Cromwell, the Lord Protector

by Antonia Fraser

  However in the rest of Scotland there remained many areas where the difference between natives and invaders was more profound than that nice distinction between a hum and a groan. In December Lambert at Cromwell’s command finally crushed the Resolutioners of the south-west, kindness having failed to bring them over. The bone of Edinburgh Castle remained to be dislodged from Cromwell’s teeth. The implacable rock had been much attacked by miners, some from the eastern mining districts of Scotland itself, others brought up from the Derbyshire collieries. But the besieged, with much resource, threw pitch and flax and other inflammable materials into the mines to smoke them out. Despite the heavy bombardment of the English guns, grouped on the north side of the Castle Hill (the east side of the castle still showing traces of their work) it was the opinion of one Englishman that guns alone would never wear down the stronghold so long as “the defendants have anything of encourage in them”. Edinburgh Castle had already withstood one famous two-year siege under Kirkcaldy of the Grange in the previous century; it had plenty of water and, at the present time, ammunition and provisions for several months. It seems therefore that its ultimate surrender on 24 December had more to do with the state of mind of the Governor, Dundas, than actual hardship. The bombardment had to cease on 16 December when a snowstorm hid the castle from view. By the time Dundas reached terms satisfactory to himself the mines were not even completed. A keen Covenanter, he was quick to join Cromwell’s side thereafter. Heath repeated an unpleasant comment on the whole affair: Edinburgh Castle having heretofore been known as the Maiden, should in future be known as the Prostitute.33

  By the end of 1650, the Royalist inspiration of Cromwell’s Scottish opponents was becoming more marked. When the moderate Resolutioners passed a regulation in the General Assembly on 14 December allowing back into the public service all those who were not actually notorious enemies of the Covenant, that pointed the way still further in this direction for the New Year. Cromwell had as yet failed to take Fife and the valuable Scottish lands lying north-east of Edinburgh, despite having made himself master of the whole of south Scotland, below the Clyde and the Forth. On i January King Charles n was officially crowned at Scone. It was a sign for all those Scots of differing yet mild persuasions to rally behind him. Cromwell and Lambert sent notice to London that the Scots with the King were ceasing to argue about doctrine and were making it “not a religious war, but a national quarrel”.34 In the meantime, for all Lambert’s confident prediction that the Scots having “filled the measure of their iniquities”, the Lord would speedily judge them, the English provisions were getting rapidly exhausted. The English army in Scotland was also suffering from pay troubles, which if they had a familiar ring to those who had followed the fortunes of the New Model, were not a soothing basis for the New Year’s operations.

  Nevertheless the most prominent casualty of Cromwell’s spring campaign – towards the kingdom of Fife, now the centre of Royalist activity was the Lord-General himself. The weather was by turns soaking and freezing. Cromwell’s health, never totally reliable, had been much lowered by the months spent fighting round Ireland, quite apart from the actual breakdown he had endured there. Scotland, an expedition initiated after only four weeks’ respite, was to take an even greater toll. And as in Ireland he had taken an exceptionally short winter break. On 8 February he fell desperately sick in the Canongate house, probably as a direct result of immersion in a snowstorm while campaigning near Linlithgow. With the typical foolishness of the man of action, who ever insists on taking one step forward before his health is ready for it, Cromwell found himself involved in three relapses within the next few weeks. It was not until the end of the month that he was well enough to discuss plans of battle with his officers, and even then he still apparently felt “a little crazy” in himself, a word he had applied to his own health in Ireland. In its contemporary meaning it conveyed a feeling of shakiness through sheer weakness, a seriously flawed constitution, rather than the modern sense of madness.

  An English newsletter of early March included a letter from a gentleman attending on Cromwell to poor “Lady Cromwell” (as his wife was generally known now) in London. It was a measure of public concern for the sick General. Describing how he has scarcely had time in his fervent nursing to put pen to paper, the servant gives this newly encouraging report: “Truly Madam, my Lord took his rest very well on Tuesday night last, and so (blessed be God) he has done every night since, and sometimes in the day also, so that he is better sensible both in Dr Goddard’s judgement and his own; hath a better stomache and grows stronger.” This gentleman was probably Cromwell’s French valet Jean Duret, whose subsequent story even Heath had to admit showed “a Ray or Specimen of humanity” in Cromwell. While ill, Cromwell would only take food from Duret’s hands, letting no one else come near him. Duret himself then fell sick, perhaps out of the exhaustion of nursing, and it was Cromwell’s turn to visit him assiduously. But Duret did not recover. In his dying breath, he commended his mother, sister and kindred in France to his master’s care. Cromwell took the charge with great seriousness. He wrote immediately on the subject to Lady Cromwell in London, who sent for the Duret family and had them seated at her own table. The sister later became one of her maids of honour, the nephews pages, while Madame Duret was greeted personally by Cromwell with gracious speeches. No linguist, he had even taken the trouble to learn some French phrases for the purpose, although his daughters, who did speak French, had in the main to act as interpreters. The burden of his message was that he Cromwell would now act as a son towards her “since the preservation of his life had its being in her entrails”. The whole story, both in the devotion of the servant and the kindness of the master, is not only characteristic of the tender private side of Cromwell, but also provides one refutation at least of the old tag that no man is a hero to his valet.35

  The news of Cromwell’s indisposition, much exaggerated, ran like wildfire to Royalist circles both at home and abroad; he was said to be so ill on ii March that his doctors kept his letters from him, although the records of his correspondence show that it was on that very day that he signed an important letter urging upon Parliament the establishment of a northern university at Durham. Education was impressed upon Cromwell’s mind: he had earlier received the flattering news that he had been elected as Chancellor of Oxford University, although he greeted the deputation with speeches of such tortuous modesty, that it was only his retention of the seal when its members left that made them realize that he had accepted the position. But in southern England, the first serious Royalist conspiracy took place. At the Hague and Rotterdam there were delicious rumours that Cromwell was dead – and by his own hand. Ralph Josselin in Essex heard that he had died.36 The whole situation, the stalemate in Scotland, the resurgent Royalists, showed the burden that lay on one man, the Novus Princeps.

  However by April Cromwell was able to write back to his wife in London, praising the Lord that his outward strength was at last better. It was a missive which showed all his usual family preoccupations: if Dick and Doll were with her, they were to be assured of his prayers and love. “The dear little ones” (Mary and Frances, now fourteen and thirteen respectively) were tenderly thanked for their letters: “let me have them often”. But he also played the watchful father: Mrs Cromwell was warned not to entertain Lord Herbert too often to her house, for since Cromwell had been granted by Parliament the estates of his father (Lord Worcester) he feared that the enterprising Herbert might try to recover them by courting Mary. But it was “poor Bettie” on this occasion who received the brunt of the spiritual admonitions. It was she who was to be reminded of the Lord’s great mercy and to beware of those “worldly vanities and worldly company” to which she was suspected of being altogether too partial.37

  Under the circumstances, it must have been a pleasure, or at any rate the usual relief of a parent of a large family that not all its members were straying at the same time, to hear from Ireland that Bridget Ireton there was causing a g
reat impression by her piety, while Henry Cromwell was reported to be “much crying to God in secret”. Alas, before Oliver left Scotland, he found himself writing a much less happy letter on the eternal subject of Dick, who had now justified his worst suspicions by getting himself heavily in debt. Richard Mayor was given the task of passing on the unwelcome message. Like many addresses of upright fathers to profligate sons, it was ostensibly more in sorrow than in anger: “I desire to be understood that I grudge him not laudable recreations, nor an honourable carriage of himself in them: Truly I can find in my heart not only a sufficiency, but more, for his own good. But if pleasure and self-satisfaction be made the business of a man’s life, so much laid out upon it, so much time spent on it, as rather answers appetite than the will of God, or is comely before His saints, I scruple to feed this humour.” But in his subsequent contrast of their two situations, Cromwell campaigning in Scotland, while Dick lolled in sinful ease in England, can be discerned the familiar cry of the father who simply cannot at heart understand why his son is not more like himself: “Indeed I cannot think I do well to feed a voluptuous humour in my son, if he should make pleasures the business of his life, in a time when some precious Saints are bleeding and breathing out their last.”38

  In May, despite this theoretic recovery which allowed him to visit Glasgow once more, Cromwell was ill again. The Scots put his collapse down to a long nagging controversy he was having with Archibald Johnston Lord Warriston, concerning the return of the Scottish records, which Warriston and his wife were particularly anxious to save. It was supposed that a particularly vehement letter from Warriston had made Cromwell sick. But this time he added the torments of a stone to the fluctuating weaknesses of a fever, and Aubrey asserted wildly afterwards that he had been in such a rage (or pain) that he had pistolled two commanders who had come to his room. Towards the end of the month, despite continued statements of recovery, he was known to have suffered five fits of ague or fever from Friday to Monday. It was not until 31 May that he was reliably known to be walking in the pleasant garden of Lady Moray’s house, and eating and sleeping well. But by this time Parliament had reached a rare state of panic at the prospect – and possible consequences of their victor’s demise. Like many of the English, putting all Cromwell’s troubles down to the Scottish climate, they instructed that he should repair to somewhere south of the border, in order to recuperate in the more favourable English air. Two doctors, Dr Wright and Dr Bate, were also sent trundling up from London in Fairfax’s coach. However, by the time they arrived, as a newsletter put it, another eminent physician – the Lord in His wisdom – had already said to Cromwell: “Live!” The mortal doctors were left to receive Ł200 for their pains.39

  It was early June before Cromwell was able to travel abroad in his coach, and even then “the ill vapours” proceeding from a Scotch mist sent him scuttling back to Edinburgh again. Cromwell himself wrote of the experience that the extremity of his sickness had been “so violent indeed my nature was not able to bear the weight thereof. But the Lord was pleased to deliver me, beyond expectation, and to give me cause to say once more, ‘He hath plucked me out of the grave!’” But perhaps the most apt comment on it all was made by a newsletter of the time: “My lord is not sensible he is grown an old man” – although even that did not quite do justice to the General’s own sagacity, since in a letter to his wife immediately after Dunbar he had confessed privately that he felt the “infirmities of age” marvellously stealing upon him, despite all the sustenance granted to the inner man.40 Cromwell was now fifty-two, and beyond middle age by the standards of the time. From Scotland onwards, he could never count on his body as a young, or even fit man of middle age might do. It is important to realize that in consequence of this prolonged scare concerning his health, lasting in effect for five months in the public mind, meant that his death thereafter must always be some sort of possibility.

  * * *

  The immediate consequence of Cromwell’s double bout of sickness was of course much to delay the prosecution of the Scottish campaign. As Mercurius Politicus observed in June: “The beauty of the summer is passing away very fast and yet we are not upon any action.” The English army had now been in Scotland for close on a year, without the cause between the two countries being effectively decided once and for all. Yet the prospect of another winter’s campaign there was something from which all right-minded men must shrink. The English ladies had begun to make the long journey north to join their husbands; they included Mrs Deane and the charming Frances Lambert, who wrote back to London with evident relief of her safe arrival and her reunion with her husband: “I bles the Lord I am safe gotten into Scot Land” (her original spelling preserved) “where for sume days I happyly enjoy my dearest frend . . .” The Lamberts had elegant tastes: during Lambert’s sojourn in Scotland, his Captain Walker had been writing off to London for a coat for his master “such as is most in fashion (the last having been of Tarnetla Hollandaise)”, swordbelts, “a good French hat of the best sort” and later another hat with bands, which should be fashionable yet black “for gold and silver pleaseth him not”. Summer riding boots, and Spanish leather shoes (which were to be of better stuff “than last we took from London”) were the subject of further requests, as were some three dozen quart bottles of the best Canary sack, which were to come by sea to Leith, and it was hoped would arrive before Lambert took the field.41

  Now Mrs Lambert in her turn started ordering up some fine French lawn from London if only because “I have nothing to wear about my neck, and I dare not go bare, for fear of giving offence to tender saints…” And with the prospect of the army’s return to England she began rather illogically to be “much satisfied” with her stay in Scotland. Her husband was “gone into the field” she wrote, and some of the English ladies rode out to watch the fighting. “I trust our good God will decide the quarrel between us.”42 Lambert’s foray was over the Firth of Forth towards Fife, since it had been decided that the time had come when this fertile area must be seized once and for all by the forces of the Commonwealth; the Scots, securely installed in Stirling, were once more reluctant to be drawn into an engagement. But at Inverkeithing, just north of the firth, Lambert in a spirited and enterprising battle, where the English were numerically roughly equal with the Scots, gave Cromwell just the victory he needed. With this peninsula delivered into the Lord-General’s hands, the time of “waiting upon God” in Cromwell’s words “and not knowing what course to take” was over. The way was clear to push north, and by i August Cromwell was actually as far advanced as Perth, bombarding the fortress of St Johnston.

  There was only one problem about this extended sally. It left the way equally clear for Charles and the remainder of the Scottish forces under Leslie to pelt for England. There they could raise the Royalist flag anew, with what increment that might involve of rising loyalist troops. In any case the alternative was not particularly attractive, for Cromwell at Perth threatened the Scottish Stirling supplies, and there was no chance of raising further men within the actual bounds of Scotland. So the King took the bait: he plunged for the march on England, at the head of the Scots as Generalissimo. They were across into England at Carlisle by 5 August. On 6 August King Charles n, “the young man” as Cromwell was supposed to nickname him in his private conversations,43 was proclaimed sovereign of England. The terms of the proclamation offered free pardon to all those who would now join him, whatever their past misdemeanours, with the three exceptions of Bradshaw, the prosecuting counsel Cook and of course the arch-criminal Oliver Cromwell himself.

  In the meantime what about the arch-criminal? We left him before Perth, in theory at least out-manoeuvred by the precipitate march of the Scots. But that Cromwell deliberately left the road open as a calculated risk to thus flush out and ultimately finish off Leslie, cannot be doubted. Not only did he show himself in no particular hurry to settle Perth, but once back at Leith, he actually took the trouble to explain his plan in advance to the Speaker; “I
do apprehend that if he [Leslie] does go for England, being some few days march before us, it will trouble some men’s thoughts” he wrote carefully, but he was comforted by the conviction that “we have done to the best of our judgements, knowing that if some issue were not put to this business, it would occasion another winter’s war, to the ruin of your soldiery.”44 For this reason any more wary notion of placing themselves between the Scots and England had to be discarded in the greater interest of ultimate settlement. The coming campaign, Cromwell’s last period of active service, showed the culmination of his career as a strategist.

  From Leith Cromwell himself now proceeded to march with remarkable rapidity after the royal party, taking with him the foot, having sent on Lambert with the cavalry to harass the Scots’ rear. By 9 August Lambert was at Penrith just behind Charles. In the meantime the south of England had not been idle in preparing to meet what the Commonwealth at any rate considered as Scottish invasion rather than a royal return. Thomas Harrison travelled north, meeting up with Lambert on 14 August. Charles Fleetwood prepared to defend the capital, in case Charles’s intentions were a quick dash towards London. A passion of anti-Scottish feelings began to be drummed up in English breasts by the official newsletter Mercurius Politicus: an early August issue recounted the entire history of the Scottish invasions of England (including Flodden) starting with King Malcolm in 1071, and suggesting that anyone so “un-English” as to join Charles should be stoned.45

  The Royalist answer to this kind of propaganda was of course the natural appeal of a King to his loyal subjects. Unfortunately for Charles the words of his proclamation had fallen on curiously infertile ground. The expected Royalists were simply not flocking to his banner. On the contrary, the newly raised militia was to play an important part in the battle against him. For all that he took the western route towards the south which would bring him in touch with the traditionally Royalist areas of Lancashire and Wales, it was by no means a swelling procession. There was a variety of reasons for this unlooked-for failure. For one thing there was already a deep-dyed dislike of the Scots in the north of England, before Mercurius Politicus did its work, based on the notorious depredations of the Scottish invasion of 1648. This aversion to the Scots was a potent factor in limiting the enthusiasm of the whole Royalist underground movement in England: a man like Sir Rowland Berkeley, for example, a keen partisan of King Charles i, actually spent the day of Worcester deliberately dodging the scene of the battle.46 But further than that, there was a considerable spirit of lassitude over the whole country, induced by the potent Government repressions that had followed a premature Norfolk rising in December, and another in April. By the time King Charles reached Worcester, not too far from the Welsh borders, on 22 August, where the loyal townsfolk, extremely Royalist in their sympathies, drove out the garrison to accept him, he had only mustered at his command under sixteen thousand men.