Cromwell

by Antonia Fraser

  I think not on the State, nor am concerned

  Which way soever the great Helm is turned.

  It was a course she pursued without interference and with success.

  Curiously enough, it was only in painting that the continued stream of human vitality which ever seeks for new ways to circumvent the dam of control, did not lead to any particular new development. On the contrary, the wholesale adaptation of Cavalier ways for the Protectoral court was total. It is possible to seek the explanation not only in Cromwell’s personal indifference to what he saw, as opposed to heard, around him but more generally in the Puritan lack of interest in the visual arts. Yet since, as has been seen, it was more than possible for them to distinguish church music from music as such, hating the former, loving the latter, it was odd that they were so much less able to make the same distinction between religious images and pictures as such. The explanation is perhaps more simply provided by the fact that the age of Charles i had seen such a wonderful flowering of the visual arts, that die following period with much less inducement to princely magnificence, simply rested on these previous laurels. That, at any rate was the point of view taken by Robert Walker, the artist responsible for depicting most of the Commonwealth dignitaries. He found no necessity to have a new and Puritanical style of portraiture: on the contrary he merely adapted not only the style, but also in many cases the actual poses and details of the pictures of an earlier decade and his great forerunner Van Dyck. Walker was quite frank about his plundering: “If I could do better,” he said, “I would not do Vandikes.” As it was he would not bend himself to do any “postures” of his own. The result was some borrowings which were exact and therefore often ironic: a portrait of Ireton employed a pose belonging to King Charles I. A truly heroic equestrian portrait of Oliver produced by the engraver Peter Lombart was simply taken from the equally equestrian painting of the King at Windsor, and a new head substituted. The bare-faced desire to suit the engraving to the times was shown up even further when, subsequent to the Restoration, King Charles’s head (in a new version) replaced that of the Protector.* (* See G. Layard, The Headless Horseman, on the various vicissitudes of this engraving, a commentary on the mutability of the times, and in general David Piper, The Contemporary Portrait of Oliver Cromwell.)

  The attitude seems to have been that a perfectly good style of Court painting existed, and it would be foolish to do more than merely take it over. There was no attempt to use such portraits as Commonwealth propaganda, to depict any kind of new regime by visual means, as the Stuarts had been so anxious to do. The unadventurous Walker portrait of Cromwell, whose very military trappings of baton and armour were obsolescent (where was the buff coat of the actual Civil War?), continued to be disseminated until 1654, with no attempt to alter its utterly conventional cavalier pose. When a new portrait was needed, it was Cooper the great miniaturist who did it, the prototype (which he perhaps kept by him as a kind of negative) being copied in lesser strength by Lely in his various full-length versions, now thought to derive from this miniature. And Lely too copied the cavalier poses, although in this case his own; the body of his pre-Commonwealth picture of the Duke of Hamilton reoccurs in a full-length portrait of the Protector. As for Cromwell, his bluff attitude to the whole subject, as a necessary evil to be squared up to honestly, has been too well summed up in what is perhaps the most famous of all anecdotes about him. First printed in 1721 by George Vertue it should be quoted as yet another example of a story, possibly apocryphal, which yet survives for the innate truth it is felt to contain about the character concerned: “Mr Lilly,” he is supposed to have observed at the start of a sitting: “I desire you would use all your skill to paint my picture truly like me and Flatter me not at all. But [pointing to his own face] remark all these roughness, pimples, warts and everything as you see me. Otherwise I will never pay a farthing for it.”31 For all that Cromwell’s artist on this occasion was far more likely to have been Cooper the originator than Lely the follower – not least because the miniature shows the warts so clearly, whereas in Lely there is a tendency to gloss them over – the words do have an authentic Cromwellian ring.

  So Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector did bring to the role in general a grandeur both of condition and of attitude which was not unacceptable to the country as a whole. Some of this must be attributable to his own personal character, and the fact that he was in no sense a kill-joy, nor indeed in any way “Puritanical” in the modern pejorative sense of the word. Here was a man who not only demonstrably enjoyed the English gentleman’s pleasures of hawking and hunting, but also saw nothing wrong in pleasure as such. Cromwell, like many Puritans, smoked tobacco (the poet Wither actually referred to God’s mercy in thus “wrapping up a blessing in a weed”). According to Lady Conway, he introduced the habit of port-drinking into England, a liquor not found in the household account of, for example, the Earl of Bedford before the 1680s.32 He loved the common sports provided only that they did not lead to sedition, disturbance and other undesirable social consequences. He certainly saw nothing harmful in sport as such. Happily he attended a hurling-match in Hyde Park on 1 May 1654 where fifty Cornishmen on either side contended for a silver ball, followed by a display of Cornish wrestling.

  Neither by temperament nor by conviction could Oliver Cromwell see anything wrong in such diversions. He would not have shared for example the attitude of the more extreme Richard Baxter towards sport in general “how far the temper and life of Christ and his best servants was from such recreations”. Nor would he have acceded to John Earle’s description of a bowling-alley as a place where three things were thrown away: “time, money and curses, and ninety per cent of the latter”. Such a wholesale condemnation has always been extremely alien to the English nature, hence many later (and inaccurate) expostulations on the subject of seventeenth-century Puritanism. Cromwell neither shared in it nor was particularly bothered by the whole question. Where he was instrumental in the forbidding of pleasure, it was for strict reasons of security. Cockfighting, condemned by an ordinance of 31 March 1654, led to gambling and disorder.33 Race-meetings were not only suspected by the Government of covering up seditious meetings, but were actually undoubtedly used for such, as in the inaugural meeting of the Western Association at Salisbury racecourse.

  As it was, it is clear both from the orders against it and memoirs and letters, that for better or worse the popular pleasures of both bear-baiting and cock-fighting managed to survive throughout the Interregnum. Hope, the well-known bear-baiting arena at Bankside, struggled on despite official closure, and there were also private performances. In September 1655 an unpleasant incident in which a child was killed at Hope by a bear, having been shut into the enclosure by mistake, showed that there was another side to the picture of closing such sports, other than that of governmental repression. Rough justice was applied to the bereaved mother: at first she was offered half the takings of that particular baiting not to prosecute (about Ł60) but she ended up with .Ł3 down payment. However in 1656 a shoot-up of bears under the auspices of Colonel Pride, apparently as a result of some row with the owner, did damp down Hope for the time being. The mastiffs were said to have been shipped to Jamaica. However two famous bears, Blind Bess and Ned of Canterbury, managed to survive the holocaust, and lived on to the looser times of the Restoration.34

  The famous words of Lord Macaulay actually apropos bear-baiting and its closure, which have best summed up the dark side of Puritanism: “The Puritan hated bear-bating, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators” – did not apply to Oliver Cromwell, and were never felt to apply to him at the time. Back in May 1653 some wretched youths at Wolverhampton had set up a Maypole – that pagan symbol of wantonness so distressing to Puritans – to signify their joy at the dissolution of the Rump, it “being an ancient custom, for no other purpose but to express our great joy for that most noble performance of the army”. They were promptly arrested and hauled before the local
magistrates. Their response was to send a personal petition to Cromwell in these touching words: “We beg not to be ruined to satisfy their thirst of revenge, nor exposed to the tyranny of those whom nothing will satisfy but a power of regulating all men by the square of their private fancies.”35 Although Cromwell (then merely Lord-General) was unable to save them from imprisonment at fanatical local hands, they had not mistaken their man in their appeal. It was precisely Cromwell’s lack of any desire to regulate men by the square of his private fancies which had given the special colour to his feelings of religious tolerance. The attitude also pervaded the personal side of his Protectorate, marked by many examples of private clemency, and public interest in the views of those who differed from himself.

  As a result, it was noticeable how the warm breath of pleasure gradually began to steal back across the life of the Commonwealth with encouraging sweetness, and much earlier than is sometimes supposed. By 1654 John Evelyn commented on how the women were beginning to paint their faces again, a colourful portent. Advertisements could be found in government-licensed newspapers for such aristocratic accoutrements as “the Countess of Kent’s Powder (now sold by her maid)”. By 1657, a real sign of the times, Joseph Cooper “that incomparable Master of the Arts” who was in fact the late King’s chef, was advertising his recipes for sale. Throughout the Protectorate, and indeed earlier, French romances translated into English enjoyed much vogue. Some had historical titles including Cleopatre in 1652, and Astree in 1656: Hymen’s Praeludia, translated from the French in 1654, had the more titillating sub-title of “Love’s Masterpiece”. Dorothy Osborne provided the explanation. Such works were, she said, more diverting than histories of the past wars (unless mingled with a great deal of pleasing fiction).

  Towards the end of the Protectorate indeed Milton’s nephew Edward Phillips the publisher took advantage of the gallantries between the sexes, which nothing seemed to extinguish, in the “thickets” of the public places, such as the New Exchange, the Mulberry Gardens and the New Spring Gardens, to publish a handbook of appropriate phrases for such rendezvous. Dedicated to “the Youthful Gentry” The Arts of Wooing and Complimenting included some imaginative essays at conversation such as “Will your ambrosiac kisses bathe my lips?”, “Midnight would blush at this” and “You walk in artificial clouds and bathe your silken limbs in wanton dalliance”. It is hard to conjure up such conversation on the traditionally pursed lips of the prototype Puritan, and it is true that a certain slackening was noticeable in all manners in the late 16505 following earlier efforts at closure of such haunts; yet as early as 1652 Sir Thomas Gower was observing apropos some measure for government security that there was more treason to be found in Hyde Park between the sexes than anywhere else in the kingdom. By June 1654 Dorothy Osborne was by her own account “dissipating herself” in a mask in the New Spring Gardens, a place which Anne Halkett in 1648 admitted as being extremely lewd.36

  The May Day celebrations of 1654 struck several people as being animated by the old happy hedonism of this controversial feast; in May 1655 a garlanded Maypole at Bethnal Green aroused such a pitch of excitement that troops had to disperse the crowds. In August of the same year, forty poor scholars enacted a pageant in which the leading parts were a King and Queen on horseback, with heralds before and ladies in a coach behind. Even Christmas, another vexed festival, which had been but blankly celebrated in 1652 and 1653, was marked by the people’s rejoicing in 1654. Easter and Shrove Tuesday might have been celebrated publicly too, had not patrols of troops deliberately prevented it. The problems of Government ordinances versus popular inclinations were shown up when several fires were started by mistake during these seasons of merry-making, but could not be put out, because it was unlawful for the people to join together to do so.

  Visitors to the capital all commented on the relaxation of manners there. It was under the Commonwealth after all that the coffee-houses came to prominence as places of social intercourse. Lisle’s and Gibbons Tennis Court, apart from their illegal theatrical connexions, were also areas where it was possible to practise archery, swim in a bathing-pool and enjoy the fashionable spectacle of a rope-dancer. Sir Francis Throckmorton, coming to London in the summer of 1656, watched dancing horses, played cards, and rode in Hyde Park, all without molestation.37 So the common pleasures, with the vitality of weeds, pushed their way back through the paving stones of earlier legislation, encouraged by a laxer spirit at the top.

  As a result of such vitality, the immense expansion of London itself as a city, begun under the Stuarts, was in no way halted during the Interregnum. Officially such building required licensing, and in the 16305 Charles I had frequently reinforced the proclamations that demanded Government control and licence. But the fact that under the Commonwealth, it was necessary to repeat such ordinances frequently, showed that the natural desire of men to conglomerate and builders to speculate, orders or no orders, was still proceeding. In 1657 a law was proposed for fining unlicensed building, which had the added advantage of making money for the Government. But of course there were exceptions, including the Earl of Bedford’s great new developments on his Covent Garden estates, and a new market there in which he took an interest – just “a few temporary stalls and sheds”. Stern efforts were made to preserve the open character of London: in 1656 one of Oliver’s ordinances stayed further building in the spaces to the west of the Haymarket, known as St James’s Fields. Yet gradually, and as later generations might concede, inevitably, the fields were being devoured by the people flocking to the capital.

  A map of London made at the end of Oliver’s Protectorate demonstrated how the buildings were beginning to spring up at the junction of Haymarket and Pall Mall, and there were even a few houses on the east side of St James’s Street, areas that had been positively pastoral in the 16305. The inexorable spread of London westwards could not be halted, while the filling-in of the gap between the City of London and Westminster, begun under the Stuarts, continued apace. Even the Government legislation, intended to preserve the grace of the environment, was capable of having the opposite effect: as Sir William Petty pointed out, in condemning the efforts of both Stuarts and Protector to limit London’s “Multiplicity of Buildings”, the lack of new dwellings often led to the cobbling up of old and unsuitable ones. It was Sir William who predicted that London would move so far west that one day the King’s Palace would be found nearer to Chelsea than Whitehall – a prediction not so far quite fulfilled although a move in that direction certainly took place with the establishment in the eighteenth century of Buckingham Palace as the royal residence. And it was Sir William whose verdict on London sums up the problem that Cromwell, as other leaders, faced in the bursting development of the city, infiltrated by immigrants, burgeoning with inhabitants who had risen to half a million before the Great Plague, from half that number at the beginning of the century: “While ever there are people in England the greatest cohabitation of them will be about the place which is now London, the Thames being the most commodious River of this Island, and the seat of London the most commodious part of the Thames.”38

  Naturally the convinced Royalists continued to mock the Protectoral Court – the Court of a usurper – from every vulnerable angle. On the one hand the Royalists laughed at Lady Cromwell’s frugalities, in particular in a spiteful piece of pseudo-reportage published in 1660 called The Court and Kitchen of Mrs Elizabeth Cromwell Commonly called Joan. They accused her of holding drinking-parties for ladies at which “lewd toasts” were drunk, although as there is no unbiased evidence for it, this tradition of the Protectress’s fondness for dissipation is presumably merely a further extension of the old tales of Oliver the brewer and Oliver the red-nosed drinker. She had, they said, no self-confidence in her new position, dividing up the State Rooms of her new lodgings with partitions to make it into cosier and smaller apartments. Some of her practices had a pleasantly rural air – keeping two or three cows in St James’s Park, for instance, and establishing a new kind
of dairy in Whitehall whose buttermilk became a speciality. Others were philanthropic such as sewing bees of spinsters, the daughters of Nonconformist ministers, or the distribution of the scraps from the Protectoral dinner to the poor of St Margaret’s or St Martin’s-inthe-Fields. The recipes copied out scornfully in this repository of Royalist satire revealed that the Protectress’s customary dishes all involved the use of the cheaper meat substitutes-delicious-sounding to modern ears but parsimonious to those of her own time, such as sweetbreads and black puddings. Marrow puddings provided a typical breakfast, and “Scotch collops of veal”, stuffed with sausage meat and fried in egg was said to be her own favourite.

  So much for Elizabeth Cromwell’s attempts to combine homeliness and dignity. At the same time the Royalists also poked fun from quite the opposite point of view at Oliver’s inordinate grandeur. The Protector, they said, spent a fortune amassed for the relief of suffering Protestants on a vast lifeguard of three thousand men, intended to resemble the renowned Turkish janissaries! And they accused him equally falsely of copying the practice of the former monarchs in touching the common people to cure the disease known as the King’s Evil: although of course the other point of the story was that none was in fact cured by the impure Protectoral fingers. In a sense, it was a situation in which it was impossible for Cromwell to win, at least against his committed critics. When the Leveller unrest in the Army drew to a head in the petition of Colonel Alured at the end of 1654, one of Oliver’s supposed malfeasances was the use of silver lace for his boot-top-hose at .Ł30 per yard, and the commissioning of a coach grander than any King’s. Economy led to scorn but state led to accusations of pomp.