Cromwell

by Antonia Fraser

  Such incidents were of course far removed from the sufferings of the average Irish Catholic peasant or indeed landowner who had not been able to prove his Constant Good Affection – as far, it might be said, as Oliver’s projected island of busy Protestant Saints was from the actual reality of an island condemned to a future of strife by English legislation. Oliver was soon made personally responsible for every evicted family, and the attachment of the settlement to his own name finished off the process by which myth, through long usage, gets a mysterious substance of its own. As early as 1659 a book by Friar Morison, printed at Innsbruck, named Threnodia Hibemo-Catholica described the sufferings of those involved, at the hands of the “Anglo-Calvinists”, as greater than those of the Israelites and Pharaoh or the innocents and Herod. He declared boldly that it was the “Arch-Tyrant” Cromwell who was responsible. The real truth was contained in another phrase of his: the English showed themselves velut lup rapaces – rapacious as wolves.

  It was true that the English intention to separate off the two nations was soon filtered away by the forbidden inter-marriage of soldiers and Irish girls. Many former soldiers became so Irishified, that by the end of the century an English observer was reporting indignantly that the descendants of Cromwell’s army could speak no English. But this relaxation did nothing to alleviate the basic problem left behind by the Acts of Plantation, which nullified any other possible advantages of English rule in the mid-seventeenth century, such as the profitable customs union and the restoration of justice and order. These former soldiers were not rich men. They melded on the contrary into the lesser elements of the nation. As for the proscribed Catholic religion, that too lived on in the hearts of the poorer people, as a secret and sacred fire whose flames could be banked down for the sake of hiding, but whose burning heat would never be totally extinguished. Although it was a felony, punishable by death, to harbour a priest, amongst the poorer classes Franciscan and Capuchin monks could still travel, working by their side in the guise of shepherds, herdsmen and ploughmen: on quite a different level above their heads, the Protestant gentry began to lord it in the former Irish properties. So a basic distinction arose between landed and landless in Ireland, exacerbated by that of religion, to which so many of its later troubles were owed.

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  The first Parliament of the Protectorate was chosen by mid-July 1654, but did not in fact meet until the beginning of September; the intervening weeks were occupied by preparations of which one of the most important was the erection of a throne – the word was actually used – for Oliver in the Painted Chamber. In the end the “throne” turned out to be “a very rich chair wrought and trimmed with gold” elevated above the company by two steps, and with a table to stand in front of it. The procession towards Parliament down Whitehall also had regal overtones, with Oliver, Lambert and Henry Cromwell in “a very gorgeous coach”; it was noticed in addition that the Protector had chosen to wear civilian costume as though to underplay the possible military elements in his rise. The actual date was 3 September, a choice on Oliver’s part which Hobbes later referred to as “more than a little superstitious”, because it was so clearly intended to coincide with his two great victories of Dunbar and Worcester.40 Unfortunately, in the inconvenient way of anniversaries, 3 September that year fell on a Sunday, and the godly immediately made a fuss at this use of the Sabbath. So the day of the 3rd saw only a brief meeting and short address followed by a sermon in Westminster Abbey, before the main ceremonies of the Monday.

  It was then on 4 September 1654 in a memorable speech of extraordinary length and not a little seeming obscurity that Oliver Cromwell gave vent to his own ideals as Lord Protector, joined in authority with Parliament. The length was deliberate and the speech was undoubtedly intended to weigh down on the consciousness of his audience as a result, like a majestic ship pressing down the billows of the ocean. The obscurity on the other hand may have gained something in the subsequent relation for two reasons: first, because Cromwell did not apparently keep notes of his speeches, reporters had to rely purely on the evidence of their own ears. Secondly, it has been plausibly suggested that a particular trick of his in oratory, a hesitation while he searched for the ideal phrase, led to further obscurity. It was a characteristic reported to Charles of Sweden by his emissary Bonde, that the Protector “piques himself on his good expression, he looks about for the most suitable word”.41 Thus an instinct for felicity at the time may well have led to accusations of confusion from critics of a later age. But in this speech Cromwell at least shows one thing clearly – how far his thinking had changed in the fourteen months since the Barebones Assembly. This is certainly a completely different orator from the optimistic Lord-General who had addressed the Saints in July / 1653, and had hoped to hand over his authority in some manner to them. Here is a man not so much disillusioned – for bitterness, although it came rapidly, came later – as at last perfectly confident in his personal role. While there was still much room for doubt in the precise part to be played by Parliament, to say nothing of how the conjunction between Parliament and Protector was expected to work, Cromwell on this occasion displayed none of his earlier meanderings and meditations on his own position. He was equally confident in his analysis of society as something where order and acquiescence to government were to be preferred without hesitation to change and reform.

  The result was a speech which began magnificently. “Gentlemen,” he declaimed, “you are met here on the greatest occasion that, I believe, England ever saw, having upon your shoulders the interest of great nations, with the territories belonging to them. And truly, I believe I may say it without an hyperbole, you have upon your shoulders the interests of all the Christian people in the world.” The Protector then swooped off in a series of lofty flights and turns of language, like a bird of prey in the sky pursuing its victim; only in this case it was the elusive truth of the past that had brought them together at this meeting which he wished to grasp in his claws for the benefit of his audience. He might he said, have chosen to list to them “a series of the transactions not of men but of the providence of God” which had led them into their present situation. But for three reasons the Protector preferred to address them in another way: first, the providences and dispensations of God were so stupendous that he could well spend all day relating them; secondly, they were surely written down in their own hearts as effectively as in any book; thirdly, such recounting of “remembered transactions” instead of healing might “set the wound fresh a-bleeding”. It was the healing and settling of a nation which he intended to make the theme of his speech.

  But such a pacific intention was in fact carried out in a speech of much passion, in which the dispensations of God certainly reappeared, and his audience were by implication castigated for having ignored them. What had been the condition of the nation, Cromwell demanded, when “this government” i.e. the Protectorate, was undertaken. The answer was grievous: “Was not everything (almost) grown arbitrary? Who knew where, or how to have right, without some obstruction or other intervening? Indeed,” he repeated, “we were almost grown arbitrary in everything.” And all this despite the dispensations of God, “his terrible ones, he having met in the way of his judgement in a ten years’ civil war, a very sharp one, his merciful dispensations, they did not, they did not work upon us, but we had our humours and interests”. So that while Cromwell’s concern for law and order, a new concept to him, was made the foundation of his Protectoral doctrine, it was noticeable that he had not deserted the old theme of God’s dispensations, but found it a convenient Additional stick with which to beat those who were said to have upset the social order.

  And beat them, metaphorically, he now proceeded to do. It was the “Levelling principles” which were now blamed for this near-arbitrary state, and their upholders were denounced for having tried to trample “the magistracy of the nation” underfoot. Nothing showed more effectively how far Cromwell had travelled from the old days of his revolutionary oppositio
n to King Charles than his now nostalgic references to “the ranks and orders of men, whereby England hath been known for hundreds of years” – a nobleman, a gentleman, a yeoman. “That is a good interest of the nation,” he declared, “and a great one.” As for these Levelling principles, what did they amount to, “but to make the tenant as liberal a fortune as the landlord? Which, I think,” he added scornfully, “if obtained, would not have lasted long.” The men of that principle, after they had served their own turns, would have “cried up interest and property then fast enough”. Nor were the Levellers the only ones to be denounced. One by one the awkward minorities were demolished, the Fifth Monarchists for believing themselves the sole guardians of God’s will, even the Jesuits who were said to be arriving from the Continent in droves to ferment England’s troubles. To such seditious aims, Oliver proceeded to contrast deliberately all the work which had been done recently to produce peace, and prosperous peace, in England, from domestic concerns such as the long-desired reform of the law and the regulation of the Church, to foreign treaties with Denmark and Portugal and even one projected with France. The financial burdens of the present, the taxes lying heavily on the people, he did not attempt to gloss over, but tried to present them in their true light, as consequent on the past, hopefully to be alleviated in the future.

  Lastly, somewhat in the manner of a headmaster who graciously assures his school that each pupil is of as much innate importance to the structure as he himself, Cromwell spoke kindly to Parliament itself on the subject of its future task, and added: “I shall exercise plainness and freeness with you, in telling you that I have not spoken these things as one that assumes to himself dominion over you, but as one that doth resolve to be a fellowservant with you, to the interest of these great affairs…” Unfortunately Cromwell was not facing anything as pre-selected as a school, nor as controlled. One of the results of the new Ł200 franchise, on which basis this Parliament had been elected, had been to increase slightly the number of country seats over those in the boroughs; that in itself cut off the Government from control, since the borough members were easier to keep in their pockets through patronage. But in any case, the new Parliament was full of elements which were quite as inclined as Cromwell had stated himself to be to regard him as merely “a fellow-servant” with themselves. It was the return of the old and stalwart republican element, men such as Thomas Scot and Sir Arthur Haselrig, which now threatened any notions Cromwell might have of interpreting the Instrument of Government in terms of the solitary power of the Protector over that of Parliament: for such men had spent much of their lives fighting off the concept of individual rule, and were scarcely likely to relax their prejudices now in Cromwell’s favour.

  So from the very first this Parliament showed itself argumentative and stubborn, in a manner which hardly commended itself to the Protector with his dreams of a pliant and forward-looking legislative body, with “a sweet, gracious and holy understanding of one another”. First it was complained that a recent law against treason had hit at Parliament’s right of free speech, since it forbade public criticisms of the Government. Next, and “notwithstanding that Ordinance”, the House proceeded purposefully to debate the nature of the new Government. Furthermore, and in a way that had been specifically forbidden by the terms of the Instrument of Government, it attempted to alter its crucial clause which defined – or rather did not define – the nature of the relationship to exist between Protector and Parliament. For the vague phrase that government should reside in “one person and Parliament” it was intended to substitute the much clearer words’ ‘in the Parliament of England, etc., and a single person, qualified with such instructions as Parliament should think fit”.42 And Parliament only should be able to legislate.

  To all this the Protectoral “Court party”, as Cromwell’s clique now came to be known, were quick to rejoin with the resurrection of all the old bogys of the Long Parliament and the Rump – for was not Parliament trying to establish its right to self-perpetuation? The whole nation, it was said, had agreed that the new constitution should not be tampered with a point that it was indeed possible to maintain, if the Instrument of Government was accepted as the will of the whole nation, since by it all subsequent alteration had been forbidden. Lastly Cromwell would never consent to a diminution of the power to which he had been so clearly called by God. The Protector’s opponents were quick to pounce on this argument to providences, which they described with some truth as a twoedged sword. “God in his providence, doth often permit of that which he doth not approve”, they observed, pointing out that otherwise a thief would have a title to every purse he found lying in a highway. Bradshaw spoke for many when he said that if they were going to have government by one man, he would prefer Charles to Oliver. Such doctrines could hardly expect to flourish unchecked by the Protector, since if carried through, they would have ham-strung him so effectively that he could have carried through very little of those works he planned. That, at least, was the practical view he was bound to take.

  On 11 September a motion was put forward in Parliament that “Government should be in the Parliament and a single person, limited and restrained as the Parliament should think fit” and the next day Cromwell felt obliged to weigh in with another long disquisition.43 This time, in addition to the healing and settling theme, he dwelt at considerable length on his own position. Now he emphasized much more strongly his own calling from God, and his trust from the people, which he would not surrender unless asked by them to do so. He was particularly emphatic, with his customary use of hesitation, that he had not sought out his eminence: “I can say it in the simplicity of my soul, I love not, I love not (I declined it in my former speech) I say, I love not to rake into sores or to discover nakednesses. That which I drive at is this; I say to you, I hoped to have had leave to have retired to a private life [after Worcester].” With rising passion, he recounted how he had only come to accept power at the entreaty of people of quality, at a time when he had the armies of three nations under his command. There were “clouds of witnesses” to the fact that he had never sought it, and he listed them, the Army, the City of London, judges, other counties, “all the people in England . . . and many in Ireland and Scotland”. Finally he would make Parliament itself his witness.

  Nevertheless, for all his reliance on providences in his appointment, Cromwell was unyielding in his assertion of the need for his solitary powers. Good government, he said, consisted of certain essentials, such as freedom of conscience, and the control of the militia by one person, otherwise there would be danger of the highly undesirable self-perpetuation of Parliament. So while repeating that the assembly was indeed a free Parliament, he in his turn subtly altered the wording of the Instrument of Government in his own favour, by referring to himself as “the authority that called you” his own authority in turn being derived from God and man. But of course the Instrument had not posited that Parliament’s powers proceeded from the Protector, any more than it had declared that the Protectors’ powers were qualified by Parliament. However a new Recognition was now drawn up, which in effect altered the Instrument, and signed within a week by about two hundred members. Still Parliament’s teeth were not drawn. A long nagging argument over the Protectoral veto of Parliamentary legislation summed up the two irreconcilable positions. Either this right was declared “to be” in the Protector, or “it shall be”; the one, desired by his Court Party, inferred a natural right ex officio, the other that it had been granted subsequently by Parliament. When a vote was passed granting Cromwell the Protectorship for life, on the surface a victory for his party, the triumph was dissipated, and he himself was said to be disappointed when a further effort to make the office hereditary was defeated by his opponents. It was on the contrary to remain elective, and if Parliament was sitting at the time of the Protector’s death, that body rather than the Council should perform the election.

  Many of the ensuing points of trouble between the Protector and his Parliament might have
received wry recognition from that unhappy ghost of King Charles I now rumoured to be roaming Whitehall:44 they included taxation and the control of the militia. One of the greatest successes fought for by the recalcitrant anti-Protectoral members was the law that no new tax should be imposed without the consent of Parliament; since at the same time, the civil estimates were to be limited at Ł200,000 a year, the Protector was unlikely to be able to afford a lengthy personal rule without Parliament, particularly in view of the expansive nature of his foreign policy. Even freedom of conscience, the subject of all others on which Oliver felt so strongly, was temporarily threatened when it was voted that a bill should be introduced to root out “damnable heresies” and to oblige people to come to church on Sundays. A committee to discuss the bill insisted on meeting the Protector, and in the end the legislation was fended off, while it was agreed that Oliver’s future consent should be necessary for laws “for the restraining of… tender consciences”. But Oliver could hardly fail to be led to the conclusion from such disputes that the Parliament he had called in being had not only less interest in the work of God, as he saw it, than he had himself as Protector, but might also actually frustrate it.

  An ugly riding accident at the end of September in which the Protector was involved, showed up the other side of the picture to Parliamentary checks: how much of the stability of England at that time depended on the continued existence of one man. It arose out of a presentation from the Count of Oldenbourg, who knowing of Oliver’s famous fondness for horses, had hoped to please him with six grey Frieslands. Oliver could not resist trying out the team personally in Hyde Park, with himself driving the coach. But the result was a disaster. First Oliver tumbled down and was then jerked along with his foot caught in the reins for some distance, only saved when the Protectoral shoe fell off and released him. Furthermore the presence of the devoted Thurloe on the expedition nearly proved fatal to his master; he too fell out and the pistol he carried in his pocket went off, narrowly missing Oliver. In one sense it was the sort of incident that gave pleasure to both pro- and anti-Cromwellians. Naturally the Royalists were delighted, exclaiming sagely that “bad driving leads to bad ends”, while anonymous satirical requests were sent to the preachers asking them to pray for “an ill-advised coachman who had undertaken to manage three kingdoms”. A pseudo-elegy on the occasion was published which pretended to chide the horses, those “foreign ill-tutored jades”, for refusing a burden which “the mild Britons” would have been happy to pull along personally. Puritans on the other hand were able to see in Oliver’s preservation a sign of miraculous favour. Parliament scurried forth with loyal addresses of congratulation and condolence. As the Venetian Ambassador commented, it could not be denied that fresh civil strife and immense confusion would have resulted from his death.45