Cromwell and his Council of Officers considered the best way forward for the government of the nation. Lambert was for a committee of a dozen men, to control all. But Cromwell and the army representatives instead approved Harrison’s proposal to commit the government of the nation to a council of religious men, who would contemplate God’s will, and express it through legislature. This body became known as Barebone’s Parliament after one of its members, Praise-God Barebone, a leather merchant of Fleet Street and a ‘man of great piety, understanding and weight’. It proved to be rather better at prayer and contemplation than government, and it soon became clear that Harrison had recommended it to Cromwell as a prelude to the Second Coming, in accordance with his apocalyptic beliefs, rather than as a practical political entity. Fifth Monarchists believed that good men were needed to prepare the way, before the victory over the Anti-Christ could be made complete.
Harrison also wanted a continuation of the war that the Commonwealth had provoked with the Netherlands. This began in July 1652 because, as George Monck, serving as one of England’s generals-at-sea, stated, ‘The Dutch have too much trade, and the English are resolved to take it from them.’11 The war was a naval one, involving terrible casualties on both sides. One who was lost was Richard Deane, the New Model Army’s artillery supremo, who had been twenty-first out of the fifty-nine signatories on Charles I’s death warrant. Deane was cut in two by a Dutch cannonball at the start of a 200-ship engagement, the Battle of the Gabbard, in June 1653. Monck threw a cloak over his fellow commander’s steaming remains, so the sight of his mutilation would not demoralise the crew. The corpse was afforded a more dignified end later, being interred with great pomp at Westminster Abbey.
Harrison saw the war with the Dutch not as a matter of commercial practicality, but as a rebuff to the Netherlands, on behalf of God, for having allowed financial greed to distract them from their religious duty. Once the Dutch were defeated, Harrison and his fellow radicals very much hoped that the war would be continued, its ultimate goal the conquest of Rome. When, in 1654, Cromwell pushed through a peace treaty with the Netherlands (he had never been happy fighting a Protestant nation) his rift with Harrison was complete.
Barebone’s Parliament was an experiment that imploded within a few months, because of indecision and infighting. Its final act, to the dismay of the Fifth Monarchists, was to surrender its sovereignty to Cromwell. Recognising his pre-eminence in the land, the Instrument of Government of 1653 proclaimed, ‘Oliver Cromwell, Captain-General of the forces of England, Scotland and Ireland, shall be, and is hereby declared to be, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland, and the dominions thereto belonging, for his life.’ The next phase of England’s republican decade was to be Cromwell’s Protectorate.
After the shattering defeats of the Civil Wars, Royalist sympathisers retained negligible armed strength, and lacked coordination. With little hope of a turning tide, and with the Prince of Wales in an exile that, after the rout at Worcester, looked as though it might be eternal, his supporters looked to any signs of hope. John Evelyn wrote of a violent summer storm, the likes of which nobody could remember, that ended a four-month drought: ‘The hail being in some places 4 and 5 inches about, brake all the glass about London: especially at Deptford, and more at Greenwich, where Sir Thomas Stafford, vice-chamberlain to the Queen, affirmed some had the shape of crowns.’12 In desperate circumstances, this was viewed as a rare positive omen.
Cromwell did all he could to ensure that hopes of a Stuart restoration remained a fanciful prospect. However, his brutal single-mindedness added to the unpopularity of his regime. Some who had loyally supported the Parliamentarian cause, including the regicide Colonel Hutchinson, watched in dismay as Cromwell played into the hands of the enemy. Lucy Hutchinson recorded that her husband and his allies recognised that ‘while Cromwell reduced all by the exercise of tyrannical power under another name, there was a door open for the restoring of their (the Royalists’)party’.13
Cromwell’s chief intelligence officer had been the regicide Thomas Scott. However, under his Protectorate, Cromwell passed this responsibility on to John Thurloe, his family’s lawyer. Thurloe combined censorship with espionage, to quash Royalist plots before they took root. As postmaster general, he had access to all mail, whether to foreign governments, or between Stuart sympathisers. He brought together a team of codebreakers, one of them the son of the slain Dr Dorislaus.
In 1655 there was a ripple of seemingly disjointed Royalist rebellions across England. It was Thurloe and his network of agents that thwarted these efforts, having prior knowledge of the conspirators’ plans after infiltrating their ranks, and reading their correspondence. Such failures crushed the morale of other potential plotters, and dissuaded foreign powers from becoming embroiled in the luckless intrigues of the exiled Prince of Wales.
Despite his successes, the Lord Protector asserted ever tighter control over England, dividing it into ten military governorships. Each was under the control of a major general, answerable only to him. Those chosen by Cromwell included two fellow regicides: William Goffe in Berkshire, Hampshire and Sussex; and Edward Whalley controlling five Eastern and Midlands counties, from Lincolnshire to Warwickshire. A third signatory to the King’s death warrant, John Barkstead, was appointed deputy to the major general of Middlesex. Barkstead performed the day-to-day duties, commanding the Tower of London, administering the key area that included the City of London and Westminster, and overseeing everything from the rounding up of hundreds of prostitutes to the suppression of Shrove Tuesday celebrations.
Cromwell relied on the major generals to preserve peace, and also to enforce his will: Harrison and Ludlow, despite their impressive military records, were considered too independent for posts that demanded obedience to the Protector. One of the major generals’ tasks was to extract the Decimation Tax, a fine of one-tenth of their property, payable by defeated Royalists. This was a particularly galling levy, since its proceeds went to fund local militias whose prime role was the policing of the Royalists. This cycle of heavy taxation and suffocating security created a self-feeding monster, whose master was Cromwell.
Ludlow detested the rule of the major generals, claiming that they frequently acted outside the law, threatening those who failed to obey them with transportation to the plantations of the West Indies. ‘And it was a misery to be bewailed in those days,’ agreed Lucy Hutchinson, ‘that many of the Parliamentary party exercised cruelty, injustice, and oppression to their conquered enemies.’14 She thought the major generals ‘silly, mean fellows . . . who ruled according to their wills, by no law but what seemed good in their own eyes.’15
Further anger greeted Cromwell’s hope, partly implemented through his major generals, to improve the nation’s morality. Swearing, drunkenness and blasphemy were harshly punished; theatres were closed, and the horses of those riding on Sundays were confiscated. Horse races, bull-baiting and cock-fighting were banned: the seventeenth-century stomach for animal-based entertainment was strong, and its forced suppression was widely resented. In 1655, Colonel Pride sent a file of musketeers into the Bear Gardens at Bankside, London, where bear- and bull-baiting had been popular on Tuesdays and Thursdays since early Tudor times: Elizabeth I had taken the Spanish ambassador there, subtly probing him for secret intelligence during the entertainments. Now, it was decreed, such sport had to end, because it degraded the godly Commonwealth.
Pride had the bears tied by the nose and shot by firing squad, sparing just one white cub. He had the mastiffs that had been the bears’ tormentors sent to the plantations of Jamaica.16 Soon afterwards Thomas Walker, a petticoat-maker from Cannon Street, bought the area and built tenement buildings in place of the redundant amphitheatre. This was, to many, a Commonwealth subterfuge: their traditional enjoyment had been removed in the name of morality; but, it was strongly suspected, the true motive had been profit.
Religion was the root of much controversy. In the late 1640s and
early 1650s the Quaker Movement spread south from northern England. Its central tenets were suited to the instability of the times: Quakers questioned the authority of Church and state, and believed that every human was blessed with a divine ‘Inner Light’. William Goffe, the major general who had shone at the Putney debates before sitting in judgment on the King, condemned the Quakers as ‘doing much work for the Devil and deluding many simple souls’.17
James Nayler was a prominent Quaker. He had served with Parliament during the Civil Wars, most recently under Cromwell at Dunbar, returning to life as a farmer in the West Riding. A vision summoned him from his life in the fields to a ministry spreading his religious beliefs. Nayler was famed for his eloquence, which he used to attack slavery. But it was his actions, rather than his words, that provoked the greatest uproar.
During a rainstorm he rode his horse into the city of Bristol, with his followers in attendance, proclaiming ‘Holy, holy, holy’. He later claimed that his aim had been to highlight every person’s possession of the Inner Light, but this failed to convince. Puritans were outraged at his impersonation of Jesus. They also condemned as blasphemous his assertion that mankind could be considered spiritually equal to the Son of God.
Nayler was brought to trial in London. There, another of Cromwell’s major generals, William Butler, called for Nayler to suffer the penalty prescribed by the Old Testament book of Leviticus: ‘Bring forth him that hath cursed without the camp; and let all that heard him lay their hands upon his head, and let all the congregation stone him.’18 Goffe joined in the call for Nayler to be killed, with the inflammatory accusation that Quakers ‘would tear the flesh off the bones of all that profess Christ’.19
Cromwell favoured leniency for Nayler, but he had to concede to the demands for serious punishment. Nayler was placed in a pillory, where he was viciously pelted by the crowd, before being made to walk through the streets, being whipped as he went. His forehead was branded with a ‘B’ – a permanent reminder of his blasphemy – while his tongue was pierced with a hot iron. Nayler was then returned to Bristol, where he was forced to re-enter the city – this time, to show his unworthiness, facing his horse’s rear. He was flogged again, before being sentenced to two years of imprisonment so hard that he never recovered. Assaulted on his way back home to Yorkshire in 1660, he died soon afterwards aged forty-two.
If Cromwell was occasionally forced to bend his policy to the prejudices of his lieutenants, he was also powerful enough to build up bastions of influence that owed him unquestioning and total loyalty.
Ireland became almost a family fiefdom: Cromwell’s son-in-law Henry Ireton took control of it, when the lord general was called away to fight the Scots. Ireton continued his father-in-law’s ruthless ways, before succumbing to grave illness. This leading regicide died in agony in Limerick at the end of 1651, his last words allegedly a call for fresh blood to flush out the fiery fever that had consumed his body. Ireton, like Dorislaus and Deane before him, was buried in a magnificent ceremony at Westminster Abbey.
Cromwell’s eldest daughter Bridget endured a short widowhood, marrying Charles Fleetwood just six months after Ireton’s death. Fleetwood, another senior officer in her father’s service, was now sent as commander-in-chief to Ireland, where he continued the brutal crushing of resistance, persecuting Catholics, and favouring Puritans over Presbyterians.
When Fleetwood was transferred to an English major-generalship in 1655, Ireland largely became the responsibility of Cromwell’s intelligent twenty-seven-year-old son Henry, who already had five years’ experience there. During his time in charge of its armed forces, then its government, he had become a popular figure, demonstrating a sense of fairness and compassion notably absent in his three predecessors. Offered £1,500-worth of Irish property as a reward for his services, he turned it down, saying Ireland was too poor a country to bear such a gift.
The Cromwell children were intriguing to contemporaries, filling the void left by the exile and imprisonment of the Stuart princes and princesses. Once their father became Lord Protector, from which point he was addressed as ‘Your Highness’, the offspring were treated as quasi-royal. Bridget was viewed as down to earth but, Lucy Hutchinson believed, ‘the rest were insolent fools’.20 The eldest surviving son – the two senior ones had died of sickness while, respectively, a student and a Parliamentary army officer – was Richard, a disappointment to his father because he preferred to indulge a passion for country sports to serving the Protectorate. Lucy Hutchinson considered Richard ‘a peasant in his nature, yet gentle and virtuous; but [he] became not greatness’.21
Elizabeth Claypole was Cromwell’s favourite daughter. Captain Silius Titus, a Royalist, wrote to the Prince of Wales’s court in exile with a delectable tale of her snobbery. Elizabeth was attending a wedding, where the wives of the major generals were surprisingly nowhere to be seen. ‘The feast wanting much of its grace by the absence of those ladies, it was asked by one there where they were,’ recorded Titus: ‘Mrs Claypole answered, “I’ll warrant you washing their dishes at home as they used to do.” This hath been extremely ill taken, and now the women do all they can with their husbands to hinder Mrs Claypole from being a princess.’22
The great question of Cromwell’s latter years was whether he would become King or not. It was an exquisitely fraught issue, since many who had signed the death warrant of one king had done so with no thought that another would ever take his place. Others, such as Lord Broghill – an ally in Ireland, who had ably assisted Cromwell and Ireton in their campaigns – urged kingship on Cromwell as the only security against the return of the Stuarts.
When Cromwell recalled Parliament in 1656, the republican Ludlow suspected that the prime reason for the summons was to have the Lord Protector proclaimed King. Cromwell closely controlled the elections for that assembly. He was particularly troubled that two of the most prominent of his fellow regicides – Lord President Bradshaw, and Ludlow himself – might cause problems, since they had made clear their absolute opposition to the return of kingship. Cromwell ordered a letter to be read aloud, in Bradshaw’s constituency of Chester. It made clear that the Lord Protector would be extremely displeased if Bradshaw were returned as a Member of Parliament. Meanwhile, in Wiltshire, voters were fed the lie that Ludlow was a prisoner in the Tower of London. He was not; but belief that he was meant that he could not be considered for election.
Even those who were elected required Cromwell’s endorsement. Using a clause in the Instrument of Government that excluded anyone from standing if they had questionable integrity or sincerity, ninety newly elected members of the House of Commons, including the regicide Thomas Scott, were barred from taking their seats. They appealed to their fellow members to help them overcome Cromwell’s ban, but the Lord Protector was too powerful to resist.
January 1657 saw the first open suggestion that Cromwell should become King. A Colonel Jephson, who pushed for him to be crowned, was teasingly told by the Lord Protector, ‘Get thee gone for a mad fellow, as thou art.’23 This was a ‘madness’ that was quickly rewarded by the secretly delighted Cromwell: the colonel and his son received rich rewards, including military promotions, and an ambassadorship to Sweden.
Jephson proved to be a rarity in the army: the majority of senior officers would not countenance a return to crowned rule and, as the possibility of a ‘King Oliver’ grew, they bared their teeth.
Lieutenant Generals Fleetwood and Lambert and Colonel Desborough – rated ‘the three great men’24 of the land by the Commonwealth’s spymaster John Thurloe – warned Cromwell, ‘that those who put him upon it were no enemies to Charles Stuart; and that if he accepted of it, he would infallibly draw ruin on himself and his friends’.25 Desborough went further, claiming that if Cromwell became King, he would betray the cause they had fought for, and be the ruin of his family. Colonel Pride also warned the Lord Protector against reaching for the Crown.
Cromwell was on the point of ignoring all of these warnings when
a lieutenant colonel presented a petition on behalf of thirty-three brother officers which declared:
That they had hazarded their lives against monarchy, and were still ready to do so, in defence of the liberties of the nation: that having observed in some men great endeavours to bring the nation again under their old servitude, by pressing the General to take upon him the title and government of a King, in order to destroy him, and weaken the hands of those who were faithful to the public; they therefore humbly desired that they would discountenance all such persons and endeavours, and continue steadfast to the old cause.26
After months of agonising, Cromwell finally refused the crown on 8 May 1657. He consoled himself, soon afterwards, with the passing of the Humble Petition and Advice. This legislation, which gave him the right to appoint his successor as Lord Protector, was deeply unpopular with republicans and with many in the military. However, it was approved by the majority of civilian Members of Parliament, who had been unsettled by various recent attempts on Cromwell’s life, which were linked to seditious cells and to Royalists, ‘it being a received principle amongst them’, Parliament noted,
that no order being settled in your lifetime for the succession in the Government, nothing is wanting to bring us into blood and confusion, and them to their desired ends, but the destruction of your person; and in case things should thus remain at your death, we are not able to express what calamities would in all human probability ensue thereupon, which we trust your Highness (as well as we) do hold yourself obliged to provide against, and not to leave a people, whose common peace and interest you are entrusted with, in such a condition as may hazard both . . .27
There was a duty to protect the cause into the next generation and beyond. Otherwise the Stuarts might return, with vengeance their inevitable companion.
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