Cromwell, the Lord Protector

by Antonia Fraser

  These were efforts to strengthen Protectoral influence in Scotland. The other half of Cromwell’s plans for that country, the welding of it together with England under a central control, can be discerned in such gestures as his treatment of the Scottish coal industry. Here the avoidance of the impositions placed upon English coal had enabled the Scots to build up a flourishing concern. But the Union logically brought Scottish coal into the English system of customs and excise. Cromwell sent his agent Thomas Tucker on an exploratory tour of Scotland, to see how this could be best and most profitably achieved. As a result, in 1657 a tax of 4s. per ton on Scottish coal in native ships and 8s. a ton in foreign vessels was imposed. The Scottish colliery owners were naturally indignant, and a mission of protest to Oliver and Noell (to whom the tax was farmed) was led by the Earl of Wemyss. Despite the hostile attitude of the Protector the tax was brought down by nearly half in each case, and at the Restoration was eliminated altogether.29 But the episode in general showed that the Union of England and Scotland posed more questions than were readily answered by Oliver’s policy, under the benevolent umbrella of Monk’s artificially induced peace. The mere fact that this peace itself was so expensive demonstrated the acute balancing-act always necessary over Scottish prosperity. The country was assessed at about Ł10,000 a month, of which not more than Ł8,500 was found, the English having to find the extra as well as pay for the construction of the five great fortresses. Perhaps the”middle sort” of people were now faring better and no doubt they deserved to do so. But no one could be greatly prosperous in a poor country, further crippled by the imposition of assessments to pay for the soldiers of occupation.

  Nevertheless, for all that it was only the bleached bones of Oliver’s Scottish policies that survived the Restoration for the inspection of a later age, it was in Scotland that could be seen most clearly the kind of work Oliver might have carried out elsewhere as an administrator, given time and opportunity. For in Scotland he tackled what was in effect a conquered country yet, unlike Ireland, not one already mortgaged with claims and counter-claims, many of them dating ten years back. The Scots were in addition a people towards whom he felt warmth and interest, again in contrast to the native Irish Catholics. Oliver’s English-style centralization, his Justices of the Peace, his Scottish members of an English Parliament, coupled with his desire for toleration to be spread by Independent ministers on the English model, and the consequent growth of both liberalism and Protectoral influence, may all have amounted to a pipe-dream. Yet the material is of interest in giving clues to things much more overlaid or hidden away in the general morass of his administration in England.

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  In late 1657 the Court, household and family of old Oliver began to relax visibly as an old man retired from work begins to stretch out easily before the fire. It was not necessarily a new extravagant mode of life which was practised, although the Ł16,000 per quarter originally allowed for the expenses of his household had proved inadequate; in October 1657, in consequence, he was given Ł100,000 for the year, on condition that the Protector himself now bore the cost of repairing the palaces, the money to be paid at a rate of roughly Ł2,000 a week from the customs, considered the most reliable source. But everywhere costs were rising as the household of other great magnates showed: the Earl of Bedford, for example, spent Ł540 on provisions in 1658 for which he had spent a maximum of Ł310 before. Nevertheless there was a different spirit abroad. It was in November 1657 that Bordeaux noted that the old ways – the dances, fetes and the like – were coming back, the melancholy preachers were retiring.30

  With regard to the dancing in particular, it would be unfair to separate it from the influence of Mary and Frances Cromwell, whose approaching nuptials in their different ways were both destined to mark a significant departure from previous Protectoral custom. A marriage after all presents an ideal opportunity for reconciliation, as for the winning of additional support. It was a point recognized by the Protector not only in his courting of Fauconberg, but also, ironically enough, in his great indignation at the prospect of another important match being made outside his own family about the same period: that of Fairfax’s daughter Mary and the young Duke of Buckingham, once considered as a groom for Frances. Even the Protector’s protests could not prevent the marriage being celebrated, and it took place on 7 September. But the soldiers despatched after the pair did at least have the effect of separating them: the bold bridegroom was forced to flee. By October the poor young bride was said to be “transcendently pensive” at her single state; with her mother she paid several visits to Whitehall to try to secure the intercession of the Cromwell ladies in her cause. But these latter were ill inclined to help those who had once scorned them. According to Sir William Dugdale, their somewhat regrettable reaction was to observe: “Proud tits! Are their stomaches now come down?‘31

  Frances’s marriage, for all its false starts, took place under happier auspices. Thurloe, with Desborough and Philip Jones, had finally concluded satisfactory terms with the Earl of Warwick. On u November, Mr Scobell, a Justice of the Peace, “tied the knot” after a godly prayer by one of Cromwell’s chaplains, according to the prevailing rules of civil marriage. The next day the wedding feast in Whitehall scaled new heights of magnificence: not only were there forty-eight violins and fifty trumpets to be seen and heard, but there was also “mixt dancing”, a thing hitherto accounted “profane”, and that went on until five o’clock in the morning. The presents called forth general remark for their splendour: the Countess of Devonshire, the groom’s’maternal grandmother (and mother of that Royalist colonel, Sir Charles Cavendish, killed so long ago at Gainsborough) gave Ł2,000 worth of gold plate, including one called the piece royal, “a tray such as a waiter would carry a glass on”. Bettie Claypole on this distaff side gave two sconces worth Ł100 each; Sir William Dugdale heard that somebody else had presented a good quantity of Barbary wine. The celebrations in general were noted for the presence of Royalists, such as the Earl of Newport, who was seen dancing with Lady Claypole. The rejoicings then moved from Whitehall to Lord Warwick’s house, to be continued for seven days. Poor Frances! She had only a bare three months to enjoy the company of the man on whom she had so long set her heart, for the gallant Robert Rich died of consumption in February of the next year. He lay in state at Warwick House, so recently the scene of his gorgeous nuptials. But he was mourned for in purple for three days “as they used to do for the great in the old days” wrote a contemporary, so that at least he died as a prince.32

  As Bettie Claypole had employed the friendly services of another Royalist, Sir John Southcote, who had gone into exile after Naseby, to buy damask beds and dress material for her in Paris (as a result of which he got some of his son’s horses back) so the social fabric of the times was being gradually re-knit in many directions. It was hardly surprising to find three offices of the former royal Court being restored at the end of the year Master-Cofferer, Substitute-Comptroller and Master of the Green Cloth – nor for that matter to find that Richard Cromwell took the oath as member of the Privy Council about the same time. The crown might not rest on the Protector’s head, but he was surrounded by all its trappings.

  Mary’s wedding shortly after that of Frances, was in one way a complete contrast since it took place in private at Hampton Court. Yet the fact that Fauconberg insisted on an Anglican service, and apparently got his way, was an even more remarkable instance of the spirit of conciliation now animating his new father-in-law. The ceremony was said to have been performed by the known Anglican Dr Hewett and out of the Book of Common Prayer itself. Nevertheless Oliver had been determined to secure Fauconberg to his side, paying Ł15,000 in dowry, and this despite some eyebrow-lifting on the subject of his suitability as a groom for Mary or indeed any other bride. In this case it was not a reprobate reputation, as in the case of Rich, which caused Oliver’s chaplain, Dr Jeremiah White, to take his master aside, but rather the lack of it. White, a waggish man, twitted the Protector
on the subject of the match: “Why I think he will never make your Highness a grandfather!... I speak in confidence to your Highness, there are certain effects in Lord Fauconberg that will always prevent him making you a grandfather, let him do what he can." 33

  The matter was not left there, for Oliver chose to repeat the remark to Fauconberg himself, as a joke. The consequence was that Fauconberg fell into a rage, trapped White in his room, and beat him about with his cane. Even so White kept his wits: “My lord,” he squeaked, “you are too angry for me to hope for mercy, but surely you can never be too angry to forget justice; only prove by getting [i.e. begetting] a child that I told the Protector wrong.” And he also advised Fauconberg to exercise his cane in future by beating the indiscreet Protector about the shoulders. As to the truth, it is hard to choose between White and Fauconberg on this delicate matter. Fauconberg was a widower, and had certainly never had any children by his first marriage. In a sense White’s warning was proved correct since Fauconberg also left no children by Mary. On the other hand a letter of his in early 1658 referred to “my dame, whose condition makes it … dangerous”, and this same letter had to be broken off abruptly: “I am just now called to my poor wife’s succour.” That seems to indicate that Mary at least fancied herself pregnant on one occasion, and may have miscarried subsequently.

  There was no public demonstration at Mary’s wedding: some said that Fauconberg wanted to avoid the waste of money, preferring to employ it more usefully. But there was at least that hallmark of the Court of King Charles i, a mask. It included two pastorals written by Andrew Marvell, by now at last secure in his State appointment.34 One of these was a musical dialogue between Cynthia the moon goddess and Endymion her lover, in which Oliver himself may have played the non-singing part of Jove, coming on at the end with the final chorus with some suitable fatherly gesture and general benevolence. The second had a country lass, Phillis, in conversation with two rustically named bumpkins, Tomalin and Hobbinol, on the subject of the wedding of Marina and Damon. Here once again Oliver probably appeared as Menalcas, father of Marina, and a shepherd; he was certainly alluded to as such in the text, the name deriving appropriately from the combined Greek for spirit and courage which had already been employed for pastorals by both Virgil and Herrick. Indeed the text contained many playful allusions: – to Fauconberg as “the Northern Shepheard’s son” a reference to his Yorkshire estates, Mary as Menalcas’s daughter, Rich as Anchises, “a shepheard too” sporting with her younger sister in the shade. There was even a coy allusion to Oliver’s alleged rejection of the young King as a bridegroom:

  For he did never love to pair

  His progeny-above the Air

  as well as one of Marvell’s characteristic references to Oliver’s own pastoral youth, contrasted with his late rise to fame:

  ... at Menalcas’ hall

  There are bays enough for all

  He, when young as we, did graze

  But when old he planted bays.

  Such graceful festivities illustrate the increasingly pleasurable aspect of the Protectoral Court, by no means as unpopular as later ages would wish to make out. Ramshness being sometimes more glamorous in the description than in the experience, those were not wanting in the colourful times of King Charles n who regretted the disappearance of the earlier more seemly manners. Thomas Povey, having known the Court of Oliver, would criticize that of Charles: here was now “no faith, no truth, no love, nor any agreement between man and wife, no friends”. Dr Bate, the Protector’s physician, who turned himself in general into an extremely hostile witness against his former master, gave his Court at least his approbation for exactly the same reasons of moral rectitude: “here [was] no Drunkard, no Whoremonger, nor any guilty of bribery”. Nor was the Court necessarily so dull: Heath, while calling it a Court of Beggars and suchlike mean people (for its financial troubles) nevertheless described it as “very gay and jocund” particularly at the news of such successes as the capture of Jamaica, and Heath was writing only a few years after the Restoration, when the Court of Oliver Cromwell was still a living memory.35 Perhaps some of this gaiety was not quite to the taste of the most elegant: the man who had once larked with the aid of a full cream-tub with his troops before Dunbar had not lost, it seems, his taste for a practical joke; in any case the closeted lives of royalties or quasi-royalties have often positively encouraged such childish manifestations among their number as a relief from tension.

  Fletcher in his biography described one such typical “Frolick” as he called it, of the Protector, who would have a drum beaten suddenly at dinner, before the guests had half finished their food. In would come his footguards, with permission to grab anything eatable they could spy upon the table. At other times Oliver would enjoy teasing the nobility, relating to them with circumstantial detail exactly what company they had lately kept, when and where they had drunk the King’s health and that of the Royal Family – “bidding them when they did it again to do it more privately”. Although that type of joke could sometimes have a grim lining to it: according to Ludlow one particular gentleman who had been given leave to travel on condition that he did not visit the King, betrayed his trust; his visit was reported by one of Thurloe’s spies, giving Oliver the opportunity to greet him on his return to Court with the ominous question: “Who was it that put out the candles when you spoke to Charles Stuart?” And he was sent to the Tower. The muse of comedy was served in a more extreme form at Frances’s palatial wedding, when the Protector felt sufficiently carried away by the occasion to throw sackposset (a particularly sweet and sticky drink) over the women’s dresses, and with equal sense of fun, to place “wet sweetmeats” on the seats, all of which the great ladies present had to pretend to take as a favour.36 If such practical jokes belonged to some other monarch of a later Hanoverian age, or even perhaps Edward vn, at least the august mockery of the nobles resembled that sovereign Oliver and his age so much admired, Queen Elizabeth.

  Not all Oliver’s pleasures were so boisterous: the deep and constant love of music remained and flourished, and Whitelocke tells us too of his pleasing literary recreations with his friends. It might be at one of those informal moments when he would call for tobacco and pipes, those friendly convivial occasions at which Thurloe, Sir Charles Wolseley, Lord Broghill and Pierrepont were typical of those who might be present. Then, wrote Whitelocke, “he would sometimes be very cheerful with us, and laying aside his greatness, he would be exceeding familiar with us, and by way of diversion would make verses with us, and everyone must try his fancy”.37 A gift for friendship – as Marvell called him, “so loose an enemy, so fast a friend” – be it with chaplains, Puritans, preachers Catholics, women, soldiers, Royalists, was not the least attractive of Oliver Cromwell’s traits.

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  Much time had been spent since the Protectoral Investiture of June 1657 in selecting suitable members for “the Other House” as the projected Second Chamber was for the time being most conveniently termed. Writs of summons were finally sent out at the end of the year, to coincide with the next session of Parliament planned for January 1658. Inevitably many of the names put forward were intimately connected with Cromwell’s own extended family circle, including his two sons, three sons-in-law (Fleetwood, Claypole and the newest recruit Fauconberg), and three brothersin-law; in fact one way and another eighteen of this new type of lord were related to the Protector. The establishment of this clique recalled the old days of the Puritan opposition in Parliament when Oliver had first joined it in 1628, when so many members belonged to the same loose but effective network of kinship. Otherwise those chosen fell into three main categories; there were Army officers, a total of twenty-one Colonels, government officials such as Whitelocke and Widdrington as Commissioners of the Seal, and finally suitable members of the old peerage. These latter included Robert Rich’s grandfather Lord Warwick, Cromwell’s old friend Lord Wharton, Manchester, Viscount Saye, Lord Broghill and Cassilis, a Scottish hereditary peer, as well
as Lord Lisle, eldest son of the hereditary Earl of Leicester. But it seems clear that Cromwell both drew and intended to draw some distinction between the new lords and these old-style hereditary peers. For in July 1657 he had deliberately created the former captain of his guard Charles Howard, Viscount Howard of Morpeth; and he made two other attempts at creating separate hereditary peerages, although both foundered. Whitelocke was offered a viscountcy in a bill just before Cromwell’s death, but recorded the fact that he did not think it “convenient” to accept. Edmund Dunch was made Baron Burnell of East Wittenham about the same period, in a charter whose seal provided one of the most remarkable encroachments of Cromwell upon the Royal seal, since it showed his figure in an ermine-lined robe, and with the abandoned crown actually upon his head. (See plate facing p. 700.)