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Childhood and Youth

It is conventional to emphasize the obscurity of Oliver Cromwell’s origins, certainly by comparison with the eminence he achieved. True, Cromwell’s family was not just vastly less distinguished than the royalty he eventually supplanted (and, his enemies said, aped), but also less distinguished than those of many of the ‘commoners’ who have led the country in more democratic ages. None the less in Huntingdon, where Oliver was born in 1599, during the last years of Elizabeth I, the Cromwells were the leading family. In 1593 Oliver’s father, Robert, had been the town’s Member of Parliament, as Oliver himself would be – though it was as Member for Cambridge that he rose to national fame. The Cromwells derived their position from the head of the family, Oliver’s eponymous uncle. Sir Oliver was a substantial landowner, who played host to the new King James I at his estate of Hinchingbrooke when James travelled south to receive the crown in 1603, and several times afterwards.

Cromwell’s early biographers, permanently on the lookout for signs of future greatness, seized on the story of a childhood encounter between the young Oliver and the future Charles I, James’s son, on one of these royal visits to Hinchingbrooke. Naturally, the toddler-prince and his slightly older nemesis are meant to have fought at this playdate pregnant with historical significance, and Oliver is meant to have won. If the tale is too good to be true (which is no argument against its being true), then it is still a reminder that, as a guest in his uncle’s house, the young Oliver is likely to have been in the presence of royalty. Despite the gulf in upbringing and expectation that separated Prince Charles and Oliver Cromwell, they did not occupy entirely different worlds. An observer at the time would have thought it unlikely, but not utterly inconceivable, that they might one day come to oppose each other as representatives of a divided nation. Englishmen had a long history of rising beyond their origins, as Cromwell’s own ancestor, his great-great-great-uncle Thomas, demonstrated from a much humbler starting point to become Henry VIII’s right-hand man. Oliver eventually outfaced his king with an insouciance that would have shocked most earlier generations, owing mostly to the transformative power of a parliamentary career and – surely even more importantly – a triumphant military one. But it was no miracle that he found himself in a position where his talents and luck allowed him to do so. And it can’t have harmed Oliver’s self-belief that Charles I was not some distant, godlike figurehead, but a flesh-and-blood contemporary whom he had seen when they were both children.

Only hindsight makes these reflected royal glories portentous. They were far from the main influence on the young Oliver’s formative years. The first of those was, undoubtedly, his religion, and specifically the strain of pure Calvinism known to us, as well as to some contemporaries, as Puritanism, though Cromwell himself, and his fellow believers, tended to describe themselves as ‘godly’. Puritans are hard to define because even at the time, the term covered a variety of different groups and beliefs. During the Civil War it began to be applied more indiscriminately, often simply to mean opponents of the king. For the time being, Puritans were still in the mainstream of the Protestant Church as settled under Elizabeth I. But they believed that the Reformation hadn’t gone far enough in ridding the Church of Catholicism. They adhered to a strict interpretation of the doctrine of ‘double predestination’: that both the saved and the damned were already determined, and that God’s grace could only be sought through faith, not good works. The practical implications of this were – perhaps paradoxically – not a withdrawal from the world, but a project to reshape it along godly lines. In worship, this meant an emphasis on Bible-reading rather than ritual, and sermonizing. Churches should be plain, unadorned with stained glass or images, and the communion table approachable by the congregation, not marked out as the territory of the priest. In Church government, episcopacy – the institution of bishops – was frowned on, though Presbyterians and those Puritans known as Independents, towards whom Cromwell would later lean, had differing views as to the suitable alternative. Most famously, Puritans had a (mainly deserved) reputation as spoilsports and vandals. They looked to a reformation in conduct outside church as well as inside, strictly observing the Sabbath, and attempting to ban games-playing, dancing and drama, certainly on the Lord’s day, and increasingly at all. The destruction of ‘papist’ imagery and church furniture, including ancient crosses and interiors, was another manifestation of this uncompromising zeal, with sporadic surges of iconoclasm occurring throughout Cromwell’s life – though not, as popular legend would have it, usually directed by him.

The lack of records of Oliver’s early life and his family’s beliefs have made it difficult to assess the extent to which this was the kind of religious grounding he received. Oliver himself has been responsible for the impression that he was a latecomer to the godly world. In October 1638, in one of the most famous letters he ever wrote, he told his cousin Elizabeth St John: ‘You know what my manner of life hath been. Oh, I had lived in and loved darkness, and hated the light. I was a chief, the chief of sinners. This is true; I hated godliness, yet God had mercy on me.’1 We do not know what Cromwell’s sin was. Recently, it has been speculated that this confession related to the murky story of a dispute over his maternal uncle’s land, during which Cromwell apparently tried to have a sane man declared a lunatic so that he could be appointed guardian of his estates.² This seems plausible, and nothing in Cromwell’s subsequent career suggests that his honest and genuine commitment to his faith stopped him from doing reprehensible things if they seemed to his advantage – and then regretting them. That may be why his legendary remark on the execution of Charles I – ‘cruel necessity’ – rings so true.³ But the likelihood that Cromwell repented of his conduct and tried to live a more godly life at least by the late 1630s shouldn’t blind us to the indications that he had been brought up in that faith.

Long before he wrote to Elizabeth St John, Cromwell’s education had been on godly lines. In Huntingdon he attended the Free School, under the care of Thomas Beard, a clergyman and doctor of divinity – and author of a book with an almost parodically Cromwellian title, The Theatre of God’s Judgments. Beard’s own Puritan credentials have been questioned, and it is true that as an adult, Cromwell himself opposed his old teacher’s appointment to a lectureship in favour of a more radical alternative candidate. But while Beard may not then have been a hot enough Puritan for the reformed, re-energized Cromwell, whether he was ‘a rather complacent conformist’ is also open to question.4 Beard published a proof that the pope was Antichrist at a time when anti-Catholicism was briefly out of fashion (he did so anonymously, but a conformist would surely not have risked doing so at all). And his Theatre, with its memorable tales of God’s interventions in human affairs ‘against all sinners, great and small, specially against the most eminent persons in the world, whose exorbitant power had broke through the barres of Divine and Humane Law’ (as the subtitle put it), certainly accords with Cromwell’s later outlook as it emerges from his letters and speeches. In his very first recorded speech in the House of Commons in 1629, which if the speaker had not later risen to such great heights would be less than a footnote to the debate, Cromwell referred to Beard, holding him up as a positive example of someone who had risked a bishop’s censure to give a sermon against another preacher’s ‘flat popery’. So while Beard’s personal influence and own radicalism should not be exaggerated, the impression made by the religious education to which he introduced Oliver was surely deep enough. When, after Huntingdon, Cromwell chose a Cambridge college, he made a less than conformist selection: not Queens’, where his father had been an undergraduate, but Sidney Sussex, known as a forcing-house for radical Puritanism. Cromwell may have strayed from the true path, as he admitted in 1638, but the lessons of Thomas Beard had clearly shown him what that path should be. Beard’s former pupil possessed the zeal not of a convert but of a believer from his youth.

Cromwell did not stay at Sidney Sussex long. In 1617, just over a year after he had gone up to Cambridge, his father died. We know nothing of Oliver’s relationship with his father Robert, and though he was Robert’s chief beneficiary, he was not actually named in the will. Oliver was now the head of a household of eight women – his mother and seven unmarried sisters – more or less depending on him. While the Cromwells were well connected, they were not well off. Throughout Cromwell’s life, until he reached the security of high office, there were times when he was hard up. Later, this could be ascribed to risky investments that depended more on religious faith than financial calculation. But his inheritance of a house and land in Huntingdon worth about £100 a year (around £9,500 today) was not much to keep a genteel household going. It was probably more because of his family connections than his prospects that in 1620 he managed to find a wife, Elizabeth Bourchier, who brought him a dowry of £1,500 and, in the course of thirty-eight years of apparently contented marriage, a total of nine children who survived to adulthood.

The 1628–9 parliament at which Cromwell offered his nugatory intervention quoting his old schoolmaster was made famous by a rather more significant battle, the passage of the Petition of Right, which tried to establish the principle that the king could not raise taxes without parliamentary consent. Though Charles I reluctantly acceded to the Petition, he found another way to circumvent it: dissolving Parliament, he did not summon it again in England for more than a decade. Cromwell, though, does not seem to have been involved in these tumultuous events. In the years before Parliament’s return, and Oliver’s return to Parliament, in 1640, the fortunes of a struggling fenland gentleman and a nation in the process of tearing itself apart on the questions of religion, taxation and the government of the three kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland could hardly have played out on more contrasting scales. During his early life, Oliver Cromwell took almost no part in ‘great events’. If his early experiences were affected by national politics, it was probably no more so than for any comparable member of his class and religious outlook.

Historians of the period of Charles’s Personal Rule – the years between 1629 and the reconvening of Parliament in 1640 – have recently begun to cast it in a more positive light.5 For Oliver Cromwell, it was a time of trial, of loss of face and of position, which only began to improve by a stroke of good fortune in 1636. Although Charles I’s increasing problems were partly of his own making, anyone in his position would have struggled in very trying political and religious circumstances; Cromwell, on the other hand, had no one but himself to blame for his local and personal difficulties – in so far, that is, as they can be reconstructed. Oliver’s uncle had so badly mismanaged his great estate of Hinchingbrooke that he had been forced to give it up, selling it to Sidney Montagu, the Earl of Manchester’s brother. Although this connection between the two families may have been the reason that it was under Montagu patronage that Cromwell made his first appearance in Parliament, the alliance did not last: Oliver got into a dispute with the Montagus over town politics in Huntingdon, which he comprehensively lost. The variance reached such a pitch, and the outcome excluded him so comprehensively from the corridors of local power – including the humiliation of being ordered to apologize publicly in Huntingdon by the Privy Council – that in 1631 he decided to sell up as well, and moved to St Ives, about five miles to the east. There, he seems to have slipped down the social scale. He was no longer a property owner, but a tenant farmer. He barely featured in the running of the town, and though his family grew (he also lost a son), his financial fortunes did not.

The Cromwells were well on the way to being extinguished as a force in local, let alone national politics. Perhaps this is why Oliver seems to have tried to have his maternal uncle Thomas Steward declared a lunatic, with a view to acquiring control of his estates. The attempt failed and, if it led to the bout of soul-searching that resulted in Cromwell’s spiritual rebirth, it does not seem to have permanently soured his relations with the childless Steward. In 1636 Steward died, leaving his estate to his nephew. Soon afterwards, Cromwell and his family moved to Ely, taking up residence in a house (which still stands) near St Mary’s Church. Steward’s estate included land and property in Ely and nearby villages, and made the thirty-seven-year-old Cromwell financially secure for the first time since reaching adulthood.

He also returned to a more prominent role in local politics. As he had already shown, Cromwell had something of a flair for controversy. To his disputes in Huntingdon and over Steward’s lands can be added his part in supporting opponents of the fen drainage scheme in his locality, which threatened to enclose common land and pass it into private hands. ‘[A] crowd of women and men, armed with scythes and pitchforks, uttered threatening words against any one that should drive their fens. It was commonly reported by the commoners in Ely Fens, and the fens adjoining, that Mr Cromwell, of Ely, had undertaken, they paying him a groat [4d, worth perhaps £1.50 today] for every cow they had upon the common, to hold the drainers in suit of law for five years, and that in the meantime they should enjoy every foot of their common.’6 It may be tempting to see here the first stirrings of Cromwell the organizer and leader of men, and Royalist propagandists later made sneering references to him as ‘Lord of the Fens’, but, as with so much of his early life (and a significant portion even of his later life), we cannot know what motivated Cromwell, or how he viewed this struggle. None the less, as the drainage scheme had recently come under royal control, Cromwell’s stand, such as it was, added to the growing opposition to Charles I on several more urgent fronts.

The Personal Rule came to an end in April 1640. The king’s failed attempt to impose a prayer book based on the English Book of Common Prayer and strengthened episcopal government on Scottish Presbyterians had eventually led to armed confrontation with representatives of the Scots’ Solemn League and Covenant. The Covenanters, taking an oath only to obey a king who supported a Presbyterian Church, humiliated an English army at Kelso, which took flight without engaging. To resume the so-called Bishops’ Wars, Charles needed money, and only a recalled Westminster Parliament could grant him sufficient funds. Faced with an open armed rebellion in one of his kingdoms, the king thought he had a right to expect his English MPs to provide him with the means to resist it. Many of those MPs, however, had other matters on their minds, were in any case sympathetic to the Covenanters’ cause, and saw Charles’s difficulties as an opportunity to raise their own issues. Years of questionable royal financial demands and objectionable religious innovations had given rise to an even more coherent opposition in England than had first moved Charles to dispense with Parliament. The strongest element of this opposition was to be found among the Puritan gentry. A new addition to their ranks, sitting for the first time as one of two Members for Cambridge, was Oliver Cromwell.