Cromwell, the Lord Protector

by Antonia Fraser

  But that was only one part of the outrage which this para-military structure – “this new chimera” Bulstrode Whitelocke called it – was generally felt to put upon the local organization of England. Its military nature could not be missed, for quite apart from the control of troops, the names of the Major-Generals sounded like a roll-call of the former young heroes of the New Model Army, now however grown to authoritarian maturity. Fleetwood, for example, returning from Ireland, was given most of East Anglia, and Lambert his native North; there was Whalley in charge of Lincoln, Nottinghamshire, Stafford, Leicester and Warwick; James Berry in North and South Wales, and Hereford; Worsley in Derby, Chester and Worcester; Colonel Goffe and Kelsey dividing up the southern counties between them from Southampton up to Kent. It was also suggested that these new masters were of unbecomingly low birth “silly mean fellows” said Lucy Hutchinson – as Berry had been according to Baxter merely clerk of an ironworks before the war; therefore the inevitable ousting of the powerful county families who had continued their quiet but formidable control of local matters was made the more painful. The county committees started in the war began to fall from usefulness; the Lord-Lieutenants found their roles usurped, and local perquisites also fell into the laps of those representatives of the central Government, as Thomas Kelsey for example in Kent acquired the governorship of Dover Castle from the neighbouring families who had previously controlled it. The people as a whole, who were just beginning to bask in the gentle warmth radiated by the stability of the Protectorate, found themselves subjected yet again to the chill wind of change.3

  The credit for a leading part in the invention of this unpopular hierarchy was given at the time to Lambert. But it is clear from his speech to Parliament a year later, reviewing their function, that Oliver himself had seized eagerly on the project. With his undying optimism where the work of God was concerned, he imagined that the Major-Generals would in addition to their policing role, help to transform the social face of England into something more generally virtuous. For their instructions were an amalgam of orders pertaining directly to security, such as the prevention of “unlawful assemblies”, and other more widely drawn clauses which even if their inspiration was still security, certainly had the effect of giving them a highly restrictive image. Ale-houses for example were to be restricted, even closed; bear-baitings, race-meetings, cock-fights, performances of plays, were all designated to fall once more under the Puritanical axe of the Major-Generals. In a sense, the closure of at least some of these scenes of pleasure was actually justifiable if the State was really threatened, since they undeniably were employed to cover up meetings of conspirators. An innocent popular gathering for purposes of pleasure always provides the ideal rendezvous for a secret agent. But of course the rage engendered in the hearts of the populace with nothing further on their minds than their own delectation was formidable and did nothing to endear the Major-Generals to them.* ( * There is something intolerable to the spirit about official kill-joys: in the same way the Chastity Commission of the Empress Maria Theresa in the eighteenth century, which was intended to raise the moral tone of the nation, and whose commissioners had power to search houses on suspicion, had to be withdrawn after six months owing to its extreme unpopularity.)

  Oliver in his speech of September 1656 did not attempt to evade this specifically moral purpose of the new men.4 “If you be the people of God, and be for the people of God, he will speak peace, and we will not return again to folly,” he said. About this folly he well knew “there is a great deal of grudging in the nation, that we cannot have our horse-races, cockfightings and the like”. It was not however that he was against such pursuits in principle – “I do not think these unlawful” – but only that he condemned the obsessional hold which they seized upon the people, “that they will not ensure to be abridged of them”, whereas they should be content merely “to make them recreations”. It was the same argument in public which he had used privately to Dick, upbraiding him from Scotland for his idleness: it was not that he condemned such pleasures (and indeed practised certain of them himself) but he did stand out firmly against them being constituted the central object of life.

  But as far as the temper of the ordinary people was concerned, Oliver might have done better to have rested his case purely on the requirements of security. His fatherly concern for the moral tone of his people met with no answering response where the hated Major-Generals were concerned. Naturally their rule varied considerably with the character of the man concerned. Heath was to describe them later as being “like Turkish Bashaws”; a benevolent Bashaw might allow a degree of leniency, as Whalley allowed racing at Lincoln, announcing robustly that it had never been part of the Government’s intention to deprive gentlemen of their sport. The more interfering Worsley on the other hand forbade it in Cheshire. Desborough in the West has been described as showing “zeal and ability”, behaving fairly to the claims of the Cornish Royalists to be exempt from the Decimation Tax, and later displaying much personal clemency to some imprisoned Quakers at Launceston, brutally handled by the local authorities.5 Lambert in instructions to his deputies in the North showed a concern for the autonomy of his district by insisting on restoring the old Court at York. Nevertheless, taken as a whole, the rule of MajorGenerals did nothing to preserve that feeling of stability in the social fabric so important to the people as a whole. This was particularly true in an age when the local minister and parish priests on whom they might otherwise have depended for continuity, were showing an uncommonly high turnover of incumbents due to the standards of the Government’s committees of Triers and Ejectors. In short, they added to, rather than detracted from the creeping repressive atmosphere of the post-Penruddock period.

  It was not a happy time for the Protector himself. In June he wrote feelingly to Fleetwood before his return from Ireland of “the wretched jealousies that are amongst us, and the spirit of calumny” which “turns all into gall and wormwood. My heart is for the people of God; that the Lord knows; and I trust will in due time manifest; yet thence are my wounds.” For as he admitted: “Many good men are repining at everything.”6 And some of this repining was beginning to take a sinister turn when the actual legal basis of the Protector’s rule began to be called in question: had he any right simply to govern through the ordinances of his Council? A merchant named George Cony refused to pay customs duties, saying that they had not been imposed by Parliament; the Chief-Justice Rolle resigned because he could not, or perhaps would not, maintain the legality of customs duties. Cromwell imprisoned Cony’s lawyers – with all the zest of a Charles I. Yet the fact that Whitelocke and Widdrington resigned the custody of the Great Seal, out of scruples at executing the ordinance that regulated the Court of Chancery, was another straw in a wind which had not yet the force of a tempest, but was nevertheless a breeze of an unwelcome nature to the Protector and his Council. It was significant that the Cony case would never have arisen had there been a King at the helm rather than a Protector; for the King’s right to levy extra customs had been established in the reign of Charles I. It was found necessary to amplify the laws against censorship in August, so that quicker action could be taken. In future only two newsletters, Mercurius Politicus and The Publick Intelligencer were to be authorized. Every printer was now to be registered and the printer’s name shown.

  Perhaps the Major-Generals would provide the administrative and above all the financial solution which Oliver needed to rule the country from on high without Parliament. For that body, by the triennial provisions of the Instrument of Government, was not necessarily due to meet before the autumn of 1657. Poised on the brink of the Spanish War as England was, it remained to be seen whether she could survive without it. In the meantime the increasingly personal character of Oliver’s rule could not be missed by outside observers. Many might see it as resting on the swords of his Major-Generals, or perhaps of his soldiers themselves. But to Oliver himself it might seem that many of his pet projects, endorsed surely by the wil
l of the Almighty, had rested more on his personal say than on that of Protector in Council. The implications of that realization were something he would have to face sooner or later.

  * * *

  Of this contrast between Protector and Council the question of the resettlement of the Jews in England provided a striking example. The rise of philo-Semitism was of long standing: many Puritans in early seventeenth-century England had been led by their quickened interest in the Bible and Bible-reading to a new appreciation of the Jews. Those who saw the conversion of the Jews to Christianity as an important work, favoured the logical view that in order to forward this conversion, the Jews should be readmitted to England – a country from which they had been expelled officially as long ago as 1290. Many of Cromwell’s early Puritan associates had desired toleration for the Jews, prominent among them his friend Roger Williams, founder of the Rhode Island colony, who had expressed his views generously in a pamphlet as early as 1643, and on a return to England in 1652 argued again to this effect. Hugh Peter, who had visited Salem and preached for Williams, became infected as a result with the same liberal spirit, and his own pamphlet A Word for the Army and Two Words for the Kingdom had advocated that “strangers, even Jews [be] admitted to trade and live amongst us”. John Sadler, also a personal friend of the Protector, had been another of those whose intense study of the Bible and Judaic customs had led him to the opinion that the descendants of this ancient people should in future be permitted to mingle with the Englishman Amos Comenius, the Bohemian Protestant whom Cromwell much respected, saw the return of the Jews to England as part of the millennium which he expected to be achieved; his fellow members of the “invisible college” of foreign divines and philosophers which surrounded Cromwell, Samuel Hartlib and John Dury also believed passionately that the Jews should be first welcomed and then converted.7

  And there were other less official aspects to the generally pro-Jewish atmosphere which prevailed by the early 1650s. The Fifth Monarchists, the intensity of whose calculations as to the probable date of the coming of Christ’s Kingdom has been stressed, believed that the conversion of the Jews played some part in the process by which the fall of Anti-Christ would be ultimately achieved. There were therefore also popular manifestations of philo-Semitism. John Robins the Ranter trained himself to reconquer the Holy Land, by existing with his volunteers on dry bread, vegetables and water. Thomas Tany taught himself Hebrew and built a small boat to carry him to Jerusalem; unfortunately he routed himself via Holland to visit the flourishing colony of Dutch Jews and was drowned on the way. In this age in which apocalyptic curiosity, millennial prophecies, superstition and genuine intellectual interest all mingled inextricably, an English sailor in Leghorn chose to inspect the interior of a synagogue. His conclusion was promising for the future of the Jews: “Shall they be tolerated by the Pope?” he was supposed to have asked “and by the Duke of Florence, and by the Bavarians, and others, and shall England still have laws in force against them?”8

  At the same time, due to extraneous conditions in Europe, this skilful people were already beginning to trickle back into England, albeit illegally and therefore secretly. The expulsion of the Jews from Spain and Portugal at the end of the fifteenth century had made England a place of refuge for a number of their former Jewish inhabitants, known as Marranos, who formed private colonies in London, Dover and York. They passed of course for Spaniards or Portuguese, and used on occasion to attend the Catholic Ambassadorial chapels by way of disguise; certain of their number were also deputed to remain uncircumcized with the same object of concealment in face of sudden persecution. So long as they did not parade their religion, the Marranos were left in peace. But at least one secret synagogue existed, in Cree Church Lane, Leadenhall Street (from whence mysterious wailings were said to emanate). The owner of the property, Moses Athias, allegedly the clerk to the Marrano merchant Don Antonio Fernandez de Carvajal, may well in fact have been a Rabbi. A man of superb and florid personality, Carvajo was known as “the Great Jew”; he rode fine horses, collected armour, and was said to have imported Ł100,000 worth of bullion a year. In 1645 he was denounced by an informer for not attending a Protestant church, but was defended by the leading merchants of the day, as a result of which the House of Lords quashed the proceedings.9 So the English Jews flourished, brought prosperity to the country and grew prosperous themselves; in the permissive atmosphere of Puritan philo-Semitism, it was understandable that they now wished to legalize their position. An approach to this effect was made to Fairfax and the Council of Officers in the winter of 1648, and although put on one side, at least received favourably.

  But there was a third strand in the weaving of the resettlement, proceeding from the Jews themselves, concerning their own prophecies for the restoration of their nation to the Holy Land and the coming of the Messiah. For this to be achieved, it was believed necessary for the diaspora the dispersion of the Jews “to the ends of the earth” as the relevant prophecy in Deuteronomy had it – to be complete. Thus in the seventeenth century much interest was taken in the ten lost tribes of Israel and their possible fates, in order to check on the progress of the dispersion. John Sadler, for example, suggested that these missing people might have come to rest in Ireland, Tara being Torah; and the Irish harp the harp of David; the coronation stone of the Irish, a holy stone brought there by the tribes of Dan, being the equivalent ofjacob’s pillow. When there came rumours of the lost tribes as far abroad as Tartary and China, and when at the same time an important body of opinion arose to suggest that the American Indians were in fact descended from another lost tribe, to many the diaspora appeared to be in a state of virtual completion. Only England remained; moreover the French name Angleterre of itself in Jewish mediaeval literature had signified the angle or end of the earth. To one Jewish theologian in particular, Menasseh ben Israel, born in Madeira but long resident in Amsterdam, the resettlement of the Jews in England became the essential prelude to a glorious new development in the history of that long beleaguered people.10

  In 1650 against a European background of renewed Jewish persecution during the Cossack rising, Menasseh ben Israel saluted England as the new refuge in a work of his own, Spes Israeli. Two English editions were rapidly sold, the translator of this Hope of Israel being careful to note that his intention was not so much “to propagate or commend Judaism” as to explain it to his fellow-countrymen, with a view to making the Jews “real Christians ere long”. A further translator’s gloss on the text explained with reference to God’s covenant with the Jews, that it was not nulled or broken, only suspended. An English MP, Sir Edward Spenser, thought it worth rebutting its arguments in a pamphlet of his own. Menasseh already had English friends among the converts to Judaism living in Amsterdam, and John Sadler for example described him as a “a very learned Civil Man, and a Lover of our Nation”. So far his religiously inspired campaign was joining very neatly with the desires of the Jewish merchants to have their position regularized, a feeling made increasingly fervent by the passing of the Navigation Act which much stepped up the volume of London trade.

  In 1651 when Oliver St John went to Amsterdam to negotiate for the abortive Anglo-Dutch alliance, John Thurloe, then his secretary, had met Menasseh ben Israel, and persuaded him to apply to the Council for resettlement. A committee, including Oliver Cromwell, was set up to consider the question in October. While Mercurius Democritus gave some instance of popular xenophobia when it referred angrily to “the devouring stomaches” of the Jews in Charterhouse Lane, the feeling among Puritans that the thing was probably intended to come about in God’s time was expressed by Ralph Josselin in his Diary. Meeting Menasseh ben Israel at the end of 1652, he wrote: “Lord, my heart questions not the calling home the nation of the Jews, thou wilt hasten it in thy season, oh my God.”11

  The interesting thing was that Cromwell himself reached his own conclusion that the Jews should be readmitted by a much less apocalyptic and much more practical route than many of his coll
eagues. Much as he believed in toleration, he had belonged earlier to that party that would have drawn the limits at those Jews or Unitarians who denied the divinity of Christ. But as Protector, under Thurloe’s tutelage, he had begun to have an extremely pragmatic respect for the activities of their people as a whole, not so much theological as Menasseh ben Israel might have hoped, as in their role as skilled purveyors of foreign intelligence. The Protector of the 16505 was no longer the straightforward soldier of the 1640s: the resettlement of the Jews, their employment in his world-wide activities fitted well into the dreams of imperial expansion which from 1654 onwards were beginning to occupy the most grandiose mansion of his mind.

  There are indeed many traces of the use of Jewish intelligencers in Thurloe’s voluminous correspondence,12 such as a letter to Monsieur Ferdinando Carnevall, Marchand aupres de la Bourse (and indeed Carvajal did live in Leadenhall Street which was near the Exchange); the letters of John Butler, whose pseudonym was Jacob Goltburgh, probably belong to the syndrome, or perhaps Butler was the husband of Carvajal’s servant Ann Somers. Another leading Marrano merchant, Manuel Martinez Dormido, was sufficiently useful as an intelligencer for Oliver to intervene personally with the King of Portugal when his property was confiscated. As relations with Spain deteriorated, their information of the movements of ships along the strung-out lifelines between the Old World and the New became of particular value: in September 1655 it was a diligent Jew at Amsterdam who reported that eight warships and ten fireships, with approximately eleven thousand men in them under General Paulo de Confreres, had left Spain; and there were details also of a Neapolitan squadron in Almeria which would join with the others against England. The purveyor of this information hoped not only that the Spaniards would fail but that Oliver himself would “remain in his arms victorious and enjoy great good success for the good of his people”.