Cromwell

by Antonia Fraser

  But it is at Putney also that we have the first glimpses of Cromwell’s other side as an orator, that extraordinarily rambling and obscure mode of expression which seemed to possess Cromwell like an evil spirit whenever the general issue was most difficult and in doubt. As Protector this tortured language became a distinct feature of his oratory, although other factors may have contributed to the disjointed records including his own lack of notes and hesitations of manner. Nevertheless he was accused at the time of employing such ambiguities deliberately in order to conceal his sense. Such a covering of the tracks of meaning while appearing to expound it was certainly a useful device for one who like the Protector Cromwell was obliged from time to time to address a Parliament or two. Later Sir Roger L’Estrange believed the “tangling” of his discourses to be deliberate: “the skill of his part lay in this – neither to be mistaken by his friends, nor understood by his enemies. By this middle course he gained time to remove obstructions and ripen occasions…” Fletcher commented on his use of this quality at public meetings “wherein he rather left others to pick out the meaning than did it himself”. But the genesis of this quality in the Putney debates is significant. Here, far from being already in control, Cromwell was merely anxious to acquire it and in real doubt as to what should be done,suggesting that the trick began at least involuntarily. An angry writer later referred to Cromwell holding himself physically slightly askew when speaking, with his ear cocked “as though Mahomet’s pigeon was about to speak into it”.10 The description of a man hoping to talk his way through to truth is probably accurate even if the alleged source of the inspiration he expected to receive is not.

  The basis of the Levellers’ proposals had been drawn up beforehand. Known as The Agreement of the People, it was the work of John Wildman, a leading Agitator and lawyer still in his early twenties who had probably drawn up The Case for the Army. What The Agreement of the People proposed was in fact quite a new system of government. Not only was the existing Parliament to be dissolved and another of four hundred members, chosen every two years, to meet from June to December yearly: these were far less revolutionary demands than the postulation of manhood suffrage as a basis for this Parliament, to include all “housekeepers of twenty-one who had not aided the King or impeded the Army” although not “persons on alms, wage-earners or servants”. This body would then appoint a Council of State, erect and abolish law courts, and generally make laws to which everyone within the realm would be subject. As for religion, that was to be reformed “to the greatest purity in doctrine, worship and discipline according to the Word of God” and maintained out of public money, with full toleration, excepting only the Catholics and Socinians as deniers of the Trinity. Behind such extremely sweeping demands, there was anequallysweepingphilosophy, and astrange romantic, even antiquarian appeal to English history. When General Fairfax, reaching Parliament with the Army in August, had referred feelingly to Magna Carta – “that is what we all fight for” – he had merely expressed the conventional notion of the origin of English liberties. Lilburne and his associates were now however pushing the argument of inherent liberties confidently back to Saxon times. It was these ancient rights which had been miserably snatched from the people at the time of the Norman Conquest, King Charles i being thus only the latest in a long line of royal Norman conquerors, who were held to have imposed their yoke on Saxon (and thus English) heads.

  It will be recalled that this appeal to former liberties had featured in the 1620s, in the days of the Petition of Right. In the hands of the Levellers the doctrine expanded wonderfully. Lilburne, who had begun his campaign by appealing to Magna Carta, by 1645 was regarding the great charter as merely an interim position capable of much improvement.11 Lilburne in prison moved to the idea of man as a citizen who had the right to give his own agreement to the government; man could rule over other individuals “no further than by free consent, or agreement, by giving up their power each to other, for their better being”. Thus the very title Agreement of the People was full of meaning and stated significantly on what the new society was intended to be based.

  All of this was of course aeons away from the struggles of the Parliamentary opposition with the King, which was still trying to establish constitutionally, having done so by force, where the supreme authority of the kingdom lay. An agreement of the type put forward by the Levellers needed to be ratified not merely by Parliament but in sort by every man in the State. It was the whole social contract which had to be made anew, since Lilburne now believed that the original social contract had dissolved into a state of nature with the war – and with it any claims Parliament might have to represent the people. The working out of the Levellers’ programme often took daring shapes which excite the modern imagination. Richard Overton, for example, an extreme radical and fanatical believer in the oppression of the Norman yoke, in his Appeale suggested free schools throughout the country, and organized care for the sick, the poor and the aged. But it cannot be too often stressed that to judge the social programmes of the Levellers by modern standards – by which they will naturally seem uncommonly worthy and deserving of approbation – is to run the risk of misunderstanding entirely the utterly revolutionary and even frightening nature of such schemes in the society in which they lived.

  The debate began with an outspoken speech from a prominent Agitator, Edward Sexby, a man originally from Suffolk who had joined Cromwell’s regiment of horse about 1643 and had been one of the three soldiers charged with a letter from the Army to their Generals in April 1647. Throughout the meetings he showed a particularly trenchant style of speech, and began by declaring forthrightly how antagonized the whole Army was by the notion of Cromwell and Ireton making a treaty with the King. He could see in fact two causes of their present miseries, both brought on by their leaders. On the one hand they had sought to satisfy all men, but in trying to achieve that had merely succeeded in dissatisfying them. On the other hand they had laboured to please the King, but unless they all cut their own throats they would not succeed in that either. They had also supported a House of Commons which Sexby rudely compared to “rotten studs”, the crumbling uprights in a wall of lath and plaster. To all of this, Cromwell’s reaction was placating, if wary: “Truly,” he observed, “this paper does contain in it very great alterations of the very government of the Kingdom, alterations from that government that it hath been under, I believe I may almost say since it was a nation … and what the consequences of such an alteration as this would be, if there were nothing else to be considered, wise men and godly men ought to consider …”12

  Oliver proceeded to conjure up all sorts of dangers, some of which perhaps owed more to imagination than reality. Supposing for example another body of men were at the same time getting together and putting out an equally compelling paper: “Would it not be utter confusion? Would it not make England like the Switzerland country, one canton of the Switz against another, and one county against another?” And public opinion too must not be ignored, whether “the spirits and temper of the people of this Nation are prepared to receive and go along with it …”. It was notable that amidst these calming and considering sentiments, even the usually clear voice of faith, Oliver’s own refuge, was not necessarily to be heard. Oliver was seeing at first hand the strange marshes into which this formerly reliable guiding light could apparently lead some members of the Army; the prospect evidently caused him much unlooked-for discomfort in a direction in which he had least expected insecurity: “I know a man may answer all difficulties with faith,” he observed, “and faith will answer all difficulties really where it is, but we are very apt all of us to call that faith that perhaps may be but carnal imagination, and carnal reasonings.” And his next remarks smacked even more of the politician, and less of the mystic: “It is not enough to propose things that are good in the end, but [even] suppose this model were an excellent model, and fit for England, and the Kingdom to receive, it is our duty as Christians and men to consider consequences and to c
onsider the way."

  Ireton it was, not Cromwell, who had earlier said quite bluntly that no plan which envisaged the destruction of either King or Parliament would secure his own co-operation. Now, as the author of the alternative Heads of Proposals, he postulated with equal firmness that the Army had made an “engagement” or bond to adhere to these previous proposals: they could not now publicly break their word simply because its provisions no longer pleased them. To this Rainsborough and John Wildman had their answer: they argued that the needs of justice were paramount over all earlier commitments. Even here Cromwell appears to have been mainly concerned to fudge the issue, if necessary agreeing with both sides. In a particularly diffused harangue, he ruminated on the righteousness or otherwise of breaking engagements when all the surrounding factors must be taken into account: “Circumstances may be such as I may not now break an unrighteous Engagement, or else I may do that which I did scandalously, though the thing be good.” And he suggested a committee should examine the question, a notion finally adopted at the end of the day, with Cromwell to sit on it, along with seventeen others including Sexby and five other Agitators.13

  The next day began with the prayer-meeting which had been called for by one Colonel Goffe, a man of rampant spirituality much inclined to suggestions of this nature. The night before, Cromwell had solemnly adjured Wildman and his followers not to pray with blocked ears: “And I say no more but this, I pray God judge between you and us when we do meet, whether we come with engaged spirits to uphold our own resolutions and opinions or whether we shall lay down ourselves to be ruled by Him and that which He shall communicate.” Whichever course had finally commended itself to the Agitators, the results were equally unsatisfactory from Cromwell’s point of view. The question of the Army’s previous engagements was raised all over again: Cromwell and Ireton, while stating categorically once more that they had no secret understanding with the King, expressed themselves much concerned with the question of the Army’s own good faith. The Army had pledged its word over the Heads of Proposals, and if they now went back on it, Cromwell and Ireton feared they might be accused of “juggling, and deceiving, and deluding the world”.14

  It was in this atmosphere, which was scarcely pacific, that the Agreement of the People was read over. At once a heated debate on the first article that which called for a quite different electorate, proportioned according to the number of inhabitants – broke out. It was certainly a novel suggestion since it swept away the notion, prevalent since the first days of Parliament under Edward I, that representation should in some way be connected with property qualification or position in society. It would also have had the effect of altering the ragged manner in which the electoral units of England were parcelled out between counties and certain boroughs (not always corresponding to the facts of a growingly citified realm). Ireton sprang to take issue: “This doth make me think that the meaning is, that every man that is an inhabitant is to be equally consider’d, and to have an equal voice in the election of the representers … and if that be the meaning then I have something to say against it.” And speak Ireton did, valiantly and sincerely, in cogent and clear language which compels admiration as he faced a hostile audience, with the ever unpopular cry of less reform rather than more. First he swept aside the premises on which their arguments were based:

  For you to make this the rule, I think you must fly for refuge to an absolute natural Right, and you must deny all Civil Right… For my part I think that [the notion of Natural Rights] no right at all. I think that no person hath a right to an interest or share in the disposing or determining of the Kingdom, and in choosing those that shall determine what laws we shall be ruled by here, no person hath a right to this, that hath not a permanent fixed interest in this Kingdom … But that by a man’s being born here he shall have a share in that power that shall dispose of the lands here, and of all things here, I do not think it a sufficient ground.15

  Looking further into these theories, and no doubt influenced by the faces of the men listening to him, many of whom, military service apart, clearly came into the rough category of have-nots, Ireton discerned a veiled attack on the whole concept of property. It was no coincidence that men were qualified to vote by the possession of property but a fundamental part of the Constitution, and if this was to be taken away “we shall plainly go to take away all property and interest that any man hath, either in land or by inheritance, or in estate by possession or anything else”. To this, Rainsborough replied by insisting passionately on the people’s rights: the foundation of all law lay in the people and “I do not find any thing in the law of God that a Lord shall choose twenty burgesses, and a Gentleman but two, or a poor man shall choose none.” But Ireton stuck to his last. “All the main thingfs] that I speak for is because I would have an eye to property”, and this he believed was taken away by the notion of natural rights. When Rainsborough grew furious at Ireton’s implications that they were planning anarchy, it was once more Cromwell who intervened soothingly: “No man says that you have a mind to anarchy, but the consequence of this rule tends to anarchy; must end in anarchy; for where is there any bound or limit set if you take away this limit, that men that have no interest but the interest of breathing shall have no voices in elections. Therefore I am confident on’t that we should not be so hot one with another.”16

  So the debate wore on: Captain Audeley complained that it looked like lasting till the ioth,presumablymeaningtheIdes,ofMarch. Sexbymadesome telling points concerning the soldiers, who had risked their lives in the war and were now told that they had no rights in the kingdom. Cromwell however showed his general inimicability to Sexby’s manner and attack by observing briskly that such sentiments did “savour so much of will”, and once more he proposed a committee to work out a compromise. But before the meeting broke up, John Wildman issued a detailed criticism of the Heads of Proposals which, by preserving authority for the King and House of Lords and leaving the militia in their hands, were merely riveting the foundations of slavery more strongly than ever before. For all that Ireton tried to prove that the main points of the Agreement were substantially covered in the Heads of Proposals, Wildman insisted that only die Agreement guaranteed thesoldiers’ future freedom. Already, he cried, the godly people were turned over and trampled upon in most places in the kingdom. And there was a particular need for an act of indemnity for their past actions, otherwise in the future the King’s judges could well have them all hanged for what they had done during the war. The real trouble arose because if the present Constitution was maintained, still nothing was law but what the King signed.17

  On 30 October, the third day, the committee of officers met again, together with representatives of the Agitators. The strength of the Agitators’ case – or at any rate of their party – had made sufficient impression for it to be agreed that manhood suffrage should be extended to all those who had served the Parliament in the last war, with their services, arms, money or horses. So the soldiers at least were to be enfranchised. But Cromwell’s own mood had undoubtedly been given a rough shaking by the experience of the last few days and latterly talk of monarchy as a form of tyranny, even the necessity of sweeping away the King and the House of Lords, had done nothing to allay his fears. In the meantime the news which was beginning to filter from the Court of the monarch’s own activities was equally disquieting. Was Charles planning to escape, despite having given his parole to the contrary and if so would he search out the Scots once more and ignite a whole new Scottish war? Cromwell’s cousin Whalley could find at least some portents pointing in that direction: when he posted his guards inside the palace of Hampton Court, instead of outside as previously, he was asked to remove them, ostensibly because the noise interrupted the sleep of Charles’s daughter, the eleven-year-old Princess Elizabeth. It was even more worrying when Charles, asked to renew his parole, refused to do so. As a result, on 30 October, the guard was increased and that loyal pair Berkeley and Ashburnham sent away.

  Neve
rtheless, when Cromwell arrived at Putney the next day for the meeting of i November, these royal troubles were not exposed: he was still concerned to argue the practicalities of the situation, which might well include the monarchy. The Jews after all in ancient times had moved through various very different forms of government, ranging from heads of families via judges to kings, according to their needs at the time. It was their duty now to accept whatever form of government best suited the present situation, particularly, he added almost pathetically, since it was liberty of conscience that had been their original aim, and all this contest for temporal things should be “but as Paul says ‘dross and dung in comparison of Christ’”.18 But Cromwell did not succeed in avoiding a series of long arguments on the subject of the King and the House of Lords: Wildman believed that neither should be allowed any sort of negative voice, and even Ireton thought dieir power should be limited; Cromwell’s main preoccupation however was that the Army should regard itself as bound by what had passed before.