Chapter 4
The hand of God was mightily seen in prospering and preserving the Parliament, till Cromwell’s ambition unhappily interrupted them.
Lucy Hutchinson, wife of the regicide Colonel Hutchinson
To those who knew him well, Cromwell was different after the battle of Worcester. Hugh Peters – who had ridden before the King’s carriage on its final journey from Windsor to London – was a chaplain to Cromwell, and his intimate confidant. In 1649, Peters had been on the Irish campaign, combining his ministry with command of an infantry regiment.
He was aware that Cromwell was prone to moments of intense euphoria, but Peters would recall that his leader had been particularly ‘elevated’ (as Peters politely termed it), as soon as the scale of victory at Worcester became clear. It was enough of a concern to him, Peters later confided to Edmund Ludlow, that he ‘told a friend with whom he [Peters] then quartered in his return to London, that he was inclined to believe Cromwell would endeavour to make himself King’.1 It was as if the consecutive 3 September victories, Dunbar and Worcester, had taken Cromwell over the threshold, from a belief that he was leading troops in a godly cause, to a personal conviction that he had been marked out by God for a special duty.
There were many with a hand in the death of the King who watched with horror and concern, as their suspicions about Cromwell’s limitless ambition seemed set to become reality: horror, because they had not ended one man’s life and absolute rule to see another govern as an autocrat in his place; concern, because they feared this character flaw in one man might leave them all vulnerable to a Royalist resurgence.
Colonel John Hutchinson, who sat as one of the King’s judges, had been quick to identify Cromwell’s self-serving streak. Even before the Third Civil War he had noticed Cromwell subtly begin to bend the army to his personal cause, replacing officers and soldiers ‘with rascally turn-coat Cavaliers and pitiful sottish beats of his own alliances and others such as would swallow all things, and make no questions for conscience’s sake’.2 After the campaign in Scotland and the triumph at Worcester, Lucy Hutchinson recalled that her husband ‘was confirmed that [Cromwell] and his confederates in the army were carrying on designs of private ambition, and resolved that none should share with them in the commands of the army or forts of the nation but such as would be beasts and ridden upon by the proud chiefs’.3 Men such as Hutchinson, who had fought for civil liberty at huge personal risk and financial cost, felt shoddily treated and excluded.
Cromwell was supported by an army in which his two key subordinates held sway. One was John Lambert, who had risen to the rank of major general in his twenties. A brave and brilliant cavalry commander, Lambert had contributed significantly to the victories that ended the Second and the Third Civil Wars, Preston and Worcester. The other was Thomas Harrison. Cromwell had spotted Harrison’s potential when the Staffordshire butcher’s son was just a captain, and since then he had been Cromwell’s protégé. Now the lord general had supreme control, Harrison continued his heady ascent: he would be regarded by many as the second most powerful man in the kingdom.
Harrison was a Fifth Monarchist. He believed that he was living in the prelude to the fifth empire of the world (the previous four had been those of Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome), when the Messiah would reappear to judge all, as envisaged in the apocalyptic Book of Daniel. The Fifth Monarchists even knew the year in which this Judgment Day would fall: 1666, for that year incorporated the dreadful number 666. This figure belonged to the Beast of the Sea, which, the Book of Revelation confirmed, would ‘rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy’.4
Fifth Monarchy was not a creed for the faint-hearted, and Harrison was a sufficiently rabid believer to become one of its leaders. He believed his role was to help make England godlier, before taking the crusade abroad, helping to prepare the way for the imminent Second Coming.
Cromwell, with customary pragmatism, harnessed Harrison’s fanaticism for his own purposes. Aiming to bring to heel one of the heartlands of Royalism in the first two Civil Wars, he appointed Harrison president of the Commission for the Propagation of the Gospel in Wales: this involved the turning out of ‘scandalous’ (that is, Royalist) priests from the principality. While fulfilling his religious brief, it was inevitable that Harrison would at the same time root out any remaining support for the Crown.
Harrison was a complex character. His sincere and profound religious devotion was of a brand normally associated with those of a dour disposition. However, the major general was, according to a contemporary, ‘of a sanguine complexion, naturally of such a vivacity, hilarity and alacrity as another man hath when he hath drunken a cup too much. But naturally also so far from humble thoughts of himself that it was his ruin.’5
Such was advertised by Harrison’s peacock apparel. The first foreign ambassador to come to Westminster in recognition of the new republic was that of Spain. This was an important validation for the Commonwealth, albeit from a Catholic power. The day before the audience, Harrison spied several members in a cluster, and took it upon himself to tell them how they must appear the next day: he stressed, one of those present recalled, that they should aim to shine through ‘wisdom, piety, righteousness and justice, and not in gold and silver and worldly bravery, which did not become saints’.6 Tomorrow, he advised, the order of the day would be one of restraint: their dress should therefore be sober, and dignified.
Surprised by this unsolicited advice, the members nevertheless took care to appear in smart but staid clothes – muted colours, silver buttons and a modest touch of gold in the trim. However, to their astonishment, Harrison entered the chamber in altogether different attire: ‘In a scarlet coat and cloak, both laden with gold and silver lace, and the coat so covered with clinquant [glitter] that scarcely could one discern the ground, and in this glittering habit set himself just under the Speaker’s chair; which the other gentlemen thought that his godly speeches, the day before were but made that he alone might appear in the eyes of strangers.’7
Such finery came at a cost, and Harrison was one of the busier regicides when it came to building up stockpiles of personal wealth. The Rump soon discovered that finding money to pay its army was an impossible task. Instead, it offered soldiers certificates of credit. These Harrison amassed with such effectiveness, buying them at reduced rates from subordinates desperate for cash, that he was able to buy a slew of confiscated royal and Church properties around London and in his home county of Staffordshire. He became a very wealthy, and much resented, figure.
There were members of the Rump Parliament who feared Harrison. They heard rumours that he was secretly building up what amounted to a vast army in Wales, and decided to conclude his Propagation of the Gospel there. At the same time, members wanted to curtail the size, power and expense of the army. This was a threat that Cromwell could not tolerate, since it would reduce the basis of his power. Meanwhile Cromwell was frustrated that Parliament was making no discernible progress in the great undertakings of the day, including the drafting of a new constitution.
In April 1653, Cromwell and Harrison were in the Chamber of the House of Commons, listening to other members in fruitless discussion. Cromwell could take no more. He whispered to Harrison, ‘This is the time I must do it’,8 got to his feet, and launched a tirade at the uselessness of the House, before taking personal aim at some of his fellow regicides. He chastised them for their lack of morals. Marten he called a whoremaster, and Chaloner a drunkard.
Cromwell then told Harrison to call in his men, and two dozen soldiers entered the chamber. While they began clearing the members, Harrison asked William Lenthall – styled by the Commonwealth as ‘Speaker of the Parliament of England’ – to vacate his chair. When Lenthall refused, Harrison grabbed the Speaker by his gown, and hauled him to his feet.
This violent ending of the Rump Parliament caused lasting consternation and division among those who had striven for the removal, then agreed to the execution, of the King. Three years later Edmund Ludlow asked his fellow regicide, Harrison, if he regretted what he had done: helping to expel an elected assembly at Cromwell’s bidding. Harrison deflected responsibility, saying his heart had been ‘upright and sincere’ when the rumpus took place. Ludlow would have none of Harrison’s evasiveness, replying, ‘That I conceived it not to be sufficient in matters of so great importance to mankind, to have only good intentions and designs, unless there be also probable means of attaining those ends by the methods we enter upon.’9
Ludlow felt that the Rump had deserved more time to find its bearings in uncharted waters. He was also furious at the open door that Parliament’s dissolution now presented to Cromwell’s ambitions. ‘It could not but be manifest,’ he told Harrison, ‘to every man who observed the state of our affairs, that upon the suppression of the civil authority, the power would immediately devolve upon that person who had the greatest interest in the army.’10
Cromwell and his Council of Officers considered the best way forward for the government of the nation. Lambert was for a committee of a dozen men, to control all. But Cromwell and the army representatives instead approved Harrison’s proposal to commit the government of the nation to a council of religious men, who would contemplate God’s will, and express it through legislature. This body became known as Barebone’s Parliament after one of its members, Praise-God Barebone, a leather merchant of Fleet Street and a ‘man of great piety, understanding and weight’. It proved to be rather better at prayer and contemplation than government, and it soon became clear that Harrison had recommended it to Cromwell as a prelude to the Second Coming, in accordance with his apocalyptic beliefs, rather than as a practical political entity. Fifth Monarchists believed that good men were needed to prepare the way, before the victory over the Anti-Christ could be made complete.
Harrison also wanted a continuation of the war that the Commonwealth had provoked with the Netherlands. This began in July 1652 because, as George Monck, serving as one of England’s generals-at-sea, stated, ‘The Dutch have too much trade, and the English are resolved to take it from them.’11 The war was a naval one, involving terrible casualties on both sides. One who was lost was Richard Deane, the New Model Army’s artillery supremo, who had been twenty-first out of the fifty-nine signatories on Charles I’s death warrant. Deane was cut in two by a Dutch cannonball at the start of a 200-ship engagement, the Battle of the Gabbard, in June 1653. Monck threw a cloak over his fellow commander’s steaming remains, so the sight of his mutilation would not demoralise the crew. The corpse was afforded a more dignified end later, being interred with great pomp at Westminster Abbey.
Harrison saw the war with the Dutch not as a matter of commercial practicality, but as a rebuff to the Netherlands, on behalf of God, for having allowed financial greed to distract them from their religious duty. Once the Dutch were defeated, Harrison and his fellow radicals very much hoped that the war would be continued, its ultimate goal the conquest of Rome. When, in 1654, Cromwell pushed through a peace treaty with the Netherlands (he had never been happy fighting a Protestant nation) his rift with Harrison was complete.
Barebone’s Parliament was an experiment that imploded within a few months, because of indecision and infighting. Its final act, to the dismay of the Fifth Monarchists, was to surrender its sovereignty to Cromwell. Recognising his pre-eminence in the land, the Instrument of Government of 1653 proclaimed, ‘Oliver Cromwell, Captain-General of the forces of England, Scotland and Ireland, shall be, and is hereby declared to be, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland, and the dominions thereto belonging, for his life.’ The next phase of England’s republican decade was to be Cromwell’s Protectorate.
After the shattering defeats of the Civil Wars, Royalist sympathisers retained negligible armed strength, and lacked coordination. With little hope of a turning tide, and with the Prince of Wales in an exile that, after the rout at Worcester, looked as though it might be eternal, his supporters looked to any signs of hope. John Evelyn wrote of a violent summer storm, the likes of which nobody could remember, that ended a four-month drought: ‘The hail being in some places 4 and 5 inches about, brake all the glass about London: especially at Deptford, and more at Greenwich, where Sir Thomas Stafford, vice-chamberlain to the Queen, affirmed some had the shape of crowns.’12 In desperate circumstances, this was viewed as a rare positive omen.
Cromwell did all he could to ensure that hopes of a Stuart restoration remained a fanciful prospect. However, his brutal single-mindedness added to the unpopularity of his regime. Some who had loyally supported the Parliamentarian cause, including the regicide Colonel Hutchinson, watched in dismay as Cromwell played into the hands of the enemy. Lucy Hutchinson recorded that her husband and his allies recognised that ‘while Cromwell reduced all by the exercise of tyrannical power under another name, there was a door open for the restoring of their (the Royalists’)party’.13
Cromwell’s chief intelligence officer had been the regicide Thomas Scott. However, under his Protectorate, Cromwell passed this responsibility on to John Thurloe, his family’s lawyer. Thurloe combined censorship with espionage, to quash Royalist plots before they took root. As postmaster general, he had access to all mail, whether to foreign governments, or between Stuart sympathisers. He brought together a team of codebreakers, one of them the son of the slain Dr Dorislaus.
In 1655 there was a ripple of seemingly disjointed Royalist rebellions across England. It was Thurloe and his network of agents that thwarted these efforts, having prior knowledge of the conspirators’ plans after infiltrating their ranks, and reading their correspondence. Such failures crushed the morale of other potential plotters, and dissuaded foreign powers from becoming embroiled in the luckless intrigues of the exiled Prince of Wales.
Despite his successes, the Lord Protector asserted ever tighter control over England, dividing it into ten military governorships. Each was under the control of a major general, answerable only to him. Those chosen by Cromwell included two fellow regicides: William Goffe in Berkshire, Hampshire and Sussex; and Edward Whalley controlling five Eastern and Midlands counties, from Lincolnshire to Warwickshire. A third signatory to the King’s death warrant, John Barkstead, was appointed deputy to the major general of Middlesex. Barkstead performed the day-to-day duties, commanding the Tower of London, administering the key area that included the City of London and Westminster, and overseeing everything from the rounding up of hundreds of prostitutes to the suppression of Shrove Tuesday celebrations.
Cromwell relied on the major generals to preserve peace, and also to enforce his will: Harrison and Ludlow, despite their impressive military records, were considered too independent for posts that demanded obedience to the Protector. One of the major generals’ tasks was to extract the Decimation Tax, a fine of one-tenth of their property, payable by defeated Royalists. This was a particularly galling levy, since its proceeds went to fund local militias whose prime role was the policing of the Royalists. This cycle of heavy taxation and suffocating security created a self-feeding monster, whose master was Cromwell.
Ludlow detested the rule of the major generals, claiming that they frequently acted outside the law, threatening those who failed to obey them with transportation to the plantations of the West Indies. ‘And it was a misery to be bewailed in those days,’ agreed Lucy Hutchinson, ‘that many of the Parliamentary party exercised cruelty, injustice, and oppression to their conquered enemies.’14 She thought the major generals ‘silly, mean fellows . . . who ruled according to their wills, by no law but what seemed good in their own eyes.’15
Further anger greeted Cromwell’s hope, partly implemented through his major generals, to improve the nation’s morality. Swearing, drunkenness and blasphemy were harshly punished; theatres were closed, and the horses of those riding on Sundays were confiscated. Horse races, bull-baiting and cock-fighting were banned: the seventeenth-century stomach for animal-based entertainment was strong, and its forced suppression was widely resented. In 1655, Colonel Pride sent a file of musketeers into the Bear Gardens at Bankside, London, where bear- and bull-baiting had been popular on Tuesdays and Thursdays since early Tudor times: Elizabeth I had taken the Spanish ambassador there, subtly probing him for secret intelligence during the entertainments. Now, it was decreed, such sport had to end, because it degraded the godly Commonwealth.
Pride had the bears tied by the nose and shot by firing squad, sparing just one white cub. He had the mastiffs that had been the bears’ tormentors sent to the plantations of Jamaica.16 Soon afterwards Thomas Walker, a petticoat-maker from Cannon Street, bought the area and built tenement buildings in place of the redundant amphitheatre. This was, to many, a Commonwealth subterfuge: their traditional enjoyment had been removed in the name of morality; but, it was strongly suspected, the true motive had been profit.
Religion was the root of much controversy. In the late 1640s and early 1650s the Quaker Movement spread south from northern England. Its central tenets were suited to the instability of the times: Quakers questioned the authority of Church and state, and believed that every human was blessed with a divine ‘Inner Light’. William Goffe, the major general who had shone at the Putney debates before sitting in judgment on the King, condemned the Quakers as ‘doing much work for the Devil and deluding many simple souls’.17
James Nayler was a prominent Quaker. He had served with Parliament during the Civil Wars, most recently under Cromwell at Dunbar, returning to life as a farmer in the West Riding. A vision summoned him from his life in the fields to a ministry spreading his religious beliefs. Nayler was famed for his eloquence, which he used to attack slavery. But it was his actions, rather than his words, that provoked the greatest uproar.
During a rainstorm he rode his horse into the city of Bristol, with his followers in attendance, proclaiming ‘Holy, holy, holy’. He later claimed that his aim had been to highlight every person’s possession of the Inner Light, but this failed to convince. Puritans were outraged at his impersonation of Jesus. They also condemned as blasphemous his assertion that mankind could be considered spiritually equal to the Son of God.
Nayler was brought to trial in London. There, another of Cromwell’s major generals, William Butler, called for Nayler to suffer the penalty prescribed by the Old Testament book of Leviticus: ‘Bring forth him that hath cursed without the camp; and let all that heard him lay their hands upon his head, and let all the congregation stone him.’18 Goffe joined in the call for Nayler to be killed, with the inflammatory accusation that Quakers ‘would tear the flesh off the bones of all that profess Christ’.19
Cromwell favoured leniency for Nayler, but he had to concede to the demands for serious punishment. Nayler was placed in a pillory, where he was viciously pelted by the crowd, before being made to walk through the streets, being whipped as he went. His forehead was branded with a ‘B’ – a permanent reminder of his blasphemy – while his tongue was pierced with a hot iron. Nayler was then returned to Bristol, where he was forced to re-enter the city – this time, to show his unworthiness, facing his horse’s rear. He was flogged again, before being sentenced to two years of imprisonment so hard that he never recovered. Assaulted on his way back home to Yorkshire in 1660, he died soon afterwards aged forty-two.
If Cromwell was occasionally forced to bend his policy to the prejudices of his lieutenants, he was also powerful enough to build up bastions of influence that owed him unquestioning and total loyalty.
Ireland became almost a family fiefdom: Cromwell’s son-in-law Henry Ireton took control of it, when the lord general was called away to fight the Scots. Ireton continued his father-in-law’s ruthless ways, before succumbing to grave illness. This leading regicide died in agony in Limerick at the end of 1651, his last words allegedly a call for fresh blood to flush out the fiery fever that had consumed his body. Ireton, like Dorislaus and Deane before him, was buried in a magnificent ceremony at Westminster Abbey.
Cromwell’s eldest daughter Bridget endured a short widowhood, marrying Charles Fleetwood just six months after Ireton’s death. Fleetwood, another senior officer in her father’s service, was now sent as commander-in-chief to Ireland, where he continued the brutal crushing of resistance, persecuting Catholics, and favouring Puritans over Presbyterians.
When Fleetwood was transferred to an English major-generalship in 1655, Ireland largely became the responsibility of Cromwell’s intelligent twenty-seven-year-old son Henry, who already had five years’ experience there. During his time in charge of its armed forces, then its government, he had become a popular figure, demonstrating a sense of fairness and compassion notably absent in his three predecessors. Offered £1,500-worth of Irish property as a reward for his services, he turned it down, saying Ireland was too poor a country to bear such a gift.
The Cromwell children were intriguing to contemporaries, filling the void left by the exile and imprisonment of the Stuart princes and princesses. Once their father became Lord Protector, from which point he was addressed as ‘Your Highness’, the offspring were treated as quasi-royal. Bridget was viewed as down to earth but, Lucy Hutchinson believed, ‘the rest were insolent fools’.20 The eldest surviving son – the two senior ones had died of sickness while, respectively, a student and a Parliamentary army officer – was Richard, a disappointment to his father because he preferred to indulge a passion for country sports to serving the Protectorate. Lucy Hutchinson considered Richard ‘a peasant in his nature, yet gentle and virtuous; but [he] became not greatness’.21
Elizabeth Claypole was Cromwell’s favourite daughter. Captain Silius Titus, a Royalist, wrote to the Prince of Wales’s court in exile with a delectable tale of her snobbery. Elizabeth was attending a wedding, where the wives of the major generals were surprisingly nowhere to be seen. ‘The feast wanting much of its grace by the absence of those ladies, it was asked by one there where they were,’ recorded Titus: ‘Mrs Claypole answered, “I’ll warrant you washing their dishes at home as they used to do.” This hath been extremely ill taken, and now the women do all they can with their husbands to hinder Mrs Claypole from being a princess.’22
The great question of Cromwell’s latter years was whether he would become King or not. It was an exquisitely fraught issue, since many who had signed the death warrant of one king had done so with no thought that another would ever take his place. Others, such as Lord Broghill – an ally in Ireland, who had ably assisted Cromwell and Ireton in their campaigns – urged kingship on Cromwell as the only security against the return of the Stuarts.
When Cromwell recalled Parliament in 1656, the republican Ludlow suspected that the prime reason for the summons was to have the Lord Protector proclaimed King. Cromwell closely controlled the elections for that assembly. He was particularly troubled that two of the most prominent of his fellow regicides – Lord President Bradshaw, and Ludlow himself – might cause problems, since they had made clear their absolute opposition to the return of kingship. Cromwell ordered a letter to be read aloud, in Bradshaw’s constituency of Chester. It made clear that the Lord Protector would be extremely displeased if Bradshaw were returned as a Member of Parliament. Meanwhile, in Wiltshire, voters were fed the lie that Ludlow was a prisoner in the Tower of London. He was not; but belief that he was meant that he could not be considered for election.
Even those who were elected required Cromwell’s endorsement. Using a clause in the Instrument of Government that excluded anyone from standing if they had questionable integrity or sincerity, ninety newly elected members of the House of Commons, including the regicide Thomas Scott, were barred from taking their seats. They appealed to their fellow members to help them overcome Cromwell’s ban, but the Lord Protector was too powerful to resist.
January 1657 saw the first open suggestion that Cromwell should become King. A Colonel Jephson, who pushed for him to be crowned, was teasingly told by the Lord Protector, ‘Get thee gone for a mad fellow, as thou art.’23 This was a ‘madness’ that was quickly rewarded by the secretly delighted Cromwell: the colonel and his son received rich rewards, including military promotions, and an ambassadorship to Sweden.
Jephson proved to be a rarity in the army: the majority of senior officers would not countenance a return to crowned rule and, as the possibility of a ‘King Oliver’ grew, they bared their teeth.
Lieutenant Generals Fleetwood and Lambert and Colonel Desborough – rated ‘the three great men’24 of the land by the Commonwealth’s spymaster John Thurloe – warned Cromwell, ‘that those who put him upon it were no enemies to Charles Stuart; and that if he accepted of it, he would infallibly draw ruin on himself and his friends’.25 Desborough went further, claiming that if Cromwell became King, he would betray the cause they had fought for, and be the ruin of his family. Colonel Pride also warned the Lord Protector against reaching for the Crown.
Cromwell was on the point of ignoring all of these warnings when a lieutenant colonel presented a petition on behalf of thirty-three brother officers which declared:
That they had hazarded their lives against monarchy, and were still ready to do so, in defence of the liberties of the nation: that having observed in some men great endeavours to bring the nation again under their old servitude, by pressing the General to take upon him the title and government of a King, in order to destroy him, and weaken the hands of those who were faithful to the public; they therefore humbly desired that they would discountenance all such persons and endeavours, and continue steadfast to the old cause.26
After months of agonising, Cromwell finally refused the crown on 8 May 1657. He consoled himself, soon afterwards, with the passing of the Humble Petition and Advice. This legislation, which gave him the right to appoint his successor as Lord Protector, was deeply unpopular with republicans and with many in the military. However, it was approved by the majority of civilian Members of Parliament, who had been unsettled by various recent attempts on Cromwell’s life, which were linked to seditious cells and to Royalists, ‘it being a received principle amongst them’, Parliament noted,
that no order being settled in your lifetime for the succession in the Government, nothing is wanting to bring us into blood and confusion, and them to their desired ends, but the destruction of your person; and in case things should thus remain at your death, we are not able to express what calamities would in all human probability ensue thereupon, which we trust your Highness (as well as we) do hold yourself obliged to provide against, and not to leave a people, whose common peace and interest you are entrusted with, in such a condition as may hazard both . . .27
There was a duty to protect the cause into the next generation and beyond. Otherwise the Stuarts might return, with vengeance their inevitable companion.
When the second term of this Parliament opened in January 1658, the ninety members excluded from the opening session were at last admitted. It was an opportunity for the republican regicides to justify their actions nine years earlier, and to attack Cromwell for not remaining true to their aims at that time.
The former spymaster Thomas Scott was quick to speak: ‘Shall I, that sat in a Parliament that brought a King to the bar, and to the block, not speak my mind freely here?’28 he challenged.
Scott was particularly incensed that the Lord Protector had formed a new House of Lords, given the Rump’s decision – immediately after Charles I’s head was cut off – to dispense with the Upper House. ‘The Lords would not join in the trial of the King,’ he reminded the Commons. ‘We must lay things bare and naked. We were either to lay all that blood of ten years war upon ourselves, or upon some other object. We called the King of England to our bar, and arraigned him. He was for his obstinacy and guilt condemned and executed; and so let all the enemies of God perish. The House of Commons had a good conscience in it.’29
On 3 September 1658, Cromwell died unexpectedly, aged fifty-nine. He had suffered from malaria and urinary infections for some time, and it seems likely that complications to these conditions led to septicaemia. Certainly, incompetent doctors hurried the death along. Equally, Cromwell’s spirit had been broken by the recent death of his favourite daughter, Elizabeth, at the age of twenty-nine. As he neared the end, Cromwell bequeathed the Lord Protectorship to his eldest surviving son, Richard.
Oliver Cromwell’s funeral was based on that of James I, father of the man in whose execution he had played so prominent a role. The cortege processed from Somerset House to Westminster Abbey, for interment in Henry VII’s Chapel. The route was strewn with sand, to muffle the clatter of hooves and wheels on the cobbles, and so set a suitably sombre tone. Rails were put in place to hold back the crowds. Soldiers looked on, their banners bound in a cypress mourning veil. Six horses drew the coffin, set on a bed of state bedecked in black velvet, to the burial place of England’s kings.
John Evelyn was among the onlookers. He noticed that ‘The Pall [was] held up by his new Lords: Oliver lying in effigy in royal robes, and crowned with a crown, sceptre, and mund, like a King: the Pendants and Guidons were carried by the Officers of the Army, the Imperial banners, Achievements etc. by the Heralds in their Coats . . .’ It was a magnificent procession. Cromwell’s generals, lords, courtiers and family were joined by the ambassadors of Holland, France and Portugal, ‘many thousands of people,’ it was recorded, ‘being spectators in the windows, and upon the scaffolds all along the way as it passed’.30
‘But,’ John Evelyn noted in his diary, ‘it was the joyfullest funeral that ever I saw, for there was none that cried, but dogs, which the soldiers hooted away with a barbarous noise; drinking, and taking tobacco in the street as they went.’31
Richard Cromwell, the new Lord Protector, had neither the resolve nor the ruthlessness to make a success of his inheritance. His quiet personal authority won over some of the senior army officers loyal to his father’s legacy, including the regicides Colonel Ingoldsby and Major Generals Goffe and Whalley, each of them related to the Cromwells by blood or marriage. These three were among the new Lord Protector’s closest followers. However, Richard was unable to control the army as a whole: his father had been its brilliant general and had earned its loyalty – successes Richard had neither attempted nor achieved. At the same time, with Oliver dead, the many Parliamentary enemies of the Protectorship felt able to speak freely.
These dangerous stirrings were noted by Colonel Thomas Pride, who was among those to sign Richard Cromwell’s proclamation as the new Protector. Pride, in failing health, felt pessimistic about the future for England, Scotland and Ireland. His last words, from his deathbed in October 1658, were, ‘that he was very sorry for these three nations, whom he saw in a most sad and deplorable condition’.32 Richard stood down in May 1659, after fewer than nine months’ rule. The Rump Parliament, dispersed by Cromwell and his henchman Harrison six years earlier, now reconvened, promising to maintain a Commonwealth with no King, no Lord Protector and no House of Lords. It also formed a Council of State of twenty-one men, seven of whom had signed Charles I’s death warrant: those responsible for the King’s death were still grimly holding on to power. But life in the absence of the charismatic and commanding Oliver Cromwell was difficult for those who had loved or loathed him: his followers found themselves leaderless, while his enemies discovered they really had very little in common, other than a hatred for the deceased.
The army was now divided, with Fleetwood and Lambert each keen to gain control of it and the nation. Yet both generals were now alienated from many of their junior officers and men, who resented their commanders taking advantage of rank and file poverty to enrich themselves: like Harrison, they had profited from their men’s desperation and bought their credit notes for wages owed by Parliament at bargain rates. Vavasor Powell, a Fifth Monarchist from Wales, spoke for many when he claimed of the newly wealthy generals that ‘Their great parks and new houses and gallant wives had choked them up.’33
Tension between the army and Parliament was taken to a higher pitch when, on 12 October 1659, MPs voted to be rid of the seven-man committee and take greater military control for itself. Lambert, with Fleetwood’s connivance, descended on the Palace of Westminster with two regiments, surrounding it, and having its doors locked and guarded. Lambert replaced Parliament’s authority with a twenty-three-man Committee of Safety, with himself and Fleetwood as its military men.
John Bradshaw, the lord president during Charles I’s trial, now stepped forward. He had lost his posts during the mid-1650s as a result of his breach with Oliver Cromwell. Richard Cromwell had called Bradshaw back to high office during his brief rule, but by then Bradshaw was seriously ill – probably with malaria. In October he insisted on being taken from his Whitehall sickbed to Parliament to denounce the military’s intimidation of the Rump. At the end of the month, by now on his deathbed, Bradshaw’s final words were defiant: if a judge had been needed to try Charles I once more, he declared, he would have been ‘the first man to do it’.
Parliament now called for loyal officers to come to its aid. Oliver Cromwell’s commander in Scotland for the previous five years, George Monck – who had served as an admiral in the Anglo-Dutch War, casting his cloak over Deane’s mangled remains – resolved to see through a promise he had earlier made in print: to protect Parliament and to champion political stability, whatever the personal danger to himself. He looked for an alliance with Colonel John Jones and Sir Hardress Waller, two of the regicides commanding forces in Ireland, but they refused to join him, fearing a fatal division in the army if they did. Monck nevertheless felt strong enough to act alone. He had discarded those likely to sympathise with Lambert and Fleetwood from his northern army. More importantly, he had ensured his men were fully paid: a decade earlier, when serving in Ireland as a colonel, 500 out of his 700 men ‘ran away to the enemy, because they ha[d] money there’.34 He would not allow such a situation to arise again. Monck prepared to march south with a unified, disciplined and well-furnished force.
In November 1659, Lambert led an army north to Newcastle, to meet Monck. He was not seeking battle, but rather for Monck and his men to unite with him: together they could block the ambitions of the common enemy, the Royalists. Lambert wrote to the Commissioners of the Army of Scotland: ‘My soul longs for such an accommodation betwixt the armies as may tend to the glory of God, the peace of these Nations, and preservation of that interest which God has owned as his own, and from which I shall (the Lord enabling me) never part.’35
But Monck had no need for, or trust in, Lambert. He delayed negotiations, knowing that Lambert’s forces were poorly supplied, unpaid, and were already beginning to desert. Meanwhile in London, on 24 December, the Committee of Safety fell. Two days later Parliament gave Monck, in Clarendon’s words, ‘the office and power of general of all the forces in the three kingdoms . . . as absolutely as ever they had given it to Cromwell’.36
Although some officers rode north now, to encourage Lambert to bring Monck to battle, it was too late: Lambert’s forces had all but evaporated. He rode south with just fifty men, most of them officers. He was scooped up and committed to the Tower of London.
On 2 January, Monck entered England, crossing the border at Coldstream with a force of 5,000 infantry and 2,000 cavalry. He received support from many quarters, including the retired lord general, Thomas Fairfax. Monck sent men ahead to have London cleared of other forces, so his men, trusted veterans, could be quartered there on their arrival. Parliament made their dependence on Monck clear once more by preparing his lodgings in a grand suite of rooms in Whitehall.
Monck had fought for the King in the Civil War, before being taken prisoner. He had then chosen to serve Parliament, rising to high rank on land and sea. Nobody could tell how he would use his great power now.