Oliver Cromwell and the Rule of the Puritans in England

by C. H. Firth

With the capitulation of Oxford on June 24, 1646, the war was over. Worcester, it is true, held out till July, and isolated castles in Wales, such as Raglan, Denbigh, and Harlech, for some months longer, but their reduction was only a question of a short time.

Cromwell left these little sieges to be conducted by others, and returned to his duties in Parliament. He removed his family from Ely to London, and took a house in Drury Lane, moving thence about a year later to King Street, Westminster. His household was diminished by the marriage of his two elder daughters. Bridget, the eldest, had married, on June 15, 1646, Commissary-General Henry Ireton, her father’s most trusted subordinate, and Elizabeth, Cromwell’s favourite daughter, became, on January 13, 1646, the wife of John Claypole, a Northamptonshire squire. Only the two youngest daughters, Mary and Frances, were still at home. Of his four sons, two were already dead: Robert died in May, 1639, before the war began, and Captain Oliver five years later, while serving in his father’s regiment. Richard, the elder of the two who survived, was now in Fairfax’s life-guard, and Henry, who was about nineteen, was a cornet or lieutenant in some cavalry regiment. Cromwell had offered his sons to the cause as freely as he gave himself to it.

CHAPTER VIII
PRESBYTERIANS AND INDEPENDENTS
1642–1647

The settlement of the kingdom after the war ended was a task of far greater difficulty than the defeat of the King’s armies. It could not be solved by putting Charles upon his throne again as if nothing had happened. Measures had to be devised for securing permanent guarantees against misgovernment in the future, and for rendering a new war impossible. Moreover, these ends must be attained by means of an agreement between the King and the Parliament, because the working of the constitution depended on the co-operation of the two powers, and on the reconciliation of the two parties which had followed their flags. Nor was it possible to effect a lasting settlement without taking into account the new ideas and the new forces which had come into existence during the four years’ struggle.

Since the beginning of the Civil War an ecclesiastical revolution had taken place in England. As soon as hostilities commenced the Root and Branch party gained the ascendancy in Parliament, and in the first negotiations with the King, the total abolition of Episcopacy was one of the demands made. In July, 1643, Parliament summoned an assembly of divines to meet at Westminster, and undertake the reformation of the Church. Then followed the acceptance by Parliament of the Solemn League and Covenant, the implied promise to model the Church of England upon that of Scotland, and the inclusion of representatives of the Scottish clergy in the Assembly of Divines.

Step by step the English Church was transformed. In January, 1645, the two Houses passed a series of resolutions for the reorganisation of the Church upon a Presbyterian basis, followed by ordinances which established one after another the component parts of the system. By the close of 1646, the use of the Prayer-book had been prohibited, and a “Directory,” drawn up by the Assembly, had been enjoined in its stead, while new Articles of Belief, a new Confession of Faith, and a new Catechism were in preparation. Bishops and all the ecclesiastical hierarchy dependent on them had been abolished, and their lands vested in trustees for the payment of the debts of the State (October, 1646). The work was still incomplete, but under all outward conformity there would be an essential difference between the Presbyterian Churches of England and Scotland. In Scotland the Church was dependent upon no one; in England it would be dependent upon Parliament. Whatever the Westminster Assembly might decide was established only by the authority of Parliament, which revised its conclusions, criticised its formularies, and limited its functions as it thought fit. Compared to an ideal Presbyterian Church ruling by its inherent right as the one divinely ordained form of Church government, the English Church would be, as a Scottish divine complained, “only a lame Erastian presbytery.” Such as it was, however, its clergy were as high in their claim to authority as English bishops, and as intolerant as Scottish ministers. They proved in a hundred different ways the truth of Milton’s maxim that “new presbyter is but old priest writ large.”

During the years which saw the growth of English Presbyterianism, a rival system of ecclesiastical organisation had also taken root in England. The Independents drew their inspiration not from Scotland, but from the Puritan exiles in Holland and the Puritan colonists in New England. To the idea of a national Church with its local basis and its hierarchy of authorities, they opposed the idea that a true Church was a voluntary association of believers, and that each congregation was of right complete, autonomous, and sovereign. Most of them accepted the theology of Calvin even when they rejected his ecclesiastical organisation; all claimed the right to interpret the Bible for themselves without regard to tradition or authority. Their principle was that set forth in the advice which John Robinson gave to the Pilgrim Fathers—to be ready to receive whatever truth should be made known to them from the written word of God. Hence came their ardent faith in new revelations, with the diversity of doctrines and the multiplicity of sects which were its natural consequence. Hence the horror with which Presbyterians and Episcopalians alike regarded a system which began by a denial of their theory of Church and State, and ended by an attack upon the fundamentals of their creed.

Just as the two divisions of the parliamentary party differed as to the constitution of the Church, so they differed as to the constitution of the State. Each was a political as well as a religious party. The aim of the Presbyterians was to make King and Church responsible to Parliament, and so far the Independents went with them. But while one party proclaimed the sovereignty of Parliament, and justified its claim by historical precedent, the other proclaimed the sovereignty of the people, and based its claim on an appeal to natural rights. Church democracy, as Baxter called Independency, brought in its train State democracy. Applied to politics, the ecclesiastical theories of the Independents developed into the fundamental principles of democratic government. Those who held that a Church was a voluntary association of believers bound together by a mutual covenant, naturally adopted the corollary that a State was an association of freemen based on a mutual contract. If it was the right of the members of a religious body to elect their own ministers, it was evidently equally just that the members of a civil society should elect their own magistrates. More than once in its paper wars with the King, Parliament had put forward the view that Kings were but officers, whose power was a trust from the people, but it shrank from the distinct enunciation or the practical application of the principle its declarations contained. It was therefore in opposition to the Long Parliament that the sovereignty of the people was first asserted in English political life. In 1646, when John Lilburn was imprisoned by the Lords for libelling Manchester he appealed to the House of Commons as “the supreme authority of the nation,” and denied the authority of the Peers because they were not elected by the people. When the House of Commons refused to hear him he appealed “to the universality of the people,” as “the sovereign lord” from whom they derived their power, and by whom they were to be called to account for its use.