by Robert Lacey
King Oliver I? Cromwell’s critics had long accused him of desiring nothing less; and his supporters urged him to take the crown. A royal House of Cromwell was not an impossible concept in a society that found it difficult to imagine life without a king. But Cromwell’s conscience would not let him. It would have betrayed everything he stood for — and the idea was, in any case, totally unacceptable to the army. In December 1653 he was proclaimed Lord Protector of England, and when he accepted this new dignity he was careful to dress in a plain black outfit with grey worsted stockings to emphasise that this was not a coronation.
The new Lord Protector believed that government should be’For the people’s good, not what pleases them’, and for nearly five years he force-fed England a diet of godliness. Since the start of the Civil War, Parliament’s Puritans had been legislating for virtue, and now Cromwell put this into practice — particularly after July 1655 when he set up a network of military governors, the major generals’. Sunday sports were quite literally spoiled: horseracing, cockfighting, bear-baiting, bowling, shooting, dancing, wrestling — all were banned on the Sabbath. It was an offence on any day to dance around a maypole or to be caught swearing: children under twelve who uttered profanities could be whipped. Fornicators were sent to prison, and for the only time in English history (apart from the reign of King Canute), adultery was punishable by death.
Human nature won through, of course. In many localities these Puritan regulations were scarcely enforced. But they have rather unfairly defined Cromwell’s place in history. He never became King Oliver, but he was crowned King Kill-Joy — and when he died of malaria in September 1658 there was dancing in the streets. It was‘the joyfullest funeral that ever I saw’, wrote John Evelyn,’for there was none that cried but dogs’.
Today the statue of Cromwell — sword in one hand, Bible in the other — rightly enjoys pride of place outside the Houses of Parliament. But the father of the great English Revolution actually proved how little revolution England could take, inoculating us permanently against deposing monarchs, rule by armies or morality by decree. It is the measure of his achievement that there are more roads and streets in England named after Oliver Cromwell than anyone except Queen Victoria — and none in Ireland.
RABBI MANASSEH AND THE RETURN OF THE JEWS
1655
MANASSEH BEN ISRAEL MADE IT HIS MISsion to secure freedom of worship for his fellow Jews. He was a rabbi living in Amsterdam during the years of the English Commonwealth, and, like many in Europe, he was fascinated by England’s great experiment in the aftermath of killing its king. He particularly pondered the burgeoning of cults and religions that followed the Civil War, for Parliament’s victorious Puritans had wasted no time in abolishing the Church of England and its monopoly over worship. Bishops, prayer books and compulsory churchgoing — all the mechanisms of an established state religion — were swept away: people were free to work out their own route to salvation.
’After the Bible was translated into English,’ wrote the political theorist Thomas Hobbes,‘Everyman, nay, every boy and wench that could read English, thought they spoke with God Almighty and understood what he said.’ An outspoken royalist, Hobbes had spent the Civil War in exile in Paris. There he gave maths lessons to Charles, the teenage Prince of Wales, while writing his great work of philosophy, Leviathan. Human life, said Hobbes, was‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’. In his opinion, humans needed a strong ruler — a Leviathan or giant — to impose order upon their unruly natures. A king was the obvious candidate, but England’s King had been destroyed, and two years after Charles’s execution the inquiring philosopher went bravely back to England to investigate life in the absence of the royal Leviathan.
Hobbes found the Commonwealth teeming with the new faiths, many with names that reflected their aims. The Levellers (see p. 195) were fighting for social equality; the Diggers prayed and campaigned for land reform; the Baptists favoured adult baptism; the Quakers trembled at the name of the Lord; the Ranters, for their part, believed that nothing human was wrong, permitting them to‘rant’ — meaning to swear blasphemously — while also smoking and drinking and practising free love. The Muggletonians took their name from their spokesman Ludovicke Muggleton, who claimed to be one of the godly witnesses mentioned in the Book of Revelation; while the Fifth Monarchists derived their theories from Daniel’s Old Testament dream: they interpreted the four beasts he saw as the four great empires of the ancient world, which were now being succeeded by a fifth, the reign of Christ — whose saints they were.
Hobbes threw up his hands at this bewildering array of creeds. These manifestly contradictory views of God confirmed his amoral and very post-modern view of life’s essential chaos. But the Commonwealth’s closest thing to Leviathan, Oliver Cromwell, rather welcomed the diversity.’I had rather that Mahometanism were permitted amongst us,’ he said,‘than that one of God’s children should be persecuted.’
When the Diggers and Levellers had threatened property and public order immediately after the death of the King and again during the Protectorate, Cromwell had gone along with the army’s suppression of their disorder. He expected his major generals to be stern in their enforcement of the new regime. But when it came to the faith inside a man’s heart and head, he held firmly that freedom of worship was the right of‘the most mistaken Christian [who] should desire to live peaceably and quietly under you, [and] soberly and humbly desire to live a life of godliness and honesty’. Liberty of conscience was‘a natural right, and he that would have it ought to give it’.
This was the cue for Rabbi Manasseh Ben Israel. In 1654 he sent his son to see the Lord Protector, and the following year he left Amsterdam for London and was granted a personal audience. The Jews had been expelled from England three hundred and fifty years earlier by Edward I (see Great Tales, vol. 1, p. 174), and prejudice still lingered. Indeed, rumours of the letters the rabbi had been sending to Cromwell had prompted speculation that the Lord Protector might be planning to sell St Paul’s to the Jews, to be turned into a synagogue: Christian merchants, it was feared, would be elbowed aside by ringleted Shylocks.
Cromwell was too clever to exacerbate such feeling with a formal decree or invitation of readmission to Jews. But he used his personal authority to make sure that they could now benefit from the toleration being enjoyed by other religious groups. In 1656 Jews started worshipping openly in their own synagogue in Creechurch Lane, near London’s Aldgate, and within a few years there were thirty to forty Jewish families, mostly of Portuguese origin, operating in the capital as bankers and as dealers in gold and gemstones. The centuries of exclusion were over.
CHARLES II AND THE ROYAL OAK
1660
IN SEPTEMBER 1651, KING CHARLES II CLIMBED up a makeshift wooden ladder to hide in the branches of a leafy oak tree near Boscobel House in Shropshire. His face was blackened with soot scraped from inside a chimney and his hair had been hastily cropped. Wearing the rough breeches and shirt of a simple woodman, he carried enough bread, cheese and beer to sustain him till nightfall. The twenty-one-year-old, who had been claiming the English throne since the execution of his father eighteen months earlier, was on the run. The royalist army he had led down from Scotland had been routed at Worcester two days earlier, and now the Roundhead search parties were scouring the countryside.‘While we were in this tree,’ he later recalled,’we see soldiers going up and down in the thicket of the wood, searching for persons escaped, we seeing them, now and then, peeping out of the wood.’
In later life, Charles loved telling the story of his refuge in the Royal Oak — how sore his feet had felt in his badly fitting shoes and how he had actually spent most of his time in the tree asleep. Thirty years later he related the full story: on one occasion he had hidden in a barn behind mounds of corn and hay, on another the sound of galloping hooves had made him dive behind a hedge for cover.
Charles was a fugitive for no less than six weeks, first heading north from Worcester, the
n doubling back south, finally making his escape to France from the little port of Shoreham in Sussex. Along the way he was sheltered by dozens of ordinary folk — millers, shepherds, farmers — as well as by prosperous landowners, many of them Catholics, who would hide him behind the panelling in their priest holes. There was a price of £1,000 on Charles’s head, and the death penalty for anyone who helped him. But the King, as this young man already was in the eyes of most, would not be betrayed.
The Crown exercised an enduring hold on England’s affections. The many faults of Charles I were forgotten in the shock of what came to be seen as his martyrdom, and the succession of republican experiments from Commonwealth to Protectorate made a restoration of the monarchy seem the best guarantee of stability. But the death of Cromwell in September 1658 did not immediately lead to the return of Charles II. Power rested with the thirty thousand officers and men of the Puritan army who were, for the most part, fiercely opposed to the return of the monarch, not to mention the‘popish’ Church of England. The title of Protector had been taken over by Oliver’s son Richard, and so long as the victors of the Civil War hung together it seemed likely that Charles would remain in exile. As his shrewd adviser Edward Hyde put it, for the monarchy to be restored, its enemies — Puritans, parliamentarians and soldiers — would have to become‘each other’s executioners’.
It happened more quickly than anyone had imagined. Richard Cromwell was no leader — he lacked his father’s sense of purpose and the very particular prestige that old‘Ironsides’ had always enjoyed with his fellow-generals and other ranks too. After only seven months the army removed Richard, and May 1659 saw the return of the forty or so remaining members of the’Rump’ Parliament. This little band of veterans who had survived Pride’s purge and dismissal by Oliver Cromwell could claim a distant, if slightly tortuous, legitimacy that went back, through all the travails of the Commonwealth and Civil Wars, to England’s last full-scale elections in 1640. But they handled their comeback no more competently than their previous spell in power. By the end of 1659 they were again presiding over chaos, with taxes unpaid and rioters calling for proper elections.
Watching this slide into disorder was George Monck, commander of the English army occupying Scotland. Of solid Devon stock, the fifty-one-year-old Monck was a tough professional soldier, but he hated what he called the‘slavery of sword government’ as fiercely as any civilian. In the closing days of the year he mobilised his forces at Coldstream, where they were stationed on the Scottish border, and started the march south. When he reached London in February 1660, he insisted that Parliament’s deliberations could not continue without the participation of the MPs who had been excluded by Pride’s purge and he finally put an end to the infamous Rump. London celebrated with revelling and barbecues. That night, II February, the streets smelt of roasting meat as rumps were turned on open-air spits in every corner of the city — thirty-one bonfires were counted on London Bridge alone.
Monck was now England’s undisputed ruler, but he refused to make himself Lord Protector. Instead he opened negotiations with Charles II, whose little government-inexile was gathered at Breda in Holland, and on 4 April 1660, Charles issued the Declaration of Breda, effectively his contract for restoration. Shrewdly heeding the advice of Edward Hyde, he kept his promises vague, placing his destiny in the hands of a free parliament’. Charles undertook to grant liberty to‘tender consciences’ and a free pardon to all who had fought for Parliament — with the exception of the‘regicides’ who had signed his father’s death warrant. The army was promised settlement of all pay arrears in full.
The following month, the diarist and naval administrator Samuel Pepys joined Charles and his brother James, at Scheveningen near The Hague, on the ship that would bring them back to a triumphant reception in London. It was the Commonwealth’s flagship the Naseby, named after the parliamentary victory in the Civil War, and after dinner its name was repainted — as the Royal Charles. England was royal again.
As sailors shinned up the rigging, setting the sails for England, Pepys fell into conversation with the tall, dark thirty-year-old who would shortly be crowned Charles II. Walking up and down the quarterdeck with him, the diarist was impressed. He found Charles‘very active and stirring… quite contrary to what I thought him to have been — and scarcely able to believe quite how dramatically his fortunes had been transformed in a mere nine years.‘He fell into discourse of his escape from Worcester… where it made me ready to weep to hear the stories that he told of his difficulties that he had passed through.’
THE VILLAGE THAT CHOSE TO DIE
1665
PLAGUE CAME TO ENGLAND WITH THE BLACK Death in 1348, and it stayed. According to London’s’bills of mortality’, people died quite regularly from the infection, which had ballooned to epidemic proportions in 1563, 1593, 1603,1625 and 1636. The rich studied the bills of mortality as a guide to their holiday plans. When the weekly plague rate started rising, it was time for a trip to the country.
The Latin plaga means a blow or knock, and in those days people often interpreted the erratic pattern of plague infections as punishing blows from an angry God. A more earthly explanation was that poisonous vapours lurked beneath the earth’s crust, symptom of a cosmic constipation that could only be cured’by expiring those Arsenical Fumes that have been retained so long in her bowels’.
Modern science remains baffled by the comings and goings of this deadly contagion. We know that bubonic plague is spread by infected fleas living on rats and humans. It is not spread from human to human by physical contact or even by human breath, except in the comparatively rare cases of pneumonic plague where the infection, having penetrated the lungs, is then breathed out by the sufferer in his or her brief remaining hours of painful life. The multiplication of rats and their fleas can be related to climactic factors — the rat flea Xenopsylla cheopis hibernates in frosty weather and flourishes at 20-25 degrees Celsius. But no one has convincingly connected particular conditions of heat or cold to the epidemic years — not least to September 1665, when plague hit England again with a vengeance. The bills of mortality mounted alarmingly — to seven thousand deaths a week by the end of the month — and the city streets sounded to the tolling of bells and the rumbling of plague carts as their drivers hooked up bodies left in doorways to convey them to the burial pits outside the city walls. Crosses were daubed on homes where infection had struck and their doors were boarded up, condemning those inside to almost certain death or — in just a few unexplained cases — to miraculous recovery.
Outside London, the plague spread wherever X. cheopis travelled, and it is thought to have reached the village of Eyam in Derbyshire that September in a box of tailor’s samples and old clothing sent to Edward Cooper, a village trader. The clothes were damp on arrival, so Cooper’s servant, George Vickers, placed them before the fire to dry. Within three days, a bluish-black plague-spot appeared on Vickers’s chest, and he died the next day. Cooper followed him to the graveyard two weeks later, and by the end of October Eyam had suffered another twenty-six deaths. The mortality rate slowed during the hard Peak District winter to between four and nine a month, but with spring it rose again, and by midsummer 1666 over seventy of the village’s 360 inhabitants had succumbed.
The old rector of Eyam, Thomas Stanley, had recently been ousted. A dissenter, he was one of the thousand or so Puritans who had refused to conform to the Church of England when, along with the monarchy, it had been restored six years earlier. So Stanley was deprived of his living, but he stayed on in Eyam, and seems to have collaborated with his young successor, the Revd William Mompesson, in face of the terrifying threat to their flock.
It was Mompesson, a married man with two children, who took the step that made Eyam famous — he urged his congregation to follow Jesus’s words in the Gospel of St John:‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’ Rather than fleeing the village and spreading the infection around the Peak Distri
ct, argued the young rector, the community should stick together and help their fellow-men. This, clearly, was to risk their own lives in an act of extraordinary self-sacrifice. The congregation agreed, and for more than a year Eyam became effectively a huge plague house, shut off from the world. Their neighbours, meanwhile, who included the Earl of Devonshire at nearby Chatsworth, responded to their gesture by leaving food and other provisions at the outskirts of the village. Derbyshire was spared further plague, and Eyam paid the price, losing more than 260 inhabitants, some three-quarters of the population. Among the last to die was Mompesson’s wife Catherine, who had gone from house to house during the outbreak, ministering to the sick.
The final burial took place on II October 1666, and Mompesson started assessing the damage.’Our town has become a Golgotha, the place of a skull…’ he wrote in November.’I intend, God willing, to spend this week in seeing all woollen clothes fumed and purified…’ Modern quarantine procedure suggests that this is the very first thing Eyam should have done. Had the fleas that were lurking in Edward Cooper’s box of clothing been destroyed on day one, the villagers would have posed no threat to their neighbours. And even if the fleas had not been destroyed, those who left the village flealess could not have infected anyone they met.
In scientific terms, we can now say that the sacrifice of Eyam’s villagers was probably unnecessary, and quite certainly counterproductive. By staying together they actually brought more humans, fleas and rats into close proximity, hugely increasing the mortality from a single source of infection. But if their lack of knowledge now seems a tragedy, does that invalidate the brave and selfless decision they took?
