2

At Westminster

In just over two years, between April 1640 and August 1642, the growing parliamentary opposition to the king brought England and Wales to civil war. (Of Charles’s three kingdoms, two – Scotland and Ireland – actually took up arms before 1642.) The new Member for Cambridge in the Short Parliament that sat for less than a month, and who retained his seat in the Long Parliament that was summoned in November 1640 and sat for more than a decade, was emphatically not a major player in this descent to all-out conflict. Our knowledge of where Oliver Cromwell ended up can make it difficult to accept that he was in fact a relatively obscure figure well into the Civil War. Cromwell might never have become a military leader if he had not first been an MP. But it was as a soldier, not a politician, that he made his name, establishing himself in the national consciousness in spite of, not because of, his position in Parliament.

But Cromwell did not spring from complete anonymity. His own family connections included men who were at the centre of the controversies of the day. One of the most keenly contested issues that had arisen during Charles’s Personal Rule was the dispute over ship money, an extra-parliamentary levy raised by his government in order to pay for naval costs, but one now enforced throughout the country, beyond the coastal counties to which it had previously been confined. By 1636, ship money had become a much-resented annual levy, and in 1637 Charles had decided to prosecute one of the most prominent refuseniks: a Buckinghamshire MP called John Hampden, who a decade previously had also refused to pay the king’s forced loan. Hampden was from a gentry family of no great wealth or influence, but he had allied himself to the Puritan opposition in the Commons and its supporters in the Lords, including John Pym (the Hampshire MP who through the 1620s and 1630s emerged as the leading voice of Puritanism in the Commons) and Viscount Saye and Sele (a powerful, godly influence in the Lords). Hampden’s mother was Elizabeth Cromwell, paternal aunt to Oliver, so Hampden and Cromwell were first cousins. Hampden’s legal counsel in the ship money case was Oliver St John, who would shortly marry another Cromwell cousin, the Elizabeth to whom Cromwell wrote of his spiritual rebirth in 1638. As far as our understanding of Cromwell is concerned, the outcome of the case (Hampden lost, but narrowly and technically enough to give encouragement to supporters of his stand) was less important than the circles to which it relates him. Cromwell’s extended godly family were leading figures in the opposition to Charles I.

For Cromwell and his fellow Puritans, as for the Scots Covenanters, opposition to the king centred on matters of religion. This was true of Cromwell from the very beginning of his parliamentary career. It is arguable that, for all the momentous issues that concentrated his mind for the rest of his life, religion remained his principal concern. In this he was not, in the seventeenth century, unique, or even unusual. Cromwell himself, like many of his contemporaries, would have in any case found the distinction between religious and political concerns a false one. For them, religion was not a part of life, but the point of it. Political questions were seen and debated through the prism of Providence, and the chief guide to political conduct was discerning the mind of God. What can seem at this distance in time to be a squabble over the technical niceties of Protestant ritual was given urgency in Cromwell’s time by the genuine fear of Catholicism – ‘popery’. It is with this in mind that we should view the reaction to Charles’s promotion in 1633 of William Laud to the head of the Church of England as Archbishop of Canterbury.

Laud was a churchman so far removed from Puritanism that he had twice been offered a cardinal’s hat (though he had refused). An enthusiastic embracer and enforcer of conformity in the Church, he emphasized the importance of the altar rather than the pulpit; the Prayer Book; and ceremonial in general, in a way that his opponents alleged made him an ‘Arminian’, a follower of the Dutch theologian of that name whose teachings on predestination Puritans saw as little better than ‘popery’. To the godly, such as Cromwell and his new allies, Laud’s position and his conduct in it were a provocation. Like his opponents, Laud saw the political and the religious as intrinsically connected, telling the king that ‘if it [the Church] had more power, the Kinge might have more both obedience and service’.1

In the first days of the spring 1640 Parliament, various godly MPs, including John Pym, raised their objections to Charles’s conduct of government, and made it clear that only after these were resolved would they move to supplying the king with finance for his war. When Charles realized that he was not likely to get any money out of Parliament, he swiftly dissolved it, after only three weeks, on 5 May. This arbitrary decision inflamed opinion beyond Westminster and, significantly, when crowds took to the streets in London after the dissolution, it was on Archbishop Laud that they turned their anger. There were threats to burn down Lambeth Palace, and Laud himself was forced to flee. The first indications in England that opposition to the king had moved well beyond a small group of disaffected ‘hot’ Protestant gentry were beginning to emerge. Here was a new element in English politics. In earlier periods, popular uprising had been sporadic, and had tended to unite establishment resistance to it. From the 1640s, those inside Parliament were forced to bear in mind the tide of popular opinion – especially as it would increasingly be revealed in the circulation of political pamphlets – and often to follow it. Later, this radical popular element would be institutionalized in the New Model Army, which for a decade became a leading player in domestic politics, and as he rose to prominence, Cromwell himself learned how to appeal to or circumvent the popular will. Cromwell’s own interventions during his early parliamentary career were not momentous, though they weren’t negligible. But the experience, not only of sitting in Parliament as great events unfolded, but also of witnessing the tumult generated in the London streets, was a political education that he would not forget. Cromwell’s early parliamentary career is significant not only for what Cromwell did in Parliament, but for what Parliament – and the city it stood in – did to Cromwell.

He only had to wait six months before resuming his apprenticeship. Charles’s attempt to re-engage the Scots Covenanters ended in disaster, when the rebels crossed into England and defeated a Royalist army at Newburn, outside Newcastle, on 29 August 1640, occupying Newcastle itself. By this time, several English peers had begun to co-ordinate with the Covenanters to bring pressure on the king to negotiate. Twelve lords, including future leaders of Parliament’s armies such as the Earls of Essex and Warwick, had petitioned him to recall Parliament. There is evidence, too, of a substantial English Puritan effort to raise money for the Scots.2 When Charles did re-summon Parliament for November 1640, it was not to raise money for war, but to pay for a peace treaty. The terms of the Treaty of Ripon were a humiliation for Charles, but not for many English subjects who had more or less tacitly supported the Covenanters’ cause. Still, the English taxpayer had to finance the Scottish victors: it was agreed that the Covenanters would remain in the six northern counties of England for the time being, and would be paid £850 a day while they did so.

Most accounts of the months during which the Long Parliament’s confrontation with Charles and his allies split the country barely mention Oliver Cromwell. In the great matters that preoccupied the House and the king – the impeachment of Charles’s chief minister, Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, on grounds of treason and tyranny for his actions on behalf of the king in Ireland and against the Scots Covenanters, the debate on the Grand Remonstrance, which set out a catalogue of the king’s errors and abuses from his accession to the present, even the Root and Branch debate, which considered the possibility of abolishing the office of bishops in the Church of England – Cromwell played a minor role at most. He was capable of a neophyte’s confident misreading of the runes, as when he assured the Royalist Lord Falkland that the Remonstrance was so well supported that it didn’t even need to be debated. In fact, the debate lasted for sixteen hours, and – as Falkland reminded Cromwell afterwards – passed by a mere eleven votes. This was clear evidence that, for all the energy of the parliamentary opposition to Charles, it was far from united, not only because confronting their sovereign was still a step too far for some, but also because those who might oppose Charles did not necessarily agree on other fundamentals, such as religious policy. Even after the split between Parliamentarians and Royalists, the strains of keeping a united front were acutely felt on Parliament’s side, where opposition to the king had created unnatural alliances, of Presbyterians and Independents, of social reformers and titled landowners. None the less, his time in Parliament saw Cromwell emerge as a vigorous and active if junior member of a group of like-minded MPs who were driving the parliamentary agenda. Appearing on committees, managing petitions, liaising between the Commons and the Lords, Cromwell placed himself in the midst of what became known as the ‘Junto’, under the (informal) leadership of John Pym in the Commons and the Earl of Bedford in the Lords. As the Parliament proceeded, Cromwell made a small impression as a presenter of petitions on behalf of other Puritans who had fallen foul of Charles’s administration, including the future anti-hierarchical ‘Leveller’, John Lilburne. Lilburne was set free four days later, the beginning of a complicated relationship between two men of unshakeable will who were not always on the same side.

Descriptions of Cromwell at this time were mostly written in hindsight, once he had achieved his fame. One of the best known is that of Edward Hyde, future Royalist Earl of Clarendon and historian of the ‘Rebellion’, who was confronted by Cromwell in a committee that Hyde was chairing. ‘Cromwell (who had never before been heard to speak in the house of commons) ordered the witnesses and petitioners in the manner of proceeding … [He] in great fury reproached the chairman for being partial, and that he discountenanced the witnesses by threatening them: the other [i.e. Hyde] appealed to the committee, which justified him, and declared that he behaved himself as he ought to do; which more inflamed him, who was already too much angry … In the end, his whole carriage was so tempestuous, and his behaviour so insolent, that the chairman found himself obliged to reprehend him.’ For that, Clarendon writes, ‘he never forgave; and took all occasions afterwards to pursue him with the utmost malice and revenge, to his death’.3 At the time, Clarendon was in fact no more experienced as an MP than Cromwell – who had, of course, ‘been heard to speak’ already on numerous occasions – as well as being ten years his junior. The impression of patrician savoir-faire given in Clarendon’s memoirs can be as misleading about his own status as that of his adversary. To set against the partial memoirs of an inveterate enemy, there is John Hampden’s approving comment made at the time of Oliver’s early parliamentary career that Cromwell was ‘one that would sit well at the mark’.⁴ While it isn’t exactly clear what Hampden meant by this – was Cromwell prepared to take matters to the limit? was he focused on his goal? – its positive tone was definitely not influenced by Cromwell’s subsequent rise, as Hampden died in 1643.

Somewhere between these two accounts lies another Royalist’s recollection, that of Sir Philip Warwick, who remembered how, as a young, courtly dandy, he came across the plain-dressed, plain-speaking Cromwell in the House of Commons.

I came into the House well clad and perceived a gentleman speaking (whom I knew not) very ordinary apparelled, for it was a plain cloth-sute, which seemed to have bin made by an ill country taylor; his linen was plain, and not very clean; and I remember a speck or two of blood upon his little band which was not much bigger than his collar, his hatt was without a hatband … his countenance swollen and reddich, his voice sharp and untunable, and his eloquence full of fervour; for the subject matter could not bear much of reason.5

On other occasions in his Memoirs, Warwick recounts stories from third parties of Cromwell’s hypochondria and dissolute ‘gaming’ life before his ‘conversion’, but here is a first-hand (if admittedly retrospective) picture both of his appearance, and, more reliably, the traits for which he would become well known: plainness, irascibility and a refusal to stand on ceremony. The record of Cromwell’s participation in numerous aspects of parliamentary business, from moving readings of bills to telling votes, shows that he was very far from Puritan Junto ‘lobby fodder’, and these intimations of self-possession and an unwillingness to allow form to trump argument fit well with this picture.

After the air of crisis was exacerbated by the outbreak of rebellion in Ireland in October 1641, Cromwell continued to place himself where he could be useful to the godly. The Catholic Irish insurgency was accompanied by stories of atrocities on both sides, and a claim that it was backed by Charles I, a rumour promoted by the Irish leader of the rebellion with an almost certainly forged document. The twinning of anti-popery with anti-royalism, which the king’s marriage to a Catholic and promotion of a form of Protestant worship associated with Catholicism had long made possible, was all but sealed by these developments. Rumours of a ‘popish plot’ took hold, and Charles was led to believe that Parliament intended to arrest his queen, Henrietta Maria, for her (alleged) part in it. It was in reaction to this apparent threat that Charles issued his famous warrant for the arrest on treason charges of the six members in January 1642 – five from the House of Commons, including Pym and Hampden, and one from the Lords, Viscount Mandeville (Edward Montagu, the future Earl of Manchester, with whom, despite their shared politics, Cromwell had clashed more than once, including at Hyde’s committee, and would clash again).

On 4 January 1642, Charles arrived at the House of Commons in person, with as many as 500 troops in tow, to take the five MPs into custody himself, only to find that, forewarned, they had already slipped away. Such was the drama of the occasion that the Commons Journal broke off its account. So it is to the recollections of the Commons clerk-assistant John Rushworth, written in the 1650s, that we owe the king’s famous observation from the Speaker’s chair, ‘I see all the Birds are flown.’6 Charles’s bungled invasion of the Commons was the symbolic moment at which trust between the king and Parliament irrevocably broke down. As the king left the chamber in humiliation, Cromwell would have been among the members who shouted ‘Privilege! Privilege!’ at his back. The next day, the House issued a Vindication of the ‘high Breach of the Rights and Privilege of Parliament’, vocally demonstrating that it was not only the king whose honour could be offended.⁷ But the breakdown was far more than rhetorical, and in the following months Cromwell played his part as Parliament made preparations for war, including a small role in initiating the Militia Ordinance. Beginning life as a Militia Bill, it was renamed an ordinance when the king refused to assent to it: the ordinance was a crucial step on the way to war, giving Parliament authority to raise their own forces and appoint Lords Lieutenant. As well as a practical measure for parliamentary defence, it was the clearest usurpation yet of a role traditionally reserved to the crown, of raising forces for the defence of the realm. The king duly used another mechanism, the (medieval) commission of array, to summon his own forces. On Parliament’s side, the Earl of Essex was appointed as Lord General of the Army. In July 1642 Charles, who had abandoned London when opinion seemed to be running high against him (another tactical blunder, to set alongside the provocation of the Scots and the bungled arrest of the five members, among many), issued requests to Oxford and Cambridge Universities to send their college plate to him in York, to help his finances. Oxford obliged, but Cromwell, as MP for Cambridge, was an obvious candidate to persuade his old university not to follow suit. He set out in August 1642 from London for his constituency, gathering a small armed force on the way.

Cromwell’s march to Cambridge was the first action in what became one of the most extraordinary military careers of any Englishman. Like almost all his comrades, Cromwell took up arms against the king not to remove him, still less to remove kingship itself, but – as so many of those who had opposed their sovereign over centuries of English history had done before – to bring the king back into the way of good government, and to remove those around him who were leading him astray. All this had happened before, and while civil war remained a last resort, it was one that English subjects had reached on numerous occasions. But the scale and extent of this civil war were unprecedented, as were the eventual casualties. It was in part because the cost became so great that the war came to have such profound consequences. But for Oliver, as for the country, it was only much later that more radical, indeed revolutionary, steps were contemplated.