Once the drainage was complete, the position of the lord of the Manor was not necessarily so unfavourable. He after all enjoyed the fruits of the undoubted improvement of his land. The benefit to the poor commoners was a good deal more difficult for them to discern. Their land for common grazing was reduced by a third and sometimes more, their opportunity to fish and fowl, so important to their winter food supply, ended.
Behold the great design, which they do now determine
Will make our bodies pine, a prey to crows and vermin
cried Powte in his Complaint. Not for the commoners after all the new delights of arable land, the flax, and hemp which it was confidently predicted would be grown on the reclaimed acres available to the lord of the Manor. Under the circumstances it was understandable if “the meaner sort of people” chose to ignore the abstract ideal of agricultural progress in favour of their own grievances. Some protested indignantly that drainage was contrary to the Christian religion because it interfered with the works of nature: “Fens were made fens and must ever continue such.” By the 1630s there was considerable local opposition to the drainage projects, or as a traveller reported in 1634, “we perceived that the Town and Country thereabouts much murmured” – the towns such as Cambridge fearing for the loss of their inland navigation routes as the people feared for their pastures.14
The critical moment arose not so much during the actual process of draining, when there might be a boom in local employment, but when the drainers, like the dwarf Rumpelstiltskin in the fairy story, returned to claim their promised prize – in this case cutting off the allotted portion of land for their own profit by ditches. There were ugly scenes of riot and physical protest against what could not be mentally accepted. It is impossible not to sympathize with the deprived and helpless commoners in their desperate reactions to the inevitable. Their resentment is particularly understandable since although as one authority has wisely observed “a degree of coercion is inseparable from projects of this kind”,15 nevertheless much less coercion would have been needed in this instance if the commoners had been given more generous terms to compensate for their changed situation. This at any rate was the line taken by Cromwell – who in 1637 allowed himself to be identified as the spokesman of these people, coming from a very different class from himself.
It was the more evident that Cromwell’s sympathetic action was initiated by his social conscience rather than by any true objection to the drainage as such, because the Cromwell family had of old been staunch upholders both of the process and of the means by which it was carried out. Both his father and his uncle had acted as Commissioners for Sewers, although it was true that his maternal uncle Sir Thomas Steward had opposed the Adventurers, and had in fact obtained the reduction of their proportion from one-half to one-quarter. Perhaps Oliver’s protests on behalf of the commoners also fitted into the wider pattern of resistance to the encroachment of the royal prerogative. As Sir William Dugdale put it, from the hostile viewpoint, Cromwell was “especially made choice of by those who ever endeavoured the undermining of Regal Authority to be their Orator …” At all events in the summer of 1637, the State Papers record one rough incident that occurred when one of the overseers of the division dikes in the Great Level attempted to drive the people’s cattle off Holme Fen, Huntingdon, with a view to enclosing it. A local Justice of the Peace, Mr Castle, obstructed the overseer with his men, while a crowd of men and women armed with scythes and pitchforks uttered fierce threats against anyone who tried to drive their cattle off the fens. At the same time it was generally reported among the commoners in Ely Fens, and the Fens adjoining, that “Mr Cromwell of Ely had undertaken, they paying him a groat for every cow they had upon the common, to hold the drainers in suit of law for five years, and that in the meantime they should enjoy every foot of their common.”16
The following year there were further riots in many parts of the Great Level, and one JP, Sir Miles Sandys, who was also a prominent Adventurer, actually feared for a general rebellion of all the Fen towns. As a result there was a change of central policy and the Commoners were allowed to keep their lands for the time being where they could prove these lands had not been generally bettered by the drainers. Before the situation could be further sorted out, a much wider rebellion of the whole English people had swallowed up this possible limited revolt of the Fen towns, and absorbed the energies of the Fen people: the whole question of the future of the Levels lay in abeyance during the Civil War.
But the significance of Cromwell’s irruption into the realm of popular leadership was not so easily forgotten. At the time the poor commoners of the Fens did not represent a particularly elevated cause to the rest of England: later indeed Cromwell’s enemies were to refer to him as the “Lord of the Fens”, a title which may have romantic connotations to us, but at the time was intended to be applied with ridicule.* ( *The tide was first applied by the Royalist newspaper Mercurius Aulicus in November) Yet it is possible to see in the whole episode not only the stirrings of Cromwell’s social conscience, but also the foundations for the powerful influence he was to exert later upon these same people in creating an army in time of war. It was noticeable that both Huntingdon, where Cromwell had attempted to block the establishment of a rotten borough, and the Fens where he tried to put the case of the deprived commoners, fell within the territorial sweep of the Eastern Association, Cromwell’s future area of military recruitment.17
* * *
Meanwhile, in London, issues of a more obviously striking nature were obsessing the attention of Oliver’s contemporaries and relations. In the summer of 1637 the trial and sentence of three Puritan writers – the lawyer William Prynne, Dr John Bastwicke and a clergyman named Henry Burton – for the production of a pamphlet News from Ipswich, was a focus for popular alarm and fury. Prynne, a powerful maniacal character described as having “the countenance of a witch”, had been driven to national politics by fear of popery and Jesuitical plots. Three years earlier he had been condemned to be fined, pilloried and have his ears “cropped” or cut off for a violent printed attack on the Queen and her court theatricals, Histriomastix. Now all three defendants were sentenced to have their ears cropped (the Puritans decided that the Lord must have caused Prynne’s ears to grow again, but a more likely explanation would be that they had only been half cut off the first time). Prynne suffered an additional refinement of cruelty with the letters “S L” branded on his cheek for Seditious Libeller: he himself with sardonic wit observed that they stood for Stigma of Laud.
The incident left a profound effect on the multitude of spectators. It appeared that adversity was merely a stimulant to the Puritans in the stalwart expression of their opinions. It was easy for the watchers to believe the words spoken out bravely by Prynne for all his ordeal: “The more I am beat down, the more am I lift up.” A woman from the crowd answered: “There are many hundreds which by God’s assistance would willingly suffer for the cause you suffered this day.”18
On a material level, one particular financial expedient of the Crown the levy of a tax known as ship-money – was causing furious resentment since its continued employment showed that it was likely to be regarded as a permanent source of revenue. In theory ship-money was not innovatory: it provided for the naval defence of the coastal towns, and as such had been levied intermittently without protest. It was the extension of the tax to all England and the regularity of its use which now aroused suspicion. When Cromwell’s cousin John Hampden refused on principle to pay his 20s. assessment for Buckinghamshire, a test case was brought against him in November 1637 in which another Cromwellian cousin, Oliver St John, pleaded for Hampden. In the end the judges found for the King, and Hampden went to prison. It was however the extension of the claims made for the royal prerogative by Sir Robert Berkeley, one of the judges who argued the case for the Crown, which was responsible for the particular dread which the verdict aroused. “Rex is Lex,” argued Sir Robert, the King is the Law, “for he is lex loquens, a livin
g, a speaking, an acting law.”19 What might be the role of Parliament in the government of this living and speaking law? For the present, the royal case stood on the King’s right to tax his subjects in time of national danger, and himself decide when that state had occurred; but the precedent for the future was dangerous, and obviously dangerous.
By 1638 the King, ultimately responsible for such mutilations and imprisonments of his subjects in London, had other troubles among his more northern satellites. The Scots, that people over whom his ancestors had ruled exclusively until his father’s fateful journey south to the English throne in 1603, were now in a state of religious revolt. For all his Stuart blood, Charles i had never either understood or liked Scotland, a country he first visited at the age of thirty-three. The feeling appears to have been mutual. A policy of heavy taxation towards the Scots – nearly 150,000 between 1635 and 1636, although before 1625 the sum had only once exceeded 50,000 – cast an unfortunate gloss on his expensive coronation there.20 Nor was the Scottish position of repugnance to such rich ceremonies animated solely by a spirit of economy; it was on the contrary part of a very deeply and long-held attitude of austerity towards all outward ornamentations of divine worship.
The golden copes of the five bishops at Charles’s coronation and the rich tapestry behind the communion table with its “curiously, wrought crucifix” all represented the innovations most feared by the” Scots, much as Prynne had feared the Queen’s theatricals, and English Puritans kept a watch for immoderate crossings and bowings at the name of Jesus. In this context it seemed exacerbating that mucn of the money raised by taxes should be spent on lavish church buildings, while the Arminian reaction among some Scottish clergy to the advent of Laud only served to stiffen the necks of the determined Calvinists. Their language did not lack colour. Their Church, wrote George Gillespie in 1637, now contained “the rotten dregs of Popery, which were never purged away from England and Ireland, and having once been spewed out with detestation, are licked up again in Scotland … Her comely countenance is miscoloured with the farding lustre of the mother of Harlots. Her shamefast forehead hath received the mark of the beast. Her lovely-locks are frizzled with the Crispins of AntiChrist fashions. Her chaste Ears are made to listen to the friends of the great Whore.. .”21
The publication of a new liturgy for Scotland in 1637, with a prefix asserting that its use was demanded by the royal prerogative alone, provoked a solemn rebuttal – the National Covenant drawn up by Alexander Henderson and Archibald Johnston and revised by three Scottish nobles, Rothes, Loudoun and Balmerino, in February 1638. Although there was much Messianic feeling in Scotland at the time, the Covenant itself was not an emotional document, even if it was a call to national action. Framed by lawyers, it appealed essentially to the rule of law, reminded the King of his coronation oath and asserted the supremacy of Parliament in appealing to the statutes. Into these dry bones the people of Scotland breathed their own vigour in their desire for a national crusade, while the Scottish aristocracy, with their own causes to quarrel with southern domination, provided readily enough the natural leaders.22 When the National Assembly of the Church of Scotland rebutted the new Prayer Book and endorsed the Covenant, despite the King’s protests, Charles was obliged to try to enforce it upon the Scots by military action, in the so-called First Bishops’ War.
It was not a popular cause with the English Puritans for obvious reasons, nor indeed with the bulk of the English people. Bulstrode Whitelocke, another cousin of Hampden’s, a lawyer and an established MP, who was to play an important part in the coming struggle, put in his diary: “The discourses of the Scottish war were very various: those who favoured the popish and prelatical ways did sufficiently inveigh against the covenanters, but generally the rest of the people favoured and approved their proceedings …” If Heath is to be believed once more, Cromwell was certainly no better “affected” or disposed to the Scottish war than he had been to ship-money. According to Heath’s story, Cromwell made clear his disapproval of the King’s action to some of the commanders of the English army who were quartered in his house on their way north to engage the Scots. While he drew suspicion on himself from the army for these “discourses” Cromwell became all the more popular in his own neighbourhood for his outspokenness, since it was “generally infected with Puritanism”.23 Although this first war was concluded by the Treaty of Berwick in 1639, there was still no compromise to be had, since neither Scots nor King could subsequently agree on the intention of the treaty. The Scots’ Assembly then went ahead and abolished episcopacy.
As the year 1640 approached, the feeling in England was one of gloom. War had already touched the North with its depredatory fingers and would surely soon touch it again. Sir Henry Slingsby, a Yorkshire gentleman later to fight for the King, probably spoke for many when he described the sight of the light horse being trained on Bramham Moor in January 1639 during the first Scottish war, as “our publick death”. “These are strange, strange spectacles,” he wrote in his diary, “to see this nation that have lived thus long peacably, without noise of shot and drum and after we have stood neutrals and in peace when all the world besides hath been in arms and wasted with it, it is I say a thing most horrible that we should engage ourself in a war with one another, and with our own venom grow and consume ourself.” At such a time there was no need to go to the theatre, and try to understand by fabulous representation the tragic revolutions of human fortune: “ourselves shall be the actors.”24
Early in 1640 the King was compelled partly by the wastage of money in the Scottish war, and partly by the need to bring Parliament to his aid in future clashes with the Scots, to summon Parliament once more. That assembly was later known as the Short Parliament. Much had changed in the eleven years of Parliamentary hush: for one thing the dark-avised Thomas WentworthEarl of Strafford, the ablest of the King’s aides, would shortly return to his side, fresh from Ireland and bringing with him, it was feared by many, the threat of an Irish army which would crush the King’s opponents, both Scots and English. Into this Parliament came Oliver Cromwell once more. He was not however elected for his old seat of Huntingdon, but as one of the two burgesses for Cambridge, the other being Thomas Meautys, Clerk of the Privy Council, a Government nominee whom Lord Keeper Finch had apparently urged forward. A few months before his election Cromwell had duly become a “freeman of the town” of Cambridge by payment of one penny to the poor. Together with some sort of token lodgings in the town, traditionally assigned to a site now the yard of the White Bull Inn in Bridge Street, this was an essential qualification for election.
The adoption of Cromwell by Cambridge points once again to his local renown, that general growing to “place and authority” in which “his parts seemed to be raised as if he had concealed faculties till he had the occasion to use them”, on which Clarendon commented as a feature of his early development. Quite apart from his relationship to the heroic Hampden, Cromwell had many connexions in and around the east Midlands area: for example the returning Mayor of the Cambridge election, Thomas French, was probably related to his sister Robina’s future husband, Dr Peter French.25 But it was no longer a case for one particular piece of influence securing the seat. Cromwell already had stature and some position; he was included in the counsels of the opposition party, dominated – although not of course officially led in the modern sense – by John Pym. His London lodgings were in Long Acre, near Covent Garden and the Strand, in that enclave where so many of the Parliamentary leaders, including Pym in Gray’s Inn Lane, found their dwellings. It was his expected right to enter the Short Parliament.
* * *
Before Cromwell left for London, his family had both multiplied, diversified, and suffered loss. His mother and youngest sister Robina now lived with Oliver, Elizabeth and their six children in the house at Ely. One of Oliver’s sisters, Jane, married John Desborough in June 1636, bringing within his circle another future Parliamentary colleague and military leader. Later rudely satirized by But
ler in Hudibras as “the grim giant Desborough” and mocked in Royalist pamphlets for his countrified origins, Desborough was in point of fact an eligible bridegroom for Jane Cromwell. He was of good Cambridgeshire stock, the younger son of the lord of the Manor of Eltisley and having earlier trained for the law, now farmed near by. Oliver’s immediate family was increased, nearly eight years after Bettie, by the birth in February 1637 of Mary, who was taken back to St John’s Huntingdon to be baptized. In 1638 however, Frances, the last child to be born to Oliver and Elizabeth Cromwell, was christened at St Mary’s in Ely.
There were now eight surviving children in Oliver’s own family, four sons and four daughters. In the early thirties, this family, like all families at the time, had not escaped the raids of death on newborn children, and Elizabeth had probably borne two babies who had died at birth. The growing family was not destined to remain in its present form unaltered. Ill May 1639 young Robert Cromwell, Oliver’s eldest son then aged seventeen, who with his brothers had been sent to Felsted school, near the house of his grandfather Sir James Bourchier, died there of some unknown fever or accident. He was buried in Felsted Parish Church. The Latin entry in the parish register refers to Robert briefly as a boy of exceptional promise, fearing God above all things.26 But the memory of the fierce grief he experienced in losing this beloved child remained with Cromwell to the end of his life.
Twenty years later, stricken down once more by the death of Bettie and himself failing, he called for the Bible and read aloud a particular text from St Paul ending: “I have learnt in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content; I know both how to be debased, and how to abound … I can do all things through Christ that strengtheneth me.” Then he added: “This Scripture did once save my life, when my eldest son died, which went as a dagger to my heart…” And he repeated the text again: “I can do all things through Christ that strengtheneth me.” The dagger to the heart, as Cromwell simply and terribly described the loss of his child, left no outward effect on the course of his life. But Cromwell, already a tender man to his own children, and sisters, retained thereafter a special affection towards those who had, like him, seen their children snatched from them: his famous letter to his brother-in-law Valentine Walton breaking the news of the death of his son after Marston Moor still stirs the emotions with its directness and its understanding. “Sir, you know my trials this way …” wrote Cromwell, “... there is your precious child full of glory, to know sin nor sorrow any more.”27
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