Cromwell, the Lord Protector

by Antonia Fraser

  About the time of the negotiations with the King, the French Ambassador had a significant conversation with Cromwell, which he repeated several years later to the Cardinal de Retz when Cromwell was Protector because it had stuck in his memory. What were Cromwell’s real aims? To which Cromwell replied enigmatically: “None rises so high as he who know not whither he is going .. .”* ( * The French text reads: “Il me disoit unjour, que I’on ne montait jamais si haut, que quand on ne sait ou l'ou va”, but of course Cromwell must have spoken to the Ambassador in English, having little if any French. S. R. Gardiner dates the conversation convincingly 9-11 July, when Bellievre visited the officers: in any case it had to take place sometime before October when Bellievre left England.39) Remembered later such words acquired easily the connotation of a sinister ambition, but at the time they were more probably spoken in the sheer bewilderment and doubt which as we have seen dominated so much of Cromwell’s mood this perplexing summer. At the same time, during one of his speeches at Reading, Cromwell had spoken frankly of the other side to his dual nature, that impulsive streak which often succeeded these periods of uncertainty. He was one who was apt on occasion to be very swift in his affections and desires, believing dangers to be imaginary rather than real “and truly I am very often judged for one that goes too fast that way”.40 In his first mood, Cromwell had hung back, and persuaded others to hang back, from the march on London for as long as he could humanly believe another solution to be possible. He was never on the side of the undisciplined hotheads of the Army and still hoped the soldiers would turn out to be, as Baxter heard he called them, “his obedient lambs”. But for one who studied the ways of Providence among men, the behaviour of the relict of the Parliament had surely indicated beyond doubt that it was the time for some more precipitate action.

  9 The game at cards

  The right was certainly in the King, but the exercise was yet in nobody; but contended for, as in a game at cards, without fighting, all the years between 1647 and 1648 between the Parliament and Oliver Cromwell

  THOMAS HOBBES IN Behemoth

  If the previous twelve months had seen the gathering strain of Cromwell’s break with Parliament, the next period of his life witnessed a dramatic series of alliances and reversals on a much swifter time scale. Years later, in his examination of the Long Parliament in dialogue form, Behemoth, Thomas Hobbes described the enormous uncertainties of this time when although the right to rule was undoubtedly in the King “the exercise was yet in nobody; but contended for, as in a game at cards, without fighting”.1 In the course of the game Cromwell discovered, as many have done since, how cruelly different are the qualities required by a statesman from those of the successful soldier; in political life, a public decision could entail a public retractment; it was indecision, hanging on events, which often paid valuable rewards. There was already, as we have seen, a strain in Cromwell’s character that could accustom itself to such periods of waiting, until some providence should indicate the correct course; but under the increasing pressure of politics, the purity of such religious feelings became inevitably tinged with more earthly opportunism, and even deceit. The blurring of such distinctions was not necessarily noticeable to the subject in whose mind they existed, and no doubt Cromwell continued to envisage himself as a simple-hearted seeker after the Lord. In the autumn of 1647 however he was no longer a simple man, but an increasingly skilled negotiator who saw to it that whichever way the play went in Hobbes’s game at’cards, he himself continued to take the tricks. The first round of the game consisted of renewed attempts to settle with the King. Charles was now brought first to his palace at Oatlands, and then on to Hampton Court. In the meantime Parliament bore the full brunt of the wrath of the returning Army leaders: all ordinances passed in the Speaker’s absence by the Presbyterian minority were to be repealed, in which work the Generals were assisted not only by the committed Independents, but by the many MPs who belonged more to the “middle group”, as it has been termed. This shifting but important body of MPs, whatever their views on military rule, were as one with the Army leaders in believing there should be no disbandment before a proper settlement; that would be merely to hurl power in the direction of the Scots. Even so by the time this Null and Void ordinance was actually passed Cromwell had lost his patience on at least one occasion. After telling Ludlow angrily that “these men will never leave till the Army pulls them out by the ears”, on 20 August he ordered a regiment of cavalry to take up stations in Hyde Park, within obvious striking distance of the House of Commons. Cromwell himself then rode down to Westminster. Although he did leave his escort of soldiers outside, it was at the completion of this ostentatious gesture that, with the help of his vote and those of the other Army MPs, the bill finally carried. The Presbyterians realized that the time had come to vanish once more from the scene. As a result Parliamentary attendance diminished woefully in general, with the average attendance of the House of Lords quoted as seven, and that of the Commons little more than one hundred and fifty on even the greatest issues. With the new and strident Army Council having virtually taken over their authority in the land, there was much to be said for the disgusted verdict of Holies: “The Army now did all, the Parliament was but a Cypher, only cry’d Amen to what the Councils of War had determined. They make themselves an absolute Third Estate .. .”2

  But Cromwell and Ireton had problems of their own with this Third Estate. The radical element in the Army, who had been restrained from the march on London like greedy wolves circling a sledge containing human prey, were by no means assuaged by the return to the capital; in particular they were prepared to watch any approaches of Cromwell to the King with vulpine suspicion. For all that, in the coming weeks, in the face of many varied types of protest, Cromwell and Ireton did deliberately court the King once more. Cromwell, although still technically Fairfax’s military subordinate, was now the undisputed political leader, for the General had withdrawn from active participation in their overtures, pained and worried by the turn matters were taking. Conditions at Hampton Court, that great palace built by a King’s servant in the century before and plundered from him by his master, were royally conceived; the number of visitors who were able to flock down there to pay their respects to the King amounted to a positive Court. And down to Hampton Court went not only Cromwell and Ireton – the Army had just moved its headquarters to near-by Putney, just south of the Thames – but also Mrs Cromwell.

  Later, this good lady was said to have been taken by the hand by Ashburnham, led forward with Bridget Ireton and Mrs Whalley and “feasted”, a process which it was only human to enjoy. On this occasion hostile gossip said that Cromwell was to be made an Earl – perhaps of Essex, the forfeited title of his kinsman Thomas Cromwell – given the blue ribbon (of the Garter) and have his son appointed as Groom in the Prince’s chamber. Although such tales caused understandable glee to Cromwell’s enemies, whether Presbyterian or Leveller, there seems no particular reason, in the climate of rapprochement between Army and King in August and September 1647, why such tides should not have been dangled before the eyes of the Army leaders. Had not Charles suggested earlier that Berkeley should promise them personal reward during negotiations? Even Cromwell’s acceptance of such an honour was not utterly out of the question had such a settlement been reached. Elizabeth Cromwell would not have been either the first or the last woman to enjoy becoming a Countess. As for his son, Oliver like most people of his time firmly believed in his family’s star rising with his own. It was a tendency underlined next month by a sarcastic entry in the Royalist Mercurius Pragmaticus, which forgave Cromwell’s “daily craving for money”, in Lilburne’s words, on the grounds that he could hardly help it, considering all the dependents he had in the Army.3 Altogether seven were listed, including his son Henry, his two sons-in-law Ireton and Claypole, and his first cousin Whalley.

  On 7 September Charles was brought to the position of informing both Houses that he would accept the Heads of Proposals; in thi
s he was probably the victim of a confusing little manoeuvre on the part of Cromwell and Ireton by which they suddenly threatened him anew with the much less favourable Newcastle Propositions. Yet it was all part of this general picture of conscious effort to settle with the King: the two men now committed themselves to supporting Charles’s demand for a personal treaty. That they were still sincere in these attempts to solve the problems of government in a monarchical context is attested, if by nothing else, by the rising vehemence of men such as Lilburne who saw themselves as being sold out. Cromwell and his Cabinet Counsel of “grandees” as they were called, men such as Oliver St John and Sir Henry Vane, were in consequence suspected of managing affairs to the Army’s discomfort. The radically minded Colonel Rainsborough was nearly done out of the job of Vice-Admiral which he had coveted and fell out with Cromwell as a result. Lilburne, who was in the Tower, heard of the intrigue and passed it on to his companion Sir Lewis Dyve, who duly wrote of it to the King.4 On 15 September Cromwell himself chose to come to the Tower, ostensibly to check what stores of armaments remained there, but he also found time to have a long and interesting conversation with Lilburne. Cromwell begged his erstwhile protege to stop speaking in such bitter terms of Parliament, for he would shortly see all things righted. Lilburne responded by asking for a free trial for his alleged offences, to which Cromwell was only able to reply rather lamely that at least matters were better now than under the previous regime. Then there had been a “habit of oppression and tyranny”; nowadays on the contrary “those things wherein Parliament might seem to have swerved from the right rules of justice was rather by way of accident and necessity”. Reform was on its way, and in the meantime, said Cromwell, patience would best become prudent men, until they had secured their own preservation. Lilburne, no patient man and not a noticeably prudent one either, continued to demand impartial justice for all men – “the likeliest and best way to preserve themselves”. Nevertheless the tenor of Cromwell’s remarks and of other pieces of information passed on to Charles at this period via Sir Lewis Dyve was to confirm the notion of Cromwell’s favour to the King. Charles could only have been encouraged by Dyve’s reports towards a feeling of his own indispensability.

  Meanwhile Cromwell’s sturdy opposition to the subversive (as he saw it) agitators within the Army itself did not abate. In early September for example he had taken a strong part in getting a Major Francis White expelled from the Army Council for observing outspokenly that there was no “visible authority in the kingdom but the power and force of the sword” – this was not at all how Cromwell liked to envisage matters these days. But an injured letter from Cromwell to Colonel Michael Jones, Governor of Dublin, a week later reflected something of the unpopularity which he was beginning to feel pressing in on him from all sides as a result of his clearly determined desire to settle with Charles: “Though it may be for the present a cloud may lie over our actions, to them who are not acquainted with the grounds of our. transactions; yet we doubt not but God will clear our integrity and innocency from any other ends we aim at but his glory and the public good.”5 On 21 September he argued cogently in the House of Commons, supported by men such as Vane, Fiennes and St John and in the teeth of Republicans like Marten, that the House should go into committee on the subject of the King. With Cromwell acting as teller for the Ayes, and Rainsborough for the Noes, the vote was actually carried, although subsequently reversed.

  The quarrel between the factions became obvious to onlookers: William Langley, writing back to his brother in Staffordshire on 28 September, described how the Agitators suspected Cromwell and his clique of labouring to insinuate themselves into the King’s favour, while Cromwell’s party on the other hand thought the Agitators took too much upon themselves in relation to the government of the kingdom. Langley was informed how much Cromwell had spoken on the King’s behalf when his answer to the propositions had been “controverted” in the House.6 The early weeks of October were spent by Cromwell busying between meetings of the Army Council – whose clamorous demands were increasingly disturbing – his place in Parliament and negotiations with the King’s personal representatives concerning the treaty to which he still pinned his faith as the amulet to ward off the Scottish advance. The arrival in London on II October of two new Scottish Commissioners to join Lauderdale only served to underline the danger that might be expected from that quarter, if Charles was able to reach some agreement with his Scottish subjects rather than the English who now held him prisoner.

  It was at this unpropitious moment (from the point of view of those in the middle) that a manifesto drawn up by five particularly mutinous regiments on 9 October, The Case of the Army Truly Stated, called for the immediate purging of the House and its dissolution within a year; other demands – manhood suffrage, a Parliament of supreme authority elected on this basis, popular sovereignty of the widest sort – left no doubt of the calibre of these Levellers’ thinking. Fairfax, as Commander-in-Chief, received The Case of the Army on 18 October; two days later Cromwell made another strong speech in support of the monarchy in the Commons. He apparently hoped to persuade Parliament that together with General Fairfax and all the heads of the Army he had not been in any way a part of the designs of those regiments which had mutinied, but that their purpose and wish from the beginning of the war had been none other than to serve the King. Throughout his whole speech he spoke very favourably of Charles, concluding that it was necessary to re-establish him as quickly as possible.7 This same speech was afterwards quoted by frenetic Royalists, believing in Cromwell’s deep-laid conspiracy to achieve supreme power, as part and parcel of his overwhelming hypocrisy. It is more realistic to assess it as one of Cromwell’s unsuccessful but still honest endeavours to preserve the middle ground, against attack from nearly all quarters. Over this middle ground he still genuinely felt that a suitably restrained King might one day be able to hold sway.

  It was against this backcloth of sensational uncertainties that the great Army debates took place from 28 October onwards in the chancel of the fifteenth-century church of St Mary the Virgin, Putney.* ( * This historic church (see Plate facingp.252),although rebuilt in the nineteenth century, can still be seen today in its old strategic position, although it now lies just over the (new) Putney Bridge.) As an edifice it was high rather than particularly large and lay on the banks of the Thames just across the river from Fulham (then only reachable by ferry). It was the parish church of the district, and although the registers show that there were no weddings celebrated there during this momentous period in its history (the soldiers’ occupation would have made it virtually impossible), there are records of soldiers who had been quartered round about being buried there: some of their names were not even known to the lodging-house keepers who reported them. With their breaks for prayer – the resolution for the proceedings of the second day read “from eight to eleven to seek God, etc.” – and their earnest invocations of Scriptural texts and even the laws of the Israelites as equally relevant to the case as English laws, these debates must rank as one of the most extraordinary moots in British history. On a rather different level, such an unprecedented turmoil of dispute must certainly rank as a triumph for the popular astrologer William Lilly who in his Almanack for 1647 had predicted “high and very great contentions … about our Customes, Privileges” for the end of October. In their course the participants ranged over ideas which varied from the wild to the prophetic, many of them so far in advance of their times that they were not fulfilled until three hundred years later, if then. Fortunately we have a remarkably full account of the course of the debates in the papers of William Clarke, then a young man of twenty-four, who had begun life as the subordinate to Rushworth, Secretary to Fairfax and the Council of War, when the New Model was formed, and had become Secretary to those commissioners who tried to arrange terms between Parliament and the Army in the summer. The notes for the Putney reports, which include the introduction of such attractive archetypal if anonymous figures as “Buff
Coat” and “Bedfordshire Man”, were probably taken down in shorthand by Clarke himself.8

  The meeting was held from the first under the presidency of Cromwell, Fairfax being officially unwell and at Turnham Green; and throughout Cromwell showed himself an effective speaker, as well as capable of producing out of the meeting those results he thought oh balance least harmful. In short, he acted the part of a capable committee chairman, having had much practice in the past as a committee man. As an orator, Cromwell ranks amongst those speakers one would like to have heard to have got the full flavour of his style, since between Marvell on “that powerful language” which “charmed” and Burnet who wrote that Cromwell was famous for speaking at length and “very ungracefully” there is obviously room for more than one interpretation of it. Certainly his actual words, at times superbly vivid and direct, are not enough to account for the profound impression he made on his hearers. Force, not to say vehemence, was clearly one paramount quality he possessed from the early days, an eloquence which Carrington politely described as both “Masculine and Martial” and which he called an inborn gift, not an acquired art. He also did not lack that form of self-induced emotional drive, the prerogative of some speakers, which it is perhaps not too fanciful to link with his inherited Welsh blood. The Venetian Ambassador, trying to sum up this particular rolling fervour dispassionately, described him more like a preacher than a statesman.9 At times this produced tears in his own eyes, at times in the eyes of his enthusiastic audience: and at times it produced the snarl of “Hypocrite” on the lips of his enemies.