seven pieces of ordnance, had been lost. His crimes were not purely tactical. One part of Willoughby’s offence in Cromwell’s view was that he had “very loose and profane commanders under him” and Cromwell gave an instance of some unseemly piece of behaviour.43 In some quarters, there was disgust at Cromwell casting dirt on one “who had so well deserved”, but Cromwell did succeed in getting Lincolnshire joined to the other counties under Manchester’s command, while Willoughby’s case was referred to a special committee. On the same day as his speech against Willoughby, 22 January 1644, Cromwell rose in rank from being a mere Colonel to become Lieutenant-General of horse and foot and Manchester’s second-in-command. His pay rose to .Ł5 per day as a result, but he also of course continued to receive pay both as Colonel and Captain of the horse, at a further 42s. a day, to include allowances for horses. And on 5 February, the last day permissible, Cromwell signed the Covenant, without which he would not have been able to have assumed his command.

  Cromwell’s opprobrious remarks concerning Willoughby’s commanders show that he was far from abandoning his first principle that military strength was to be sought amongst the godly. At the end of August from Cambridge he had pointed out the practical advantages of choosing reputable Captains of horse in the first place: other honest men would follow them, and they would be careful only to mount such. In a passage which has rightly become famous as an expression of his personal philosophy towards the hosts of war, Cromwell declared: “I had rather have a plain russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than that which you call a gentleman and is nothing else. I honour a gentleman that is so indeed.” It was true that there might be material disadvantages for the men themselves in such a policy of Self-control, as Cromwell pointed out to Sir Thomas Barrington in the course of one of his many appeals for money: “many who can plunder and pillage; they suffer no want …” while his own men depended on their pay which was weeks behind. For all that, how great were the advantages of discipline! “Truly mine (though some have stigmatized them with the name of Anabaptists) are honest men, such as fear God, I am confident the freest from unjust practices of any in England, seek the soldiers where you can.” At times Cromwell preached the doctrine along the lines of necessity: replying to the criticism of men such as Hotham at the end of September, and denying again that his men were Anabaptists, he pointed out in defence of the so-called plain men who had been made Captains of horse: “It had been well that men of honour and birth had entered into these employments, but why do they not appear? Who would have hindered them?” Seeing it was necessary the work must go on, better plain men than none. Yet Cromwell’s true feelings were seen in his conclusion: it was not only needful but actually better to use such men “patient of wants, faithful and conscientious in the employment”.44

  As will be seen, throughout 1643, Cromwell was still strongly denying that his troops were in any way contaminated by those feared and despised bogymen, the Anabaptists. There were many exaggerated tales told of this sect, emanating from Continental rumours. In fact their outward practices such as adult baptism were matched by an inward principle that it was the right of any man to seek God’s truth for himself in the Scriptures. This primacy given to individual judgement led on in turn to the belief that should a crisis arise between Church and State, obedience to the State should not extend beyond conscience. Although the Baptists also believed that they should endure peacefully any punishments inflicted upon them by the State as a result, the fears of anarchy which such a doctrine could arouse in seventeenth-century breasts may be imagined. It was in the spring of 1644 that the origins of the quarrel between Cromwell and Manchester that was to explode at the end of the year, began to spark off in the disputes between Cromwell and Manchester’s Major-General, Lawrence Crawford. Crawford, a strict Scottish Presbyterian, not only considered that Anabaptism itself was heinous, as most men did at that time, but believed in addition that through its own leniency, Independency itself was naturally prone to such abuses. And the growth of the power of the Independents in the Army, which was of course at the bottom of the dispute, was already being noted in the spring by the Scottish Presbyterian divine, Robert Baillie.45

  The two men came into contact after the establishment of the committee of Both Kingdoms, while Manchester’s army was holding some sway in the debatable lands between Charles’s capital of Oxford and the counties of the Eastern Association. Cromwell led a practical expedition which went so far as to drive away the cattle from outside the very walls of Oxford. He stormed the Royalist outpost, Hillesden House, about five miles from Buckingham, half-way between Oxford and Newport Pagnell, held for Parliament by its Governor, Sir Samuel Luke. When orders came from the Committee to prevent the King joining up with his General, Hopton, Cromwell was already engaged in trying to do so. Fresh troops were to be summoned with speed from the Eastern Association: on 8 March, Cromwell wrote to Luke asking him to send on to Bedford from Newport Pagnell any troops which might arrive from Cambridge with all convenient speed; here they should await Cromwell at the Swan Inn. In his postscript, Cromwell showed that like a good Puritan he also believed in self-help towards self-preservation: he asked Luke to remind Colonel Aylife that he had promised Cromwell his own coat of mail.46

  It was at this point that Crawford incurred Cromwell’s wrath by arresting a certain Lieutenant William Packer, known to be a Baptist, for some offence which was presumably religious. Packer complained to Cromwell and Cromwell sent back an emissary to Crawford that Packer was a “godly man” and he should be left unmolested. Then Crawford’s own Lieutenant-Colonel, Henry Warner, refused to sign the Covenant on the gro
unds of his Baptist convictions, and was as a result sent to Manchester. Cromwell fairly exploded on the subject in a long letter back to Crawford from Cambridge, urging him forcibly not to turn away one so faithful to “the Cause” and eager to serve Crawford. Did Crawford really prefer a man notorious for wickedness, drinking and oaths to one that “fears to sin”? Of course the nub of the problem was not that Warner feared to sin, but that he chose to avoid sin by allegedly Anabaptist methods. Cromwell, who six months earlier had denied the possibility that there might be any Anabaptists among their army, now at one stroke both admitted the likelihood, and dismissed it as being quite irrelevant to the conduct of the war: “Ay, but the man is an Anabaptist. Are you sure of that? Admit he be, shall that render him incapable to serve the public … Sir, the State, in choosing men to serve them, takes no notice of their opinions, if they be willing faithfully to serve them, that satisfies. I advised you formerly to bear with men of different minds from yourself; if you had done when I advised you to it, I think you would not have had so many stumbling blocks in your way. ...” Naturally if there was any military charge against Warner that was a different matter and must be dealt with judicially. Nevertheless Crawford should “take heed of being sharp, or too easily sharpened by others, against those to whom you can object little but they square not with you in every opinion concerning religion”.47 Yet in this case Crawford was the professional soldier with experience abroad, it was Cromwell who was here reacting as the purely military man. At this point he saw himself neither as the committed enemy of the Presbyterians, nor indeed as a totally convinced Independent, since he was not sparing the time to mull over such problems: but Cromwell did see himself as a man committed to bring about a victory in the field, whatever the niceties of his troops’ religious observances.

  There is no licence which frees a soldier altogether from the cares of private life, even when, like Cromwell in the spring of 1644, he was campaigning hard on the one hand, and trying to combat Crawford’s inquisition on the other. The household at Ely had to be maintained and could not live on air: in April Cromwell signed an order for some of the money due to him to be paid out to his wife at a rate of Ł5 a week, an incident which Manchester later tried to blow up into evidence of Cromwell’s peculation. And the Cromwell family was once more depleted by the death of young Oliver at the age of twenty-one, of smallpox, while serving in the Army at the garrison of Newport Pagnell. The soft-natured Richard was now the elder surviving son of the Cromwells. Young Oliver vanishes from history, as five years earlier Robert had vanished, and little is known of him except that he was described after his death as having been “a civil young gentleman and the joy of his father”. However a surviving letter of his, written six months earlier when he was at Peterborough with his father, complains of a knave or two who had been admitted to his troop. Young Oliver looked on them as “dishonourers of God’s cause and high displeasers of my father, myself and the whole regiment”; so that it seems while he lived the boy was at least something of a chip off the old Cromwellian block.48

  But for his father, private agonies had now to be put aside. The sonorous noise of war had rolled towards the North. Here, Sir Thomas Fairfax and his father Ferdinando Lord Fairfax had captured Selby, and the Scots under Leven having finally arrived over the border in January, were installed as far south as Durham. The result of this successful squeezing movement on Lord Newcastle (created a Marquis by the King in the previous autumn) was to pen him, together with a considerable force of five thousand horse and six thousand foot, within the city of York itself; although he did subsequently send out most of his horse under Lord Goring to join the hoped-for relieving force. The siege of York began on 22 April. The prospects for Parliament were extremely good, so long as Prince Rupert could be held off from coming to the relief of Newcastle. In the first stages of the siege Lord Manchester and Cromwell stayed near Belvoir Castle in Lincolnshire, lest Rupert should in fact turn south; and while Cromwell held off Goring, Lord Manchester stormed Lincoln. Then, with the eastern Midlands temporarily in the safe hands of Parliament, Manchester and Cromwell headed north to join the Fairfaxes and the Scots in front of York. There was no particular unity of spirit among the various Parliamentary commanders now joined together there; they included the gentle Manchester, ever ready to listen to more experienced men, the Fairfaxes who were very much on their home ground, and the veteran leader of the Scots, Alexander Leslie, Earl of Leven who had fought under Wallenstein and Gustavus Adolphus. But they were emphatically agreed that it would be fatal to allow Rupert’s army to join up with that of Newcastle. At the same time York itself could not be taken despite a rash and ill-organized attempt by Crawford to do so.

  When the news came that Rupert, a sweeping victory at Newark under his belt, had relieved the gallant Countess of Derby in her defence at Lathom House, and was even now at Knaresborough, it was clear that the unthinkable had indeed to be thought of- Rupert was in a prime position to relieve York and join up with Newcastle’s army. With Rupert scudding northwards like an angry wind it was clearly too late for the Parliamentary army to receive the expected reinforcements from Sir John Meldrum sent to secure the town of Manchester, or from the Earl of Denbigh. Since the Parliamentarians believed that Rupert had eighteen thousand men (in fact he probably had no more than fourteen thousand) it was decided to withdraw from York itself, even if it meant jettisoning valuable siege materials. They would concentrate on staving off his advance from the fatal conjunction with the further forces of Newcastle. It was therefore decided to straddle the main Knaresborough-York road, in a position just by Long Marston. Rupert also took into account the size of his opponents’ armies, and he therefore decided on a circling manoeuvre of great spirit and extraordinary speed or, as Whitelocke put it, “fetching a compass about with his arms”,49 to relieve York from the north-west, instead of advancing up the main road. The venture was a success. While Parliament waited in some confusion as to Rupert’s whereabouts, York was relieved and Newcastle’s men in a position to join those of Rupert.

  But Rupert had not finished with Parliament with this highly successful coup. Taking advantage of a rather ambiguous despatch from the King, which discussed York being relieved in the same sentence as beating the rebels’ armies, although the latter venture was not necessarily intended to follow on the former, Rupert decided to interpret his orders precisely as if it were.50 With scarcely a pause from the relief of the city, and urging Newcastle on, he decided to pursue the Parliamentary armies now falling back south to Tadcaster. As yet unaware of what had transpired, the Parliamentary army in the shape of its rearguard under Cromwell, Fairfax and Leslie, found itself within sight of Rupert’s advance guard of horse. The intentions of the Parliamentary rearguard had been to cover the retreat of Leven and the foot who were by now nearing Tadcaster. But clearly Rupert presented no idle threat. An anguished message was sent to Leven to turn and come back. By four o’clock in the afternoon Leven and the foot were drawn up with the rest of the Parliamentary forces. On the other side, the Royalist order of battle also was complete. The two sides faced each other across the moor of Long Marston.

  Of the many rivalries which existed between the two sides, Roundhead and Cavalier, there was one interesting one to be determined between the two redoubtable cavalry leaders, Rupert and Lieutenant-General Cromwell. The contrast between the two men could hardly have been greater. Rupert, twenty years Cromwell’s junior, was not only “very sparkish” in his dress, a true Cavalier in the romantic sense of the word, but also in the prime of his fame, the victor of Powick Bridge, Cirencester, Chalgrove Field, Bristol and only recently Newark; his recent daring tactics only enhanced his glamour. Cromwell at forty-five was, true enough, as yet unbeaten as a cavalry leader, but had taken part in no colossal engagement and his men, chosen by his unorthodox methods, were still largely an unknown quantity. Yet among his Puritan contemporaries his victories had already been marked as a sign of divine favour: “It was observed God was
with him,” wrote Joshua Sprigge, “and he began to be renowned.” And his military reputation had already excited the imagination of Rupert himself. “Is Cromwell there?” he enquired eagerly, before the battle, of a captured trooper from the Eastern Association. The man was later released and told the story to his own side.51

  “By God’s grace he shall have fighting enough” was Cromwell’s grim comment when he was told of Rupert’s interest. It remained to be seen whether at Marston Moor God’s grace – or its more worldly manifestations such as the new training of the army of the Eastern Association would enable Parliament to fight off the reckless but brilliant Rupert.

  6 Ironsides

  Truly England and the Church of God hath had a great favour from the Lord, in this great victory given to us. It had all the evidence of an absolute victory obtained by the Lord’s blessing upon the godly party principally.

  OLIVER CROMWELL ON MARSTON MOOR

  So far as numbers were concerned, the battle of Marston Moor during the long evening of 2 July 1644 was certainly the biggest ever to be fought on British soil: afterwards the environs of the battlefield would constitute the largest communal burial ground.* ( * For the battle in general see especially Brigadier Peter Young, Marston Moor 1644, where the various contemporary accounts are listed, pp. 210-69.)Therehad been wet weather all that summer and this was yet another cold damp day with intermittent squalls of rain, of the type that sometimes makes the English summer climate the despair of its denizens. If the weather was gloomily predictable, one of the surprises of the terrain was that in the level verdant flatness of the Vale of York there should be some high points, of sufficient rise to constitute some sort of strategic advantage. For out of the green rye fields, knee high and soaking wet and at the edge of an area of heath, between the two villages of Tockwith and Long Marston, there arose an undoubted if gentle eminence known as Marston Hill. At the crest was parked the Parliamentary baggage while just below it, on the spot now known as Cromwell’s Plump, the joint forces of the Parliamentary armies had established a form of command-post from where they could survey the battlefield. On the lowest flanks of the slope and just above the Tockwith-Marston road was stretched out their battle line, extending for about one and a half miles between the two villages – it was not customary at this date to fortify the villages themselves.