4

General and Regicide

Cromwell was almost the only man, and certainly the most prominent, who remained an MP and a serving officer in this period of the Civil War. That put him in a unique position to influence the next phase of events. It can be tempting to cast the time up to the execution of the king in January 1649 as the latest stage in Oliver’s inexorable rise to pre-eminence. And yet, although he certainly did emerge during these years as one of the most important voices, and the most effective commander in the country, the process looks anything but inexorable. In the confusion generated by the end of the war, which came after Charles’s surrender in May 1646 – what with the criss-crossing arguments of the king, his supporters, Presbyterians and Independents in Parliament, the Scots Covenanters, political radicals and the simply ill-treated in the army, and those inside and outside both Houses who wanted to seek more agreeable terms with Charles – Cromwell was often to be found attempting a balancing act between at least two bodies of opinion. In particular, his loyalty to Parliament and his loyalty to the army became, if not mutually exclusive, at least incompatible. Now that Charles was defeated, Cromwell’s two masters’ differences, in religion and political outlook, emerged more starkly. Partly in consequence, with his growing fame came growing censure from all sides. One of the most persistent accusations against him was one of hypocrisy: his desire to find a solution, willingness to listen to arguments, but ultimate intransigence on matters closest to his conscience all combined to give the impression that he was disingenuous. Charles was accused of much the same: in his case, though, his own private correspondence reveals the allegations to be well founded. The personal motivations in Cromwell’s surviving private correspondence are, however, not as easy to pin down, or expose. Cromwell could always argue that his actions were guided by a concern to follow the promptings of Providence, and the mind of the Lord. Many of his letters from this period reveal an agonized attempt to discern what that was. If the results were mysterious to some, that was the way the Lord moved.

Comparing Cromwell and the king can be misleading, if it tempts us to think of the two as having anything like equal weight for their respective sides at this time. While Charles indisputably still spoke for his party, despite his defeat and capture, Cromwell was only one of many speakers on his side. Indeed, the most noticeable thing about Cromwell in the first part of the process to extricate the king from Scottish control and impose mutually acceptable terms on him is how unnoticeable he was. The MP for Cambridge resumed his place on numerous parliamentary committees and was the teller in numerous votes. But anyone unaware of his record or his future who analysed the months between Charles’s surrender to the Scots in 1646 and the crisis precipitated by the break between the army and Parliament the following year would be unlikely to make him out as the key player. In simple terms, this was because the group of Independents with which he was increasingly associated were not in the majority in either House. In any case, even among the Independents, Cromwell was not yet the leading parliamentary voice. Arguably, he never became so: almost all his really significant political interventions came in spite of, rather than because of, his parliamentary connection. The driving Independent force in the Commons was Sir Henry Vane, known as the Younger to distinguish him from his father, who had played a major role in the fall of the Earl of Strafford, but was now eclipsed by his more uncompromising son. The other leader of the Independents in the Commons was Cromwell’s brother-in-law, Oliver St John, although, like Cromwell, he played a quieter role during this period. On the Presbyterian side – those whose religious views made them more natural allies of the Scots – with the majority of MPs behind him was Denzil Holles, who had long favoured making terms with Charles, and now sought a wholesale demilitarization on all sides: Royalists, Scots and, most troublesomely, the New Model Army.

The only part of Holles’s plan that worked was the removal of the Scots, whom Parliament in effect paid to hand over Charles and go home. In February 1647, after two down-payments totalling £200,000, the king was surrendered to Parliament and kept in captivity at Holmby House in Northamptonshire. Cromwell was a signatory to the agreement with the Scots – but he had not negotiated it. Indeed, in the same month, a Royalist intelligence report informed Edward Hyde that ‘Cromwell is dangerously ill’.

It was given out that he had ‘an imposthume [abscess] in the head’, something that, it has subsequently been suggested, was in fact some form of psychosomatic illness.1 Tales of Cromwell’s possibly hypochondriac tendencies, which nowadays we might prefer to explain as a depressive temperament, stretch back to his younger days: he is assumed to have consulted the eminent doctor Théodore de Mayerne in 1628 for melancholia – depression – though Mayerne’s medical diagnosis may actually have been for a physical ailment, brought on by an excess of black bile (the literal meaning of melan-cholē), following the medical consensus about the importance of the four humours. What is more, we may in this case have the wrong ‘Monsieur Cromwell’, as Mayerne refers to him, who could equally have been his cousin Henry.² Similarly, the ‘imposthume’ was clearly a physical complaint, an abscess, rather than a mental illness, still less an imaginary one.³ Cromwell himself plainly told Fairfax that he had suffered a ‘dangerous sickness … I received in myself the sentence of death, that I might learn to trust in Him that raises from the dead, and have no confidence in the flesh.’⁴ If Cromwell’s illness had a psychological element, it seems to have resided in the fact that recovering from it further reanimated his faith. What didn’t kill him made him stronger.

Cromwell’s correspondence with Fairfax is our best guide to his part in the next looming national crisis, though as always we must allow that it tells his side of the story. Parliament failed to deal with the New Model Army as fairly as they had done with the Scots. (In the event they didn’t deal especially fairly with the Scots – they never paid the full amount promised – but they had, in the first instance, shown more willing.) Soldiers who were owed substantial arrears were expected to disarm and return home on the vaguest promises. The plan debated in the Commons in March 1647 to refashion part of the army as a force to quash the ongoing Irish rebellion was equally half formed, while suggested measures to remove all officers from England, except for the Lord General, Sir Thomas Fairfax, and later to insist that officers for the Irish force renew their commitment to the Covenant were all highly provocative. For, despite its sterling service in winning the war, the army had become doubly distasteful to the Presbyterian majority in Parliament: first, for its undoubted preference for Independent rather than Presbyterian religious government, and secondly because of a growing core of politically radical soldiers, and the emergence of a form of political organization to voice their agenda.

Such men, whom it seems that Cromwell first christened as ‘Levellers’ – those who wished to ‘level’ social distinctions based on wealth and property – included the consistently antagonistic John Lilburne. Having fallen foul of the House of Lords, Lilburne was in prison, where he remained from July 1646 until November the following year. But he was not to be silenced, writing to Cromwell in March 1647 accusing him of obstructing the soldiers’ plans to petition Parliament and becoming steadily convinced that Cromwell meant to betray his old comrades as their aims diverged. But to begin with, the army’s actual position was far less radical than the likes of Lilburne might have wished. The Petition that the army drew up and presented to Parliament at the end of March was a reasoned document issuing from both officers and the ranks requesting such unobjectionable measures as parliamentary indemnity for past actions, reliable prospects of settlement of arrears, regular pay for those who remained under arms, and provision for the disabled, widows and orphans.

In Parliament Denzil Holles led the over-reaction, perhaps fearing the signs of creeping democracy and a Leveller takeover, as evidenced by the new groups of army ‘agitators’ who contributed to the Petition. In truth, most of their radical contributions had been removed by army officers before the Petition was presented. In front of a thin House, Holles gathered enough support to pass what became known as the ‘Declaration of Dislike’. It included a description of petitioning soldiers – those men who had finally delivered the king into Parliament’s hands after four years of fighting and more than a decade of opposition and impasse – as ‘enemies of the state’.

Unsurprisingly to all but Holles, the army did not respond positively to this latest insult. In part, their answer was personal. At a gathering of officers at the Essex town of Saffron Walden on 15 April, it became clear that only with their old commanders would they even contemplate service in Ireland: ‘Fairfax and Cromwell, and we all go!’5 Cromwell wasn’t with the army at this point, but after the officers re-presented essentially the same petition to Parliament as had spawned the Declaration of Dislike, he was despatched at the beginning of May to Essex, along with fellow parliamentary veterans Henry Ireton (now his son-in-law), Charles Fleetwood and Philip Skippon, to negotiate a compromise.

Although Cromwell didn’t appear to realize, it was too late for that. He and his fellow officer-negotiators clearly sympathized with their comrades, but their mistake was to believe that they could bring the Presbyterian majority in the House of Commons to a similar understanding. After three days, the four parliamentary commissioners sent a report to Westminster in which they backed the army’s case, as having ‘good ground’.⁶ Cromwell had put to the officers what he took to be the gradual thawing of Parliament, including their offer of indemnity and a fortnight’s pay. He seems to have believed that the majority in the army could be persuaded to disband, and to ‘maintain a good opinion of that authority that is over both us [the officers] and them [the men]’. Certainly, that is what he reported to Parliament on his return, with only a few provisos.⁷ But MPs ignored the concessions Cromwell had suggested, and proceeded with plans for disbandment, only to find that when they tried to put them into practice, the army had already decamped, with plans to muster in defiance of parliamentary orders near Newmarket.

Cromwell’s part in this was seen by some at the time and by many since as characteristically scheming and Machiavellian, playing off a Parliament in which he had little support against an army which lacked political legitimacy but would follow him anywhere. As has often been pointed out, however, even had he wanted to, there was no need for Cromwell to act as the army’s provocateur, leading them into a dispute with Parliament: the animosity of Holles and co. was provocation enough. As for the army, its officers and men needed no outside encouragement to believe what was true: Parliament wished to be rid of them, and wouldn’t, or couldn’t pay enough to do so. There was more to their dispute than money, as the ‘agitators’ in the army had begun to make clear: political reform and religious freedom were also on their agenda. But it seems likely that, as with the Scots, many less radically inclined officers and men would have been willing to stand down if they had been offered a proper incentive to do so. In words and deed, Parliament appeared to some to be treating its army with contempt.

For an understanding of Cromwell, this episode has two salient points. The first is that Cromwell himself did not play the key role. He had been sick, dismayed by the breakdown in relations between Parliament and the army, and while hardly inactive had not been the most conspicuous presence in negotiations after the end of hostilities. To the army, Fairfax, who had stayed with them despite his reservations (apart from a brief period when he suffered his own bout of illness), was a more significant figure at the time, while even among the parliamentary commissioners at Saffron Walden, Skippon was given equal weight with Cromwell. The second point is that Cromwell’s own actions and words give no indication of duplicity. He may have been guilty of naïvely trusting that he could negotiate a solution – in other words of wishful thinking – a defect from which, for all the great power that eventually attached to him, he continued to suffer. But, as some modern commentators have observed, the split between Parliament and the army shows Cromwell in a familiar, and flawed, role of would-be coalition builder.8 The trouble with coalitions, especially when they don’t work, is that they satisfy nobody. Cromwell, accordingly, came under attack from all sides: Presbyterians, Royalists and army Levellers.

The fact that Cromwell chose this time to push for his own financial settlement, receiving almost £2,000 from Parliament for his arrears, was fuel for his critics. John Lilburne, still imprisoned in the Tower on parliamentary orders, seized on it: ‘Accursed be the day that ever the House of Commons bribed you with a vote of 2,500l to betray and destroy us.’⁹ But Lilburne saw conspiracies everywhere, which was understandable in a man who had suffered as much persecution as he had: before the Civil War he had been whipped, pilloried and imprisoned; during it he had clashed with superior officers, which had led to his current incarceration. Cromwell’s payment was not conditional on his support for disbandment, and he is likely to have agreed with his fellow commissioner Skippon’s verdict, in a letter to the Speaker of the Commons, that ‘the disobliging of so faithful an army will be repented of’.¹⁰

For months, between his recovery in March and the final break between Parliament and army in late May 1647, Cromwell had been trying to bring the two sides together (while their vanquished enemy, the king, used his opponents’ internal squabbles to play for time in his own negotiations). But now the moment was coming when he would have to choose between the two. The Cromwells had moved into a house in Drury Lane in London, and it was there that, on 31 May, he was visited by a junior New Model Army officer, Cornet George Joyce. What Cromwell and Joyce discussed is not known, but two days later Joyce arrived at Holmby House at the head of a troop of 500 horse, and removed the king from his parliamentary guard under Major-General Browne, whose garrison was loyal to the Presbyterian majority in Parliament, before setting off with him to Newmarket.

It seems unlikely, to say the least, that this momentous plan had not been mentioned at the meeting between Joyce and his far superior officer. Whether Joyce revealed his whole scheme, whether he told Cromwell that he planned merely to substitute his troops, loyal to the New Model Army, for Parliament’s, and what Cromwell made of the plan, have all been the subject of speculation ever since. Those who could not believe that an officer as junior as Joyce would not be under orders have argued that Cromwell must have put him up to it. Indeed, perhaps the first to do so was Charles I: ‘he [Joyce] could not venture to attempt such a thing as to bring me away, for it was Treason, but that he had the countenance of greater Persons’, as the king told Fairfax, Cromwell and others at their first meeting. But Joyce reminded him then that he had explicitly not claimed the generals’ authority for his action, and the king conceded ‘That it was true indeed, he did say so.’11 If all this was put on for show, it was convincingly played. And men with even less authority in the army had begun in that spring of 1647 to voice their own opinions and formulate their own plans. Joyce did not necessarily need Cromwell to tell him what to do.

Whether the architect of the scheme or, more likely, a partially informed and interested party, Cromwell realized quickly that he could not keep up his balancing act any longer. Faced with threats of impeachment by a Parliament where the majority believed he had gone behind their backs and greatly exceeded his authority, and now with no prospect of effecting a negotiated solution between his two masters, he chose the army. The choice was not entirely motivated by the wish to avoid imprisonment. In the army, Cromwell had surrounded himself with like-minded individuals and seen what godly men, the ‘well affected’, could accomplish in war. He had hoped to secure liberty for these men’s ‘tender consciences’ in the peace that followed, but had been unable even to secure their back pay. When he failed to do so, the army had taken the most important bargaining chip of all into their own hands: the king. The choice to join them, and their Lord General Fairfax – who had himself been completely wrong-footed by the abduction of Charles – was not difficult. In his memoirs, the Royalist officer John Berkeley, who was later sent to negotiate with Cromwell and Ireton, characterized the Levellers’ view of Cromwell as the eternal trimmer, ready always to speak untruth for power, but the point Berkeley made that ‘when he quitted the Parliament, his chief dependence was on the army, which he endeavoured by all means to keep in unity’ is difficult to argue against.12

If Cromwell had had an elaborate plan to use Charles and the army to make himself more powerful, the events of the next few months showed that neither party was biddable. With Charles in their hands, the army now took the business of negotiating a settlement with him on themselves. The position they set out was designed to answer their own requirements as well as impose a lasting solution to Charles’s position. Parliament was not excluded from the envisaged outcome, though Independent MPs, rather than Presbyterians, now came to the fore in negotiating it. But these new arrangements proved to be no more successful at answering the various problems thrown up by the Civil War than previous ones. Charles continued to resist agreement after the army drew up new negotiation terms, known as the Heads of the Proposals, in July 1647. Cromwell’s son-in-law Henry Ireton is traditionally credited with formulating these terms – perhaps the most generous ever offered to the king – though recently it has also been argued that Independents in Parliament, as well as the Council of Officers, had an input.¹³ The Heads set out the army’s vision for a post-war England and Wales. Parliament was to be biennial and would control the army and navy, while the king would retain executive power along with a Council of State elected by Parliament. There was to be no established Church, but no imposition of Presbyterianism: Cromwell’s liberty of conscience was on the menu. There would be indemnity for Parliamentarians, but earlier plans to punish long lists of Royalists were now much reduced.

From a mixture of stubbornness, lack of trust that what was offered could be delivered, and covert plans to return to war, Charles could not be persuaded to agree. Many of the army’s problems remained internal, though it would intervene effectively to exclude the Presbyterian element from Parliament and turn back an armed attempt by the City governors to seize power and impose their own settlement. There was increasing noise from those who wished for a more radical constitutional solution than had been put forward in the Heads of the Proposals. The document in which this was enshrined, An Agreement of the People, was published in October, after negotiations with the king had been going on for three months without progress. The Agreement proposed to wipe the constitutional slate clean, reforming Parliament, gesturing towards manhood suffrage, allowing freedom of religion, and not even mentioning the office of king or House of Lords. Cromwell had negotiated face to face with Charles in the summer in his combined role as MP and army grandee, and then with the disaffected in the army in the autumn. It is difficult to say which he found harder. Certainly, neither negotiation yielded anything concrete, although at Putney, where Fairfax quartered the army to keep watch on the City, some principles emerged that would last much longer than Charles’s reliance on his own indispensability.

Cromwell’s role in what have come to be known as the Putney debates, during which the radical proposals of the Agreement of the People were scrutinized by senior officers and men, was his by now familiar one of compromiser: trying to hold the centre ground in the face of more extreme proposals. Putney is still remembered today as the place where the idea of ‘one man one vote’ was first aired, not least because the case for it was expressed in such memorable terms by Colonel Thomas Rainsborough, addressing Henry Ireton, in one of those moments when a voice seems to emerge from history and speak directly to us: ‘really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he; and therefore truly, sir, I think it’s clear, that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under …’14 Ever since, in opposing Rainsborough’s proposal for universal male suffrage, Cromwell and Ireton seem to have been on the wrong side of an argument that resonates far beyond the squabbling over forms of worship or government, or even about the fate of Charles I. But in truth, Rainsborough’s remarks, made at a prayer meeting before a session of the debate rather than at the debate itself, do not seem to have become the lasting focus of many at the time – even of those Levellers who might have been expected to have been sympathetic to them.

For both sides, there were other priorities. For Cromwell, Ireton and the army leadership, maintaining army unity in the face of a hostile body of Presbyterian opinion and the machinations of the king was paramount. On the army’s side, those agitators who pressed for radical reform seemed far more interested in the settlement of the soldiers’ own position, the protection of liberty of conscience, reform of Parliament and the law, than with a wholesale, principled extension of the franchise.

The real sticking point for the army at Putney and beyond turned out to be what to do with the king, how far to go in removing him from power and punishing him for having led the country into civil war. Levellers who did discuss the vote were often happy to accept continued restrictions on it, not only confining it to men (even Rainsborough had not countenanced votes for women) but to those who were not servants or receiving alms, not exactly the ‘poorest he’. To today’s way of thinking, the vote is such a fundamental political right that it can be difficult to accept that, in the seventeenth century, those who advocated manhood suffrage were a small minority; and that those who disputed it, like Cromwell, were not reactionary betrayers of a popular revolutionary ideal, but adherents to the mainstream. Nevertheless, when Cromwell and his fellow generals acted to put down a mutiny at Ware in Hertfordshire in November, they presented themselves as preservers of army unity rather than the constitutional status quo. They did so successfully. Only one of the three army rendezvous that took place at that time showed mutinous tendencies, and the harsh discipline meted out – including the execution of one soldier – swiftly halted the spread of army dissent.

During their discussions about the fate of the king, Cromwell was at pains to warn the company at Putney not to mistake their desire for retribution for the clear word of God on the matter. Like many present, Cromwell conceded that ‘we all apprehend danger from the power of the King and from the Lords’. But he resisted the logic that said that Charles must therefore be removed. As he put it, he wasn’t sure that in working to preserve the king on his throne, under whatever conditions, ‘it is Babylon that we are going about to heal’.15 To a modern observer, such conscientious wrestlings might look like window-dressing. But some godly men still viewed the office of king, if not the king himself, as divinely ordained. Attacking it was a matter not just of politics, but of conscience. On 11 November, however, Charles himself changed the terms of the debate, when he escaped from his captors at Hampton Court and made for the Isle of Wight.

Charles’s escape played so neatly into Cromwell’s hands that it has often been suggested (without any more than circumstantial evidence) that he was complicit in it. Charles had apparently hoped to find an ally in the Governor of the Isle of Wight, the disaffected parliamentary officer Robert Hammond. But Hammond, who also happened to be Cromwell’s second cousin, was not to be turned, and instead incarcerated the king in Carisbrooke Castle. There, on 26 December 1647, Charles still managed to complete a secret agreement, the Engagement, with a faction of Scots, subsequently known as the Engagers, who agreed to invade England on his behalf in return for the imposition of Presbyterianism in England. In February the following year, a rebellion began in south-west Wales against the New Model Army and the Engagement became public knowledge. Such a dramatic demonstration of the king’s untrustworthiness may have provided Cromwell with the sign he sought. Even if we can’t be sure that these events made up Cromwell’s mind to support the idea of trying Charles for his crimes, they did for others in the army. In April 1648, at a prayer meeting in Windsor Castle that Cromwell probably did not attend, officers agreed that, if they won the war that was now about to start, they would ‘call Charles Stuart, that man of blood, to account’.16

Before that could happen, and whatever form the calling to account would take, Parliament needed to win a war. Although still under the command of Fairfax, who had inherited his father’s barony in March, Cromwell was nevertheless emerging as the New Model Army’s undisputed champion, even if he encountered some obstacles. Charles’s decision to reopen hostilities through the Engagers, despite still being in captivity, encouraged Royalist uprisings in the south-east and Wales as well as the north, in anticipation of a Scottish invasion. Cromwell, taking the fight westwards towards Wales, had initial successes at Chepstow and Tenby, but was then held up by a six-week-long siege of Pembroke Castle. After Pembroke’s surrender Cromwell returned to England and, while Fairfax carried on a bitter, drawn-out siege of Colchester, he marched to Preston to confront a Scottish army led by the Duke of Hamilton. Hamilton had joined with an English Royalist force under Sir Marmaduke Langdale, while Cromwell combined his force with that of John Lambert. This was Cromwell’s first battle as sole commander. The result was a vindication of the professionalism of the New Model Army, which triumphed spectacularly against a disunited and poorly led enemy, and of its decisive leader in the field. The battle was hard fought over three days, with Langdale’s troops in particular putting up stiff resistance. Hamilton’s infantry retreated but was pursued beyond Wigan, and he surrendered at Stafford. About 10,000 prisoners were taken, and perhaps 2,500 men were killed. On Parliament’s side, losses were as little as 100.

In his letter to Parliament after the Battle of Preston, Cromwell estimated that their forces had been outnumbered by 21,000 to 8,600. Other estimates put the Scottish combined force at nearer 15,000 and Parliament’s at 14,000. The numbers are significant in part because of the rhetorical use to which Cromwell put them. In the victory of (on his view) a vastly outnumbered force, Cromwell saw – predictably enough – ‘nothing but the hand of God’ and, in his letter to the Speaker of the House, made the ominous statement that ‘they that are implacable and will not leave troubling the Land may speedily be destroyed out of the Land’.17 The implications for Charles seem clear, but it is possible that Cromwell had actually not yet made up his mind, either about the king’s person or a future government for the country, and may merely have been referring to the Scots invaders. In the circumstances, it may have suited him that there was still military work to be done: work that took him first to Scotland, in pursuit of the remainder of the Engagers’ army, and to Edinburgh, where he concluded an agreement with the Marquess of Argyll, leader of Scottish Presbyterians who had successfully opposed the Engagers, before returning to a mopping-up operation in the north of England. At Pontefract, where Thomas Rainsborough had been killed while conducting the siege, Cromwell took command.

Cromwell stayed long at Pontefract, presiding over a siege that others could perfectly well have overseen – and did, after Cromwell left. If he knew what was about to unfold in the capital, he seems to have wanted to avoid it. In the south, after Colchester had fallen, the political situation had briefly returned to its previous pattern, in which Parliament – despite an earlier resolution not to do so – continued fruitless negotiations with the king, still imprisoned at Carisbrooke; while the army again demanded better treatment. Another formal demand, the Remonstrance of the Army – drafted by Henry Ireton after talks between Independents and Levellers at a pub near the Guildhall – was presented to the Commons on 18 November. It included unequivocal plans to try the king for his life, pressing for ‘capital punishment upon the principal author and some prime instruments of our late wars’. The response of the Commons was first to ignore the Remonstrance while they considered what the king had offered – which was actually rather more than had been required of him by the Heads of the Proposals – and then to reject the Remonstrance on 1 December.

As far as the army was concerned, the Presbyterian element in Parliament’s persistence with attempted negotiations with the king, despite his demonstrations of untrustworthiness and their earlier assurances that they would not negotiate, was proof that they no longer represented the will of the people. Five days later, several New Model Army regiments surrounded Parliament, and Colonel Thomas Pride, who had fought with Cromwell at Preston, stood on the steps with a list of members to be arrested. Forty-five MPs were taken into custody, and a total of around 200 were kept out, or stayed out of the House, including those who had voted against the Remonstrance. Those that remained, who came to be known as the Rump, could be relied upon to give the army what it wanted.

Cromwell, ordered south by Fairfax over a week before, arrived in London hours after Pride’s Purge had taken place. He claimed not to have known it was going to happen – which may have been true of the detail, if not the general outline, of the army’s plans. But he did not try to distance himself any further from it: ‘since it was done, he was glad of it, and would endeavour to maintain it’.18 He knew what the implications were. That November, in two letters to his cousin Robert Hammond, then the king’s gaoler, he had wrestled with the propriety of putting the king on trial, and overriding the will of Parliament to do so if necessary. Although Cromwell had run out of patience with Charles – ‘this man, against whom the Lord hath witnessed’ – he stopped short, unlike his son-in-law Henry Ireton, of the conclusion that this must mean the king’s trial and death.¹⁹

He continued to look for a different solution to the problem, including offering the king a chance to stay on the throne as little more than a figurehead, or to abdicate, both of which Charles rejected. Cromwell may have expected Charles to do so, but this does not mean that the offer was purely cosmetic: plenty of his comrades had no such qualms. After the Restoration, Cromwell was consistently portrayed as having been bent on the king’s destruction. The truth seems on the contrary to have been that he felt compelled to accept that it was the right thing, the godly thing, to do, but he carried on trying not to do it long after many of his allies had made up their minds. Though often seen as the embodiment of religiously inspired certitude, Cromwell actually seems to have been a champion ditherer. One explanation of the long delay in Pontefract is that Cromwell was characteristically staying out of a fraught political situation until the difficult decisions had been taken by others. He certainly had a knack of absenting himself at crucial moments, and his enemies may have been right to see his hand behind such episodes as Joyce’s arrest of Charles I, the king’s escape to the Isle of Wight (under the governorship of his cousin) or Pride’s Purge, with all of which he can be associated. But through innocence or cunning, he left no fingerprints.

The distance between what Oliver Cromwell wrote and did is not so great that we can clearly catch him in a lie. So our understanding of his motivations has to fall back on our instincts about his sincerity. Plenty of contemporaries, from Royalists to Levellers, doubted it. But it seems most likely that Cromwell’s absences stemmed from hesitancy rather than subterfuge. First, staying away didn’t exonerate him in his opponents’ eyes in any case, as he must have realized. It was his own conscience with which he was wrestling, not others’ opinions. Secondly, he had shown before, on the battlefield and off it, a willingness to thrust himself into danger, to risk his reputation as well as his life. Episodes of low cunning are harder to identify. In the years to come, of regicide, Commonwealth and Protectorate, he would risk unpopularity or losing support if he believed that he was acting as God wanted him to. It was when he wasn’t sure what Providence had planned for him that Oliver’s disappearing act was also reprised.

At the climactic drama of the age, ‘this last tragical expedition’ as Clarendon, the Royalist historian who became Charles II’s Lord Chancellor, called it – the trial of Charles I – Cromwell was very definitely present. Clarendon tells the story that Lady Fairfax, whose husband stayed away from the trial, made several interruptions from the gallery, and questioned the court’s standing as unrepresentative of the will of the people. Another account says that she declared: ‘Oliver Cromwell is a rogue and a traitor.’20 Justice John Bradshaw, a judge of impeccably radical credentials, had been appointed Lord President of the court to try Charles. But now that the army, through a Commons it controlled, was directing events, and its commanding officer, Lord Fairfax, had absented himself at the crucial moment, Cromwell was widely understood to be the driving force behind the new politics. He attended all four days of the trial as one of the commissioners of the court, and according to one regicide who later tried to exonerate himself, Cromwell gave anyone who objected short shrift, snapping that ‘it is not fit that the Court should be hindered from their duty by one peevish man’.²¹

When the sentence was passed, Cromwell’s was the third of the fifty-nine signatures on the death warrant, after Bradshaw and Thomas Grey (Lord Grey of Groby, who had stood by Colonel Pride, pointing out those to be arrested during the purge). Many stories were told afterwards about Cromwell and the death warrant, which many even in the purged Parliament were reluctant to sign. One has Cromwell and the republican MP Henry Marten flicking ink at each other over the parchment like naughty schoolboys, as if they thought this gravest of historical moments was a lark. Another has one of the signatories, Richard Ingoldsby, physically restrained by Cromwell, his hand forced to write his name. Though Ingoldsby was the only regicide who secured a pardon after the Restoration, neither tale sounds particularly credible, and the evidence of the warrant itself, in the Parliamentary Archives, shows that if Ingoldsby’s signature was forced, then between them he and Cromwell still managed some extremely elegant and confident flourishes.22 Cromwell does not seem to have attended the execution itself. The legend of his cloaked figure being spied over the body the night afterwards, murmuring ‘Cruel necessity’, is one more colourful addition impossible to verify. But Cromwell had certainly come to believe that there was no choice in the matter.

With the beheading of Charles on 30 January 1649, England made its great constitutional leap in the dark. Kings had been deposed and killed before, as Bradshaw, passing sentence on Charles, reminded him. But that had always been to put another on the throne. Those who had executed Charles I had put an end not just to a king, but to kingship itself, formalized by a vote in Parliament for its abolition in the first week of February. (The acts for ‘abolishing the kingly office’, and the House of Lords, were not actually passed until late March.) But who had executed Charles? That is, beyond the names on the death warrant, who supported the new direction? The question that the king himself (and Lady Fairfax) had raised about the authority of the court applied to the whole government of the nation. If ever Parliament could have been said to represent the general will, it did not do so now. Even its Rump, as the remainder of the Long Parliament came to be known, was not entirely convinced of the new dispensation, and an election along any lines would surely have returned a majority which opposed the execution of the king. The fact was that an extreme wing of the army, of which Cromwell was now the leading representative, had taken control. Cromwell had been one of the most popular parliamentary leaders, but his identification with a narrow strand of army republicans shrank that popularity, in spite of the victories to come. Attempts to broaden the basis of their government exercised Cromwell for most of the rest of his life, when he was not on campaign – and sometimes even then.

Despite his growing power, Cromwell was still not the sole director of policy in what became known as the Commonwealth. He was an MP in the Rump Parliament, which expanded periodically from its low point after Pride’s Purge, but which still averaged around only fifty members at any vote at which they were counted throughout its four-year existence.23 The new executive body, on which Cromwell sat, was the Council of State, but he was one of only two officers to be appointed, so that the Rump managed to replicate the old division between Parliament and the army without actually being independent of the latter. The constitution under which they would govern was not settled for five months. A revised Agreement of the People, with Leveller input, had been submitted before the king’s trial, but its approval became bogged down amid accusations of treachery by Lilburne and his fellow Levellers. Lilburne claimed to have eavesdropped on Cromwell banging his fist on the table in the Council of State and shouting that ‘you have no other way to deal with these men but to break them or they will break you; yea and bring all the guilt of blood and treasure shed and spent in this kingdom upon your heads and shoulders’. The Levellers and their supporters were, Cromwell raged, ‘a despicable, contemptible generation of men’.24

The split between Cromwell and the Levellers – with many of whom, like Lilburne, he had served in arms – was sealed at Burford in Oxfordshire, where he confronted a Leveller army mutiny that broke out in May 1649. Both Fairfax, still Lord General of the Army, and Cromwell approached the threat presented by the Levellers to army unity in much the same way as they had the previous defiance at Ware in 1647. They tried to reassure those who could be drawn back with promises of support, but made examples of the ringleaders. At Burford, after Cromwell arrested and imprisoned 340 mutineers in the church, there were five courts martial. Three soldiers were executed by firing squad outside the church. Although Lilburne and other Leveller pamphleteers would continue to voice their disdain for ‘England’s new chains’ whenever they found the opportunity, the radical political possibilities of the Commonwealth were being closed off in an attempt to find a governing solution that could take more of the country – or at least more of the establishment – with it. Cromwell’s own sentiments are perhaps not best dismissed in Lilburne’s version of his former comrade’s words, in that he continued to believe in much of what the Levellers had espoused, especially in terms of freedom of religion. In terms of his political reputation, however, Burford was the place where Oliver Cromwell lost the Left, those eventual inheritors of what came to be enshrined as the ‘Good Old Cause’, the socialist and labour movements. An annual Levellers Day at the village, otherwise the epitome of Cotswolds prosperity, still commemorates the soldiers’ defiance of Cromwell’s ‘dictatorship’.25

If there was a dictatorship in England in 1649, it was not Cromwell’s alone. He was still second in command of the army, even if Fairfax’s influence (as a marginalized Presbyterian) and appetite (having avoided the trial of the king) were clearly waning. And he was still beholden to a Parliament which had yet to settle on its own principles of government. On 19 May 1649, two days after the executions in the churchyard at Burford, the Rump eventually passed its act declaring England to be a Commonwealth, ‘governed by the Representatives of the People in Parliament, and by such as they shall appoint and constitute as Officers and Ministers under them for the good of the People, and that without any King or House of Lords’. It was a piece of legislation that left almost everything to the imagination about how such a revolutionary experiment was to be conducted, and in particular – since the Leveller proposal for annual parliaments and a broadened franchise had been so comprehensively rejected – how the ‘representatives of the people’ were to be selected.

The spark for the mutiny in the army had not been the work of the Levellers alone, but was again the soldiers’ reaction to the prospect of being sent against their will to Ireland – which the Levellers co-opted for their case. With haunting foresight, in view of the reputation that Cromwell’s eventual Irish campaign gained, a Leveller pamphlet, The English Soldier’s Standard, warned of taking the fight to Ireland, ‘It will be no satisfaction to God’s justice to plead that you murdered men in obedience to your general.’ It was not just that the army’s men were tired of fighting: some saw an Irish campaign as morally flawed from the beginning, especially while ‘those rights and liberties of the people, for which you took up arms in judgment and conscience’, had not yet been secured.26 The proposed leader of the Parliamentarian force to go to Ireland was, unsurprisingly, Oliver Cromwell. Though the expedition had been mooted at the beginning of the year, Cromwell held out until he could be sure that it would be properly financed and his own authority would be unquestioned, before accepting his appointment as Lord Lieutenant.

His task was to put an end to the Catholic rebellion that had been continuing in one way or another since before the outbreak of the other kingdoms’ civil wars. This uprising now showed signs of taking on a new lease of life from Royalist input following the proclamation of Charles’s son as Charles II in February 1649, and the likelihood that any attempt to re-establish the monarchy would be launched from Ireland or Scotland. Scotland initially looked less favourable, as the Scots continued to insist that the new king agree to impose the Presbyterian Covenant, which Charles resisted at first. In Ireland, there were fewer obstacles for a Royalist revival. The Stuarts’ viceroy in Ireland, the Marquess of Ormond, had managed to negotiate a treaty with the Catholic Confederate rebels, who represented about two-thirds of Irish Catholics, weeks before Charles I’s execution (a substantial force of Irish Catholics, under Owen Roe O’Neill, opposed the Confederation and remained outside the alliance). Cromwell himself had been a passionate advocate of the suppression of the rebellion since its outbreak in 1641, and had made several investments, as an Irish ‘adventurer’, in a parliamentary scheme to finance the Irish war in return for parcels of conquered rebel lands, which had, of course, not yet been ‘recovered’. But his financial investment, on such risky terms, is perhaps better understood as a statement of faith: of a conviction that God would be revenged on Catholic rebels whose slaughter of English Protestants had been widely broadcast. Though Cromwell established the terms of his appointment with the dispassion of a professional soldier, he arrived in Ireland as an instrument of divine judgement.

Cromwell’s Irish campaign became the most notorious blot on his reputation. As a strategic intervention his expedition, from his arrival on 15 August 1649 to his departure on 26 May the following year, was decisive, even if the rebellion did not formally end until April 1653, long after he had left. He was helped by the fact that, by the time he arrived in Ireland, his chief opponent Ormond had already been defeated at the Battle of Rathmines outside Dublin. Cromwell marched his 12,000 troops up the east coast northwards to Drogheda, and when the English Royalist commander, the one-legged Catholic Sir Arthur Aston, refused his summons to surrender, he bombarded the city before assaulting it. There was a fierce fight, before the great advantage in numbers on Cromwell’s side told. It was after this that Cromwell gave his order not to ‘spare any that were in arms in the town’. Aston was apparently battered to death with his own wooden leg. Cromwell returned briefly to Dublin before setting out south to Wexford, where another 2,000 defenders, priests and some other non-combatants were killed, many in cold blood. As disease began to ravage Cromwell’s army, he went on to Waterford, which managed to hold out against his siege, and then attacked Clonmel, which only surrendered after its defenders had slipped away. Clonmel was the last Irish action in which Cromwell engaged. He left in May 1650, never to return.

Only those who have a wholly negative view of Cromwell and see that opinion vindicated in Ireland approach the nine months he spent there with any relish. But we do not have to have elevated him into a Carlylean Hero to recoil. We can do our best, as we must, to put his actions there in context, to say that terrible things had already happened in Ireland and Cromwell merely elaborated on a theme, to point out that by the contemporary ‘laws of war’ he did little that was unconscionable. The war in England and Wales had sometimes become pitiless, for example when Fairfax refused to allow the evacuation of women and children during the siege of Colchester in 1648. We can also admit that Cromwell’s visceral hatred of the Catholic Irish was Puritan orthodoxy (Pym had wanted Catholics to wear distinguishing clothing, for example, while 150 Irish prisoners had been tied back to back and thrown to their deaths in the sea off Pembroke in 1644 on the orders of a parliamentary vice-admiral). We can make comparisons with the awful massacres of the Thirty Years War, only just ended on the continent, to show that Cromwell’s Irish campaign was not unusually bloody by the standards of the time. Contemporaries did so too, comparing the events at Drogheda and Wexford to the slaughter at the siege of Magdeburg in 1631, in which as many as 20,000 died.27

But the difficulty with all this is that Cromwell himself has in other cases left us so many insights into the way his fanatical zeal could be tempered by a genuine humanity that when we see it given full rein, as it was in Ireland, it makes the task of historical empathy much harder. Cromwell felt keenly the horror of war, the evil of those who ‘have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood’, as he described the Irish he faced at Drogheda, referring to the massacres widely reported in 1641. But there he took that widely shared opinion as a licence to interpret the conventions of siege warfare in the most uncompromising way, and had no sense that at Drogheda it was he who was imbruing his hands. Subsequently at Wexford, there was an even less justifiable slaughter as terms of surrender were being negotiated, though in that case it is likely that Cromwell’s troops were out of control.

If there was a strategic justification in killing all those who refused a ‘summons’ of a town to surrender – pour encourager les autres – it was not one that had been applied so harshly in England. And Cromwell’s characteristically messianic letters to Parliament and the Council of State after Drogheda, in which he encourages them to ‘give the glory of this to God alone, to whom indeed the praise of this mercy belongs’, show that, for all his concession that ‘such actions … cannot but work remorse and regret’, he suffered little genuine self-doubt on this occasion. It is hard to read the sentences ‘I believe we put to the sword the whole number of the defendants’, shortly followed by ‘And I truly believe that this bitterness will save much effusion of blood’, without concluding that their author was a stranger to irony.28 Taking Cromwell on his own terms, moreover, does little to absolve him: as many as half of his 3,000-odd victims at Drogheda were not Catholics, and none had been among the Irish Confederate rebels responsible for the massacres of 1641, so they were hardly complicit. In fact, many were English, including their commander: the Irish folk memory of Cromwell as an English scourge passes over the fact that even in Ireland, many of his victims were his own countrymen.

By the time Cromwell left Ireland in May 1650, the campaign had cost almost all the men he had set out with, though he had received reinforcements and vast amounts of money. It was only really after Cromwell’s death that the blight on his reputation can be added to the bill. And it should be added that the use Parliament went on to make of his conquest after 1652, turning it into a form of ethnic cleansing under which all Catholic landowners were forced to move to Connacht, leaving more than half Ireland’s land mass to Protestant English ‘adventurers’, was not his responsibility, or not his alone. At the time, Parliament’s Lord Lieutenant appeared to have succeeded where so many others had failed. If some in England had hoped that Ireland would swallow up Cromwell’s ambitions in military disaster, as it had for so many before him, they would be disappointed. Those English radical voices that had been raised against the morality of the Irish campaign might have seen their fears confirmed, but, more broadly, Cromwell’s contemporary standing was only boosted by his Irish campaign. One consequence of that success was that Cromwell was the only realistic candidate to lead Parliament’s military response to the next Royalist threat. In June 1650, Charles II concluded a treaty with the Scots, and shortly afterwards he arrived in the country to prepare an invasion. Returning home from Ireland to a triumphant welcome, Cromwell almost immediately put in a request to Parliament to lead an army to Scotland.

He was to do so as that army’s Lord General. Fairfax was first asked to resume command, but he declined to take the field against his fellow Presbyterians. The Scottish campaign thus marked the occasion when Cromwell accepted his promotion – with a reluctance that seemed genuine to observers at the time, but was in hindsight widely seen as ‘acted’ – to supreme command of the army, a role which many believed he had already been occupying for some months.29 It was as ‘General of the Forces of the Parliament of the Commonwealth of England’ that he led a force in July of around 16,000 men into Scotland against David Leslie’s Covenanters, who numbered as many as 20,000.

Though the threat of a Royalist alliance had been used to bring about the invasion, the army that Cromwell eventually faced at Dunbar on 3 September 1650 was not part of such an alliance. It was the armed wing of the Presbyterian Kirk, implacably opposed to England’s parliamentary leaders who had triumphed over the Presbyterian element following Pride’s Purge. Despite their differences, Cromwell tried to win over the Scots in one of his best-remembered phrases: ‘I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.’³⁰ At Dunbar, despite being outnumbered almost two to one, with a force reduced by disease to as little as 11,000, Cromwell achieved perhaps his most impressive victory. As before, it was a triumph of belief as much as of tactics, this time in a clash with an equally committed foe: ‘The Enemy’s word was, The Covenant … ours, The Lord of Hosts’, and, as at Marston Moor, Cromwell’s opponents were ‘made by the Lord of Hosts as stubble to our swords’. It was reported that Cromwell had burst into laughter at the extent of the victory.³¹

As with earlier judgements of God on the battlefield, he also drew some practical lessons. Here was support for the political programme that he viewed as godly: ‘relieve the oppressed, hear the groans of poor prisoners in England; be pleased to reform the abuses of all professions’.³² The victory, in which as many as 3,000 Scots were killed and 10,000 taken prisoner, and only twenty of Cromwell’s men were lost (according to his own estimate), was welcomed not only by the English Parliament but also – clearly an unintended consequence – by the Royalists in Scotland, who correctly saw this as the death knell for the Covenant, and a chance to make a full alliance with Scottish Stuart sympathizers. In January 1651 the Marquess of Argyll, with whom Cromwell had previously collaborated, crowned Charles II king at Scone Abbey.

Cromwell’s Scottish campaign lasted another six months: not because the new alliance posed a particularly formidable threat, but because the Lord General fell ill, first with the dysentery that had racked his army, then with kidney stones. He was fifty-one years old, had been on campaign off and on for almost a decade, and was feeling the strain. The day after Dunbar he wrote to Elizabeth, his ‘beloved Wife’: ‘I have been in my inward man marvellously supported; though I assure thee, I grow an old man, and feel infirmities of age marvellously stealing upon me.’ In April he was able to tell her that ‘I am increased in strength in my outward man’, but it was not until June that he was well enough to resume the fight.33 In July 1651 he combined with his deputy, Major-General John Lambert, in drawing the Scots into battle again, and Lambert won another victory over them at Inverkeithing, just north of Edinburgh. Cromwell continued north, to Perth, cutting off the Scottish army’s access to reinforcements, forcing them to march south and gamble everything on an invasion of England. They were chased and harassed by several Parliamentarian forces, which drove them westwards for three weeks, away from the road to London. They reached Worcester before a vastly bigger Parliamentarian army caught up with them. With the delay of a day – which might have been deliberate – Cromwell was able to face the Scots on the anniversary of Dunbar, and on 3 September 1651 he dealt what appeared to be the final blow to Royalist hopes. As far as Cromwell was concerned, this last victory, the final battle in which he participated, was indeed ‘for aught I know, a crowning mercy’. Charles II got away, experiencing the picaresque adventures for which his personality seemed better suited than the grim business of war. Royalism was a lost cause. That much appeared to be confirmed not only by the defeat, but also by the signal lack of support or rallying to his colours that Charles’s army experienced as it marched through England. For nearly a decade, while Cromwell lived, it remained so.

That, however, was not necessarily how Cromwell saw it. Even after Worcester, there were men both inside and outside the Rump Parliament who could still contemplate a monarchy, and a Stuart sitting on the throne. Remarkably, Cromwell seems to have been one of them. In his recollections of the events of the middle of the century published after the Restoration, a former supporter of Cromwell, Bulstrode Whitelocke, gave an account of a meeting convened by the Lord General in December 1651 between a group of senior MPs and senior officers to discuss the future constitution. From their conversation, it emerges that no one thought the Commonwealth’s brief declaration of 1649 of a government ‘without any King or House of Lords’ had settled the matter. While most of the officers present at the discussion were in favour of a kingless republic, most of the MPs preferred to contemplate ‘a mixt Monarchical Government … suitable to the Laws and People of this Nation, and if any Monarchical, I suppose we shall hold it most just to place that Power in one of the sons of the late King’. Though voices were heard in reply for a republic, the fact that thoughts quickly turned to which of Charles’s sons would be most acceptable is an indication of how comfortable some of the assembled company appeared to be with the idea of restoring a king. When it was suggested that even Charles II might be widely accepted, the man who had just fought against him was sceptical: ‘That will be a Business of more than ordinary difficulty,’ Cromwell said, but he was not against the principle: ‘really I think, if it may be done with safety, and preservation of our Rights, both as Englishmen, and as Christians, that a Settlement with somewhat of the Monarchical Power in it, would be very effectual’.34

For a man who had just fought two bloody campaigns on behalf of a kingless commonwealth, this was a remarkable statement. Whether Cromwell’s equivocation about the ease of a Stuart restoration was a way of promoting his own candidature is difficult to say. Famously, Whitelocke recorded a later private conversation in which Cromwell disingenuously enquired, ‘What if a man should take upon him to be King?’, and received from Whitelocke a less than encouraging reply. The fact that no one at the earlier meeting – when barely two months had passed since Cromwell’s latest demonstration of his providential value to his nation – had thought to enquire of the Lord General if he might consider taking up the burden of the crown himself, should perhaps have made him realize that the exceptional circumstances in which such an offer could be imagined had not yet arisen. But if he took any conclusion from the discussion, it can only have been that the English, or at least those classes of Englishmen whom he saw as suited for choosing governments, were not naturally inclined towards republicanism.

Over the next two years, Cromwell had a place as both an MP and a leading member of the Council of State, as well as his role as commander of the army, which placed him at the head of the Council of Officers. All these prominent roles could not, however, combine to bend Parliament to his will. In fairness to Cromwell, what can be discerned of his wishes at this time was not some personal agenda, but widely shared hopes for a dissolution of Parliament and plans for its reconstitution along lines that might ‘heal’ the divides of the Civil War; and religious reforms along Independent lines, allowing for liberty of conscience and the propagation of the Gospel. How widely shared is difficult to say, but these were certainly matters that exercised the army, and during these years Cromwell found himself in his habitual position of serving two masters, the army and Parliament. As before, he eventually came down on the side of those who had, as far as he was concerned, risked so much more in the cause of liberty.

Eventually Cromwell lost patience with the Rump, interrupting a bill-reading and dissolving Parliament by force in April 1653, in a scene matching in drama Charles I’s intervention to arrest the five members (though Cromwell was, of course, a sitting MP, so he did at least have a right to be present, if not to do what he did). It is possible that the Rump may actually have been on the way to answering some of Cromwell’s wishes. It was later claimed that the bill whose reading Cromwell so violently interrupted was one to establish a procedure for new elections, but we will never know for sure. As well as clearing the mace away (‘What shall we do with this bauble? Here, take it away’) and summarily dismissing his fellow MPs (‘You are no Parliament … I will put an end to your sitting’), Cromwell snatched up the bill under debate, and it has never been seen again.

If we can’t know exactly why Cromwell acted against the Rump when he did, beyond an obvious loss of patience, it is possible to say from what came afterwards what his intentions were, even if they, too, might have been changed by events. To begin with, they were very clearly not to restore the monarchy or assume power himself, as that was not what he implemented – though both were popular topics of discussion. Some gossiped that ‘he intends to call home the young king’, while others apostrophized Cromwell himself in May as a ‘great Captain and Prince’ who would ‘ascend three Thrones’ (of England, Ireland and Scotland).35 Instead, the reduced Council of State that was brought in days after the dismissal of the Rump as an executive body to carry on day-to-day business was not, as in so many cases of military takeovers, a permanent front for a dictatorship or oligarchy. The legislative body that was eventually put in place, however, though it too was planned as a temporary measure, was a unique creation in English history. Summoned in June and sitting from July 1653, it was an Assembly rather than a Parliament, made up of 140 members nominated by a majority vote of the army’s Council of Officers rather than elected. They are generally (and rather misleadingly) known as ‘Barebone’s Parliament’ (after one of their number, Praisegod Barebone, a lay preacher and Leathersellers Warden who was not as hot a Protestant as he sounds).

Cromwell is in part responsible for the caricature of this body as a group of religious extremists and social levellers. But socially and religiously, the Nominated Assembly was not unlike earlier parliamentary bodies. Whatever its virtues, however, only five months into a term that was scheduled to last for sixteen, it too were dissolved, after its own disagreements made progress impossible. This time the more conservative members voted their own dissolution and presented their decision to Cromwell as a fait accompli. Cromwell had had high hopes for the Assembly, outlined in a lachrymose two-hour speech at its opening. But he and his fellow officers had seen the failure of the Assembly coming, and Cromwell had nodded at Major-General Lambert’s contingency plans, contained in a document called the Instrument of Government. Originally, the Instrument contained a proposal to confer the title of king on Oliver, but, perhaps remembering the discouraging words of Bulstrode Whitelocke, Cromwell refused to hear of it. So on 16 December 1653, at Westminster Hall, four days after the Nominated Assembly had offered up its resignation, Oliver Cromwell was invested in another title with a long history: Lord Protector.