Cromwell, the Lord Protector

by Antonia Fraser

  One member of the family was however not only tolerated but positively flourished. Mary Fauconberg lived robustly on, as the wife of a man who bounded easily from one regime into another, and as a great lady both of the Court and of her husband’s northern estates, received the Duke and Duchess of York at Newburgh in 1665 as they were escaping from the plague in London. Fauconberg became Ambassador Extraordinary to Venice in 1669, in 1679 still under Charles II he became a Privy Councillor, and was finally made an Earl by William III. He died full of years and honours – received from many different directions – in 1700. Mary herself, although childless, proved a busy and useful intercessionary on behalf of Cromwell nephews and nieces at Court; she retained to the end the masterful spirit which had led her as a child to match-make for her brother. An impertinent Cavalier who twitted her on having seen her father’s corpse hanging on the gibbet received the cold answer: “What then, Sir?” “He stunk most abominably,” was the reply. “I suppose he was dead then,” retorted the great lady. “Yes.” “I thought so or else I believe he would have made you stink worse.” In the reign of Queen Anne observers at Court considered her “a great and curious piece of antiquity… fresh and gay though a great age”. And as an old lady Mary enjoyed the admiration of Dean Swift, who pronounced her extremely like the portraits of her father.20

  Bridget Fleetwood however died soon after the Restoration. She left no descendants by Charles Fleetwood – one of their children was that little Anne (“it was a child I particularly loved” wrote Fleetwood at her untimely death) who had been buried in the Abbey to be exhumed at the Restoration. Fleetwood himself, freed from the extreme penalties paid by the regicides because he had taken no part in the trial of the King, lived to marry a third time, merely excluded from public offices of trust. But there are to be found descendants of Bridget’s first marriage to Ireton, through her daughters Jane and Elizabeth, unlike the offspring of Bettie and Claypole, who left no posterity. And Frances Rich married again, appropriately enough to Sir John Russell of Chippenham, heir to her father’s friend Sir Francis, and brother to Henry Cromwell’s wife. It is from the prolific family of her second marriage that so many of the remainder of the Lord Protector’s descendants spring. She herself provided the most remarkable example of all of longevity in this family of historic survivors: she lived until 1721, well into the reign of the Hanoverian dynasty which succeeded the ill-fated Stuarts, and over sixty years after the death of her father. With her sister Mary, she was buried at St Nicholas Church, Chiswick.

  So the strain of the Cromwell blood spread backwards into those ranks from which it had come, of which Oliver had been proud to boast that he was “by birth a gentleman, living neither in any considerable height, nor yet in obscurity.” In a characteristic sonorous passage, the Reverend Noble, to whose researches on the subject in the eighteenth century much is owed, compared the Protectoral house of Cromwell to a river, rising in the mountains of Wales, gaining strength from the imperial Thames, rolling on north-east to Huntingdonshire, and there dividing into various branches. It was one of these which suddenly “swelled itself into a tremendous river, which not only swallowed up the main stream, but at length overflowed three mighty nations, and by its rapidity, and dreadful violence, spread the terror throughout the globe when it as silently, as suddenly returned to far less than its original limits; leaving, however, many noble branches behind it, instead of its former boundless current, it is now only admirable for the clearness and goodness of its stream”.21

  Clearly, with the descendants of three children to draw on, it is possible for many to claim with truth that the blood of the former Lord Protector flows in their veins: the historian S. R. Gardiner was proud to do so. The marriage of Frances’s daughter Elizabeth Russell to Sir Thomas Frankland introduced the Cromwellian blood into many English families including that of the Worsleys, from whom descends HRH the Duchess of Kent so that in the children of the Duke and Duchess of Kent flows the blood of both Charles I and Cromwell. It was from the marriage of Frances’s son Charles Russell to Mary Rivett, heiress of Chequers, that many of the Cromwelliana and portraits now in the official residence of British Prime Ministers, have come down. On the whole it seems that this inheritance has been regarded with pride. In a nineteenth-century biography Frederick Harrison repeated a story told to him by a lady descended from Oliver, how as children they were obliged to do penance on the anniversary of the death of King Charles I, to atone for the unfortunate descent.22 They were taught that an ancestral visitation hung over them “which would certainly overtake them in this world or the next”. But the present writer, despite enquiries among many living descendants of the Lord Protector, has not been able to trace either this tradition or the memory of it. It seems therefore that it was never widespread, and has in any case now vanished.* ( * The American President Theodore Roosevelt, repeating this story in his own biography of Oliver Cromwell, waxed particularly indignant over it, in view of the many honours given to the descendants of Charles II and his mistresses: “One hardly knows whether to be most amused or indignant at such fantastic incapacity to appreciate what was really noble or what was ignoble,” he wrote.23)

  It is however no longer possible in England for one bearing the actual name of Cromwell to claim descent from the Protector, the male line having died out in 1821 with the death of Oliver Cromwell of Cheshunt, great-grandson of Henry Cromwell, at the age of seventy-nine. There had been some attempt to get the Cromwell name transferred to his son-inlaw, husband of his sole heiress Elizabeth Olivaria Cromwell. According to one tradition, King George III merely replied firmly: “No, no – no more Cromwells.”24 The present senior branch of the family, descendants of Elizabeth Olivaria, is that of Cromwell Bush, owners of many other Cromwellian pictures and relics (now chiefly on loan to the Cromwell Museum, Huntingdon). English Cromwells can however well descend from the numbers of collateral branches of the family, Oliver’s kin, or even from that earlier founder of their fortunes, Thomas Cromwell, from whom the surname was actually copied.

  Is it possible that a genuine Protectoral branch, blood and surname and all, has survived in the New World? Unfortunately this has been demonstrated to be extremely unlikely. The names of Henry’s younger sons, Richard or William, grandsons of the Protector, have been canvassed: but they both died young. As for the possibility that Richard, son of Sir Philip Cromwell, emigrated to found at least a close collateral branch to the Protector, it has been shown that he left only daughters. So that American Cromwells can be remote cousins to Oliver at best. But there is a more affecting link between the late Protector and the Cromwellian name in the United States. A century ago James Waylen, who had been secretary to Thomas Carlyle, inspired by his employer’s work on the subject of the letters and speeches, made a study of the Protector’s descendants dedicated with permission to Carlyle, whose publication had “elevated our admiration of the Protector into love”; In the course of his researches he visited the States to try and trace any Protectoral Cromwells there. While failing he found a touching testimony to the power of the Protectoral name. The Cromwells with whom he got in touch via commercial advertisements in his own words turned out “not infrequently to belong to the coloured race”.25 They were the descendants of the slaves who upon emancipation had been allowed to desert the simple appellation of “torn and Nick”, and choose their own surnames. One of the names thus chosen had been that of Cromwell. Waylen, with Victorian values, called it “innocent ambition”. A hundred years later we may see in the choice a genuine radical tribute.

  * * *

  There were a few significant exceptions to the policy of tolerance and lack of bloodshed for which the English Restoration has been rightly praised. Nor can King Charles n, by nature clement, be greatly blamed for wishing to pursue the men he regarded as the actual murderers of his father. The concentration was on the trial of the King, and now in their turn the regicides were put on trial. In the end, some were executed, some imprisoned for life. Lamber
t was one of those who languished in a prison to the end of his days, for all the devoted efforts of his wife Frances to extricate him. It was difficult to avoid the conclusion that with all his talents, his had been an unlucky life. As for Oliver Cromwell, one effigy of him had been burnt at Westminster on Restoration Day. Another, specifically stated to be that displayed formerly with so much pomp at Somerset House, was hung out of the window by the neck at Whitehall a few weeks later. The effigy apparently survived this unpleasant ordeal, since something remarkably like it was mentioned by Christian Huyghens in July 1663, and he saw the same lifelike image, like those of the former Kings and Queens, again in the Banqueting House as late as 1689. It may therefore be that same effigy of plaster which has rested in the Bargello Museum at Florence since 1738; alternatively the funeral effigy may have perished finally in the flames of the Banqueting House fire.26 The rich hearse in the Abbey was however destroyed speedily with eager hands. But such symbolic pieces of vengeance were not enough. Three men, it was decided, had managed to cheat the executioner in life. They should not cheat him in death. The Parliament of 1660 bayed for blood, even if it was blood now long congealed.

  When the Bill of Attainder, introduced into the second session of the Convention Parliament against Cromwell and the other regicides, returned from the Lords on 4 December, it was suggested by a Captain Titus that the bodies of Cromwell himself, his son-in-law Henry Ireton (dead since 1652) and John Bradshaw, who had died in 1659, should be exhumed. There was also some suggestion of exhuming Colonel Pride, but since he had been buried in Surrey, in the end his corpse eluded its fate, due to the slackness of the Sheriff of Middlesex. Marvell, now an MP for Hull, reported the fact back to his constituents quite coolly: the victims were to be drawn “with what expedition possible upon an hurdle to Tyburn, there be hanged up for a while, and then buried under the gallows”.27 But his lack of emotion, while contrasting with the heroic sentiments of the Death Ode written only a year previously, was perhaps characteristic of a man who now prudently had it cancelled, together with the Horatian Ode and the Ode on the First Anniversary, from all known editions of his works. But there were those to whom the fate seemed, in a way they could not quite analyse, curiously inappropriate, even vaguely shocking; Pepys confessed himself disquieted that a man of such courage should receive such dishonour “though otherwise he might deserve it well enough”. On 29 January then, the three corpses were solemnly exhumed from the Abbey by a mason named John Lewis, who was subsequently paid iys. for his pains. It was at this point that the opportunity was taken to dig up other corpses of the Commonwealth, some to be moved to an adjacent spot by St Margaret’s, others to fall into a common pit.* ( * It is to the boundless energy of that great guardian of Westminster Abbey in the Victorian age, Dean Stanley, that is owed the tablet, now hidden by the carpet of the RAF chapel, which commemorates the interment of Cromwell, his mother, sister Jane Desborough, Ireton and little Anne Fleetwood. The Cromwell Association have now placed a stone at the east end of the Henry VD” chapel which reads: “The burial place of Oliver Cromwell 1658-1661.”)

  The grisly ritual was not without its own problems. Henry Ireton’s corpse had been duly embalmed before its long sea-voyage from Ireland, as had been that of Oliver Cromwell. But John Bradshaw’s embalment had not been successful, and it was thus in a somewhat unpleasant state of repair after its year-long sojourn in the grave. The corpses of Cromwell and Ireton were then duly taken to an inn called the Red Lion, at Holborn, to lie there overnight guarded by soldiers (hence a tradition that Oliver’s ghost afterwards haunted the spot); but Bradshaw’s had to wait for the morning to join them. It was in fact at dawn the next day that “those odious carcases”, as Mercurius Politicus termed them, were dragged through the streets of London from Holborn to Tyburn (near the present site of Marble Arch) on open hurdles. The idea of the dawn start was to prevent the populace from pelting the hurdles with stones, brickbats and mud since the corpses were to be reserved for a more awful public fate. Even so it was watched by many, including Pepys’s wife – the great diarist was unfortunately by chance absent. “O the stupendous and inscrutable judgements of God,” expostulated John Evelyn of the translation of the swaddled mummies to that nemesis of the common criminal, Tyburn itself, out of their “superb tombs” at Westminster.28

  About ten o’clock, or earlier according to one account, the hurdles had achieved the site of Tyburn and “that Triple Tree”. Here, still in their grave clothes – Cromwell and Ireton were in green cere-cloth, Bradshaw in white, but stained with the green of corruption – they were hung up in full gaze of the public, at angles to each other. It was significant of the emphasis on the trial of the King that it was Bradshaw, as President of the Court, not Cromwell as his successor, who occupied the central position. At four o’clock when the next ghoulish stage in the ceremony was due to take place, the corpses were taken down. The common hangman proceeded to hack off the heads. In the heavy muffling of the grave clothes round the neck, it took eight blows to get off Cromwell’s head, six to chop off that of Ireton. Nor was that the only incision now performed upon these inanimate unprotesting objects. It seems that fingers and toes were hacked off at the same time, and it is at this point that Cromwell’s skull may have lost an ear.29

  The three headless trunks were now consigned into a deep pit dug beneath the gallows of Tyburn. But for the heads a further fate still was reserved. They were taken down to Westminster Hall, and five days later stuck solemnly up on its fa$ade on poles of oak tipped with iron which had been driven through the centre. Here, now unswathed from their mummified protections, they remained to awe, impress, horrify and perhaps even sadden the public gaze. But the wags, struck by the coincidental presence of a tavern called Heaven near by, made some merry puns on the subject of Hell lying above Heaven. Here the heads mouldered in a state of gathering decomposition until at least 1684. The general theme of the fate of Oliver Cromwell’s remains was worthy of Milton, reflecting on God’s various treatment of man in Samson Agonistes:

  Not only dost degrade them, or remit

  To life obscured, which were a fair dismission

  But throw’st them lower than thou didst exalt them high…

  Oft leav’st them to the hostile sword

  Of Heathen and prophane, their Carkases

  To dogs and fowls a prey.

  And yet one cannot bewail for Oliver Cromwell himself the treatment thus meted out. Had he not, with perhaps some dying prescience, forgiven the desecrators of his tomb in advance at the end of his last prayer “Pardon such as desire to trample upon the dust of a poor worm, for they are thy people too”?30 Throughout his life, he had shown a curious indifference to appearances, to what he might have termed inessentials, a concentration on the spirit not the flesh. If therefore one cannot regard the accounts of these last grim ceremonies without a shudder, it is rather an instinctive recoil on behalf of human dignity against the coarseness of the perpetrators, not for any damage done to the Lord Protector. As he himself would have been the first to point out, with the spirit fled, there was only his dust to trample upon. For this same reason, any of the various theories concerning possible alternative resting-places for his body which depend on the desire of the Protector, while still alive, to evade insults to his corpse, seem psychologically implausible. As has been seen, the prospect of death only became real to him a comparatively short time before his actual decease. The very full record of his last hours contains no such instructions or even train of thoughts; his thoughts were either on his religion, or when he touched on those he left behind, it was in terms of forgiveness.

  Nevertheless such stories have grown up, perhaps because the legend is so often more alluring than the truth. One such tradition concerns the Protector’s last-minute instructions that he should be buried on the field of Naseby, “where he obtained the greatest victory and glory and as nigh the spot as could be guessed, where the heat of the action was . . .” Transmitted to the regicide Colonel Ba
rkstead, and from him to his son of fifteen, who lived to haunt the coffee-shops in the 1740s, it was handed on to John Banks, author of a popular biography of Cromwell of that period. According to this story, the hearse was taken to the field at midnight, interred in a prepared grave in great secrecy, and the whole field carefully ploughed thereafter and sewn with corn. A nineteenth-century vicar of Naseby, the Reverend W. Marshall, heard another version of the tale via the last male descendant of the Protector, Oliver Cromwell of Cheshunt. His mother, who lived till over a hundred, had heard the story at Cheshunt as a child from an old servant of Richard Cromwell; as a boy this servant remembered seeing the corpse brought first to Cheshunt, then to Huntingdon, and while he was left to hold the horses, it proceeded further to a mysterious destination.31 The place generally indicated is to the west of the battlefield, beyond Selby Hedges and the minor road now there.