5

Lord Protector

Oliver Cromwell’s emergence as head of state would not have surprised opponents who had been warning of his ambitions since the 1640s, in pamphlets with titles such as A Coffin for King Charles a Crowne for Cromwell.1 Supporters of the Parliament and Commonwealth might have expected it too. Though discussions about forms of government during the Commonwealth had not reached a consensus on the appeal of ‘mixt monarchy’, the continuing focus on Cromwell in print and image between 1649 and 1653 had done nothing to break the habit of concentrating the culture of government on an individual. When Cromwell had the parliamentary mace seized as he dismissed the Rump, he may not have intended it, but he was flinging out one of the rare examples of a newly commissioned piece of Commonwealth iconography. The parliamentary symbols on the Commonwealth mace had replaced the regal and dangerously ‘popish’ ones of crown and cross on its predecessor. More often, Cromwell was held up as his government’s answer to royalty. In 1649, on the eve of his Irish expedition, he had allowed himself to be painted by Robert Walker as an idealized warrior in antique armour, with a courtly page tying his sash as he fixes his gaze on the viewer, a marshal’s baton in his hand. Other Parliamentarians had been depicted in similar fashion, notably Sir Arthur Heselrige, whose martial portrait (sans page) in the same pose, it has recently been suggested, was painted over one of Oliver.2 But the image Cromwell approved, and which was reproduced across the country in copies and engravings, shows him in posture and dress reminiscent of Anthony Van Dyck’s portraits not only of the Earl of Strafford, his doomed Royalist predecessor as Lord Lieutenant, but even of Charles I and his offspring.

As Lord Protector, Cromwell would continue to employ painters who copied Van Dyck’s opulent style, even if, in subtle ways, these images would also be distinguished from those of royal predecessors. Although he had resisted attempts to single him out on a medal to commemorate the victory at Dunbar, on his return from the Battle of Worcester he had allowed himself to be greeted just as a victorious monarch would have been, by the City corporation, who led him into London in a procession watched by thousands. Expanding from these pioneering gestures, between 1653 and Oliver’s death in 1658 the Protectorate was able to establish a form of legitimacy and wide acceptance. It did so without (quite) becoming a monarchy, but increasingly by allowing Oliver to be portrayed as the equivalent of monarch: a man, if not anointed, then certainly chosen by God, fitted for rule less by popular acclamation than divine approbation.

The Lord Protector had plenty of practical concerns to occupy him and his government over these five years, and several significant achievements. What he couldn’t do was to create a convincing permanent substitute for monarchy. His own son was unable to attract the same sort of backing as Oliver when he succeeded him. (How could he have done? Oliver had established himself as a result of his achievements, which meant as much to his opponents who feared crossing him as it did to his supporters: on its own, the Cromwell name had none of the pulling power of royalty.) A return to Commonwealth government subsequently quickly unravelled. A nation that had been content with, or at least tolerant of, a form of kingship in the Protectorate could not be persuaded to fall back in line with a kingless Commonwealth. In that sense, the lesson of the Cromwellian experiment was that monarchy continued to appeal to those subjects who had a say in their political destiny. If opinion polls are to be trusted, it still does.

The experience of the Protectorate, and what followed it, showed that England had not abandoned the comforts of monarchy. But Cromwell discovered that the struggles of the 1640s had left the scope of action for a ‘supreme legislative authority’, when it ‘resided[d] in one person, and the people assembled in Parliament’, frustratingly restricted for that one person.3 An irony of the first Protectorate, which was set up under the Instrument of Government and lasted until Cromwell and the Council of State dismissed the Protectorate Parliament in January 1655, was that its head found Parliament as obstructive to his concept of good government as Charles I had done in his time. Under the terms of the Instrument, MPs were to be ‘persons of known integrity, fearing God, and of good conversation’. They were not to have fought against Parliament since 1641, or to be Roman Catholics. These terms, perhaps unsurprisingly, proved to be far too broad if the purpose was to create a legislative body that would carry on what Oliver saw as the task of the Protectorate Parliament: ‘healing and settling’, to ‘put the top-stone to this work, and make the nation happy’.4

What he meant by this was perhaps deliberately vague, but in the months before the opening of Parliament, in the vigorous work of the Council of State, there were some indications. The Council made moves to enforce a harsh policy in Ireland, and a slightly less rigorous approach, complete with a plan for union, towards Scotland. In this period, reforms of the legal system and the beginnings of a religious settlement along Cromwell’s favoured lines, which permitted a broad interpretation allowing Independents, Presbyterians and Baptists to coexist, were also set in motion. Finally, the origins of perhaps the most enduring, if least glamorous, of Protectorate reforms, of government finances and the taxation system, were initiated in this period. In all, between January and September 1655 the Protector and his Council passed eighty pieces of legislation. In its nearly five months’ sitting, before Cromwell gave in once again to his exasperation with parliaments, the Protectorate Parliament passed none.

Cromwell and the Council’s decision to dissolve the Protectorate Parliament stemmed from more than impatience at its lack of energy and preoccupation with constitutional arrangements. What MPs had seemed to be on the verge of enacting didn’t appeal much either. One objectionable feature was attacks on ‘heretics’, which appeared to leave the way open for an expansion of religious intolerance, in direct opposition to the Protector’s hopes for ‘union and right understanding between godly people’.5 Threats to the army were another. Cromwell saw the army as the guarantee of a balanced constitutional settlement, the only body that could stop Parliament from engrossing and perpetuating its own power. If it occurred to him that there were equally legitimate fears that the army could be used to inflate his own power, he did not see that as a problem. The army, he told MPs, ‘determines his [the Protector’s] power … for doing the good he ought’. Cromwell’s opponents habitually saw such self-justification as rank hypocrisy. In hindsight, it is Cromwell’s sincerity, or his naïvety, that seems more striking. Success in battle and his own elevation to political pre-eminence, what Cromwell took to be the mark of God’s favour, had made him ever more certain of himself. Someone who is convinced he is right, as Cromwell increasingly became, as Charles I was almost from the beginning, can be far more damaging than a hypocrite.

The period between Protectorate Parliaments, lasting from January 1655 to September 1656, is associated with Cromwellianism at its most earnestly raw. In fact, the epitome of the regime’s authoritarianism, the Rule of the Major-Generals, was not instituted until August 1655, and did not come to an end until January 1657. This attempt to govern the country along military lines, with twelve major-generals responsible for individual regions, was not a purely Cromwellian solution. During this period Cromwell worked closely with his Council, and John Lambert, the author of the Instrument of Government, was the driving force behind the establishment of the major-generals’ regime. In October 1655, instructions were issued to these new satraps which give an impression of the Protectorate’s ambitions and its sense of embattlement, surrounded by Royalist plots on the one hand, and the spread of ‘ungodliness’ on the other. There had indeed been a Royalist conspiracy, the little-supported and easily crushed Penruddock’s rising in and around Salisbury in March 1655, but the Protector and his Council took the opportunity it presented to introduce a form of administration that was reminiscent of the military divisions of the country in the early 1640s. In effect, and despite the fact that all three former kingdoms were under the government’s control, the Protectorate was acting as if the Civil War was still being fought.

Royalists and ‘papists’ were not the only groups whom the major-generals were directed to monitor – though only they were made to pay for the new set-up through a ‘decimation tax’, and only they were subject to a formal registration system and a requirement to take out bonds against good behaviour. The last government to have been forced to such an expedient was Richard III’s, but he at least had the justification of a genuine threat to his regime. The other menace that Cromwell’s appointees were to look out for was the one whose suppression has made his name synonymous to some with Puritan joylessness: the spectre of ‘Prophaneness and Ungodliness’. This would be manifest in ‘Drunkenness, Blaspheming, and taking of the Name of God in vain, by swearing and cursing, Plays and Interludes, and prophaning the Lord’s day’. In fact, there were already laws against these ‘abominations’ (and the notorious ordinance to abolish the feast of Christmas, along with Easter and Whitsun, had been passed in 1647). But the major-generals were sternly tasked with their ‘more effectual execution’.6

To modern eyes, fears about the security of the regime – whether centred on Royalist threats or the failures in the ‘Western Design’ to capture Hispaniola from the Spanish – look like separate, ‘political’ concerns in contrast to the programme for the introduction of ‘godly reformation’. But it should not surprise us that Cromwell, whose politics, military and personal financial decisions were so openly governed by a belief that they followed a Providential path, should feel compelled to enforce a similar outlook on the nation at large, when the Lord had seen fit to place it in his care – or that he should view the failures of foreign policy as a divine judgement on domestic conduct. From the time he had first taken up arms, as he had boldly explained to John Hampden, Cromwell equated the chances of success with encouraging those ‘as had the fear of God before them’. The Instructions to the Major-Generals showed an intention to elaborate on the good work.

Lord Protector, Council and the major-generals themselves all seemed to have been convinced of the rightness and indeed the popularity of their cause. That is the best explanation for the major-generals’ confidence, when the government was forced to review the regime’s finances, in predicting that a new Parliament would support their work. In fact, when in 1656 new parliamentary elections were duly held, it became clear that there was widespread opposition to the regime. The Council, apparently without Cromwell’s input, as he later claimed not to have agreed with their actions, were only able to ensure a quiescent Parliament by excluding as many as 100 MPs, while around sixty more reacted to the purge by not taking their seats. The Council was acting within the letter of the Instrument of Government in taking this action, but it only confirmed suspicions that they (and their master Cromwell) had no interest in free elections, or a truly independent Parliament. The remaining members seem to have been encouraged by the Protector’s confidence that the ‘liberty and prosperity of this nation depend upon reformation, to make it a shame to see men to be bold in sin and profaneness’.7 Unlike the previous Parliament, this one went about its work with vigour, sending Cromwell seventy-one acts for his assent.

Even this Parliament, however, could not be relied on to stay united for long. Soon, the same fault lines that had fractured the first Protectorate Parliament, and indeed previous parliaments in various forms, began to re-emerge. Religious (in)tolerance and military funding and establishment were, once again, the sticking points. The issue of Parliament’s authority over religious practice was highlighted by a colourful case in which a Quaker minister, James Nayler, committed what most took to be a ‘horrid blasphemy’ when he re-enacted Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, by riding a donkey into Bristol while Quaker women strewed palms before him. The condemnation of this rather literal imitation of Christ was almost universal, but a number of MPs, Council members and probably the Protector himself were troubled by the idea that Parliament would decide what constituted blasphemy and, potentially, threaten a transgressor with death.

The army’s role in government resurfaced in a reintroduced Militia Bill, which had the unhappy effect of reopening discussions about how permanent to make measures against former Royalists. Under the terms of the bill, it was envisaged that even those who had long since repented of their Royalism (and who were therefore covered by the Act of Oblivion, which only exempted from its blanket amnesty those who continued their anti-Parliamentary activities after January 1648) would go on paying the decimation tax which funded their own oppression. It was into these newly divided circumstances that the Miles Sindercombe plot introduced an element of urgency and danger. The outcome was that a group of MPs and Council members (it has never been established exactly who, though the case for the involvement of Cromwell’s Secretary of State, John Thurloe, in whipping up fears of invasion in the wake of the plot has been convincingly made) gathered to concoct a Remonstrance, which was introduced in Parliament by Sir Christopher Packe on 23 February 1657. This document saw the solution to the Protectorate’s problems in a reformed constitution, with an upper house to be nominated by the Lord Protector who, for his part, was to take a new title: that of king.

Both in Parliament and in the army there were instant objections to, as well as instant support for, the new offer, which was shortly formalized as the Humble Petition and Advice. This new version of the Remonstrance made it clear that Cromwell was expected to accept all or nothing: that is, if he wanted the rest of the settlement, including the Other House and the power to name his successor, then it must be as King Oliver.

It was not until May, more than two months after it had been presented, that Cromwell finally rejected the Remonstrance – rejected, that is, the part that insisted on his becoming king. In an epic speech he set out his reasons, and Parliament responded by acceding to his wishes, going back on their original all or nothing offer. It would be unfair to interpret the long delay as a sign of prevarication, or an attempt on Cromwell’s part to secure support for accepting the crown. On the contrary, by the time the Petition was formally presented to him on 31 March, Cromwell had already dismissed the crown as ‘a feather in a man’s hat’, in a stormy meeting with senior army officers who were worried he might succumb to temptation. He first rejected the offer only three days later. It was only the persistence of Parliament, and Cromwell’s characteristic desire to keep as many different opinions with him as he could (a trait that he seems to have rediscovered over this great issue), that strung the business out for so long. Cromwell really does seem to have been convinced that ‘God has seemed providentially not only to strike at the family but at the name … I would not build Jericho again.’8 It was not just the Stuarts, but kingship itself that had been divinely judged. Who was Cromwell to go against that? As before, he was prepared to seek God and deliberate for long enough to be persuaded that he was mistaken but, despite repeated attempts by some to change his mind, he stood firm.

What seems very clear is that Cromwell wasn’t particularly troubled by potential opposition to his taking the crown. The nearest he came to flirting with acceptance was in his conversation with army officers who were opposed to it. On that occasion, he seems to have been so angered by the implication that he might want the title that he was prepared to set out its potential benefits. He acknowledged that some men might be tempted, but he wasn’t. If Oliver Cromwell had wanted to be King Oliver, he could have been. The dynamics of this famous episode fall very much on the side of the crown pursuing Oliver, rather than Oliver pursuing the crown.

The title had been rejected, but Cromwell embraced many of the trappings of monarchy after the Humble Petition. His reinvestiture as Lord Protector on 27 June 1657, which was not required by the new constitution, was accordingly a far more ostentatious affair than the relatively self-effacing ceremony that had first settled the title on him. In the words of the hostile Lord Clarendon, it was ‘nothing wanting to be a perfect formal coronation but a crown and an archbishop’ – both of which, of course, had been abolished. But there was an oath, an ermine-lined robe with train, a presentation of the equivalent of the regalia – sword, sceptre and bible – as well as the nod to a coronation’s role as moment of public acclamation. At the climax of the ceremony, in answer to the heralds’ proclamation of Oliver, the audience shouted out, ‘God save the Lord Protector’.

Much of what was important about the Protectorate had already happened before this apotheosis. The union with Scotland and the substitution of Jamaica as the site of nascent imperial ambitions after the failure at Hispaniola had both preceded it. So too had the ‘readmission’ of the Jews, after the appeal of Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel of Amsterdam, in 1656. Of all the achievements of the Protectorate, this one can most squarely be attributed to Cromwell himself. The Council opposed it, but the Protector had met in person with the rabbi and was clearly persuaded by his arguments. Cromwell decided that as the Jewish expulsion in the Middle Ages had been a royal edict, he could personally authorize their readmission. His reasons are not entirely clear, and surely would have had little to do with modern notions of anti-discrimination. Cromwell had included the Jews among his list of the godly peoples who he hoped would live together, and he knew that Christ’s reign on earth was to be preceded by their conversion. So it is possible that the new beginnings of British Judaism are owed to an urge to evangelism rather than toleration.

Oliver Cromwell died, aged fifty-nine, on 3 September 1658, the anniversary of his crushing victories at Dunbar and Worcester. He had been reinvested as Lord Protector less than fifteen months before. A king with such a short reign would have had little time to make much impression on history, and Cromwell’s ‘reign’ was far from the most dramatic period in his life. Cromwell’s eventual position at the head of the nation was a remarkable achievement, but the career that had brought him there is the reason he is remembered. The year before his final illness, a chest infection that developed into pneumonia that August, had seen a rise in the activities of those ‘Commonwealthsmen’ for whom Oliver’s quasi-monarchy was too much to bear. In 1658, faced with the threat of an alliance between opposition republican elements in the army and in Parliament, he moved once again to dissolve the latter. Parliament had provided the means by which Cromwell first made a name for himself, but he had long since wearied of it. He was still confident, on the other hand, of his ability to bring the majority of the army with him. As well as dismissing the more troublesome officers, he knew how to appeal to the remainder, inviting 200 of them to a banquet in Whitehall two days after the dissolution, at which the guests declared in their cups their ‘resolve to stand and fall, live and die, with my Lord Protector’.9

When he wasn’t entertaining his former comrades and seeing off threats from republicans and Royalists alike, the Lord Protector continued to project a kingly persona, having his portrait painted on several occasions, and elevating his family with two aristocratic marriages for his daughters. Although Cromwell’s court took up only around 3 per cent of government expenditure compared to Charles I’s 40 per cent, it was a cultured and refined environment where choral music and ‘mixed dancing’ were encouraged, to the disappointment of some Puritan observers.¹⁰ What survived of Charles’s furniture, art and tapestries after the depredations of the Commonwealth were put on display in Cromwell’s residences at Whitehall and Hampton Court. But if the Lord Protector managed to advertise an image of his Protectorate that gave it a wide legitimacy, allowing his regime to conduct high-level diplomacy with the French, for example, he did not do enough to establish a succession. The Humble Petition empowered him to nominate his successor, but there is no certainty that he ever did. It is most likely that on his deathbed he nominated his eldest son Richard, but the fact that there is any doubt points up the contrast with a conventional royal succession. Even in a monarchy, the sovereign’s nomination of a successor was no guarantee of a smooth transfer of power, but perhaps only Elizabeth I had resisted naming one for so long. To the last, Oliver delayed making the difficult decision, no doubt seeking the Lord before finally, as he lay dying, indicating that his son should follow him. Richard Cromwell thus came to the task woefully under-prepared. The Protectorate was never quite a personal cult, but the system behind Oliver was not strong enough to sustain a successor who was thrust into the job – even if he lasted longer than might have been predicted, until May the following year.

Oliver Cromwell was buried as a king. His effigy wore the ‘cap of regality’ – that is, as other observers put it, it had ‘a crown on the head’. Though it was still as Lord Protector, rather than King Oliver, that he was laid to rest in Henry VIII’s chapel in Westminster Abbey, in all other respects this ceremony, ‘performed with very great majesty’, was the royal recognition that Cromwell had gone to such lengths to avoid.11 Its trappings still have the power to command attention today. In 2015, the inscribed copper gilt funeral plate later removed from the coffin was sold at auction for £70,000. Cromwell’s body itself was, after the Restoration, subjected to much greater indignities: dug up, hanged and decapitated, with his severed head leading a colourful afterlife, during which it became something between a lucky charm and a historical exhibit. It would be hard to say whether Cromwell’s own flirtation with kingship made the revenge or the curiosity any more intense.

Cromwell’s legacy can be as difficult to locate as his physical remains. Much of it is negative, notable mainly for the reaction it provoked. After the Restoration, most of what Cromwell himself would have prized was overturned, including the relatively tolerant religious settlement that he had eventually overseen. The Protectorate’s contributions to the ‘sinews of power’, the financial arrangements upon which the British Empire was based, are achievements too technical to have much popular traction. To a modern observer, wary again of the harm religious fanaticism can do on the political stage, Cromwell the zealot does not invite much empathy. But as well as the zeal that led him to the horrors of Drogheda and Wexford, he consistently displayed an urge to improve the religious lives (and to a lesser extent, and much less importantly to him, the lives tout court) not only of those with whom he was in sympathy, but also those with whom he disagreed. He was in many ways, to use his own word, ‘unEnglish’, both in his zeal and his tolerance. His resistance to the idea of monarchy was not unEnglish enough to lead him to a wholehearted support for republicanism, but the fact that it resulted in the unique experiment of the Protectorate is testimony to Cromwell’s extraordinary power to bend events to his will. His most impassioned posthumous advocate, Thomas Carlyle, compared him to Napoleon, because ‘In rebellious ages, when Kingship itself seems dead and abolished, Cromwell, Napoleon step forth as kings.’12 But, unlike the Emperor of the French, Cromwell demonstrated that it was possible to take a great nation’s future in his hands without also taking a crown.