Cromwell

by Antonia Fraser

  What seemed inescapable in the autumn and winter of 1656 was the gathering personal authority of Oliver Cromwell himself. Problems multiplied, yet all solutions seemed to encompass employing in some form or other this man still as “Chief Magistrate”. It was as though the view of Oliver himself as a powerful figure of historical necessity, to which many loyalists had adhered from 1653 onwards, was beginning to triumph over the notion of a rightly descended hereditary leader. Even the Oceana of James Harrington, a work of political theory printed in 1656, which was in essence republican, envisaged the use of Oliver – here described as Olphaeus Megaletor – to found the new constitution for his imaginary State. Harrington’s ideas went on to include the equitable distribution of land, with a limitation on estates of Ł2,000 a year (and only Ł500 in Scotland); the senate would propose laws, the people vote them and the Supreme Magistrate carry them out. The book was actually dedicated to Cromwell, but Harrington was popularly supposed to have secured licence for publication only by using the intercession of Bettie Claypole. Harrington humorously threatened to steal her little boy, unless her father restored his own brain-child. Oliver himself observed on the subject of his proposals, that Harrington wanted to trepan him of all his power, but he did not intend to surrender it all for “a little paper-shot”.6 Yet the Protector might have taken comfort from the undeniably pre-eminent position enjoyed by Olphaeus Megaletor in Harrington’s scheme of things. He was needed to bring about that more equitable distribution of property which Harrington believed would prevent future civil wars.

  The treatment of two topics within the confines of Parliament, both given unexpected twists, now accelerated matters in the business of the kingship. The first was the case of an extreme Quaker named James Naylor. He was already famous as a preacher in London, his long hair and beard creating a prophetic impression which some of his followers even likened to that of Christ, when he paid a visit to the West Country to see Fox in Launceston jail. Despite Fox’s efforts to exercise a calming influence on their behaviour, Naylor and his followers ended by being incarcerated in their turn in Exeter prison. And once released, Naylor then proceeded to ride in triumph to Bristol, in what was certainly a direct imitation of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, with cries of “Hosanna” and “holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Israel” from the crowd. The hysterical raptures of his followers can be judged from the utterances of a maid, Dorcas Ebury, who on examination by a magistrate, declared that Naylor had raised her from the dead (seventeenth-century Quaker speech for a conversion) in Exeter jail and that “James Naylor shall sit at the right hand of the father and judge the world”. Another letter from London wrote that his name should no longer be called James, but Jesus.7 Naylor was brought back to the capital, and designated to be tried before the House of Commons for “horrid blasphemies”.

  The trial however raised serious problems concerning the judicial role of the House. Had they in fact any proper duty to try a subject, or had the judicial role of the House of Lords not perished with it? The trial did nevertheless take place: in the course of it Naylor refused to doffhis hat or bow to the Speaker. And when some exceptionally severe, even disgusting penalties were prescribed to be inflicted on the wretched prisoner, the role of Cromwell as mediator on behalf of the liberties of the subject was also called in question. Naylor was to be whipped at the cart-tail through the streets, pilloried, branded with B (for blasphemy), his tongue bored, and as if that were not sufficient, the process was to be roughly repeated in Bristol, the scene of his offensive semi-religious entry; it was considered merciful that he should subsequently merely be imprisoned, instead of being condemned to death. Sir William Sydenham had expressed the general view of Parliament itself on the legality of all this: “I take it we have all the power that was in the House of Lords, now in this Parliament.” To this the Protector sent a pertinent enquiry: “We being interested in the present government on behalf of the people of these nations; and not knowing how far such proceedings, entered into wholly without us, may extend in the consequence of it – do desire that the House will let us know the grounds and reasons whereupon they have proceeded.”8

  The House refused to back down. Cromwell was left to attempt some minor alleviations of Naylor’s lot. For instance he enforced an order by which Naylor’s wife was allowed to give the prisoner supplies. In May 1657 his Chamberlain, Sir Gilbert Pickering, provided special confinement for the captive on Oliver’s instructions. One of the last public actions of the Protector in August 1658, on hearing of Naylor’s illness, was to send his secretary William Malyn to enquire after his needs. Malyn was a humane man, who encouraged the Protector’s own propensity to acts of generosity towards individuals. It was he, for example, as a friend of Lady Elizabeth Kerr, who interested Oliver in the problem of her Royalist father’s funeral in exile in the Netherlands. Lord Ancram had left so many debts that his creditors refused to let the body be interred until they were given some sort of satisfaction. But Cromwell caused the Dutch Ambassador to intervene, and allow the unfortunate corpse to be buried without further disturbance.9

  In his case Naylor refused a doctor (“God was his physician and he needed no other”) and although Malyn seems to have given him money at Oliver’s orders, Naylor declined to send a message to the Protector. Malyn, while commenting on the prisoner’s wicked pride, nevertheless concluded piously in his report: “I hope I should not go about to dissuade your Highness from a work of tenderness and mercy which is pleasing to God.”10 But the whole trial, the obduracy of Parliament, the undoubted cruel sufferings of one man who had acted if unwisely at least for conscience’s sake, and which the Protector had proved powerless to mitigate effectively, could not help raising in Cromwell’s mind yet again the whole “union” of himself and Parliament, to which he had referred in his opening speech. Was this really how the work of Christ was to be done in England, a Parliament free from any restraining influence in its judicial functions, and a Protector who must stand by? This was scarcely the merciful if orthodox society of which Oliver had so often spoken with such eloquence.

  Ironically, the second topic which helped to shape the political form of the new year, that of the extinction of the Major-Generals, was raised in the first instance by these gentlemen themselves. It was Desborough who deliberately brought up the subject of their renewal on Christmas Day 1656. Although it was much vaunted as a working-day under Puritan rule, nevertheless attendance had dropped suspiciously low, a fact which Desborough obviously intended to turn to pious advantage. For he now proposed the introduction of a short bill for the continuation of that Decimation tax of ten per cent on Royalists which had been found necessary originally to maintain the militia and subsequently to finance the MajorGenerals. Christmas Day or no, permission to put the bill forward was secured surprisingly only by a tiny majority; and to any political observer, the fact that many members of the Cromwellian clique were seen to vote against it pointed significantly to the sinking usefulness of these “Bashaws” in the Protector’s mind. Why divide a nation further with a tax whose end result was not even productive of harmony? The final omen of their failure was unmistakable: in the debate on the subject in January, the principal attack on the Major-Generals was actually mounted by Cromwell’s sonin-law and Master of the Horse, John Claypole. When Sir John Trevor talked of the measure which divided “this Commonwealth into provinces …. a power too great to be bound within any law” it was understood that he was talking by now of an experiment which had failed.

  The most spirited attack came from another Cromwell, Colonel Henry, grandson to old Sir Oliver of Hinchingbrooke, representing the senior branch of the family. Unlike his Royalist father and grandfather, this Henry Cromwell had bowed to time and favour, and having been returned previously to the Parliament of 1654, was in 1657 made assessor for Huntingdon. On this occasion, he rose hotly to answer the vigorous speech of Major-General Butler. Vincent Gookin later described the whole episode in a letter:11 how “he observed many gentlemen,
and he that spoke last [Butler] did say and think it just, that because some of the cavaliers had done amiss, therefore all should be punished; by the same argument (says honest Harry) because some of the Major-Generals have done amiss, which I offer to prove, therefore all of them deserve to be punished”. At this Colonel Kelsey on a point of order asked for those erring MajorGenerals to be named. Honest Harry, not in the least put out, begged the House to give him leave to name them, and although says Gookin, this particular fire “was put out by the water-carriers”, this did not prevent the Major-Generals from going afterwards and threatening Harry that His Highness would take the whole matter extremely ill. Even this did not abash him: setting off promptly to see his august kinsman, he repeated all he had said in the House previously both “manfully and wisely”, with blackbook and papers in his hands to prove his assertions if necessary. It was not for nothing that Oliver Cromwell had by now been dealing with men in the Army and elsewhere for fifteen years. He answered Harry with “raillery” and taking a rich scarlet cloak from his own back and gloves from his own hands, pressed them on his cousin; off strutted Harry back to the House “to the great satisfaction and delight of some” as Gookin put it, “and trouble of others”. It was, said Gookin, “a pretty passage of his Highness’’. The whole incident had more significance than the mere cooling down of a rash speaker; nor was it surprising under the circumstances that the bill for the renewal of the Decimation tax was soon to be defeated. On 28 January at the second reading, it met rejection by one hundred and twenty-four votes to eighty-eight.* ( * This Henry Cromwell continued to show a nice sense of timing in his allegiances. He was married to his cousin, the poetess Anna Cromwell, a passionate Royalist, who in some lines even compared Charles I to Jesus Christ; after the Restoration, he was one of those Cromwells who changed their name back to the earlier Williams, under which patronymic he attended the Court of Charles II with success.)

  Some days before the completion of this process of attrition, the Protector’s loyal Parliament had been shaken by the revelations of yet more dastardly plots against his person, under the general direction of the former Leveller, Colonel Sexby. The variety of the conspirators’ contrivances would seem to have justified the line of one epitaph on the Protector – “needing more eyes than ever Argus had”. There had been three separate plans. Miles Sindercombe, aided by the old soldier Cecil and frustrated already at the opening of Parliament, had in the first place intended to fire at Cromwell with “screwed guns”, each containing twelve bullets and a slug, on his route to Hampton Court; the intention was to blow him to bits, and for this a house was hired from the coachman of the Earl of Salisbury at Hammersmith, which had a convenient little banqueting room overlooking the readjust where it was so narrow and dirty that the coaches had to slow down. For exact timing, the assassins obviously needed information about the Protector’s schedule, and for this an old comrade of Sindercombe’s in the lifeguard, one Toop, was bribed first with a down payment of Ł10 and then with the promise of Ł1,500. In the event, the plot was foiled at the last minute when the Protector went by boat, either because Cromwell was warned or because he was lucky.12

  It has been seen that the Protector allowed no serious questions of security to intervene with his constant perambulations and exercise in St James’s and Hyde Parks. The next plan consisted of hopes of shooting him outright in Hyde Park, the murderer having mingled with his train. For this the hinges were filed off a particular gate to facilitate escape. Cecil also acquired a specially swift black horse for his getaway, and wore lightweight clothes – the quality of the horse even catching the Protector’s admiring eye on one occasion. But the chosen horse got a cold, and that plan too lapsed. The third essay was intended to be altogether more cataclysmic: it was hoped to fire Whitehall itself, by placing some kind of explosives in the chapel. But at this point Toop gave the game away, and a basket full of strange combustible materials was duly discovered in the chapel, with two pieces of lighted match aptly placed to ignite the “most active flaming stuff”. Arrests were made, Cecil confessed and Sindercombe too found himself on trial; but after having conducted himself “most insolently” at the bar of the House of Commons, he finally evaded the barbarities of the traitor’s death by committing suicide right under his jailers’ noses. The method used was arsenic taken on paper, and they actually witnessed him “cheerfully rubbing his hands together, then his face and nose” as he applied his poison. He did so, he said, in a note found left behind, as God knew, “because I would not have all the open shame of the world executed upon my body”.13 So that same body was now buried at the orders of the Government, more tranquilly but with equal ignominy beneath the common highway, as befitted that of a suicide.

  It was this tale of horror averted which Thurloe unfolded to the House on 19 January. There was perhaps more than a little element of Schadenfreude in his whole tone, and Bordeaux, always an acute observer, even thought it worth reporting the belief of some cynics that the whole enterprise had been cooked up merely to give “more colour to the establishment of the family of the Protector”. In the event the plots were real enough, if the penetration of their organization by Thurloe’s agents probably meant that the threatened dangers never loomed quite so large as was made out afterwards. As Samuel Morland in Whitehall wrote to John Pell in Switzerland: “The royalists are high, and threaten sudden action; but I hope, an evil foreseen may be an evil prevented.” A service of thanksgiving was ordered by the Government for 23 January which paradoxically endangered official lives again, for the great crowd on the thirty-six-yearold rickety staircase of the Banqueting House caused it to collapse, and a number of celebrants were hurt, including Richard Cromwell. Oliver himself, in his speech for the occasion, admonished his audience that “righteousness and peace must kiss each other”, garnishing his words as usual with many Scriptural allusions, including his favourite eighty-fifth Psalm.14 But Sexby did not abandon the pursuit of his Protectoral fox with these failures: it was in 1657 that the celebrated pamphlet advocating assassination of which he was joint author, Killing No Murder, with its selfexplanatory title (and incidentally an audacious dedication to Cromwell as “The True Father of Your Country”) began to be spread about England. Nevertheless none of this diminished the importance of the personal position and authority of the man thus threatened, the Protector himself. It was on that same day as Thurloe’s report, 19 January, that in the continuing debate on the Decimation tax and the Militia bill, the issue of the kingship was again raised. Predictably, Desborough spoke against it, and it was now too that Lambert’s personal opposition became clearer.

  In human terms, there had always been much likelihood that Lambert would view with jaundiced eye any move to make the Protectorship hereditary for the obvious reason that he was now, in elective terms, clearly the front runner as Oliver’s successor. The establishment of the hereditary principle quite simply replaced John Lambert with Richard Cromwell in that position. This is certainly not to deride the sincerity of Lambert’s republican beliefs altogether, but the significant timing, taken in conjunction with his previous record, does seem to indicate that it was pride as much as republicanism that stirred him in the early months of 1657.

  Lambert was a different, more complex and outwardly certainly far more attractive character than his two companions in opposition to the Crown, Fleetwood and Desborough; but their straightforward instinctive rejection of the kingly title, accompanied by general support of Cromwell in other directions, is easier to comprehend. Lambert no doubt believed himself honest when he said that the issue was not whether John Lambert or Richard Cromwell should succeed, but whether they should go backwards or forwards. But the charge made by Cromwell that there had been a time when the Army had pressed the title of King upon him (in late 1653) was never answered by Lambert. Nor was Lambert himself of that rigid mould of Fleetwood and Desborough, both men who might earnestly stick on one particular issue as a matter of conscience. It was hard indeed for Cromwell�
�s favourite, the dashing popular soldier, to see the possibilities of future leadership wrenched from him in favour of the soft Richard, the younger and much less deserving of the two. Leaving aside the future, under Oliver’s monarchy Lambert would no longer be a “demi-collegue” as one letter put it, but would become a mere subject. As subsequent events were to confirm, Lambert had at least a streak of vanity, that most dangerous quality for any politician, coupled with something spoilt, even slightly sulky about his nature. It sprang perhaps from the unalloyed successes of youth, which had left him with no experience and thus no preparation for the inevitable reverses and disappointments of life in middle age. Even now, said Bordeaux, Lambert was having difficulty in consolidating his own support among the soldiers since he had lately been living much apart, and had in consequence gained a reputation for arrogance.

  In the meantime London – and also Europe – buzzed with rumours concerning future changes. On 7 February a newsletter reported that citizens were laying wagers that “we shall have suddenly an alteration of the present government”. A letter of Sir Henry Vane of 2 February, sent from the Hague and intercepted by Thurloe commented knowingly; “I did always believe this Parliament would make him King before they parted.” Bordeaux was convinced that Oliver was set on the title. Throughout February and March he took care to assure Mazarin of the fact, breaking to him also the news of the English Royalists’ satisfaction: a return to the monarchical principle would, they believed, only strengthen their hands since the government of England would resolve itself into a quarrel between two families, that of Cromwell and Stuart, in which that of Stuart could be expected to win out. Mazarin’s reaction was to impress upon Bordeaux that if Cromwell were to be crowned, then he must by no means be the last to congratulate him. In mid-March from the Hague Marigny told Stouppe that he was full of impatience to hear “if your protector will be king”.15 Everything depended, said Bordeaux, and it was a point which needed making, on the length of Oliver’s days.