Cromwell

by Antonia Fraser

  All of this was dramatic enough, but what was to follow showed that in Cromwell, the sleeping tiger, the man of action was never so far relaxed that he could not spring into the fray once more, the moment his blood was up. Pausing merely to order up a party of soldiers, and not even botheringTo change his clothes (the surprising informality of his dress struck contemporary witnesses: he had been in his own home and was wearing merely a plain black coat with grey worsted stockings), he rushed through Whitehall like a whirlwind. It was 11.15 am by the dial in St James’s Park, so the industrious Ashmole discovered later,39 andit must have been only a few minutes later when this amazing apparition burst into the chamber of the House of Commons.

  For what happened now the three main accounts,* ( * That of Whitelocke who was present, that of Algernon Sidney the Republican MP whose father, Lord Lisle, later Lord Leicester, recorded it, and that of Ludlow who pieced together his story from various eye-witness accounts, notable amongst them that of Thomas Harrison.40) although they differ, like the synoptic gospels in details and order of events, together collate into an extraordinary picture of rising tempest. For a pregnant pause, Cromwell sat slumped in his place, listening to what was going on. Then standing up, he began to speak, battling still with the surging passions in his breast, for his first words, according to Sidney, were comparatively calm, and he still tried to commend Parliament for their pains and care of the public good. But even as he spoke, their treachery, the injustice of their behaviour started to well up within him, and his style began to change. Soon the rage was full upon him, beyond anyone’s control: he was talking in what Whitelocke called “a furious manner”, and what by Ludlow’s account must have been something almost demented, for he continued to speak “with so much passion and discomposure of mind as if he had been distracted . ..”, walking up and down the House like a madman, kicking the ground with his feet and shouting. His language in itself showed the extremes almost of paranoia as he strode about, pointing now at this man, now at that, singling out by his gestures if not by name his old enemies for condemnation; calling some of them “Whoremasters” (he gazed at Marten and Sir Peter Wentworth), some drunkards, some corrupt and unjust men, and some scandalous to the profession of the Gospel. “Perhaps you think this is not parliamentary language,” he bellowed. “I confess it is not, neither are you to expect any such from me … It is not fit that you should sit as a Parliament any longer. You have sat long enough unless you had done more good.”

  At last Peter Wentworth, grandson of the Parliamentary leader of Queen Elizabeth’s day, had the guts to protest against Cromwell’s language of abuse, all the more horrible because it was coming from the man they had all “so highly trusted and obliged”. This was the last straw to Cromwell’s balance. “Come, come,” he riposted savagely, “I will put an end to your prating. You are no Parliament. I say you are no Parliament. I will put an end to your sitting.” Then he called to Thomas Harrison who was sitting on the other side of the House and shouted: “Call them in” or words to that effect. In rushed five or six files of musketeers from Cromwell’s own regiment of foot under Lieutenant-Colonel Worsley, making altogether between twenty and thirty soldiers. Cromwell pointed at the Speaker. “Fetch him down,” he said grimly. Harrison, as told to Ludlow, remonstrated briefly with Cromwell – “the work is very great and dangerous”. But there was no gainsaying Oliver Cromwell at this point. Harrison duly pulled the Speaker down by his gown. Seeing the musketeers, it was Vane who called out: “This is not honest, yea it is against morality and common honesty.” Cromwell turned on him like a snake and cried out in a loud voice: “O Sir Henry Vane, Sir Henry Vane, the Lord deliver me from Sir Henry Vane.” And Sidney, who was sitting next to the Speaker and refused to obey orders to leave, was put out by threat of force from Harrison and Worsley.

  Then Cromwell went to the table in front of the Speaker and looked at the mace, the symbol of the Speaker’s authority, lying there. “What shall we do with this bauble?” he asked contemptuously. “Here take it away.”* ( * Ludlow’s version. According to Sidney, Cromwell said: “Take away these baubles”, and according to Whitelocke, he bid one of his soldiers take away “that fool’s bauble the mace”.41) So the mace was hurried out by the soldiers, and was subsequently stored carelessly for many days in the room of Worsley, in charge of the foot. The reference was to the jester’s cap and bells, his bauble, and this strange amalgamation of entertainment and dishonesty seems to have been much on Cromwell’s mind, for just as Vane was going out, he told him that he too was nothing but a juggler. Cromwell now turned to the eighty to a hundred members who must have been sitting aghast as they watched the ejection of their Speaker and the collapse of a whole style of procedure. “It is you that have forced me to do this,” he cried with incredible bitterness, “for I have sought the Lord night and day, that he would rather slay me than put me upon the doing of this work.” So saying he had the entire House cleared by the soldiers, but not before he had himself snatched up the paper containing the Act of Dissolution which was lying there waiting to be passed. He took the paper away with him and so it vanished from the sight of history. Thus its exact provisions will for ever remain a mystery. Perhaps Cromwell, on finding that it did not contain a new Recruiter clause, burnt it.42 The records of the House were also seized. By 11.40 a.m., according to Ashmole, it was all over: Parliament was extinguished, as lifeless as an old candle.

  There was no official entry in the Commons’Journal of the dissolution, but Mr Scobell, the clerk of the House, admitted at the Restoration to having written in his own handwriting and without being directed to do so: “This Day his Excellency the Lord General dissolved this Parliament: Which was done without Consent of Parliament.” This entry was then officially expunged. At the time a wag with more wit than Scobell put up a poster outside: “This House is to be Lett; now unfurnished.”

  Cromwell himself proceeded back to the Cockpit where he broke the news of what he had done to those officers who were not members of Parliament. It is significant that he referred to his action as being unpremeditated: he told the men that before he went down to the House he had not thought to have done this: “but perceiving the spirit of God so strong upon me, I would not consult flesh and blood”. In the afternoon Cromwell turned his attention to the Council of State, telling them that in future they could only meet together as private persons, since the Parliament of which they were the servants had been put to an end. It was then that John Bradshaw, not otherwise a particularly inspiring character, had his moment of greatness. “Sir,” he replied courageously, “we have heard what you did at the House in the morning and before many hours all England will hear of it; but, Sir, you are mistaken to think that the Parliament is dissolved; for no power under heaven can dissolve them but themselves; therefore take you notice of that.” Haselrig, Love and Scot made some more remarks to the same effect, but in the end, finding themselves “under the same violence,” departed.43

  One thing emerges from this whole extraordinary episode with incontrovertible clarity, and that is that Cromwell acted in a fit of uncontrollable passion, the kind of sudden berserk fury of which his career provides a number of bouts, including the famous massacre of Drogheda. In each case, he felt himself suddenly assailed by some unlooked-for piece of aggression or double-dealing, and reacted accordingly. His language alone in Parliament, the accusations of whoremastering, to say nothing of the physical manifestations of his rage such as the kicking of the very floor of the House of Commons, point to some deep-seated disturbance beyond ordinary frustration or mere exasperation. It also seems clear that it was Ingoldsby’s message that provoked the storm, and by the same process of reasoning it must have been the sense of having been betrayed by the Rumpers which convinced Cromwell that nothing good could now ever come out of these men. It seems quite possible that the missing Act of Dissolution did show him, if he examined it later, that the Rump were proposing an Act based on a new electorate and had not inserted a Recruiter clau
se at the last minute. But it was the treachery of the sudden unplanned morning’s meeting, contrary to the previous night’s agreement, which had convinced him that the Rump all along had not changed its spots: perpetuation, under some form or other, was their aim. In this context the Act of Dissolution was less important to his motivation, since he only discovered it afterwards, than the brusque arrival of Ingoldsby’s message.

  Afterwards of course Cromwell, like many another politician, justified what had been done in terms which owed a great deal to the prevailing atmosphere of the time, rather than to previous events. The specific Recruiter charge was comparatively slow to develop. Even the Army, in their Declaration made soon after the dissolution, only referred to the intentions of the Rump to “recruit the House with Persons of the same Spirit and Temper, thereby to perpetuate their own sitting”, not to their efforts to do so by law. Otherwise it laid heavy if generalized emphasis on the corruptions and jealousies of that body so that “this cause which the Lord hath so lately blessed, and bore witness to, must needs languish under their hands, and by degrees be wholly lost”. At the beginning of July, Cromwell described “the preposterous haste” of the Rumpers as having been the last straw – but it was haste to get the bill through and thus keep their own control over the November elections, rather than haste to put in a Recruiter clause. These elections would have brought in “neuters or such as should impose upon their brethren, or such as had given testimony to the King’s party”.44 Only much later did the argument emerge that the Rumpers had deliberately introduced a new Recruiter clause into the Act of Dissolution.

  At the time, one small but momentous decision on the part of the Rumpers, to continue the discussion of the bill and thus rush it through, turned Cromwell from his long-held policy of bridging the gap between MPs and officers, to final permanent distrust of the MPs. His decisive temperament, coupled with his streaks of manic rage, did the rest and produced certainly the most amazing scene in English Parliamentary history. “Is this not a strange turn?” wrote Dorothy Osborne wryly to her lover, William Temple: surely John Pym if he were alive might think that this was as great a breach of the privilege of Parliament as ever the demanding of the Five Members had been. To Europe later Nouvelles Ordinaires extended the old explanation of what had transpired: the Army had been led to this “par la necessite et par le providence” beyond their design and beyond their previous thoughts.45 So they flung themselves upon the mercy of God, hoping for his blessing on what they had done.

  Unfortunately for Cromwell personally, he could in future no longer hope for the blessing of those who condemned in toto military rule. By using his sword to cut the Gordian knot of the Rump Parliament, he had at the same time flourished it in the faces of all England. There could be no more glad confident morning again of Parliamentary government. The basis of his power had well and truly been shown to be the muskets of his soldiers. Yet curiously enough this result was in the final analysis the product of impulse rather than reflection. Perhaps there was no other way to get rid of the odious Rump except by force, of a sort: but force need not necessarily be identified with violence. It was violence which had now raised its hideous head in the House of Commons, in a manner never to be forgotten so that in British politics still, “Cromwellian solutions” are sometimes identified with Draconian ones. Better for Cromwell then to have guarded the jewels of his passion, let his impetuous temper sparkle in private, and used it to inspire an equally masterful but less overtly brutal action in public.

  The tragedy of Oliver Cromwell as a statesman was that those qualities that had raised him in war, qualities so natural to his character, decision, speed and dash in a critical situation, the ability to strike and strike hard, could in the far more ambiguous sphere of politics turn to something quite else. It was a point to be made later in the year by Cromwell’s enemies the Fifth Monarchists, who had a common saying among themselves that in the field the General was “the graciousest and most gallant man in the world, but out of the field and when he came home again to government, the worst”.46 The trouble was that these adapted qualities were not only less attractive but even in the long term less effective. It was patience, management, reserve and cunning which Milton’s chief of men needed to bring about the victories of peace.

  16 At the edge of prophecies

  You are as like the forming of God as ever people were . . . You are at the edge of promises and prophecies

  CROMWELL ADDRESSING THE BAREBONES PARLIAMENT, July 1653

  Of the inglorious end of the Rump, Oliver Cromwell wrote later complacently:’ ‘There was not so much as the barking of a dog, or any general or visible repining at it.” A Staffordshire man, John Langley, writing back at the end of April from London to his master Sir Richard Leveson, told much the same story if in less vivid language: “All things seem strangely to rest in a quiet posture; the City trading, the courts sitting, lawyers pleading and all other vulgar concernments proceeding after the usual manner.” Indeed the Rump, with its many failures and delays, had dug its own grave deep enough, for there to be little popular reaction to the final disappearance of the unlamented corpse. The late Speaker, Lenthall, for example was supposed to have made some unseemly profits out of his office – he was said to be “closely watched and might be called to account”.1 Although he never was officially taxed with peculation and the evidence is inconclusive, he did subsequently have to contribute 5 0,000 to a forced loan, which was perhaps an unacknowledged payment in return for the dropping of charges. Under these and similar circumstances, it was hardly surprising that the Parliament generally was unregretted.

  Even among those with less vested interest in the success of the Commonwealth, the end of the Rump was hailed with satisfaction. At the Hague in exile Sir Edward Hyde described the dissolution as a “glorious action” because it put an end at last to “an accursed assembly of rogues”. And in England there was no doubt that Cromwell personally was extremely popular for his whole stance in many quarters from which he had previously expected only criticism. The radical preachers at Blackfriars, men who never minced their words, saluted him for his wisdom in “grubbing up the wicked Parliament, not leaving a rotten root thereof”. From the opposite angle, the English Royalists, and in particular the Catholics, hoped for better things from the care of the Lord-General, relief from the endless exactions to which they were subject and perhaps immunity for private worship, because Cromwell was known to have acted mercifully in individual cases over the surrender of strongholds. Here, where a blanket indemnity had been granted, it was sometimes argued that Catholics should none the less pay the penalties of their faith, and at Oxford for example, the Catholics had in the end had to compound for one-third of their estates. So now hopes rose: “If all this ado would procure us a fair pardon,” wrote one Catholic, “we would make your Cromwell our idol.”2

  The pertinent question had now to be answered however, after the grubbing up of the wicked Parliament roots and all, as to exactly what form of government should replace it. In the speed of events, this was the one thing which there had been absolutely no time to settle. It will be remembered that England was still in the throes of a Dutch War: whereas Scotland was only apprised of the news of the change in a discreetly modified newsletter (where the Speaker was merely described as having been pulled “modestly” out of his chair, and Parliament dissolved with “as little noise as can be imagined”), particular care was taken to secure the assent of the Navy to the recent cataclysm. The Army Declaration of 22 April listing the reasons for their actions was disseminated as widely as possible. The Master of Ceremonies, Sir Oliver Fleming, was sent to all foreign ministers to reassure them that friendships would not be changed. What exactly had been left behind to act as an executive out of the wreckage of that April morning? This problem was solved by setting up on 29 April a body known to Royalists as the Decemvirate, headed by Cromwell and including Lambert (who acted as first President), Desborough and Thomas Harrison, as well as officials.<
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  Earnest confabulations were now embarked upon by this body as to what sort of legislative power should now exist in England, the need for further money for the Dutch War making the decision urgent not only in theory but in practice. Already the division between Lambert, the popular gentlemanly man of the Army and Harrison, the spokesman of the wilder Fifth Monarchists was beginning to show: Lambert argued for a council of twelve, whereas Harrison, showing incidentally the philo-Semitic tendencies of the time, argued for a council of seventy, along the lines of the Jewish Sanhedrin. On 30 April an announcement signed by Cromwell, and eventually printed on 6 May, made it clear not only that there would be a “new representative”, but also that this assembly – the word Parliament was avoided, and continued to be so – of “persons of approved fidelity and honesty” duly acquired from all quarters of the Commonwealth, would be no mere provisional Government, but the future repository of a very real power. As this Declaration put it, they would be “called … to the supreme authority”. Whatever the internal dissensions before this point was reached, it was clear that Cromwell himself had not yet turned his head away from the idea of a general assembly – if only the correct one could somehow be established.