Rebellion: The History of England from James I to the Glorious Revolution

by Peter Ackroyd

  It was not a question of private ambition; as he had said many times, the crown and sceptre meant very little to him. He already had more power than any English king. So he struggled. Thurloe said that Cromwell had ‘great difficulties in his own mind’ and that ‘he keeps himself reserved from everybody that I know of’; when a parliamentary delegation came to him, in the middle of April, ‘he came out of his chamber half unready in his gown, with a black scarf around his neck’. No doubt he prayed incessantly for divine guidance, hoping that as in the past a resolve or a decision would be presented to him as if by an act of grace.

  He heard vital news of God’s providence in England’s affairs when he was told that Admiral Blake had successfully maintained a siege of the Spanish coast and had destroyed another treasure fleet, thus disabling Spain as a maritime power. England now effectively controlled the high seas, an ascendancy that was unprecedented in its history. With colonies in Jamaica and Barbados, as well as those such as Virginia on the American mainland, Cromwell was the first statesman since the days of Walsingham to contemplate a global empire. As Edmund Waller put it,

  Others may use the ocean as their road

  Only the English make it their abode.

  Pepys noted, in the pusillanimous years of Charles II, that ‘it is strange how everybody do nowadays reflect upon Oliver and commend him, what brave things he did, and made all the neighbour princes fear him’.

  Yet on the most pressing matter of monarchy he could not, or dare not, come to a decision. On 3 April he declared to a parliamentary delegation that he could not discharge his duties ‘under that title’; five days later parliament urged him to reconsider, on which occasion it is reported that he delivered ‘a speech so dark, that none knows whether he will accept it or not’. He may still have been waiting for divine guidance. He knew that it was proper and expedient that he should take the crown but, as he said, ‘I would not seek to set up that which providence hath destroyed and laid in the dust, and I would not build Jericho again.’ In the first week of May it is reported that he told a group of members of parliament that he had decided to accept the title; yet once more he changed his mind.

  On 8 May he told parliament that he could not and would not become King Oliver I. ‘At the best,’ he said, ‘I should do it doubtingly. And certainly what is so [done] is not of faith.’ The protests of the army officers had in the end proved to be persuasive; two of them, Fleetwood and Desborough, had in fact married into Cromwell’s family. They had told him that, if he accepted the crown, they would resign from all their offices and retire into private life. Other officers, who had been with him from the beginning and had fought with him through fire, also registered their strong disapproval. This was decisive. He could not at this late stage abandon his comrades and colleagues; he could not betray their trust or spoil their hopes. So his final answer to parliament was that ‘I cannot undertake this government with the title of king’.

  The only way forward was by means of compromise. Even if Cromwell would not be king, he could accept the other constitutional measures recommended by parliament; in particular it seemed just, and necessary, to re-establish the House of Lords as a check upon the legislature. On 25 May the ‘humble petition’ was presented again with Cromwell named as chief magistrate and Lord Protector, an appointment which he accepted as ‘one of the greatest tasks that ever was laid upon the back of a human creature’. On 26 June 1657, Oliver Cromwell was draped in purple and in ermine for the ceremony of installation in Westminster Hall; upon the table before his throne rested the sword of state and a sceptre of solid gold. The blast of trumpets announced his reign. His office was not declared to be hereditary but he had been given the power to name his successor; it was generally believed that this would be one of his sons. So began the second protectorate, which was now a restored monarchy in all but name.

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  Is it possible?

  There was a time for celebration. At the end of 1657 one of Cromwell’s daughters, Frances, married Robert Rich, the grandson of the earl of Warwick, and the ceremonial matched the status of the pair. Music and song echoed through the corridors of Whitehall in honour of the occasion; the orchestra comprised forty-eight violins and fifty trumpets. Guns were fired from the Tower in the manner of previous royal weddings. There was even ‘mixt dancing’, men and women together, that continued until five o’clock the following morning. In the spirit of the festivity Cromwell was moved to spill sack-posset, a rich and creamy drink, over the dresses of the women and to daub the stools where they were to sit with sugar and spice. He had an almost rustic sense of fun. At the subsequent wedding of another daughter, Mary, the ceremony at Hampton Court included a masque in which Cromwell played the non-speaking role of Jove. It was an astonishing return to the customs of the Stuart kings.

  The French envoy reported that ‘another spirit’ was abroad and that ‘the preachers of old time are retiring because they are found too melancholic’. When Cromwell gave banquets for foreign envoys ‘rare music’ was always part of the occasion and, in the great hall of Hampton Court, two organs were placed for the use of a resident organist. It is to the credit of Cromwell, too, that under his rule the opera was introduced into England. The Protector was known to be a great lover of harmony, both of instruments and of voices.

  Immediately after his installation Cromwell had adjourned parliament until the new year; when it reappeared, it would be in its old constitutional form of two houses. He had named his new council; it was the same as its predecessor, with the solitary exception of John Lambert who had resigned all of his offices and retired with a large pension. He had once believed that he would be the Protector’s successor but he now realized that he would be pre-empted by another, and younger, Cromwell.

  One of the principal tasks of the re-established council was to decide upon the nature of the new upper chamber, but some of their proceedings took place in the absence of the Protector. Cromwell was now being called, even by his intimates, ‘the old man’; his signature was no longer bold and striking but tremulous. He spent much of the summer in the healthful air of Hampton Court, but he was suffering from painful catarrh.

  The second session of the second protectorate parliament reassembled on 20 January 1658, but immediately it began to confront the military regime. The members of the new House of Lords were largely chosen from Cromwell’s most loyal supporters and, as a result, the Commons became antagonistic; some of the most inveterate of Cromwell’s opponents, who had been excluded from the previous session on the grounds of ‘immorality’ or ‘delinquency’, were returned to Westminster where at once they began to question the authority of the ‘other house’.

  Cromwell summoned both houses to the Banqueting House, five days after they had first met, and urged them to be faithful to the cause. But his intervention had no material effect, and the Commons remained as hostile as before. One of its most formidable members, Sir Arthur Haselrig, made a speech in which he scorned the actions of the House of Lords in the past. ‘And shall we now rake them up,’ he asked, ‘after they have so long laid in the grave?’ An observer at Cromwell’s court noted that the assertions of the Commons, and the divisions between the two houses, threw the Protector ‘into a rage and passion like unto madness’. His anger was augmented by the fact that elements of the army in fact supported the Commons in its affirmation of supremacy.

  On a cold morning, 4 February, Cromwell rose early and announced his determination to go to Westminster. He could not journey down the frozen Thames, and so impulsively he took the first coach for hire he could find. When he arrived in the retiring room of the Lords, his son-in-law and close military colleague, Charles Fleetwood, remonstrated with him on learning his intention. ‘You are a milksop,’ Cromwell said to him, ‘by the living God I will dissolve the house.’ And that was what he proceeded to do.

  He told the Commons that ‘you have not only disquieted yourselves, but the whole nation is disquieted’. With the prospect of invas
ion from abroad, and rebellion from within, they had done nothing. ‘And I do declare to you here that I do dissolve this parliament. And let God be judge between you and me.’ To which pious aspiration some of the members cried out, ‘Amen!’ Cromwell’s latest, and last, constitutional experiment had come to an end. It was a sign of the radical anomaly of military rule that none of his parliaments had succeeded. He was now being openly criticized. The envoy from Venice reported that the people were ‘nauseated’ by the present government; the Dutch ambassador similarly noted that Cromwell’s affairs were ‘in troubled and dangerous condition’ while a visitor from Massachusetts remarked that many men ‘exclaim against him with open mouths’.

  A royalist agent in London, Allan Broderick, reported to Edward Hyde that the army ‘is infected with sedition’ and that the treasury was exhausted; he added that the countries of Europe were ‘cold friends or close enemies’ and that the people of England were labouring under ‘an unwearied restless spirit of innovation’. Yet Broderick said of Cromwell himself that ‘the man is seemingly desperate, any other in his condition would be deemed irrecoverable, but as the dice of the gods never throw out, so is there something in the fortune of this villain that often renders ten to one no odds’.

  This message was designed to encourage Charles Stuart. It was reported that the exiled king was waiting in Flanders with an army of 8,000 men, ready to strike at the first favourable opportunity. Another royalist insurrection was planned for the spring, but once more the plotters were betrayed and taken; four of them were found by Colonel Barkstead, the lieutenant of the Tower, in what he called ‘a desperate malignant alehouse’. Other royalists were beheaded or hanged, drawn and quartered, but the majority were consigned to gaol.

  Another fortunate throw of the dice also favoured Cromwell. In the early summer of the year the forces of the French and English scattered the Spanish just outside Dunkirk in the ‘battle of the dunes’; Dunkirk, hitherto held by Spain, was then surrendered to England. It was the first piece of continental territory to fall into English hands since the time of Calais. Since there was a royalist contingent in the Spanish army, victory for Cromwell was all the sweeter. The French king now hailed him as ‘the most invincible of sovereigns’. Yet this praise concealed the truth that the Protector’s expenditure far outran his income; the exchequer was often bare and the pay of his soldiers was in arrears. It was said that his ministers had to go ‘a-begging’ to the merchants of the City.

  Sickness was also in the air. A malignant fever, called ‘the new disease’, had arisen. In the spring of 1658 the new epidemic spread, in the words of a contemporary, Dr Willis, ‘as if sent by some blast of the stars’. Cromwell himself laboured under the burden of personal rule to the extent that, as one of his servants, John Maidstone, said, ‘it drank up his spirits’. His private suffering was then increased by the death of his most loved daughter, Elizabeth Claypole, at the beginning of August from an obscure or undiagnosed disease; the event, though long expected, had a violent effect upon him. Thurloe reported that ‘he lay very ill of the gout and other distempers, contracted by the long sickness of my lady Elizabeth, which made great impressions on him’; he became dangerously ill, but then recovered sufficiently to ride in Hampton Court Park.

  When one of the leaders of the Quakers, George Fox, visited Cromwell, however, he reported that ‘I saw and felt a waft of death go forth against him, and when I came to him he looked like a dying man’. In the last week of August Cromwell fell sick again with a condition then known as ‘tertian ague’, a form of malaria with fits every three days. It began with chills and sensations of coldness which were followed by a stage of dry heat that ended in a drenching sweat.

  He was taken back to Whitehall where, as Thurloe put it, ‘our fears are more than our hopes’. Prayer meetings assembled throughout the capital. His condition varied from rally to relapse, as all the time he grew weaker, but he was said to have prayed for ‘God’s cause’ and ‘God’s people’. He asked one of his doctors why he looked so sad.

  ‘How can I look otherwise, when I have the responsibility of your life upon me?’

  ‘You doctors think I shall die.’ His wife was sitting by his bedside and he took her hand. ‘I tell thee I shall not die of this bout; I am sure I shall not. Do not think I am mad. I tell you the truth.’ He then told the astonished doctor that this was the answer God had given to his prayers. He also questioned one of his chaplains.

  ‘Tell me. Is it possible to fall from grace?’

  ‘It is not possible.’

  ‘Then I am safe; for I know that I was once in grace.’

  He had always been sustained by the notion that he was one of the elect; his pride and his piety were thereby combined, giving him that irresistible power to remove all obstacles in his path. Yet there were many times when he did not know what to do, when he waited for a sign. He once said that no man rises so high as one that does not know where he is going. He had reached the height of his command through a mixture of guile, zeal and adventitious circumstance; no one could have predicted the series of measures and counter-measures that had led to his ascendancy. It did not matter that he was inconsistent, in turns pragmatic and authoritarian, as long as the force of righteousness was with him. That is why he believed above all else in ‘providence’ as both the cause and justification of his actions.

  On Thursday 2 September it became clear that he was dying. One of his physicians offered him a sleeping draught but he replied that ‘it is not my design to drink or to sleep, but my design is to make what haste I can to be gone’. Five officers, called to the deathbed, testified that he had declared that his son, Richard Cromwell, should succeed him. He died on the afternoon of 3 September which had been called by him his ‘fortunate day’ as the anniversary of his victories at Dunbar and at Worcester. His battles were all now over.

  * * *

  When in 1650 Oliver Cromwell came back to England, after his successful campaign in Ireland, he was greeted by ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwel’s Return from Ireland’. It has been described as the greatest political poem in the English language, but it is not the most transparent. Andrew Marvell was at this time a poet of no great account. He had been educated well, and had made the obligatory tour of Europe. He might have become a clergyman or secretary to some great man; instead he lived off the sale of some lands in the north, and revolved in the circles of London literature.

  He seems to have first been attached to some royalist poets or poetasters but the crucial victories of Cromwell, and the execution of the king, gave him pause. It might be time to find patronage among the new rulers of the land, and it may be that he composed his ‘Ode’ with some such purpose in sight. Yet his words, distilled as if in an alembic, testify to his creative ambiguity and equivocation. His mind is so finely tempered that he can become both royalist and republican at the same time; he is open to all possible opinions, and thus finds it impossible to choose between them. He is in the position of one who, on coming to a judgement, realizes at the same time that the opposite is also true. We may therefore discuss Marvell here as representative of the confusion that must have been experienced by many others in this period of change and conflict. The poem itself was composed in the interval between Cromwell’s return from Ireland and his subsequent campaign in Scotland.

  In the opening lines of the ‘Ode’ Cromwell is one who finds fulfilment not in ‘the inglorious Arts of Peace’ but in ‘advent’rous War’ through which he takes his ‘fiery way’. This might not necessarily be construed as a compliment but Marvell is withholding judgement as well as praise. He goes on to declare that:

  ’Tis Madness to resist or blame

  The force of angry Heavens flame:

  And, if we would speak true,

  Much to the Man is due.

  This is as much as to say that Cromwell cannot be resisted and should not in any case be censored or condemned. He may have emerged into the light as part of the inexorable movement of tim
e, or of historical necessity, but in that respect his personal failings are of no consequence. It was his destiny (providential or otherwise) to

  … cast the Kingdom old

  Into another Mold.

  Though Justice against Fate complain,

  And plead the antient Rights in vain:

  But those do hold or break

  As Men are strong or weak.

  Cromwell is in other words a strong man whose strength is its own reward. If justice has been sacrificed in the process, it is a necessary and inevitable consequence of change. Cromwell is in any case a creature of ‘Fate’ rather than of ‘Justice’, decisive and undeflectable. A leader may be both redeemer and despot. It had often happened in the history of the world, and Marvell’s contemporaries were thoroughly acquainted with the career of Julius Caesar.

  So this is a poetry of doubt and ambiguity rather than of praise and affirmation, which may thus reflect a more general distrust and uncertainty concerning Cromwell’s motives in these crucial years. It can only be confirmed that he has:

  Nor yet grown stiffer with Command,

  But still in the Republick’s hand:

  How fit he is to sway

  That can so well obey.

  It can at least be said that Cromwell has not become a tyrant. Marvell does not take sides because there are no sides to take, and we may recall T. S. Eliot’s remark upon Henry James that ‘he had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it’. Marvell’s almost impenetrable reserve and self-effacement are also evident. He utters no real opinion of his own, and seems ready to retreat at almost any moment into silence. This, too, may have been the stance of many contemporaries in the face of Cromwell’s supremacy.

  Four years later Marvell applied himself once more to the phenomenon of Oliver Cromwell with ‘THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY of the Government under O.C.’. This is a much more positive account of Cromwell’s rule, but it would be fair to say that it is a panegyric on the nature of protectorate government rather than on the Protector himself. Cromwell is compared to Amphion who with his brother raised the city of Thebes by means of music. So: