Cromwell, the Lord Protector

by Antonia Fraser

  As for Cromwell, the crusading flavour of it all was seen not only in his remarks to the House of Commons on the subject of the Irish a few weeks back, but also in his first significant encounter with John Owen, the chaplain who was destined to enlarge his circle of godly friends from April onwards. Their meeting was at Fairfax’s house: on 19 April Owen gave a sermon there on the need for shaking out the “anti-Christian mortar” that was cementing the present constitution of the government of nations, equated by Owen with the papal system. He then hammered the point home by describing the battle with Catholicism as both religious and civil. When Owen came to bid his adieus after the sermon, Oliver went over to him, touched him on the shoulder and said: “Sir, you are the person I must be acquainted with.” “That will be much more to my advantage than yours,” Owen replied politely. “We shall see,” said Oliver, and subsequently invited Owen to accompany him to Ireland as his chaplain, with the additional persuasion that Owen’s brother was going as a standard-bearer.26

  Owen was that very preacher who had once described phrases such as “Where is the God of Marston Moor and the God of Naseby?” as “an acceptable expostulation on a gloomy day”. Quite as much as Cromwell, he believed in military success as a healthy indication of divine favour. Not only did Cromwell’s choice of Owen show the direction his thinking was already taking on the subject of Ireland, but Owen’s presence in itself and the close friendship he came to have with his master, must have had its effect in underlining this tendency in Cromwell’s own mind. Owen later testified in the dedication of one of his books to “the daily spiritual refreshment and support” he had received from Cromwell, guided by him into discovering “the deep and hidden dispensations of God towards his secret ones, which my spirit is taught to value”.27 Certainly there would be signs enough of a sort for Owen and Cromwell to puzzle over in Ireland.

  * * *

  By early May breaking-point on the subject of the Irish expedition had been reached by various angry regiments, and a more extensive mutiny than Lockier’s abortive rising exploded. The two chief centres were at Salisbury and Banbury. At Salisbury the regiments of Ireton and Colonel Scrope declared their intention to remain in England until that nation’s liberties should be secure, encouraged no doubt by the publication by Lilburne of his latest Agreement of the People, which demanded a Parliament based on manhood suffrage. The Banbury mutiny was led by Captain William Thompson of Colonel Reynolds’s regiment. In London Cromwell showed his own awareness of the delicacy of the situation – and the justice of many of the men’s financial grievances – in a speech he made in Hyde Park on 9 May. He stressed not only such past gestures towards freedom as “the execution of justice against the grand delinquents”, but also, on a more down-to-earth level, the various proceedings that had been put in hand to deal with the soldiers’ arrears of pay. And Cromwell was quite as good as his word in his preoccupation with their monies, having laid his hands on .Ł10,000 for the Army which had been originally intended for the Navy, to the fury of Sir Harry Vane of the Admiralty Committee. But even so he could see the ribbons in the hats of “the ‘Seagreen men’” as the Perfect Diurnall called them, and as once before after Putney, angrily had them pulled out.28

  A few days later Cromwell and Fairfax set out together to deal with the germinating situation of military rebellion in the south-west. At Andover Cromwell made another fine speech to the soldiers, recalling himself to them, “that he was resolved to live and die with them” and urging them to join him in bringing those “revolters” the Levellers to proper justice.29 The main body of both risings had now been quelled without too much difficulty, and with the exercise of a certain amount of compromise on the subject of those who were utterly determined not to go to Ireland: the remaining threat was constituted by those of Reynolds’s regiment under Thompson who had escaped the settlement, and were now on their way to join up with their fellow mutineers from Salisbury. By Sunday, 13 May, this remnant were passing through Burford in Oxfordshire on their route to the union. Here they decided to encamp in the village and round about for the night. In fact a Major White had already been despatched to them by the two Generals on what was evidently intended at first to be a peaceful mission of mediation. White was deputed to tell the soldiers that “although they [Cromwell and Fairfax] sent messengers to them, they would not follow with force at their heels”, a message he had duly managed to deliver to them on the morning of the day before near Abingdon. Yet follow, and follow hard with force, was exactly what Cromwell proceeded to do.* (* See R. H. Gretton for The Levellers at Burford, pp. 233-56 in Studies in Burford History.)

  On the Sunday itself Cromwell made a lightning strike of forty-five miles before midnight – an amazingly swift coverage of ground – and in the darkness surprised the soldiers resting at Burford. Either confused, frightened, or simply startled into fighting by the unexpected appearance of an opposing force in the middle of the night, the mutineers gave some sort of battle. A few were killed and the rest were locked up in Burford Church as prisoners. The most likely explanation for Cromwell’s change of plan is that the Generals received news that the rebels in a “high and peremptory” manner declined to abandon their project of joining up with their fellows. It was this conjunction of the two bodies that Cromwell was determined to prevent. The offer of mediation was considered to be invalidated by the rebels’ own pursuit of their former plan. Nevertheless the soldiers felt afterwards that they had been betrayed by Cromwell, and that the White mission had promised them a quarter not afterwards shown to them, a view to which the surprising night attack, hardly likely to promote peace, gave some colour.

  In the event the consequences to the mutineers were not pleasant but they were not particularly summary by the standards of the time. Nearly four hundred of them were kept shut up in the church from the Sunday night until Thursday morning when the ringleaders were executed. Captain William Thompson, the original instigator, had actually escaped in the midnight me’lee and was killed a few days later in a skirmish. But his brother Cornet Thompson was one of those shot in the churchyard – a contemporary wrote rather pathetically: “Death was a great terror to him, as unto most.”* 30 (* A signature carved by a soldier Antony Sedley during his enforced residence can still be seen in Burford Church, and a note in the register records three soldiers shot to death on 17 May 1649 buried in Burford churchyard.) A Corporal Dunne was reprieved at the last moment, probably because while locked up he prudently embarked on writing a pamphlet directed against the mutiny.

  From Cromwell’s point of view, he seems to have laid much of the blame for the unpleasant incident at the door of John Lilburne, and there is more than a touch of paranoia about his reaction, as reported by White, when the latter suggested that the whole business might be “composed of” Cromwell became cross, and “discovered much dissatisfaction”, saying that it was ridiculous to talk of glossing over such an incident. Once more he thumped the table at the name of Lilburne and exclaimed: “Either Lilburne or himself should perish for it.”31 It was the measure of his growing feeling that it was Lilburne and his associates who were now the ones imperilling what had been hardly won by the war. In the meantime two measures passed and instigated in London showed how little the people of England were to be trusted to enjoy their new liberties properly. A Treason Act of 14 May not only gave to Parliament all the powers and qualities in that respect formerly appertaining to the King, but also made it treason for any civilian to stir up mutiny among the soldiers. A week later preparations began for an Act to prevent the printing of scandalous books and pamphlets (although the major Act of the Commonwealth instituting full-scale censorship did not make its appearance until the autumn).

  During the incommodious incident at Burford, Cromwell and Fairfax had at least been able to spend their nights comfortably at near-by Burford Priory, the house of Speaker Lenthall which he had purchased from Lord Falkland before the war. Now they moved on to Oxford, where their quarters were equally agreeable �
� the Warden’s Lodgings at All Souls’ College – and their reception much pleasanter. Although Oxford had been the King’s headquarters during the war, it was obviously not the Royalist dignitaries of the University who were now sent to welcome the Army leaders to their academic bosom, and install them as Doctors of Civil Law. “Were they not first made masters, and then doctors?” – so ran the dialogue in Hobbes’s Behemoth.32 There was some truth in the sneer. For new men had been put in the places of the old loyalists, and of these it was Jerome Sankey, Sub-Warden of All Souls’, in the place of the Anglican Warden Gilbert Sheldon, a future Archbishop of Canterbury, who welcomed the Generals. Sankey’s very different sympathies could be shown clearly enough by the fact that he later followed Cromwell to Ireland. The next day the Generals were welcomed by speeches which Antony a Wood chose to describe as “bad, but good enough for soldiers”.33

  Bad they may have been, but Cromwell in his own reply, a speech of gracious and unexceptionable sentiments, showed that in some respects at least the mantle of royalty had fallen easily on his shoulders. He referred to the fact that no Commonwealth could flourish without learning, and that their new rulers intended to encourage learning to the hilt, whatever they might hear to the contrary. Later more good cheer (and more bad speeches) were offered at Magdalen College, set off by bowling on the green after dinner. The whole outing was rounded off by the presentation of the famous doctorates of Civil Law by Convocation. Here Sankey expressed delight that the University had shown eminent patriots in their midst, and all the other speakers strove to “outvie” each other in the ardour of their welcome. Even the undergraduates were admitted to Convocation, contrary to custom (although still behind rails) that they might be duly “encouraged in [by] the sight of such a solemnity”. Finally Cromwell and Fairfax paraded in their newly acquired scarlet gowns through the streets of Oxford. It must have been an awesome sight to those who remembered the Royalist Oxford of the wartime days.

  By 25 May Cromwell was back in London, reporting with satisfaction to the House of Commons how the wicked design of the Levellers had been “by God’s Providence prevented from further going on within the kingdom”.34 The remaining months of the summer were to be spent in hectic preparations for the Irish expedition, a project of ever-increasing urgency as the fortunes of the Commonwealth in Ireland itself correspondingly decreased. Ormonde in alliance with the Catholic Irish had produced unlooked-for victories, and the fact that Cromwell’s own arrival still seemed to outsiders to hang in the balance only encouraged the Royalist cause – it was reported to Ormonde from Paris for example that few there believed Cromwell would ever actually set off.

  It was true that the disease of disunity which had plagued Ireland still manifested its infectious presence under the new dispensation: the Celtic Irish leader Owen Roe O’Neill reached a point of dissatisfaction over Ormonde’s inadequate religious concessions which enabled him to reach an agreement with the Parliamentary General George Monk in early May, by which he promised not to make terms with the enemies of the cornmonwealth for three months. This understanding, which was possibly made with Cromwell’s foreknowledge, was kept generally secret for the time being. Otherwise, by the end of May, the Commonwealth state in Ireland was parlous, Monk only maintaining himself in Ulster with difficulty and Colonel Michael Jones, the Governor of Dublin, threatened with future obliteration by the combined encircling forces of Ormonde and Lord Inchiquin. Jones, badly hampered by lack of ammunition and with many of his men deserting, might well have been conquered altogether by Ormonde at that point. But Ormonde, unable perhaps to believe in the prospect of Cromwell’s arrival, forbore from striking quickly; as it was Drogheda, Dundalk and Trim all fell to the Royalists in June. Meanwhile offKinsale on the southern coast of Ireland, Prince Rupert and his little squadron of ships scored an encouraging victory.

  For the Commonwealth it was a season beset with difficulties, and not all the casualties of this particular summer died in battle. In May Dr Dorislaus, the newly appointed envoy to Holland, who had of course played a prominent part in the trial of the King, was assassinated by a group of Royalists. Their names became known to the Dutch Government, but the efforts made to punish them were purely perfunctory and as such quite unsuccessful. Back in London Parliament as a whole was horrified. Dorislaus was given a public funeral of much solemnity and buried in Westminster Abbey itself, although the presence of a multitude of soldiers at the ceremony seemed intended as much to guard the remaining Commonwealth leaders as to honour their dead comrade. Assassination could and would be a dangerous weapon in the hands of the Government’s opponents, particularly when this Government itself clearly rested so much on the strength and personality of a mere handful of men. As a result, there were rumours everywhere, rumours that Cromwell himself was threatened, more particularly that he was about to be seized and imprisoned by his own men, rumours that even Ireton had quarrelled with his father-in-law over the suppression of the Levellers. Both stories were in point of fact unlikely, the one because his soldiers issued an official pamphlet denying it and protesting loyalty, the other because Ireton was shortly rewarded with the post of Major-General to the Irish army, a post that had been expected to go to Lambert.35 But that such tales could flourish was symptomatic of the uneasy times in which men now lived.

  In the midst of this uncertainty, a lavish showpiece was enacted, in the shape of a magnificent banquet given by the City of London authorities on 7 June as an official thanksgiving to the Government for the ending of the Leveller troubles. The deliberate intention was to display confidence and solidarity, not to say pure military force, to frighten off the weaklings from opposition. But for all the splendour of its ritual celebration, the banquet and its surrounding circumstances also had the effect of showing up the extremely thin ice of popular support on which Army and Council of State were now skating. On the journey from “Westminster to the City there were jeers as well as cheers for the leaders in their heavy coaches, and the whole procession ground to a halt when some frivolous or wayward spirit removed the linchpin from Cromwell’s own carriage.

  At the banquet itself, which included all officers above the rank of lieutenant, as well as the members of the Council of State and the three commissioners of the Great Seal, “very free and cheerful entertainment” was given; the word WELCOME was inscribed on bannerets on each and every one of the numerous dishes of food. Some of this food was afterwards distributed to several London prisons (with the word WELCOME no doubt obliterated) and a propitiatory Ł400 spread among the poor of the City. The pro-Government Perfect Diurnall reflected complacently that it was “a feast indeed of Christians and chieftains” compared with similar functions in days gone by, which it compared to those of “cretians and cormorants”.36 But quite apart from the military tinge to the company, it was significant that the only music heard was that of the drum and the trumpet – martial sounds indeed for a peaceful banquet.

  In these disquieting days, Cromwell was one of those who opposed a Parliamentary resolution that would have brought in another hundred members to the denuded House of Commons. He was only too well aware of the slim chance that existed these days of finding a hundred members who were favourably disposed towards their policies. Instead, Cromwell suggested that Parliament should be adjourned for three months and elections postponed. In October an interim solution was brought forward by which all sitting or future members of Parliament were expected to take the oath of engagement hitherto applied to members of the Council of State. It read: “I do declare and promise that I will be true and faithful to the Commonwealth of England as the same is now established, without a King or House of Lords,” and was expected to keep encroaching former Royalists from having a hand in the nation’s affairs. On 20 June the House of Commons formally constituted Cromwell not only Commander-in-Chief but also Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, the civil as well as the military arm to be under his guidance on arrival. According to Clarendon, Cromwell celebrated the occasion with a speech
of more than ordinary self-abasement, protesting first his own unworthiness, secondly his entire resignation to their commands, and thirdly and most characteristically his “absolute dependence upon God’s providence and blessing, from whom he had received many instances of favour”. On these terms he submitted himself to them, expressing the rather melancholy hope that even if he lost his own life, that too might help to obstruct the successes of the Commonwealth’s enemies in Ireland.37