“I find him,” says a modern military writer, “at the very first entrance into the war acting on principles which past experience had established, following closely upon just that stage which the art of war had reached under Gustavus, using the very same moral stimulus which Gustavus had made so effective, using the very words on one occasion which Gustavus used on another, and indicating in various ways that he had most carefully studied the past, though he had not had the opportunity of doing any peace parade work.”
Cromwell watched the growth of arbitrary government in England with a still keener interest. In 1630, he was one of the many gentlemen prosecuted for omitting to go through the ceremony of knighthood, and finally had to pay ten pounds for his neglect. Presumably he also paid Ship-money, for there is no mention of his opposition to it amongst the State papers. If he refused to pay, the sheriff doubtless distrained upon his goods for the required amount, and there the matter ended. On another question Cromwell came into conflict with the local authorities, and was brought into collision with the King’s Council. Up to 1630, Huntingdon had been an ancient prescriptive corporation, governed by two bailiffs and a common council of twenty-four inhabitants who were elected yearly. On July 15, 1630, the town obtained a new charter from Charles I. “To prevent popular tumult,” the old common council was dissolved, and the government of the town vested in twelve aldermen elected for life, with a mayor, chosen annually out of the twelve, and a recorder. An oligarchy replaced a democracy. The chief agent of this change seems to have been Mr. Robert Barnard, a barrister who lived at Huntingdon, had lately bought an estate at Brampton hard by, and afterwards became Recorder of the town. The old common council had consented to the change in the government of Huntingdon, but when the terms of the new charter were examined a widespread discontent was aroused. Complaints were heard that it gave the mayor and aldermen power to deprive the burgesses of their rights in the common lands, and to levy exorbitant fines on burgesses who refused municipal office. Cromwell had assented to the change, and in the new charter he was appointed one of the three justices of the peace for the borough. But he thought these complaints well founded, and made himself the spokesman of the popular dissatisfaction. Perhaps Cromwell felt that he had been overreached by Barnard, whom in a later letter he significantly warns against too much subtlety. In his anger he made “disgraceful and unseemly speeches” to the new mayor and Barnard, and the corporation complained to the Privy Council. On November 2, 1630, the council committed Cromwell and one of his associates to custody. The case was heard on December 1st and referred to the arbitration of the Earl of Manchester, who, in his report, blamed Cromwell’s conduct, but ordered the charter to be amended in three points to meet his objections. The rights of the poorer burgesses were secured by an order that “the number of men’s cattle of all sorts which they now keep, according to order and usage, upon their commons, shall not be abridged or altered.” As to the personal question Manchester’s report was:
“For the words spoken of Mr. Mayor and Mr. Barnard by Mr. Cromwell, as they were ill, so they are acknowledged to be spoken in heat and passion and desired to be forgotten; and I found Mr. Cromwell very willing to hold friendship with Mr. Barnard, who with a good will remitting all the unkind passages past, entertained the same. So I left all parties reconciled.”
This quarrel was doubtless one of the reasons why Cromwell left Huntingdon. At St. Ives and Ely, he showed the same zeal to defend the rights of his poorer neighbours. In 1634, a company was incorporated for the drainage of the fens round Ely, which were known as the Great Level. The “Adventurers,” who were headed by the Earl of Bedford, were to be paid by a share of the lands they rescued from the water, and in 1637 the work was declared completed, and the reward claimed. By these drainage works the commoners lost the rights of pasturage and fishing they had previously enjoyed, and Cromwell made himself the champion of their interests against the “Adventurers.”
“It was commonly reported,” says a complaint, “by the commoners in Ely Fens and the Fens adjoining, that Mr. Cromwell of Ely had undertaken, they paying him a groat for every cow they had upon the commons, to hold the drainers in suit of law for five years, and that in the meantime they should enjoy every foot of their commons.”
In 1638, the King intervened, declared the work of drainage incomplete, and undertook to complete it himself, announcing that the inhabitants of the district were to continue in possession of their lands and commons till the work was really finished. Nothing else is known of Cromwell’s part in these disputes except a vague story told in the Memoirs of Sir Philip Warwick, that “the vulgar” grew clamorous against the scheme, and that Mr. Cromwell appeared as the head of their faction. Warwick, writing long after the events he referred to, assumed as a matter of course that Cromwell opposed the King, and the mistake found easy credence.
Some years later, Cromwell came forward in the same way to defend the rights of his old neighbours at St. Ives. The waste lands at Somersham near St. Ives had been enclosed without the consent of the commoners and sold to the Earl of Manchester. When the Long Parliament met, the aggrieved commoners petitioned the House of Commons for redress. The Lords intervened with an order in favour of Manchester. The commoners replied by proceeding “in a riotous and warlike manner” to break down the hedges and retake possession. Then the Lords sent the trained bands to reinstate Manchester, and Manchester issued sixty writs against the commoners. Without seeking to justify the violence of the commoners, Cromwell got the House of Commons to appoint a committee to consider the rights of the case. Hyde, its chairman, was greatly scandalised by the vehemence with which Cromwell advocated the rights of the commoners before it. Cromwell “ordered the witnesses and petitioners in the method of their proceeding, and enlarged upon what they said with great passion.” He reproached the chairman for partiality, used offensive language to the son of the noble earl who claimed the land, and “his whole carriage was so tempestuous, and his behaviour so insolent,” that the chairman threatened to report him to the House.
This persistent championship of the rights of peasants and small freeholders was the basis of Cromwell’s influence in the eastern counties. Common rights were something concrete and tangible, which appealed to many who were not Puritans, and came home to men to whom parliamentary privileges were remote abstractions. Every village Hampden looked to Cromwell as a leader, and was ready to follow him. In 1643, a royalist newspaper nicknamed him “The Lord of the Fens,” but his popularity with the fenmen began long before the military exploits which gained him the title.
In a more limited sphere Cromwell was well known as a zealous Puritan, but his opposition to Laud’s ecclesiastical policy did not bring him into any general notoriety. Williams, Bishop of Lincoln, was Cromwell’s kinsman, and lived during these years at Buckden near Huntingdon. He was wont to relate afterwards that his relative was in those days “a common spokesman for sectaries, and maintained their part with great stubbornness.” A part of Laud’s policy to which Cromwell was particularly hostile was the suppression of lectureships. The Puritans in the towns, discontented with the negligence of the established clergy in preaching, or with their doctrine, clubbed together to support lecturers, that is, clergymen whose sole business was preaching. Most corporations maintained a lecturer, and in 1625 a small society was formed for buying up impropriated tithes, and using the proceeds for the payment of lecturers. Laud sought to suppress these lectureships, and in 1633 the Star Chamber dissolved the Feoffees of Impropriations, and gave their patronage to the King.
At St. Ives or somewhere else in Huntingdonshire, there was a lectureship which Cromwell was anxious to keep up. It had been founded by some London citizens, and in 1636 was in danger of coming to an end through the stoppage of their subscriptions. Cromwell’s first letter is an appeal to a forgetful subscriber, worded with singular care and tact. “Not the least of the good works of your fellow citizens,” he begins,