Cromwell, the Lord Protector

by Antonia Fraser

  Cromwell in his correspondence persisted in regarding his disagreement with Manchester as a military one. Why would not Manchester perform his evident obligation as a General? It is clear from his outburst to Walton that he regarded the counter-charges of the Presbyterians that he was filling his ranks with Independents as irrelevant to the point at issue, which was to win the war. But while Cromwell was certainly right to criticize Manchester for his failure, it seems that he himself was also not guiltless of the crime of picking Independents, if crime indeed it was. Manchester later repeated words said to have been spoken by Cromwell at this juncture: “I desire to have none in my army but such as of the Independent judgement.” The reason was that if there should be propositions for peace which would not be satisfactory to honest men, “this army might prevent such a mischief”. As a result, said Manchester, his regiment of horse was swarming with “those that call themselves the godly”, some of them actually professing to have seen visions and received revelations. As for the Scots and their fanatically strict Church discipline Cromwell was further reported to have burst out: “In the way they carry themselves now … I would as soon draw my sword against them as against any in the King’s army.”24

  The truth was that the concealed problem of peace, the need to beat the King thoroughly before terms could be proposed, as well as the manifest problems of war, were beginning to obtrude themselves on Cromwell’s consciousness. And the Independents were more likely to achieve total defeat than any other body. It was the conduct of the war which now divided Manchester and Cromwell, not the mysterious alleged plot of Sir Henry Vane to replace King Charles i with some other more religiously tolerant monarch on the eve of Marston Moor, which has recently been exposed as a myth with but little to substantiate it.25 The behaviour of Cromwell’s own men, so many of them Independents, under fire at Marston Moor itself had settled his own mind resolutely on the course it had long been faintly pursuing. Surely God had showed his approval of the Independents by rewarding them with such a resounding victory.

  Thus an inclination towards Independency grew to a conviction. On 13 September, in a debate in Parliament – the first Cromwell had attended for seven months – on the subject of the ordination of the ministers of the proposed new style of Church, Cromwell spoke out on behalf of the sectaries. Oliver St John’s motion on the subject put the loose and tolerant point of view of Independency extremely well. The Committee of Lords and Commons appointed to deal with the Commissioners of Scotland and the Committee of the National Assembly on the subject “should take into consideration the differences in opinion of the members of the Assembly in point of church-government, and, in case that cannot be done, to endeavour the finding out some way, how far tender consciences, who cannot in all things submit to the common-rule, which shall be established, may be borne with according to the Word …” And at the time the motion was remarked as being redolent of the spirit of Cromwell. It was during this sitting that the Speaker of the House gave official thanks to Cromwell for his faithful service in the late battle near York “where God had made [him] a special instrument in obtaining that great victory”.26 While the Presbyterians were thereby reminded of the real source of Cromwell’s influence at the present time – he was an effective warlord the wording would also have been approved by Cromwell who did indeed see himself as God’s special instrument on this occasion. The problem would arise, and was indeed to make itself felt shortly, when God’s special instrument did not provide a victory: clearly for one of Cromwell’s providentialist philosophy the explanation would have to be sought in outside interference of some sort, the undue blunting of the godly weapon.

  In the meantime as the Parliamentary offensive once more got under way, Manchester at last brought himself to move: his orders were to fill the gap left in the middle of England by the departure of Waller to help Essex in the west. Yet his delays were still incontrovertibly so great, despite the explicit orders of Parliament, that he had only reached Harefield in Middlesex by 27 September. And his correspondence with the Committee supports the view that these delays were deliberate, and of Manchester’s own choice.27 The plan had been that Manchester should send his horse on ahead to join that of Waller and Essex, together with his refurbished infantry. But Manchester now stuck stubbornly at Reading long enough to miss the opportunity of checking the King before he got to Salisbury. As a result the Royalists not only entered Salisbury but also obliged the Parliamentarians to call off their own siege of Donnington Castle, a splendid fortified strongpoint a mile north-west of Newbury. At last Manchester did react to the crisis, and joined up with Waller at Basingstoke. When Essex’s foot arrived, and with the addition of some trained bands from London, the Parliamentary forces now added up to the handsome total of eighteen thousand – incidentally outnumbering the King’s by two to one. When the King took his stand at Newbury on 27 October, it seemed that Providence was offering to Parliament once again, four months after Marston and after many vicissitudes, the opportunity of inflicting upon him a resounding defeat.

  But the King had one advantage left at least: he was occupying an extremely strong position, with Donnington Castle at his back, the left wing of his cavalry on the Lambourne River with fortified Shaw House protecting the crossing, and his right at Newbury. The attack would need considerable co-ordination if it were to succeed. The plan now hatched at a Council of War, under Manchester’s general command since Essex was ill, was twofold. One half of the army under Waller (who may have suggested it), including the horse under Skippon and Cromwell, were to make a wide detour of a march, and end by attacking Prince Maurice at Speen from the rear. At the same moment Manchester himself was to assault Shaw House from the front. Despite the fact that Prince Maurice was prepared and waiting for them, the Parliamentarians at Speen did well. The chanting sound of the Psalms was heard again about three o’clock in the afternoon. They stormed the fortifications and captured Prince Maurice’s guns. It was at this point that Manchester’s capacity for delay was once more fatally exhibited. He had been waiting to hear the noise of Waller’s guns at Speen to commence his own assault, but for some reason could not distinguish them from the rest of the gunfire, and so his supporting lunge hung fire until after four o’clock, by which time the two prongs of the attack were fatally out of kilter. Eventually night put an end to his attempts, although Manchester said later that they had fought vainly by moonlight for at least one hour. Just as Manchester failed to blast his way into Shaw House, so too the cavalry could make no further headway without assistance. Thus the combined assault ended in confusion. Under cover of darkness the Royalist party now managed to escape.

  So far, so disastrous – but there was more to come. Waller and Cromwell, frantic at the lost chance, were all for pursuing the enemy and rushed back to Manchester to try to persuade him to join them since infantry support was essential. But once again Manchester preferred inaction, giving as a reason this time the exhaustion of his own men. There was also undoubtedly a miserable lack of doctors to attend to the wounded. There followed more fruitless maneuvering, in the course of which the King returned to the relief of Donnington Castle, and Cromwell refused to obey Manchester’s orders to stop the Royalist advance on the grounds that his horses were exhausted. “This most unhappy accident” at Donnington as Sir Samuel Luke, who had been after the guns for his own garrison at Newport Pagnell called it; and still there had been no further battle against the King.28 By 9 November the Parliamentarians were still at Newbury, and no nearer to capturing either Donnington or indeed Basing House, the great Catholic fortress near Basingstoke. In the meantime the particularly filthy weather of the autumn, the lack of communal spirit among the commanders, sickness among the men, had all combined to weaken still further their forces. The King on the other hand, having secured his guns and siege materials from Donnington and staved off a harrying action on his rearguard from Cromwell’s horse, had once more joined up with Prince Rupert. On 23 November he took up his quarters for the wint
er at Oxford.

  Acrimonious dissensions now broke out between Manchester and the more belligerent membersof the army on the one hand, and the Committee at London and the united army on the other. In the first of these disputes it was Cromwell who blamed Manchester’s string of delays for their failure to punch home any form of victory. And these delays in turn, as he saw it, originated in Manchester’s inability to grasp the true importance of a victory in the field: only by beating the King would they achieve the much desired proper religious settlement. The issue was fairly raised at the Council of War held by the Parliamentary commanders near Newbury on 10 November. Cromwell spoke up boldly for continuing the war, despite the seedy condition of their men, citing as arguments the eternal military advantages of decision and surprise. Even if the present moment did not appear particularly propitious, how much worse things might become in the spring, if the King succeeded in obtaining aid from France. Manchester on the contrary spoke up against taking any further action. One of his remarks, reported by Cromwell later, revealed significantly the sheer bewilderment of much of the thinking of those on the Parliamentary side:29 “If we beat the King 99 times, he would be King still and his posterity, and we subjects still,” cried Manchester, “but if he beat us but once we should be hanged and our posterity undone.” To which Cromwell retorted: “My Lord, if this be so, why did we take up arms at first? This [Manchester’s words] is against fighting hereafter. If so, let us make peace, be it never so base.” But the truth was that not everyone on the Parliamentary side was as certain as Cromwell of the paramount need for war.

  In the second dispute on the other hand, in which the Committee of Both Kingdoms attacked Manchester for not abiding by their orders to attack Basing House, Cromwell took the side of his General against that of the central civilian authority; this included of course the Scots whose ill-informed orders had in fact also contributed to the inefficiency of the past campaign. A reply was drawn up by Cromwell, which all signed, pointing out that the total of Manchester’s strategic decisions had been taken by a Council of War. It also drew attention to the utterly exhausted state of their sick and weary men and horses “in such extremity of weather as hath seldom been seen”, and the fact that the country people were being bankrupted by having the soldiers quartered upon them. The fundamental error had been to indulge in such sieges as Donnington in the first place and “the loose prosecution of them; we find nothing of that can be laid to our charge”.30 In the last remark can be detected the particular bugbear of Cromwell, the new type of professional soldier, who instinctively turned away from the old idea of sieges and retreats to fortresses (beloved of the King) towards the modern method of attack as a method of winning. On 17 November permission was given by the Committee for the Army to go into winter quarters at Reading; the commanders themselves adjourned to Westminster, and on 23 November Waller and Cromwell, as members of the Committee, were asked to give an account of events at Basing House, Donnington Castle and “the present postures of the armies”.

  Clarendon revealed in his History that at this stage of the war, when the King was feeling “melancholic” he used to cheer himself up by reflecting that the disorder of Parliament was greater, and that all the wealth of the kingdom could not prevent them being plagued from inside with “distractions and emulations”. Sir Samuel Luke, whose Letter-books reveal his growing dislike of and antipathy to the Independents after Marston Moor, put it another way: on the subject of the coming discussions between the various parties of opinion in the Army, he reflected: “I fear fair Words will endanger us more this Winter than all the force of the enemy has done this Summer.”31 Certainly the battle between Manchester and Cromwell, smouldering before Newbury, flaming thereafter, was about to begin in earnest, and words enough, fair or otherwise, would pour forth upon the ears of the Commons and the country for the next few months.

  On 25 November, at the request of the House of Commons, Cromwell presented to them his case against Manchester in a long speech, of which the main burden in the short notes on the subject which have come down to us, was that “the said Earl hath always been indisposed and backward to engagements, and the ending of the war by the sword, and always for such a Peace as a thorough victory would be a disadvantage to – and hath declared this by principles express to that purpose, and by a continued series of carriage and actions answerable”. Another version of Cromwell’s accusation exists in his Narrative, a printed statement in the drawing up of which Waller, Haselrig and Vane may well have had a hand. This Narrative lists the charges against Manchester in great detail (although Cromwell’s own refusal to attack Donnington when his horses were exhausted is not touched upon).32

  Manchester’s answer to all this was to make a long personal statement of his own to the House of Lords three days later, in the course of which he accused Cromwell of crude outbursts against the nobility itself: “he [Cromwell] hoped to live to see never a nobleman in England, and that he loved such better than others because they did not love Lords”. He had even told Manchester personally that “it would not be well till he was but Mr Montagu”. Such tales, even if true in substance, had certainly lost nothing in the telling, and were of course calculated to enrage the House of Lords to whom they were recounted. Cromwell was also said to have boasted of making the Isle of Ely the strongest place in the world, where, having thrown out all the irreligious wretches, “he would make it a place for God to dwell in”. The writer of the aide-memoire to Manchester’s accusations, which is the only form in which they survive, added to this statement the gratuitous view that in fact Ely was now no better than ever and in fact more like Amsterdam (a notorious haunt of the sectaries). Then there were the charges of embezzlement, including that .Ł5 a week paid to Mrs Cromwell referred to earlier.

  Apart from these personal charges, Manchester also issued his own long Narrative,33 probably drawn up for him by Crawford, full of military justification. Its outstanding theme was that Manchester had enough to do from keeping the army from mutinying without being “put on by Cromwell and his junto” and that Cromwell “went on in a most high way . .. attributing all the praise to himself of other men’s actions” (a charge for which the modern-sounding explanation has been suggested that Cromwell was more inclined to talk to the special correspondents for the battles, and was thus given preferential mention in the newspapers of the day). Manchester also accused Cromwell of failing to support him with the horse and thus preventing them routing the King. As a result of all these parallel trumpetings, full of sound and fury, each House referred the dispute to its own committee.

  Into this situation already virulent with the plague of military quarrels came the further animosity of Cromwell’s religious enemies. At the beginning of December, Essex suggested that some lawyers, including Whitelocke, might confer with the Scots to see if Cromwell could be charged with being “an Incendiary”. According to Whitelocke, not only was the charge thought difficult to make stick but the truth was that Cromwell was extremely popular generally, and it was hard to see what would be gained overall for the Parliamentary cause.34 Nevertheless the mere exploration of such a possibility shows how bitterly the opponents of the King were already divided within their own hearts; and of course such hostility can scarcely have endeared the Scottish faction to Cromwell himself.

  However Cromwell showed by his next move that whatever the pettiness of others, his own stature was growing with his opportunities, and great events were beginning to make a great man of him. Three stirring speeches were made by him in the House of Commons in one day, and although Clarendon noted of the second that he “had not yet arrived at the faculty of speaking with decency and temper” so that no doubt he had not quite cast off his old vehement style, the language of the first at least is noble. The philosophy expounded is also highly adroit.35

  “It is now a time to speak, or forever hold the tongue,” he began:

  The important occasion now is no less than to save a Nation out of a bleeding, nay, almost d
ying condition, which the long continuance of this War hath already brought it into; so that without a more speedy, vigorous and effectual prosecution of the War – casting off all lingering proceedings like those of soldiers-of-fortune beyond sea, to spin out a war – we shall make the kingdom weary of us, and hate the name of Parliament.

  In a passage reminiscent of Mark Antony after the death of Caesar, Cromwell proceeded to discuss the many criticisms being uttered of the self-interest of members of Parliament who continued the war just because they had “great places and commands and the sword into their hands”: but these were not his own thoughts, nor was he doing more than expressing to their faces what others were saying behind their backs; he himself was “far from reflecting on any”. No one knew better than he the worth of these commanders, members of both Houses, who were still in power: “but if I may speak my conscience without reflection upon any, I do conceive if the Army be not put into another method, and the War more vigorously prosecuted, the People can bear the War no longer, and will enforce you to a dishonourable peace”.

  In his suggestions for a cure, Cromwell showed further the two-faced charity of Mark Antony. It was not for him “to insist upon complaint or oversight of any Commander-in-Chief upon any occasion whatsoever; for as I must acknowledge myself guilty of oversights, so I know they can rarely be avoided in military matters”. (This was from one who had just listed Manchester’s military oversights to no mean tune.) But without strict enquiry into the causes of such things “let us apply ourselves to the remedy; which is most necessary. And I hope we have such true English hearts, and zealous affections towards the general weal of our Mother Country, as no Members of either House will scruple to deny themselves, and their own private interest, for the public good. ...”