FOR THE FORTHRIGHT and the adamant, it was time to begin again; to bleach the country of the stains of the past. ‘Whatever our Fore-fathers were,’ declared Henry Marten in parliament, ‘or whatever they did or suffered or were enforced to yeeld unto, we are the men of the present age and ought to be absolutely free from all kinds of exorbitancie, molestation or Arbitrary Power.’ All over the country in the early months of 1649, acts of obliteration, big and little, got under way. Young Isaac Archer, living near Colchester, had been spending time innocently gluing pieces of decorative silk to prints, when his father, William, ‘with a knife, I know not why, cutt out the picture’. The picture was of Charles I. In the weeks after the king’s execution, the remnant of the purged parliament lopped off its own head by abolishing the House of Lords as ‘useless and dangerous’. The monarchy itself followed the peerage into the trash, denounced as ‘unnecessary, burdensome, and dangerous to the liberty, safety and publick interest of the people’. The Great Seal, which gave acts of parliament the force of law and which bore the likeness of the monarch, was defaced and replaced by the stamp of the House of Commons, bearing the optimistic inscription ‘In the First Year of Freedom by God’s blessing restored 1648’. Writs, which had formerly required acts to be carried out in the name of the king, were now issued in ‘the name of the Keepers of the Liberty of England’.
So there was a ‘Commonwealth’. But what was that – an absence or a presence? Official bravura papered over popular uncertainty and confusion as to where, exactly, sovereignty now lay. There was no shortage of suggestions, of course. ‘At that time,’ wrote Lucy Hutchinson, the wife of a staunchly Puritan soldier, ‘every man allmost was fancying forms of government.’ The problem was who was to judge between them. To look for arbitration was to stare at a void.
As it happens, voids were a topic of compulsive fascination among philosophers, both natural and political. Learned disputes raged over whether vacuums could occur at all in nature; and if they did, whether they indicated utter vacancy, or the presence of a mysteriously ‘subtle matter’, albeit invisible and indeterminate. In 1644 the Italian physicist Evangelista Torricelli had performed the famous experiment which set off the debate. Torricelli took a glass tube, sealed at one end, filled it with mercury and then put it upside down into a basin, also filled with mercury. He had made, in effect, a primitive barometer. Atmospheric pressure pushed the mercury up the tube, but not all the way. Between the top of the mercury level and the sealed end of the tube was a space. But what was inside that space: a something or a nothing? This was what divided ‘vacuists’ from ‘plenists’, those for whom a vacuum was a possibility in nature and those for whom the horror vacui was a paramount truth.
The philosopher Thomas Hobbes was a plenist, someone for whom a vacuum was as abhorrent in the government of the state as in the operations of nature. When Charles I was executed in January 1649, Hobbes was living in Paris, debating the mystery of the Torricellian gap with French philosophers like Marin Mersenne, and writing, among other works, his answer to the dilemma posed by the vacuum of sovereignty. Published two years later, in 1651, his Leviathan would be profoundly shocking to the royalists who had confidently assumed Hobbes to be one of their own, for it seemed to counsel submission, indeed unconditional submission, to the self-appointed powers which had rushed into the space left by the dead king. Worse, in that same year, Hobbes acted on his convictions by returning to England, now governed by parliament and Council of State, both filled with unrepentant regicides. For someone thought to have owed everything he had – station, employment, security – to royalist families like the Cavendishes, this was unforgivable apostasy.
Hobbes, the son of a Wiltshire parson and the nephew of a prosperous glover who had given him the means to be educated at Oxford, had subsequently been tutor to the future second Earl of Devonshire, William Cavendish. No sooner had he come into his own than he proceeded to squander it, to the detriment of his old tutor who, according to his friend John Aubrey (the nonpareil of seventeenth-century gossips), wore out his shoes and caught colds from wet feet going ‘up and downe to borrow money’. But after the second earl died in 1628, Hobbes continued to collect monies for the Devonshires, extracting the forced loan of 1628 and billeting soldiers in the homes of loan refusers. In 1640 he had stood, unsuccessfully, for parliament from Derby, as a loyal champion of royal prerogative and the personal rule. Perhaps, though, his defeat in the polls made Hobbes (who prided himself on the clarity of his prescience) see the writing on the wall. For he took himself off to exile in Paris well before the war began. His patrons the Cavendishes duly lost battles and fortunes and then trooped to Paris themselves to join the court in exile. Still in favour, Hobbes became mathematics tutor to the Prince of Wales and to his prematurely dissipated companion, the second Duke of Buckingham. Geometry, which for Hobbes was one of the few uncontestable realities in the universe, bored both his charges. According to Aubrey, Buckingham relieved the tedium of his instruction by languidly masturbating, while Charles thought his tutor ‘the oddest fellow he ever met with’.
The publication of Leviathan would certainly not have made the prince any less bemused. Apart from supplying arguments for accepting the outcome of the civil war, it also seemed to attack institutional Christianity with such withering scepticism that in court circles Hobbes was deemed little better than an atheist. ‘It was below the education of Mr. Hobbes,’ complained Edward Hyde, who had enjoyed his company in the circle of Viscount Falkland at Great Tew, ‘& a very ungenerous and vile thing to publish his Leviathan with so much malice and acrimony against the Church of England when it was scarce struggling in its own ruins.’
Hobbes was a materialist, a rationalist, and not really a Christian in the sense of subscribing to gospels full of miracles and sacred apparitions. But he certainly believed in some sort of deity to whom alone otherwise absolute sovereigns had to render account. If for nothing else, Hobbes’s God was needed to keep Leviathan honest. And he was certainly unequivocal in his condemnation of the rebellion against the king. His later history of the civil war, Behemoth (1679), begins with an imaginary view from the Devil’s mountain, of ‘all kind of Injustice, and of all kinds of Folly that the world could afford’. But in 1650 he believed that moral anathema was no help at all in answering the paramount questions for everyone caught in the sovereignty vacuum. It was all very well to follow the lament ‘the king is dead’ with the shout ‘long live the king’ if you happened to be in Paris, since that was indeed where the new king could be found. But suppose you were stuck in Wiltshire? Then the questions that preyed on you were not about propriety but self-preservation. To pretend otherwise was self-deluding humbug. Simple but inescapable anxieties forced themselves on any rational person. What will become of me and mine? Who should be obeyed? On whom can we depend for our elementary needs of safety? Who will stop differences of opinion and differences of religion – for, argued Hobbes, there will always be such differences, incapable of adjudication – from becoming causes for endless, murderous war? Who will stop soldiers from burning dwellings, stealing animals and assaulting the defenceless? Who will enforce contracts – the very touchstone of justice? Who would allow us to sleep quietly in our beds? And how may such a protector be known: by faith or by reason?
They are the terrors of orphaned children who had seen their father-ruler killed in front of them; who, in counties ravaged by war, had seen familiar adjudicators – bishops and priests – effaced from the landscape of authority. Those anxieties would not be put to rest with the return of the bishops and the judges when Charles II was restored to his throne in 1660 and received his old maths tutor once more at court. For the Restoration closed, but it did not heal, the puncture wounds with which the civil war had pierced the body politic. Beneath the skin there was still traumatized tissue, which could be made raw and bloody again by collisions with misfortune. Plague, fire, defeat and paranoia would shake the confidence of the English in the protective authority of the throne and would make allegiance once more arguable, contingent. Forty years after the Great Seal of the beheaded king was defaced, his son James would drop it into the Thames in an act of perverse self-destruction. The political barometer would feel the pressure of altered atmosphere. The mercury of liberty would rise. A vacancy at the top would be declared.
The cure for fearfulness, Hobbes thought, was the frank acknowledgement that it was the natural and universal condition of man. Hobbes knew all about fear. According to John Aubrey, the philosopher claimed that he had been born prematurely in 1588 as the result of his mother taking fright at the prospect of the Spanish Armada. Terror of the unknown, ‘feare of power invisible . . . imagined from tales publiquely allowed’, Hobbes daringly claimed, was the source of most if not all religious experience. Pious fictions – like miracles, revelations or the existence of the soul itself – which could neither be proved nor disproved, might be a consolation for the anxious, but they were of no use in helping men escape the pitiless war of all against all, which was their lot in a state of nature. The only true asylum from anarchy lay in the surrender of liberty to an omnipotent sovereign – the Leviathan – in whom all individuals would be subsumed. What, after all, was the point of clinging to the freedom of mutual self-destruction? Neither sanctity, nor tradition, nor moral pedigree could confer on a government the authority to claim obedience. If Leviathan offered safety and justice, if Leviathan could keep disputes over beliefs from becoming acts of violence, then Leviathan was legitimate.
If this was not an atheistic answer, it was a shockingly amoral and impious one. And it was an affront to royalists because, in the aftermath of the death of Charles I, all they had was piety. Hobbes mocked ‘immaterial’ things. But for the devoutly loyal, the immaterial presence of the king was their solace and their hope, and they clung with desperate consolation to any and every purported relic that came their way: to little pieces of brown cloth said to be stained with the blood of the royal martyr; to the ribbon-bound locks of hair sworn to have come from the decapitated head. Above all they hung on the every last word of Charles, collected in the Eikon Basilike, the book of his meditations. Despite the attempts of the Commonwealth to suppress it, ‘The King’s Book’ was an immediate publishing sensation. No fewer than thirty-five editions (plus an extra twenty-five for unvanquished Ireland) appeared in 1649 alone, the first just a week after the beheading. In March 1649 an especially popular expanded edition, complete with the king’s prayers and his speech on the scaffold, was made available. Charles’s posthumous campaign of persuasion was perhaps the most successful he ever waged. Dead, he seemed more ubiquitous and materially present in England, Scotland and Ireland than he had ever been when he was alive. And this was exactly what Charles had intended. For although the editorial genius behind his book was the clergyman Dr John Gauden, Charles had taken enormous pains to present himself (like his grandmother Mary) as a martyr for the Church (in this case the Church of England).
The Eikon Basilike was designed as the king’s spiritual legacy, the gospel according to St Charles, in sure and pious hope of the resurrection of the monarchy. Complicated (but to contemporaries intelligible) Christian symbolism dominated the frontispiece designed by William Marshall, engraved by Wenceslaus Hollar and obviously in tune with the king’s presentation of his posterity. Its themes were consolatory: comfort for the bereft, steadfastness in turmoil, light in the darkness. Palm trees the trees thought never to die and thus the ancient emblems of the resurrection – continue to grow, even under the weight of royal virtue, while the rock of faith (also an emblem of the true Church) remains immovable in the storm-tossed sea. The grace bestowed on the king-martyr was represented as an illumination, the reception of light. Out of the murky skies a shaft of sublime light strikes the head of the kneeling king and imbues him with vision. Blessed with celestial sight he is able, as his parting words promise, to leave his corruptible, earthly crown at his feet and behold his reward, the heavenly crown of glory, radiant with stars.
By the end of the first year of the Commonwealth, ‘The King’s Book’ was everywhere, showing up like an irrepressible phantom, even in miniature editions designed for concealment. Its undeniable popularity disconcerted the stewards of the new state whose own sense of legitimacy depended on their conviction that it was they who represented the ‘honest’ and ‘godly’ kind of people. Apparently there were more of their countrymen enslaved to the old despotism than they had anticipated. Royalist newspapers like John Crouch’s scabrous weekly The Man in the Moon ‘shone its light’ on the devilish Commonwealth, while the Man’s dog, Towzer, shamelessly lifted his leg on proclamations of the Rump Parliament. Something had to be done to counter these scandalous influences. So John Milton, already established as a dedicated propagandist for parliament, was mobilized to enlighten the deluded. Milton was fast losing his own sight. His greatest works – Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes – would be the masterpieces of his long years of blindness and defeat. He had published a volume of poetry in 1645 and thought of prose writing as merely ‘the work of my left hand’. But he also thought of himself in the classical tradition of virtuous republicans such as Cicero who had laid aside ‘idle’ pursuits to place their eloquence at the service of the state. With his own vision dimming, Milton would none the less be the physician of the ‘blind afflictions’ of the common people, the kind of myopia that made them hanker, sentimentally, for the late, unregretted tyrant.
So in February 1649, in the midst of the royalist hagiography, Milton published the essay that brought him to the attention of the beleaguered leaders of the Commonwealth, not least Oliver Cromwell, for whom Milton made no secret of his ardent admiration. The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates went unerringly to the vacuum-anxiety, attacking the parliamentarians who had become queasy or even indignant at the king’s trial and punishment, beginning to ‘swerve and almost shiver . . . as if they were newly enter’d into a great sin . . . when the Commonwealth nigh perishes for want of deeds in substance, don with just and faithfull expedition’. Why, if they now flinched from its proper and legal outcome, had they embarked on the resistance against the king in the first place? Could they not see that by resorting to arms, the king had unilaterally torn up the contract with his subjects: the bedrock on which his authority rested. When he had raised his standard at Nottingham he had dethroned himself. God and parliament had merely affirmed that fall from grace by his defeat. For Milton there was no vacuum of authority to lose sleep over. It had always been lodged in the sovereign people whose conditionally appointed executive the king had been. Once stripped of that shared and limited power, Charles Stuart had to be judged for his crimes like any other felon. To accept his assertion that only God could judge him was a dangerous absurdity, since it put in question his earthly accountability for any laws or treaties he signed or promises he forswore (including his coronation oaths).
Historically, this was entirely back to front. The war had begun in 1642 not to remove Charles but to constrain him. The ‘people’ had not existed as a party to the conflict except through their representatives in parliament. But everything had changed in the brutal second civil war, the war of 1648, which had indeed turned into a life-or-death struggle, at least to Cromwell, who treated Milton’s publication like the job application it more or less was. The poet duly became secretary of foreign tongues to the Council, responsible for translating Latin and European documents into English and vice versa. So it was as a dependable attack propagandist that, in October 1649, Milton took his polemical sledgehammer to the Elkon Basilike. His Eikonoklastes, ‘The Image Breaker’ (1649), took the carefully manufactured image of sanctity apart, extracting from the book the passages he thought most fraudulently self-serving. But chopping up ‘The King’s Book’ proved untidier work than chopping up the king, and not much more popular. Milton later confessed that this was a job he had been told to do, which may account for the hectoring manner of its tone and style, alternating between needling, posthumous interrogations (as if Milton regretted not having sat himself on the court which had judged Charles) and bursts of epic denunciation. To Charles’s famous comments in the House of Commons that ‘the birds have flown’, Milton added images which turned the king into a carrion carnivore feeding off the carcasses of the free: ‘If some Vultur in the Mountains could have open’d his beak intelligibly and spoke, what fitter words could he have utter’d at the loss of his prey?’
Milton’s invective may have been more persuasive than his political theory. For his daringly advanced argument, that the authority of governments was based on popular consent and that they were at all times beholden to, and limited by, the will of the sovereign people, left wide open the problem of how the people were supposed to exercise their rediscovered majesty and in whom they could safely put their trust? Parliament, of course, ought to have been the answer. But to many among the traditional governing class – even those who had fought under its flag – the purged, single-chamber assembly of 1649, that came to be known derisively as ‘the Rump’, bore no resemblance at all to the representative institution that had taken to the field in defence of the nation’s liberties in 1642. Those who had been ‘excluded’ in 1648 for their known opposition to the trial of the king never regarded the Rump and its executive Council of State as anything more than an illegitimate usurping power.
Attacks on the presumption of the Rump Parliament and its councillors to fill the void left by the defunct monarchy came from those who thought it was not nearly bold enough, as well as from those who questioned its audacity. For the hottest Protestants, free to speak their minds in the void left by bishopless England, the only proper successor to King Charles was King Jesus. Prophecies abounded that a new millennium was at hand, and that the destruction of Antichrist and the coming of the Last Days were imminent. Combing through the books of Daniel and Revelation, the most fervent declared that the Four Monarchies – of Egypt, Persia, Greece and Rome – would now be succeeded by a Fifth: the reign of the godly, the visible saints. To those gripped by this ecstatic fervour, the execution of the king had not just been a political act but a sign from God that he had indeed chosen England as his appointed instrument for a universal redemption. And the freshly sanctified country would look like no other realm, for its mighty would be laid low and its humble raised up. Under the rule of the saints ‘no creature comfort, no outward blessing’ would be denied.
For the Fifth Monarchists and a multitude of other equally fervent sects, the emptiness left by the dethroned king was not a void at all but the antechamber to glory. Their preachers and prophets said so in the streets and to rapt congregations of apprentices and artisans. But the message resonated with special force in the army where sabres had been honed by the fire of sermons. The army remained, as it had been since 1647, the dominant institution in the country, for although royalism had been defeated in England, it was very much alive elsewhere in the islands. On learning the news of Charles’s execution, the Presbyterian regime in Scotland had immediately declared his son King Charles II of England and Scotland. In Ireland, not only had the Catholic confederacy not been defeated, it was now reinforced by the explicitly royalist army of the Duke of Ormonde. And since over the past decade the outcome of power struggles in England had been determined by events in Scotland and Ireland, it was impossible for the military to let its guard down and be lulled into a fool’s peace.
So England remained an armed camp, a place of troopers and horses and armourers and arsenals; an occupied country in all but name, where law might as easily be delivered on the point of a sword as in the magistrates’ court. It was an army, moreover, which had changed almost out of all recognition in the course of a decade. The officer corps, especially at the junior level, was younger, less traditionally educated, drawn from lower down the social scale and passionately religious. Since something like 70 per cent of artisans – shoemakers, weavers, coopers, tanners and so on – could read, the rank and file had a political awareness of its destiny and that of the country, and of their own part in shaping it, that was absolutely new in England. In the autumn of 1647, each regiment had elected two Agitators to represent it at the army Council and they had the audacity to debate with Cromwell and Ireton at Putney on the future of the country’s political and social institutions. Their grievances with parliament over arrears of pay and pensions had likely been in part inspired by Leveller writers and orators like John Lilburne, Richard Overton and William Walwyn into a crusade to transform England into something which, if not quite a representative democracy, was none the less shockingly radical by seventeenth-century standards. Under the Leveller proposals, the franchise would go to all male householders over the age of twenty-one. Parliaments would be annual and members debarred from sitting consecutive terms. Tithes supporting the clergy and excise taxes on food would be abolished, and the law would be simplified and made accessible to the whole people.
As far as Lilburne and his fellow-Levellers were concerned, they were not asking for the moon, just the ‘free-born’ natural rights which Anglo-Saxons had apparently enjoyed before being crushed beneath the Norman yoke, rights which had only been partly restored by Magna Carta. Twenty to thirty per cent of adult males in England in fact already had the vote, and once the categories that the Levellers continued to exclude (servants, apprentices and paupers) were subtracted they could reasonably argue that they were merely extending to the rest of the country what was already de facto household suffrage in towns like Cambridge and Exeter. For the most part, Walwyn, Overton and Lilburne were at pains to distance themselves from any imputation of social egalitarianism. The label of ‘Leveller’ had originally been a hostile accusation. When they called their newspaper The Moderate there was no irony intended. They believed in rank, they insisted. They believed in orderly government.
All the same, they could hardly avoid the impression that they were radicals since it was unquestionably true. If they did not want to see a great social levelling, they did want some sort of attention to the just complaints of the poor. The Levellers were trying to make more fortunate citizens see that these starvelings were not the armies of travelling beggars that haunted the imaginations of constables and magistrates, and which could be whipped out of sight and out of mind. The new poor were often settled folk – agricultural labourers and artisans, or even tenant farmers – who had been distressed or made destitute by the disruptions of the war, their fields burned and their carts and animals requisitioned (in other words stolen) for the troops. The abolition of the tithe was meant to help the tenant farmers, but the Levellers also wanted the Commonwealth government to initiate some sort of sustained programme of relief for the needy rather than abandon them to the Elizabethan poor laws. Even more daringly, they argued that those immediately above pauperdom should be considered active members of political society. At the Putney Debates the naval officer and MP Colonel Thomas Rainborough declared that ‘The poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he,’ and insisted that no man should have to live under laws to which he had not personally given his own express consent.
This was an argument of genuinely revolutionary boldness and it appalled the officers whom Lilburne assailed as the ‘grandees’ of the army – Ireton, Fairfax and Cromwell. They came to believe that the Levellers and their allies in the army were hell-bent on subverting both the godly discipline of the troops and, for that matter, the entire social and political order. Against Rainborough’s literal interpretation of the sovereignty of the people, Ireton argued the sovereignty of property: ‘no person hath a right to an interest or share in the disposing of the affairs of the kingdom . . . that hath not a permanent fixed interest . . . and those persons together are properly the represented of this kingdom.’ In other words, a man’s estate counted when it came to the vote. A parliament stuffed with lawyers, moreover, was unlikely to feel warmly about the Levellers’ proposals to democratize the law. Oliver Cromwell’s own attitude to the importance of social rank was best summed up in his later dictum: ‘A nobleman, a gentleman, a yeoman. That is a good interest of the nation and a great one.’
Bitter enemies though they became, Oliver Cromwell and John Lilburne none the less shared a history. Lilburne, who like Cromwell came from a family of county gentry, was always one of those restless souls, easier to recognize in the nineteenth than the seventeenth century, who seem destined to be outsiders. In his twenties he had been arrested for circulating pamphlets attacking Laud and the bishops, and his savage sentence in 1637 had been one of the causes célèbres which helped make the Star Chamber notorious. Lilburne had been flogged through the streets of London from the Fleet to Palace Yard, then set in the pillory (from which he continued to harangue the crowds) and finally incarcerated in the Tower of London for more than two years in conditions of brutal deprivation and restraint. It had been Cromwell, in fact, who had brought Lilburne’s plight to the attention of the Long Parliament and got his release. Commissioned as a captain in the regiment of Lord Brooke, Lilburne was captured by Prince Rupert’s soldiers in the rout at Brentford and was subjected to an exemplary trial for high treason at Oxford. Had not parliament made it clear it would exact retribution on its own royalist prisoners, he would have been executed then and there. For the bravery of his demeanour during the trial the Earl of Essex offered Lilburne £300, a sum his chronically indebted family could hardly afford to turn down. But, of course, Lilburne did just that, announcing he would ‘rather fight for eightpence a day until the liberties and peace of England was settled’. As an officer in the Eastern Association he would certainly have encountered Cromwell, and he made no secret of sharing Oliver’s dim view of the Earl of Manchester’s capacity for command. Shot through the arm at Wakefield, repeatedly robbed and plundered and seldom paid, Lilburne was in a sorry enough plight in 1645 for Cromwell to write to the Commons recommending he receive the special pension he had been voted on account of his treatment by the Star Chamber, but which had failed to materialize.
This, however, was as far as their comradeship went. Cromwell raised no objection to Lilburne’s imprisonment twice in 1646, first in Newgate, then in the Tower where he was committed by the House of Lords for accusing the peers of, among other things, ‘Tyranny, Usurpation, Perjury, Injustice and Breach of Trust in them reposed’. It didn’t help that when Lilburne appeared before the Lords, he refused to take off his hat, which was taken (as intended) as a refusal to acknowledge their right to try a ‘freeborn Englishman’. In Newgate he barricaded himself in his cell and stuck his fingers in his ears to avoid hearing the charges against him. It was two more years before Lilburne was finally released. But nothing, not even being deprived of writing materials, seemed to be able to gag him as pamphlet after pamphlet somehow issued from the Tower and into the streets, apprentice shops, garrisons and Baptist churches. During 1647 the Levellers began to mobilize mass petitions, often delivered by noisy crowds wearing the Leveller token of a sea-green ribbon in their hats. Cromwell was in no doubt at all that Leveller agitations, with their demands for direct political representation, were undermining military discipline. After the high command had forbidden a ‘general rendezvous’ of the army, two regiments none the less showed up at Corkbush Fields near Ware in Hertfordshire to hear the Leveller Agitators, carrying their literature. The papers and green ribbons were ripped from their hats, the meeting broken up at sword point, and one mutineer shot.
The Levellers were not yet finished as a threat to the ‘grandees’. Through the second civil war The Moderate continued to voice the programme set out the year before in their ‘Agreement of the People’, as well as to point fingers at backsliders and adventurers in parliament. (Astonishingly, some of the Leveller chiefs even began to make contact with the king in hopes of persuading him to become a patron of their household democracy.) After Charles’s defeat Ireton grafted some of their principal demands – the abolition of the House of Lords and the monarchy, and annual parliaments – on to his own official proposals for republican government. But by the beginning of 1649 Overton, Lilburne and Walwyn were convinced that the Commonwealth had been delivered into the hands of an oligarchy every bit as rapacious, self-serving and heedless of the needs of the masses as the one it had replaced. Lilburne’s snarling rebuke to the House of Lords in 1646 held just as well for the Rump Commons three years later: ‘All you intended when you set us a-fighting was merely to unhorse and dismount our old riders and tyrants, that so you might get up and ride in their stead.’
Lilburne detested everything about the new regime. He had been against the execution of the king and had refused to support his trial on the grounds that it violated all the principles of equity encoded in the common law. Even Charles Stuart he believed was entitled to the same benefits of Magna Carta as Freeborn John, including the right to trial by jury. When three of the captured royalist commanders – the Scots Duke of Hamilton, Lord Holland and Lord Arthur Capel – were awaiting trial in the Tower (they would be beheaded shortly after the king in front of the parliament house), Lilburne sent them law books for their own defence. The response of the Leveller leaders to a formal ban on political discussions in the army was a two-part pamphlet called England’s New Chains, which at the very least put in question any kind of obedience to a regime they condemned as illegitimate. On 28 March 1649 Lilburne, Overton and Walwyn, together with a fourth colleague Thomas Prince, were arrested and dragged before the Council of State. There (according to Lilburne), both they and the councillors were treated to a fist-pounding eruption of rage by Oliver Cromwell:
I tell you . . . 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 the blood and treasure shed and spent in this kingdom upon your heads and shoulders, and frustrate and make void all that work that, with so many years’ industry, toil and pains, you have done, and so render you to all rational men in the world as the most contemptible generation of silly, low-spirited men in the earth . . . I tell you again, you are necessitated to break them.
Not surprisingly, then, the Levellers who refused to acknowledge the authority of the Council were packed off to the Tower. But then something quite astonishing – and to the hardened grandees of the army incomprehensible – happened. A petitioning campaign for their release immediately broke out in London, mobilized by Leveller women. In 1646 Lilburne had already gone against the grain of virtually every household manual (a Puritan speciality) by insisting, and in print, that women ‘were by nature all equall and alike in power, dignity, authority and majesty [to men]’. Leveller women had always been directly involved in the movement’s campaigns. Elizabeth Lilburne had been politicized through her early efforts to spring her reckless spouse from one prison or another, moving from the expected tear-stained pleas to unexpected assertions of the rights of man and woman. Mary Overton seems to have been, from the beginning, a radical at heart. For printing and distributing her husband’s tracts, she had been brutally punished, dragged through the London streets by a cart, as she was holding her six-month-old infant, while being pelted and abused like a common whore. But the most articulate and impassioned of the sisters was the charismatic preacher-turned-Leveller Katherine Chidley, who tried to make the Commonwealth understand the particular sufferings of their sex and to institute poor relief for their assistance:
Considering that we have an equal share and interest with men in the Commonwealth and it cannot be laid waste (as it now is) and not we be the greatest and most helpless sufferers therein; and considering that poverty, misery and famine, like a mighty torrent is breaking in upon us . . . and we are not able to see our children hang upon us, and cry out for bread, and not have wherewithal to feed them, we had rather die than see that day.
The outrageous temerity of women giving voice to these grievances was profoundly shocking to mainstream Puritan culture, devoted as it was to an especially draconian hierarchy of the sexes in which the woman’s role was that of obedient, quietly devoted helpmate. When Elizabeth Lilburne and Katherine Chidley, at the head of a mass demonstration of women, presumed to petition parliament for the release of the Leveller leaders, they met with a predictably dusty response: ‘The matter you petition about is of a higher concernment than you understand, the House have an answer to your Husbands and therefore you are desired to go home and looke after your own businesse, and meddle with your huswifery.’
But the Leveller women did not go home. Instead they made sure that the Manifestation, published from the Tower under the names of all the imprisoned Levellers, was widely distributed in London. Its quasi-theological touches – comparisons between the sufferings endured by the Levellers and those inflicted on Christ and his disciples – suggest the authorship of William Walwyn, the grandson of a bishop. But the Manifestation was less of a treatise and more an explanation to the obtuse of why, after so much persecution, deprivation and frustration, they had no choice but to persevere, whatever further ordeals might come their way. In its determination and bleak pathos, the Manifestation is a vocational manifesto of an unmistakably modern profession: the revolutionary calling.
’Tis a very great unhappinesse we well know, to be alwayes strugling and striving in the world, and does wholly keep us from the enjoyment of those contentments our severall Conditions reach unto: So that if we should consult only with our selves, and regard only our own ease, Wee should never enterpose as we have done, in behalfe of the Common-wealth: But when so much has been done for recovery of our Liberties, and seeing God hath so blest that which . . . has been desired, but could never be atained, of making this a truly happy and wholly Free Nation; We think our selves bound by the greatest obligations that may be, to prevent the neglect of this opportunity, and to hinder as much as lyes in us, that the bloud which has been shed be not spilt like water upon the ground, nor that after the abundant Calamities, which have overspread all quarters of the Land, the change be onely Notionall, Nominall, Circumstantiall, whilst the reall Burdens, Grievances, and Bondages, be continued, even when the Monarchy is changed into a Republike.
All the same, the four denied that they were ‘impatient and over-violent in our motions for the Publick Good’, hoping to achieve their ends through another ‘Agreement of the Free People’, which they proceeded to publish from their ‘causelesse captivity’ on 1 May 1649. The document was serious and not impractical: a legislature of 400 chosen ‘according to naturall right’ by all males over twenty-one years old, other than paupers, royalists and servants. Neither military forces nor taxes could be raised without its consent, but the limits of that parliament’s power were spelled out as forcefully as its jurisdiction. It was not to infringe freedom of conscience; it was not to coerce anyone into the military, nor to create any kind of legal procedures not provided for in the common law. It was neither to limit trade, nor to impose capital punishments or mutilations for anything other than murder and certainly not for ‘trivial offences’. No one, except Catholics who insisted on papal supremacy, was to be disqualified from office on account of their religion. Judged by what was thought politically acceptable, in the Commonwealth, this ‘(third and final) Agreement of the [Free] People’ was a non-starter. But this did not mean that the kind of assumptions and arguments made by the Levellers should be thought of as utopian (hence their desperation to mark out clear differences from Gerrard Winstanley’s ‘Diggers’, who preached community of land and goods). Leveller principles would have a future, in fact, and not just in America.
But the soldiers who continued to read Lilburne, Overton and Walwyn (and who knows, perhaps Katherine Chidley too) could not wait around for the future. In April a mutiny over pay in London turned into a mass demonstration at the funeral of one of the executed mutineers. In mid-May, another mutiny broke out among some troops passing through the garrison stationed in the staunchly Puritan town of Banbury in Oxfordshire. Two more regiments mutinied near Salisbury and attempted (but failed) to join the Oxfordshire rebels. On 13 May, Cromwell and Fairfax marched a pursuit force 50 miles in a single day, catching the mutineers in the middle of the night at Burford on the edge of the Cotswolds. Seven or eight hundred fled, but 400 were captured of whom four were sentenced to be shot and three were. The next day, Cromwell went off to receive an honorary degree in law from Oxford University. Ringing Leveller statements continued to be published from Bristol before the heavy hand of the army came crashing down again. There was nothing to connect Lilburne directly with the mutiny, but he did his best to remedy that by publishing An Impeachment of High Treason against Oliver Cromwell and Henry Ireton in August. In October, though, it was Lilburne who was tried for treason at the Guildhall in the City of London, where he played brilliantly to the gallery by insisting that the jury alone was empowered to issue a verdict and the judges merely ‘cyphers’ of the people’s will. It duly acquitted him and Lilburne was freed without conditions, the other three in the Tower following, provided they subscribed to the oath of engagement which the Commonwealth now required of all its citizens. Walwyn, Overton and Prince agreed, but everyone from Cromwell down knew better than to ask John Lilburne.
By the autumn of 1649 it was clear that, whatever else was going to fill the space left by the monarchy, it was not going to be the visionary Commonwealth of the Levellers. Bought off, intimidated or imprisoned, their officers dispersed; the rank and file of regiments thought unreliable were shipped off to Ireland where they could vent their fervour and frustration on the benighted rebels. Their leaders eventually went their separate ways. The philosophical Walwyn became an amateur authority on matters medical, John Wildman made a packet from speculating in confiscated royalist property, Overton went to France, while Lilburne took up sundry social causes and grievances before being banished for life in 1651. In exile in the Netherlands, he attempted to make sense of what had happened by reading deeply in the classical literature of Roman republicanism: Livy and Sallust. But the texts only seemed to confirm for him the gloomy likelihood of oligarchy or tyranny. Returning to England in 1653 he published again, was imprisoned again and eventually ended up a Quaker.
Leveller fire transmuted into Quaker light is less startling than it might seem, for any number of former political zealots faced with the ferocity of the republic’s repression turned to religion in their search for truth and deliverance. And this spiritual migration was not just a matter of consolation for thwarted populists. If Levelling had failed, it had to be because God had willed it so, wanting the brethren to turn aside from the ‘carnal’ world and look elsewhere for salvation. Elsewhere meant, first and foremost, within themselves, in the recesses of their being, which had been overlaid by carnal things: appetites, words, ambitions. Buried beneath all that worldly muck were the spotless hearts and souls of the children they remained in their innermost spirit and which, once released from the bondage of the carnal world, could be opened to receive the light of God’s grace.
The first apostles of this personal redemption were utterly convinced, even when locked up in the stinking darkness of a dungeon, that they were walking in the time of light. God had willed the terrible wars, not for carnal alterations – a parliament, a republic – but so that the institutions of false authority should fall away. Away had gone bishops. Away had gone presbyteries. What was left was freedom – the precious freedom for them to find their way. In Rome 1650 may have been the Jubilee year, and Pope Innocent X was erecting his own column of light, the obelisk, in the Piazza Navona. But it was an age of miracles for the seekers after grace. For while the Commonwealth and the generals were adamant about the monopoly of armed force and the control of expressly political opinions, they were (especially Cromwell) equally insistent on freedom of conscience for any sect or confession (other than Catholics, naturally) who caused no threat to the public peace. Just what constituted such a threat, of course, was often left to the judgement of local magistrates whose threshold of outrage was often much lower than Cromwell’s, as the Quakers in particular were to discover. But this brief period of benign neglect produced the most fertile proliferation of spiritual enthusiasms since (or for that matter before) the Reformation. Some were organized, like the Baptists, into Churches, but others were frequently no more than cult followings gathered around the personality of charismatic preachers like Abiezer Coppe or the Ranter Laurence Clarkson.
From group to group they differed wildly on, for example, the status of Scripture (some of the Ranters and Quakers thought it no more than an historical document) or the importance of baptism and church marriage (which the Quakers rejected along with any other outward sign of communion). But what they all had in common was an intense aversion to any kind of formal ecclesiastical authority or institutional discipline. Calvinism’s dogma of predestination, with its irreversible separation of the elect and the damned, they rejected out of hand as utterly inconsistent with God’s love, which could be received by any who opened themselves truly to his grace. The most extreme of their number, such as Laurence Clarkson, taught that, since God was perfect, the idea of sin, and the shame which went with it, must have been a human invention, and to the scandal of other Christians went about conspicuously testing their theory by living openly with a series of concubines. The disregard for formal authority, pushed to its logical extreme and professed by Quakers as well as Ranters, was that God lived in each and every one, and was simply waiting to take possession of the transformed believer.
Separated from the fraudulent and redundant authority of the clergy, salvation could now be a free, voluntary act by anyone old enough to know what she or he was doing (hence the Baptists’ refusal to countenance infant baptism). The mere idea of a parish was an arbitrary geographical absurdity, a jurisdictional convenience masquerading as a Church. Why should all the people who happened to live within the same bounded area be supposed, by that fact alone, to be brethren or sisters in Christ? Church buildings themselves the Quakers ridiculed as ‘steeple houses’, mere piles of stones built for carnal admiration and which had to be broken up, in spirit if not in fact, before the enslaved flocks could be converted into Children of Light.
The sects satisfied two quite different visions of the imperfect alteration of the state from kingdom to Commonwealth and pointed a way ahead in two quite separate directions. For Fifth Monarchists like John Rogers, Vavasor Powell and Major-General Thomas Harrison, their noses buried in scriptural prophecy, the new, last age had dawned with the beheading of the king. So they were under an obligation not to turn their back on the state but to convert it to the rule of the Saints, and so be in a position to prepare the Commonwealth for the consummation of prophecy. Their soldiers, magistrates and preachers had to infiltrate, not abandon, the public world, the better to bend it to God’s command.
For the Quakers and those who thought like them, this obstinate attachment to carnal affairs was only compounding the problem. Polities were, by their very nature, incapable of spiritual transformation, and hence should simply be shunned, the better to concentrate on what counted – the alteration of individual personalities to fit them for the admission of light. Self-assertion, the quality that made men leaders, had to give way to self-nullification.
Their lives, then, became journeys towards sweet nothingness, which began, necessarily, with an uprooting from familiar habits. When he was barely nineteen, George Fox, a Puritan weaver’s son, began his wanderings away from his home in Drayton-in-the-Clay in Leicestershire (much to his father’s displeasure). It was 1643 and Fox walked through a landscape torn apart by the war, plodding patiently in his grey leather coat along roads travelled by troopers and munitions wagons. In the garrison town of Newport Pagnell on the Bedfordshire/Buckinghamshire border, he watched Sir Samuel Luke’s soldiers rip out statues from the churches and smash them in the streets. And he listened to the ex-tailor and army captain Paul Hobson sermonize the troops, denouncing the vanity of ‘steeple houses’ and insisting that a church was but a gathered body of believers. Two years later, while Fox was roaming the orchards in Leicestershire, he began to experience the ‘openings’ which exposed him to illumination. By 1649 he was now ready to begin his wanderings in earnest. It helped that he had a modest inheritance from which he could supply his even more modest wants on the road. In Derbyshire villages populated by hungry lead miners, for whom neither king nor parliament had done much, he preached against tithes and approached potential converts, unbidden, to attempt a ‘convincement’. More perilously, he began to disrupt Presbyterian lectures, shouting of the woe to come and the awaiting light.
Soon, Fox was planning his interventions to provoke the maximum attention and became, to the Presbyterians especially, first a nuisance and then an intolerable menace. For his fearless temerity Fox spent months at a time in prison, in the filthiest of conditions. But (just as with Lilburne) his confinement only enhanced his reputation and did nothing at all to quiet him. In fact he began to get attentive visitors. In Derby, where he was sentenced to a six-month spell in 1650, a jailer asked if he might share his cell for a night to listen to Fox’s instruction. Irrepressible, Fox moved north to Lancashire and Yorkshire, gathering converts not just from the poor but also from the propertied classes – the wonderfully named high sheriff of Nottingham, John Reckless, and Margaret Fell, the pious wife of a Lancashire JP, both of whom opened their houses to Fox to use as an asylum and recruiting headquarters. At Wakefield he brought in the ex-weaver and New Model Army quartermaster James Nayler, who was already a gifted preacher and would be for Fox both a blessing and a curse.
The quaking began. Although he used them freely enough to attack ‘sprinkling’ and ‘steeple houses’, Fox taught his flock to despise and mistrust words; reason was the enemy of the light. When suffused by it, the ‘Children of the Light’, as they called themselves, felt a great trembling of the earth as if it was opening like their own souls, and they themselves began to shake and sway and sometimes sing for joy. The community they felt in this state of grace was important, for it insulated them, up to a point, from the very real perils and penalties they faced from the carnal world. For without question the Commonwealth, and the Protectorate after it, felt threatened by the Quakers, notwithstanding their continual protestations of indifference to politics and loyalty to the powers that be. They were somehow deeply offensive. They refused to doff their hats or to be quiet in church. Indeed, they came to church specifically to make an ungodly noise. Fox was punched in York Minster, and in Tickhill, Yorkshire, he was smacked in the face with a Bible, dragged from the church and tossed over a hedge. He was sat in stocks, pilloried, repeatedly arrested and jailed, despite a modicum of protection from John Bradshaw, president of the court that had tried Charles, a Councillor of State and a friend of Margaret’s husband Thomas Fell.
Yet he remained indomitable. In the spring of 1652 Fox climbed to the top of Pendle Hill, on the border between west Yorkshire and Lancashire, and beheld, if not the Promised Land, then the green Ribble valley stretching west to the Irish Sea, a whole country waiting to be gathered. ‘I was moved’, he wrote, ‘to sound the day of the Lord.’ He bathed in the Light.
As far as Thomas Hobbes was concerned light was just a ‘fancy of the mind caused by motion in the brain’. Like everything else in the human world, it was not mystery but matter and capable of explanation by sound reasoning. At the same time that Fox was in the throes of his illuminations, Leviathan appeared, its premise being that matters of religion ought to be shunted off into the realm of metaphysical speculation where they belonged. Politics and government could only be decided by hard-headed, unflinching logic. Moral distaste was neither here nor there. Reason demanded submission to whatever sovereign had the capacity of providing peace and law.
When he got back to England in the spring of 1651, Hobbes discovered that, for all the shouting and prating, there were others who thought very much like himself when it came to the criteria of allegiance. One of them was Marchamont Nedham, the most prolific and ingenious of the parliamentary journalists, whose Mercurius Britannicus jousted with its royalist rival Mercurius Aulicus. For a brief spell in the late 1640s, Nedham had switched sides. But once the war was over, he reverted to the Commonwealth and was its leading propagandist. Not only did Nedham now subscribe readily to the official ‘Engagement’ that the Commonwealth required of all its citizens, he was prepared to develop a public position which might be used to reconcile the countless thousands of royalists in England to accepting the de facto power of the Rump Parliament and its government. Nedham started from the same premise as Hobbes: that the paramount reason to institute any government and to accept subjection to it was its power to offer protection to subjects, otherwise prey to anarchy. Nedham’s argument, reinforced by Hobbes, replaced the question ‘Is it proper?’ with the question ‘Does it work?’ And with that apparently simple change in perspective, for better or worse, modern political science was born.
So was Oliver Cromwell Leviathan, the ‘artificial man’ in whom all men were combined in one indisputable, unarguable sovereign? Later, when he was Lord Protector, his steward John Maidstone described his appearance as though it was indeed a one-man national monument: ‘his head so shaped, as you might see it a storehouse and shop . . . a vast treasury of natural parts’. But however slavish the sycophancy, it’s to Cromwell’s credit that he never quite seemed to fall for it. Nor is there any serious evidence that, from the beginning of the Commonwealth, Cromwell aimed at any sort of personal supremacy, regal or otherwise. Though those who came to hate him, like Edmund Ludlow, believed that his repeated declarations of aversion to high office were hypocritical, masking a monomaniacal ambition, there is good reason to believe them sincere. Cromwell certainly showed some of the symptoms of absolutism – colossal self-righteousness, haughty intolerance, a frighteningly low threshold of rage, a coarse instinct for bullying his way past any opposition. But he also lacked the one essential characteristic for true dictatorship: a hunger to accumulate power for its own sake. For Cromwell, the exercise of power was a necessary chore, not a pleasure. And it was not undertaken for personal gratification. Whatever his many failings, vanity was not one of them. He saw the warts clearly and without extenuation, and they were not merely on his face. Throughout his life as a public figure, Cromwell believed himself to be no more than the weak and imperfect instrument through which an almighty Providence worked its will on the history of Britain. Often he sounded like the stammering Moses, drafted by an insistent Almighty into business he would rather leave to someone else.
But there was, as he wrote to Oliver St John in 1648, no shirking the call: ‘The Lord spake thus unto me with a strong hand and instructed me.’ Cromwell, then, believed he worked for God. Real dictators believe they are God. It was those who fancied themselves little gods, from Charles I to the republican oligarchs of the Rump like Henry Marten and Sir Arthur Haselrig, who most aroused Cromwell’s contempt. He mistrusted power-seekers and personal empire-builders and constantly questioned their motives, including his own. ‘Simplicity’ was a word he used repeatedly of himself and his conduct, and it was the highest of moral compliments. Better, always, to be thought naïve than wickedly sophisticated. If he was no manipulator, then nor was Cromwell (unlike Ireton) much of an ideologist of the new Britain. Arguably, the survival of the republic was jeopardized by his complete indifference to creating anything like a true commonwealth culture to replace that of the defunct royal regime. In the last analysis Cromwell was not that far from Fox (whom he found both fascinating and repellent) in believing in the ultimate triviality of ‘carnal’ forms of government. They were all, he said, following St Paul, ‘dross and dung in comparison of Christ’. This spiritual loftiness was personally admirable, but it was also politically fatal to the perpetuation of the Republic. To prolong itself, the Protectorate needed Cromwell to be more of a Leviathan, more of a ruthless sovereign, than he could ever manage to stomach. This is both his exoneration and his failure.
Though he is an obligatory fixture in the pantheon of heroes, along with Caesar, Napoleon and all the usual darlings of destiny, the wonder of Oliver Cromwell is that for so much of his life he showed absolutely no inkling of what awaited him, nor any precocious impatience to be recognized as exceptional. For the greater part of his fifty-nine years he toiled away in dim mid-Anglian obscurity, amid the cabbage fields, very much the provincial country gentleman-farmer. For most of his career the man who was to become the arbiter of power in Britain was breathtakingly innocent of it. Likewise, the greatest general of his age was completely unschooled and unpractised in the arts of war. Cromwell was not, then, someone who instinctively knew that he was fated to ascend. On the contrary, he thought of himself as a casualty of a triple fall – social, political and spiritual. His rise was the ungainly clambering of a man making his way up the forbidding stone face of Purgatory.
Socially, Cromwell spent most of his early life on the narrow edge of respectability rather than embedded comfortably within it, for he was the son of a second son. He was tantalizingly close to real fortune. His grandfather, Sir Henry, had been sheriff of both Huntingdonshire and Cambridgeshire, a member of the Elizabethan parliament and opulent enough in his entertainments at least to be called ‘the Golden Knight’ by the Queen. His oldest son (also called Oliver) also managed to cut a stylish figure both at court and in East Anglia: a herald at the funeral of James I; married into Dutch and Genoese banking money. All of which made the much more modest circumstances of Oliver’s father, Robert, glaringly uncomfortable. Uncle Oliver’s money was needed to keep the modest estate afloat and to send young Oliver (the only surviving boy in a family of seven children) to the Inns of Court in London. There, however, he made what seemed to be his saving fortune by marrying Elizabeth Bourchier, a wealthy London fur-trader’s daughter. He seemed very much on his way up. With a legal education and some funds in hand he was elected to the parliament of 1628 which saw the dramatic struggle over the Petition of Right. But there was no sign, in that momentous year, that Oliver Cromwell was anything but a silent back-bencher while the debates over prerogative and the common law were thundering around him. All that is known of his presence amid the political furore was that the royal physician, Sir Theodore Mayerne, treated Cromwell for severe depression – valde melancholicus – a condition that would often revisit him. (In fact, his wild mood swings – from bursts of disconcerting laughter while praising the Lord for a particularly comprehensive annihilation of the enemy, to his descents into scowling gloom – suggest the classic symptoms of clinical depression.)
Whatever the cause, around 1629–30 Cromwell’s fortunes seem to have collapsed. By 1631 his circumstances had become so parlous that he was forced to sell almost all of his land and transplant himself to St Ives in Huntingdonshire. There he farmed about 17 acres, not as the squire of the manor but as a yeoman tenant, leasing holdings from Cambridge colleges and working the land alongside his hired hands. Cromwell’s social descent and his experience of rural toil in these years gave him a closeness to the speech and habits of ordinary people which became a priceless asset when he translated it into the charisma of military command. He never lost the soft East Anglian burr in his voice, and when he spoke about the ‘plain russet-coated captains’, the ‘honest’ men he wanted at the core of his army, Cromwell knew exactly what and whom he was talking about. Before his fall from genteel ease, he had also been on the losing end of a bitter local political dispute in Huntingdon when the royal government had changed the borough charter. Cromwell was among the local gentry discomfited by the changes and, for the first but not the last time, let the vainglorious winners feel the rough edge of his tongue. One of his adversaries complained about the ‘disgraceful and unseemly speeches’ he made against the mayor and recorder of Huntingdon, which were aggressive enough to get him reported to the Privy Council.
De profundis, politically marginalized, socially demoted, submerged below sea-level in the sodden Fens, Cromwell was suddenly reborn. It was this conversion experience, so he believed (rather than a timely inheritance from a bachelor uncle), which started him on the road to redemption. A justly famous letter to his cousin, the wife of Oliver St John, written later in 1638, but recalling his redemption, is a classic of Pauline-Calvinist reawakening: ‘Oh, I lived in and loved darkness, and hated the light. I was a chief, the chief of sinners. This is true; I hated godliness, yet God had mercy on me. O the riches of His mercy!’
His political election – to the Short and then the Long Parliament in 1640 as member for Cambridge – was less important than his spiritual election to stand forth and do God’s bidding. Or rather, political life for Oliver Cromwell was a spiritual office. Whatever accountability he might nominally have to his electors or to the king was as nothing compared to his accountability before God. Although he had become a man of some substance again, living in Ely, Cromwell still thought of himself as a marginal man in the world of the grandees. His distance from and deep scepticism of oligarchs and aristocrats, even those who professed proper parliamentary opinions, gave him the unwavering resolution they often lacked. While he was deeply committed (and would always be) to the prevailing social order, he did not believe it would be subverted by a forthright challenge to the king’s presumptions. On the contrary, only by resisting those presumptions, the corrupt arrogance of a court, could this ancient and essentially benevolent English hierarchy be securely preserved. Unlike many, in and out of the parliaments of 1640–2, Cromwell was not afraid of a fight, always provided that it was for a godly cause. He was convinced, much earlier than most, that a great struggle between the forces of righteousness and unrighteousness was inevitable and that to pretend otherwise was false comfort. By knowing that it would be so Cromwell made it so, becoming the most vocal member of the Commons to demand that the authority to appoint Lords-Lieutenant and to muster militia be transferred from the king to parliament. As far as Cromwell was concerned, the war did not begin with the raising of the royal standard in Nottingham but much earlier, in the Irish rebellion behind which he saw the bloody hand of Stuart machination. Putting the country ‘into a posture of defence’, he urged, with a clarity which Hobbes would have grudgingly admired, was no more than an act of timely self-preservation.
So where others dithered and hesitated, Oliver Cromwell acted. Having raised a troop of sixty horse in Cambridgeshire, he used it to seize Cambridge Castle for the parliament and to stop the removal of college and university plate to the king’s war chest. Dead straight-ahead decisiveness was to be the hallmark of Cromwell’s spectacular career during the war itself (in such contrast to his later indecisiveness in the world of pure politics). He had no time for those whom he suspected – first Denzil Holles, then the Earl of Manchester – who fought, always with an eye to negotiation rather than to total victory, or for those like Essex who he thought shrank from engagement. Equivocation was unworthy of the helmeted Jehovah who he knew fought on his side. Inside the hymn-singing, pocket Bible-carrying New Model Army, Cromwell turned Gideon: the leader of a godly troop. He played it for all it was worth, helping John Dillingham, editor of The Parliament Scout, to drum up the Cromwellian reputation as a general in his newsbook, because he undoubtedly believed that he had been designated by the Lord of Hosts to lead his captains and corporals. And Cromwell also understood that the rank-and-file soldiers would respond better to an officer who never betrayed any doubts about the rightness of the cause or the certainty of eventual victory. This spiritual armour-plating did not make Cromwell any less of an intelligent tactician, for all his lack of military experience or training. What he brought to Marston Moor and Naseby (and learned from the failure at Edgehill) was a cavalry strong enough to take the impact of an enemy charge and flexible enough to regroup for a counter-offensive to which an undeployed reserve could be added for additional force. He was also blessed with the one quality without which all paper planning would be useless: an infallible sense of timing. Cromwell could ‘read’ a battle, right through the din and the choking smoke and the chaos, and have an uncanny sense of how to react to its ebb and flow. This did not mean, however, that he sat at a distance surveying the carnage with his perspective glass. On the contrary, he was usually to be found in the thick of it, leading charges, urging on pikemen and dragoons, risking (and sometimes taking) a wound but always surviving. His personal bravery and steely composure in the heat of battle won the trust of men who were being asked to put themselves in harm’s way. How could they not believe in a general who never lost? (Even the indecisive second battle of Newbury was at worst an unsatisfying draw.) With every fresh victory, Cromwell’s soldiers had proof that they were themselves protected by the general’s close relations with Providence. Faith that his soldiers were truly doing God’s work was not the same, though, as assuming that the army rather than parliament should dictate the political fate of the nation.
The two Cromwells – the socially conservative believer in the ancient constitution and the zealous evangelical reformer – were still at odds within his own personality. Despite the presence of true Puritans like Sir Robert Harley in the parliament, Cromwell, like Ireton, was unsure of its commitment to godly reformation. But the thought of imposing a settlement at sword point on parliament still made him uneasy, right through the crisis of the summer and autumn of 1647. A regime of generals, however pious, was not what he had fought for. A year later, though, many of these reservations had fallen away in the ferocity of the second civil war. Presbyterianism no longer seemed the vanguard, but the rearguard, of the pure. Its parliamentary champions such as Holles seemed frightened by true liberty of conscience and even prepared, like the Scots, to make a cheap bargain with the king to secure the interests of their own narrow Church. They had ‘withdrawn their shoulder from the Lord’s work through fleshly reasonings’, he wrote. So even though he let Ireton do the hatchet work and disingenuously remained at a distance from Colonel Pride’s Purge, Cromwell was no longer a devout believer in the sacrosanct untouchability of the Long Parliament. He was already the sceptic of the mask of legalism. ‘If nothing should be done but what is according to the law,’ he would say before yet another of the purges he sponsored (that of the second Protectorate parliament),’the throat of the nation may be cut while we send for some to make a law.’ This is the rationalization of all coups d’état.
When Cromwell joined the republic’s Council of State in 1649, however, he never imagined he was presiding over the conversion of a parliamentary state into a military-theocratic dictatorship. It was merely the old parliament, riddled with equivocation and bad faith, that had needed to be got rid of. And when on 15 March he accepted the command of the expedition to suppress the Irish revolt Cromwell did so, in his own mind, as the servant rather than the master of the ‘Keepers of the Nation’s Liberties’, as the Rump styled itself. Even as ‘Lord-Lieutenant’ Cromwell was still, in theory at least, subordinate to the commander-in-chief of the Commonwealth armies, Fairfax. All the issues of titles and authority, which seemed to exercise many people, were for Cromwell beside the point. ‘I would not have the army now so much look at considerations that are personal,’ he told the Council of State, ‘whether or no we shall go if such a Commander or such a Commander go and make that any part of our measure or foundation: but let us go if God go.’ He was clear in his own mind that, unless Ireland was subjugated, it would always remain the springboard of an invasion of England: perhaps even half of a pincer movement, with the other thrust coming from Scotland where Charles II had been declared king. So while the innocent might think 1649 a time to sit back and settle the Commonwealth, for Cromwell it was still very much a pressing wartime emergency.
But emergency or not, what Oliver Cromwell then perpetrated in Ireland in the autumn of 1649 has been remembered as one of the most infamous atrocities in the entirety of British history, an enormity so monstrous that it has shadowed the possibility of Anglo-Irish co-existence ever since. Unquestionably, events of appalling cruelty took place at Drogheda and Wexford. But exactly what happened, and to whom, has for centuries been clouded with misunderstanding. Only recently have Irish historians like Tom Reilly, a native son of Drogheda, had the courage and scholarly integrity to get the story right. Getting it right, moreover, is not in any sense exoneration or extenuation. It is explanation.
The first thing to get right is just who the victims at Drogheda were. The vast majority were neither Catholic nor Gaelic Irish, nor were any of them unarmed civilians, the women and children of Father Murphy’s largely mythical history published in 1883. For in the first instance Cromwell was being sent by the Council of State and the Rump Parliament to confront not the Catholic Confederates who had risen in 1641, but a royalist, largely Protestant army led by the Duke of Ormonde, which for many years, until the execution of the king, had been fighting against, not alongside, the rebels led by Owen Roe O’Neill. Drogheda, from the beginning a staunchly loyalist Old English town, had in fact defied the siege of Phelim O’Neill’s insurgent army in 1641. At the time, then, when Cromwell and thirty-five of his fleet of 130 ships, carrying 12,000 troops, set sail from Milford Haven, there were no fewer than four distinct armies in Ireland: the Gaelic-Irish forces of the Confederacy, dominated by Owen Roe O’Neill and Cardinal Rinuccini; the royalist army of Ormonde; the Scots-Presbyterian army in Ulster of General Monro, which had been pro-parliament but since the proclamation of Charles II in Scotland was now potentially another enemy of the English; and finally the English parliamentary forces commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Michael Jones. It’s quite true that a negotiated truce between the royalist army and the Irish-Catholic Confederation had simplified this military quadrille for Cromwell, but as much as he heartily detested Roman Catholicism and believed that the Irish rebellion was a Trojan Horse, not just for the Stuarts but for Rome and even Spain (he was to his marrow an Elizabethan in this respect), he also identified the immediate and most formidable enemy in Ireland not as Irish Catholic but as royalist. If he was about to be merciless in his onslaught it was because he had been equally implacable in his prosecution of the evidently unfinished second civil war.
Cromwell made no secret of his contempt for the native Irish population. In common with many of his Puritan contemporaries, he believed the pornographic exaggerations of the atrocity propaganda by which most Englishmen got news of the rebellion of 1641: all those impaled Presbyterian babies and mutilated patriarchs in Ulster and Leinster. ‘You, unprovoked,’ he wrote to the Irish bishops in 1650, ‘put the English to the most unheard-of and most barbarous massacre (without respect of sex and age) that ever the sun beheld.’ There’s also no doubt that his credulous belief in the bestiality of the Irish hardened him against any suffering that might be inflicted on the native population as a result of the campaign. But this did not turn him to genocide. Soldiers, not civilians, were the targets of his fury. In fact, and in keeping with his practice in past campaigns in England, Cromwell went out of his way, publicly, to threaten retribution against any of his troops found assaulting the unarmed and unresisting population. Before the siege of Drogheda ever got under way, two of his men were hanged expressly for violating that prohibition. Nor did Cromwell have any particular relish for the inevitable bloodshed. It was precisely because he might have anticipated General Sherman’s dictum that ‘war is hell’ that he resolved to wage it with maximum ferocity, the better to shorten its duration.
Whenever there was a chance of intimidating a defending stronghold into capitulation without loss of life, Cromwell did whatever he could to make that happen. At Drogheda, commanding the main road between Dublin and Ulster, he believed there was just such a chance, since the commander, the royalist veteran (and one of its few Catholics) Sir Arthur Aston, was hopelessly outnumbered, not least in the heavy artillery department where Cromwell could bring massive siege mortars to bear on any attack. In an attempt to obtain Aston’s peaceful surrender on the morning of 10 September Cromwell delivered a chilling ultimatum to him:
Sir, having brought the army belonging to the parliament of England before this place, to reduce it to obedience, to the end the effusion of blood may be prevented, I thought fit to summon you to deliver the same into my hands to their use. If this be refused you will have no cause to blame me. I expect your answer and rest, your servant, O. Cromwell.
Aston, of course, summarily rejected the ultimatum. The experience of the long-drawn-out siege of 1641–2 and the apparently imposing walls of Drogheda made him believe that the town could hold out against the first shock of Cromwell’s assault, at least long enough for him to be relieved by troops supplied by Ormonde. As it turned out, he was tragically deluded twice over. Drogheda’s walls did not hold, and on the day of the attack Ormonde’s troops were nowhere in sight, though he had sent a small number of reinforcements to the garrison the day before. It took Cromwell’s guns no more than a few hours to blast breaches in the outer walls, but longer for his infantry to penetrate those breaches, furiously defended by royalist soldiers among whom was young Edmund Verney, Ralph’s brother. The gaps choked with wounded and dying, Cromwell himself led a third and decisive charge into the breach. The defenders fell back into a flimsily defended stockade area on Mill Mount, while some of them retreated to the tower and steeple of the Protestant Church of St Peter.
What then happened was not unprecedented in the appalling history of seventeenth-century warfare, and especially not in the Irish wars. The Scottish-Presbyterian General Monro massacred 3000 at Island Magee. After the battle of Knockanauss in 1647 Colonel Michael Jones had 600 prisoners killed in cold blood and deserters from his own side (including his own nephew) hanged. But it was, all the same, an obscenity. Cromwell’s own account of what he did is startlingly unapologetic and without any kind of procrastination or euphemism: ‘our men getting up to them (Aston and his men on Mill Mount), were ordered by me to put them all to the sword. And indeed, being in the heat of action, I forbade them to spare any that were in arms in the town, and, I think, that night they put to the sword about 2000 men.’ At least 3000 royalist soldiers were massacred in Drogheda, the vast majority not as they were frantically fighting the parliamentary troops, but when they had all but given up and were either surrendered or disarmed. The refusal of quarter to unresisting, defeated men was a calculated slaughter. At St Peter’s Church, Cromwell had his soldiers burn the pews beneath the steeple to smoke out the defenders who had taken refuge in the tower, with the result that many fell to their deaths in flames along with the bells and masonry which came crashing down. The murders were so inhuman that it seems certain that not all of Cromwell’s officers could bring themselves to obey his orders and that some actually went out of their way to save their enemies.
This atrocity inflicted on soldiers, few of whom were either Irish or Catholic, is surely sufficiently unforgivable to indict Cromwell, without any additional need to subscribe to the fiction that he deliberately or even passively extended the massacre to civilians. As Reilly correctly points out, the stories of women and children raped and mutilated, derive in their entirety from non eye-witnesses, virtually all of them either passionate royalists (like the antiquarian Anthony Wood), who published the stories during the Restoration witch-hunts against republicans, or compilers of accounts at least one or two centuries after the fact. Wood’s brother Thomas, who had fought for the royalists in England, then switched sides to parliament, then reversed his allegiance again in the Restoration, was notorious for his buffooning and indulgence in tall tales, and, obviously anxious to exonerate himself, was the source of many of the juiciest stories. His version of Drogheda, repeated by Wood, supplied the story of Aston being beaten to death with his own wooden leg (though he was certainly robbed by his killers of gold worn on a belt around his body), and that of the mysterious martyred ‘virgin’ (how would they know in the heat of battle?) arrayed in her finest jewels and finery, who was stabbed in the ‘belly or fundament’ by marauding troopers. None of this apocrypha is needed to make the case for the prosecution. The most damning witness against Cromwell is Cromwell, who makes no bones about his deliberate intention to perpetrate a slaughter so ghastly that it would dissuade other strongholds from making Drogheda’s mistake and refusing peaceful capitulation.
The strategy of terror worked. In many other places along his march – New Ross, for example – the fate of Drogheda did indeed guarantee a bloodless surrender. Even at Wexford, where the defending troops and civilian inhabitants, unlike those at Drogheda, were Catholic and holding the town for the Irish Confederacy, and where there was another terrible slaughter, the military governor had not in fact refused to capitulate before the violence began on 11 October. Although he had, as usual, made it unequivocally clear what would happen were his ultimatum refused, Cromwell promised the governor, Colonel Sinnott, that should there be a surrender he would let the soldiers and non-commissioned officers depart peacefully, once they had undertaken not to take up arms again, and make the officers prisoners. ‘And as for the inhabitants, I shall engage myself that no violence shall be offered to their goods, and that I shall protect the town from plunder.’ Sinnott never got this note. While negotiations were still under way firing broke out, and in no time at all the parliamentary troops were inside the city killing as many of the other side as they possibly could. Once again it’s no mitigation of the horror to realize that civilians were not among the masses of dead at Wexford. The most tragic and numerous civilian deaths occurred when there was a panicky rush for the boats moored at the quayside. Overloaded, they inevitably capsized, drowning people. At least 2000 perished – 300 by drowning – at Wexford that day, including priests (some of whom, understandably, may have been armed) as well as soldiers.
Cromwell is unlikely to have shed tears for the fate of the Fathers. He made no secret of the fact that he did not regard the priesthood as innocent bystanders to the conflict, but as conspiring agents of the forces of Antichrist. When the Catholic prelates of Ireland accused him, at the end of 1649, of deliberately aiming to ‘extirpate’ their religion from the country, Cromwell responded, in January 1650, with a lengthy, thunderous denunciation which exposed in the most extraordinary way the intensity of his passions and prejudices and his selective, Protestant version of Anglo-Irish history:
You say your union is against a common enemy . . . I will give you some wormwood to bite on, by which it will appear God is not with you. Who is it that created this common enemy? I suppose you mean Englishmen. The English! Remember ye Hypocrites, Ireland was once united to England; Englishmen had good Inheritances, which many of them purchased with their money; they or their Ancestors from many of you and your Ancestors . . . They lived Peaceably honestly amongst you. . . . You broke this union!
It was the clergy, he asserted, who were responsible for deluding the poor common people in the snares of their theological fraud, while reaping the benefits of wealth and rank. Cromwell bluntly owned up to his refusal neither to tolerate the saying of the Mass ‘nor suffer you that are Papists: where I can find you seducing the People, or by any overt act violating the Lawes established’. Catholics in Ireland, in other words, were to be treated just as harshly as, but no worse than, Catholics in England. As far as private practice was concerned, they were to be left alone: ‘As for the People, what thoughts they have in matters of Religion in their owne breasts I cannot reach; but thinke it my duty, if they walk honestly and peaceably, not to cause them in the least to suffer for the same, but shall endeavour to walke patiently and in love towards them: to see if at any time it shall please God to give them another or a better minde.’ As for the charges of ‘extirpation’ through ‘Massacring, destroying or banishing the Catholique Inhabitants . . . good now, give us an instance of one man since my coming into Ireland, not in armse, massacred, destroyed or banished; concerning the two first of which, justice hath not been done or endeavoured to be done.’ As the evidence shows, he had a point. But Cromwell’s passions, rather than his reason, rose like a tidal wave at the end of his tirade. Scornfully rejecting the notion that the English army had come expressly to rob the Irish of lands, he readily conceded that the soldiers had been, as usual, promised recompense from the confiscated lands of proven rebels, but:
I can give you a better reason for the Armies comming over then this; England hath had experience of the blessing of God in prosecuting just and righteous causes, what ever the cost and hazard be. And if ever men were engaged in a righteous cause in the World, this wil be scarce a second to it . . . We come to breake the power of a company of lawlesse Rebels, who having cast off the authority of England, live as enemies to humane society, whose Principles (the world hath experience of) are to destroy and subjugate all men not complying with them. We come (by the assistance of God) to hold forth and maintaine the lustre and glory of English liberty in a Nation where we have an undoubted right to doe it.
This is, to the core, absolutely authentic Cromwell and today it makes unbearable reading. It is not the same as the unwitting confession of a genocidal lunatic, but it is the unwitting confession of a pig-headed, narrow-minded, Protestant bigot and English imperialist. And that is quite bad enough.
Even for his most devoted warrior, however, God could occasionally drop his guard. Except at Clonmel in County Tipperary, where Cromwell botched an attack, there was not a lot the remaining royalist and Irish armies could do to stop the relentless campaign of subjugation. Most of the strongholds in Munster in the south fell to his army. But his own troops were not immune to Major Hunger and Colonel Sickness, which launched a pitiless offensive in the awful winter of 1649–50. Cromwell himself became seriously ill as the attrition rate in his army rose to devastating levels. Even though he issued draconian prohibitions forbidding his soldiers from wantonly stealing and looting from the native population, the orders were unenforceable. In all likelihood, several hundred thousand more died from those kinds of depredations, as well as from the epidemics of plague and dysenteric fevers which swept through war-ravaged Ireland, than from the direct assault of English soldiers. It was, all the same, a horror, and it went on and on and on.
Cromwell was recalled by the Council of State in April 1650 and appointed Ireton as his deputy, but the country was still by no means pacified. Ireton would die on campaign the following year, and Ludlow, with good reason for trepidation, became temporary commander-in-chief, until July 1652, when he was replaced by Charles Fleetwood. Forcibly reunited with England, Ireland went through another huge transfer of land: the gentry and nobility associated with the revolt were stripped of their estates in the east, centre and south, and transplanted to much smaller and much less fertile lands in stony Connacht in the west. Some of the officers and men taken prisoner on the campaign – at Wexford, for example – were treated as chattel prizes and sold as indentured quasi-slaves for transport to Barbados.
Cromwell returned to England the Puritan Caesar. More than Marston Moor, Naseby or Preston, it was the Irish campaign in all its gruesome ugliness which had made him an English hero. He had revenged 1641. He had laid the lash on the barbarians. He was covered in laurels and greeted by shouts of acclamation. Thousands cheered him on Hounslow Heath. The young Andrew Marvell addressed a Horatian ode to the victor, confident that he remained unspoiled by triumph:
How good he is, how just,
And fit for highest Trust:
Nor yet grown stiffer with Command,
But still in the Republik’s hand:
How fit he is to sway
That can so well obey.
Whether or not Cromwell’s head was beginning to be turned by all this noisy adulation, he continued to insist that he was still the servant of God and the Commonwealth. And, debilitated as he was by whatever sickness he had contracted in Ireland, Cromwell also knew there was at least one more decisive campaign to fight in the interminable British wars before the task of’ healing and settling’, as he often referred to it, could be undertaken. Marvell agreed:
But thou the Wars and Fortunes son
March indefatigably on.
This next war would be in the north. For in the summer of 1650, the twenty-year-old Charles II had arrived to assume his throne in Scotland. It had not been his first choice for a theatre of counterattack. In every way, not least the presence of Ormonde’s army, Ireland would have been (as Cromwell had guessed) a much more desirable operational base, but the events of late 1649 had put paid to that hope. So, more in desperation than jubilation, Charles had met with Scots negotiators in Holland and had agreed to their dismayingly severe condition that he sign the National Covenant which had first seen the light of day as a battle-cry against his father. Much had happened since 1637, of course, and in extremis even Charles I had been prepared to accept it as the price for Scottish support. All the same, Charles II was, as the Scots themselves knew, an even more unlikely Presbyterian, being not much given to professions of Calvinist repentance. He was, even at twenty, working hard on accumulating sins to repent of, beginning with the first of a long string of mistresses, Lucy Walter, who bore him the bastard Duke of Monmouth. As a young man Charles was already what he would be all his life: effortlessly charming, affable, intelligent, languid and hungrily addicted to sex, in every respect the polar opposite of his chaste, austere, publicly conscientious but neurotically reserved father. When Charles II was introduced to Lady Anne Murray, who had helped his younger brother James escape from England disguised as a girl, he promised that, if ever it was in his power to reward her as she should deserve, he would do so. ‘And with that,’ she wrote, ‘the King laid his hand upon mine as they lay upon my breast.’ This was the sort of gesture that came naturally – for better or worse – to Charles. It was almost impossible not to like him and almost as impossible to take him seriously. But once in Scotland, he chafed against the vigilance imposed on him by the Covenanter leaders like the Marquis of Argyll, hoping somehow to be liberated by a genuinely royalist Scottish army led by Montrose – until that is, the hitherto indestructible and elusive Montrose was betrayed by the Scottish parliament, seized, taken to Edinburgh and hanged and quartered, his several parts distributed throughout Scotland.
The Covenanter suspicion of royalist contamination of their army led them to purge it of any officers and troops whom they believed to be potentially disloyal. The result was a large but unwieldy and amateurish force, led by General David Leslie. It was this army that Cromwell smashed at the battle of Dunbar in September 1650. He had come to the command only after Fairfax (whose wife was a Presbyterian Scot and who had fought alongside the Covenanters) had refused to lead the northern expedition. The numerical odds were against Cromwell, but he offset them with one of his headlong cavalry-led onslaughts right at the thick of the Scottish force an hour before dawn when they were not yet properly mustered. Thousands were killed in the brief mêlée, thousands more taken prisoner.
The Scots retreated, as so often before, out of Midlothian and Fife across the Forth to Stirling, and Charles was duly inaugurated at Scone on 1 January 1651. But despite appalling weather and over-extended supply-lines, Cromwell took the war to them, crossing the Firth of Forth. In the summer of 1651, Charles and Leslie took what they thought was the audacious step of leaving Cromwell’s army floundering in the rain and mud while they marched west and south into England itself. The hope was (as it would be for Charles’s great-nephew Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1745) that, once inside England, a nation of burning Stuart royalists would flock to his standard. And, as in 1745, it never happened. It was not that the entire country was so devoted to the new Commonwealth that rallying to Charles was under any circumstances unthinkable. It was rather that the armies of the republic were so obviously still formidable that it made absolutely no sense to anyone but the most blindly devoted royalist to hazard their safety by supporting so reckless a gamble. So the march down western England to Worcester – where, as Cromwell noted, the civil wars had begun – was a lonely and exclusively Scottish business. Cromwell had let them go deep into the heart of England from which there could be no way back. What had begun as a daring venture had become a steel trap closing fast on Charles II. Another substantial army moved north and west to join Cromwell. Together, outside Worcester, some 28,000 Commonwealth troops faced a royalist-Scottish army of hardly more than half that number. The result was a bloody catastrophe, which ended at twilight with men still hacking at each other in the streets of the city.
Oliver Cromwell returned to an even noisier triumph in London than had greeted his Irish victory. Charles embarked on the extraordinary six-week flight from captivity, which was the coolest and bravest thing he would ever do. Although once he got back to Paris and the exiled court he invented a great number of details – to avoid incriminating his helpers, it was said, but also because he evidently enjoyed telling the stories – the truth of his adventure was astonishing enough. Disguised as a country yeoman, with his mane of black curls cropped short, his face darkened with nut juice to look more weather-beaten and wearing a rough leather doublet, Charles outsmarted and outran his pursuers. Relying on a network of royalists in the West Country, many of them Catholics and thus expert at improvised concealment, Charles hid first in the Staffordshire woods around Boscobel House, the home of the Penderel brothers. Then, having failed to cross the Severn in an attempt to get to Wales, Charles was first hidden in a hayloft and then walked in the rain back to Boscobel, where he slept exhausted in one of the great oaks in the park while troopers searched the estate for him. For royalist legend-makers it was a perfectly emblematic moment: the young hope of the future safely cradled in the fatherly embrace of the ancient English tree. There followed a ride across country disguised as ‘William Jackson’, the manservant of Jane Lane; failure to find a safe passage either from Bristol or from Bridport in Dorset, where the quays and taverns were crawling with Commonwealth soldiers about to be shipped to the Channel Islands; and then abortive wanderings along the south coast before finally finding a reliable ship, the Surprise, at Shoreham in Sussex. Given the £1000 price on his head, and his willingness to test the limits of his disguise by engaging in reckless banter about the rogue Charles Stuart (the sort of game that amused the king), it was astonishing that he was not, in fact, betrayed or discovered. To royalists who had reconciled themselves to submitting for the time being to Leviathan, his near miraculous survival gave them a consoling legend to develop in competition with Cromwell’s depressing record of invincibility.
Charles II’s escape, dependent as it was on so many helping hands, says something important about this very English revolution: that it was (for its own good) deficient in those elements which make for the survival of republics – police and paranoia. Whether you were a gung-ho republican like Edmund Ludlow, a visionary like John Lilburne or a wistful royalist like John Evelyn, it was glaringly obvious that the Commonwealth had signally failed to develop an independent republican culture to replace the banished monarchy. No revolution, especially not those in eighteenth-century France or twentieth-century Russia or China, could hope to survive for even as long as they did without a conscious cultural programme for the redirection of allegiance. Those programmes were aggressively, even brutally, executed to orchestrate loyalty in the interests of the new state. (Hobbes would have understood this very well.) In their requirements of public demonstrations of allegiance – sung, sworn, chanted, enthusiasm reinforced by fear – they would make political neutrality either an impossibility or a crime. There could be no going back.
Nothing of the sort happened in the Britain of the 1650s. And in this sense the shocking drama of the beheading of Charles I is a misleading guide to the true nature of the Commonwealth and Cromwell’s Protectorate. For the men who ran the country were not Jacobins, much less Bolsheviks, in stove-pipe hats and fallen collars. They were clear-eyed pragmatists who were prepared to mouth the necessary shibboleths about ‘Liberty’, always provided these were vague enough to avoid a commitment to anything like a systematic programme of radical change in, for example, the procedures of the law (as the Levellers had wanted). There had been a lopping all right, a lopping such as has never happened before or since. The king, court, house of peers and bishops had all gone. But this still left a lot of England undisturbed – the England that most of the bigwigs who now ran it, like Henry Marten and Arthur Haselrig, had grown up with, and were partial to and, for all the sound and fury of 1649, had never dreamed of doing away with in the name of some imagined new Jerusalem. Their Zion was still comfortably seated, thank you very much, in the magistrate’s chair, in the county hunts and in city counting houses, and in the 1650s it was doing very nicely. So it was possible for unrepentant royalists like John Evelyn (again in startling contrast to the fate of émigrés in the French Revolution) to travel back and forth between London and the Stuart court in Paris, armed with a passport issued to him personally by John Bradshaw, the judge who had presided over the court which had tried the king and who had sentenced him to death! In that same year, 1649, Evelyn bought himself another country estate, and in February 1652 he came back for good, in effect taking the Leviathan option offered by another of the returnees, his friend Hobbes, ‘no more intending to go out of England, but endeavor a settled life, either in this place [Deptford], or some other, there being now so little appearance of any change for the better, all being intirely in the rebells hands’.
But no prospect, either, for Evelyn of some nightmarish descent into revolutionary terror. In fact he saw, at first hand, an impressive demonstration of the republic’s commitment to upholding the traditional regime of law and order after he had been relieved by a pair of robbers at knife point, while riding through Bromley forest, of two rings (one emerald, one onyx) and a pair of buckles ‘set with rubies and diamonds’. The mere fact that Evelyn wore all this glittering hardware at all while out for a ride scarcely suggests he thought of the Commonwealth to which he had returned as an inferno of social chaos and disorder. And he was right. After two hours tied up against an oak ‘tormented with the flies, the ants, the sunn’, he managed to get loose, find his horse and ride to ‘Colonel Blount’s, a greate justiciarie of the times, who sent out a hugh & crie immediately’. In London Evelyn had notices of the mugging printed and distributed, and within a mere two days knew exactly what had become of his valuables, which were duly restored to him. A month later he was summoned to appear at the trial of one of the thieves, but not being ‘willing to hang the fellow . . . I did not appeare’. For the swift return of his jewellery and the exemplary apprehension of the malefactors Evelyn was ‘eternaly obliged to give thanks to God my Savior’. But he might also have given some credit to the smooth operation of the law in regicide England. For the next eight years of the interregnum he spent his days much as he would had there been a king on the throne, the significant exception being the difficulty of finding acceptable sermons to hear and the prohibition on celebrating Christmas, which upset him greatly (especially when one clandestine service was raided). But he went about his business, attending to his own estates and advising acquaintances and learned colleagues and gentry on the landscaping and arboriculture of their properties.
In the summer of 1654 Evelyn was able to stay for an extended time in Oxford, now transformed from the Laudian capital of the king and governed by heads of colleges like his host Dr Wilkins of Wadham, approved of by the Protector. Obedient or not, Oxford was none the less a congenial place of science and learning where Evelyn made the acquaintance of many of the prodigies who would be his colleagues in the Royal Society, including ‘that prodigious young Scholar Mr. Christopher Wren, who presented me with a piece of White Marble he had stained with a lively red [presumably in imitation of porphyry], very deepe, as beautifull as if it had ben naturall’. In fact Evelyn’s entire journey through England – through the West Country and back to East Anglia and Cromwell’s Cambridge – is a record of a country conspicuously going about its business, war damage being repaired, farms flourishing (even in a decade of some economic dislocation), gentlemen planning ‘beautifications’ to their houses and gardens. It was certainly not a country in shock.
And it was still being run largely by men of a practical, rather than a messianic, temper. To read the journal of a man like Bulstrode Whitelocke, the Middle Temple lawyer turned Buckinghamshire gentleman and MP, Commissioner of the Great Seal and a friend of Cromwell’s, is to be struck once more by the relentless normality of his life, by the imperturbable continuity before and after the killing of the monarch. What electrified Whitelocke in 1649 was not Charles I’s death. A staunch parliamentarian and moderate Puritan inclining towards the Independent view of liberty of conscience, he had none the less been against the trial and had declined to serve as one of the commissioners of the court (a gesture which in Jacobin Paris would have booked him a certain date with the guillotine). But Whitelocke had more important things to think about – above all the death of his second wife, Frances, a trauma which almost unhinged him. With all his misgivings about what the Commonwealth was supposed to be, and his sense that any English state ought to have ‘something of a monarchy’ about it (he suggested the youngest Stuart, Prince Henry of Gloucester, as a potential replacement, being of an age to be re-educated in political virtue and moderation), Whitelocke sailed on serenely in public life.
Men like Whitelocke, as well as the other dominant figures of the Council of State and the Rump Parliament, invested far more time and energy in preventing any sort of radical change than in promoting it. Their tenure in power suggests perhaps what a pragmatic government might have looked like had Charles I actually succeeded in winning over men like John Pym, rather than just appointing a few token opposition figures to his Privy Council in 1641. Instead of the firebrands he feared, Charles might have had what men like Henry Marten, Henry Vane and Arthur Haselrig had become – businessmen of state, mercantilists, money-managers. And, in their swaggering, beady-eyed way, fierce patriots. For if there was some sort of republican ideology that had replaced the inadequate and suspect policy of the Stuarts and around which the English (rather than the British) could indeed rally, it was that of the aggressive prosecution of the national interest. It’s all too easy to think of the Commonwealth after the battle of Worcester as living in a kind of pious peace. In fact, it lived in profane war with first the Dutch, then the Portuguese and then the Spanish. It was, as behooved a set of rulers who were excessively misty-eyed about the memory of the sainted Virgin Queen, the most successful warrior state, especially on the high seas, since the death of Elizabeth, in glaring contrast to the string of military fiascos perpetrated by the hapless Stuarts. Admiral Blake succeeded where Buckingham had failed. Cromwell at his most merciless triumphed where Essex had failed. The republic hammered out an empire not only in Britain (where both James I and Charles I had most pathetically failed) but overseas too, in the North Sea and the Baltic and beyond in the Atlantic, both sides of the equator. It was commercially rapacious and militarily brutal, beery chauvinism erected into a guiding principle of state. So a better guide to this kind of Britain than the execution of its king would be the Navigation Act of 1651, which prohibited any ships other than British or those of the country of origin from bringing cargoes to Britain, thus taking deadly aim at the shipping supremacy of the Dutch. It was a policy to maximize business which (another first) the state was prepared to back up with war if that’s what it took. Often it did.
Was this it, then? Was this the reason nearly 200,000 had lost their lives in battle, and far more than that number through disease and misery, just so that Britain could be run by a corporate alliance of county gentry and city merchants? Henry Vane and Arthur Haselrig, and the Rumpers might have said, yes. For it may not be the new Jerusalem but it is no small thing, this liberty of self-interest and of religious conscience. It’s a big thing. (And it would seem unquestionably big when making a return appearance at Philadelphia in 1776.) But for Oliver Cromwell, the godly Caesar, it was never, somehow, quite big enough. He was haunted by the thought that this do-as-you-like Britain was too paltry a dividend for all the blood sacrifices that had been made. His long, rambling speeches to the parliaments of the interregnum, which must have been almost as much torture to listen to as they were to give, combed relentlessly through the history of the civil wars in a hopeless effort to define the essential, redeeming meaning of the conflict.
Cromwell could never establish, to his own satisfaction, that clear and unarguable rationale because, just as he was hoping to ‘heal and settle’ the nation, the civil war was being fought all over again within his own personality. It was the same struggle that continued to frustrate the search for political peace in England: the war between godliness and good order. And the outcome for Cromwell, as for the Commonwealth, was far from clear.
Enough of him belonged to the party of order to respect its strong sense that the Stuarts had been fought so as to keep England the way it was imagined to have been until they came along. That was an England in which monarchs had been bound by the common law and in which there had been no way to tax the people but through parliamentary consent. The country gentleman in Cromwell respected and subscribed to this social conservatism. But anyone who endured his speeches to parliament would have known that there was also a godly zealot inside Cromwell, for whom moral reformation was paramount. For this zealous Cromwell, it made no difference how the war had begun. What mattered was how it must end. ‘Religion was not at first the thing contended for but God brought it to that issue at last and at last it proved to be what was most dear to us.’ He had worked by indirection, making the Stuart Pharaoh stiff-necked so that his Chosen People might rise and depart. But the vision of the Promised Land was a revelation that no one could have imagined at that setting forth, and it was the task of Cromwell to bring the people to it.
So he was Gideon no more. He was Moses. And the Rumpers seemed to him, more and more, like the worshippers before the Golden Calf. Cromwell looked coldly at the unscrupulous trade in confiscated properties, at the vulgar swagger of republicans such as Henry Marten whom he despised as a drunken libertine, and he was scandalized by the profanation of God’s bounteous grace. Cromwell’s view of government was essentially pastoral, or, as he would say later, constabular. It was the obligation of men to whom God had given authority and good fortune to provide disinterested justice for their charges. What he saw in the Rump was good law denied to the people so that lawyers might line their pockets. He saw fortunes being amassed in land and trade, and men being sent to fight against the Dutch so that merchants could fill their warehouses and fatten their moneybags. Was it to satisfy such carnal appetites that his troopers had left their limbs behind on the fields of Marston Moor and Dunbar? ‘The people were dissatisfied in every corner of the nation,’ he would say in a speech in July 1653, justifying the action he took against the Rump, ‘at the non-performance of things that had been promised and were of duty to be performed.’
What galled him most was the Rump politicians’ air of self-evident indispensability. He, on the other hand, had always considered the regime of 1649 to be provisional, pending the settlement of a proper constitution for the Commonwealth. The time-serving and procrastination, he concluded, had gone on long enough. The Rump needed to expedite plans for its own liquidation. But for a year, at least, Cromwell, who genuinely hated the idea of forcing the issue at sword point, tried, together with colleagues in the army council, to get the Rump leaders themselves to concentrate on the transformation of the Commonwealth into a properly ‘settled’ form. Much energy and time were spent attempting to reconcile the parties of order and zeal. In early December 1651 Cromwell called a meeting of prominent members of parliament, including Whitelocke, Oliver St John and Speaker William Lenthall, together with senior generals, some of them, like Thomas Harrison, who were becoming impatient to transform the prosaic Commonwealth into something more closely resembling a new Jerusalem. Together they discussed what form the new state should take. Most of the generals said they wanted an ‘absolute republic’, the MPs a ‘mixed monarchy’. But one of the generals – Oliver Cromwell – allowed that some sort of monarchy might suit England best.
A little less than a year later, Bulstrode Whitelocke, the Commissioner of the Great Seal, found out why. As he strolled through St James’s Park with Cromwell, the general suddenly asked, ‘What if a man should take upon him to be King?’ Whitelocke (by his own account) replied with disarming candour, ‘I think that remedy would be worse than the disease.’ He went on to explain that, since Cromwell already had the ‘full Kingly power’ without incurring the envy and pomp of the office, why should he do something so impolitic? This dousing of cold water was not what Cromwell wanted to hear. Even less welcome was the home truth that ‘most of our Friends have engaged with us upon the hopes of having the Government settled in a Free-State, and to effect that have undergone all their hazards.’ While Whitelocke hurried to assure Cromwell that he personally thought them mistaken in their conviction that they would necessarily enjoy more liberty in a Commonwealth than in a properly restrained monarchy, he warned him that the risk of any kind of quasi-monarchy would be to destroy his own power base. ‘I thank you that you so fully consider my Condition, it is a Testimony of your love to me,’ Cromwell replied. But Whitelocke knew that the general was not ready to hear home truths.
With this the General brake off, and went to other Company, and so into Whitehall, seeming by his Countenance and Carriage displeased with what hath been said [especially Whitelocke’s advice to make contact with Charles II!]; yet he never objected it against [me] in any publick meeting afterwards.
Only his Carriage towards [me] from that time was altered, and his advising with [me] not so frequent and intimate as before; and it was not long after that he found an Occasion by honourable Imployment [an embassy to Sweden] to send [me] out of the way . . . that [I] might be no obstacle or impediment to his ambitious designs.
Even if he was not (yet) to be a king, Oliver Cromwell was moving towards an unembarrassed sense of himself as the man chosen by God to settle the political fate of the British nations, to end the ‘confusions’ of the time. The messiah was coming to dominate the manager. Psalm 110 was much on his mind and his lips: ‘The Lord shall send the rod of thy strength out of Zion: rule thou in the midst of thine enemies.’ After the deed was done, Cromwell and his officers liked to pretend that the country was desperate to be shot of the Rump. Probably, because of the taxes they had levied to finance the war against the Dutch and the armies in Scotland and Ireland, the parliament and Council of State were indeed unpopular. But that only added to the Rump’s own conviction that, once it had got the army off its back, properly reduced and obedient to the civil power, it could lighten the tax load and be seen as the nation’s saviour. To the senior army officers, of course, this diagnosis of the Commonwealth’s ills was exactly back to front. They and not the Rump were the true guardians of the people’s interests. If not the army, then who else could call the oligarchs to account for not properly attending to the plight of the common people, their denial of simple justice, the provision for a sound ministry? In other words, both sides suspected each other of scheming their self-perpetuation on the backs of the citizenry. Both sides saw the precondition for ‘settling’ the Commonwealth as being rid of the other.
Oliver Cromwell, as usual, would decide the matter, though not exactly in a temper of calm deliberation. He was both soldier and politician, and for some time could see the truth in both sides’ assertion that they were the authentic representatives of the people. But by early 1653 he was coming off the fence and down on the side of the troops whose welfare he had so often vowed to defend. In particular he was offended by the Rump’s presumption that it could dismiss the soldiers who had given so much to the nation, without adequately attending to their claims of arrears of pay and pensions. He still felt that the parliament could be induced by persuasion, or, if that’s what it took, by other means, to go quietly, consenting to its dissolution and making proper arrangements for its elected replacement. But his threshold of suspicion was low. When the Rump leaders such as Thomas Scott, Vane and Haselrig produced a plan for the piecemeal reconstitution of parliament, as and when individual members retired rather than at one fell swoop, Cromwell assumed this was a strategy of shameless self-perpetuation. Worse, he believed the gradual elections would be likely to guarantee an assembly packed with Presbyterians or ‘Neuters’ hostile to the work of godly reformation that he now thought was the Commonwealth’s true justification. Out there in the country, he felt sure, there were pure-hearted Christians who might yet be brought to Westminster to fulfil God’s purpose for England. But since the unclean and the powerful stood in their way, they needed help in getting over the stile placed in the way of realizing the republic of the saints. So, at the discussions he convened between parliamentary and army leaders, Cromwell proposed the creation of some sort of executive council to act as steward during the gap between dissolution and new elections – a body which might scrutinize the credentials of those putting themselves forward for the House. Though the Rump, in fact, owed its own preservation to Colonel Pride’s Purge in 1648, five years later it was unembarrassed about presenting itself as the guardian of parliamentary freedom against military intimidation.
Still, swords were swords. And the bullies were starting to finger the scabbards. Veiled threats of military intervention were hinted at. It seemed to work. By the evening of 19 April Cromwell evidently believed he was very close to an agreement on a plan for the dissolution and replacement of the Rump. The parliamentary leaders said they would sleep on his proposals and halt discussion on their own plan until they had given them proper consideration.
But on the following morning Cromwell learned that, instead of abandoning their own plan, the Rump leaders were hastily reading it to the House. Always on a short fuse, he now exploded. Reneging on an agreed course of action was final proof, if ever he needed it, that there was no disgraceful subterfuge to which the politicians of the Rump would not stoop if it served their own selfish interests. ‘We did not believe persons of such quality could do it,’ he said in his July 1653 speech narrating the event.
Cromwell stormed down Whitehall escorted by a company of musketeers. Leaving them outside the doors of the parliament house, he took his usual place in the chamber and for a while appeared to respect its conventions, asking the Speaker’s permission to speak, doffing his hat and commending the Rump for its ‘care of the public good’. But this was meant as an obituary, not a vote of congratulation, and as Cromwell warmed to his work niceties were thrown aside. Speaking ‘with so much passion and discomposure of mind as if he had been distracted’, he now turned on the dumbstruck members, barking at them for their indifference to justice and piety; their corrupt machinations on behalf of lawyers (an obsession of Cromwell’s); and their wicked flirtation with the Presbyterian friends of tyranny. ‘Perhaps you think this is not parliamentary language,’ one account has him saying forthrightly. ‘I confess it is not, neither are you to expect any such from me.’ The hat went back on (always a bad sign), as Cromwell left his seat and marched up and down the centre of the chamber, shouting, according to Ludlow (who was not there but heard the details from Harrison), that ‘the Lord had done with them and had chosen other instruments for the carrying on with his work that were more worthy’. Foolhardy attempts were made to stop him in full spate. Sir Peter Wentworth from Warwickshire was brave enough to get to his feet and tell Cromwell that his language was ‘unbecoming’ and ‘the more horrid in that it came from their servant and their servant whom they had so highly trusted and obliged’.
But Cromwell was now in full exterminating angel mode, glaring witheringly at the special objects of his scorn and fury: not just the presumptuous Wentworth, but Henry Vane and Henry Marten, accusing them (though unnamed) of being drunkards and whoremasters. Finally he shouted (again according to Ludlow),’You are no parliament. I say you are no parliament’ and called the musketeers into the chamber. The boots entered noisily, heavily.
The symbols of parliamentary sovereignty were now treated like trash. The Speaker was ‘helped’ down from his chair by Major-General Thomas Harrison; the mace, carried before him, was called ‘the fool’s bauble’ and taken away by the soldiers on Cromwell’s orders. The immunity of members was exposed as a joke. When Alderman Allen tried to persuade Cromwell to clear the chamber of soldiers, he himself, as treasurer of the army, was accused of embezzling funds and put in armed custody. The records of the house were seized, the room emptied, the doors locked.
It was what, in the depressing lexicon of modern politics, we would recognize as a text-book coup d’état: the bludgeoning of a representative assembly by armed coercion. In fact it was at this precise moment on the morning of 20 April 1653, when the argument of words gave way to the argument of weapons, that Cromwell himself crossed the line from bullying to despotism. In so doing he undid, at a stroke, the entire legitimacy of the war which he himself had fought against the king’s own unparliamentary principles and conduct. When he sent the Rump packing, Cromwell liked to think that he was striking a blow at ‘ambition and avarice’. But what he really wounded, and fatally, was the Commonwealth itself, whose authority (if it was not to be grounded on pure Hobbesian force) had to be based on the integrity of parliament. It’s true, of course, that the Rump had lost its own virginity five years before when its members allowed themselves to be ushered through Colonel Pride’s file of soldiers while their colleagues were barred from the chamber. And Cromwell was certainly right to believe that, if upstanding godliness was the proper qualification for serving in parliament, Marten and his ilk were unworthy of their charge.
But none of this matters a jot besides the indisputable butchery of parliamentary independence that Cromwell perpetrated that April morning, a killing that makes the presence of his statue outside the House of Commons a joke in questionable taste. Was it not to resist precisely such assaults on the liberty of the House that in the spring of 1642 parliament had determined to fight King Charles, with Cromwell himself among the most militant in asserting the House’s control over its own defences? How was this any different? Had England beheaded one king only to get itself another more ruthless in his indifference to parliament than the Stuarts?
Oh, but this was quite different, Cromwell would insist in his speech of 4 July 1653 to the first sitting of the new assembly. His purpose in dismissing the Rump had been not to deliver the coup de grâce to parliamentary government, but to give it a new lease of life. His dearest wish was to save the Commonwealth, not kill it. Leaving the Rump to its own devices, he argued, would have done just that, by hastening a parliament full of men fundamentally hostile to the essential causes for which the Republic stood – liberty of conscience and justice for the people. Instead of these saboteurs who would have killed liberty by stealth, there would now sit a gathering of dependably righteous men, appointed rather than elected, who would act as godly stewards for sixteen months while the proper institutions of government were finally ‘settled’.
The truth was that, as usual, Cromwell was learning on the job. He really had no clear idea at all what kind of assembly, if any, could or should eventually replace the remnant of the Long Parliament. God for him certainly didn’t lie in the details, always too petty to merit his concentrated attention. Instead he spoke in cryptic pieties – ‘have a care of the whole flock’ (this to the new nominated assembly) . . . ‘Love all the sheep, love the lambs, love all, and tender all’ . . . ‘Jesus Christ is owned this day by your call and you own him by your willingness in appearing here’ – none of which was especially helpful when deliberating on the fine print of constitutional arrangements. On the other hand, this kind of parsonical hot air did encourage the most optimistic of the saints, such as the Fifth Monarchist Major-General Harrison along with militant preachers like Christopher Feake, John Rogers and Vavasor Powell, to believe that the long-heralded day of the ‘saints’ appointment was finally at hand. So they pushed for a ‘Sanhedrin’ of seventy (all of their godly persuasion) to be summoned to save Britain-Israel. Harrison in particular became very excited by the coming rapture and stalked about in a scarlet coat, his red face coloured by ‘such vivacity and alacrity as a man hath when he hath drunk a cup too much’. For a brief, thrilling few weeks it seemed that Cromwell shared their high-temperature elation. Did he not address them as being on ‘the edge of . . . promises and prophecies’? Psalm 110 was invoked yet again, as if Cromwell himself was already in the throes of the anticipated rapture: ‘Thy people shall be willing in the day of thy power, in the beauties of holiness from the womb of the morning: thou hast the dew of thy youth.’
But this was not Jerusalem. It was England, where rapture and politics seldom cohabit, at least not easily. And when the fervour had abated and Cromwell had calmed down a bit, his political id, the Huntingdonshire country gentleman, leery of disorderly enthusiasm, predictably reasserted itself. And from a glance at the men of the new assembly it was obvious that the Council of Officers had chosen men as impervious to the ecstasies of revelation as any of their parliamentary predecessors; men in fact who resembled squire, rather than preacher, Cromwell. Two-thirds of the 140 were landowners, 115 of them justices of the peace. They included four baronets, four knights of the shire, an aristocrat – Lord Lisle – and the elderly Provost of Eton, Francis Rous, who had been an MP. Most of them bore names like Gilbert, William and Charles, not Adonijah or Hezekiah. So although the assembly became known after its London representative Praisegod Barbon, leather merchant and Separatist, as the ‘Barebone’s’, this was not, for the most part, a gathering of wild-eyed millenarians. What other choice was there? Once the army grandees had turned their back, on both the Leveller programme of expanding the franchise and the hotter Christian sects, the only social group from which the new assembly could be chosen was the same ride-to-hounds class (with perhaps a tad more conspicuous piety) that had always populated the benches at Westminster. Not surprisingly, then, men who would become hardy perennials of the Restoration parliaments – men such as Edward Montagu, Samuel Pepys’s patron and later the Earl of Sandwich, and Anthony Ashley Cooper (like Hobbes and Aubrey a Malmesburyite), erstwhile royalist commander in Dorset and later the Earl of Shaftesbury – first made their entry into politics in the assembly which we imagine, wrongly, to have been a temple of Puritanism.
When it became apparent that the vast majority of the Barebone’s Parliament were just the usual squires from the shires and would resist the zealots’ deeply cherished goals such as the abolition of the tithe, the most fervent of the saints, like Thomas Harrison, departed in high dudgeon. The militant preachers Feake and Powell, who had initially hailed the assembly as the coming reign of Christ, were now left crying in the wilderness, their messianic ambitions reduced to campaigning for the propagation of the gospel in Wales. When the members of Barebone’s did manage to agree on dramatic changes, it was in the direction of less religion rather than more, nowhere so dramatically as in the abolition of marriages in church. For three years after 1653, only marriages solemnized before a justice of the peace were considered legal. But this certification by magistrates was not exactly the reborn evangelized Commonwealth that the Fifth Monarchists had anticipated. Unaccountably, too, Cromwell appeared reluctant to prosecute the war against the Dutch with all the ardour they wanted, but seemed to be conniving at a peace. Their dreams frustrated, they took to name-calling, denouncing Cromwell as ‘a man of sin’ and ‘the old dragon’ and damning the moderates as the ‘unsainted’. Tiring of the rant, and thwarted from the kind of practical government they looked for from the Commonwealth, the leaders of the moderates, including William Sydenham and Anthony Ashley Cooper, came to Cromwell on 12 December 1653 and, in a reversal of what had happened the previous April, voluntarily committed institutional suicide. Resigning their commission on their knees before him, they implored Cromwell to put the miserably captious assembly out of its misery. He was only too happy to oblige.
Barebone’s was the closest that Britain (for there were representatives from Ireland, Wales and Scotland in the nominated assembly) ever came to a theocracy: a legislature of Christian mullahs, and it was not very close at all. For all Cromwell’s holy thunder about the imminent reign of the righteous, the crackpot frenzy of their matter and manner put him off the saints in a hurry. He seems to have been genuinely horrified by the licence which summoning the godly assembly seemed to have given to every hedgerow messiah to declare his hobbledehoy flock a ‘gathered’ Church. And he couldn’t help noticing that, while the sects were only too happy to avail themselves of the liberty of conscience guaranteed to them by the Commonwealth, they were not inclined to extend that toleration to any of their competitors in the battle for souls. Predictably, then, he became increasingly intolerant of their intolerance. When Christopher Feake and John Rogers made scandalous comparisons between the General and Charles I he had them locked up in the same filthy airless holes in Lambeth Palace where a century before his namesake Thomas Cromwell had incarcerated those who didn’t agree with him. When Rogers was later dragged out for a show debate with Cromwell, he demanded to know whether he appeared as prisoner or freeman, to which Cromwell responded, with a peculiar mixture of sarcasm and sanctimoniousness, that, since Christ had made us all free, it must be as a freeman. After the charade, the free Christian was dumped back in his cell.
On 16 December 1653, just four days after the gathering of the saints had been dispatched into limbo, Oliver Cromwell was sworn in, at a pompous ceremony in the Court of Chancery, as Lord Protector. The title had last been used by Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, during the minority of Edward VI. Given the fact that Somerset ended up on the block, this was not an auspicious precedent. But for the compulsive history-readers of the seventeenth century, the late 1540s meant the hallelujah years of Thomas Cranmer’s evangelism, when that first Lord Protector had presided over England’s Protestant conversion from Roman error. And Cromwell knew better (at this stage) than to give himself aristocratic airs. On his way to a reception in the Grocers’ Hall given by the Lord Mayor he made sure to be seen riding humbly bare-headed through the streets.
There was no need to bother Cromwell with the institutional minutiae of the new regime. Anticipating (not to say expediting) the débâcle of the nominated assembly, the more down-to-earth members of the Council of Officers had a prefabricated ‘Instrument of Government’ ready and waiting to be put to work. Its principal author was the intelligent and extremely ambitious General John Lambert, who seems to have understood his Cromwell better than anyone since Henry Ireton and to have known when to move him away from prophecy and back to power. Concentrated power and authority were, so Lambert persuaded Cromwell, the best hope of the ‘healing and settlement’ he was always going on about, and the Instrument of Government would deliver them, he promised, without sacrificing liberty. For the country was to be governed now by ‘a single person and parliament’ – the formula which became the Protectorate’s constitutional mantra for the remainder of Cromwell’s life. In fact it was the Lord Protector’s Council of State that exercised the day-to-day functions of government. The Council of State was an embryonic cabinet of fifteen to twenty men, many of them drawn from the most managerial figures in the Barebone’s assembly including his old comrade and cousin-in-law Oliver St John, Edward Montagu and Anthony Ashley Cooper (until he left the Council in December 1654), along with its secretary and de facto chief of security, John Thurloe. But, on paper at any rate, the Protectorate parliaments were not just window-dressing. They were to be elected every three years, to have representatives from all four nations of Britain and to sit for at least five months of each year. In other words they corresponded to the proposals set out by the most advanced parliamentarians of the 1640s, and for that matter to what would actually come to pass after the next round of revolution in 1688–90.
The constitutional blueprint was the easy part. The real problem for the future of the remade kingless state was not its formal design but its political workability. Realistically, as old Hobbes knew, for all the completeness of the apparent victory over the king this new Britain still had trouble in converting passive consent into active allegiance. The problem was compounded by the fact that the closer the Protectorate came to effective and acceptable (if not popular) government, the less distinguishable it became from a monarchy: not perhaps the old Stuart monarchy, but some sort of monarchy none the less, embodied in a virtuous, responsible prince, respectful of the common law and a dependable guarantor of limited religious liberty. This was, in fact, exactly how Cromwell saw himself, and why he had so much trouble thinking up reasons why he should not become king – the kind of king parliament had wanted in 1642 and 1647 and which the obtuse, self-destructive Charles Stuart had spurned. This was just the latest of Oliver’s convictions about God’s intentions for him and for his country. (After all, not all the kings of Israel had descended from the same house. David had not been the son of Saul.) With this conviction lodged in his mind, Cromwell inched towards majesty. His likeness appeared on the Great Seal of the Protectorate. In 1655 his head was superimposed on Van Dyck’s equestrian portrait of Charles I. In another engraving he appeared as the armoured Peacemaker in the classic imperial pose between two pillars, decorated with the kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland kneeling in grateful supplication while a dove of peace (or the Holy Spirit depending on your theological position) fluttered above his laurel-clad brow.
In that same print Cromwell also features as the modern Ulysses, the Great Navigator who had steered the ship of state safely between the hazards of Scylla and Charybdis. The fact of the matter, though, was that Scylla and Charybdis in the shape of the only two groups on which the Protectorate could base its government – republican zealots and managerial pragmatists (old Cromwellians and new Cromwellians) – still represented opposite and mutually threatening poles of power. If Cromwell steered too close to the pragmatists he risked dangerously alienating the army officers and even the republican politicians of the ousted Rump who had never forgiven him for their expulsion. If he moved more dogmatically towards the zealots, he invited anarchy and the erosion of his own authority as the great, inclusionary Peacemaker.
Ironically, if Cromwell had had a more arrogant and dictatorial confidence in his own authority he might have responded to the repeated requests to become king by doing so, thus creating a third way which he could then have presented to the nation as the best way to ensure stability. But the fact was that, for better or worse, Oliver Cromwell was not really cut out to be Leviathan. For almost three years he took a back seat to Lambert and Thurloe in the practical administration of the government, and the political course he steered between the zealots and pragmatists consisted mostly of reactions to whatever had happened to be the most recent threat. In war a famous strategist, in peace Cromwell seldom escaped the trap of tactics. So when the elections to the first Protectorate parliament, which met in September 1654, produced a crop of survivors from the Rump (like Thomas Scott and Arthur Haselrig) who had no intention of accepting the Instrument of Government, Cromwell’s reaction was to authorize yet another purge, evicting anyone not prepared to sign an oath of ‘Recognition’. So much for the zealots.
There was one occasion, though, when – providentially, Cromwell might have said – religious conviction and patriotic pragmatism perfectly dovetailed and that was the re-establishment of the community of English Jews. It’s not a moment that can be glossed over lightly in the checkered history of Cromwellian England because, however mixed or even confused his motives, Oliver’s actions did for once have a measurable and completely benevolent result. For the Jews and their descendants the Protector’s title was something more than a formality.
This is not to say that Cromwell’s inclination to bring the Jews back to England proceeded from the ‘tender-heartedness’ optimistically ascribed to him by the chief promoter of the immigration, the scholar and rabbi Menasseh ben Israel, then living in Amsterdam. Like so many of his evangelical contemporaries, Cromwell was responding in the first instance to the messianic timetable which decreed that, only when the Jews had been converted could the decisive destruction of Antichrist get under way. Conversely, Menasseh’s cabalistic programme required that only when the Jews had been dispersed among all the nations of the earth, would the Messiah appear, his people restored to Zion and the Temple rebuilt. Which was all well and good, but had more pragmatic motives not also nudged Cromwell in that direction the readmission would never have got as far as it did. And those concerns were not about redemption but about money and power.
There had, in fact, been a small community of Marrano (Spanish and Portuguese Jews, supposedly converted to Christianity) living and trading illicitly in the City of London, enough to have founded a secret synagogue in Creechurch Lane. City merchants divided between those who believed the Sephardi Jews, with their network of co-religionists scattered throughout the Hispanic and Netherlandish trading world, were a priceless source of commercial and military intelligence, and those who feared that, if given a foothold, the Jews would drive out the competition. John Thurloe, though, was someone who believed they could only further the ambitious plans to build an English mercantile empire in the Atlantic at the expense of the Spanish, Portuguese and the Dutch. And it was he who encouraged the Jews to take steps to seek readmission. At the beginning of 1655 the proposal was put before the Council of State, where it got a distinctly cool reception. Rumours circulated that Cromwell was about to sell St Paul’s to the Jews to be turned into a synagogue, that good English merchants would be driven into poverty by the notoriously rapacious Israelites.
But Cromwell went ahead none the less. In October 1655 he had a personal meeting with Menasseh who was lodged in the Strand near the Protector’s house. The encounter was the stuff of the Apocrypha if not the Scriptures. Menasseh thought of Cromwell as a second Cyrus who would further the holy aim of the return to and rebuilding of Jerusalem, and was said, in some of the more self-serving Christian accounts, to have pressed his hands against Cromwell’s body to make sure he was, after all, made of mortal stuff. But there were few men of any learning and religious passion in Amsterdam who could withstand the spellbinding mixture of sanctity and intelligence combined in Menasseh’s person. It’s easy to imagine the two of them exchanging educated opinions on scripture, ancient history, prophecy and science. A momentous sympathy was established. So, although a majority of the Council were against the measure, making it impossible for Cromwell to move to a formal readmission, Oliver used his personal authority both to protect those who were already in London as well as others who might discreetly arrive. It was not what Menasseh had hoped for. Anything short of a public readmission and the prophecy of the full dispersion would fail. Despondent and impoverished, he had to appeal to Cromwell for funds to get himself and the body of his son, who had died in London, back to Amsterdam. He died himself not long after.
But a community had been reborn. In 1656 the outbreak of war with Spain made assets belonging to subjects of the Spanish Crown residing in England subject to forfeiture. One of the affected merchants was Antonio Rodrigues Robles, who petitioned the government to have the seizure annulled on the grounds that he was not a Spaniard but a Jew. When his case was tacitly upheld, it became possible, for the first time for three and a half centuries, for Jews to live, trade and worship openly and, for the most part, untroubled in the City of London. The oak benches on which those Jews first parked their behinds in the little synagogue of Creechurch Lane still exist, moved to the later and much grander temple of Bevis Marks. They are narrow, backless and unforgiving, indistinguishable from the benches of any Puritan chapel – hosts and guests sharing common furniture.
The pragmatic managers of state who, whatever their personal feelings about the readmission of the Jews, understood that it was, after all, in the state’s interest, were men whose vision of the world (and of Britain’s place in it) was essentially mechanical and commercial rather than evangelical: technicians of power; data-gatherers; calculators of profit, not Christian visionaries. If the goal of the Protectorate was to build the new Jerusalem, then the first thing these men wanted to know was the price of its bricks. We think of these few years as anomalous in British history, but, in this respect at least, king or no king, for good or ill, they mark the true beginning of modern government in these islands. It was at this time that a commercial empire was being created, often by means of unscrupulous military aggression and brutal inhumanity, in the slaving islands of the Atlantic. On the New England seaboard a Commonwealth, at once godly and lucrative, was beginning its spectacular history at Massachusetts Bay. But another empire was being founded too: an empire of knowledge – scientific knowledge that was acquired not just for its own sake but as the raw material of power.
The men who saw a natural continuity between scientifically acquired information and the effective mastery of government would later describe themselves as ‘political arithmeticians’. William Petty, who coined the phrase, was himself an astonishing example of the type. The son of a clothier, Petty went to sea only (it was said) to be abandoned by his shipmates with a broken leg on the French coast. Educated first by Jesuits in Caen, subsequently in the rough school of the Royal Navy, Petty revealed himself to be a prodigy at mathematics and natural science – enough of one anyway to be employed in Paris by Thomas Hobbes. Perhaps he was also enough of a Hobbesian to return at the end of the civil war to England, where, still in his twenties, he fell in with the group of scientists who included Robert Boyle, adamant royalist but still more committed ‘natural philosopher’. Every such man of science needed a marvel which would command public attention, and Petty, now a qualified physician, got his in 1650 in the shape of Ann Greene, who had been hanged for the murder of her illegitimate child. Rescued in the nick of time from anatomical dissection, Greene, who had been pronounced definitively dead and packed into a coffin, was resuscitated by Petty, who bled her, looked after her and in the end raised a dowry for her marriage. It was the kind of tale that the anecdotalists of the press loved, a relief from the bitter passions of politics. It made Petty famous and it got him elected as a fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford.
It was in Oxford that Petty would first have encountered the nucleus of the company of scientists who, with the Restoration, would be the founders of the Royal Society: Warden John Wilkins of Wadham College, young Christopher Wren and Robert Boyle. They were looked on benevolently by Oliver Cromwell. Boyle may have been a royalist but his brother was Lord Broghill, one of Cromwell’s closest friends and advisers. Cromwell himself paid a visit to Wilkins’ lodgings where his daughter Elizabeth and her husband, the MP and member of the Committee on Trade, John Claypole, were staying, and took an obviously keen interest in the optical and mechanical devices displayed there. William Petty, though, had ambitions that went beyond the circles of the learned. In 1652 he moved to Ireland as Physician-General to the army (which badly needed medical help), and in the years which followed, applied his acumen for statistics to the business of mapping much of the forfeited land previously identified by the Civil Survey, 1654–6. This was not a matter of disinterested cartography. Petty’s land survey was meant to provide Oliver’s son Henry, the adversary of the zealot officers, with what, in both senses, was a measured design for the transfer of land from the defeated Irish landowners to the conquering army. He was now the anatomist of the mutilated body of Ireland, working day and night, dictating to short-hand clerks, to complete his assignment. Petty had turned himself, in effect, into the chief scientist of dispossession, but he persuaded himself that his precision was infinitely preferable to the still rougher justice of a chaotic and greedy land grab by the army. He was, after all, not just in the business of eviction but also in that of transplantation, finding land in Connacht on which the displaced Irish could be resettled. When after a year he delivered his immense work to Henry Cromwell, it was a map of population, ownership, land and beasts such as had never been seen before in British history. By mastering the data Petty had become, much to the disgust and dismay of ideological republicans like Ludlow who thought him the Protector’s bootblack, the proconsul of Irish colonization. And he was not yet thirty.
For better or worse, men like William Petty were the prototype of the English bureaucrat: as polished in Latin poetry as they were proficient in higher statistics. They gorged on memoranda and got tipsy on the power machine that was the new English state. This was just as well since the scale of business tackled by the Protectorate’s Council of State was positively gargantuan. On one, not atypical, day, for instance, the agenda ran to sixty-two items.
But energetic and competent as they might have been in their government offices, the administrators, the ‘Yes, Protector’ men, knew that all their efforts would come to naught unless they managed to rebuild the old alliance between Whitehall and the counties which had broken down so completely in the 1640s. That meant taking political, as much as administrative, decisions – to restore as justices of the peace the traditional landed gentry who had been roughly supplanted by the county committees appointed during the civil war. So, along with some of the trappings of the monarchy at Whitehall, innumerable, tentative little restorations took place in the counties. Men who had steered clear of, or who had been kept from, the magistracy now came back to pass judgement on drunks and thieves. The calendar of county society began to recover something like its ancient routines. Gentlemen (including the Protector’s oldest surviving son Richard, who made no secret of his enjoyment) galloped after stags again. Houses that had been wrecked, plundered or had fallen into neglect during the war were repaired and restored, their parks and farms restocked. Neighbouring landowners could entertain each other again over supper, a pipe and (thanks to the peace with Portugal) a glass of port. Although dancing and theatre were still officially frowned on, music and poetry were again encouraged (not least at Cromwell’s own court) as edifying entertainments. The stirrings of pleasure were obscurely sensed. And they were not a good sign for the godly state.
The more republican and zealous members of the Council of State – Lambert himself and his fellow army officers Disbrowe and Charles Fleetwood – looked on the reawakening of the old county communities with misgivings. By encouraging them to come out from beneath the ruins and reseating them in their old places of authority, might not the Protectorate be sowing the seeds of its own undoing? From his perch in Ireland, Lieutenant-General Ludlow was even more incensed at what he took to be craven abdication of republican power to ‘time-serving Cavaliers’, lawyers and ‘corrupt parsons’, ‘and in the meanwhile such men as are most faithfull to the publique interest for which so much blood hath been spilt . . . such as have been valiant in the field and ventured their lives . . . for the liberties of the people, such as have all along in the greatest revolutions and dangers . . . appeared in their purses and persons for the true interest of the Nation, that these honest men should be thus slighted and undermined’ he thought a cause for scandal, contempt and alarm. For such men to come into parliament was to invite back royalism in a Trojan Horse.
In the spring of 1655 their suspicions seemed to have been confirmed when a royalist rising, incompetently led by John Penruddock, broke out in Wiltshire. It was quickly smashed, and was followed by the usual parade of hangings and beheadings, Penruddock’s taking place in May. But the sudden threat, together with well-founded fears of assassination, was enough to jolt Cromwell out of complacency. He was also badly shaken by the disastrous outcome of an expedition against the Spanish in the Caribbean, an unaccustomed military fiasco which he took as God’s verdict on the sinfulness of the nation. Statistics weren’t everything, it seemed.
Time, then, for contrition. Time for repentance. Time for a heavy dose of zeal. For about a year and a half from July 1655 Cromwell let the outriders of righteousness, the major-generals, have their head, inflicting on England a coercive military regime the like of which had not been seen since the security states of Walsingham and Thomas Cromwell. Over the reassuring map of the counties were laid twelve military cantons, each governed by a major-general. Their mission was, in the first instance, a police action, dismantling the embryonic county militias and replacing them by rock-solid loyal cavalry financed by a ‘decimation’ – collecting a tenth of the value of royalist or suspected royalist estates. Security and pre-emptive deterrence were thus economically combined. But Cromwell, and to an even greater degree his generals, were also convinced that a true pacification meant tackling the task which so often had been shirked or postponed in the name of reconciliation: the rigorous conversion of profane, carnal England to a state of godly submission. In the name of the decimation, gentry like Sir Ralph Verney, who had returned to England but whose record as a supporter of parliament in 1642 was not enough to clear him of suspicion, were summoned to appear before the generals and their assessors and give security for their levies. Failure to pay meant confiscation or imprisonment.
Very quickly the major-generals became a flying squad for righteousness. Quixotic though it was, this was a crusade that the Puritan zealots had been fighting since the beginning of the civil war, when James I’s permissive Book of Sports had been burned by the Common Hangman and edicts published to make sure pleasure never happened on a Sunday; now once more ‘no persons shall hereafter exercise or keep maintain or be present at any wrestling, shooting, Bowling, ringing of bells . . . masque, Wake, otherwise called feasts, church-ales, dancing and games’. Away too with cock-fights, cock-running, horse-races and bear-baiting. Woe betide anyone caught putting up a maypole, working on the Sabbath or furtively celebrating Christmas. Alehouses were to come under vigilant licensing and inspection and were to be purged of fiddlers and gamblers. The Swearing and Cursing Act punished anyone caught uttering a profanity with a fine according to their status (more for gents than commoners). Children under twelve heard saying something filthy were to be whipped. Convicted fornicators were to spend three months in prison, adulterers to suffer the death penalty.
This is the stereotypical image we have of Cromwell’s England: a dour Puritan Sparta where the military was mobilized to wipe out fun. And as far as the ambitions of the major-generals go, it’s not altogether wide of the mark. But, needless to say, the experiment in enforced virtue was a dismal flop, not least because of the impossibility of supplying the manpower to police it. Lacking their own Enforcers for Christ, the major-generals had no option but to fall back on the constables and justices who were already in place. And they were very unlikely to be sympathetic to the great work. On the contrary, the records of local magistrates are full of malefactors who paid no attention whatsoever to the morals police. Punishment, when it was meted out, was often an elaborate joke. When John Witcombe of Barton St David in Somerset was put in the stocks for swearing, his own minister, protesting the illegality of the law, brought him ale to keep his spirits up. In Cheshire, a servant girl who had been denounced as flagrantly violating the Sabbath by working on a Sunday was (incorrectly) judged a minor so that, instead of being fined, she could be ‘corrected’ by her master. In the presence of the local constable her punishment was ‘turned all into a jest. The master plucked off a small branch of heath from a turf and therewith gave her two or three such gentle touches on her cloathes as would have not hurt an infant two days old.’
In many places this must have been as deep as the bite of ‘Cromwell’s mastiffs’ reached. Secretary Thurloe’s papers are full of their bitter complaints at the hopelessness of their task. ‘I am much troubled with these market towns,’ Major-General Berry wrote from Monmouth, ‘everywhere vice abounding and the magistrates fast asleep.’ But if their attempt to impose godliness on horseback was a failure, they did alienate enough of the people whom the Protectorate needed to survive – the county gentry – to give Cromwell serious pause. Although the military regime did its best to intimidate during the elections of 1656, the results produced a majority which swept parliament clean of their supporters and dismantled their entire structure of power. Prodded by the pragmatists on the Council, Cromwell now swung back – permanently this time – to a conservative regime of ‘settling’.
In the summer of 1657 he accepted the ‘Humble Petition and Advice’ and a government that was virtually the same as the reformed monarchy envisioned by the Long Parliament, the one critical difference being the commitment to protect liberty of conscience. But even this commitment was beginning to wobble, as the threshold of censure on Christian sects deemed scandalous became much lower. Despite assuring Cromwell (he could not take an oath) in a face-to-face interview that he submitted to the powers that be, the Quaker leader George Fox was still repeatedly locked up in conditions of nightmarish filth and squalor as a menace to the public peace. When he attempted to warm himself by lighting straw in one of his cells, his gaolor pissed on the fire to put it out and threw shit on the prisoner from a gallery above. Horrible though these trials were, they were nothing compared to the fate of Fox’s maverick protégé James Nayler, tried for blasphemy by parliament and the Council of State in the late autumn of 1656. Nayler’s crime had been to ride through Bristol in imitation of the Saviour (pretending that he was Christ, said his prosecutors), his few disciples crying hosanna as he trotted through the rain-soaked streets. For his deranged temerity Nayler was pilloried for two hours, his forehead branded with a ‘B’ for blasphemer, his tongue bored through with a hot iron, and flogged through the streets of London – and then taken to Bristol to be flogged all over again before being incarcerated. He endured the excruciating torment with astonishing fortitude, but died four years later still suffering from its after-effects.
To his credit, Cromwell seemed as disturbed as anyone by the punitive overkill of the House and actually questioned the legitimacy of the trial. Afterwards he seemed to want to moderate the power of a single House and so became open to the restoration of a second, upper chamber, designated unimaginatively as ‘the Other House’. Bulstrode Whitelocke was installed there as Viscount Henley, alongside Cromwell’s two new sons-in-law, Viscount Fauconberg and Robert Rich, the Earl of Warwick. History seemed to be on fast rewind to 1642, with Cromwell playing the part of the king-who-might-have been. As John Pym had wanted, parliament now had the authority to approve or veto appointments to the high offices of state. No taxes could be raised or declarations of war or peace made without its consent. In fact, the constitution of 1657 was so close to being the responsible monarchy, constrained by the common law, which the civil war had been fought for that it seemed only logical to cap it with a responsible king. Whitelocke, who had been against the idea five years earlier, had now evidently changed his mind, personally urging it on Cromwell as the best way to stabilize the future of the reformed state of Britain.
But though he was tempted, in the end Cromwell could not manage to turn himself into King Oliver I. Political reasons certainly weighed in his decision to reject the offer (provided he could none the less name his successor as Protector), for generals Lambert and Fleetwood all but threatened a major mutiny in the army should he dare to mount the throne. But Cromwell showed he could handle the army by abruptly cashiering Lambert and purging the officer corps of any he thought disloyal to his regime. The most serious restraint came, rather, from his own exacting conscience: his deeply felt certainty that, since God had decreed the ‘extirpation’ of the monarchy in England, it was not for him to overturn that decision. If a new sign came from Providence that he should indeed be a king unto Israel that would be different. But the Almighty fought shy of direct communication in 1657 and the brow of the Protector remained unanointed.
Oliver Cromwell would, in fact, get to wear the crown, but only once he was dead. On 3 September 1658, the anniversary of the battles of both Dunbar and Worcester, he passed away. While he was breathing his last a tornado-like tempest bore down on England, ripping out trees and sending church steeples (with their unused belfries) crashing to the ground. To the omen-conscious (which meant virtually everyone), this was no coincidence. It was the Devil coming to get his due, for an old story had circulated that after the battle of Worcester Oliver had sold his soul for supreme power. There were other dire portents. Although 1658 was a rare year free of battles, won or lost, the shadow of mortality still seemed to fall heavily over the nation. The winter had been brutal. Crows were found with their feet frozen to branches. Trade stopped. Grain prices went through the roof. An epidemic of the ‘quartan’ fever (probably some form of influenza) held in its deadly grip a country already weakened by plague. Poor John Evelyn had his darling five-year-old prodigy son die in late January, and a second child perish barely two weeks later. ‘Here ends the joy of my life,’ he wrote later, ‘for which I go even mourning to my grave.’ Terrified survivors in the cities abstained from fish and flesh and ate nothing ‘but sage posset and pancake or eggs or now and then a turnip or carrot’. Whatever she ate, fever and cancer carried off Cromwell’s favourite daughter in August. The Protector fell into a distraction of sorrow and then seemed to go under with the sickness himself. At Greenwich John Evelyn joined the crowds watching a beached whale thrash its flukes hopelessly on the mudflats, blood pouring from its wounded spout. Even reasonable men were mindful of the portent. Leviathan was in its death throes.
By the time the leaves were on the turn Oliver was dead, though not quite gone. There had been a botched embalming. The regime, which wanted to preserve the Protectorate, had started by failing to preserve the Protector. But before the inevitable atrophy, an effigy had been cast from the body. It was then exposed for a lying-in-state at Somerset House, in the manner of the medieval kings, robed in imperial purple, the shrine lit by a great incandescence of candles. But then it was decided that he should be winched upright, and there he stood for another two months, stiffly erect like a mannikin, crown on head, sceptre and orb in his hand, king at last. On 23 November there was a massive state funeral which ended in ignominious fiasco. According to the French ambassador (who was not exactly innocent in the débâcle), altercations about diplomatic precedent and protocol delayed the beginning of the enormous procession, which took seven hours to file through London. By the time it finally got to Westminster Abbey it was nearly pitch dark, and the inadequate supply of candles inside the church made it impossible for the ceremonies to be prolonged. So for the ruler who, above all others, had most loved sermons, and who relentlessly meditated out loud on God’s purpose in history, there were no funeral orations, no prayers, no preaching. Just a few short sharp blasts on the trumpets before the effigy was bundled into a waiting tomb. But not before little Robert Uvedale, one of the Westminster school boys summoned to attend, had made his way through the chaotically exiting crowd and stolen away with a souvenir, the ‘Majesty Scutcheon’ on which the arms of the British nations were figured on a flag of white satin.
Had Cromwell been able to write his own funeral eulogy, what would he have wanted to say about his extraordinary career? Certainly not its trajectory from obscurity to supreme power, because, avidly as he embraced it, there was always a side of Cromwell which was deeply disgusted by it. When, not long before he died, he protested that he ‘would have been glad to have been living under a woodside, to have kept a flock of sheep rather than to have undertaken such a place as this was’, the confession seemed, and was, perfectly genuine. His was, in fact, the classic case of great power falling to the very person who least wanted it, and precisely for that reason. The only hero of the civil wars who wanted it even less was Thomas Fairfax, who never quite recovered from the trauma of the trial and execution of the king – and who would re-emerge from his Yorkshire obscurity to help put Charles I’s son back on the throne. Cromwell could never be that self-effacing because he had, like Moses, gone through an experience of the Call, just as surely as if he had heard a voice coming from the Burning Bush, and believed that his life thereafter was devoted to the execution of God’s design for the nation.
Ironically, it was just because that design seemed to be a work-in-progress for Jehovah who only vouchsafed glimpses of it now and then, even to a servant as doggedly devoted as Cromwell, that he never much felt the need to work out a consistent strategy for the republic, nor a policy which might have been able to reconcile the self-evidently conflicting claims of parliamentary liberty and Christian godliness. Nor did he even bother to arbitrate in any consistent way between zeal and freedom. Rather he let God show him the way. And if God changed his mind every so often, well that was His privilege.
Buried amid the immense screed of Cromwell’s pious circumlocutions to parliament was, however, a genuine statement of what he wanted for England, if circumstances would ever permit. (That he could make the circumstances permit, nudge God along a bit, was a thought he dismissed as sacrilegious.) It turns out that the vision of this angry, ruthless, overbearing, self-torturing man was a thing of consummate sweetness, humanity and intelligence. More astonishingly still, the most deeply felt principle of the man who created the matrix of the modern English state was, in its essence, liberal. For at the heart of that conviction lay tolerance: the unforced hope that men (provided they were not Catholic) might be allowed to be left alone to receive Christ in any way they wished; to hoe their few acres and keep their pigs, untroubled by the rude intrusions of the state – always provided they did not conspire against the freedom of others. After all his slaughters, his marches and his red-faced fits of shouting, what Oliver Cromwell really wanted, for everyone, was a quiet life: ‘a free and uninterrupted Passage of the Gospel running through the midst of us and Liberty for all to hold forth and profess with sobriety their Light and Knowledge therein, according as the Lord in his rich Grace and Wisdom hath dispensed to every man and with the same freedom to practice and exercise the Faith of the Gospel and lead quiet and peaceable lives in all Godliness and Honesty without any Interruption from the Powers God hath set over this Commonwealth.’
It would be perhaps another two and a half centuries before anything like this dream could be realized. And by then, really, no one much cared.