Oliver Cromwell and the Rule of the Puritans in England

by C. H. Firth

“the gentlemen of ancient families were for the most part well affected to the King, yet there were a people of inferior degree, who by good husbandry, clothing, and other thriving arts, had gotten very great fortunes, and by degrees getting themselves into the gentlemen’s estates were angry that they found not themselves in the same esteem and reputation with those whose estates they had; and therefore studied all ways to make themselves considerable. These from the beginning were fast friends to the Parliament.”

In purely agricultural districts, the influence of the great landowners was generally decisive, but there were many notable exceptions. In the eastern counties, many of the chief gentry were disposed to take up arms for the King, but “the freeholders and yeomen in general adhered to the Parliament.”

Yet, though the bulk of the upper classes was on one side, the war never became a social war, but remained a struggle of opinions and ideas. From the very beginning, men who were determined to maintain the Church intact adopted the King’s cause, and those who desired to change the government of the Church, or sought freedom of worship outside of it, supported the Parliament. At first, even to Puritans, the political question seemed more important than the religious. Colonel Hutchinson read the manifestos of both parties till “he became abundantly informed in his understanding and convinced in his conscience of the righteousness of the Parliament’s cause in point of civil right.” But “though he was satisfied of the endeavours to bring back Popery and subvert the true Protestant religion, he did not think that so clear a ground for the war as the defence of English liberties.”

No contemporary record reveals the precise motives which led Cromwell to take up arms: we are left to infer them from his earlier acts and his later utterances. “I profess,” he wrote in 1644, “I could never satisfy myself of the justness of this war, but from the authority of the Parliament to maintain itself in its rights.” Like Hutchinson, he regarded the King’s Church policy as subversive of Protestantism, and defined the war as undertaken for “the maintenance of our civil liberties as men, and our religious liberties as Christians.” As the war progressed, religious liberties grew more and more important in his eyes, and what had been originally a struggle against innovations became an attempt to establish freedom of conscience.

“Religion,” said Cromwell in 1654, “was not the thing at first contested for, but God brought it to that issue at last, and gave it unto us by way of redundancy, and at last it proved to be that which was most dear to us. And wherein consisted this more than in obtaining that liberty from the tyranny of the bishops to all species of Protestants to worship God according to their own light and conscience?”

In every civil war, political and religious convictions must often conflict with family ties. Few families were like the Fairfaxes and Sheffields, of whom it was said that there was not one of those names but was on the side of the Parliament. Royalists might have made a like boast of the Byrons, the Comptons, and many less distinguished houses, but in very many cases the nearest relations took opposite sides. At Edgehill, the Earl of Denbigh and the Earl of Dover charged in the King’s guard, while their sons, Lord Feilding and Lord Rochford, fought under Essex. In Cromwell’s own family, his uncle, Sir Oliver, and his cousin, Henry Cromwell, were both ardent Royalists, and owed the preservation of their estates, after the defeat of their party, to the intercession of their kinsman.

While this division of families and friends made the war more painful, it tended to humanise the manner in which it was conducted. The men who found themselves reluctantly arrayed in arms against each other could not forget old friendship and old kinship.

“My affections to you,” wrote Sir William Waller to his old comrade, Sir Ralph Hopton, when their two armies were about to meet in battle, “are so unchangeable that hostility itself cannot violate my friendship to your person, but I must be true to the cause wherein I serve. The great God, who is the searcher of my heart, knows with what reluctance I go upon this service, and with what perfect hatred I look upon a war without an enemy. The God of peace in His good time send us peace, and in the meantime fit us to receive it. We are both upon the stage, and we must act the parts that are assigned us in this tragedy. Let us do it in a way of honour, and without personal animosities.”

On the whole, the war was honourably and humanely carried on. The savage cruelty which marked the Thirty Years’ War in Germany is absent in the contemporaneous war in England. Little blood was shed except in the heat of battle; quarter was liberally granted, and the lives of non-combatants were respected. But inevitably the prolongation of the war embittered the temper of both parties, and when, as in Scotland and Ireland, their hostility was inflamed by national animosity a fiercer spirit showed itself.

War broke out in England in the summer of 1642, and there were many local struggles between the partisans of King and Parliament before the royal standard was set up at Nottingham (August 22, 1642). In many counties a royalist lord-lieutenant endeavoured to put in force the King’s commission of array, while a parliamentary lord-lieutenant tried to carry into effect the Parliament’s militia ordinance. Each called on the local train-bands to gather round him, and sought to obtain possession of the magazine in which the arms and munitions of the county were stored. The first of these collisions—a bloodless one—took place at Leicester in June; blood was shed in an affray at Manchester on July 15th. In July, the King attempted to besiege Hull, and some lives were lost in a sally. In August, the Marquis of Hertford proclaimed the commission of array in Somersetshire, the Governor of Portsmouth declared for the King, and the flame spread from the north and the midlands to the western counties. As yet there was no serious fighting, but everywhere men gathered in arms, and preparations for the campaign began.