Oliver Cromwell and the Rule of the Puritans in England

by C. H. Firth

In May, Cromwell took another opportunity of attacking the bishops. The Commons had passed a bill excluding clergymen in general from holding secular office either as judges, councillors, or members of the House of Lords, and the Upper House showed a resolution not to pass it. On this the “root and branch” men replied with a bill for the abolition of bishops altogether, which Sir Edward Dering, a noted speaker, was persuaded to introduce. Afterwards Dering repented and explained. “The Bill,” he said, “was pressed into my hands by Sir Arthur Haslerig, being then brought to him by Sir Henry Vane and Mr. Oliver Cromwell.”

The “root and branch” bill never got farther than committee, but its introduction further accentuated the division in the popular party. A section, headed by Hyde and Lord Falkland, severed themselves definitely from their former friends. Naturally conservative in temper, they were satisfied with the reforms already achieved, and were more willing to trust the King with the constitution than Parliament with the Church. Before the end of the session, Hyde was in communication with the King, and a party of constitutional Royalists based on the defence of the Church was in process of formation. Charles was equally determined to maintain the Church, and full of schemes for regaining his lost power. The prospect of obtaining support in the House of Commons itself increased his confidence of ultimate success, and in August he set out for Scotland, hoping to win the Scottish nobility to his side, and to use one kingdom against the other.

In October, 1641, when the second session of the Long Parliament began, the position of affairs was greatly altered. The popular party was weakened by its differences on the religious question, and the division was rapidly spreading to the nation. At the same time, the parliamentary leaders had lost, through the withdrawal of the Scottish army, the military force which had protected them from an attempted coup d’état. That the fear of such a stroke on the King’s part was by no means groundless, the news from Scotland proved. It was rumoured that with the King’s sanction a party of royalist soldiers had plotted to seize Hamilton and Argyle, whose hasty flight from Edinburgh had alone saved their lives. On the top of this came the news of a rebellion in Ireland, of an attempt to surprise Dublin Castle, and of a massacre of the English colonists in Ulster. The rebellion spread daily, and as tattered fugitives straggled into Dublin, each with his story of murder and pillage, the excitement in England rose to fever heat. It came to be an article of faith that fifty thousand Englishmen had been barbarously murdered, and some said 150,000.

To modern historians the Irish rebellion seems only the natural result of the English system of governing Ireland, but to contemporary Englishmen it came like a bolt from the blue. The native Irish were embittered and impoverished by the confiscations of the last sixty years, and filled with fury and fear by Strafford’s intended plantation of Connaught. Now that the Puritans were in power, the complete suppression of the Catholic religion, only threatened before, seemed imminent and inevitable. The impeachment of Strafford and his most trusted counsellors had crippled the strong Government which Strafford had built up, and the disbanding of his army had filled the country with men trained to arms. The opportunity for a successful revolt had come at last, and it was no wonder that the Irish seized it. At its beginning, the rebellion of October, 1641, was a rising of the native Irish with the object of recovering the lands from which they had been expelled. It broke out first in the six counties of Ulster, planted in the reign of James I., and next in Wicklow, the most recent of the later plantations. But bloody and barbarous as the rebellion was, no general massacre was either planned or carried out. The first object of the rebels was simply to drive the colonists from their houses and lands, and in the process some were murdered, and all plundered. The number of persons killed in cold blood during the first month or two of the rebellion probably amounted to about four thousand, and perhaps twice as many perished from hardships and destitution.

To English Puritans, the only possible explanation of the rebellion was that it was the natural result of Popery. On December 4, 1641, the Long Parliament passed a resolution that they would never consent to any toleration of the Popish religion in Ireland, or in any other of his Majesty’s dominions. Equally fatal was the resolve that the funds for the reconquest of Ireland should be raised by fresh confiscations of Irish land, and the assignment of two and a half million acres for the repayment of those who advanced the money. One vote turned a local insurrection into a general rebellion; the other made the rebellion an internecine war.

Both parties in Parliament approved of these votes. A public subscription was opened, to which members of Parliament and merchants of London contributed freely. “Master Oliver Cromwell,” who knew nothing of Irish history, thought the plan wise and just, and put his name down for £500, which was about one year’s income. He shared the general ignorance of his contemporaries about the causes of the rebellion, and believed the prevalent exaggerations about the massacre.

“Ireland,” he told the Irish clergy eight years later, “was once united to England. Englishmen had good inheritances, which many of them had purchased with their money; they and their ancestors, from you and your ancestors. They had good leases from Irishmen, for long times to come; great stocks thereupon; houses and plantations erected at their own cost and charge. They lived peaceably and honestly among you. You had generally equal benefit of the protection of England with them; and equal justice from the laws, saving what was necessary for the State, out of reasons of State, to put upon some people apt to rebel upon the instigation of such as you. You broke this union. You unprovoked put the English to the most unheard-of and barbarous massacre (without respect to sex or age) that ever the sun beheld. And at a time when Ireland was in perfect peace.”

To reconquer Ireland an army had to be raised at once, and it was impossible for the parliamentary leaders to trust the King with its control. Less than six months before, Charles had plotted to bring up an army to overawe their debates. In his recent journey to Scotland he had again been tampering with the officers of the same army, and its disbandment had only just been effected. If they gave him a new army, who could doubt that before six months were over he would be turning it against the Parliament? Pym had no doubts, and, on November 6th, he brought forward an address saying that unless the King would employ such ministers as Parliament approved “they would take such a course for the securing of Ireland as might likewise secure themselves.” And while Pym proposed to seize upon the executive power as far as Ireland was concerned, Cromwell proposed to lay hands on it in England also. On November 6th he carried a motion that the two Houses should vote to the Earl of Essex power to command all the train-bands south of the Trent, and that those powers should continue till this Parliament should take further order. A month later, Haslerig brought in a militia bill, which gave a general appointed by the Parliament the supreme command of all the train-bands in England. The question whether the King or the Parliament should command the armed forces of the nation was thus definitely raised.

In the same November the Long Parliament appealed to the nation for support. The Grand Remonstrance set forth all the ills the nation had suffered in the fifteen years of the King’s reign, and all the Parliament had done in the last twelve months to remove them. It pointed out the obstacles which hindered them in their task, and announced what they hoped to do in the future. The root of every evil was a malignant design to subvert the fundamental laws and principles upon which the religion and justice of the kingdom were based. Let “the malignant party be removed,” and the reformation of Church and State could be completed. The Remonstrance bade the nation judge whether its representatives had been worthy of its confidence, and asked it to continue that confidence. It brought war nearer, not because it was an indirect indictment of the King, but because the ecclesiastical policy set forth in its last clauses divided the nation into two camps. In them the House declared its intention of taking in hand the work of church-reform, and demanded the calling of a general synod of divines to aid it in the task. Over these clauses of the Remonstrance the debate was long and bitter (November 22nd). When it passed by but eleven votes, and the majority proposed its printing, it seemed as if the Civil War would begin at once, and on the floor of the House. Members protested, and shouted, and waved their hats, and some took their sheathed swords in their hands as if they waited for the word to draw them. “I thought,” said an eye-witness, “we had all sat in the valley of the shadow of death; for we, like Joab’s and Abner’s young men, had catched at each other’s locks, and sheathed our swords in each other’s bowels.”

When the tumult was allayed, and the members went home, Cromwell’s whispered words to Falkland showed how much that night’s decision meant. “If the Remonstrance had been rejected,” he said, “I would have sold all I had the next morning, and never seen England more; and I know there are many other honest men of the same resolution.”