Cromwell, the Lord Protector

by Antonia Fraser

  Fairfax’s first interview with Charles should have warned him of the hopelessness of any plan which entailed the King’s adherence to an open and steady course. Throughout, understandably if fatally, Charles reserved to himself the right to change directions and allies in so far as the ultimate interests of the Crown, as he saw them, might require it. “Sir, you have an intention to be an arbitrator between the Parliament and us,” exclaimed Ireton. “And we mean it to be between your Majesty and the Parliament.” Nevertheless the negotiations proceeded. Intermediaries were necessary. The choice of the Independents fell upon Sir John Berkeley, the former Governor of Exeter, and a diplomat before the war; he was a favourite of Queen Henrietta Maria and had come from her side in France to try and use his influence with the Army chiefs. Time would show that Berkeley was a man of honour but unfortunately also rather naive in a situation where extreme subtlety rather than a streak of the ingenuous, was called for. On his way back through England at Tonbridge in Kent, Berkeley was met by Sir Allen Apsley, formerly Royalist Governor of another Western stronghold, Barnstaple. Berkeley in his memoirs revealed that Apsley there entrusted to him letters, a cypher and instructions from Cromwell and the other Army officers. The main tenor of these was that the King should expect to find the Independents much disillusioned with the Presbyterians, and therefore in a mood to make good “what the Presbyterians had only pretended to do, that is, restoring King and People to their just and ancient rights”.28

  The first steps of this delicate process went suspiciously smoothly; so swift indeed did the pace appear to some, that Oliver St John felt it necessary to warn his cousin Cromwell that he was doing “the King business” altogether too fast. An interview between Cromwell and the King on 4 July, authorized by Fairfax, went so well that many believed an understanding between the King and the Army would be reached within fourteen days. Major Huntington reported afterwards that Cromwell and Fairfax were prepared to shower the King with offers of goodwill ranging from access to his chaplains to contact with his younger children. Another interesting earnest of their genuine intentions to restore the King was provided by the serious discussions now instituted to give toleration to the Roman Catholic community. Rumours of this development reached the French Ambassador on 9 July. It was an amazing change about for such dedicated Puritans as Cromwell and Ireton, if one remembers the old anti-Catholic attitudes of the 16305, and an example of the growth of belief in toleration among the soldiers with the coming of Independency. But of course, as has been mentioned, the Catholics had by no means showed themselves the lethal Cavaliers of popular imagination during the recent war.29 If they could now consent to terms which brought them firmly within the English polity, and did not for example adhere to the notion of any foreign civil jurisdiction in England, perhaps they too could be allowed to join up with the forces of light – and tolerance – in a new peaceful England under the King.

  These negotiations probably began with secret approaches from the English Catholic community led by Henry More, acting Vice-Provincial of the Jesuits.30 More pointed out how Catholics in Germany and Holland managed to live peaceably under non-Catholic regimes. Lord Brudenell, a Catholic in the Army, was also influential in assuring the Army Council that there was nothing in the Catholic doctrines to prevent some satisfactory agreement being reached; this was despite such practical problems as the amount of Catholic property which had been confiscated during the war. The conditions drawn up to which the Catholics should subscribe if they wished to enjoy the common liberty of conscience were not harsh by the standards of the time: Catholics were allowed to exercise their religion in their homes, but were not to carry arms, and were specifically excluded from having intelligence with foreign powers. Eventually the nub of the difficulty was found in the prospect of an oath of civil allegiance, contained in Article IV. Amongst other doctrines which it was forbidden to promulgate was the Pope’s right to dispense a Catholic from his oath, including an oath of loyalty to the civil power. But after some acrimonious discussions among the Catholic community, and some theological soulsearchings, it was decided that even Article IV was acceptable since the matters touched on by it were not necessitate medii – necessary to salvation. The Propositions, which were finally dated i August were signed by representatives of the clergy, and the Catholic community. A preface added by Henry More took care to emphasize that this was in esssence merely an arrangement with the civil power: to the disgust of Lord Brudenell who feared that the whole negotiation would be imperilled, it stated: “We do not acknowledge the above-mentioned proposition as articles of our faith or as things taught us by our pastors.” In this form the Propositions were forwarded to Rome via the Papal Nuncio in Paris. Here their subsequent fate was less fortunate: the Propositions, possibly put forward in a slightly different form due to alterations en route which may have been accidental,31 were condemned by the Pope in January

  1648. More, who felt he had signed a conditional agreement rather than an absolute one, left England. But in any case by this time, political implementation of the Propositions had been refused ,by the House of Commons in England. Various Catholic petitions for toleration were prepared for Parliament in the early autumn, but when the House of Commons in mid-October discussed the possibility of Presbyterian government with all others given freedom of worship, the Catholics were deliberately exempted. At this point Henry Marten with his usual independence of judgement, spoke up unexpectedly for the Catholics. Why tolerate the Presbyterians and deny the Catholics? he enquired acidly. Surely it was far better to have one tyrant whose power was limited to spiritual things and anyway lived outside the realm, than a tyrant in every parish. In the end the whole project fell victim to the growing complication of England’s political squabbles, and ended for ever when Cromwell parted company with the King.* (* See Thomas H. Clancy S. I. The Jesuit and the Independents: 1647.)

  But this is to anticipate: in the meantime, while this praiseworthy if short-lived attempt to integrate the Roman Catholics into the structure of England was still in progress, the illusionary love affair of the Army and the King also proceeded. Perhaps Charles should not be judged too harshly for failing to understand the mentality of the men who had confronted him: believing as he did so unalterably that “a sovereign and a subject were two quite different things” no doubt it was virtually impossible for him to concede that they should negotiate together on equal terms. Nevertheless his private words to Berkeley – the fact that none of the Army officers asked anything for themselves made it so hard for him to trust them – shocked even his own servant. On 12 July Berkeley met Cromwell together with two others, Colonel Thomas Rainsborough and Sir Hardress Waller, and told them that Henrietta Maria wanted Charles to agree to the Army’s demands in so far as conscience and honour would allow. Cromwell’s reply stressed that altruism which so disquieted the King: the Army officers wanted no more than to live as subjects, and he added a sentence which raised Berkeley’s hope of a speedy restoration to a new peak: “they thought no men could enjoy their lives and estates quietly without the King had his rights”.32 They had already declared this in general terms, and would soon do so in greater particular to include all the various interests of the Royal, Presbyterian and Independent parties.

  There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of what now seemed to have turned into a reaihoneymoon between Independents and King. Three days later Cromwell described to Berkeley in moving terms a scene he had witnessed between the King and his three youngest children; the sight of such paternal tenderness, so close to his own deepest emotions, had brought tears into his eyes.33 The King, he told Berkeley, was “the uprightest and most conscientious man of his three kingdoms” and the Independents were for ever indebted to him. for rejecting the Newcastle Propositions of 1646, which would have resulted in the establishment of Presbyterianism. The truth was that while the London pamphleteers snapped at Cromwell’s heels in print, enraged at his union with the Army, like mastiffs baiting the contemporary bears at
Bankside, an agreement with the King presented quite genuinely the most hopeful outcome of an extremely tangled situation. Cromwell did not need to be a hypocrite to expound such a view: if the character of Charles had been different there might have been a real possibility of such a settlement. But Cromwell’s upright and conscientious sovereign was even now taking hope from another direction: secret messages from the Scottish Earl of Lauderdale encouraged him in the belief that the Army were not his only possible supporters. In the meantime the Presbyterians in London were threatening in earnest to invoke the Scottish army themselves; there were ugly rumours that Colonel Poyntz at York intended to betray the Northern army to the Scots; while the Agitators within the English Army’s ranks were raising an increasing furore that they should march on the capital and settle the whole situation by brute occupation.

  It was against this fermenting background that a General Council of War was called at Reading on 16 July to consider the Agitators’ request. Between fifty and one hundred officers were present – accounts vary – and for the first time a number of Agitators were “in prudence” admitted, as a newsletter euphemistically put it.34 The Agitators’ demands, from the banning of the infamous eleven members from sitting in the House of Commons to the freeing of such prisoners as John Lilburne, all pointed to one urgent desire that the Army should be immediately marched to London or near it. Cromwell on the other hand, who made frequent speeches, from the first put forward sweet reason not blind force as being the passion which must sway them: “Marching up to London,” he began, “is a single proposal, yet it does not drop from Jupiter, as that it should be presently received and debated without considering our reasons.” Again and again, most interestingly for one who was later with reason accused of setting aside Parliament by sheer strength, Cromwell showed himself anxious to settle matters lawfully: “Whatsoever we get by a treaty … it will be firm and durable, it will be conveyed over to posterity. We shall avoid the great objection that lies against us that we have got things of the Parliament by force, and we know what it is to have that stain lie upon us…” Much of Cromwell’s argument concentrated indeed on the use of Parliament, where not only was their own party steadily gaining ground, but if it was reformed and purged would soon be full of highminded men working only for the public interest. That surely had been the principle for which they had marched at Uxbridge and St Albans, and a wise, honourable and just principle it was too. “Really, really,” he expostulated in another intervention, “have what you will have, that which you have as force I look upon it as nothing. I do not know what force is to be used except we cannot get what is good for the kingdom without force.”35

  It was Ireton, however, his father-in-law’s political familiar, who from his first speech pointed out what should be the true subject of debate, rather than the march on London. The great point he said was not to get power into one man’s hands more than another, but to settle the liberties of the kingdom and to show what the Army would do with power when they got it. And he announced his intention of setting out a few proposals, with the help of Lambert, which would lay a proper foundation for the common rights and liberties of the people and an established peace. The meeting finally broke up after midnight, with the march on London temporarily abandoned; the Army’s proposals were to be submitted in the form of a manifesto to the commissioners who would pass them on to Parliament; in the meantime they were to be considered by the Council and then by a committee of twelve officers and twelve Agitators. These Heads of the Army Proposals were later to be of crucial significance as a basis for Army thinking. For measures undeniably concocted in haste by a group under pressure who were most of them, as an Agitator put it “but young statesmen”, they were comparatively temperate, although rather rambling and at times confused in the text. Berkeley when he heard them even told the King that he found the outcome surprisingly moderate “never was a Crown so near lost so cheaply recovered as his Majesty’s would be if they agreed upon such terms”.36

  Parliament was to have biennial sessions of at least one hundred and twenty and not more than two hundred and forty days; there was to be an important Council of State, more authoritative than the old Privy Council; there was to be a better distribution of Parliamentary seats and free elections; members of the House of Commons were to be allowed to dissent with both King and Lords freely, and the King was not to protect officials from Parliamentary judgement. With the militia in the hands of Parliament for ten years, and the Council of State controlling the armed forces and foreign affairs, they turned to the Church settlement. Here although the bishops were to be swept away and the Book of Common Prayer no longer legally enforced, there were other acts for repealing the disabilities of the papists; nor was the Covenant to be legally enforced. Then there was a long list of grievances to be redressed from inequalities of taxation to the forest laws. But at the end of it all the Crown was not forgotten: the King and his family were to be restored to a condition of safety, honour and freedom, without diminution to their personal rights or further limitation to the future exercise of the royal power.

  Unfortunately, before King Charles was able to make any public pronouncement on these proposals – they were probably first shown to him unofficially on 23 July – the violence in London had erupted beyond recall. The London mob, not a pretty sight, pressed in on both Houses of Parliament, and holding down Speaker Lenthall, forced him to rescind Parliament’s control of the militia. Thereafter Lenthall with upwards of sixty remaining Independent MPs, including even the once hostile Manchester, saw that the hour for flight had come, and promptly took themselves off to the Army, for fear of something worse at the hands of the Presbyterians. The eleven members returned, and with more confidence than wisdom, started to prepare the defences of London. It was of course exactly the sort of news for which the bold spirits in the Army had been waiting. Surely it would soon be their positive duty to rescue London from the chaos into which it was falling. It was at this critical juncture that Charles, much encouraged by the signals he was receiving from Scotland and hearing the noise of riot afar off as music to his ears, chose with mad confidence to rebut the Army’s proposals publicly to their faces. As Ludlow recorded, John Maitland Earl of Lauderdale, the Scottish emissary, was at the King’s side and with others of the City of London assured Charles that they would oppose the Army to death.

  The scene at this official renunciation, on or about 28 July, was a traumatic one for those Army officers such as Ireton who witnessed it. From the start, King Charles’s language revealed the heady mood into which undue optimism had betrayed him. To his own men he had already commented on the proposals airily that since the Army could not get by without him: “I shall see them glad ere long to accept more equal terms.” Now he excelled himself by crying, as he brushed the Heads of Proposals aside: “You cannot do this without me! You fall to ruin if I do not sustain you,” in what even Berkeley described as a series of “very tart and bitter discourses”. In vain the faithful Berkeley tried to hush him, whispering that the King must possess some secret source of strength to behave so confidently, and as it was something whose existence he had concealed from him, Berkeley, it would be as well if he hid it from the Army too. Colonel Rainsborough was quick to steal away and spread the news of the King’s immoderate reaction among the soldiers.*37 ( * Rainsborough was a rising star in the councils of the Army, a man who had connexions with Puritan worlds both New and Old; one of his sisters was married to Governor Winthrop of Massachusetts and another to Winthrop’s son. Having raised a regiment for Manchester (which was full of returned New Englanders) he had become an MP in May.)

  It was no wonder, as Clarendon wrote afterwards, that Cromwell’s attitude to the King was noticeably cooler after this episode,38 and in the strange patchwork of Cromwell’s relations with Charles Stuart, this particular incident must certainly have made a striking effect upon him. But now events were moving too fast in London for too much further introspection. It was mob rule, or something v
ery little short of it, which was approaching. Apprentices broke into the very buildings of Parliament to demand the repeal of the militias ordinance and the recall of the King to the capital. Not only the Speaker but members of both Lords and Commons including Ludlow and Haselrig decided that the moment had come to cast themselves upon the mercies of the Army for protection. And as the uncouth Reformadoes began to talk of plundering that wealthy prey, the City of London, the borough of Southwark extended an invitation to the Army to return. The fact that the Army, now at Hounslow Heath, could count on the Speaker to head its ranks, provided it with the last spur to action since there was now a gloss of legality to its march. The soldiers as they threw their hats in the air were able to cry “Lords and Commons and a free Parliament” with real conviction.

  At 2.00 a.m. on 6 August, some regiments were entering the City through the opened gates of the rebel borough of Southwark. The main body of the Army surged forth on the heart of London, sprigs of conquering laurel in the hats of the soldiers. Cromwell rode his horse at the head of his own regiment, which preceded the main body of the cavalry under Fairfax. At Hyde Park the Lord Mayor and Aldermen met them with hasty speeches of welcome, and at Charing Cross they were greeted by the Common Council. Before the end of the day, the Speaker was restored to his proper place in Parliament, a day of public thanksgiving had been ordered, and a month’s pay for the rank and file. The Commons passed a speedy if scarcely sincere resolution: “This House doth approve of the coming up of the General and the Army for the safe sitting of the Parliament, and that Thanks be given to the General and the Army for the same.” The eleven members, those symbols of the counter-revolution, vanished once more. The next day the entire Army, some eighteen thousand of them, swaggered through the City on their way to taking up a position at Croydon, leaving both the Tower and Parliament guarded. Fairfax, who had been ill, sat placidly in a carriage with his own wife and Mrs Cromwell, the perils of a political hostess quite forgotten in the glories of a conqueror’s wife. But Oliver Cromwell rode on at the head of the cavalry. The prediction of Jacob Astley made a year previously that the Parliamentarians might well wreck their own peace if they fell out with themselves, had come home to roost with a vengeance.