# Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Cromwell, Oliver (1599-1658)

​CROMWELL, OLIVER (1599–1658), the Protector, second son of Robert Cromwell and Elizabeth Steward, was born at Huntingdon on 25 April 1599, baptised on the 29th of the same month, and named Oliver after his uncle, Sir Oliver Cromwell of Hinchinbrook. His father was the second son of Sir Henry Cromwell of Hinchinbrook, and grandson of a certain Richard Williams, who rose to fortune by the protection of Thomas Cromwell, earl of Essex, and adopted the name of his patron. Morgan Williams, the. father of Richard Williams, was a Welshman from Glamorganshire, who married Katherine, the elder sister of Thomas Cromwell, and appears in the records of the manor of Wimbledon as an ale-brewer and innkeeper residing at Putney (Phillips, The Cromwells of Putney; The Antiquary, ii. 164; Noble, House of Cromwell, i. 1, 82). In his letters Richard styles himself the ‘most bounden nephew’ of Thomas Cromwell. In the will of the latter he is styled ‘nephew’ (which may perhaps be taken to define the exact degree of relationship) and ‘cousin,’ which was probably used to express kinship by blood in general. Elizabeth Steward, the mother of Oliver, was the daughter of William Steward, whose family had for several generations farmed the tithes of the abbey of Ely. It has been asserted that these Stewards were a branch of the royal house of Scotland, but they can be traced no further than a family named Styward, and settled in Norfolk (Rye, The Steward Genealogy and Cromwell’s Royal Descent; The Genealogist, 1885, p. 34). The early life of Oliver Cromwell has been the subject of many fables, which have been carefully collected and sifted by Mr. Sanford ​(Studies and Illustrations of the Great Rebellion, pp. 174–268).
Cromwell received his education at the free school attached to the hospital of St. John, Huntingdon, during the mastership of Dr. Thomas Beard. At the age of seventeen, on 23 April 1616, he matriculated at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, one of the colleges complained of by aud in 1628 as a nursery of puritanism. Royalist writers assert that both at school and the university he ‘made no proficiency in any kind of learning’ (Dugdale). But Edmund Waller testifies that he was ‘well read in Greek and Roman story,’ and when protector he frequently talked with foreign ambassadors in Latin. The statement of Bates is doubtless true that ‘he was quickly satiated with study, taking more delight in horse and field exercise,’ or, as Heath expresses it, ‘was more famous for his exercises in the fields than in the schools, being one of the chief matchmakers and players at football, cudgels, or any other boisterous sport or game’ (Flagellum, p. 8). The graver charges of early debauchery which they bring against him may safely be dismissed. On the death of his father in June 1617, Cromwell seems to have left the university and betaken himself to London to obtain the general knowledge of law which every country gentleman required. According to Heath he became a member of Lincoln’s Inn, but his name does not appear in the books of any of the Inns of Court. In London, at St. Giles’s Church, Cripplegate, he married, on 22 Aug. 1620, Elizabeth, daughter of Sir James Bourchier. Sir James is described as ‘of Tower Hill, London,’ was one of a family of city merchants, and possessed property near Felstead in Essex. It is noticeable that in a settlement drawn up immediately after the marriage, the bridegroom is described as ‘Oliver Cromwell, alias Williams’ (Noble, i. 123–4). After his marriage Cromwell took up his residence at Huntingdon, and occupied himself with the management of his paternal estate. Robert Cromwell, by his will, had left two-thirds of his-property to his widow for twenty-one years for the benefit of his daughters, so that the actual income of his eldest son cannot have been large. The fortunes of the Cromwell family were now declining, for Sir Oliver Cromwell, burdened with debts, was forced in 1627 to sell Hinchinbrook to Sir Sydney Montague, and the Montagues succeeded to the local influence once enjoyed by the Cromwells (ib. i. 43). It is therefore probable that the election of the younger Oliver as member for Huntingdon in 1628 was due as much to personal qualities as to any family interest.
In parliament Cromwell’s only reported speech was delivered on behalf of the free preaching of puritan doctrine, and against the silence which the king sought to impose on religious controversy (11 Feb. 1629). The Bishop of Winchester, he complained, had sent for Dr. Beard, prohibited him from controverting the popish tenets preached by Dr. Alabaster at Paul’s Cross, and reprehended him for disobeying the prohibition (Garmner, History of England, vii. 55). Of Cromwell’s action in public matters during the eleven years’ intermission of parliaments there is only one authentic fact recorded. In 1630 the borough of Huntingdon obtained a new charter, which vested the government of the town and the management of the town property in the hands of the mayor and twelve aldermen. Cromwell was named one of the three justices of the peace for the borough, and gave his consent to the proposed change (Duke of Manchester, Court and Society from Elizabeth to Anne, i. 338). Afterwards, however, he raised the objection that the new charter enabled the aldermen to deal with the common property as they pleased, to the detriment of the poorer members of the community, and used strong language on the subject to Robert Barnard, mayor of the town and chief instigator of the change. On the complaint of the latter, his adversary was summoned to appear before the council, and the dispute was there referred to the arbitration of the Earl of Manchester. Cromwell owned that he had spoken in ‘heat and passion,’ and apologised to Barnard, but Manchester sustained Cromwell’s objections and ordered that the charter should be altered in three particulars to meet the risk which he had pointed out (preface to Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1629–31, p. viii). A later legend, based chiefly on a passage in the memoir of Sir Philip Warwick (p. 250), represents Cromwell as successfully opposing the king on the question of the drainage of the fens, but it is not supported by any contemporary evidence. If Cromwell took any part in the dispute between the king and the undertakers, which occurred in 1636, he probably, as at Huntingdon, defended the rights of the poor commoners, and therefore sided for the moment with the king and against the undertakers (Gardiner, History of England, viii. 297). The nickname of ‘Lord of the Fens,’ which has been supposed to refer to this incident, is first given to Cromwell by a royalist newspaper (Mercurius Aulicus, 6 Nov. 1643), in a series of comments on the names of the persons composing the council for the government of the foreign plantations of England appointed by parliament on 2 Nov. 1643. ​In the same way the legend which represents Cromwell as attempting to emigrate to America and stopped by an order in council cannot be true as it is usually related, though it is by no means improbable that Cromwell may have thought of emigrating. According to Clarendon, he told him in 1641 that if the Remonstrance had not passed ‘he would have sold all he had the next morning, and never have seen England more’ (Rebellion, iv. 52). In May 1631 Cromwell disposed of the greater part of his property at Huntingdon, and with the sum of 1,800l. which he thus realised rented some grazing lands at St. Ives. In 1636, on the death of his uncle, Sir Thomas Steward, who made him his heir, he removed to Ely, and succeeded his uncle as farmer of the cathedral tithes.
During this period an important change seems to have taken place in Cromwell’s character. His first letter, like his first speech, shows him solicitous for the teaching of puritan theology, and watching with anxiety the development of Laud’s ecclesiastical policy. From the first he seems to have been a puritan in doctrine and profession, but by 1638 he had become something more. After a long period of religious depression, which caused one physician to describe him as ‘valde melancholicus,’ and another as ‘splenetic and full of fancies,’ he had, as he expressed it, been ‘given to see light.’ Looking back on his past life, he accused himself of having ‘lived in and loved darkness,’ of having been ‘the chief of sinners.’ Some biographers have supposed these words to refer to early excesses. They describe rather the mental struggles by which a formal Calvinist became a perfect enthusiast. They should be compared with the similar utterances of Bunyan or ‘the exceeding self-debasing words, annihilating and judging himself,’ which Cromwell spoke during his last illness. In the letter to Mrs. St. John in which Cromwell thus revealed himself he expressed the desire to show by his acts his thankfulness for this spiritual change. ‘If here I may honour my God either by doing or suffering, I shall be most glad. Truly no poor creature hath more cause to put himself forth in the cause of God than I. I have had plentiful wages beforehand’ (Carlyle, Letter ii.) In the two parliaments called in 1640 Cromwell was one of the members for the town of Cambridge (O. Cromwell, Life of O. Cromwell, p. 263). His connection with Hampden and John secured him a certain intimacy with the leaders of the advanced party in the Long parliament, and both in the House of Commons itself and in the committees he was very active. During the first session Cromwell was ‘specially appointed to eighteen committees, exclusive of various appointments amongst the knights and burgesses generally of the eastern counties’ (Sanford, 306). On 9 Nov., three days after business began, he presented the petition of John Lilburn, who had been imprisoned for selling Prynne’s pamphlets. It was on this occasion that Sir Philip Warwick first saw Cromwell, and noted that in spite of his being ‘very ordinarily apparelled’ he was ‘very much hearkened unto.’ ‘His stature,’ says Warwick, ‘was of (good size, his countenance swollen and reddish, his voice sharp and untuneable, and his eloquence full of fervour’ (Memoirs, 247). On another committee, appointed to consider the grants made from the queen’s jointure, the question of the enclosure of the soke of Somersham in Huntingdonshire arose, and Cromwell zealously defended the rights of the commoners against the encloser, the Earl of Manchester, and against the House of Lords, who supported his action (Sanford, 370). Cromwell’s name is also associated with two important public bills. On 30 Dec. 1640 he moved the second reading of Strode’s bill for reviving the old law of Edward III for annual parliaments. He spoke earnestly for the reception of the London petition against episcopacy, and was one of the originators of the ‘Root and Branch’ Bill introduced by Dering on 21 May 1641 (Dering, Speeches, p. 62). In the second session Cromwell brought forward motions to prevent the bishops from voting on the question of their own exclusion from the House of Lords, and for the removal of the Earl of Bristol from the king’s councils. Still more prominent was he when the parliament began to lay hands on the executive power. On 6 Nov. 1641 he moved to entrust Essex with the command of the trainbands south of Trent until parliament should take further order. On 14 Jan. 1642 he proposed the appointment of a committee to put the kingdom in a posture of defence (Gardiner, History of England, x. 41, 59, 119; Sanford, 474). The journals of the House of Commons during the early summer of 1642 are full of notices attesting the activity of Cromwell in taking practical measures for the defence of England and Ireland. Though he was not rich, he subscribed 600l. for the recovery of Ireland, and 500l. for the defence of the parliament (Rushworth, iv. 564). On 15 July the commons ordered that he should be repaid 100l. which he had expended in arming the county of Cambridge, and on the 15th of the following month Sir Philip Stapleton reported to them that Cromwell had seized the magazine in the castle at Cambridge, and ​hindered the carrying of the university plate to the king. Ably seconded by Valentine Walton, husband of his sister Margaret, and John Desborough, who had married his sister Jane, Cromwell effectually secured Cambridgeshire for the parliament.
As soon as Essex’s army took the field, Cromwell joined it as captain of a troop of horse, and his eldest surviving son, Oliver, served in it also as cornet in the troop of Lord St. John. At the battle of Edgehill Cromwell’s troop formed part of Essex’s own regiment and, under the command of Sir Philip Stapleton, helped to turn the fortune of the day. Fiennes in his account mentions Captain Cromwell in the list of officers who ‘never stirred from their troops, but they and their troops fought to the last minute’ (Fiennes, True and Exact Relation, &c., 1642). In December the formation of the eastern association and the similar association of the midland counties recalled Cromwell from the army of Essex to his own country. In the first of these associations he was a member of the committee for Cambridge, in the latter one of the committee for Huntingdon. Seizing the royal sheriff of Hertfordshire and disarming the royalists of Huntingdonshire on his way, he established himself at Cambridge at the end of January 1643, and made that place his headquarters for the rest of the spring. We hear of him busily engaged in fortifying Cambridge and collecting men to resist a threatened inroad by Lord Capel. But his most important business was the conversion of his own troop of horse into a regiment. A letter written in January 1643 seems to show that he was still only a captain at that date (Carlyle, Letter iv.), and he is first styled ‘colonel’ in a newspaper of 2 March 1643 (Cromwelliana, 2). By September 1643 his single troop of sixty men had increased to ten troops, and it rose to fourteen double troops before the formation of the ‘New Model’ (Husband, Ordinances, f. 1646, p. 331; Reliquiæ Baxterianæ, 98). His soldiers were men of the same spirit as himself. From the very beginning of the war Cromwell had noted the inferiority of the parliamentary cavalry, and in a memorable conversation set forth to Hampden the necessity of raising men of religion to oppose men of honour. ‘You must get men of a spirit that is likely to go on as far as gentlemen will go, or you will be beaten still’ (Speech xi.) Other commanders besides Cromwell attempted to fill their regiments with pious men, but he alone succeeded (Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War, i. 180). In September he was able to write to St. John and describe his regiment as ‘a lovely company,’ ‘no anabaptists, but honest, sober christians.’ The officers were selected with the same care as the men. ‘If you choose godly, honest men to be captains of horse, honest men will follow them,’ wrote Cromwell to the committee of Suffolk. ‘I had rather have a plain russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for and loves what he knows, than what you call a gentleman and nothing else. . . . It had been well that men of honour and birth had entered into these employments, but seeing it was necessary the work should go on, better plain men than none’ (Carlyle, Letters xvi. xviii.)
So far as it lay in Cromwell’s own power the work did go on, in spite of every difficulty. On 14 March he suppressed a rising at Lowestoft, at the beginning of April disarmed the Huntingdonshire royalists, and on the 28th of the same month retook Crowland. At Grantham on 13 May he defeated with twelve troops double that number of royalists (Letter x.), and before the end of May was at Nottingham engaged on ‘the great design’ of marching into Yorkshire to join the Fairfaxes. The plan failed through the disagreements of the local commanders and the treachery of Captain John Hotham, whose intrigues Cromwell detected and whose arrest he helped to secure (Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War, i. 187; Life of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. 1885, i. 220, 363). The repeated failure of the local authorities to provide for the payment of his forces added to Cromwell’s difficulties. ‘Lay not too much,’ he wrote to one of the defaulters, ‘on the back of a poor gentleman who desires, without much noise, to lay down his life and bleed the last drop to serve the cause and you’ (Carlyle, Letter xi.) Obliged to return to the defence of the associated counties themselves, Cromwell recaptured Stamford, stormed Burleigh House (24 July), and took a leading part in the victory of Gainsborough (28 July). He it was who, with his disciplined troopers, routed Charles Cavendish and his reserve when they seemed about to turn the fortune of the fight, and covered the retreat of the parliamentarians when the main body of Newcastle’s army came up (ib. Letter xii. app. 5). On the same day that Cromwell thus distinguished himself he was appointed by the House of Commons governor of the Isle of Ely, and a fortnight later became one of the four colonels of horse in the new army to be raised by the Earl of Manchester (Husband, Ordinances, 10 Aug. 1643). Though not yet bearing the title of lieutenant general, he was practically Manchester’s second in command; and, while ​the earl himself besieged Lynn with the foot, Cromwell and the cavalry were despatched into Lincolnshire to assist Lord Willoughby in the defence of the small portion of that county still under the rule of the parliament. The victory of Winceby on 11 Oct. 1643, gained by the combined forces of Lord Willoughby, Sir Thomas Fairfax, and the Earl of Manchester, was followed by the reconquest of the entire county. In the battle Cromwell led the van in person, and narrowly escaped with his life. ‘Colonel Cromwell,’ says a contemporary narrative, ‘charged at some distance before his regiment, when his horse was killed under him. He recovered himself, however, from under his horse, but afterwards was again knocked down, yet by God’s good providence he got up again’ (Fairfax Correspondence, iii. 64). Lincolnshire was won, but Cromwell saw clearly that it could not be held unless a change took place in the conduct of the local forces and the character of the local commander. From his fellow-officers as from his subordinates he exacted efficiency and devotion to the cause. He had not hesitated to accuse Hotham of treachery, and he did not shrink now from charging Lord Willoughby with misconduct, and brought forward in parliament a series of complaints against him which led to his resignation of his post (22 Jan. 1644; Sanford, 580). About the same time, though the exact date is not known, Cromwell received his formal commission as lieutenant-general in the Earl of Manchester’s army, and he was also appointed one of the committee of both kingdoms (9 Feb. 1644). The former appointment obliged him to register his acceptance of the ‘solemn league and covenant’ (5 Feb.), which he appears to have delayed as long as possible (Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War, i. 305). The spring of 1644 was as full of action as that of 1643. On 4 March Cromwell captured Hilsden House in Buckinghamshire (Sanford, app. B). At the beginning of May he took part in the siege of Lincoln, and while Manchester’s foot stormed the walls of the city Cromwell and the horse repulsed Goring’s attempt to come to its relief (6 May 1644; Rushworth, v. 621). The army of the eastern association then proceeded to join the two armies under Fairfax and Leven, which were besieging York. Cromwells only account of Marston Moor is contained in a letter which he wrote to Valentine Walton to condole with him on the death of young Walton in that battle (Carlyle, Letter xxi.) Cromwell was in command of the left wing of the parliamentary army, consisting of his own troopers from the eastern association and three regiments of Scotch horse under David Leslie, who numbered twenty-two out of the seventy troops of which his force consisted. These he mentions somewhat contemptuously as ‘a few Scots in our rear,’ and makes no mention of their share in securing the victory ; but it should be remembered that he expressly says he does not undertake to relate the particulars of the battle, and sums up the whole in four sentences. Scout-master Watson, who terms Cromwell ‘the chief agent in the victory,’ thus describes the beginning of the fight: ‘Lieutenant-general Cromwell’s division of three hundred horse, in which himself wus in person, charged the front division of Prince Rupert’s, in which himself was in person. Cromwell’s own division had a hard pull of it ; for they were charged by Rupert’s bravest men both in front and flank. They stood at the sword’s point a pretty while, hacking one another, out at last he brake through them, scattering them like a little dust’ (A more exact Relation of the late Battle near York, 1644). In this struggle Cromwell received a slight wound in the neck, and his onset was for a moment checked; but the charge was admirably supported by David Leslie, and Rupert’s men made no second stand. Leaving Leslie to attack the infantry of the royalist centre, Cromwell pressed behind them, and, pushing to the extreme east of the royalist position, occupied the ground originally held by Goring. As Goring’s cavalry returned from the pursuit of Sir Thomas Fairfax’s division, they were charged and routed by Cromwell, and the victory was completed by the destruction of the royalist foot. How much of the merit of the success was due to Cromwell was a question that was violently disputed. ‘The independents,’ complained Baillie, ‘sent up Major Harrison to trumpet over all the city their own praises, making believe that Cromwell alone, with his unspeakably valorous regiments, had done all that service.’ He asserted that, on the contrary, David Leslie was throughout the real leader, and even repeated a story that Cromwell was not so much as present at the decisive charge (Letters, ii. 203, 201), 218). Denzil Holies, writing in 1648, went still further, and, on the authority only of Major-general Crawford, charged Cromwell with personal cowardice during the battle {Memoirs, 15), Soldiers like David Leslie and Rupert, however, recognised him as the best leader of cavalry in the parliamentary army. When Leslie and Cromwell’s forces joined at the end of May 1644, Leslie waived in his favour the command to which he was entitled, and ‘would have Lieutenant-general Cromwell chief’ (Parliament Scout, 30 May–6 June). ‘Is Cromwell there?' ​asked Rupert eagerly of a prisoner whom chance threw into his hands an hour or two before Marston Moor, and a couple of months after the battle a parliamentary newspaper mentions Cromwell by the nickname of ‘Ironside; for that title was given him by Prince Rupert after his defeat near York’ (Mercurius Civicus, 16–26 Sept. 1644; Gardiner, Great Civil War, i. 449). The name Ironside or Ironsides speedily became popular with the army, and was in later times extended from the commander to his troopers.
But Cromwell was now something more than a mere military leader. The last few months had made him the head of a political party also. As early as April 1644 Baillie distinguishes him by the title of ‘the great independent’ (Baillie, Letters, ii. 153). In his government of the Isle of Ely Cromwell, while he suppressed the choral service of the cathedral as ‘unedifying and offensive’ (Carlyle, Letter xix.), had allowed his soldiers and their ministers the largest license of preaching and worship. ‘It is become a mere Amsterdam,’ complained an incensed presbyterian (Manchester’s Quarrel with Cromwell, 73).
In Manchester’s councils also Cromwell had used the great influence his position gave him on behalf of the independents. ‘Manchester himself,’ writes Baillie, ‘a sweet, meek man, permitted his lieutenant-general Cromwell to guide all the army at his pleasure; the man is a very wise and active head, universally well beloved, as religious and stout; being a known independent, the most of the soldiers who loved new ways put themselves under his command’ (Letters, ii. 229). Even Cromwell’s influence was hardly sufficient to protect them. In December 1643 a presbyterian colonel at Lincoln imprisoned a number of Cromwell’s troopers for attending a conventicle. In March 1644 Major-general Crawford cashiered a lieutenant-colonel on the ground that he was an anabaptist. ‘Admit he be,’ wrote Cromwell, ‘shall that render him incapable to serve the public ? Sir, the state in choosing men to serve it takes no notice of their opinions; if they be willing faithfully to serve it, that satisfies’ (Carlyle, Letter xx.) Manchester’s army was split into two factions—the presbyterians headed by Crawford, the independents headed by Cromwell, struggling with each other for the guidance of their commander. A political difference between Cromwell and Manchester seems to have decided the contest in favour of Crawford. In June, while the combined armies were besieging York, Vane appeared in the camp on a secret mission from the committee of both kingdoms to gain the consent of the generals to a plan for the actual or virtual deposition of Charles as the necessary preliminary of a satisfactory settlement. All three refused, but Leven and the Scots are mentioned as specially hostile to the proposal. ‘Though no actual evidence exists on the subject, it is in the highest degree probable that Cromwell was won over to Vane’s side, and that his quarrel with the Scots and with Manchester as the supporter of the Scots dates from these discussions outside the walls of York’ (Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War, i. 432). Manchester’s inactivity during the two months which followed the capture of York still further alienated Cromwell from him. Believing that if Crawford’s evil influence were removed Manchester’s inactivity and the dissensions of the army would be ended, he demanded Crawford’s removal. Manchester and his two subordinates came to London in September 1644 to lay the case before the committee of both kingdoms. At first Cromwell peremptorily demanded Crawford’s dismissal, and threatened that his colonels would lay down their arms if this were refused; but he speedily recognised that he had gone too far, and changed his tactics. Abandoning the personal attack on Crawford, he devoted himself to the attainment of the aims which had caused the quarrel. From Manchester he obtained a declaration of his resolution to push on with all speed against the common enemy. From the House of Commons he secured the appointment of a committee ‘to consider the means of uniting presbyterians and independents, 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 as may stand with the public peace’ (13 Sept. 1644; Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War, i. 482). This, though hardly, as Baillie terms it, ‘really an act of parliament for the toleration of the sectaries,’ was the most important step towards toleration taken since the war began.
At the second battle of Newbury in the following month Cromwell was one of the commanders of the division which was sent to storm Prince Maurice’s entrenchments at Speen, on the west of the king’s position, while Manchester was to attack it on its northern face at Shaw House. But Manchester delayed his attack till an hour and a half after the other force was engaged, wasted the results of their successes, and effected nothing himself. The same slowness or incapacity marked his movements before and after the battle, and Cromwell, putting to​gether his actions and his sayings, came to believe that ‘these miscarriages were caused not by accident or carelessness only, but through backwardness to all action, and that backwardness grounded . . . on some principle of unwillingness to have the war prosecuted to a full victory.’ On 25 Nov. he laid before the House of Commons a charge to that effect, supporting it by an account of Manchester’s operations from the battle of Marston Moor to the relief of Donnington Castle (Rushworth, v. 732; Manchester’s Quarrel with Cromwell, 78). Manchester replied by a narrative vindicating his generalship (Rushworth, v. 733–6), and by bringing before the lords a countercharge against Cromwell for offensive and incendiary language on various occasions. His expressions were sometimes against the nobility; he said that he hoped to live to see never a nobleman in England. He had expressed himself with contempt of the assembly of divines, and said that they persecuted honester men than themselves. His animosity against the Scots was such that he told Manchester that 'in the way they now carried themselves pressing for their discipline, he could as soon draw his sword against them as against any in the king’s army.’ Finally he had avowed that he desired to have none but independents in the army of the eastern association, ‘that in case there should be propositions for peace, or any conclusion of a peace such as might not stand with those ends that honest men should aim at, this army might prevent such a mischief’ (Camden Miscellany, viii.) Those sayings should not be considered as the malignant exaggerations of an enemy; there can be little doubt that they represent genuine specimens of the plain speaking in which Cromwell was wont to indulge.
The publication of Cromwell’s sayings was at the moment an effective answer to his narrative of Manchester’s conduct. It enlisted on his side the Scots, the presbyterians, and the House of Lords. The Scots and the English presbyterians immediately took counsel together on the possibility of indicting Cromwell as an ‘incendiary’ who strove to break the union of the two nations (Whitelocke, Memorials, f. 116). ‘We must crave reason of that darling of the sectaries and obtain his removal from the army,’ wrote Baillie to Scotland (Letters, ii. 245). Just as the commons had appointed a committee to inquire into Manchester’s conduct, so the lords appointed one to inquire into that of Cromwell, and a quarrel between the two houses on the question of privilege was on the point of breaking out. Once more Cromwell drew back, for to press his accusation was to risk not only himself but also his cause. As in the case of Crawford, he abandoned his attack on the individual to concentrate his efforts on the attainment of the principle. The idea of the necessity of a professional army under a professional general had already occurred to others. The first suggestion of the New Model is to be traced in a letter of Sir William Waller to Essex (Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War, i. 454). Only a few days earlier the House of Commons had referred to the committee of both kingdoms ‘upon the consideration of the state and condition of the armies, as now disposed and commanded, to consider of a frame or model of the whole militia and present it to the house, as may put the forces into such posture as may be most advantageous for the service of the public’ (Commons’ Journals, 23 Nov. 1644).
Seizing the opportunity thus afforded, Cromwell on 9 Dec. urged the House of Commons to consider rather the remedies than the causes of recent miscarriages. He reduced the charge against Manchester from intentional backwardness to accidental oversights, which could rarely be avoided in military affairs, on which he begged the house not to insist. The one thing needful was to save a bleeding, almost dying, kingdom by a more speedy, vigorous, and effectual prosecution of the war, which was to be obtained by removing members of both houses from command, and by putting the army ‘into another method.’ ‘I hope,’ he concluded, ‘that no members of either house will scruple to deny themselves and their own private interests for the public good’ (Rushworth, vi. 6). These words struck the keynote of the debate with the vote that no member of should hold military command during the rest of the war.
Before the Self-denying Ordinance had struggled through the upper house, but after the lords had accepted the bill for new modelling the army, Cromwell was again in the field. Under Waller’s command he was ordered into the west (27 Feb. 1645) to relieve Taunton, succeeded in temporarily effecting that object, and captured a regiment of the king’s horse in Wiltshire (Commons’ Journals; Vicars, Burning Bush, 123). Waller has left an interesting account of Cromwell’s behaviour as a subordinate. ‘At this time he had never shown extraordinary parts, nor do I think he did himself believe that he had them; for although he was blunt he did not bear himself with pride or disdain. As an officer he was obedient, and did never dispute my orders or argue upon them’ (Recollections).
​Immediately on Cromwell’s return to the headquarters of the army at Windsor (22 April), Fairfax, at the order of the committee of both kingdoms, despatched him into Oxfordshire to interrupt the king’s preparations for taking the field (Sprigge, Anglia Rediviva, p. 11, ed. 1854). His success was rapid and complete. On 24 April he defeated a brigade of horse at Islip and took two hundred prisoners, captured Bletchingdon House the same night, gained another victory at Bampton in the Bush on the 26th, and failed only before the walls of Farringdon (30 April). The king was obliged to summon Goring’s cavalry from the west to cover his removal from Oxford. Cromwell and Richard Brown were ordered to follow the king’s motions, but recalled in a few days to take part in the siege of Oxford. Free from their pursuit, the king stormed Leicester and threatened to break into the eastern association. At once Cromwell, with but three troops of horse, was sent to the point of danger, with instructions to secure Ely and raise the local levies (Rushworth, vi. 34).
According to the Self-denying Ordinance Cromwell’s employment in the army should ere this have ended, for the date fixed for the expiration of commissions held by members of parliament was 13 May. But when the time came Cromwell was in pursuit of the king, and on 10 May his commission was extended for forty days longer. On 5 June a petition from the city of London to the lords demanded that Cromwell should be sent to command the associated counties, and on 8 June Fairfax and his officers sent a letter to the commons asking that Cromwell might be continued in command of the horse, ‘being as great a body as ever the parliament had together in one army, and yet having no general officer to command them.’ It can hardly have been by accident that those who nominated the officers of the New Model had left vacant that post of lieutenant-general which the council of war thus proposed to fill. The House of Commons took the hint, and ordered that Cromwell should command the horse during such a time as the house should dispense with his attendance (10 June). And the lords were obliged reluctantly to concur, though they took care to limit the period of his employment to three months. It was afterwards again prolonged for terms of four and six months successively (Journal of the House of Commons, 18 June, 8 Aug., 17 Oct. 1645, 26 Jan. 1646).
In obedience to the summons of Fairfax Cromwell returned from the eastern counties, and rejoined the army the day before the battle of Naseby (Rushworth, vi. 21). In that battle Cromwell commanded in person the right wing, and Fairfax entrusted to his charge the ordering of the cavalry throughout the whole army. Before his task was completed the royalists advanced to the attack. In a letter written about a month later, Cromwell says: ‘When I saw the enemy draw up and march in gallant order towards us, and we a company of poor ignorant men to seek how to order our battle, the general having commissioned me to order all the horse, could not, riding alone about my business, but smile out to God, in praises, in assurance of victory, because Goa would by things that are not bring to nought things that are’ (Carlyle, app. 9). The parliamentary right routed the division opposed to it, and Cromwell, leaving a detachment to prevent the broken troops from rallying, fell on the king’s foot in the centre and completed their defeat. He followed the chase of the flying cavaliers as far as the suburbs of Leicester. At the victory of Langport also, on 10 July 1645, Cromwell was conspicuous both in the battle and the pursuit, and he took part in the sieges of Bridgewater, Sherborne, and Bristol. After the surrender of the last place, he was detached by Fairfax in order to secure the communications between London and the west, and captured in succession Devizes (23 Sept.), Winchester (5 Oct.), Basing (14 Oct.), and Langford House (17 Oct. 1645). At the end of October he rejoined Fairfax at Crediton and remained with the army during the whole of the winter.
On 9 Jan. he opened the campaign of 1646 by the surprise of Lord Wentworth at Bovey Tracy, and shared in the battle of Torrington (16 Feb.) and the siege of Exeter. Then, at Fairfax’s request, Cromwell undertook to go to London, in order to give the parliament an account of the state of the west of England. On 23 April he received the thanks of the House of Commons for his services rewards of another nature they had already conferred upon him. On 1 Dec. 1645, the commons, in drawing up the peace propositions to be offered to the king, had resolved that an estate of 2,600l. a year should be conferred on Cromwell, and that the king should be requested to make him a baron. After the failure of the negotiations, an ordinance of parliament had settled upon him lands to the value named, taken chiefly from the property of the Marquis of Worcester (Parliamentary History, xiv. 189, 252; Thurloe Papers, 1. 75).
Cromwell returned to the army in time to assist in the negotiations for the surrender of Oxford. The leniency of the terms granted ​to the royalists both here and at Exeter, ‘base, scurvy propositions’ as Baillie describes them, is attributed by him to the influence of Cromwell, and to a design to set the army free to oppose the Scots if it should be necessary (Baillie, ii. 376). It is certain that Cromwell’s influence was constantly used to ‘procure the fair and moderate treatment of the conquered party, and he more than once urged on the parliament the necessity of punctually carrying out the Oxford articles and preserving ‘the faith of the army.’ With the fall of Oxford the war was practically over, and Cromwell returned to his parliamentary duties. His family removed from Ely and followed him to London, with the exception of his eldest daughter Bridget, who had married Ireton a few days before the surrender of Oxford (15 June 1646). During the last eighteen months parliament had voted all the essentials for a presbyterian church, and the question of the amount of toleration to be legally granted to dissentients was more urgent than ever. Cromwell had not ceased to remind parliament of the necessity of establishing the toleration promised in the vote of September 1614. ‘Honest men served you faithfully in this action,’ he wrote after Naseby; ‘I beseech you not to discourage them. He that ventures his life for the liberty of his country, I wish he trust God for the liberty of his conscience and you for the liberty he fights for’ (Letter xxix.) Again, after the capture of Bristol, writing by the special commission of Fairfax and the council of war, he warned the house: ‘For being united in forms commonly called uniformity, every christian will for peace sake study and do as far as conscience will permit. . . . In things of the mind we look for no compulsion but that of light and reason.’ The presbyterian party in the commons turned a deaf ear to these reminders, and suppressed these passages in the letters published by its order. When Cromwell returned to his seat in the House of Commons, the question of toleration was still undecided; the recruiting of the parliament by fresh elections inclined the balance against the presbyterians, but the flight of the king to the Scots gave them again the ascendency. Of Cromwell’s views and actions during the latter half of 1646 and the spring of 1647 we have extremely little information.
Two letters to Fairfax show the anxiety with which he regarded the king’s negotiations with the Scots and the satisfaction with which he hailed the conclusion of the arrangement by which he was handed over to the commissioners of parliament. With even greater anxiety he watched the increasing dissensions within the parliament, and the growing hostility of the city to the army. ‘We are full of faction and worse,’ he writes in August 1646; and in March 1647, ‘There want not in all places those who have so much malice against the army as besots them. Never were the spirits of men more embittered than now (Letters xxxviii, xliii.) Cromwell’s attitude at the commencement of the quarrel between the army and the parliament has been distorted by fable and misrepresentation. Thoroughly convinced of the justice of the army’s claims, he restrained the soldiers as long as possible, because he saw more clearly than they did the danger of a breach with the only constitutional authority the war had left standing. He risked his influence with them by his perseverance in this course of action. ‘I have looked upon you,’ wrote Lilburn to Cromwell on 25 March 1647, ‘as the most absolute singlehearted great man in England, untainted and unbiassed with ends of your own. . . . Your actions and carriages for many months together have struck me into an amaze. I am informed this day by an officer, and was informed by another knowing man yesterday, that you will not suffer the army to petition till they have laid down their arms, because you have engaged to the house that they shall lay them down whenever the house shall command.’ This conduct Lilburn proceeds to attribute to the influence of Cromwell’s parliamentary associates, ‘the politic men,’ ‘the sons of Miachiavel,’ ‘Vane and St. John’ (Lilburn, Jonah’s Cry, p. 3; a similar account of Cromwell’s behaviour at this juncture is given by John Wildman in a tract called Putney Projects published in November 1647). Angered by the reserve of their superiors, the agitators of eight regiments addressed a letter to Fairfax, Cromwell, and Skippon, adjuring them in the strongest language to plead the cause of the soldiers in parliament (Declarations, &c. of the Army, 4to, 1647, p. 5). Skippon laid his copy of the letter before the House of Commons, and the house, now thoroughly alarmed, sent down Cromwell, Skippon, and other officers to examine into the grievances of the army (Rushworth, vi. 474). But the concessions which parliament offered were too small and too late, and the failure of Cromwell’s mission gave colour to the theory of his double dealing, which his opponents were only too ready to accept. There seems to be no reason to doubt the truth of the common story that they were on the point of arresting him, when he suddenly left London and joined the army (3 June 1647). ​Whether before leaving Cromwell planned the seizure of the king by Joyce is a more doubtful question. Hollis definitely asserts that Joyce received his orders to secure the king’s person at a meeting at Cromwell’s house on 30 May (Hollis; Maseres, Tracts, i. 246). Major Huntingdon makes a similar statement, with the addition that Joyce’s orders were only to secure the king at Holmby, not to take him thence, and that Cromwell said that if this had not been done the king would have been fetched away by order of parliament, or carried to London by his presbyterian keepers (Maseres, Tracts, i. 399). Although the evidence of Huntingdon is not free from suspicion, this statement is to some extent supported by independent contemporary evidence, and is in harmony with the circumstances of the case and the character of Cromwell. So long as it was possible he had striven to restrain the army and to mediate between it and the parliament; when that was no longer possible he took its part with vigour and decision. The effect of Cromwell’s presence at the army was immediately perceptible. Discipline and subordination were restored, and the authority of the officers superseded that of the agitators. As early as 1 July Lilburn wrote to Cromwell complaining: ‘You have robbed by your unjust subtlety and shifting tricks the honest and gallant agitators of all their power and authority, and solely laced it in a thing called a council of war’ (Jonah’s Cry, p. 9). In the council itself Fairfax was a cipher, as he himself admits, and the influence of Cromwell predominant; his adversaries spoke of him as ‘the principal wheel,’ the ‘primum mobile’ which moved the whole machine (A Copy of a Letter to be sent to Lieutenant-general Cromwell from the well affected Party in the City, 1647). Hitherto the manifestos of the army had set forth simply their grievance as soldiers; now they began to insist on their claim as citizens to demand a settlement of the peace of the kingdom and the liberties of the subject. In the letter to the city of 10 June, which Carlyle judges by the evidence of its style to be of Cromwell’s own writing, the willingness of the army to subordinate the question of their pay to the question of the settlement of the kingdom is very plainly stated, and special stress is also laid on the demand for toleration (Rushworth, vi. 554). Cromwell shared the general opinion of the army that a settlement could best be obtained by negotiation with the king. Whatever the world might judge of them, he said to Berkeley, they would be found no seekers of themselves, further than to have leave to live as subjects ought to do, and to preserve their consciences, and they thought that no men could enjoy their lives and estates quietly without the king had his rights (Maseres, Tracts, i. 360). Accordingly he exerted all his influence to render the propositions of the army acceptable to the king; and, when Charles made objections to the first draft of those proposals, introduced important alterations in the scheme for the settlement of the kingdom, which was finally made public on 1 Aug. In this Cromwell acted with the assent of the council of war; but the extreme party in the army held him specially responsible for this policy, and accused him of ‘prostituting the liberties and persons of all the people at the foot of the king’s interest’ (Wildman, Putney Projects). The same willingness to accept a compromise showed itself in the line of conduct adopted towards the parliament after the entry of the army into London. Cromwell and the council of war were satisfied with the retirement of the eleven accused members, and did not insist on their prosecution or on the complete ‘purging’ of the House of Commons, as many of their followers in the army desired (ib.) The king did not accept the proposals of the army, and definitely refused those offered him by the parliament (9 Sept. 1647). A considerable party opposed the making of any further application to the king, but after three days’ discussion (21–3 Sept.) Cromwell and Ireton succeeded in carrying a vote that fresh terms should be offered to him (Masson, Life of Milton, iii. 565; Hist. MSS. Comm. 5th Rep. 179). Cromwell’s most important intervention in the debates on the new propositions took place on the question of the duration of the presbyterian church settlement. The army leaders had expressed, in their declaration to the city, their willingness to accept the establishment of presbyterianism, and, in their proposals to the king, to submit to the retention of episcopacy; in each case they had required legal security for the toleration of dissent. What Cromwell sought now was to limit the duration of the presbyterian settlement, and, failing to fix the term at three or seven years, he succeeded in fixing as its limit the end of the parliament next after that then sitting (13 Oct., Commons’ Journals). Before the new proposals could be presented to the king, the flight of the latter to the Isle of Wight took place (11 Nov.) The charge that the king’s flight was contrived by Cromwell in order to forward his own ambitious designs is frequently made by contemporaries. It is expressed in the well-known lines of Marvell, which describe how—
Twining subtle fears with hope, He wove a net of such a scope That Charles himself might chase To Carisbrook’s narrow case, That thence the royal actor borne The tragic scaffold might adorn. (Marvell, Works, ed. Grosart, i. 163.)
But the testimony of Sir John Berkeley shows clearly that the persons who worked on the king’s fears were the Scotch envoys; they instigated the flight, and reaped the fruit of it in the agreement they concluded with the king on 26 Dec. 1647. Moreover, so long as the king remained at Hampton Court he was in the charge of Colonel Whalley, Cromwell’s cousin, and throughout one of his most trusted adherents. At Carisbrook, on the other hand, the king was in the charge of Robert Hammond, a connection of Cromwell by his marriage with a daughter of John Hampden, but a man as to whose action under the great temptation of the king’s appeal to him Cromwell was painfully uncertain (Carlyle, Letter lii.) At the time the king’s flight greatly increased the difficulties of Cromwell’s position. His policy for the last few months had been based on the assumption that it was possible to arrive at a permanent settlement by treaty with the king. To secure that end he had made concessions and compromises which had created a wide-spread feeling of dissatisfaction and distrust in the ranks of the army. Rumours had been persistently circulated by royalist intriguers that Cromwell was to be made Earl of Essex, and to receive the order of the Garter, as the price of the king’s restoration, and among the levellers these slanders had been generally believed. In consequence, his influence in the army had greatly decreased, and even his life was threatened (Berkeley, Memoirs; Maseres, Tracts, i. 371).
The change in Cromwell’s policy which now took place has been explained by the theory that he was afraid of assassination, and by the story of an intercepted letter from the king to the queen (Carte, Ormonde, bk. v. § 18). It was due rather to the fact that the king’s flight, and the revelations of his intrigues with the Scots which followed, showed Cromwell on what a rotten foundation he had based his policy.
For the moment the most pressing business was the restoration of discipline in the army. In three great reviews Fairfax and Cromwell reduced the waverers to obedience (15–18 Nov. 1647), and the general entered into a solemn engagement with the soldiers for the redress of their military grievances and the reform of parliament, while the soldiers engaged to obey the orders of the general and the council of war (Old Parliamentary History, xvi. 340). Cromwell especially distinguished himself by quelling the mutiny of Colonel Lilburn’s regiment in the rendezvous at Ware; one of the mutineers was tried on the field and shot, and others arrested and reserved for future punishment (15 Nov.; Ludlow, Memoirs, ed. 1751, p. 86). On the 19th Cromwell was able to report to the commons that the arm was in a very good condition, and received the thanks of the house for his services (Rushworth, vii. 880).
During December a series of meetings of the council of the army took place at Windsor, in which dissensions were composed, reconciliations effected, and the re-establishment of union sealed by a great fast day, when Cromwell and Ireton ‘prayed very fervently and very pathetically’ (23 Dec. 1617; Cromwelliana, p. 37). As the authorised spokesman of the army, Cromwell took a leading part in the debate on the king’s rejection of the four bills which the parliament had presented to him as their ultimatum (3 Jan. 1618). ‘The army now expected,’ he said, ‘that parliament should govern and defend the kingdom by their own power and resolution, and not teach the people any longer to expect safety and government from an obstinate man whose heart God had hardened’ (Walker, History of Independency, ed. 1661, pt. i. p. 71). He added that in such a policy the army would stand by the parliament against all opposition, but if the parliament neglected to provide for their own safety and that of the kingdom the army would be forced to seek its own preservation by other means. Under the influence of this speech, and a similar one from Ireton, parliament voted that no further addresses should be made to the king, and excluded the representatives of Scotland from the committee of both kingdoms. The conviction that this course alone afforded security to the cause for which he had fought was the motive which led Cromwell thus to advocate a final rupture with the king. Had he been already aiming at supreme power, he would hardly have chosen the very moment when events had opened the widest field to ambition to begin negotiations for the marriage of his eldest son with the daughter of a private gentleman (Carlyle, Letters liii. lv.) The contribution of a thousand a (year for the recovery of Ireland from the lands which parliament had just settled on him, and the renunciation of the arrears due to him by the state, are smaller proofs of his disinterestedness (21 March 1648; Commons’ Journals, v. 513).
Cromwell’s chief occupation during the months of March and April 1648 was to ​prepare for the impending war by uniting all sections of the popular party. For that purpose he moved and spoke in the House of Commons, and endeavoured to arrange an agreement with the city (Walker, p. 83). With the same object he procured conferences between the leaders of the independent and presbyterian parties, and between the ‘grandees’ and the ‘commonwealthsmen’ (Ludlow, Memoirs, p. 92). The commonwealthsmen declared openly for a republic but Cromwell declined to pledge himself; not, as he explained to Ludlow, because he did not think it desirable, but because he did not think it feasible. What troubled him still more than the failure of these conferences was the distrust with which so many of his old friends had come to regard him. On 19 Jan. 1648 John Lilburn, at the bar of the House of Commons, had accused him of apostasy, and denounced his underhand dealings with the king (Rushworth, vii. 969; Lilburn, An Impeachment of High Treason against Oliver Cromwell). These charges bore fruit in the jealousy and suspicion of which he so bitterly complained to Ludlow, and must have confirmed him in the resolve to make no terms with the king (Ludlow, Memoirs, p. 95). The outbreak of a second civil war in consequence of the king's alliance with the presbyterians converted this resolve into a determination to punish the king for his faithlessness. In the three days’ prayer-meeting which took place at Windsor in April 1648 Cromwell took a leading part. The army leaders reviewed their past political action and decided that ‘those cursed carnal conferences with the king’ were the cause of their present perplexities. They resolved ‘that it was their duty, if ever the Lord brought them back in place, to call Charles Stuart, that man of blood, to account for all the blood he had shed and the mischief he had done’ (Allen, Faithful Memorial, &c.; Somers Tracts, vi. 501). A few days later (1 May 1648) Cromwell was despatched by Fairfax to subdue the insurrection in Wales; on 11 May he captured the town of Chepstow, and, leaving a regiment to besiege the castle, established himself before Pembroke on 21 May. For six weeks Pembroke held out, and it was not till the beginning of August that he was able to join the little corps with which Lambert disputed the advance of the great Scotch army under Hamilton. Marching across the Yorkshire hills, and down the valley of the Ribble, Cromwell fell on the flank of the Scots as they marched carelessly through Lancashire, and in a three days’ battle routed them, with the loss of more than half their number (17–19 Aug.) Then be turned north to recover the border fortresses, expel Hamilton’s rearguard from English soil, and take measures for the prevention of future invasions. In this task he was much aided by an internal revolution in Scotland which placed the Argyll party in power. To assist them Cromwell marched into Scotland, and obtained without difficulty the restoration of Carlisle and Berwick, and the exclusion from power of those who had taken part in the late invasion (October 1648). Then he returned to Yorkshire to besiege Pontefract. like the army which he commanded, Cromwell came back highly exasperated against all who had taken part in this second war. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is a more prodigious treason than any that had been perfected before; because the former quarrel was that Englishmen might rule over one another; this to vassalise us to a foreign nation. And their fault that appeared m this summer’s business is certainly double to theirs who were in the first, because it is the repetition of the same offence against all the witnesses that God has borne’ (Carlyle, Letter lxxxii.) ‘Take courage,’ he wrote to the parliament after Preston, ‘to do the work of the Lord in fulfilling the end of your magistracy, in seeking the peace and welfare of the land—that all that will live peaceably may have countenance from you, and that they that are incapable and will not leave troubling the land may speedily be destroyed out of the land’ (ib. lxiv.) But several weeks before this letter was written parliament had reopened negotiations with the king, and when Cromwell re-entered England the treaty of Newport was in progress. Moreover, the House of Lords had favourably received, and recorded for future use, a series of charges against Cromwell, which a late subordinate of his had laid before them (Lords’ Journals, 2 Aug. 1648; Major Huntingdon’s Reasons for laying down his Commission). His recent victories had now removed the personal danger, but there still remained the danger of seeing those victories made useless by the surrender of all he had fought for. In his letter to Hammond, Cromwell describes the Newport treaty as ‘this ruining hypocritical agreement,’ and asks if ‘the whole fruit of the war is not like to be frustrated, and all most like to turn to what it was, and worse’ (Carlyle, Letter lxxxv.) He refers to it again in a later speech as ‘the treaty that was endeavoured with the king whereby they would have put into his hands all that we had engaged for, and all our security should have been a little bit of paper’ (ib. Speech i.) Accordingly, Cromwell expressed his entire concurrence with the ​petitious of the northern army against the treaty, which he forwarded to Fairfax, and approved the stronger measures adopted by the southern army (Rushworth, vii. 1399). ‘We have read your declaration hero,’ he wrote to Fairfax, ‘and see in it nothing but what is honest and becoming honest men to say and offer’ (Engl. Historical Review, ii. 149). To Hammond he wrote that the northern army could have wished that the southern army would have delayed their remonstrance till after the treaty had been completed, but seeing that it had been presented they thought it right to support it (Carlyle, Letter lxxxv.)
The arguments by which Cromwell justified the action of the army in putting force upon the parliament are fully stated in the long letter in which he attempted to convince the wavering Hammond; ‘Fleshly reasonings’ convinced him that if resistance was lawful at all, it was as lawful to oppose the parliament as the king, ‘one name of authority as well as another,’ since it was the cause alone which made the quarrel just. But he laid more stress on higher considerations, on those ‘outward dispensations’ of which he elsewhere owns he was inclined to make too much (ib. Letter lxvii.) Every battle was, in his eyes, an ‘appeal to God’—indeed he many times uses that phrase as a synonym for fighting—and each victory was a judgment of God in his favour. ‘Providences so constant, clear, and unclouded’ as his successes could not have been designed to end in the sacrifice of God’s people and God’s cause. In the army’s determination to intervene to prevent this he imagined that he saw ‘God disposing their hearts,’ as in the war He had ‘framed their actions.’ ‘I verily think, and am persuaded, they are things which God puts into our hearts,’ and he was convinced not merely of the lawfulness but of the duty of obeying this belief (Letters lxxxiii–lxxxv.)
The southern army took the lead in its acts as it had done in its petitions, nor did Cromwell arrive in London until Pride had already begun the work of purging the House of Commons (6 Dec.) He snowed his approval of that act by taking his seat in the house the next day, and was then thanked by it for his ‘very great and eminently faithful services’ (Commons’ Journals, 7 Dec. 1648). What share he took in the proceedings of the next few days is uncertain, but he seems to have been more active outside parliament than within it. With Whitelocke and other lawyers he discussed in several conferences the future settlement of the kingdom, and with the council of war revised the constitutional proposals known as the Agreement of the People (Whitelock, ff. 362–4; Lilburn, Legal and Fundamental Liberties, p. 38). Walker represents Cromwell as saying, when the trial of the king was first moved in the commons, that if any man had designed this he should think him the greatest traitor in the world, but since Providence and necessity had cast them upon it he should pray God to bless their counsel (Walker, History of Independency, ii. 54).
When the trial was once commenced, no one was more active in its prosecution. The stories told at the trial of the regicides are hardly trustworthy, but Algernon Sidney states in one of his letters that, having himself urged that neither the high court of justice nor any other court would try the king, he was answered by Cromwell, ‘I tell you we will cut off his head with the crown upon it’ (Blencowe, Sidney Papers, p. 237). Burnet describes Cromwell as arguing with the Scotch commissioners on the justice of the king’s trial, showing from Mariana and Buchanan that kings ought to be punished for breach of their trusts, proving that it was in accordance with the spirit of the covenant, and getting the better of them with their own weapons and upon their own principles (Burnet, Own Time, i. 72, ed. 1823). On one occasion only does Cromwell himself afterwards refer to the king’s execution, and he then speaks of it in a strain of stern satisfaction. ‘The civil authority, or that part of it which remained faithful to their trust and true to the ends of the covenant, did, in answer to their consciences, turn out a tyrant, in a way which the christians in aftertimes will mention with honour, and all tyrants in the world look at with fear’ (Carlyle, Letter cxlviii.) Yet, though untroubled by scruples himself, Cromwell was willing to make allowances for those of others, and anxious to rally the doubters to the support of the new government. As temporary president of the council of state he appears to have originated the modification of the ‘engagement’ by which those who refused to approve of the king’s sentence were enabled to sit side by side with those who had taken part in it (Parliamentary History, xix. 38). It was more difficult to secure the support of the extreme section of his own followers. For Lilburn and a great party in the army the scheme of constitutional reform set forth in the agreement of the people was not sufficiently democratic, nor were they content to await its gradual realisation. They published a programme of their own under the same name, demanded the immediate execution of its provisions, and prepared to impose it by arms. They printed a series of virulent attacks on Crom​well and the council of state, in which the council was described as the mere creature of Cromwell, his viceroy until he chose to assume his kingship, and Cromwell himself as a tyrant, an apostate, and a hypocrite. ‘You shall scarce speak to Cromwell about anything but he will lay his hand on his breast, elevate his eyes, and call God to record. He will weep, howl, and repent even while he doth smite you under the fifth rib’ (‘The Hunting of the Foxes by Five Small Beagles,’ Somers Tracts, vi. 49). Though he might despise insults, Cromwell could not despise the dangers with which this agitation threatened the Commonwealth. ‘You have no other way to treat these people,’ said he to the council, ‘but to break them in pieces; if you do not break them, they will break you’ (Lilburn, The Picture of the Council of State, p. 15). His advice was followed, the leaders of the levellers were arrested, and the mutiny in the army swiftly and vigorously suppressed by himself and Fairfax (May 1649). Apart from the paramount necessity of preventing a new war, Cromwell had no sympathy with either the social or political aims of the levellers. He was tenaciously attached to the existing social order. ‘For the orders of men, and ranks of men, did not that levelling principle tend to the reducing of all to an equality? What was the purport of it but to make the tenant as liberal a fortune as the landlord, which I think, if obtained, would not have lasted long?’ (Carlyle, Speech ii.) Not less did he differ from them on the constitutional question. They sought to limit the powers of the government and demanded the largest liberty for the individual. He sought to change the aims of the government, but to retain all its authority. So in the very first days of the Commonwealth those profound differences of opinion appeared which separated Cromwell from many of his former adherents in the army and caused him so many difficulties during the protectorate. Nearly two months before the outbreak of the levellers took place Cromwell had been selected by the council of state to command in Ireland (15 March 1649). He was entrusted for three years with the combined powers of lord-lieutenant and commander-in-chief, and granted a salary of 8,000l. a year in the latter capacity in addition to his salary as lord-lieutenant, making in all about 13,000l. (preface to Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1649–50, p. xlv).
His army was to consist of twelve thousand men, and their equipment and support was provided for on the same liberal scale. Cromwell landed at Dublin on 16 Aug. 1649, and signalised his arrival by a searching purgation of the Irish army and by the publication of two proclamations which marked the beginning of a new era in the Irish wars. One of them was levelled against profane swearing (23 Aug.), the other prohibited plunder and promised the people protection and a free market in his camp (24 Aug.) From Dublin he marched to Drogheda, which was stormed on 10 Sept., and the garrison of two thousand five hundred put to the sword. The few score who received quarter were shipped to Barbadoes to labour in the sugar plantations. In the same way the storming of Wexford on 11 Oct. was marked by the slaughter of two thousand of its defenders. Warned by their fate, Ross surrendered after two days’ attack (19 Oct.), but the approach of winter and the increase of sickness in his army obliged Cromwell to raise the siege of Waterford (2 Dec. 1649). During this period his lieutenants had been equally successful. One, Colonel Venables, relieved Londonderry and regained the court towns of Ulster (September 1649). Another, Lord Broghil, received the submission of Cork and other Munster ports, whose protestant garrisons his intrigues had induced to revolt (November 1649). Nevertheless the greater part of Ireland was still unconquered. ‘Though God hath blessed you,’ wrote Cromwell to the speaker, with ‘a great longitude of land along the shore, yet hath it but little depth into the country’ (Gilbert, Contemporary History of Affairs in Ireland, ii. 468).
The second campaign, which began at the end of January 1650, was devoted to the reduction of the inland fortresses. Cashel, Cahir, and several smaller places fell in February, Kilkenny capitulated on 27 March, and Clonmel surrendered on 18 May after a stubborn and bloody resistance. The rapidity of Cromweirs conquests was due in part to the dissensions of the Irish leaders and the growing breach between Ormonde’s protestant and catholic adherents. It was due still more to the excellence of his army, his own skill as a leader, and the firm and consistent policy which he adopted. What that policy was Cromwell’s letters, and above all his answer to the Clonmacnoise declaration of the Irish clergy, very clearly show. He came to Ireland not only to reconquer it, but also to ‘ask an account of the innocent blood that had been shed,’ and to punish ‘the most barbarous massacre that ever the sun beheld.’ These reasons justified in his eyes the severity exercised at Drogheda and Wexford. Of the slaughter at Drogheda he wrote: ‘I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches who have ​imbrued their hands in so much innocent bloody and that it will tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future, which arc the satisfactory grounds of such actions, which otherwise cannot but work remorse and regret’ (Carlyle, Letter cv.) At Wexford the massacre which took place was accidental and unintentional, for Cromwell wished to preserve the town ; but he was far from regretting the accident. 'God, by an unexpected providence, in his righteous justice brought a just judgment upon them, causing them to become a prey to the soldiers who in their piracies had made preys of so many families, and with their bloods to answer the cruelties which they had exercised upon the lives of divers poor protestants' (Letter cvii.) Relentless though Cromwell was, he abhorred the indiscriminating barbarities practised by so many English commanders in Ireland. For soldiers who had put him to a storm, renegades who had once served the parliament, or priests taken in the captured towns, he had no mercy. But no other general was so careful to protect peaceable peasants or noncombatants from plunder or violence. ‘Give us an instance,’ he challenged the catholic clergy, ‘of one man, since my coming into Ireland, not in arms, massacred, destroyed, or banished, concerning the massacre or the destruction of whom justice has not been done or endeavoured to be done.’ In the manifesto which called forth the answer, the Irish prelates had admitted ‘the more moderate usage’ of ‘the common people’ by Cromwell, but urged them not to be deceived by this show of clemency. What terms those Irish who submitted were to expect the same declaration plainly stated. Cromwell thoroughly approved the parliament’s policy of land forfeiture. Those who had been or wore now in arms were to suffer for it in their estates, as parliament should determine, according to their actions. The leaders and chief contrivers of the rebellion were to be reserved for exemplary justice. Those who had taken no part in the rebellion were promised equal justice with the English, equal taxation, and equal protection from the law. On the question of religion the declaration was equally explicit. Cromwell held that the catholic doctrine was poisonous and antichristian; that the catholic clergy were the chief promoters of the rebellion ; and that the catholic religion had no legal right to exist in Ireland. In conformity with these principles, the exorcise of the catholic worship was not to be suffered, and the laws against it strictly enforced against all offenders. Liberty of conscience in the narrowest sense of the term was left to the people. ‘I meddle not with any man’s conscience. . . . As for the people, what thoughts they have in matters of religion in their own breasts I cannot reach, but shall think it my duty, if they walk honestly and peaceably, not to cause them in the least to suller for the same.’ Cromwell trusted that these measures would be followed in time by the conversion of the Irish. ‘We find the people,’ he wrote to John Sadler, ‘very greedy after the word, and flocking to christian meetings, much of that prejudice which lies upon people in England being a stranger to their minds. I mind you the rather of this because it is a sweet symptom, if not an earnest of the good we expect’ (Carlyle, app. 17).
His second remedy for the condition of Ireland was the establishment of a free and impartial administration of justice. ‘We have a great opportunity to set up a way of doing justice amongst these poor people, which, for the uprightness and cheapness of it, may exceedingly gain upon them . . . who have been accustomed to as much injustice, tyranny, and oppression from their landlords, the great men, and those that should have done them right as any people in that which we call Christendom. If justice were freely and impartially administered here, the foregoing darkness and corruption would make it look so much the more glorious and beautiful, and draw more hearts after it’ (ib.)
From the colonisation of Ireland with fresh settlers from England Cromwell also hoped much. In announcing the reduction of Wexford he pointed out to the parliament the advantages it offered for the establishment of a new colony (ib. Letter cvii.) He also wrote to New England to invite 'godly people and ministers' to transplant themselves to Ireland, and found many who were willing to accept his proposal (Nicholls, Letters addressed to Cromwell, p. 44). But there is no suggestion in his letters of the wholesale transplantation of the Irish to Connaught which afterwards took place, for it had not yet been decided on by parliament. In other respects the policy announced by Cromwell was in all essentials the policy ultimately adopted by parliament.
Immediately after the capture of Clonmel Cromwell returned to England, having been recalled by parliament on 8 Jan. 1650, to take part in the impending war with Scotland. Parliament wished to utilise the services both of Cromwell and Fairfax, and voted on 12 June that the latter should command, with Cromwell as his lieutenant-general. But Fairfax retracted his consent and laid down his commission, and on 26 June Cromwell was appointed captain-general and ​commander-in-chief of all the forces of the Commonwealth. Fairfax’s resignation was caused by unwillingness to attack the Scots unless they actually invaded England. Cromwell, on the other hand, held that it was just and necessary to forestall their invasion. The energy with which he endeavoured to convert Fairfax to these views is the best refutation of the theory that Cromwell intrigued to obtain his post. Whitelocke and Ludlow, who record his arguments, were both at the time convinced of his sincerity. It was not till long afterwards that they came to doubt it (Ludlow, Memoirs, 122; Whitelocke, Memorials, f. 460). ‘I have not sought these things ; truly I have been called unto them by the Lord,’ was Cromwell’s own account of his promotion (Letter cxxxiv.) Less than a month after his appointment Cromwell entered Scotland with sixteen thousand men (22 July 1650). He found David Leslie entrenched in a strong position near Edinburgh, and spent a month in fruitless attempts to draw him from it. On 30 Aug. the council of war decided to retreat to Dunbar and fortify that place, to await there the arrival of provisions and reinforcements. Leslie pursued, and succeeded in seizing the passes beyond Dunbar and the hills behind it. The Scots boasted that they had Cromwell in a worse pound than the king had Essex in Cornwall. Cromwell himself, in a letter written the day before the battle, admitted the greatness of the danger. ‘We are upon an engagement very difficult. The enemy hath blocked up our way at the pass at Copperspath, through which we cannot get without almost a miracle, he lieth so upon the hills that we know not how to come that way without great difficulty; and our lying here daily consumeth our men, who fall sick beyond imagination’ (Letter cxxxix.) On the evening of the day on which these words were written the Scots began to move down from the hill to the narrow space at its loot with the intention of attacking. Cromwell saw the opportunity their movement gave him, and the advantage of seizing the offensive himself. Early on the morning of 3 Sept. he fell on their exposed right wing with an overwhelming force, and after a sharp struggle threw their whole army into confusion. ‘The sun rising upon the sea,’ says one of Cromwell’s captains, ‘I heard Noll say, "Now let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered;" and he following us as we slowly marched, I heard him say, “I profess they run,” and then was the Scots army all in disorder, and running both right wing and left and main battle. They routed one another after we had done their work on their right wing’ (Memoirs of Captain Hodgson, p. 148). Three thousand men fell in the battle, and ten thousand were taken prisoners. Edinburgh, Leith, and the eastern portion of the Scottish lowlands passed into Cromwell’s hands. But he made no attempt to press his victory to the utmost, and seemed more solicitous to improve it by argument than by arms. From the moment the Scotch war began Cromwell’s strongest wish had been to come to some agreement with the Scots. ‘Since we came to Scotland,’ wrote Cromwell in his Dunbar despatch, ‘it hath been our desire and longing to have avoided blood in this business, by reason that God hath a people here fearing his name, though deceived.’
With this object he had begun the campaign by a series of declarations and letters protesting his affection to the Scots, and endeavouring to convince them of their error in adopting the Stuart cause. In spite of the ill success of his overtures, he was urged to persist in them by many leading independents. Ireton wrote from Ireland expressing to Cromwell the fear that he had not been sufficiently forbearing and long suffering with the Scots. St. John reminded him that while the Irish were a people of atheists and papists, to be ruled with a rod of iron, the Scots were many of them truly children of God. ‘We must still endeavour to heap coals of fire on their heads, and carry it with as much mercy and moderation towards them as may consist with safety’ (Nickolls, Letters addressed to Cromwell, pp. 25–73). In accordance with those views, which were also his own, Cromwell now began a new series of expostulations, directed particularly against the Scotch clergy and their claims to guide public policy, he charged them with pretending a reformation and laying the foundation of it in getting to themselves worldly power; with perverting the covenant, which in the main intention was spiritual, to serve politics and carnal ends ; with claiming to be the infallible expositors of the covenant and the scriptures, his own theory of the position of the clergy he summed up in half a dozen words: ‘We look at ministers as helpers of, not lords over, God's people.’
In equally vigorous language he refuted their claim to suppress dissent in order to suppress error. ‘Your pretended fear lest error should step in is like the man who would keep all wine out of the country lest men should be drunk. It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy to deprive a man of his natural liberty upon a supposition he may abuse it. When he doth abuse it, judge’ (Letter cxlviii.)
Once more he stated the conditions on ​which peace might be obtained. ‘Give the state of England,’ he wrote to the committee of estates, ‘that satisfaction and security for their peaceable and quiet living beside you which may in justice be demanded from a nation who have, as you, taken their enemy into their bosom whilst he was in hostility against them’ (Letter cl.) Nor did these declarations entirely fail of their effect. A serious division began among the Scots, and the rigid covenanters of the west separated themselves from the mixed army under Leslie’s command. For the moment they repelled Cromwell’s advances and attempted to carry on the war independently. But their army was routed by Lambert on 1 Dec. 1650, and as Edinburgh Castle surrendered a few days later (19 Dec.), all the south of Scotland was subdued by the close of 1650. During the spring of 1651 operations were delayed by the dangerous illness of Cromwell. An intermittent fever brought on by exposure attacked him in February; more than once his life was in danger; three successive relapses took place, and parliament urged him to remove to England until he recovered strength. In June Cromwell was again well enough to take the field, and found Leslie strongly entrenched near Stirling. Unable to attack successfully in front, Cromwell threw Lambert’s division across the Firth of Forth into Fifeshire, and followed himself with the bulk of the army a week later. Perth was captured on 2 Aug., Leslie’s supplies were cut off, and his defences were taken in the rear. The road to England was thus left open to Charles, and Cromwell was well aware that he would be blamed for not having prevented the invasion which took place. But he explained that his movement was decided rather by necessity than choice. Another winter’s war would have ruined the English army and emptied the treasury of the republic. The plan he had adopted was the only way to dislodge the enemy from their position and prevent the prolongation of the war. Except with a commanding army on both sides of the Forth, it would have been impossible at once to invade Fife and bar the road to England (Letter clxxx.) Sending his cavalry before to impede the king’s march, Cromwell hurried after him with the foot through central England, summoning all the militia of the southern and midland counties to meet him. With their aid he was able to surround Worcester with an army of thirty thousand men and attack the royalists with an overpowering force on both sides of the Severn. As usual Cromwell freely exposed himself in the battle. He was the first man to cross the Teme and bring support to Fleetwood’s hard-pressed troops. When victory was assured he rode in person to offer quarter to the enemy’s foot in the Fort Royal, and was received by a volley which he luckily escaped. In his letter before the battle he had encouraged the parliament to hope for a victory like that of Preston, but none so complete as this had marked the course of the civil wars. ‘The dimensions of this mercy,’ wrote Cromwell to the speaker, ‘are above my thought; it is, for aught I know, a crowning mercy’ (Letter clxxxiiii) Parliament recognised the completeness of the victory by voting the general lands to the value of 4,000l. a year, and by granting him Hampton Court as a country residence (6, 11 Sept. 1651). Hostile observers have professed to trace henceforth in Cromwell’s conduct the signs of his approaching usurpation. Ludlow sees a sinister meaning in the words of his letter to Lenthal. Whitelocke, who notes the ‘seeming’ humility of Cromwell’s bearing after Worcester, records expressions which appeared to reveal his secret ambition. In the conferences on the settlement of the kingdom in December 1651 he let fall the opinion that a settlement with somewhat of monarchical power in it would be best. ‘What if a man should take upon him to be king?’ was his significant question in the following November (Whitelocke, Memorials, pp. 517, 549). But these recollections were not written till long after the events to which they refer, and Cromwell’s immediate actions showed no trace of personal motives. There is no reason for doubting his statement that he begged in vain to be relieved from his command and allowed to retire into private life (Speech iii.) But the parliament could not afford to dispense with his services, and outside the parliament all looked to him and his influence for the accomplishment of the promised reforms.
‘Great things God has done by you in war, and good things men explicit from you in peace,’ wrote Erbery to L mwell, ‘to break in pieces the oppressor, to ease the oppressed of their burdens, to release the prisoners out of bonds, and to relieve poor smilies with bread’ (Nickolls, Letters addressed to Cromwell, p. 88).
All these things and more Cromwell had urged on the parliament in his despatches from Scotland (Carlyle, Letters cxl. clxxv.), and his return to his place in the house was followed by a marked increase in its legislative activity. Parliament took up once more the question of putting a limit to its own sittings, but could not be persuaded to fix the date of dissolution earlier than November 1654. His influence was more successfully exerted in the Act of Pardon and Oblivion ​passed in February 1652 with the hope of reconciling the conquered royalists to the new government (Ludlow, Memoirs, p. 171). He was appointed a member of the committee to select commissioners for the reform of the law, and of that charged to consider the laws touching the n»lief of the poor. In the still more important committee for the propagation of the gospel Cromwell headed the section which advocated complete toleration. ‘I had rather,’ he said in one of its debates, ‘that Mahometanism were permitted amongst us than that one of God's children should he persecuted.’ It was as a member of that committee that Milton appealed to Cromwell against the new foes who threatened to bind the soul in secular chains, and called upon him to save free conscience from hirelings (Masson, Life of Milton, iv. 394, 440).
In a few months, however, the impetus thus given to reform was spent. The Dutch war led parliament to raise money from the royalists in the old fashion, and confiscation began again. The work of law reform stood stock still, and neither the propagation of the gospel nor liberty of conscience was provided for (Carlyle, Speech i.) To Cromwell and his officers it seemed that the duty of setting these things right rested on themselves. In 1652, as in 1647, they held that their successes had called them to govern and take care of the commonwealth and made them the guardians of the land (Religuiæ Baxterianæ, p. 99).
Now they had also the additional responsibility of the promises made in the army manifestos of 1647–9. ‘So,’ says Cromwell, ‘finding the people dissatisfied in every corner of the nation, and laying at our doors the non-performance of those things which had been promised and were of duty to be performed, we did think ourselves concerned if we would keep up the reputation of honest men in the world’ (Speech i.) One sign of this rising feeling was the army petition of 12 Aug. 1652. Another was the series of conferences between the officers of the army and the members of the parliament which began in October 1652. But these conferences produced no result save that the bill for a new representative was pressed forward with renewed zeal. It was not simply the faults and shortcomings of the Long parliament, but a fundamental difference between soldiers and parliamentarians concerning the future constitution of the state, which led to the final breach. The original plan of the parliamentary leaders had been to perpetuate the existence of the present parliament by following the precedent of 1646 and electing new members in the place of those dead or excluded. The resistance of Cromwell forced them to abandon this plan, and they then adopted a scheme which provided for a continuous succession of parliaments, each lasting two years, and one immediately succeeding another. From the army point of view there was little to choose between a perpetual parliament and perpetual parliaments. Each alike meant a legislative power always sitting and arbitrarily usurping the functions of the judicial and executive powers (Speeches iii. xiii.) Four years ago, in the ‘agreement of the people,’ the army had demanded constitutional securities against the arbitrary power of parliament, and they were not willing now to accept a settlement which prolonged that power and embodied none of those guarantees. A minor objection was that, by the provision in the bill relating to the qualifications of electors, neutrals and deserters of the cause would have been enabled to vote (Speech i.) In a final conference the officers urged these objections, and proposed that parliament should select a small body of men of approved fidelity and commit to them the trust of settling the nation. According to the statement of the officers they obtained a promise from the representative of the parliament that the progress of the bill should be stopped till this expedient had been considered. But the next morning news was brought to Cromwell that the third reading of the bill was being hurried through the house. Ere this the officers had reluctantly come to the conclusion that it was their duty to resort to force rather than submit to the passing of this measure (ib.) Now this breach of faith seemed to render any compromise impossible. Cromwell hastened to Westminster, and after listening for a few minutes to the debates rose and addressed them. ‘At the first and for a good while he spake in commendation of the parliament for their pains and care of the public good; afterwards he changed his style, told them of their injustice, delays of justice, self-interest, and other faults.’ from the faults of the parliament as a body he proceeded to the faults of the individuals, giving them sharp language but not mentioning their names. Finally he called in five or six files of musketeers, pointed to the speaker and bade them fetoh him down, pointed to the mace and bade them take away these baubles. As the members were going out he called to Vane by name, telling him that he might have prevented this extraordinary course, but he was a juggler and had not so much as common honesty (Sidney Papers, ed. Blencowe, p. 140; other accounts are : Ludlow, Memoires, p. 174; Whitelocke, Memorials, p. 554; Letter from Bordeaux to Servien, ​Guizot, i. 492; Bernhardi’s Despatch to the Genoese Government, Prayer, p. 85.)
At the moment Cromwell’s conduct in putting an end to the sitting of the Long parliament met with general approval. Some of the royalists cherished the belief that Cromwell would recall Charles II and content himself with a dukedom and the vice-royalty of Ireland (Clarendon State Papers, ii. 208). Others expected him immediately to assume the crown himself, and an enthusiastic partisan set up in the Exchange the picture of Cromwell crowned, with the lines underneath:—
Ascend three thrones, great Captain and divine, I’ th’ will of God, old Lion, they are thine, &c. (Tanner MSS. lii. 9.)
Cromwell’s own view was that he, as general of the forces of the three kingdoms duly appointed by act of parliament, was the only constituted authority remaining. His authority he regarded as boundless, but purely provisional. It was necessary for the army leaders to show that they had not turned out the Long parliament for their own ends, ‘not, to grasp at the power ourselves, or to keep it in military hands, no, not for a day.’ The cause of the convocation of the Little parliament was ‘the integrity of concluding to divest the sword of all power in the civil administration’ (Carlyle, Speech i.) The writ by which the members of that assembly were summoned clearly defined the nature of their qualifications and the source of their authority. They were summoned in the name of ‘Oliver Cromwell, captain-general and commander-in-chief,’ ‘nominated by myself and my council of officers,’ as ‘persons fearing God and of approved fidelity and honesty.’ In the speech with which Cromwell made over the supreme authority to this assembly, he expressed the exaggerated hopes with which he regarded it. The great issue of the war had been the calling of God’s people to the government. Godly men had fought the people out of their bondage under the regal power, godly men were now called to rule them (Speech i.) Looking back on this constitutional experiment four years later, Cromwell confessed that the issue was not answerable to the simplicity and honesty of the design, and termed it a story of his weakness and folly (Speech xiii.) The reforming zeal of the Little parliament seemed likely to end in ‘the confusion of all things.’ The policy adopted by it on the ecclesiastical question was fundamentally opposed to the opinions of Cromwell on that point. Cromwell was anxious for the maintenance of a national church, and held the propagation of religion the most important duty of the state; a settled ministry and a settled support for them were therefore essential parts of his scheme.
But the votes of the Little parliament, their abolition of the rights of patrons, and their rejection of the scheme laid before them for the appointment and maintenance of the clergy threatened the very existence of a national church. The conservative section of the republican party and the conservative portion of the assembly itself turned their eyes to Cromwell to deliver them from revolution. On the motion of a staunch Cromwellian, the conservative minority in the Little parliament resolved to render up their powers again to the general from whom they had received them; a certain number of waverers followed their example, and the sittings of the remainder were put an end to by a file of musketeers. ‘I did not know one tittle of that resignation,’ Cromwell told the parliament of 1654, ‘until they all came and brought it, and delivered it into my hands’ (Speech iii.) Cromwell was thus replaced in the position which he had occupied before the meeting of the Little parliament. ‘My power was again by this resignation as boundless and unlimited as before; all things being subjected to arbitrariness, and myself a person having power over the three nations without bound or limit set’ (ib.) In this emergency the council of officers drew up the constitution known as the ‘instrument of government,’ and urged Cromwell to undertake the government under its provisions. The title of king seems from subsequent references to have been offered him (Milton, Defensio Secunda, Prose Works, i. 288, ed. 1853; Burton, Diary, i. 382), but he refused it, and was installed as protector 16 Dec. 1653.
The peculiarity of the new constitution lay in the attempted separation of the executive and legislative powers. The executive power was placed in the hands of the protector, assisted and controlled by a council of state. The power of legislation and taxation was placed in the hands of a parliament whose acts became law without the assent of the Protector, provided they were not contrary to the provisions of the constitution. In the mutual independence of parliament and protector, and the arrangement which made the Protector in some sense the guardian of the constitution against the parliament, lay the seeds of future difficulties. During the abeyance of parliament the Protector and council were empowered to make ordinances which had the force of law until parliament otherwise ordered, and Cromwell made a ​liberal use of this power. This was the creative period of his government. All the leading principles of the Protector’s domestic policy are to be found in the collection of ordinances issued by him between December 1653 and September 1654, and all the more important of the eighty-two ordinances published in it were ratified by parliament in 1656. The union of the three kingdoms which Cromwell’s arms had begun his laws now completed. One series of ordinances reorganised the administration of justice in Scotland, abolished feudal courts and feudal servitudes, and settled the details of that incorporation of Scotland with England which had been planned by the Long parliament. Scotland, impoverished by long wars, began now to revive under the influence of free trade and good government, and Cromwell dwelt with pride on the ‘thriving condition’ of the meaner sort and ‘the middle sort’, of people ‘in that country’ under his rule (Speech xiii.) Other ordinances regulated the interests of the adventurers for Irish lands, extended the privileges of the new colonists, and determined the representation of Ireland in the British parliament. In England itself Cromwell’s chief care was the reorganisation of the church. The efficiency of the clergy was secured by the establishment of committees to eject the unfit from their livings, and the institution of a central board of triers to examine into the fitness of all new candidates for benefices. Other ordinances provided for the visitation of the universities, the better support of ministers, and the propagation of the gospel in Wales. Of the triers Cromwell boldly asserted ‘there hath not been such service to England since the christian religion was perfect in England.’ He was proud also of the comprehensiveness of his church: ‘Of the three sorts of godly men, presbyterians, baptists, and independents, though a man be of any of these three judgments, if he have the root of the matter m him he may be admitted’ (ib.) Another great object of Cromwell’s legislation, and an object in which he was thoroughly at one with the whole of the puritan party, was the reformation of manners. ‘Make it a shame to see men bold in sin and profaneness,’ he said to his second parliament. ‘These things do respect the souls of men, and the spirits which are the men. The mind is the man; if that be kept pure, a man signifies somewhat; if not, I would very fain see what difference there is betwixt him and a beast. He hath only some activity to do more mischief’ (Speech v.) Ordinances against duelling, cock-fighting, horse-racing, and swearing showed Cromwell’s zeal for social reform.
At the same time Cromwell attempted the reform of the law. The court of chancery was reorganised and its fees much reduced; a scheme was devised for the relief of poor debtors, and a committee appointed to consider ‘how the laws might be made plain, and short, and less chargeable to the people.’ The administration of justice was improved by the appointment of new judges ‘of known integrity and ability,’ one of whom was Matthew Hale. The revision of the severe criminal code, ‘wicked and abominable laws;’ as Cromwell termed them, he did not at present undertake, but recommended it urgently to parliament in 1657. Another reform, however, which is frequently attributed to Cromwell—the reform of the system of parliamentary representation—was not his work at all. It was embodied in the ‘instrument of government,’ and the credit of it is due to the council of officers who drew up that document. It had been demanded in all the great manifestos of the army since 1647, had been worked out by Ireton in the ‘agreement of the people,’ and further elaborated by the Long parliament during its last sittings.
During the same few months a complete change took place in the position of England in Europe. Even before the expulsion of the Long parliament Cromwell had been an important factor in European politics. His return from Ireland was regarded as the prelude to some great enterprise in Europe, and that not only in Marvell’s verses, but in the secret reports of Mazarin’s agents (Guizot, Cromwell, i. 237; Marvell, Poems, ed. Grosart, p. 161).
His victories in Scotland secured the recognition of the republic by foreign states. ‘The wise and faithful conduct of affairs where you are,’ wrote Bradshaw to Cromwell, ‘gives life and repute to all other actions and attempts on the Commonwealth’s behalf’ (Nickolls, Letters addressed to Cromwell, p. 39). According to De Retz, Cromwell entered into communication with him through Vane directly after the battle of Worcester (Memoirs, pt. ii. cap. xxi.) In the spring of 1652 Cromwell was engaged in some mysterious negotiations for the acquisition of Dunkirk (Chéruel, Histoire de France sous le Ministère de Mazarin, i. 57 ; Revue historique, iv. 314). The agents of Condé and the frondeurs of Bordeaux made special application to Cromwell, as well as to the council of state, and the envoys of Mazarin were personally accredited to Cromwell as well as to council and parliament (1652; Guizot, Cromwell, i. 264–6). The state in which Cromwell found the foreign relations of England in 1653 is described by him in his ​second speech. There were wars with Portugal and Holland, and open hostility with France and Denmark. The nation was fast sinking beneath the burden of taxation and the cessation of trade. In spite of the pressure of those who urged that perseverance in the war would bring Holland to complete submission, Cromwell signed on 5 April 1654 a peace with the States-General which provided security for English commerce and satisfaction for the losses of English merchants in the east. The Dutch conceded the supremacy of the English flag, and submitted to the Navigation Act. By a private engagement with the province of Holland, the permanent exclusion of the princes of the house of Orange from authority was secured, and the English republic was thus freed from the danger of royalist attacks from that quarter. A few days later a commercial treaty with Sweden was concluded, which included also a prohibition of protection and favour to the enemies of either that might be developed into a political alliance. By the ambassador Cromwell sent to Christina a portrait of himself with dedicatory verses by Marvell, and Whitelocke found the queen full of admiration for the Protector, rating him greater than Condé, and comparing him to her own ancestor, Gustavus Vasa (Whitelocke, Embassy to Sweden, i. 247, 285; Marvell, Poems, ed. Grosart, p. 416). A treaty with Denmark, opening the Sound to the English on the same terms as the Dutch, end indemnifying their merchants for their losses during the late war, was the natural corollary of the treaty with the United Provinces (14 Sept. 1654).
Lastly, the long disputes with Portugal were closed by a treaty which not only extended the large trading privileges enjoyed by the English in Portugal, but secured special advantages to English shipping, and the free exercise of their religion to English merchants (10 March 1653; Schäfer, Geschichte von Portugal, iv. 571 All four of these treaties were distinguished by the care exhibited in them for the interests of English commerce. But Cromwell valued the three with the protestant states still more, as stepping-stones to the great league of all protestant states which he hoped to see formed. In his negotiations with the Dutch envoys he had brought the scheme prominently forward. At the meeting of his first parliament he had dwelt on the security these treaties afforded to the protestant interest in Europe. ‘I wish,’ he added, ‘that it may be written on our hearts to be zealous for that interest’ (Geddes, John de Witt, pp. 338, 362; Carlyle, Speech ii.)
The fulfilment of these hopes, the success of Cromwell’s foreign policy, and the permanence of his domestic reforms, all alike depended on the acceptance of his government by the nation. It was necessary that a parliament should confirm the authority which the army had conferred upon Cromwell, and it was doubtful whether any parliament would accept the limitations of its sovereignty which the council of officers had devised. The first parliament elected according to the ‘instrument of government’ met in September 1654. From the beginning of its debates that assembly, inspired by the old leaders of the Long parliament, refused to admit the validity of a constitutional settlement imposed by the army. It was willing to accept the government of a single person, but insisted on the subordination of that person to parliament. ‘The government,’ ran the formula of the opposition, ‘shall be in the parliament of the people of England, and a single person qualified with such instructions as the parliament shall think fit’ (Burton, Diary, i. xxv). The co-ordinate and independent power attributed to the protector by the ‘instrument of government’ was thus denied, and Cromwell thought necessary to intervene to protect his own authority and the authority of the constitution itself. He granted their claim to revise the constitution, but only with respect to non-essentials. ‘Circumstantials’ they might alter, ‘fundamentals’ they must accept. Those fundamentals he summed up in four points: government by a single person and parliament, the division of the power of the sword between a single person and parliament, the limitation of the duration of parliaments, and liberty of conscience. Finally, he announced his resolution to maintain the existing settlement against all opposition. ‘The wilful throwing away of this government, so owned by God, so approved by men . . . I can sooner be willing to be rolled into my grave and buried with infamy than I can give my consent unto’ (Carlyle, Speech iii., 12 Sept. 1654). Ninety members were excluded from the house for refusing to sign an engagement to be faithful to the Commonwealth and the Lord Protector, and not to alter the government as settled in a single person and a parliament. But those who remained did not consider that their acceptance of this principle bound them to accept the rest of the constitution. They proceeded to revise one after another all the articles of the ‘instrument of government,’ and trenched on more than one of the provisions which Cromwell had defined as Fundamentals. They restricted the Protector's ​authority over the army and his veto over legislation, they minimised the amount of religious toleration guaranteed by the constitution, and delayed, in order to prolong their own existence, the vote of supplies for the army and navy. ‘It seemed,’ complained Cromwell, ‘as if they had rather designed to lay grounds for a quarrel than to give the people settlement.’ All the opponents of the government were encouraged by these transactions to believe that there would be no settlement, and cavaliers and levellers were plotting to put the nation again in blood and confusion. Cromwell seized the first opportunity the constitution gave him to put an end to their sittings (22 Jan. 1655; ib. iv.)
The plots of which the Protector had spoken were real and dangerous, but the vigilance of his police nipped them in the bud. The leaders of the military malcontents were arrested, and all danger of a rising of levellers and Fifth-monarchy men came to an end. Deterred by the discovery of their designs, the chiefs of the royalists refund to head the general movement which was to have taken place in February 1655, and the isolated rising which actually took place in March was easily suppressed. A few of the leaders were executed, and some scores of their followers were sent to the West Indies to work in the sugar plantations. So easy was the government’s triumph that it has been seriously argued that the rising was concerted by Cromwell himself in order to justify the arbitrary measures which he had before decided to adopt (Quarterly Review, April 1886). This is merely an ingenious paradox, but the fact remains that the measures of repression seem to have been stronger than the actual danger of the situation required. The country was parcelled out into twelve divisions, each under the government of a major-general (October 1655). The major-general had under his command the local militia, and additional troops maintained by a tax of ten per cent, on the incomes of the royalists. His instructions charged him with the care of public security, with the maintenance of an elaborate political police, and with the enforcement of all the laws relating to public morals (Parliamentary History, xx. 461). The suggestion of this scheme appears to have come from the military party in Cromwell’s council, but he adopted it as his own, and proceeded to carry it out with his usual energy.
His first object was to provide for the peace of the nation by strengthening the army and police. 'If there were need of greater forces to carry on this work, it was a most righteous thing to put the charge upon that party which was the cause of it’ (Speech v.)
He sought both to deter the royalists from future appeals to arms and to punish them for continuing to plot against the government after the passing of an amnesty (Declaration of his Highness . . . shewing the reasons of his late Proceedings for securing the Peace of the Commonwealth, 1655; Parliamentary History, xx. 434). He hoped by the agency of the major-generals to carry out the social reformation which the ordinary local authorities could not be trusted to effect. In his defence of the major-generals to his second parliament Cromwell declared that the institution had been more effectual to the discountenancing of vice and the settling of religion than anything done for the last fifty years (Speech v.)
Another reason helped to cause the further development of military government. A legal resistance more dangerous than royalist plots threatened to sap the foundations of the protectorate. The validity of the ordinances of the Protector and his council was called in question. Whitelocke and Widdrington resigned the great seal from scruples about executing the ordinance regulating the court of chancery ({sc|Whitelocke}}, Memorials, ff. 621–627). Judges Newdigate and Thorpe refused to act on the commission established, according to the ordinance on treasons, for the trial of the Yorkshire insurrectionists. A merchant named Cony refused to pay duties not imposed by parliament, and Chief-justice Rolle resigned from unwillingness or incapacity to maintain the legality of the customs ordinance.
Cromwell sent Cony’s lawyers to the Tower, replaced the doubting judges by men of fewer scruples, and enforced the payment of taxes by the agency of the major-generals. Necessity justified this in his own eyes and he believed that it would justify him in the eyes of the nation. ‘The people,’ he had said, when he dissolved his last parliament, ‘will prefer their safety to their passions, and their real security to forms, when necessity calls for supplies’ (Carlyle, Speech iv.) If this argument did not convince, he relied on force. ‘ ’Tis against the voice of the nation, there will be nine in ten against you,’ Calamy is represented as once saying to Cromwell. ‘Very well,’ said Cromwell, ‘but what if I should disarm the nine, and put a sword in the tenth man’s hand; would not that do the business?’ (Banks, Critical Review of the Life of Oliver Cromwell, 1747, p. 149).
Apologists for Cromwell's rule boasted the freedom of conscience enjoyed under it (Moore, Protection Proclaimed, 1656). In that respect also political necessities led him to diminish the amount of liberty which had ​existed under his earlier government. On 24 Nov. 1655 a proclamation was issued prohibiting the use of the prayer-book, and imposing numerous disabilities on the ejected Anglican clergy. Several anabaptist preachers were thrown into prison for attacking the government in their sermons. ‘Our practice,’ said Cromwell in his defence, ‘hath been to let all this nation see that whatever pretensions to religion would continue quiet and peaceable, they should enjoy conscience and liberty to themselves, but not to make religion a pretence for blood and arms’ (Carlyle, Speech v.) The sincerity of Cromwell’s desire to respect freedom of conscience showed itself in the protection he extended to many persons outside the pale of legal toleration. Biddle the Socinian was indeed imprisoned, but saved from the severer penalties to which parliament had doomed him. Fox and other quakers were rescued by the Protector more than once from the severity of subordinate officials. The Jews, whose readmission to England Cromwell, after long discussion, felt unable to propose, were remitted privately to settle in London and to establish a synagogue there (Harleian Miscellany, vii. 617; Ellis, Original Letters, 2nd ser. iv, 3). In answer to an appeal from Mazarin, he avowed his inability to make any public provision for the catholics, but expressed his belief that under his rule they had less reason to complain as to rigour on men’s consciences than under the parliament. ‘I have plucked many,’ he continued, ‘out of the raging fire of persecution which did tyrannise over their consciences, and encroached by an arbitrariness of power upon their estates’ (Carlyle, Letter ccxvi.) With all its defects and restrictions the amount of religious liberty maintained by the Protector was far in advance of average public opinion even among his own party. The misfortune was that it depended, like the rest of his government, solely on the will of the strong man armed.
During this period of arbitrary rule the development of Cromwell’s foreign policy was marked by his championship of the Vaudois and his rupture with Spain. In the closing months of 1654, while it was yet doubtful whether the Protector would ally himself with France or Spain, he had despatched two great fleets, one commanded by Blake, the other by Penn. Blake’s fleet made English trade secure and the English flag respected throughout the Mediterranean. In April 1655 he bombarded Tunis and forced the dey to release all his English prisoners. The massacre of the Vaudois in the same April roused the sympathy and indignation of Cromwell. He declared that the misfortunes of the poor people of the Piedmontese valleys lay as near to his heart as if it had concerned the dearest relations he had in the world. He headed with a contribution of 2,000l. the national subscription raised for the sufferers. By the pen of Milton he called for the interference of all the protestant powers of Europe. He sent a special ambassador to bespeak the intervention of Louis XIV, and another to remonstrate with the Duke of Savoy. He urged the protestant cantons of Switzerland to attack Savoy, and even meditated using Blake’s fleet to capture Nice or Villafranca. But the protestant cantons were too cautious to accept his overtures for combined action. Mazarin, anxious to prevent a European war, and eager to secure the friendship of England, obliged the Duke of Savoy to patch up an accommodation with his protestant subjects (18 Aug. 1655). The treaty of Pignerol frustrated Cromwell’s wide-reaching plans for a league of all protestant states to defend their oppressed co-religionists, and also forwarded the treaty with France which Cromwell’s breach with Spain had made a necessity (Morland, Churches of Piedmont; Guizot, Cromwell, ii. 223, 233; Stern, Cromwell und die Evangelische Kantone der Schweiz). The causes of the war were the exclusiveness of Spanish colonial policy and the uncompromising character of Spanish catholicism. English traders in the American seas and English colonists in the West Indies were continual victims of Spain’s treacherous hostility. English merchants in Spanish ports were continually maltreated by the inquisition on account of their religion. For these injuries redress had been persistently denied, and Cromwell’s demand for freedom of trade and freedom of religion for English merchants was indignantly refused. Another series of considerations combined, with these to turn Cromwell against Spain. From the time of Queen Elizabeth Spain had been the traditional enemy of England and the traditional ally of English malcontents. Now, as then, Spain was the head of the catholic party in Europe. No honest or honourable peace was attainable with Spain, and even if a treaty were made it would be subject to the pope’s veto, and valid only so long as the pope said amen to it (Carlyle, Speech v. 17 Sept. 1656, Declaration of the Lord Protector showing the reasonableness of the cause of this against the Spaniards). The same mixture of religious and political motives appears in Cromwell’s letters to the English commanders in the West Indies. In one letter he bids the admiral in command at Jamaica remember ‘that the Lord Himself ​hath a controversy with your enemies, even with that Roman Babylon of which the Spaniard is the great underpropper. In that respect we fight the Lord’s battles’ (Letter cciv.) In another he urges the seizure of Providence or any other island off the Spanish main, ‘for it is much designed among us to strive with the Spaniard for the mastery of all those seas’ (Letter ccvi.)
At the time when Penn*s expedition was despatched, Cromwell hoped to confine hostilities to the new world, in the Elizabethan fashion, and believed that he would be able to maintain an independent position in the European struggle between France and Spain. But the disgraceful failure at San Domingo and the retaliatory measures of Spain led to the extension of the war to Europe and obliged Cromwell to accept the offered alliance of France. The first step to the closer alliance which finally took place was the treaty of 24 Oct. 1655. It was a commercial treaty, which also bound each party not to assist the enemies of the other, and contained a secret article promising the expulsion from French territory of Charles II and nineteen other persons (Chéruel, Histoire de France sous le Ministère de Mazarin, ii. 392 ; Clarendon State Papers, iii. 287). This was followed in June 1656 by a commercial treaty with Sweden, the most important clause of which was one binding Sweden not to supply Spain with naval stores during the present war. Cromwell was anxious to develope this into a general league of all protestant powers, and earnestly endeavoured to reconcile Sweden and the States-General for that purpose (Masson, Life of Milton, v. 270–2 ; Carlson, Geschichte Schwedens, iv. 77, 82).
In order to raise money to carry on the war with Spain, Cromwell reluctantly assembled a second parliament (September 1656). But even a parliament from which all open opponents were excluded was far from being in complete agreement with the Protector’s policy. The votes against James Naylor showed how little most puritans shared his hostility to persecution. The refusal to legalise the position of the major-generals proved how repugnant even to his supporters was the military side of his rule. At the same time acts annulling the claims of the Stuarts, making plots against the Protector high treason, and appointing special tribunals tor their punishment, proved their attachment to Cromwell’s person (Scobell, Acts, ii. 371–6). Foreign successes and domestic conspiracy combined to suggest the idea of making Cromwell king. Waller proposed it in his verses on the capture of the Spanish treasure ships in September 1656 (Poems, ed. 1711, p. 198).
Let the rich ore be forthwith melted down
And made more rich by making him a crown;
With ermine clad and purple, let him hold
A royal sceptre, made of Spanish gold.
In the discussion of Sindercombe’s conspiracy in parliament one member declared that it would tend very much to the preservation of himself and us that his highness would be pleased to take upon him the government according to the ancient constitution (19 Jan. 1657; Burton, i. 363).
In February 1657 a proposal for the revision of the constitution and the restoration of monarchy was introduced into parliament. According to Ludlow, this scheme was prepared by Cromwell’s creatures and at his instigation; but this is hardly consistent with his hesitation to accept the crown, and his dissatisfaction with some of the provisions of the constitution. On 25 March it was decided by 123 to 62 votes that the Protector should be asked to take the kinship upon him, and on 31 March the ‘petition and advice’ was presented to him for acceptance. Cromwell replied by expressing his general approval of the provisions of the scheme and his sense of the honour offered him, but saying that he had not been able to find that either his duty to God or his duty to the parliament required him to undertake that charge under that title (Carlyle, Speech viii. 3 April 1657). A series of conferences now took place, in which parliament endeavoured to remove Cromwell'’s scruples as to the title, and agreed to consider his objections to some of the details of the new constitution. On 8 May he grave his final answer: ‘Though I think the act of government doth consist of very excellent parts, in all but that one thing of the title as to me . . . I cannot undertake this government with the title of king’ (Speech xiv.) All the efforts of the constitutional lawyers had failed to convince Cromwell of the necessity of the restoration of the kingly title.
‘I do judge for myself that there is no necessity of this name of king; for the other names may do as well' (Speech xi.) He was half inclined to believe that God had blasted the title as well as the family which had borne it (ib.) He contemptuously described the title as ‘a feather in the hat,’ and the crown as ‘a shining bauble for crowds to raze at or kneel to’ (Carlyle, Letter cc.) But if it signified nothing to him, it signified much to others. To the army it meant the restoration of all they had fought to overthrow, and from the first moment they had been loud in their opposition. On 27 Feb. 1657 Lambert and a hundred officers addressed the Protector to refuse the crown, ​and on 8 May a petition from many officers against the restoration of monarchy was presented to parliament (Burton, Diary, i. 382, ii. 116). This last petition was, according to Ludlow, the sole cause of Cromwell’s final refusal (Ludlow, Memoirs, 224). From many a staunch Cromwellian outside the army letters and pamphlets against kingship reached the Protector (Nickolls, Letters addressed to Cromwell, pp. 139–43; Chidlby, Reasons against choosing the Protector to he King). It became clear that to accept the crown would alienate the greater part of the army. Such a schism the Protector was extremely anxious to avoid. In his speech on 13 April he told the parliament that good men generally did not swallow the title, and urged them to comply with the weaknesses of men who had been faithful and bled for the cause. ‘I would not,’ he said, ‘that you should lose any servant or friend that might help in this work, that any should be offended by a thing that signifies no more to me than I have told you this does’ (Speech xi.)
Thus at the very beginning of the conferences Cromwell plainly stated the reason which led to his final refusal of the title, but he had good reason for delaying the refusal itself. After so many experiments and failures, the petition and advice held forth a prospect of the long desired settlement. ‘I am hugely taken with the word settlement, with the thing, and with the notion of it,’ he told parliament. In the scheme in question the religious and civil liberties of the nation seemed to him to be fully secured. There was that monarchical element which he had pronounced desirable in 1651. There were the checks on the arbitrary power of the House of Commons which he had considered indispensable in 1653. Above all, ‘that great natural and civil liberty, liberty of conscience,’ which had led to the breach with his first parliament, was fully secured in it. ‘The things provided in the petition,’ said Cromwell, ‘do secure the liberties of the people of God as they never before had them’ (Speech xiii.)
Had he definitely refused the crown when it was first offered him, parliament might have thrown up the whole scheme in disgust. Even if they had persisted in enacting the rest of the petition and advice, they would hardly have adopted the Protector’s suggestions for its amendment, for those suggestions were adopted in the hope of obtaining his acceptance of the crown. After the refusal of the crown they simply substituted the title of lord protector for that of king, and altered the first clause accordingly. Cromwell accepted the petition thus altered on 25 May, and was a second time installed Protector on 26 June 1657. But his powers under the new constitution wore far more extensive than they had been under the ‘instrument of government.’ He acquired the right to appoint his own successor. With the approval of parliament he was empowered to nominate the members of the newly erected second chamber. The grant of a fixed sum for the maintenance of the army and navy made him to a great extent independent of parliamentary subsidies. The increase of his authority was marked by a corresponding increase in his outward state. At his first inauguration Cromwell had been clad in plain black velvet, and invested with the civil sword as the symbol of his authority. At his second he was robed in purple and ermine, and presented with a golden sceptre. His elder children had married into the families of private gentlemen. Now he matched his third daughter, Mary, with Lord Falconbridge (11 Nov. 1657), and his youngest, Frances, with the heir of the Earl of Warwick (19 Nov. 1657).
As 1657 was the culminating point of Cromwell’s greatness at home, so it marked the fullest development of his foreign policy. On 23 March 1657 he concluded an offensive and defensive alliance with France, by which six thousand English foot were to take part in the war in Flanders, and Dunkirk and Mardyke to be England’s share of the joint conquests (Guizot, ii. 562; Chéruel, Histoire de France sous le Ministère de Mazarin, iii. 52). On 20 April Blake destroyed the Spanish fleet at Santa Cruz, and in September Mardyke passed into Cromwell’s hands. Cromwell sought to complete the league with France against the Spanish branch of the Hapsburgs by a league with Sweden against the Austrian branch. It was necessary to support Sweden in order to maintain the freedom of the Baltic and protect English trade thither. It was necessary also to stand up for the protestant cause against the league of the pope, Spain, and Austria to tread it under foot. He spoke of Charles Gustavus as a poor prince who had ventured his all for the protestant cause (Carlyle, Speech xvii.) All depended, however, on the question whether parliament would co-operate with the Protector to maintain the recent settlement. When parliament met in January 1658, Cromwell’s party in the House of Commons was weakened by the promotion of many of his supporters to the upper house and the readmission of the members excluded during the first session. The Protector’s opening speech was full of confidence that the desired settlement was at last secure. He hailed the ​assembled members as the repairers of breaches and the restorers of paths to dwell in, the highest work which mortals could attain to in the world (Speech xvi. 20 Jan. 1658). But the republican leaders refused to recognise the new House of Lords or to transact business with it. They remained deaf to Cromwell’s appeals to consider the danger of the protestant interest abroad, and the risk of a new and a bloodier civil war (Speech xvii. 25 Jan. 1658). While they disputed, Charles II had collected in Flanders the Irish regiments in Spanish service, hired Dutch ships for their transport, and was preparing to effect a landing in England; the plan of the opposition was to incite the malcontents in the army and city to present petitions against the late settlement, and to vote, in reply, an address demanding the limitation of the Protector’s control over the army and the recognition of the House of Commons as the supreme authority of the nation. Cromwell forestalled the completion of their plot, and, charging them with playing the game of the King of Scots, and seeking to throw everything into a confusion in order to devise a commonwealth again, suddenly dissolved parliament (Speech xviii. 4 Feb. 1658; Tanner MSS. lii. 225, 229).
Over the threatened insurrection and invasion Cromwell triumphed without difficulty. City and army again declared their resolution to stand by him. The plots of the anabaptists and the royalists were paralysed by the arrest of their leaders, and the strength of the English navy prevented any landing from Flanders. Abroad his policy seemed still more successful. In February 1658 an English agent mediated the peace of Roschild between Denmark and Sweden. On 28 March the league with France was renewed for another year (Chéruel, iii. 133). In April came news of the defeat of a Spanish attempt to reconquer Jamaica. On 4 June the united forces of France and England defeated the Spaniards before Dunkirk, and on the 15th that place was handed over to Lockhart [see Lockhart, Sir William]. Once more Cromwell intervened on behalf of the Vaudois, and by his influence with Mazarin seemed some amelioration of their condition. But this success was more apparent than real. In spite of all opposition another Austrian prince had been elected emperor, and Mazarin was already preparing to make peace with Spain. The war between Sweden and Denmark broke out again in August, and the ambition of Charles Gustavus brought Brandenburg and Holland to the aid of the Danes. A protestant league was impossible, because the protestant powers preferred to pursue their separate national interests. The great aim of the Protector’s foreign policy was unsuited to the actual conditions of Europe. The era of religious wars was over, and material rather than religious considerations shaped the mutual relations of European powers. Nevertheless the energy of the Protector’s government had given himself and England a great position in Europe. His greatness at home, wrote Clarendon, was a mere shadow to his greatness abroad; and Burnet recalls Cromwell’s traditional boast that he would make the name of Englishmen as great as ever that of Roman had been (Clarendon, Rebellion, xv. 152; Burnet, Own Time, i. 138, ed. 1823). Poets were still more emphatic. ‘He once more joined us to the continent,’ sang Marvell, while Sprat depicted Cromwell as rousing the British lion from his slumbers, and Dryden as teaching him to roar (Three Poems upon the Death of Oliver, late Lord Protector, 1659). Still more glorious appeared his policy when contrasted with that of Charles II. ‘It is strange,’ notes Pepys, ‘how everybody do nowadays reflect upon Oliver and commend him, what brave things he did, and made all the neighbour princes fear him’ (Diary, 12 July 1667). Of those who inquired into the aims of Cromwell’s foreign policy, many, like Morland, praised him for identifying the interests of England with the interest of European protestantism (Morland, History of the Churches of Piemont, p. 2). In the parliament of 1659, however, there were loud complaints that the Protector had sacrificed the interests of trade. In the eyes of the merchants and of many of the republicans Holland rather than Spain was the natural enemy of England (Burton, Diary, iii. 394; Coke, Detection, ii. Still more was he censured by one class of politicians, as the rivalry of France and England grew more bitter, for destroying the balance of power in Europe by his alliance with France against Spain (Bethel, The World’s Mistake in Oliver Cromwell; Bolingbroke, Letters on the Study of History, vii.; Hume, History of England).
While abroad Cromwell’s policy was only partially successful, he was beginning himself to perceive his failure in England. ‘I would have been glad,’ he said, ‘to have lived under my woodside, to have kept a flock of sheep, rather than undertake such a government as this’ (Carlyle, Speech xviii.) The Protector frequently compared himself to a constable set to keep the peace of the parish, and the comparison was not inapt. He could keep order amid contending factions, but he could do no more. He could maintain his government against all oppo​sition, but he could not found it on the acceptance of the nation.
Maidstone does not hesitate to say that it was the burden of being compelled to wrestle with the difficulties of his places without the assistance of parliament which brought Cromwell to his grave (Thurloe, i. 766). Yet he had hardly dissolved his last parliament when the need of money obliged him to determine to summon another, and he was considering the question of the securities to be exacting from its members during the summer of 1658. In the last months of his life, Cromwell, according to Heath and other royalist writers, was in constant dread of assassination (Flagellum, 204). His murder had formed part of the plots of Gerard (1654) and Sindercombe (1657), and incitements to it both from royalist and republican quarters were not wanting. A proclamation was secretly circulated in 1654, promising in the name of Charles II knighthood and 500l. a year to the slayer of ‘a certain base mechanic fellow called Oliver Cromwell,’ who had tyrannously usurped the supreme power (Thurloe, ii. 248). Sexby published ‘Killing no Murder’ during the debates on the kingship, in 1657. In 1656 Cromwell had thought it necessary to double his guards, but there is no evidence of extraordinary precautions being taken in 1658.
Cromwell’s health had long been impaired by the fatigues of war and government. In the spring of 1648, and again in the spring of 1651, he had been dangerously ill, an mentions of his ill-health frequently occur during the protectorate (Cal. of State Papers, Dom. p. xvii, 1657–8; Guizott, ii. 230). The summer of 1658 was exceedingly unhealthy, and a malignant fever raged so generally in England that a day of public humiliation on account of it was ordered. The death of his favourite daughter, Elizabeth Claypoole (6 Aug. 1658), and attendance on her during her illness seriously affected Cromwell’s own health. Even before his daughter’s death he had begun to sicken, and his illness finally developed into what was defined as ‘a bastard tertian ague.’ Early in August he was confined to his bed, but on the 20th George Fox met him riding at the head of his guards in Hampton Court park, and thought he looked like a dead man already (Fox, Journals, p. 195). The fever returned and grew worse, and, by the advice of his physicians, Cromwell removed from Hampton Court to Whitehall for change of air. At Whitehall he died, at three o’clock on the afternoon of 3 Sept., on the day after the great storm, and the anniversary of Dunbar and Worcester. (Accounts of Cromwell’s illness and death are to be found in the following places: Thurloe, vii. 294–375; A Collection of several Passages concerning his late Highness Oliver Cromwell in the Time of his Sickness, written by one that was then Groom of his Bedchamber, 1659, probably by Charles Harvey; Bate, one of Cromwell’s physicians, gives some additional information in his Elenchus Motuum Nuperorum, pt. ii. p. 234, ed. 1685; and something may be gathered from Ludlow, Memoirs, p. 232, and Mercurius Politicus, 2–9 Sept. 1658.)
Cromwell’s body after being embalmed was removed to Somerset House (20 Sept.), where his effigy dressed in robes of state was for many days exhibited. The funeral was originally fixed for 9 Nov., but, owing to the magnitude of the necessary preparations, did not take place till 23 Nov. (Mercurius Politicus). He was buried in Westminster Abbey, in Henry VII’s chapel at the east end of the middle aisle, ‘amongst kings and with a more than regal solemnity,’ writes Cowley. (Accounts of the funeral are given in Mercurius Politicus for 1658; Noble, i. 275; Cromwelliana; Burton, Diary, ii. 516; Evelyn, Diary, 23 Nov. 1658.) The expense of the funeral was enormous: 60,000l. was allotted for it, and in August 1659, 19,000l. was reported to be still owing (Heath, Chronicle, 39; Cal. of State Papers, Dom. 1658–9, xi.) In the second session of the Convention parliament a bill for the attainder of Cromwell and other dead regicides was introduced into the House of Commons by Heneage Finch (7 Nov. 1660). On 4 Dec., when the bill was returned from the lords with their amendments, Captain Titus moved that the bodies of Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw should be exhumed and hung on the gallows. This was unanimously agreed to; though many must have secretly agreed with Pepys, whom it troubled, ‘that a man of so great courage as he was should have that dishonour done him, though otherwise he might deserve it well enough’ (Diary, 4 Dec. 1660). Cromwell’s body was accordingly disinterred on 26 Jan. 1661, and hung on the gallows at Tyburn on 30 Jan. 1661, the twelfth anniversary of the king’s execution. The head was then set up on a pole on the to of Westminster Hall, and the trunk buried) under the gallows (Mercurius Publicus, 24 Jan., 7 Feb. 1661; Kennet, Register, 367; Parliamentary History, xxiii. 6, 38; Diaries of Pepys and Evelyn, 30 Jan. 1661). Before long a rumour was spread that the body thus treated was not Cromwell’s. When Sorbière was travelling in England in 1663, he heard that Cromwell had caused the royal tombs in Westminster Abbey to be opened, and the bodies to be ​transposed, that so his own burial-place might be unknown (Sorbière, Voyage to England, p. 68, ed. 1709).
Pepys mentioned Sorbière's story to Jeremiah White, late chaplain to the Protector, who told him that he believed Cromwell 'never had so poor a low thought in him to trouble himself about it' (13 Oct. 1664). Another report was that by Cromwell's last orders his body had been secretly conveyed away and buried at the dead of night on the field of Naseby, 'where he had obtained the greatest victory and glory' (Harleian Miscellany, ii. 286). A number of references to different stories of this nature are collected by Waylen (House of Cromwell, 340, 344). A tablet was erected in Westminster Abbey by Dean Stanley to the memory of Cromwell and other persons whose remains were ejected at the Restoration.
Elizabeth Cromwell, the widow of the Protector, survived her husband seven years, dying on 19 Nov. 1665 (Noble, i. 123). Of her life and character little is really known. One of her letters to her husband is printed by Nickolls (Letters addressed to Cromwell, p. 40). Ludlow mentions her unwillingness to take up her residence at Whitehall, and the gossip of the royalists about her homeliness and parsimony is collected in a pamphlet entitled 'The Court and Kitchen of Elizabeth, commonly called Joan Cromwell.' On her husband's death she was voted the sum of 20,000l., an annuity of 20,000l., and St. James's Palace for residence (Cal. State Papers, Dom. p. 11, 1658–9). But this does not seem to have been paid, for one of the requirements of the army petition (12 May 1659) was that an annuity of 8,000l. should be settled on the Protector's widow (Parliamentary History, xxi. 405). After the Restoration she found a refuge with her son-in-law, John Claypoole, at Norborough in Northamptonshire (Noble, i. 123–9).
The following is a list of the children of Oliver and Elizabeth Cromwell: Robert, baptised 13 Oct. 1621, died May 1639, described in the register of Felstead Church as 'Eximie pius juvenis Deum timens supra multos' (Noble, i. 132; Forster, Edinburgh Review, January' 1856); Oliver, baptised 6 Feb. 1622–1623, cornet in Lord St. John's troop in the army of the Earl of Essex, died of small-pox in March 1644 (Noble, i. 132; Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War, i. 369); Richard, afterwards lord protector, born 4 Oct. 1626 [see Cromwell, Richard; Henry, afterwards lord-lieutenant of Ireland, born 20 Jan. 1627–8 [see Cromwell, Henry]; Bridget, baptised 4 Aug. 1624, married Henry Ireton 15 June 1646, and after his death Charles Fleetwood [see Ireton, Henry; Fleetwood, Charles]; Elizabeth, baptised 2 July 1629, married John Claypoole [see Claypoole, Elizabeth; Claypoole, John]; Mary, baptised 9 Feb. 1636–7, married Lord Fauconberg 19 Nov. 1657 [see Belasyse, Thomas], died 14 March 1712 (Noble, i. 143; Waylen, p. 96); Frances, baptised 6 Dec. 1638, married Robert Rich 11 Nov. 1657, and after his death Sir John Russell, bart., of Chippenham, died 27 Jan. 1720–1 (Noble, i. 148; Waylen, p. 102). Lists of the engraved portraits of Cromwell are given by Granger and Noble (Granger, Biographical History; Noble, i. 300), and the catalogue of the prints inserted in the Sutherland copy of Clarendon in the Bodleian may also be consulted with advantage. Some additional information on this subject is to be found in Walpole's 'Anecdotes of Painting' (ed. Dallaway and Wornum, pp. 432, 529). Walpole is the authority for the story of Cromwell and Lely. Captain Winde told Sheffield, duke of Buckingham, that Oliver certainly sat to Lely, and while sitting said to him: 'Mr. Lely, I desire you would use all your skill to paint my picture truly like me, and not flatter me at all; but remark all these roughnesses, pimples, warts, and everything, otherwise I never will pay a farthing for it' (ib. 444). Of his portraits the most characteristic is that by Cooper at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. Of caricatures and satirical prints a list is given in the 'Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, Division I., Satires,' vol. i. 1870. An account of all medals, coins, and seals representing Cromwell is given by Mr. Henfrey in his elaborate 'Numismata Cromwelliana,' 1877. Of Cromwell's person the best description is that given by Maidstone, the steward of his household. 'His body was well compact and strong, his stature under six feet, I believe about two inches, his head so shaped as you might see it a storehouse and shop both of a vast treasury of natural parts.' 'His temper was exceeding fiery', as I have known; but the flame, if it kept down for the most part, was soon allayed with those moral endowments he had. He was naturally compassionate towards objects in distress, even to an effeminate measure. ... A larger soul, I think, hath seldom dwelt in a house of clay than his was' (Thurloe, i. 766). Warwick, a less favourable observer, speaks of Cromwell's 'great and majestic deportment and comely presence' when Protector, and Clarendon remarks that 'as he grew into place and authority his parts seems to be renewed, and when he was to act the part of a great man he did it without ​any indecency through the want of custom’ (Warwick, Memoirs, p. 247; Clarendon, Rebellion, xv. 148).
Few rulers were more accessible to petitioners, and accounts of interviews with the Protector are very numerous. With old friends he would occasionally lay aside his greatness and be extremely familiar, and in their company, in the intervals of the discussion of state affairs, he would amuse himself by making verses and occasionally taking tobacco (Whitelocke, Memorials, f. 656). Throughout his life Cromwell retained a strong taste for field sports. Aubrey notices his love for hawking, and the favour Sir James Long thereby found with him (Letters from the Bodleian, ii. 433). English agents in the Levant were commissioned to procure arabs and barbs for the Protector, and horses were the frequent present of foreign princes to him. His accident when driving the six horses sent him by the Duke of Oldenburg was celebrated by Wither and Denham (Denham, The Jolt; Wither, Vaticinium Casuale). Equally strongly marked was Cromwell’s love for music (Perfect Politician, p. 217). ‘He loved a good voice and instrumental music well,’ says Wood, and tells the story of a senior student of Christ Church, expelled by the visitors, whom Cromwell restored to his studentship in return for the pleasure which his singing had given him (Wood, Life, p. 102). Nor was he without feeling for other arts. Cromwell’s care kept Raphael’s cartoons in England, his rooms at Hampton Court and Whitehall were hung with finely worked tapestries, and many good puritans were scandalised by the statues which he allowed to remain standing in Hampton Court gardens (Cal. State Papers, Dom.: Nicholls, Letters addressed to Cromwell, p. 115). Cromwell protected and encouraged learning and literature. With his relative, Waller, he was on terms of considerable intimacy; he allowed Hobbes and Cowley to return from exile, and he released Cleveland when he was arrested by one of the major-generals. Milton and Marvell were in his service as Latin secretaries, and he also employed Marvell as tutor to one of his wards. He personally intervened with the Irish government to save the estate of Spenser’s grandson, but rather on account of his grandfather’s writings on Ireland than his poetry (Prendergast, Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland, p. 117). Ussher, Dr. Brownrigg, and other learned royalists were favoured by the Protector, and Walton was assisted in the printing of his polyglot bible.
Cromwell protected the universities from the attacks of the anabaptists, and even Clarendon admits that they flourished under his government. He was chancellor of Oxford from 1601 to 1667, presented a number of Greek manuscripts to the Bodleian, and founded a new readership in divinity (Wood, Annals, ii. 667). In 1656 he granted a charter to the proposed university at Durham (Burton, Diary, ii. 631).
Of Cromwell’s character contemporaries took widely different views. To royalists like Clarendon he was simply ‘a brave, bad man;’ and it was much if they admitted, as he did, that the usurper had some of the virtues which have caused the memory of men in all ages to be celebrated (Rebellion, xv. 147–66). To staunch republicans like Ludlow, Cromwell was an apostate, who had throughout aimed at sovereignty and sought it from the most selfish personal motives. Ludlow’s charges were well replied to by an anonymous writer immediately on the publication of his ‘Memoirs’ (Somers Tracts, ed. Scott, vi. 416). Baxter expresses a very popular view in his sketch of Cromwell’s career (Reliquæ Baxterianæ, p. 99). ‘Cromwell,’ says Baxter, ‘meant honestly in the main, and was pious and conscionable in the main course of his life till prosperity and success corrupted him. Then his general religious zeal gave way to ambition, which increased as successes increased. When his successes had broken down all considerable opposition, then was he in face of his strongest temptations, which conquered him when he had conquered others.’ A study of Cromwell’s letters and speeches leads irresistibly to the conclusion that he was honest and conscientious throughout. His ‘general religious zeal’ and his ‘ambition’ were one. Before the war began he expressed his desire to put himself forth for the cause of God, and in his last prayer gave thanks that he had been ‘a mean instrument to do God’s people some good and God service.’ He took up arms for both civil and religious liberty, but the latter grew increasingly important to him, and as a ruler he avowedly subordinated ‘the civil liberty and interest of the nation’ ‘to the more peculiar interest of God’ (Carlyle, Speech viii.) Save as a means to that end, he cared little for constitutional forms. ‘I am not a man scrupulous about words, or names, or such things,’ he told parliament, and he spoke with scorn of ‘men under the bondage of scruples’ who could not ‘rise to the spiritual heat’ the cause demanded (Speeches viii. xi.) In that cause he spared neither himself nor others. ‘Let us all be not careful,’ he wrote in 1648, ‘what men will make of these actings. They, will they, nill they, shall fulfil the good pleasure ​of God, and we shall serve our generations. Our rest we expect elsewhere: that will be durable’ (Carlyle, Letter lxvii.)
Life of Oliver Cromwell, by a Gentleman of the Middle Temple’ (John Banks), 1739, 8vo, which reached a third edition in 1760. In 1740 the Rev. Francis Peck published his ‘Memoirs of the Life and Actions of Oliver Cromwell, as delivered in three Panegyrics of him written in Latin;’ Peck also published various papers relating to Cromwell in his ‘Desiderata Curiosa,’ 1732–6. More valuable was ‘An Account of the Life of Oliver Cromwell’ after the manner of Bayle, by William Harris, D.D., published in 1762, and forming the third volume of the collection of lives by Harris published in 1814. In 1784 appeared Mark Noble’s ‘Memoirs of the Protectoral House of Cromwell,’ ‘a kind of Cromwellian biographical dictionary’ Carlyle terms it, the third edition of which, dated 1787, is here referred to. The nineteenth century opened with the publication of ‘Memoirs of the Protector, Oliver Cromwell, and of his sons Richard and Henry, illustrated by original Letters and other Family Papers,’ by Oliver Cromwell [q. v.], a descendant of the family. The author was a great-grandson of Henry Cromwell, and his last descendant in the male line. His avowed object was to vindicate the character of the Protector, and his work is valuable as containing copies of original letters and authentic portraits in the possession of the Cromwell family. These papers were in 1871 in the possession of Mrs. Prescott (Hist. MSS. Comm. 2nd Rep. 97). Forster’s ‘Life of Cromwell,’ 1839, which forms two volumes of the series of ‘Lives of Eminent British Statesmen’ in Lardner’s ‘Cabinet Cyclopaedia,’ is a work of considerable research, but written too much from the standpoint of the republican party. The vindication of Cromwell’s character which his descendant had attempted was achieved by Carlyle in ‘Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches,’ 1845, but as an account of Cromwell’s government and policy Carlyle’s work is far from complete. Of later English lives the only one deserving mention is that by J. A. Picton, ‘Oliver Cromwell, the Man and his Mission,’ 1883. Foreign lives are numerous, but of little value. Galardi’s ‘La Tyrannie Heureuse, ou Cromwell Politique,’ 1671, is mainly based on Heath, and the lives by Raguenet (1691) and Gregorio Leti (1692) are interesting as works of imagination. The first foreign life of any value is that of Villemain (1819). The last, ‘Oliver Cromwell und die puritanische Revolution,’ by Moritz Brosch, 1886, contains the results of some recent researches in Italian archives. Guizot’s ‘Histoire de la République d’Angleterre et de Cromwell’ (translated, 2 vols. 1864), Ranke’s ‘History of England’ (translated, 6 vol. 1875), and Mason’s ‘Life of Milton’ (6 vols. 1867–80) are indispensable for the history of Cromwell’s government, and Gardiner’s ‘History of England’ (10 vols. 1883–4) and ‘History of the Great Civil War,’ 1886, for Cromwell’s earlier career Godwin’s ‘History of the Commonwealth of England’ (4 vols. 1824–8) is still valuable from the author’s knowledge of the pamphlet literature of the period.
II. Of the authorities valuable for special portions of Cromwell’s life the following may be mentioned. The evidence relating to Cromwell’s life up to 1642 is collected in Sanford’s ‘Studies and Illustrations of the Great Rebellion,’ 1868. For the first civil war Rushworth’s ‘Collections,’ vols. v. vi.; Sprigge’s ‘Anglia Rediviva,’ 1647; the ‘Fairfax Correspondence,’ vols. iii. iv. ed. Boll, 1849; the ‘Letters of Robert Baillie,’ ed. Laing, ​3 vols. 1841; and the Camden Society’s volume on ‘Manchester’s Quarrel with Cromwell’ will be found most useful. The scantiness of the ‘Domestic State Papers’ of this period is in part supplied by private collections, among which the Tanner, Carte, and Clarendon MS. in the Bodleian Library, and by the papers calendared in the reports of the Commission on Historical Manuscripts, of which the Lowndes and Verney MSS., and the papers of the Dukes of Sutherland and Manchester, are the most valuable. The journals of the two houses of parliament the great collection of pamphlets and newspapers in the British Museum are now and throughout indispensable. A volume of extracts from newspapers relating to Cromwell was published in 1810 under the title of ‘Cromwelliana,’ but except for the Protectorate the collection is very incomplete. Volumes vi. vii. of Rushworth’s, ‘Collection,’ supplemented by the papers printed in the ‘Old Parliamentary History’ (24 vols. 1751–1762), illustrate Cromwell’s conduct in 1647–8. The ‘Memoirs’ of Denzil Holles (1699) and Berkeley (1702), the ‘Vindication’ of Sir William Waller (1793), the ‘Narrative and Vindication of John Ashburnham published by Lord Ashburnham
C. H. F.