Cromwell

by Antonia Fraser

  Although the Protector had picked up physically from his prostration by 17 August sufficiently to go about his affairs at Hampton Court, and even to ride in the park, the change in his demeanour struck those who had not seen him for some time.*23 ( * Oliver’s last known signature, on a document connected with the custody of an idiot, is dated 29 July; another very late signature on a letter from Hampton Court of 26 July (Milnes-Coates MSS, not printed in W. C. Abbott. See Plate facing p. 605) concerning a pkce to be filled, is weak and extraordinarily shaky.) George Fox, like a holy harbinger of doom, went down to Hampton Court again hoping to reason with him on religious matters and saw Oliver-attended by his lifeguards. “And I saw and felt a waft of death go forth against him,” he wrote, “that he looked like a dead man.” Fox was not able to have one of his contentious conversations with the Protector on this occasion; and when he went back to Hampton Court the next day to desire an audience, he was told that the great man was once more unwell. Yet for all these weaknesses and his own tribulations, Cromwell at this period neither suffered from a death-wish, nor expected himself to die. It was comfort and support to enable him to carry on in the service of God which he sought, not the ultimate peace of the grave. The modern idea of merciful oblivion, or even the more religious notion of a speedy celestial reunion with his dead child, was not one which such a sincere adherent to the precepts of Calvin could permit himself. The hour of death for each mortal was indicated by God and God alone. Just as Calvin had written in his Institutes that no medicine could avert the hour of death once established, equally the burden of existence could only be laid aside when God himself decided that the task designed for that individual was accomplished. If the providences were studied, those invaluable signs, there was certainly little in the political situation in England in the high summer of 1658 to indicate that such a time had come for the Lord Protector.

  For one thing, although it had been agreed by Parliament that Oliver should nominate his successor, the name he had chosen (if indeed he had chosen one, which was uncertain) had not been made public. The whole matter of who – or what – might follow after his death was thus clouded with doubt. In the meantime the talk of an impending coronation had not been altogether stilled by the rejection of the previous year: there had been a resurgence of such rumours in November 1657 at the time of the ‘ little wenches’” palatial weddings. After the dissolution of Parliament in February, it was inevitable that gossip should drift that way again. In May, for example, it was said that two velvet caps, purple and crimson respectively, were being made up at the behest of the Master of the Wardrobe; they were of the type “worn only by princes”, and must surely be interpreted as a sign that some sort of royal change was meditated. During August, reported Bordeaux, there was renewed talk of Cromwell’s assuming the crown, made appreciably easier for him after the great victories in Flanders. At the same time there was also talk of a new Parliament – an expedient which, as has been seen, would have been made virtually unavoidable by the need for money, had Cromwell lived. And Thurloe, discussing the meeting of the Council in mid-July on the subject of the succession, said that while the majority had voted that it did not matter whether this turned out to be hereditary or elective, the minority had afterwards insisted on adding that it was “desirable” to have it continued elective. “I fear,” wrote Thurloe to Henry Cromwell, “the word desirable will be made necessary, if it ever come upon the trial.”24 It was evident that the hard core of opposition to the plan of coronation had in no way yielded their objections.

  As for Oliver’s own view, that too was still too undefined and protean at the moment of his last illness, for any definite conclusion to be drawn. He told Thurloe in mid-July apropos the Council’s vote that since he could get no proper advice from those he expected to give it to him, he would “take his own resolutions”. He could no longer be satisfied to sit still and “make himself guilty of the loss of all the honest party, and of the nation itself”. Thurloe, who had of course hoped for the monarchy in the previous year, interpreted this reply optimistically. He told Henry Cromwell that he had long wished for the Protector to proceed according to his own satisfaction “and not so much consider others, who truly are to be indulged in everything but where the being of the nation is concerned”. Nevertheless it was a long haul for Cromwell between such explosive sentiments to his confidant, and the actual assumption of the crown. This would still, so it seemed, have to take place in the teeth of his oldest supporters. The problems he would always experience in bringing himself to take such a step had already been amply demonstrated by the events of spring 1657. No one knew better than Thurloe the prolonged state of doubt which could prevail in the mind of the Protector: while he consoled himself that it was “good for a man both to hope and wait for the salvation of God … and I trust, he will at last show his highness a right way”, there was no absolute proof that the decision of May 1657 would in the end have been reversed.25 So that the most that can be said with certainty of the prospects for a monarchical settlement had Cromwell lived, was that it was still within the bounds of possibility – and still hedged with difficulties.

  The strange thing was that nothing was done about the succession during the brief period of Oliver’s recovery after his first bout of illness. It was all the odder because the detailed correspondence of Thurloe to Henry Cromwell throughout this period mirrors the day-to-day joys and anxieties that beset the Court, much as he had once regaled him with the suspenseful story of the kingship. And Thurloe had bemoaned the “great alarum” which Oliver’s sickness had caused them, “being in the posture we are now in”, that is to say, with nothing definite planned for the future. Fleetwood confirmed that “these late providences hath much retarded our publicke resolutions”. Since recently all work had been held up in the simple sorrow of Oliver’s illness, there had been no progress at all in what Thurloe to Henry termed “our business”. Now, said Thurloe, God had given them a further space “and the Lord give us hearts to make good use of it”.26 Nevertheless the Council did not act. It was as though, reassured once more by his rallying, his comrades still could not believe that Oliver Cromwell would actually die.

  It may however have been during this period of recovery that Oliver himself sent from Hampton Court to Whitehall to obtain a certain sealed paper, in which he was said to have named his successor. The emissary despatched was his valet John Barrington. But the paper was never found, in spite of the palace being searched “very narrowly”.27 Nor did Oliver ever enlighten those around him as to the name which had been written therein. For this reason, it has sometimes been suggested that of his sons he named the more manly Henry as opposed to the douce and ineffectual Richard. The tone of Thurloe’s correspondence to Henry, not only the reference to “our business” but other ambiguous phrases, is certainly susceptible of the interpretation that he at least believed Henry to be his father’s secret choice, so long as the death was not sudden enough to work to the absent Henry’s disadvantage. But Thurloe, while a most reliable guide to the Protector’s intimate conversations and day-to-day actions, was not always correct in his guesswork about the hidden workings of his mind, as witness his confident but false prediction concerning the kingship. He was also personally close to Henry, and could as well as any contemporary estimate his natural advantages of character over those of his brother; perhaps the wish was father to the thought.

  Since the only other detail known about this vanished document is that the Protector had drawn it up shortly before the Investiture, the odds must in fact be heavily in favour of his having named Richard his elder son. This was after all the period when he deliberately drew Richard into prominence, made him Chancellor of Oxford, and generally attempted to mould him into a less retiring, more exciting image. He did not at the same time attempt to send for Henry from Ireland. In family matters, Oliver Cromwell was a conservative man. What was more, he knew the dislike of many of the Army officers for Henry. It is unlikely that he would have delibe
rately preferred the younger to the elder son without revealing the fact, and preparing the world for it well in advance. In the same way, had he been seized with a secret preference for a truly nominated successor, possibly outside his own immediate blood relations, such as Fleetwood; as Heath afterwards suggested,*28 ( * But see Earl Malcolm Hause, Tumble-Down Dick, pp. 45-8 for a recent view that Fleetwood was Oliver’s intended successor.) it is unthinkable that he would not have shared the secret with the man in question before his death. Yet Fleetwood never asserted this. Enigmatic as Oliver was in many ways, he had no desire to wreck by a surprise solution after his death the peace of a country he had tried so long to secure during his life. His public silence should therefore be seen more truly in the context of his own conviction that the time had not come for him to die, than of some complicated private conspiracy.

  As it fell out, on the night of 17 August however Oliver was stricken down again with severe pains in his bowels and back; he could not sleep. Fleetwood at least hoped that they would all derive some spiritual benefit from such a development: “Oh! that we might in some proportion have suitable effects from such a dispensation,” he wrote. In the meantime the illness showed no sign of abating. It was decided to bring the Protector back from Hampton Court to Whitehall. On 24 August the news that Thurloe had to pass on to Henry was grim indeed: on the Friday as well as the Saturday Oliver had fallen into what he called fits, long and rather sharp. There was general consternation, and Thurloe ended the letter with a hastily added footnote: “P.S. His Highness is just now entering into his fitt. I beseech the Lord to be favourable to him in it.” But still Thurloe’s faith in his ultimate recovery was unshaken: “the doctors do not conceive there is any danger to his life”.29 It was a faith shared by Oliver himself: Fleetwood told Henry that the Protector had had some “very great discoveries of the Lord to him in his sickness, and hath had some assurances of his being restored”, although “I shall desire it may not go further than your own breast”. Indeed Fleetwood’s excited remarks, coupled with another mention of “a revelation” given to the Protector during his illness and Thurloe’s unswerving optimism, suggest that it was Oliver as much as the doctors who was the purveyor of the general confidence which now animated his closest circle. And this confidence itself seems to have sprung from some interior certainty, some vision of survival, which the Protector believed had been granted to him. So that it was in no sense in dread, but rather buoyed up by earnest hopes, that the Court faced the ordeal of the coming days.

  Were they in fact right, courtiers, doctors and Protector himself, to believe that his disease was not necessarily mortal? That depends of course on what interpretation is put on the medical evidence bequeathed to us from the seventeenth century concerning his illness, bearing in mind the well-known adage that no hundred per cent diagnosis can ever be made in the absence of the patient (and his corpse). Modern research has pointed out that Oliver, in common with large numbers of his contemporaries, must have suffered from malaria. Indeed it has been said that this disease attained its widest distribution in Europe in the seventeenth century, while it was still fairly common in England-until 1840.* ( * See Dr Frederick F. Cartwright in collaboration with Michael D. Biddis, Disease and History, pp. 141-4 for a historical discussion of the subject of malaria.) Although, brought up as he was on the edge of the marshes of the Fens, it would have been possible for Oliver to have acquired the disease in childhood, it seems more likely he first acquired it in the foetid swamps of Ireland during his campaign there (where he fell extremely ill). The so-called “tertian agues” from which Oliver and others of the period suffered, showed as their name indicated the characteristic three-day cycle of a malarial infection, since all the parasites injected by one mosquito bite would be at the same stage of development. Then followed the typical development of a malarial fit, with a cold stage, a hot stage and finally a sweating stage. But it is important to emphasize that this highly prevalent European malaria was not caused by the same bug which would prove so lethal to Europeans in Africa later. The European P (plasmodium). Vivax, as opposed to the African P. Falcipamm, was rarely a killer. The main effect of prolonged attacks of P. Vivax over a long period was to cause chronic anaemia, due to the parasite’s destruction of the haemoglobin contained in the red blood cells. Vigour and strength would decline. Nevertheless tertian malaria, while it obviously rendered the sufferer more susceptible to other diseases, rarely in itself was more than a contributory cause of death. Had it in fact been a killer on the African scale, much of the English and indeed European population would indeed have been wiped out.

  In the particular case of Oliver Cromwell, not only did he show symptoms of malarial attacks, but the remedies of the time for it were tried on him. A favourite was the Peruvian quina-quina or bark of the tree which had been shipped to Spain and found efficacious; although ironically enough the real healing bark cinchona (from which quinine is now made) was only discovered by mistake, substituting for the popular myroxlyon bark of the time when supplies ran short. Myroxlyon could cause fevers and delirium: nineteenth-century doctors suggested that Cromwell might even have died of it. However there is no proof that in this case it was applied in sufficient quantity. But as has been seen, the unfortunate man also suffered from a number of other diseases, more peculiar to himself, including the stone. From malaria, he had recovered previously and might have recovered again – as it was generally thought he would. But a severe case of septicaemia or blood-poisoning, set up by an infection of the kidneys and bladder caused by the stone, coming to a man weakened over many years, could be lethal; such urinary infections were of course particularly prevalent in an age without anti-biotics.* ( * The author is grateful to Dr Chalmers Davidson of Edinburgh for this diagnosis, and to the Wellcome Institute of the History of Medicine for consultation.) In this connexion it is interesting that his first phase of illness of mid-August was compared directly to the “distempers” he had had in Scotland in May 1651. On that occasion he had been first ill of the stone, and then a fortnight later tortured by five fits of fever. Now the stone, which had bothered him so much since then, was tormenting him again: it seemed more than a coincidence that he also fell into fevers, reminiscent of the effects of a severe poisoning in the blood. The Venetian Ambassador traced the progress of his disease in two letters of 20 and 27 August; gout, then the stone “from which at times he suffers extremely”, a hope of improvement and finally a lapse into a tertian fever. As the post-mortem showed, Cromwell’s spleen was suppurating with infection. Wrote Dr Bate: “though sound to the eye” it was in fact “a mass of disease and filled with matter like the lees of oil”. It is possible of course that this was merely the termination of the malaria, but it is even more likely in view of the general benignity of the seventeenth-century malaria which Cromwell like many others learnt to live with, that it was the infection caused by the wretched stone which ultimately caused his death.30 Indeed so rarely were these tertian agues fatal, that Cromwell’s sudden collapse at the end even led to accusations of poison: Dr Bate (turned Royalist) was even supposed to have boasted in later years of having administered the poison himself.

  So the Lord Protector continued to grapple manfully with the grasping fingers of his weakness. On Thursday, 26 August he was well enough to have dinner with Whitelocke. The Protector discoursed with him privately, said Whitelocke afterwards, about his “great businesses”. About this time he also had one last unpleasant interview with his former comrade and sometimes chief, Fairfax, on the subject of his daughter’s marriage to Buckingham; Fairfax was so infuriated at the idea of Buckingham’s arrest – he was now incarcerated in the Tower of London – that he flew into a passion in the course of their talk, cocked his hat and threw his cloak over his arm. It was not always prudent to treat the Protector thus, and his servants expected Fairfax to join his son-in-law in the Tower forthwith; but Oliver, either through exhaustion or policy, “was wiser in his passion” and let him be.31 The next day, Friday,
27 August, Cromwell was once again subject to alternate hot and cold fits, of an exceptionally severe nature, followed by “a breathing sweat”. At last the doctors were beginning to worry whether he would continue to surmount such ordeals; even Thurloe showed signs of genuine worry about the future: “How we are all like to be left as to outward appearance, I need not mention,” he told Henry, “I write of it with great perturbation, yea and perplexity of mind.” The next day was set aside for prayer.

  By the beginning of the following week, the news was dramatically worse: Oliver had hardly been conscious at all and the doctors could no longer hold out any hope. Yet Thurloe still clung desperately to the fact that the Lord had “as in some former occasions” given the Protector a particular assurance “that he shall yet live to serve him.” How could he die when no successor was yet named? It was not Charles Stuart that Thurloe feared, his interest was not so great, nor his party so powerful in themselves – “but I fear our own divisions.” Thurloe also reported a fact, confirmed by letters of both Fauconberg and Fleetwood on the same date, that there was no successor named publicly. He did indeed on this very day attempt to press Oliver a little on the subject in his moments of consciousness, but according to his own version, the Protector’s illness “disenabled him to conclude it fully”. Fauconberg had a different story: Thurloe simply lacked the resolution to insist on the matter, fearing Oliver’s displeasure if he recovered.32 It was a remarkable tribute to the strength of will still exerted by the palpably dying man that his own assurances of recovery still counted for more with his devoted servant than all the divisions of the country which they were fast heading for on his death.