Cromwell, the Lord Protector

by Antonia Fraser

  Nevertheless this inevitable sniping from right and left did not prevent Cromwell as Lord Protector presenting to the country as a whole a figurehead not unworthy of the role. He was undeniably a man of many private virtues. This in itself constituted one of the problems of his attackers. The point has been well made that he was no Richard in to be presented as the image of evil.39 It was difficult to transform Cromwell, the friendly approachable individual known and loved by thousands of ordinary people who had served under him in the Army, into the very picture of a blackhearted villain, with any conviction. Another example of Oliver’s lack of the “killjoy” spirit was the fact that he actively enjoyed the company of lively and attractive younger women, even if they were of different political complexion. His manners to women altogether were notably courteous, particularly when they were in distress: later Lady Ormonde would benefit from them; in the last summer of his life Lucy Countess of Carlisle described an interview with Mrs Mordaunt who went to plead on behalf of her conspirator husband.40 The Protector “played the gallant so well that she believed he would have waited upon her the next morning, which she said he told her”. Prime amongst those who sparkled even at the Court of the Protectorate, was “Bess”, otherwise Elizabeth Murray, Countess of Dysart in her own right.

  In the later more dissipated years of the 1670s she was to achieve much notoriety as the imperious Duchess of Lauderdale. But Bess, daughter of Charles I’s whipping-boy and later attendant William Murray, created Earl of Dysart, had begun public life very differently.41 As the wife of Sir Lionel Tollemache of Helmingham Hall in Suffolk, the mother of his eleven children, and the hostess after 1651 of her father’s reclaimed property of Ham House, as well as a house in the newly built fashionable area of Inigo Jones’s Covent Garden, Bess cut a considerable dash in London Society of the Commonwealth. She was amusing and original, while an early portrait by Lely still at Ham House bears witness to her enchanting early appearance, hair the colour of sunshine and the exquisite pink and white complexion of some Scottish redheads. Dorothy Osborne gives a lively picture of her as one that says “she can do whatsoever she will”, as an example of which was Bess’s refusal to catch smallpox at a time inconvenient to herself, although her physician told her that the spots were actually coming out. Bess nevertheless by her own account repelled the onslaughts of the disease by sheer will-power or as she put it “the strength of reason and the power of philosophy”.

  The attractions of her company were appreciated by the Lord Protector. Some thirty years older than she was (Bess was exactly the age of his own daughter Bettie), he was not averse to hearing such amazing prattle from a pretty woman, particularly when it was accompanied by a brain and education beyond that of most of her sex. Later Bishop Burnet would bear witness to Bess’s intellectual powers: she was quick in mind and conversation, one who had studied mathematics, history, divinity, and philosophy. Nor was Cromwell averse to the conversation of those of very different opinions from himself and Bess, with her strong Royalist connexions, fell into this category too. Her husband’s brother-in-law was that Sir William Compton of the Sealed Knot, and Lord Maynard, her sister’s husband was, another member. It seems highly probable that Bess herself on her trips abroad acted as courier and intriguer for Sealed Knot operations, relying hopefully on Cromwell’s patronage to secure an uninterrupted passage. In fact, it appears to have been this dubious side to her delightful company which eventually led Cromwell to put an end to their association, slight as it was. This, at any rate, was the story spread by Burnet, who wrote that “Cromwell was certainly fond of her and she took care to entertain him in it; till he, finding what was said upon it, broke it off.” Bess’s own letter home from abroad, on hearing of Cromwell’s death, is highly revealing of her own attitude at that time: referring to him as “the old one”, she observed frankly: “I can only say I did know him, and I hope I shall never know his fellow.”42

  So much for the realities of the friendship: Bess was certainly never Cromwell’s mistress in the sexual sense, a relationship that would have been unthinkable to him. It was after the Restoration, when Bess’s fortunes took a different turn, that it became important to her to improve the story beyond all measure. As mistress and later wife of the first Duke of Lauderdale, she was anxious to maintain that it was her influence with Cromwell that had saved him from death back in 1651 after Worcester, although there is no evidence for it. Then there was the teasing story of Bess’s son Thomas Tollemache, the second of her eleven children born some time in 1651, being the offspring of the Protector. Tollemache himself enjoyed the reflected glory of this insubstantial tale, according to Burnet, perhaps because he rose to be a brave and daring soldier in his turn before his premature death at the expedition to Brest in 1694; yet the dates hardly fitted, due to Cromwell’s prolonged absences abroad at this period.

  Like mother, like son: as memories of Cromwell receded in the looser pleasantries of the Restoration age, there was considerable mileage for a great lady in having been the monster’s mistress, the lover of “the old one” himself. So came about the many allusions and hints of the memoirs of the 16705 onwards. “She is Bess of my heart, she was Bess of Old Noll …” So ran one scurrilous rhyme. In the meantime Bess herself, the charming young woman of Cromwell’s Court, had been transformed into an ageing and litigious harridan. The double portrait by Lely of herself and Lauderdale provides a Hogarthian comment on her progress if compared with the earlier version with the sunshine hair darkened to flaming red, and the innocent sensuality of youth deepened to frank debauchery. Against the slanders or boasts of this termagant, “violent in everything she set about, a violent friend, but a much more violent enemy”,43 the long-dead Oliver Cromwell had no protection.

  Cromwell’s other possible tender passion, of which more was made at the time, was for Frances Lambert, wife of the General. It is significant that Heath, in his deliberately scurrilous biography published in 1663, mentions Frances but does not dwell on Bess – clearly because at this date her rumours had not yet been started up. In a way, if one is determined to prove that the Lord Protector, like any other man, could be subject to human frailty, there was far more to be said in favour of his supposed love for Frances Lambert than for wilful Bess. Frances was not a dangerous Royalist plotter, a Sealed Knot intriguer. She belonged on the contrary to the inner circle of the Puritans, her husband was Cromwell’s “dear Johnnie”, at times his “dear son”. She was young, not quite so young as Bess, but over twenty years younger than the now middle-aged Protector, and to him at least had the charm of youth. Cromwell stayed on several occasions at the Lambert family home in Yorkshire, and when ultimately reconciled to Lambert towards the end of his life following their quarrel, his first concern was to ask after Lambert’s “jewel”, Frances. Since Frances, like Bess, had eleven children, and had an appealing, vivacious, essentially feminine character, concerned for her appearance in Scotland, eager to emphasize her husband’s position in London, there was nothing to stop Cromwell seeing in her too the charms of an attractive young matron.

  They also had in common the same religion, with all that implied; indeed, it is difficult to believe that Cromwell could have felt the extremes of love for any lady who could not share with him his pleas and supplications to the Almighty, together with an analysis of the content of the Almighty’s discernible replies or dispensations. But the earliest discoverable reference to Cromwell’s friendship with Frances – in that pseudoCromwell sermon of the summer of 1649 – picks on her piety, and makes Cromwell say: “She had within her a soul, a devout, sweet soul: and (God knows) I loved her for it.” Added to this the arrogance of which her contemporaries accused her would hardly have been apparent as anything more than confidence by a man so much superior to her; Frances was also undoubtedly very pretty. But all this was a far cry from the coarse jibe repeated by Heath on the subject: “They say that the Lord Protector’s Instrument [of Government] is found under my lady Lambert’s petticoat.” The compar
ison made by the Reverend Mark Noble, in his late eighteenthcentury memoirs, between Frances and Bess probably contained the truth of Frances’s attraction: Oliver had to discontinue his visits to the gay Lady Dysart for fear of the godly’s disapproval, “but there could be no hurt in holding heavenly meditations with Mrs Lambert”.44

  These two relationships, both with lively and attractive women young enough to be his daughters, prove nothing more about the Lord Protector than that he enjoyed such kinds of company. Fatherly overtones are in both cases more apparent than sexual ones even if the latter were perhaps entangled in the former; the whole process in the seventeenth century was certainly unconscious. His particular love of his daughter-in-law Dorothy, already noted, and his endless concern with her family affairs, fell into the same pattern: on the very day after the battle of Dunbar he had been back worrying about her possible pregnancy: “I pray tell Doll I do not forget her nor her little brat” he wrote to her father, “she writes very cunningly and complimentally to me; I expect a letter of plain dealing from her. She is too modest to tell me whether she breeds or no . . .”45 Here again there may have been some sort of unconscious self-identification with his son’s marriage, a wistful looking back to his own youth. Such types of innocent attraction were not to be confused with actual sexual involvements. Not only is there no proof that the fifty-five-year-old Lord Protector ever indulged in them, but they would of course have also cut directly across his own personal sense of sin.*

  ( * The other few scattered mentions of mistresses and bastards are remarkable only for their paucity and unlikelihood. In late 1650 (when Cromwell was in Scotland) a woman “of ill report” in London was saying that Cromwell “had been often with her, and bragged up and down of it, and that he used to give her 20s. a time”. Colonel Barkstead was said to have given her 40s. Such stories were not taken seriously by Cromwell’s contemporaries and need not be given greater weight now. In any case like Bess’s tarradiddles, they mainly spring from the gossip of later ages, such as the story of Dr Millington, conjectured in the postscript to a letter of 1744 to be “a bastard of Oliver Cromwell”. There was supposed to be a note in the register of his birth at Strensham in Worcestershire: “Query, was he not a bastard of Oliver Cromwell?” But if this was the royal doctor Sir Thomas Millington, born in 1628, who became President of the Royal College of Physicians and died in 1704 – so that he would have been known to the writer of the letter – he was born at Newbury in Berkshire. Even Noble, who accepted this rather dubious evidence, described a history of “a natural son of the Protector” then extant, as being “too marvellous to be true”.46)

  It therefore seems extraordinarily unlikely that he should have done so. If a patriarchal appreciation of the company of younger women was a substitute, it was certainly a very different kind of activity in the contemporary estimation.

  The emergence of this man of private rectitude and public strength in a position of solitary power gave a new impetus to those growing feelings of acquiescence which have already been discerned in attitudes to the Commonwealth. Loyalist sentiments were only encouraged by the emergence of a Protector, something even easier to recognize than a Council of State. John Persehouse, a gentleman of Staffordshire, who was in trouble at having his estates confiscated for delinquency, pleaded that he had only fought then “through the want of judgement and experience at the age of seventeen years”. He was now loyal to the Protector “whom God hath appointed to rule over us”, having already offered to raise a troop for the Commonwealth before Worcester, since God had so evidently shown where his sympathies lay in apportioning victories to the Parliamentary cause.47 Although this Vicar-of-Bray-like figure managed to end up as Justice of the Peace under Charles n, in his assertion that the Protector was in some way divinely set up, he spoke for very many placid spirits, who lacked the fire necessary for incessant opposition to the governing regime.

  This atmosphere of historic ordination was one heavily encouraged by the apologists of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, principal among them Milton. It was a two-way process. Ammunition for praise was provided by the undoubted steely quality of Cromwell’s own nature. Praise along these lines further added to the concept in the public gaze. So the two possible ways of explaining Cromwell’s formidable rise to power either as an instance of Providence or as a consequence of his own preeminent qualities – became gradually merged into one. Thus all Milton’s incessant belief in heroes came to the fore in his Second Defence of 1654, and he created out of Oliver a type of Old Testament leader, great in war and great in peace. Obsessed as he was with such “great-souled leaders and kings”, to take later form in Samson, Adam and Christ himself, he found an ideal subject for his theories in Cromwell, around whom he could build all his theories that “nature appoints that wise men should govern fools”.48 He was able to speak with conviction in 1654 of “a well-regulated liberty”, which was all the more necessary for England to enjoy because of past periods of turbulence; it might not have the outward liberal appearance of some regimes, yet the Protectoral rule in his view provided a much more genuine freedom than any earlier more liberal-seeming experiments.

  Just as it would have been impossible for Milton to construct this defence around a lesser man than Oliver Cromwell, so Cromwell’s own qualities did combine to make his fulfilment of the Protectoral role, in the personal sense at least, not unworthy of the royal throne which it so closely copied. To many, from the opposite angle, he represented the ideal of the Calvinist magistrate, who was destined by God to do great things on earth, or as Louis du Moulin had written in 1650, one who was designed to “declare the will of the Grand Legislator (even God in his word)”.49 This again, it would not have been possible to suggest in the context of a lesser man. In general, the sum of these thoughts, the idea that Cromwell represented some great historic force to which he in turn gave a unique representation, was given its finest expression by Marvell in his shining ode of late 1654 on The First Anniversary of the Government Under His Highness the Lord Protector. From their early unequivocal praises of Cromwell’s unique quality:

  Cromwell alone, with great vigour runs

  (Sun-like) the stages of succeeding suns,

  And still the day which he does next restore,

  Is the just wonder of the day before …

  down to their last more subtle elevation of the Protector, for all the opposition he must inevitably arouse:

  While thou thy venerable head dost raise

  As far above their malice as my praise;

  And, as the angel of our commonweal,

  Troubling the waters, yearly mak’st them heal

  these lines would not have been written to a man who was not in himself of towering stature.

  He lived “in the condition of a prince, with the moderation of a private man” wrote Flecknoe in 1659. It was an epitaph that many more lawfully constituted heads of State might envy. The meridian of Oliver Protector’s grandeur then, was not a time of which England needed to be ashamed, either in the particular quality of its artistic life, if that be a test, nor in the quality of the man himself. As Lucy Hutchinson, herself a hostile witness, was compelled to admit,50 because he had much natural greatness, Oliver Cromwell “well became the place he had usurped”.

  18 Briers and thorns

  ... Weeds and nettles, briers and thorns, have thriven under your shadow, dissettlement and division, discontentment and dissatisfaction, together with real dangers to the whole.

  CROMWELL’S SPEECH DISSOLVING THE 1st PROTECTORAL PARLIAMENT.

  "Indefatigable Cromwell" as Maxwell called him, now set about to create those new conditions of the country for which Oliver at least had been so long desirous. He did so with the help of his colleagues in the Council only, for until a Parliament should be summoned both legislative and executive functions were to be performed by Protector and Council of State, without further check upon them. These important associates themselves consisted very much of names already known, for
one reason or another, as solid Cromwell supporters. In the Protector’s own words, much had been learned from the lesson of the Barebones assembly, and the names of the members of the Council of State displayed a full grasp of the realities of power. Not necessarily from the elected Saints, but from men with a vested interest in the alliance could executive loyalty be expected.

  Thus the Council included not only the expected soldiers such as Lambert, Desborough and Monk, and a divine such as John Owen, but some less predictable names of the middle ground. There was for example Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, a leading West Country magnate, who after the Restoration bid fair as ist Earl of Shaftesbury to become the greatest politician of his age; but he had eschewed the King’s cause as early as 1644, and had taken the Engagement and had been officially pardoned for his delinquency by Parliament in March 1653. He was an excellent example of one who currently believed in supporting the de facto Government for the good of the country. Then there was Sir Gilbert Pickering, personally inclined to Oliver’s service, and Sir Charles Wolseley who had taken such a vocal part in the termination of Barebones. A significant appointment was that of Edward Montagu, son of Cromwell’s former rival Manchester who was made Admiral of the Fleet with the specific task of ridding the Navy of its disconcerting radicals. These were solid men, as the opposition to King Charles I had once consisted of established figures: there was nothing in them of the wild men who had later started to grow up like dandelions in the green fields of reform.

  Above all there was the devoted and capable John Thurloe who had succeeded Walter Frost as Secretary to the Council early in 1652. The son of an Essex clergyman, and then aged thirty-six, he had early studied law, and after being recommended to Oliver St John, had become one of the secretaries to the Parliamentary commissioners at Uxbridge in 1648; he had also travelled with St John on his fruitless mission to Holland in 1651. Thurloe brought to Cromwell’s service not only the essential qualities of application and brains – he was, said Henry Cromwell, adept at picking the lock that led to the hearts of men – but also an intense loyalty to his master personally. At the same time, under his sway, an intelligence service was developed, which like invisible vine leaves, was beginning to twine its acanthine way around nearly all the correspondence proceeding in or out of Britain at this time. At its height, monitoring mail and employing spies was rumoured to have cost Ł70,000 a year – so at least was Samuel Pepys’s belief. Heath wrote of .Ł60,000 a year. Presumably both spoke with more awe at vanished glories than accuracy since the actual figure has been estimated as being more like ,Ł3,000 a year. The average pay of Thurloe’s spies seems to have been about Ł10 a month. Nevertheless his employees were numerous, his interferences highly effective, and the exaggerated reports of a later age only pay further tribute to the impression he created. As for Thurloe’s open expenditure, with his own ,Ł800 a year, and numerous secretaries (including John Milton) messengers and clerks, this has been calculated to have come to well over Ł5,000 a year.1