A History of Britain, Volume 2

by Simon Schama

  The more republican and zealous members of the Council of State – Lambert himself and his fellow army officers Disbrowe and Charles Fleetwood – looked on the reawakening of the old county communities with misgivings. By encouraging them to come out from beneath the ruins and reseating them in their old places of authority, might not the Protectorate be sowing the seeds of its own undoing? From his perch in Ireland, Lieutenant-General Ludlow was even more incensed at what he took to be craven abdication of republican power to ‘time-serving Cavaliers’, lawyers and ‘corrupt parsons’, ‘and in the meanwhile such men as are most faithfull to the publique interest for which so much blood hath been spilt . . . such as have been valiant in the field and ventured their lives . . . for the liberties of the people, such as have all along in the greatest revolutions and dangers . . . appeared in their purses and persons for the true interest of the Nation, that these honest men should be thus slighted and undermined’ he thought a cause for scandal, contempt and alarm. For such men to come into parliament was to invite back royalism in a Trojan Horse.

  In the spring of 1655 their suspicions seemed to have been confirmed when a royalist rising, incompetently led by John Penruddock, broke out in Wiltshire. It was quickly smashed, and was followed by the usual parade of hangings and beheadings, Penruddock’s taking place in May. But the sudden threat, together with well-founded fears of assassination, was enough to jolt Cromwell out of complacency. He was also badly shaken by the disastrous outcome of an expedition against the Spanish in the Caribbean, an unaccustomed military fiasco which he took as God’s verdict on the sinfulness of the nation. Statistics weren’t everything, it seemed.

  Time, then, for contrition. Time for repentance. Time for a heavy dose of zeal. For about a year and a half from July 1655 Cromwell let the outriders of righteousness, the major-generals, have their head, inflicting on England a coercive military regime the like of which had not been seen since the security states of Walsingham and Thomas Cromwell. Over the reassuring map of the counties were laid twelve military cantons, each governed by a major-general. Their mission was, in the first instance, a police action, dismantling the embryonic county militias and replacing them by rock-solid loyal cavalry financed by a ‘decimation’ – collecting a tenth of the value of royalist or suspected royalist estates. Security and pre-emptive deterrence were thus economically combined. But Cromwell, and to an even greater degree his generals, were also convinced that a true pacification meant tackling the task which so often had been shirked or postponed in the name of reconciliation: the rigorous conversion of profane, carnal England to a state of godly submission. In the name of the decimation, gentry like Sir Ralph Verney, who had returned to England but whose record as a supporter of parliament in 1642 was not enough to clear him of suspicion, were summoned to appear before the generals and their assessors and give security for their levies. Failure to pay meant confiscation or imprisonment.

  Very quickly the major-generals became a flying squad for righteousness. Quixotic though it was, this was a crusade that the Puritan zealots had been fighting since the beginning of the civil war, when James I’s permissive Book of Sports had been burned by the Common Hangman and edicts published to make sure pleasure never happened on a Sunday; now once more ‘no persons shall hereafter exercise or keep maintain or be present at any wrestling, shooting, Bowling, ringing of bells . . . masque, Wake, otherwise called feasts, church-ales, dancing and games’. Away too with cock-fights, cock-running, horse-races and bear-baiting. Woe betide anyone caught putting up a maypole, working on the Sabbath or furtively celebrating Christmas. Alehouses were to come under vigilant licensing and inspection and were to be purged of fiddlers and gamblers. The Swearing and Cursing Act punished anyone caught uttering a profanity with a fine according to their status (more for gents than commoners). Children under twelve heard saying something filthy were to be whipped. Convicted fornicators were to spend three months in prison, adulterers to suffer the death penalty.

  This is the stereotypical image we have of Cromwell’s England: a dour Puritan Sparta where the military was mobilized to wipe out fun. And as far as the ambitions of the major-generals go, it’s not altogether wide of the mark. But, needless to say, the experiment in enforced virtue was a dismal flop, not least because of the impossibility of supplying the manpower to police it. Lacking their own Enforcers for Christ, the major-generals had no option but to fall back on the constables and justices who were already in place. And they were very unlikely to be sympathetic to the great work. On the contrary, the records of local magistrates are full of malefactors who paid no attention whatsoever to the morals police. Punishment, when it was meted out, was often an elaborate joke. When John Witcombe of Barton St David in Somerset was put in the stocks for swearing, his own minister, protesting the illegality of the law, brought him ale to keep his spirits up. In Cheshire, a servant girl who had been denounced as flagrantly violating the Sabbath by working on a Sunday was (incorrectly) judged a minor so that, instead of being fined, she could be ‘corrected’ by her master. In the presence of the local constable her punishment was ‘turned all into a jest. The master plucked off a small branch of heath from a turf and therewith gave her two or three such gentle touches on her cloathes as would have not hurt an infant two days old.’

  In many places this must have been as deep as the bite of ‘Cromwell’s mastiffs’ reached. Secretary Thurloe’s papers are full of their bitter complaints at the hopelessness of their task. ‘I am much troubled with these market towns,’ Major-General Berry wrote from Monmouth, ‘everywhere vice abounding and the magistrates fast asleep.’ But if their attempt to impose godliness on horseback was a failure, they did alienate enough of the people whom the Protectorate needed to survive – the county gentry – to give Cromwell serious pause. Although the military regime did its best to intimidate during the elections of 1656, the results produced a majority which swept parliament clean of their supporters and dismantled their entire structure of power. Prodded by the pragmatists on the Council, Cromwell now swung back – permanently this time – to a conservative regime of ‘settling’.

  In the summer of 1657 he accepted the ‘Humble Petition and Advice’ and a government that was virtually the same as the reformed monarchy envisioned by the Long Parliament, the one critical difference being the commitment to protect liberty of conscience. But even this commitment was beginning to wobble, as the threshold of censure on Christian sects deemed scandalous became much lower. Despite assuring Cromwell (he could not take an oath) in a face-to-face interview that he submitted to the powers that be, the Quaker leader George Fox was still repeatedly locked up in conditions of nightmarish filth and squalor as a menace to the public peace. When he attempted to warm himself by lighting straw in one of his cells, his gaolor pissed on the fire to put it out and threw shit on the prisoner from a gallery above. Horrible though these trials were, they were nothing compared to the fate of Fox’s maverick protégé James Nayler, tried for blasphemy by parliament and the Council of State in the late autumn of 1656. Nayler’s crime had been to ride through Bristol in imitation of the Saviour (pretending that he was Christ, said his prosecutors), his few disciples crying hosanna as he trotted through the rain-soaked streets. For his deranged temerity Nayler was pilloried for two hours, his forehead branded with a ‘B’ for blasphemer, his tongue bored through with a hot iron, and flogged through the streets of London – and then taken to Bristol to be flogged all over again before being incarcerated. He endured the excruciating torment with astonishing fortitude, but died four years later still suffering from its after-effects.

  To his credit, Cromwell seemed as disturbed as anyone by the punitive overkill of the House and actually questioned the legitimacy of the trial. Afterwards he seemed to want to moderate the power of a single House and so became open to the restoration of a second, upper chamber, designated unimaginatively as ‘the Other House’. Bulstrode Whitelocke was installed there as Viscount Henley, alongside Cromwell’
s two new sons-in-law, Viscount Fauconberg and Robert Rich, the Earl of Warwick. History seemed to be on fast rewind to 1642, with Cromwell playing the part of the king-who-might-have been. As John Pym had wanted, parliament now had the authority to approve or veto appointments to the high offices of state. No taxes could be raised or declarations of war or peace made without its consent. In fact, the constitution of 1657 was so close to being the responsible monarchy, constrained by the common law, which the civil war had been fought for that it seemed only logical to cap it with a responsible king. Whitelocke, who had been against the idea five years earlier, had now evidently changed his mind, personally urging it on Cromwell as the best way to stabilize the future of the reformed state of Britain.

  But though he was tempted, in the end Cromwell could not manage to turn himself into King Oliver I. Political reasons certainly weighed in his decision to reject the offer (provided he could none the less name his successor as Protector), for generals Lambert and Fleetwood all but threatened a major mutiny in the army should he dare to mount the throne. But Cromwell showed he could handle the army by abruptly cashiering Lambert and purging the officer corps of any he thought disloyal to his regime. The most serious restraint came, rather, from his own exacting conscience: his deeply felt certainty that, since God had decreed the ‘extirpation’ of the monarchy in England, it was not for him to overturn that decision. If a new sign came from Providence that he should indeed be a king unto Israel that would be different. But the Almighty fought shy of direct communication in 1657 and the brow of the Protector remained unanointed.

  Oliver Cromwell would, in fact, get to wear the crown, but only once he was dead. On 3 September 1658, the anniversary of the battles of both Dunbar and Worcester, he passed away. While he was breathing his last a tornado-like tempest bore down on England, ripping out trees and sending church steeples (with their unused belfries) crashing to the ground. To the omen-conscious (which meant virtually everyone), this was no coincidence. It was the Devil coming to get his due, for an old story had circulated that after the battle of Worcester Oliver had sold his soul for supreme power. There were other dire portents. Although 1658 was a rare year free of battles, won or lost, the shadow of mortality still seemed to fall heavily over the nation. The winter had been brutal. Crows were found with their feet frozen to branches. Trade stopped. Grain prices went through the roof. An epidemic of the ‘quartan’ fever (probably some form of influenza) held in its deadly grip a country already weakened by plague. Poor John Evelyn had his darling five-year-old prodigy son die in late January, and a second child perish barely two weeks later. ‘Here ends the joy of my life,’ he wrote later, ‘for which I go even mourning to my grave.’ Terrified survivors in the cities abstained from fish and flesh and ate nothing ‘but sage posset and pancake or eggs or now and then a turnip or carrot’. Whatever she ate, fever and cancer carried off Cromwell’s favourite daughter in August. The Protector fell into a distraction of sorrow and then seemed to go under with the sickness himself. At Greenwich John Evelyn joined the crowds watching a beached whale thrash its flukes hopelessly on the mudflats, blood pouring from its wounded spout. Even reasonable men were mindful of the portent. Leviathan was in its death throes.

  By the time the leaves were on the turn Oliver was dead, though not quite gone. There had been a botched embalming. The regime, which wanted to preserve the Protectorate, had started by failing to preserve the Protector. But before the inevitable atrophy, an effigy had been cast from the body. It was then exposed for a lying-in-state at Somerset House, in the manner of the medieval kings, robed in imperial purple, the shrine lit by a great incandescence of candles. But then it was decided that he should be winched upright, and there he stood for another two months, stiffly erect like a mannikin, crown on head, sceptre and orb in his hand, king at last. On 23 November there was a massive state funeral which ended in ignominious fiasco. According to the French ambassador (who was not exactly innocent in the débâcle), altercations about diplomatic precedent and protocol delayed the beginning of the enormous procession, which took seven hours to file through London. By the time it finally got to Westminster Abbey it was nearly pitch dark, and the inadequate supply of candles inside the church made it impossible for the ceremonies to be prolonged. So for the ruler who, above all others, had most loved sermons, and who relentlessly meditated out loud on God’s purpose in history, there were no funeral orations, no prayers, no preaching. Just a few short sharp blasts on the trumpets before the effigy was bundled into a waiting tomb. But not before little Robert Uvedale, one of the Westminster school boys summoned to attend, had made his way through the chaotically exiting crowd and stolen away with a souvenir, the ‘Majesty Scutcheon’ on which the arms of the British nations were figured on a flag of white satin.

  Had Cromwell been able to write his own funeral eulogy, what would he have wanted to say about his extraordinary career? Certainly not its trajectory from obscurity to supreme power, because, avidly as he embraced it, there was always a side of Cromwell which was deeply disgusted by it. When, not long before he died, he protested that he ‘would have been glad to have been living under a woodside, to have kept a flock of sheep rather than to have undertaken such a place as this was’, the confession seemed, and was, perfectly genuine. His was, in fact, the classic case of great power falling to the very person who least wanted it, and precisely for that reason. The only hero of the civil wars who wanted it even less was Thomas Fairfax, who never quite recovered from the trauma of the trial and execution of the king – and who would re-emerge from his Yorkshire obscurity to help put Charles I’s son back on the throne. Cromwell could never be that self-effacing because he had, like Moses, gone through an experience of the Call, just as surely as if he had heard a voice coming from the Burning Bush, and believed that his life thereafter was devoted to the execution of God’s design for the nation.

  Ironically, it was just because that design seemed to be a work-in-progress for Jehovah who only vouchsafed glimpses of it now and then, even to a servant as doggedly devoted as Cromwell, that he never much felt the need to work out a consistent strategy for the republic, nor a policy which might have been able to reconcile the self-evidently conflicting claims of parliamentary liberty and Christian godliness. Nor did he even bother to arbitrate in any consistent way between zeal and freedom. Rather he let God show him the way. And if God changed his mind every so often, well that was His privilege.

  Buried amid the immense screed of Cromwell’s pious circumlocutions to parliament was, however, a genuine statement of what he wanted for England, if circumstances would ever permit. (That he could make the circumstances permit, nudge God along a bit, was a thought he dismissed as sacrilegious.) It turns out that the vision of this angry, ruthless, overbearing, self-torturing man was a thing of consummate sweetness, humanity and intelligence. More astonishingly still, the most deeply felt principle of the man who created the matrix of the modern English state was, in its essence, liberal. For at the heart of that conviction lay tolerance: the unforced hope that men (provided they were not Catholic) might be allowed to be left alone to receive Christ in any way they wished; to hoe their few acres and keep their pigs, untroubled by the rude intrusions of the state – always provided they did not conspire against the freedom of others. After all his slaughters, his marches and his red-faced fits of shouting, what Oliver Cromwell really wanted, for everyone, was a quiet life: ‘a free and uninterrupted Passage of the Gospel running through the midst of us and Liberty for all to hold forth and profess with sobriety their Light and Knowledge therein, according as the Lord in his rich Grace and Wisdom hath dispensed to every man and with the same freedom to practice and exercise the Faith of the Gospel and lead quiet and peaceable lives in all Godliness and Honesty without any Interruption from the Powers God hath set over this Commonwealth.’

  It would be perhaps another two and a half centuries before anything like this dream could be realized. And by then, really, no one much car
ed.

  CHAPTER 4

  UNFINISHED BUSINESS

  NOT LONG AFTER Cromwell died, John Dryden wrote, with premature optimism, ‘No Civill broyles have since his death arose / But Faction now by Habit does obey’. The question on everyone’s mind – could the Protectorate survive the loss of Oliver – was about to be answered resoundingly in the negative. At first it seemed as though Oliver’s named successor, his eldest surviving son, Richard, might make a go of it. Loyal addresses poured in, and the thirty-one-year-old was recognized as decent, honest, well meaning and quite without his father’s alarming irascibility. His greatest asset was that no one could think of any reason to dislike him. But this was also a liability. Richard’s conspicuous inability to command Oliver’s selectively deployed menace made him politically defenceless as well as clueless. His father had known all along that Richard was too amiable for his calling, too softly seated upon the cushions of life’s many pleasures. He made no one break out in a sweat, either of exertion or of fear. This became a problem when Richard, faced with the usual choice of depending on the army or the pragmatists, opted heavily for men like Ashley Cooper and Montagu. However conservative Oliver might have seemed, the generals, beginning with Fleetwood, felt that through the brotherhood of arms they could always recall him to the colours of the ‘Good Old Cause’. Richard, on the other hand, seemed more the plaything than the master of his civil servants. So out of a sense of self-preservation – for themselves and for the republic – the generals made common cause with the same Rump politicians they had ousted in 1653. It may be that by the spring of 1659 they felt they had no choice, for the generals were themselves being hard pressed by junior officers, angry about forty-month arrears of pay; about the political purges that had taken place in the last years of Oliver’s Protectorate and about the systematic policy of replacing them with the old county militias under the control of the gentry.