Cromwell

by Antonia Fraser

  The whole fracas, whose exact course remains obscure, had consequences beyond its immediate gossipy interest. Lambert at the time became still more disenchanted with Parliament and increasingly vocal in opposition to it. Later Cromwell was accused (as so often) of having engineered the whole incident to incite Lambert to get rid of Parliament for him; but this seems far-fetched. In fact Parliament’s actions were probably dictated by economy, Cromwell by sacrificing his Lord-Lieutenant’s salary to Ireton in the autumn having already pointed the way. Furthermore Cromwell showed his personal sympathy for Lambert by directing that a payment of Ł2,000 should be made to him out of the remaining arrears of this pay, to help him bear the costs he had incurred in the expectations of stately life in Ireland. It was more likely that Parliament insisted on having its own way (even against Cromwell’s inclinations) than that Cromwell himself indulged in a particularly deep-laid plot. Nevertheless the exchange of Lambert for Fleetwood was surely not to the advantage of Ireland. Fleetwood was essentially a narrow-minded man, if a sincere and honourable Puritan: Lambert’s more outgoing and freer nature would have constituted a more congenial presiding spirit.

  In England itself financial necessity continued to impose its own pattern on the settlement of the nation, and affect what otherwise might have been the more tolerant intentions of the Government. Cromwell was one of those who felt strongly on the subject of the State’s leniency: in the passing of the new Act of Oblivion – “that all Rancour and Evil will be occasioned by the late Differences may be buried in perpetual oblivion” – in February 1652, he argued strongly on behalf of mercy. In fact the Act was intended to be all-encompassing, but by excepting all those who had committed High Treason, unless it was in words only, the way was left open for exacting continued financial penalties in the shape of confiscations from the Royalists, should that prove necessary. The same spirit of limited forgiveness could be seen in the repeal of the extreme penalties on the Roman Catholic recusants in September 1650. The intention to mould them further into the English State did exist: for although the Mass was still prohibited, it was no longer mandatory to attend an English church on Sundays. Records in 1652 and 1653 showed a decline in the people indicted for the practice of the Catholic faith. But at the same time the sequestrations of their estates remained one of the Government’s chief sources of money, not to be ignored in time of stress, or as one disillusioned rhyme put it:

  For where there’s money to be got

  I find this pardon pardons not. . .

  In a country so recently torn by war, there was of course a crying need for a new kind of social policy, or indeed any kind of social policy at all which would take into account the rising problem of vagrants, coupled with the inevitable problems raised by the war such as disbanded and wounded soldiers. In theory the Puritans had always concerned themselves very seriously with the quality of the lives of ordinary people, although their early ideas on legislation were scarcely in keeping with the views of the majority of the populace. An Act of 1650 made adultery and incest punishable by death, although the reluctance of juries to convict meant that it fell into virtual desuetude; fornication received three months’ imprisonment; prostitutes were to be whipped, branded with B (for Bawd) and serve in a house of correction for their first offence, put to death for their second. The Act of Oblivion also specifically excluded from pardon not only Royalists but those guilty of “the Detestable and abominable vice of Buggery with Mankind or Beast” as well as “the carnal ravishment of women” and bigamy. Drunkenness was taken extremely seriously as an offence, and unlike adultery much punished. Although a law that forbade the painting of faces, the wearing of patches and immodest dresses was not read a second time, carefully graded fines for swearing were enacted, in which the advantage for profanity went to women and the lowborn: whereas it cost a lord 30s. to swear, for a gentleman the fine sank to 6s. 8d., and below that 3s.. 4d.; husbands were responsible for their wives’ oaths and fathers for their daughters’.

  These provisions, whether or not they achieved a more clean-living or at least clean-tongued population (which is doubtful), had little to do with the kind of real problems that were facing ordinary people at the time. The increase of enclosures obviously put up the numbers of the out-ofwork, and that in turn led to an increase in vagrancy. Ordinary people also found that their lot was often worsened with the change of ownership in the land consequent upon the confiscations, because the new owners were noticeably less humane than the established proprietors to whom the local inhabitants and their troubles were familiar of old. Gerard Winstanley the Leveller referred to “the new (more covetous) gentry”. A man like Richard Baxter felt justifiable anxiety for the dispossessed peasant “of public consequence and of spiritual and everlasting concernment”.11

  It was an atmosphere in which Parliament was ever watchful of the rights of ownership and as such disinclined for example to protect the copyholders – those who held their land by immemorial usage but not outright – against the enclosers; it was no wonder that the more radical doctrines of the Levellers towards property flourished. The public mood was uneasy and disturbed, demonstrated by the expectant fearful attitude towards an impending eclipse of the sun in March 1652. The day itself was referred to in advance as Black Monday, and there were those who actually fled from London to avoid its consequences. As for its import, this was variously interpreted as the collapse of Scottish Presbyterianism (by William Lilly the astrologer) to the coming of the Fifth Monarchy (by those who were awaiting it). In the end the Council of State, having problems enough of their own on earth, were obliged to put out a paper stating that eclipses were natural events.

  But of all the subjects in which the interests of the Rump or the Government generally showed themselves disjointed from those of the ordinary people, that of the reform of the law was the most glaring. The delays and abuses to which Englishmen were subject had been one of the most prominent grievances stressed on the eve of the Civil War; although some reforms of the highly unpopular Chancery had been carried out in 1649, it was still possible to refer to it as “a Mystery of Wickedness and a standing Cheat” in a contemporary pamphlet (a later writer referred to “a hotchpotch of linsey-wolsey Laws”!). Shortly before Worcester, Cromwell in conversation with Edmund Ludlow had spoken of the need to reform the law as among the other crying necessities of this “free and equal Commonwealth”. Latin was also abolished as the official legal language in late 1650 in a gesture against obscurantism: English was now to be the sole language of the public records, and English what was more, written ” in an ordinary, usual and legible Hand and Character”.12 Yet for all the establishment of a committee in 1652 to discuss possible reforms, nothing further was achieved by the Rump beyond endless discussions.

  The members of the Rump could hardly plead ignorance: more than half their members had attended an Inn of Court, and the converse – too many legal vested interests to carry through reforms – was more likely to be true. Yet the findings of the committee under the chairmanship of Matthew Hale, passed on to the Parliamentary Law Committee, there to be discussed and if necessary presented to Parliament, showed how many “Inconveniences in the Law” existed to bedevil the lives of ordinary people. Sixteen bills were drafted by the committee ranging from the prevention of bribery by judges to the easier recovery of small debts and simpler methods for the registration of wills. There was also an effort to ameliorate the lot of those who suffered under the Criminal Law – the abolition of the fearful and still surviving peine forte et dure, by which those who refused to plead at all, no plea being considered a plea of guilty, could be pressed to death slowly.* ( * This was finally repealed in 1772. In 1827 the law was altered so that if a prisoner stood mute, a plea of not guilty was entered. For this whole subject see G. B. Nourse, Law Reform under the Commonwealth and Protectorate.) Further mitigations were suggested: women who killed their husbands were to be hanged not burned, the goods of suicides were not to be forfeited, prisoners were t
o have counsel and witnesses to give evidence on oath. Some judicial ideas proposed even took into account the notion that a prisoner should be cured as well as punished, a theory of justice still not universally accepted many centuries later: it was suggested that a “godly and painful preacher” should be installed in each city and county jail to pray helpfully to that end with the prisoners. The penalties for stealing involved the theory of restitution as well as punishment. Yet although in January 1653 Parliament spent two days reading the law book of Hale’s committee, none of these reforms got a statute book hearing within the lifetime of the Rump.

  However while the Rump argued and talked and did little to win public popularity, the reconstitution of the organization of the English Church was a problem which fell into different and more energetic hands. In essence it was a situation which needed an executive solution: for while the Independents had once appeared as a minor sect threatening official Anglicanism, they were now the men in power, whose religion was in turn threatened by a multitude of minor sects. But at present there was no existing organization for choosing ministers, and if they were chosen, still less was there any way of paying them other than the previous system of tithes by which the local ministers received a proportion of the parish offerings, now denounced by so many of the sectaries. Parallel with the need for some kind of uniformity, if only to beat off the wilder extravagances of some of the sectaries, there existed then the hectic question of how this uniformity should be imposed, and if imposed, how paid. The ultimate casus belli of the Government against the sectaries came in February 1652 when a book was published advocating the doctrines of a sixteenth-century Italian named Socinius who not only proposed general rather than individual grace (appalling heresy to the Independents) but even denied the divinity of Christ.

  In order to establish what might or might not be tenable under the Commonwealth, a committee was set up under John Owen, who by Cromwell’s friendship and patronage had become first Dean of Christ Church and then Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University (although he was said by Anthony Wood to annoy convocation by his dress, at once ornate and over-youthful).13 However where religion rather than dress was concerned, his stable opinions of the middle way, neither too Presbyterian nor too mystical, were felt to fit him for the task. Owen produced “Fifteen Fundamentals”, which proceeded from the general proposition that none who believed it possible to seek God’s will elsewhere than in the Scriptures should be allowed to propagate the gospel – thus ruling out the Fifth Monarchists, but including Congregationalists, Presbyterians and of course Independents. Two sets of commissioners were also set up to raise up an Established Church of sorts: Triers, who were to be a type of local committee, passing on those ministers thought suitable, and Ejectors, a national body to supervise and remove ministers (and incidentally also schoolmasters). But the payment of the ministers still could not be solved for the time being in any manner other than the application of the old tithes. This in itself caused great outrage to all those sectaries who had set their hearts against them.

  Long before the Civil War, for decades, centuries even, the issue of tithes had been a controversial one, and there had been many disputes on the subject. Literally meaning a tenth or tithe of the produce and livestock of the parish, dedicated to the support of the local church, the tithe had come to symbolize a series of different – but equally emotive – things to different people. It was Monk who termed it “the issue of blood”. In many cases tithes had passed into the hands of temporal owners at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries and the maintenance of the system had become part of powerful vested lay interests. From this it was an easy step to establish a close connexion between tithes and all other forms of property: there was a general if irrational feeling that if tithes were abolished, private property as such might be the next to go.14

  On the other hand there was genuine doubt in many quarters as to the propriety of tithes as a form of stipend. Should the parishes in fact be responsible for their ministers, or should the Government handle the finances of the clergy themselves? In the general dislocation of the war, the people had often taken the opportunity to refuse to pay the tithes, and in the absence of the ecclesiastical courts, it was difficult to bring them to book. A more radical suggestion for the ministers’ support was that they themselves should labour. From 1647 onwards, the more extreme sects such as Levellers and Diggers, and lately the Fifth Monarchy Men, were taking what many thought to be an unhealthy interest in the abolition of tithes and including it in their programme. In a vicious circle, the identification of these sects with suspicious radicalism led in turn to greater conservative fear of the abolition of tithes.

  In the debates on the new system, Cromwell took the opportunity to make his personal views clear. As in Ireland, he did not propose to concern himself with whatever feelings might lurk unheard within the hearts of men. The aim must be public tolerance. To Parliament he spoke up strongly against State persecution: he had no need of revelation, he said, “to discover unto me that man who endeavours to impose upon his brethren”. When he was asked for a persecuting Saul rather than an indifferent Galileo, Cromwell replied splendidly: “I had rather that Mahometanism were permitted amongst us than that one of God’s children should be persecuted.” It was an outspoken statement by the standards of the time, if only because almost the first act of censorship by the Commonwealth in 1649 had been to seize an edition of the Koran printed in London.15 Obviously he hoped that the new system would be a loose net in which the consciences of godly men might flourish, and those who did not somehow adhere to the right way would nevertheless be allowed to live in peace – so long as, that was, they themselves also practised peaceful ways.

  But over the question of the tithes, it was significant that Cromwell, with his sense of law and order and what was practicable, came down on the side of keeping them, for the time being until some other stipend could be worked out. On 29 April 1652 it seems that Cromwell was amongst those who voted for their contemporary but unlimited preservation. It was the occasion of much indignation for those who believed that he was committed to their withdrawal, prominent amongst them the Quaker George Fox, who subsequently spread a story that Cromwell had promised God to surrender the tithes in return for a victory at Dunbar.16 The tale was hardly likely to be true, but it did show the bitter new development in Cromwell’s relations with sectaries more extreme than himself.

  Over the interesting if nebulous question of Cromwell’s own personal religion, that was of a more mystical turn than that of his friend Owen. It was demonstrated by his choice of chaplains. Peter Sterry, for example, who incurred later criticism for his mystical tendencies, impressed Cromwell sufficiently to be commanded by him to preach before him regularly on Sundays either at Hampton Court or Whitehall. Sterry was an attractive companion by any standards, loving poetry, music and painting, praising Virgil, Titian and Van Dyck. The rigid organization and methods of the Presbyterians, he declared “laboured to hedge in the wind, and to bind up the sweet influence of the spirit”. Throughout Cromwell’s period of influence, Sterry certainly enjoyed much patronage being employed on various tasks such as an inventory of the State records and certification of the fitness of ministers; that he owed much to Cromwell’s support can be seen further by the fact that he fell out of favour when Cromwell died.17

  Neither friendship – with Owen or with Sterry – can fully encase the measure of Cromwell’s religion. It was not only that he had an admirable and healthy passion for friendships where discussions could take place between two opposing points of view. Throughout Cromwell’s life, his religious views showed signs of being extremely subjective, and he had presumably chosen the Independent structure originally for the very reason that the looser bonds would give fuller play to his temperament, rejecting in turn Anglicanism and Presbyterianism. Certain facets remained sparkling in his beliefs, including his dislike for those who wanted to jacket their comrades’ spirits into uniformity, instead of fighting
the common enemy. Two years later he was speaking with outright annoyance of the strange itch in the spirits of men: “Nothing will satisfy them unless they can put their finger upon their brethren’s consciences, to pinch them there.”18 That meant that the external forms which the practice of religion might take never meant as much to him as it did to many of his contemporaries.

  By himself, he preferred to wrestle with the Scriptures on the one hand, and the other revelations of God’s will in the shape of his signs. In company his philosophy since earliest times was best summed up by a petition of some suffering Quakers at Horsham: “We hear that thou hast declared that none in this nation shall suffer for conscience sake.” Law and order was another matter again, and his attitude to the sectaries (who were said to be obsessing him in October 1652) would shift to and fro in accordance with the nature of their resistance to the State. But it was significant that Cromwell was one of those Independents – who also included Ireton and Lambert – never actually associated with a particular “gathered church”. He was thus never in the modern sense a true Congregationalist, any more than those enthusiastic words he once wrote to Bridget on the love of Christ, made him an actual member of the sect known as the Seekers: “Happy seeker, happy finder! Who ever tasted that the Lord is gracious, without some sense of self, vanity and badness? Who ever tasted that graciousness of His, and could go less in desire, and less in pressing after full enjoyment?”19 It was as a searcher himself, a perpetual pilgrim, that he wrote, not a sectary committed to any particular branch.* ( * Sir Charles Firth did take the reference to the “Seeker” in this sense,20 although there is no other evidence for Cromwell’s participation. See also Geoffrey F. Nuttall, The Lord Protector: Reflections on Dr Paul’s Life of Cromwell.) Indeed if any modern comparison can be made, he might have found a happy niche for himself in the present-day Church of England, attending some acknowledgedly “low” congregation. The point has been well made that Cromwell might have been less spiritually lonely in his later years had he enjoyed the support of a particular “gathered church”. As it was, in his religious life he was thrust back to a marked degree on the perusal of divine dispensations.