Cromwell, the Lord Protector

by Antonia Fraser

  But Cromwell’s worries over Dick were probably justified. The son’s portrait shows a face of infinitely softer contours than his father’s; gone are the musing wonderful eyes; the mouth is over-sensitive; the whole expression sweet and a little timid. The contemporary verdict on him in youth was correspondingly of a rather weak, gentle young man, whom Lucy Hutchinson called a peasant by nature – country gentleman might have been a kinder way of putting it. Perhaps he had been unfortunate in growing to manhood at the exact period of his father’s meteoric rise to national fame as a military leader (his dead brothers were both grown up before Oliver left obscurity). At any rate the father continued to mull over the son’s deficiencies long after the marriage ceremony had officially parted them; Oliver had a particular obsession about Dick’s reading matter. In the summer he urged Richard Mayor to get his new son-in-law to read more, perhaps history and geography might do the trick. A year later, from Ireland, Oliver personally adjured Dick to read Raleigh’s History of the World, a book whose contents make it easy to understand why Cromwell, not at first sight a particularly bookish man, should single it out for special approbation. Raleigh’s message accorded all to well with Oliver’s own theories: his whole history was designed to show that “an omnipotent God visits upon sinful men and nations just and inevitable punishments”. In another phrase Raleigh wrote: “There is not therefore the smallest accident, which may seem unto men as falling by chance and of no consequence, but that the same is caused by God to effect somewhat else by .. .”15 It was no wonder that Oliver, raised on the doctrines of Dr Thomas Beard, swore by the book, and recommended it so passionately to the laxer Richard.

  Otherwise Oliver, while encouraging Dick as a correspondent (“I take your letters kindly: I like expressions when they come plainly from the heart, and are not strained or affected”) was full of the more spiritual advice that he was fond of spreading about his children as they grew up. Dick was adjured to “Seek the Lord and His face continually” as Bridget had once been. Like Bridget, the subject of his marriage was touched upon, although introduced with slightly more tact in deference to Richard’s masculinity: “You will think (perhaps) I need not advise you to love your wife. The Lord teach you how to do it, or else it will be done ill-favouredly. Though marriage be no instituted Sacrament, yet here the undefiled bed is, and love, this union aptly resembles Christ and His Church. If you can truly love your wife, what [love] doth Christ bear to His Church and every poor soul therein.”16 Taken in conjunction with the somewhat similar comparisons expressed to Bridget on the image of Christ to be found in her bridegroom, and the vivid personal interest which Oliver continued to take in the relationship of Dick and Doll, one gets the impression that his vicarious role as match-maker cum Puritan father was one that Oliver Cromwell much enjoyed.

  The zest shown by Oliver in his pre-wedding correspondence with Mayor was the more remarkable in that a new danger level in the affairs of state was rising from the end of February onwards which might well have put paid to his energetic domestic mood and damped his cheer. Royalist apathy, especially abroad, could not be expected to last for ever. All Europe had gasped at the death of King Charles. The diplomatic contacts open to the new Commonwealth were minimal in a continent where far too many countries were ruled by crowned heads to view such proceedings in England with anything like equanimity. For a time the Commonwealth was in a manner of speaking sent to diplomatic Coventry. And there were persistent rumours of military intervention from abroad, perhaps by the Duke of Lorraine. Meanwhile in Scotland, the new King Charles n had been proclaimed on the instant of the reception of the news of his father’s death, and the gallant Montrose had vowed in a passionate poem to sing his royal master’s obsequies “with trumpet sounds, And write thine epitaph in blood and wounds”. But it was in fact from Ireland that menace to the new State seemed to loom most immediately.

  There a treaty had been finally concluded between Ormonde on behalf of the King and the Irish Catholics at Kilkenny in January. A week before his father’s death, the future Charles n had already been invited to come over to focus the Royalist support there. Ireland was therefore by now by far the likeliest direction from which a Royalist intervention might be expected; geographically it provided as always an excellent jumping-off ground for an invasion of England; in addition to which Prince Rupert had formed a small but able naval squadron of eight ships, based on the Scilly Isles, which could only too easily link Ireland and the English mainland. But the notion of a pre-emptive strike against Ireland by a Parliamentary army immediately brought into focus all the old problems that such an expedition had raised two years earlier in the spring of 1647. Once more, perennial Army topics such as disbandment, arrears of pay, disinclination of soldiers to make the expedition in the first place, reared their heads. And the situation was in a sense much worse than in 1647, for Army disaffection now had a permanent source of spokesmen in the Levellers. The Leveller party, far from being assuaged by the killing of the King, were now becoming from one wing as vociferous in their criticisms of the newly established government, as ever the Royalists had been from the other. The triangle formed by Royalist danger in Ireland, the need to send an army there, and the rise of the Leveller opposition, was one in which Cromwell now found himself personally encased.

  The main point made by the Levellers was that the Army grandees were busy betraying the aims of the revolution by not implementing those social reforms they had believed implicit in all their agreements. By the beginning of March Mercurius Pragmaticus heard with delight of dissensions between Cromwell and Henry Marten and his “levelling crew” in the House, in the course of which “Ruby Nose” (i.e. Cromwell) was said to have drawn his dagger.17 A Leveller pamphlet England’s New Chains Discovered infuriated the new powers that were. When on 15 March, Cromwell was formally named as the new Commander-in-Chief for the Irish expedition, for which the Council of State proposed an army of twelve thousand men, it was against a background of rising Leveller fury. Another pamphlet issued on 21 March, euphoniously entitled The Hunting of the Foxes from Newmarket and Triploe Heath to Whitehall by Five Small Beagles, referred angrily to Cromwell as the “new King” and added some pungent phrases in criticism of him. Whenever Cromwell is addressed, “he will lay his hand on his breast, elevate his eyes, and call God to record; he will weep, howl and repent, even while he doth smite you under the first rib …” “Oh Cromwell!” cried the authors, “whither art thou aspiring?” Was it towards a new regality?

  With such attacks mounted on him – and it was ironical that he was now being accused of aiming at the crown from two angles – it was hardly surprising that Cromwell’s reaction to the request for his generalship in the Army Council on 23 March was publicly extremely cautious. He might be “the proudest rebel in the pack” as Mercurius Elenticus termed him, but he could not be unaware that the pack was extremely disunited behind him. His absence in Ireland would certainly present his enemies with an excellent opportunity to tear at his position. As for his reputation, even that might not survive an Irish campaign from which few English Generals in the past had emerged with anything but tarnished glory. Cromwell’s speech was therefore long and tortuous, not to say tortured.

  On the one hand he never ceased to invoke the will of God, and remind his hearers that if that will require him to go to Ireland, then he would certainly go. “... And I do profess it as before the Lord of Heaven, and as in His presence, I do not speak this to you, that I would shift at all from the command, or any sneaking way or in any politic lead you to an engagement before I declare my thoughts in the thing, whether I go or stay, as God shall incline my heart to …” He also expressed himself in strong terms on the subject of the Irish nation itself, showing that his prejudices on that subject had by no means abated since the early 16405: “I had rather be overrun with a Cavalierish interest than a Scotch interest; I had rather be overrun with a Scotch interest, than an Irish interest; and I think of all this is most dangerous… all the wor
ld knows their barbarism.” But there was equally the more mundane subject of supplies to raise: that “the army do move for such provisions as may be fit for honest men to ask”. That was the kernel of it all: Cromwell had no wish to lead an unsuccessful – because it was ill-equipped – expedition to Ireland. After that was settled, then “let us go if God go .. ,”18

  It was perfectly true that the fitting out of the Irish army presented the Council of State with a renewed financial problem when it was already stretching out for monies in vain. In addition 1649 was marked by an economic depression. The need was for immediate revenues, and before expedients such as sales had time to come into effect, it was decided to ask the City of London for Ł120,000 on the security of the royal fee-farms that were now to be sold. But the City had its understandable doubts and since the climate of the time was generally so unfavourable to raising money, recourse had to be had back to sales. A new Act was brought to sell the lands of the deans and chapters in order to raise the necessary funds for Ireland. All of this meant delays and yet more delays, a time of nervous frustration and negotiation for all concerned, more particularly as the Leveller tongues simply would not be stilled.

  A few days after Cromwell’s speech to the Council, some leading Levellers, including Lilburne and Richard Overton, were brought before the Council of State, because the pamphlet England’s Chains had been condemned by the Commons as seditious and likely to lead to a new civil war. Lilburne as usual remained defiant under cross-examination. He was rewarded by overhearing Cromwell after he had left the room, shouting and thumping the table:

  I tell you sir,” [he cried] you have no other way to deal with these men but to break them or they will break you; yea, and bring all the guilt of the blood and treasure shed and spent in this kingdom upon your heads and shoulders, and frustrate and make void all that work that, with so many years’ industry, toil, and pains, you have done, and so render you to all rational men in the world as the most contemptible generation of silly, low-spirited men in the earth to be broken and routed by such a despicable, contemptible generation of men as they are … I tell you again, you are necessitated to break them.19

  Much of Cromwell’s later deeply held resentment against the Levellers and their offshoots as the disturbers of the rule of the saints, can be heard in this speech. Even so the Levellers were only condemned to imprisonment by a majority of one.

  A few days later Cromwell agreed in principle to command the Irish army, and on 30 March his appointment was approved by the House of Commons. But that he continued to be much perturbed in spirit and uncertain over the whole business can be seen from the report of even such a hostile source as Clement Walker in his History of Independency. On 1 April Cromwell was among those public preachers who were called upon by “the Spirit of the Lord”; Cromwell spent an hour in preliminary prayer, and then gave a sermon of an hour and a half’s length. Walker commented acidly that Cromwell asked God “to take off from him the government of this mighty People of England, as being too heavy for his shoulders to bear: an audacious, ambitious and hypocritical imitation of Moses”. And Cromwell, said Walker, had now formed the habit of retiring for a quarter or half an hour before any important matter was to be discussed, and then returning to deliver “the Oracles of the Spirit”.20 Leaving aside Walker’s dislike of Cromwell, the picture given is of a man no longer quite so certain where God – or man – was leading him.

  The question now arose of the choice of regiments to go to Ireland, beyond Cromwell’s own and two others already designated. A child was brought along to select four pieces of paper with the word “Ireland” on it, out of a hat, for horse and foot respectively. The rest of the papers were a discreet blank. Among the horse thus chosen were Ireton’s, Lambert’s and Scrope’s; the foot included those of Hewson, Ewer and Deane; there were also to be five troops of dragoons. So far, so good. But the mood of the men was by no means so compliant as that of the child must have been. Leveller suspicions of the Army leaders, coupled with a very real lack of pay, were beginning to produce an extremely ugly spirit which now boiled over into mutiny. Whalley’s regiment (which was to remain in England) had to be bribed by the officers’ own money to leave London; Hewson’s men threw down their arms. Worst of all from the point of view of the Government was the unsightly crowd of poor petitioners who crowded outside the House of Commons, many of them women, demanding with the aid of ten thousand signatures that the Levellers’ leaders should be released from prison. Some soldiers among them cocked pistols at the breasts of some members of Parliament (shades of the summer of 1647) and eventually some twenty agitators got inside the lobby. Here one unwise member attempted to tell a female petitioner that “it was not for women to Petition, they might stay at home and wash the dishes”. But his heckler had wit as well as sense on her side. He was answered smartly: “Sir, we have scarce any dishes left us to wash, and those we have are not sure to keep.” Another MP ventured the milder comment that it was at least strange for women to petition, only to receive the telling rejoinder that that which was strange was not necessarily unlawful: “It was strange that you cut off the King’s Head, yet I suppose you will justify it.”

  Cromwell himself did not fare much better. The same spirited female took hold of his cloak as he left and reproached him for caring so little for the common people as not to hear their petitions. There had been a time when he had been willing to listen, when they had had money to give him for the war: “You think we have none now, but we have a little left, but not for you, and blood too, which we shall spend against you.” “What will you have?” asked Cromwell, to this tirade. “Those rights and freedoms of the Nation, that you promised us …” came the reply, and the woman went on to specify the release of the Leveller leaders, imprisoned contrary to the law. In vain Cromwell argued that there had been an ordinance of Parliament for their trial by law. He was in the toils of a harpy who was quite his match: “Sir,” she replied, “if you take away their lives, or the lives of any contrary to law, nothing shall satisfy us but the lives of them that do it, and Sir we will have your life too if you take away theirs.”21

  Already the Leveller movement was producing various offshoots of dissent. That millenarian group known as the Fifth Monarchists, who believed that the Roman Empire would shortly be replaced by the Empire of Christ and whose calculations to this effect were greatly encouraged by the death of the King, gave their first sign of political action in February. The first petition Certain Quaeres came from Norwich; a second petition from Norfolk in March sought “the advancement of lesus Christ” and “the enlargement of his kingdom here on earth” as well as the purging of the clergy and the abolition of tithes, on a more mundane level.22 A Leveller splinter group were the Diggers, named literally for their freethe-land-for-the-people activities, which began in April near Windsor at St George’s Hill. It seems quite possible that Cromwell in March had allowed some poor soldiers in need to dig up some common land as they claimed. The organized Diggers’ activities were more serious not only because they threatened the existing rights of the freeholders, but because the theories they produced to substantiate their activities, if carried through, would menace the whole foundations of property, as Ireton had once believed that manhood suffrage would do.

  Whitelocke’s description of the Diggers was graphic. Having dug the ground and sowed it with roots and beans, “they invited all to come in and help them, and promised them meat, drink, and clothes; they threaten to pull down park pales, and to lay all open; and threaten the neighbours that they will shortly make them all come up to the hill and work”. The intention of their leaders William Everard and Gerard Winstanley was’ in fact to restore to God’s people the fruits and benefits of the earth, to which noble work Everard had been prompted by a vision. But in a petition to Fairfax, the Diggers reminded him that they had not yet received the benefit of their victories over the King, nor yet been freed from that ancient encumbrance, the Norman yoke; their land was still withheld from
them “by the Lord of Manors, that as yet sit in the Norman chair”.23 Thus social discontent, visionary inspiration and political theory were all jumbled together in a melange which with one element alone present might have been held to be less dangerous. On 19 April the Diggers were dispersed by troops, the seedlings being torn up afterwards by the indignant freeholders. But when their leaders were taken before Fairfax at Whitehall, they showed their attitude to authority by refusing to take off their hats; the movement was by no means quashed.

  Cromwell too had his visitants – “a Northern Prophetess” appeared in London about the same time and presented him with a paper which predicted dire troubles for England if “the poor commoners” were not given their proper liberties. Under the circumstances, with military disaffection on the one hand, popular unrest on the other, a lack of finance and a Royalist opposition that would not long be quiescent, he would have been entitled to conclude that England had her troubles already. Bradshaw was supposed to have remarked sadly about the end of April: “I wonder much that for all the fair and foul means we can use, yet not one Cavalier is heartily converted to us.”24 But the problem was more extensive than that: it was the gradual slipping away of the few slender supports which the new Commonwealth actually possessed which was the major concern of its leaders.

  A campaign to weed out the Levellers from amongst the ranks of those regiments destined for Ireland was considered an essential concomitant of a successful expedition, considering the mood these dissidents had achieved; but it led to an outright mutiny. The ringleader, twenty-threeyear-old Robert Lockier (who had already served seven years in the Army) was seized and shot, the rebellion quelled. But Lockier was popular, and reputedly of a pious character, not at all of the calibre of a disorderly ruffian. His death presented the Levellers with that essential ingredient of a popular campaign, their first martyr, and at his funeral they paraded ostentatiously with ribbons of their own colours – sea-green – and bunches of rosemary for remembrance in their hats, to show where their allegiance lay.* ( * Shades of the colour green were then the acknowledged colours of the revolutionaries, as red is now.) Although the plucking forth of the Levellers from the Irish ranks was an understandable military precaution, the attitude of the Levellers to the Irish nation already noted in its early form at Saffron Walden two years earlier, was in startling contrast to that of their less radical English contemporaries. One cannot help regretting the enforced absence from the Irish campaign of the kind of men who resolved in the Levellers’ language: that “the cause of the Irish natives in seeking their just freedoms was the very same with our cause here in endeavouring our own rescue and freedom from the power of oppressors”. It was a very different approach from the colonialist or missionary attitudes of their attackers: when the City was asked for money for the project, for example, approving reference was made to the famous words of King James i on the subject: “Plant Ireland with Puritans and root out Papists and then secure it.”25