Cromwell

by Antonia Fraser

  Unfortunately the feelings of these peers for this novel second chamber were not reciprocally warm. Of the sixty-three lords (as they were generally known) summoned, forty-two accepted, and thirty-seven came to the first meeting. Those conspicuous by their absence were those already in possession of peerages, who were frightened that their ancient rights might be prejudiced by acceptance. As Bordeaux wrote, they did not want by choice what formerly had been theirs by birth, and which they now could not pass on to their children. Fauconberg or Broghill might appear, for they had both thrown in their lot too thoroughly with the Protectoral order to turn back now: Fauconberg had recently been assigned Lambert’s former regiment. But it is significant that a senior magnate like the Earl of Warwick, a man who only seven months previously had been found carrying the sword at the Investiture, to say nothing of the very recent nuptials of his grandson, jibbed at this particular fence. Afterwards the reluctance of the hereditary peers was ascribed by men like Ludlow to mere social snobbery – Warwick, he said, would not condescend to sit between Colonels Hewson and Pride, one of whom had been a shoemaker and the other a drayman in civilian life. These lords, said Dr Bate, later were “the dregs of society”, and it was suggested that Hewson should have an awl as his ensign. But this was to smear as frivolous, objections which were in fact deeply rooted in the peers’ own concept of their ancient rights – rights it must be said, which were amply backed up by English history.

  Saye’s letter to Wharton, dissuading him from accepting, was an eloquent plea for the former House of Lords: “they have been as the beam keeping both scales, King and People, in an even posture … long experience hath made it manifest that they have preserved the just rights and liberties of the people against the tyrannical usurpation of Kings, and have also, as steps and stairs, upheld the crown from falling upon the floor, by the insolence of the multitude …” All of this would be thrown away if they, as peers, by taking their seats, acknowledged the pretensions of this new body. Saye begged Wharton not to make of himself “a felo-de-se”. And so the old guard did not turn up, leaving of course an unnatural balance towards the military among the remaining Lords.38

  The new session of Parliament opened on 20 January 1658. It was a sign of the times that preparations for the new House of Lords were ordered to be as cheap as possible, whether chairs, carpets or hangings of “baize striped stuff” – not noticeably luxurious – for the six rooms set aside. Cromwell on the other hand proceeded in the now familiar state to Westminster, once more by water and then by coach, with horses in gold and jewelled trappings to attend him. But a heavy snowfall kept the crowds away and the public reaction was disappointing. There was indeed a chill of winter over the whole occasion. Oliver’s speech reiterated many of his old themes, including references to his favourite eighty-fifth Psalm, but in general its tone was depressed and at one point he told the listening members:39 “I have been under some infirmity, therefore dare not speak further to you .. .”, a confession of physical weakness which he repeated to them at the end. Otherwise there were the customary exhortations to Parliament to carry out the divine will: “if God should bless you in this work, and make this meeting happy upon this account, you shall all be called the blessed of the Lord; the generations to come will bless us. You shall be the repairers of breaches, and the restorers of paths to dwell in; and if there be any work that mortals can attain to in the world, beyond this, I acknowledge my ignorance.” Above all it was the cry of an old man, old Oliver, who as the old do, prized peace above many other virtues: “The greatest demonstration of his [God’s] favour and love appears to us in this, that he hath given us peace, and the blessings of peace, to wit the enjoyments of our liberties, civil and spiritual.”

  But this newly met Parliament showed itself from the first in a captious mood and peace was the last quality likely to emerge from it. No guards had been placed at the entrance, so that all those elected members who were prepared to take the oath were admitted; it was apparent as a result that many of the old republicans who had so strenuously opposed Cromwell’s personal rule were now back in style, in contrast to their exclusion in September 1656. These included Sir Arthur Haselrig, who had never made any secret of his opposition to what he considered Cromwell’s usurpation, and had in addition recently declined the writ as a new lord; for one who was sometimes accused of undue self-aggrandizement as Governor of Newcastle, his refusal was equally frank: “I will not take the Bishops’ seat,” he said, “because I know not how long after I shall keep the Bishops’ lands.” As a result of this republican influence, the subject of the Second Chamber was subjected to immediate contentious scrutiny in the Commons. The optimistic words of Lord Fiennes, a Commissioner of the Great Seal, spoken on the subject of the constitutional advantage – “if anything inconvenient should chance to slip out at one door, must it not pass two more?”40 were not generally accepted. For one thing there was sharp dispute on the actual status of the new chamber, symbolized by the arguments over its name (although it was generally accepted that the members themselves should be termed Lords). Should it be called the Other House, thus only claiming the powers recently accorded to it in the Humble Petition and Advice’? Or should it be named the House of Lords, in which case might it not be able to claim all the old powers of that body, including its judicial position?

  Men such as Haselrig and Thomas Scot greeted the possibility of the return of the old Lords with horror, comparing it to the bondage of the Jews in Egypt. Had not the people been set free in 1649 by its abolition, from any form of “negative”, and was this “negative” now to be reintroduced amongst them? At the same time there were others who attacked this Other House with equal rancour from exactly the opposite point of view, that these new jumped-up men had no stake in the country, unlike the former territorial magnates, and as such could claim to represent “not the forty thousandth part of England”. Sir John Northcote, a man of Cromwell’s own age, who had been an MP in the Long Parliament, and had served in both Parliaments of 1654 and 1656, criticized the new chamber on this unlanded score because the present House “ventured their lives but not their fortunes. The other house did venture both and that they should be excluded and these advanced, is not just nor reasonable.” The former Lords-Lieutenant, he said, had been great lovers of the people, because they had been financially independent: “These [the new Lords] are mean people and must be paid by you . . .”41 These powerful arguments showed how deeply the concept of a nominated chamber had outraged the deepest social instincts of the time. On the other hand, in favour of the new chamber, it was the lawyers who postulated the need for a balance against the over-hasty passing of laws by the Commons. And the soldiers in their turn waxed indignant at these public slights on the composition of the new body. They particularly resented the notion that it lacked weight, so that “they [the members] are not a balance as the old lords were”.

  Five days later, as these wrangles continued unresolved, Oliver spoke again to both Houses, a discourse which he described as unprepared, and reproached them generally for their lack of solidarity: they were, playing he said, the game of the King of Scots.42 In addition he touched on various less narrow points such as the dangers of Popery abroad, how they ought to have “a brotherly fellow-feeling of the interest of all the Protestant Christians in the world”, and in general justified his foreign policy, at this moment aimed principally at the completion of the Peace of Roskilde in the Baltic. To obstreperous merchants he demanded: “If they can shut us out of the Baltic sea, and make themselves masters of that, where is your trade?” He gave them a bold argument against isolationism: “You have accounted yourselves happy in being environed with a great ditch from all the world beside. Truly you will not be able to keep your ditch, nor your shipping, unless you turn your ships and your shipping into troops of horse and companies of foot, and fight to defend yourselves in terra fama.” But in the throes of such sentiments, waving aside the squabbles of both Republicans and merchants, it was perhap
s typical of the Protector’s domestic situation that he actually forgot to give the House that account of public monies which he had planned to pass on to them, and had to write a rapid note to the Speaker afterwards to that effect.

  Cromwell’s reference to the “game” of the King of Scots was not without its application to the current activities of the Royalists in England. It was true that a younger generation of Cavaliers had grown up, children at the time of Charles I’s death, boys maybe orphaned by their fathers’ deaths in the wars, and keen for action. But this phenomenon was not in itself any guarantee of the kind of unity which had so long eluded the protagonists of the Sealed Knot. On the contrary, to the dissensions between those abroad and those at home was now added the traditional antagonism of those who had lived through much and grown tired, and those who had lived through little and were therefore doubly energetic; in short, of old and young. It was to soothe over these difficulties that Ormonde paid a personal visit to London in January 1658, having landed secretly near Colchester. In the capital he lodged first at a Catholic chirurgeon’s, and then with a French tailor near Blackfriars, and it was of course necessary to adopt a strict disguise. Part of this consisted of dyeing the famous blond poll of James the White black, the dyeing proving a painful and difficult experience in the course of which Ormonde not only scalded himself, but also emerged halfway through with a head of many colours. Even with tinting successfully accomplished, his problems of concealment were not over, in view of the fact that the entire Sealed Knot organization was, unbeknownst to itself, at the mercy of the activities of its treacherous member, Sir Richard Willys.

  While Ormonde was discovering that there was little he could do to bind together the disunified Sealed Knot, Willys was carefully keeping Thurloe in touch as to its movements. It is just possible that he only betrayed Ormonde’s hiding-places after he had left them, thus keeping his word to Thurloe without imperilling his comrade. But the fact that it was Cromwell who now dropped a heavy hint in Broghill’s direction concerning Ormonde’s arrival, suggests that it was the Protector, not Willys, who decided that it would be impolitic to have the famous Royalist publicly arrested. Cromwell told Broghill pointedly that there was “a great friend of his” in town, and supplied him with the date. At this Broghill duly warned Ormonde, who was able to make his escape, back to France. It is easy to see how from the Protector’s point of view the arrest, trial and subsequent possible death sentence of such a man would have served a much less healing purpose than his effective disappearance abroad, particularly as Willys could be relied on to report any further developments in that direction.43

  Nevertheless it was the existence of such Royalist capers that now provided Oliver with a nice excuse to pounce on his contentious Parliament as a cat irritated out of sleep lunges at a body of squeaking mice. The criticism of the “Other House” was far from being dropped by Haselrig and his fellow republicans. On the contrary they were now busy organizing a monster petition on the subject, which would deny the Second Chamber any of the rights of the old House of Lords.* ( * The controversy about the two possible emotive names for the Second Chamber was solved in the time of Richard’s Protectorate by referring to it as neither the House of Lords nor the Other House, but as the Upper House.) In the process, the republicans were actively wooing support from other factions, the officers and the preachers. The growth of such organized opposition in his own Parliament, was far more immediately dangerous to Oliver than any suborned Royalist conspiracies, and it has been seen that of old, he always maintained the most vigorous dislike and suspicion of any opposition with two separate groups of dissidents joining together. In the past, he had always taken care to strike and strike swiftly on such occasions, and old as he might be and sick, the events of the dissolution of Parliament on 4 February were to show that he had still not lost his capacity for a decisive move.

  There is indeed much circumstantial evidence for the suddenness of his action. It was related subsequently in a letter from one MP, possibly Jenkins, the member for Wells, to an excluded comrade, starting with the dramatic events of the night of 3 February.44 As the republican petition began to snowball dangerously in the Commons, this member went down to Whitehall with a letter recommending the Protector strongly to come down to the House on the morrow “to do service for the Army and Nation”. Thurloe received the letter and handed it to Maidston, Oliver’s valet. Maidston however demurred that the Protector had retired and was “very close shut up”. In the end he was persuaded to knock hard. “Who’s there?” called out Cromwell angrily. Thurloe had a letter for him “of great concernment”, replied Maidston. At this the Protector received the letter, perused it shortly, and immediately sent for Whalley and Desborough and those others who were on watch, to ask if they had any news. They answered no. So he asked them again whether they had not heard of a petition. Once again, they answered no. The Protector then ordered them to proceed to Westminster, and order the guard there up to Whitehall, exchanging it with the Westminster guard. On the way however these high-ranking officers overheard some of the Westminster soldiers talking among themselves of how their posterity would be held in thrall even if they themselves lived well for a while. So the officers turned back and reported this to the Protector. He then told them to go to the Mews and order up that guard instead for security’s sake, exchanging it with that at Whitehall. This done, Oliver relaxed till morning.

  His first action then was to tell Thurloe that he intended to go down to the House, which kept the Secretary amazed at the suddenness of it all, particularly as Oliver gave no reason, but merely announced that he had taken a resolution to do so. He also wrote a letter to the City which seemed to trouble him somewhat. His dinner he ordered up and consumed before nine o’clock, unwontedly early. After dinner, the Protector withdrew intending apparently to go quietly up the backway – via the river to Westminster. But here he encountered an unexpected obstacle over which even his determination could not prevail. The winter of 1657-8, as we know from John Evelyn’s diary, was “the severest.. . that any man alive had known in England”, where the very crows’ feet had frozen to their prey, and islands of ice had been known to enclose not only fish and fowl, but also people rowing in their boats. On this particular morning the ice made it impossible for Oliver to take to the Thames. Instantly he turned and rushed back to the land-side of the palace, where the coaches were, and seized the first coach available. In spite of the fact that it had only two horses to it, and there were not more than five or six guards, a considerable depletion of the usual Protectoral magnificence, Cromwell ordered it towards Westminster. There he went first to what was known as the Lords’ House, a retiring room, and strengthened himself with a cup of ale and a piece of toast, while the Lords in attendance were broken the news that he intended to dissolve Parliament. When Fleetwood remonstrated, Oliver turned on him with all his habitual vigour, and exclaimed “you are a milksop, by the living God I will dissolve the house”.* ( * When Henry Cromwell was told of this later, his acid brother-in-law’s comment was: “I believe the milk wherein 653 (code for Fleetwood) was sopped had much water in it." 45)

  His actual speech of dissolution was as violent in tone as many of his earliest utterances, showing that for better or for worse the old Adam certainly still persisted in old Oliver. He gave a valiant and ferocious defence of the concept of a nominated second chamber:46 “You granted that I should name another House,” he cried, “and I named it with integrity, I did. I named it out of men that can meet you wheresoever you go, and shake hands with you, and tell you that it is not titles, it is not lordship, it is not this or that that they value, but a Christian and English interest. Men of your own rank and quality, and men that I approved my heart to God in choosing . . . loving the same things that you love, whilst you love England and whilst you love religion.” And above all he threatened them with the army of Charles Stuart, described vividly if inaccurately as being “at the waterside, drawn down towards the waterside, ready to
be shipped for England”. What could not be expected of “blood and confusion” if they were threatened by such a force, when the very effect of their recent efforts in Parliament had been merely to strengthen the King’s hand? “If this, I say, be the effect of your sitting . . .” said the Protector finally, “I think it high time that an end be put to your sitting and I do declare to you here that I do dissolve this Parliament.” He ended his speech on a note which was not so much violent as sombre: “Let God judge between you and me.” But there were at least enough republicans present in the House for a few hearty “Amens” to spoil the effect of even that solemn appeal to divine judgement.

  That Cromwell’s immediate target was the Parliamentary opposition rather than the Royalists whom he accused them of helping at least by default, is shown by one of his surviving pieces of correspondence on that momentous day. Part of his morning’s plan had been to send orders to the Lieutenant of the Tower of London, to secure certain ministers for fear of trouble. But a letter written by Cromwell on 4 February itself to Colonel Cox of the Hertfordshire militia, although it did warn him against “the old Cavalier party” also dilated at length on the real causes which had led him to the day’s dissolution.47 Cromwell’s tone was exasperated towards the abandoned assembly, which had done nothing in fourteen days, he said, but debate whether they should acknowledge the system of government outlined in the Humble Petition and Advice. It was a system which not only had they already invited him to accept, and sworn him to it, but they themselves had taken an oath to support it before entering the House. Such behaviour, thought Cromwell, had very dangerous consequences for the peace of the nation and might result in loosening all the bonds of government. Despairing of obtaining the supplies of money from such people needed to cope with “the exigencies of the Nation”, Cromwell had “thought it of absolute necessity to dissolve this present Parliament; which I have done this day”. In this context, it is perfectly possible, as the Venetian Ambassador had indeed heard, that Parliament were also plotting tighter control of taxation under their own authority, as well as protesting against the return of the House of Lords, which involved a general criticism of the Humble Petition. Another suggestion, that Cromwell by the dissolution further planned to avoid receiving a separate petition of two thousand names against his personal dictatorship, also fits into this general picture of a man acting fast and hard to defuse a situation, where the potentially explosive material might be expected to gather rather than dissipate with the days.48