Oliver Cromwell and the Rule of the Puritans in England

by C. H. Firth

Meanwhile, in the south of England the campaign so prosperously begun was ending in disaster. Charles had turned on his pursuer, and defeated Waller at Cropredy Bridge, in Oxfordshire, on June 29th. Leaving Waller’s disorganised and mutinous army too weak to do any harm, he followed Essex into the west, and, joined by the forces of the western Royalists, threatened to overpower him. At the end of August, the Committee of Both Kingdoms ordered the army of the Eastern Association to go to the succour of Essex. Cromwell was eager to do so. “The business,” he wrote to his friend Walton, “has our hearts with it, and truly, had we wings we would fly thither.” Manchester’s army, though ill provided with necessaries, and slandered by evil tongues as factious, was ready to serve anywhere. “We do never find our men so cheerful as when there is work to do.” But he went on to hint that there were obstructives in high places, who were less willing to fight than their soldiers. “We have some amongst us much slow in action; if we could all intend our own ends less, and our own ease too, our business would go on wheels for expedition.”

Before Manchester stirred from Lincoln the anticipated disaster came. At Lostwithiel on September 2nd, Skippon and the infantry of Essex’s army were forced to capitulate and to lay down their arms. The horse escaped by a night march through a gap in the royalist lines, while Essex himself and a few officers fled by sea. After his victory the King returned slowly to Oxford, and Manchester with the greatest reluctance moved south-west to meet him. “My army,” he said openly, “was raised by the Association and for the guard of the Association. It cannot be commanded by Parliament without their consent.” It was imperative that Charles should be fought before he could get to his old headquarters at Oxford, while his army was weakened by the forces left behind in the west, but Manchester’s refusal to advance allowed the Royalists to reach Newbury before the King was obliged to fight. At Newbury, on October 27th, Manchester’s army, strengthened by Waller’s forces and by what remained of Essex’s troops, made a joint attack on the King. Charles had only ten thousand men to oppose to the nineteen thousand brought against him, but he had chosen a strong position between two rivers, protected on one side by Donnington Castle, and covered, where it was most assailable, by intrenchments. Above all, his army was under a single commander, while the Parliament’s was directed by a committee. Essex was absent from illness, and the Committee of Both Kingdoms hoped to avoid disputes by putting the command in commission.

The parliamentary scheme was that Skippon’s foot, with the horse of Cromwell and Waller, should attack the King’s position on the west, while Manchester assaulted it on the north-east. It failed through lack of combination. Skippon’s infantry carried the royalist intrenchments, and recaptured several guns they had lost in Cornwall, but the cavalry, impeded by the nature of the ground, could effect little. Manchester delayed his attack till it was too late to assist them, and was repulsed with heavy loss. Nevertheless the result of the day’s fighting was that the King’s position was so seriously compromised that only a retreat could save his army. In the night, the royalist army silently marched past Manchester’s outposts, and by morning it was half way to Wallingford. Waller and Cromwell set out in pursuit with the bulk of the cavalry, but as Manchester and the majority of the committee refused to support them with infantry Charles made good his retreat to Oxford. A fortnight later, the King, reinforced by Rupert with five thousand men, returned to relieve Donnington Castle and carry off the artillery he had left there (October 9, 1644). He offered battle, and Cromwell was eager to fight, but Manchester and a majority of the committee declared against it. Foot and horse alike were greatly reduced in numbers, and the latter “tired out with hard duty in such extremity of weather as hath been seldom seen.” Manchester, in addition to military reasons, urged political arguments against risking a battle.

“If we beat the King ninety-nine times, yet he is King still, and so will his posterity be after him; but if the King beat us once we shall all be hanged, and our posterity made slaves.” “My Lord,” retorted Cromwell, “if this be so, why did we take up arms at first? This is against fighting ever hereafter. If so, let us make peace, be it ever so base.”

But much as he might despise Manchester’s logic, he had to bow to the logic of facts, and to accept the view of the committee in general.

So ended the campaign of 1644. The north of England had been definitely won, and with capable leadership the defeat of Essex in Cornwall might have been compensated by the defeat of the King in Berkshire. When Cromwell came to reflect on the incidents of the last few months, he attributed the failure to obtain this victory entirely to Manchester. He had failed, apparently, not through accident or want of foresight, but through backwardness to all action. And this backwardness, concluded Cromwell, came “from some principle of unwillingness to have the war prosecuted to a full victory; and a desire to have it ended by an accommodation on some such terms to which it might be disadvantageous to bring the King too low.” On November 25th, Cromwell rose in the House of Commons, told the story of the Newbury campaign, and made this charge against Manchester. Manchester vindicated his generalship in the House of Lords, alleging that he had always acted by the advice of the council of war, and that Cromwell was a factious and obstructive subordinate. Then, leaving military questions alone, he made a bitter attack on Cromwell as a politician. He had once given great confidence to the Lieutenant-General, but latterly he had become suspicious of his designs, and had been obliged to withdraw it. For Cromwell had spoken against the nobility, and had said that he hoped to live to see never a nobleman in England. He had expressed himself with contempt against the Assembly of Divines, and with animosity against the Scots for attempting to establish Presbyterianism in England. Finally, he had avowed that he desired to have none but Independents in the army of the Eastern Association, “so 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.”

Cromwell did not deny these utterances, and their revelation produced the effect which Manchester had anticipated. An enquiry into errors in the conduct of the war developed into a political quarrel. The Lords took up the cause of Manchester as the cause of their order. The Scots intrigued against Cromwell as the enemy of their creed. “For the interest of our nation,” wrote Baillie, “we must crave reason of that darling of the sectaries,” and talked of breaking the power of that potent faction “in obtaining his removal from the army, which himself by his over-rashness has procured.” Some of the Scottish leaders consulted together on the feasibility of accusing Cromwell as an “incendiary” who had sought to cause strife between the two nations, but the English lawyers consulted advised against it.

“Lieutenant-General Cromwell,” said Mr. Maynard, “is a person of great favour and interest with the House of Commons, and with some of the peers likewise, and therefore there must be proofs, and the most clear and evident proofs against him, to prevail with the Parliament to judge him an incendiary.”

As the controversy proceeded, the Lower House declared on Cromwell’s side, and the conviction of Manchester’s incapacity spread amongst its members. But, instead of pressing the charge home, Cromwell drew back. A personal triumph, to be gained at the cost of a rupture between the two Houses, and perhaps a rupture between England and Scotland, was not worth gaining. What he wanted was military efficiency and the vigorous conduct of the war, and he resolved to use the dissatisfaction which Manchester’s slackness had roused in order to obtain these ends, and to abandon the personal charges to secure them. The moment was propitious, for on November 23rd the Commons had ordered the Committee of Both Kingdoms to consider the reorganisation of the whole army. On December 9th, when the report on the charges against Manchester was brought in to the House of Commons, Cromwell turned the debate to the larger issue. The important thing now, he said, was to save the nation out of the bleeding, almost dying condition, which the long continuance of the war had brought it into.

“Without a more speedy, vigorous, and effectual prosecution of the war, we shall make the kingdom weary of us, and make it hate the name of a Parliament.”