A Brief History of Britain 1485-1660

by Ronald Hutton

  The other ticking bomb was financial. The Commonwealth had fought its wars on a basis of heavy taxation and huge land sales; but the effort required was too much even for that, and by 1654 the state was heavily in debt and at the end of its credit. The Protectorate made matters worse, because of two miscalculations. The first was to court popularity by reducing the level of direct taxation, while not reducing the number of its soldiers to one that the new level could support. It was gambling on winning the acceptance of the political nation, which would enable it to reduce the army to a sustainable level and receive further grants from Parliaments. Neither occurred, and the soldiers’ pay slid ever further into arrears as the years passed.

  The second mistake was to declare war on Spain, an action itself prompted by financial difficulty. In one of the very rare debates that they held which was recorded, Cromwell and his councillors decided that they could not afford to pay off the fleet sailing home at the end of the war with the Dutch in 1654. They decided to solve the problem by sending it out again to attack the Spanish colonies in the Caribbean. The hope was that the Spanish monarchy, long committed to a war in three European theatres, would be prepared to write off some of its many overseas possessions, which would be lucrative enough to yield the English government an immediate profit. To those who thought the scheme ridiculously foolhardy, Cromwell and his supporters replied that God would surely favour a blow against an intolerant Catholic state. The critics were correct: in 1655 the English fleet was beaten off its main objective, and had to settle for seizing the smaller island of Jamaica, which required great expense to hold and develop it. The Protectorate was now locked into a full-scale struggle with a furious Spain, which was both very expensive and damaging to English trade. A subsequent alliance with France brought more victories, and the acquisition of a Channel port, Dunkirk, to replace the great medieval trophy of Calais. Dunkirk was, however, itself both costly and unprofitable, and the English economy slid into recession, even as the government, unable to make peace, faced the possibility of bankruptcy. The only sure ways to avert this were either to tax without Parliament, which even the soldiers thought ideologically unacceptable, or to find a way of working with a Parliament at last.

  The second course was the one taken by the new Lord Protector, Cromwell’s oldest surviving son, Richard, who had succeeded his father in default of any other candidate behind whom the dead Protector’s followers could unite. He had been brought up outside political life, and so a large part of his acceptability lay in the fact that nobody knew quite what to expect of him. He soon showed his quality, having all of his father’s courage and verve but very different ideas. He called a Parliament and asked it to settle the nation and supply the government, making it clear that he had no personal interest in the army’s reform programme. In April 1659, he launched a coup to break the power of the soldiers, calculating that a third of its colonels would support him and a third hesitate, leaving his supporters able to attack and overpower the third who held to the soldiers’ old ideals. When the moment came, his miscalculation became clear, as regiment after regiment commanded by his supporters ignored their colonels and marched off to join those gathering to oppose him: the army as a whole still clung to its old ideals. The Parliament was dissolved and Richard Cromwell fell from power, taking the Protectorate with him.

  The army now recalled the MPs who, of all those that had sat during the previous ten years, had seemed most amenable to its wishes: the purged remnant of the Long Parliament, which had at least abolished the monarchy and Lords and allowed people to worship outside the national Church. Its hope was that their time in the wilderness would have made its members more receptive to the soldiers’ wishes. What followed was a fast-forward version of the events of 1648–53. First came a miniature equivalent to the Second Civil War, called Booth’s Rebellion, in which former Royalist and Parliamentarians joined forces to resist further radical change. The army had taken four months to suppress the risings of 1648; it stamped out that of 1659 within four weeks. A yet more rapid rerun now followed. It had formerly taken four years for the army to get disappointed with the purged Long Parliament and throw it out; now it took four months to do so, and by October the MPs were expelled again. What seemed most likely to happen next was a Second English Revolution, as junior officers called for the rapid introduction of further reforms, and some began to speak of abolishing the church and some of the central law courts altogether. Many civilians suspected that the Quaker manifesto was about to be put into action.

  Instead, for the first time, a section of the army turned against the rest – the one that was holding down Scotland, commanded by George Monck, a former Royalist who had changed sides to become a personal protégé of Oliver Cromwell and had been promoted by him to the Scottish command. Monck’s political attitudes remained flexible, but he turned out to have a rigid devotion to the Church of England, which he now believed to be in danger. He formed a flying column of supporters to ride around the separate army bases, arresting the many officers who sympathized with the soldiers in England. He replaced them with loyal men promoted from the ranks, and brought in Scots to fill up those, so creating a counter-revolutionary force. The army of England was still larger, and mobilized against him in November, but heavy snow made operations difficult through the winter and Monck cleverly bought time by offering to talk. Because Scotland was still overtaxed, his army was well paid, but that of England, crowded into inadequate quarters around Newcastle, felt the English fiscal and administrative system giving way behind it at last. It was underpaid, undersupplied and led by a provisional government of generals who had no clear and agreed plan for political action. At the end of the year, the regiments in England began to mutiny and disintegrate, and some of them called back the purged Parliament – now derisively known as the ‘Rump’ – yet again. The MPs now definitively ended the revolutionary era, by dismissing most of the army officers and men who had called for the reform programme. They then summoned Monck’s army, believing it to be their only reliable armed force, to march south in order to defend them and enforce their will on the English.

  When Monck and his men arrived at the capital, however, they found a thoroughly unpopular Commonwealth government adrift amid a turbulent and resentful populace, and saw no reason why they should continue to support it. Instead, they invited back the surviving MPs who had been purged at the end of 1648, with instructions simply to dissolve the Long Parliament legally and call another, which would settle the nation as it chose. When this ‘Convention Parliament’ was elected, in April 1660, it contained almost nobody who wanted a republic to continue. Within a few weeks it restored the monarchy, with Charles II invited back as king, and the House of Lords, composed of the traditional aristocracy; the pre-war Church of England, with bishops, cathedrals and the Prayer Book, duly followed, and Ireland and Scotland were allowed to recreate their own royal governments and national Parliaments.

  These events can be read in two quite different ways. On the one hand, it is entirely legitimate to argue that the first and last republic that Britain has ever known was an entirely artificial and unnatural creation. It was imposed by a most unusual and unrepresentative group of people, the New Model Army, against the sustained will of the great majority of the population of England, Scotland and Wales. This army had been created and given ideological fuel by a unique set of experiences, and only its military power and its collective will allowed the republic to endure as long as it did. As soon as that power and that will collapsed, the traditional political and religious order returned almost immediately, as a process of nature.

  On the other hand, it is equally justifiable to point out that revolutions are rarely made by the majority of a population, but by relatively small cadres of determined people who seize power and then subdue or re-educate the rest. In that sense, what happened in Britain was entirely normal, and a process of further radicalization and alteration ought to have ensued, as it almost did in 1659. This perspective
would emphasize the financial errors of the Protectorate in undermining its stability, but above all the personal action of Oliver Cromwell in putting George Monck in charge of the army of Scotland instead of a soldier who had been part of the revolution of 1648–9 and shared its ideals. In that sense, only a historical accident wrenched the British Isles from their natural course of development into a yet more revolutionary republic. Readers may choose whichever of these verdicts seem the most compelling to them as individuals; and in doing so, of course, they will reproduce some of the instincts and beliefs that opposed people at the time.

  Oliver Cromwell

  The huge scale and unique nature of Cromwell’s achievement speaks for itself: he was a soldier who never lost a battle or failed in a siege, the only commoner ever to be offered the Crown of England, and the only person ever to be offered that crown who preferred to rule without it. He also remains one of the most puzzling people in British history.

  John Morrill has carried out the only genuinely original research into Cromwell’s career in recent times, dedicated to the period before he came to power, and decided that three successive experiences formed him as a man. The first was loss of status, when a promising early public career, sponsored by a rich uncle, ended in 1630 with Oliver being reduced to a working tenant farmer. The second was religious conversion, to a classic Puritanism, which brought him to the attention of godly aristocrats and assisted his political and social rehabilitation. As a result, he became a zealous Parliamentarian at the outbreak of war and underwent his third experience, of rapid promotion to a general’s rank and national fame. He emerged with a powerful sense of having been given a special mission by his God, and with the devoted loyalty of the army which was to make the English Revolution.

  As Colin Davis has demonstrated, it is hard to define precisely the sort of religion in which Cromwell believed, within the broad spectrum of mainstream English Puritanism. He patronized all kinds of Protestant clergy who were prepared to accept the Church as reformed after the Civil War, and was also committed to liberty of conscience for godly Protestants who wanted to contract out of it. He was never interested in programmes, forms, creeds, structures or disputations, and was not a theologian any more than he was an intellectual in general. He was no stereotypical Puritan, having a personal love of dancing, music, smoking and practical jokes, and was unusual among the godly of his time in failing to give much importance to the devil. Instead he had a vivid personal relationship with an all-powerful God, and was prepared to recognize that some religious opponents had godliness in them that might leave them open to salvation. When Protestant extremists were locked up for attacking orthodox doctrine or disturbing ministers, he tried to release them as soon as possible or to ensure that they were kept in comfortable conditions. Catholics fared even better under his rule than they had under that of Charles I; only one priest was executed in the course of it, and that was against Cromwell’s will. His dislike of persecution seems therefore to have been deep and genuine, as was his desire for the comprehension and reconciliation of different Protestants; the real problem was, as said, that his regime failed to persuade the nation to embrace either.

  As a statesman, he had little interest in theories of government, and never drew up a blueprint for one. That had the defect of making him completely reliant on others for ways and means to rule the land, and when those around him ran out of ideas, he was politically paralysed. He embraced the broad principles of the Parliamentarian cause, and of the New Model Army, respecting the existing ranks of society but believing that godliness and goodness could be found in all, and vaguely recognizing the need for a better provision of education and of legal and social justice. He was prepared to work with or lead any form of government which seemed likely to fulfil the ideals of his soldiers and their civilian allies, and which placed restrictions on the power of the head of state; and he welcomed and emphasized those restrictions just as avidly when he himself was that head.

  All this seems admirable, if woolly. The associated problem, which has made Cromwell’s career endlessly controversial, is in attempting to discern where flexibility and open-mindedness shade into duplicity, deviousness and manipulation. He was a brilliant politician, whose success, like that which he enjoyed as a soldier, depended on confusing and outmanoeuvring his opponents before launching a decisive strike. His classic pattern of behaviour was to conceal his thoughts and intentions during a long period in which he took opinions and considered options, and then take sudden dramatic action. Repeatedly, he allied with individuals and groups at particular periods, only to discard them when they became inconvenient or redundant, and to blame them for failures of policy. He had the habit of giving people of widely differing views the impression that he sympathized with each of them, inevitably embittering many when his subsequent actions proved otherwise. He altered the tone of his speeches significantly according to the audience at which they were aimed, portraying himself as a godly radical at one moment and a conservative the next. He kept altering his public representation of key events in his own career, such as his expulsion of the remnant of the Long Parliament in 1653, to suit the political needs of the moment. When he favoured a policy which he found to be unpopular, such as the legal readmission of Jews to England, he first tried to get somebody else to take responsibility for it and then removed it from public debate while enacting it by indirect means. While preserving Catholics from persecution in practice, he was quite capable of whipping up feeling against them in Parliament when he seemed likely to gain political advantage by doing so.

  Historians can often, quite genuinely, know more about people who are long dead than those who lived alongside them could do. Cromwell is not one of these. Very few of his contemporaries doubted the sincerity of his religious faith and of his commitment to liberty of expression for a broad spectrum of Protestant belief and to limitations on the powers of those who governed in church and state. What troubled many of them was the extent to which these ideals became tainted by the ruthlessness and cunning with which he wielded authority and steered his way through politics. In an age in which public life was full of able, self-made newcomers thrown up by civil war and revolution, Cromwell stood out to his contemporaries as somebody whom others found unusually unpredictable, inscrutable and slippery. Many of them remained uncertain of how self-centred, self-deceiving, exploitative and untrustworthy he really was; and so must we be.

  Cromwell and Posterity

  In the generation after his death, Oliver Cromwell had virtually no friends at all; he had managed to pull off the unfortunate trick of becoming the leader of a lost cause without seeming romantic. He had died in office rather than as a martyr or war hero, and those who had supported him could make him a scapegoat for the failure of the republic. He had in fact no influential admirers for well over a century, until the American Revolution rekindled an interest in republicanism in the English-speaking world; the Evangelical Revival made a strenuous, godly Protestantism socially respectable again; pious army officers began to feature as heroes of the expanding British Empire, and independent Protestant churches expanded enormously in number and political power. All this recreated a natural constituency of support for the Protector, and it was supplied with its key text in 1845 by Thomas Carlyle, who had grown up in an independent Church with a Calvinist belief in a predestined number of godly in each generation. To Carlyle, the Puritans had been the creators of Britain’s subsequent greatness, and Cromwell literally the chosen of God. Carlyle’s edition of Cromwell’s letters and speeches established him for all time as a sincerely religious man with an acute desire to do right. It revealed his fears and doubts, his moments of elation and depression, and made him accessible to a modern age in a way in which most previous rulers, who have left no such personal records, are not. It became the bedrock on which future biographies of him were built, and also, with Paradise Lost and The Pilgrim’s Progress, one of the three classics of Puritan literature.

  As a result, C
romwell became the towering figure of seventeenth-century English history, a moral success even though a political failure, who had saved his country from tyranny and shown it a dream of a better future which eventually it achieved. He was a champion of the people who had yet not threatened the rich and titled, and a defender of freedom and tolerance who had also acted as a defence against real revolution. As such he was pretty well the perfect hero for middle-class England in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and could be appropriated by a string of authors with widely differing political views. To be sure, some conservatives, at all social levels, still remembered him as bad man, a few extreme socialists regarded him as a person who had betrayed a revolution by preventing genuine social reform, and Irish nationalists increasingly demonized him as a conqueror and a butcher. In Britain, however, his popularity only increased with time: with the coming of the third millennium he came third in the national poll to find the greatest Briton of the entire second millennium.