As yet, however, Lilburn’s principles found little acceptance in Parliament, and the Lower House had no intention of quarrelling with the Upper on a question of abstract rights. In the Commons, even after the new elections of 1645 and 1646 had recruited the numbers of the House, the Independents were a minority both on political and ecclesiastical questions. On a purely religious issue they could muster fifty or sixty votes, of whom probably less than half were convinced democrats. But the ties of party allegiance were weak, and the ability of the Independent leaders gave them an influence beyond the circle of their followers. On questions such as the conduct of the war, the control of the pretensions of the Westminster Assembly, and the claim of the Scots to dispose of the King, a majority of the House adopted the policy of the Independents. But when the war was over, and the dispute with the Scots settled, the ascendancy passed to the Presbyterian leaders, and remained with them.
On the other hand, the army had been from the beginning a stronghold of Independency, and there its adherents grew more numerous every day. In the summer of 1645, when Richard Baxter became chaplain to a regiment of cavalry, he found it full of hotheaded sectaries. Every sect and every heresy was represented in its ranks. “Independency and Anabaptism were most prevalent; Antinomianism and Arminianism equally distributed.” One day he had to confute the opponents of Infant Baptism, and another to vindicate Church order and Church government. But the most universal belief amongst officers and soldiers, and the error he most often had to controvert, was that the civil magistrate had no authority in matters of religion either to restrain or to compel, and that every man had a right to believe and to preach whatever he pleased.
In the army, too, the political principles of Independency had reached their fullest and freest development. Baxter found officers and soldiers “vehement against the King and against all government but popular.”
“I perceived” he writes, “that they took the King for a tyrant and an enemy, and really intended absolutely to master him or to ruin him, and that they thought, that if they might fight against him they might kill or conquer him; and if they might conquer they were never more to trust him further than he was in their power; and they thought it folly to irritate him by wars or contradictions in Parliament, if so be they needs must take him for their King, and trust him with their lives when they had thus displeased him.”
These were the principles upon which they thought any settlement should be based, and they meant to make their views heard. “They plainly showed me,” continues Baxter, “that they thought God’s providence would cast the trust of religion and the kingdom upon them as conquerors.”
In peace, even more than in war, the army looked to Cromwell to lead it. Apart from his splendid military gifts, he had all the qualities required to win popularity with soldiers. Cromwell had none of the reserve or reticence of Fairfax. A large-hearted, expansive, vigorous nature found expression in his acts and utterances. “He was of a sanguine complexion,” says Baxter, “naturally of such a vivacity, hilarity, and alacrity, as another man is when he hath drunken a cup of wine too much.” Elsewhere he speaks of Cromwell’s “familiar rustic carriage with his soldiers in sporting,” and one of Cromwell’s officers tells us that “Oliver loved an innocent jest.” Nor did it make him less popular that underneath this geniality lay a fiery temper, which sometimes flamed up into vehement utterances or sudden bursts of passion. Partly for this very reason he was generally credited with much more democratic opinions than he really had. People remembered his hard sayings about the Lords during his quarrel with Manchester, and took a practical man’s irritation against half-hearted and incapable leaders for rooted hostility to an institution. His patronage of Lilburn seemed another proof of his extreme views. Cromwell had procured Lilburn’s release from imprisonment in 1640, obtained him a commission in Manchester’s army in 1643, and intervened on his behalf with the House of Commons in 1645. People attributed to sympathy with advanced democracy what was really due to hatred of oppression and injustice. Lilburn’s praises fostered the illusion. Great as Cromwell was in the field, argued Lilburn, he was still more useful in Parliament.
“O for self-denying Cromwell home again ... for he is sound at the heart and not rotten-cored, hates particular and self-interests, and dares freely to speak his mind.” “Myself and all others of my creed,” wrote Lilburn to Cromwell in 1647, “have looked upon you as the most absolute single-hearted great man in England, untainted or unbiassed with ends of your own.”
In religion, however, Cromwell represented the army more completely than in politics. Cromwell was, as Baillie truly termed him, “the great Independent”—a type of Independency itself, representing not any particular species of Independent, but the whole genus which the term included. He called himself by the name of no sect, “joined himself to no party,” and “did not profess of what opinion he was.” “In good discourse” he would sometimes “very fluently pour himself out in the extolling of Free Grace,” but he refused to dispute about doctrinal questions. There are indications in some of Cromwell’s utterances that he was attracted to those who called themselves “Seekers,” because they found satisfaction not in any visible form or definite creed, but in the perpetual quest for truth and perfection. “To be a Seeker,” says Cromwell in a letter written about this time, “is to be of the best sect next after a Finder, and such an one shall every faithful humble Seeker be in the end.” But while standing a little apart from every sect, Cromwell seemed to share the aspirations and enthusiasms of each. “Anabaptists, Antinomians, Seekers, Separatists,” he sympathised with all, welcomed all to the ranks of the army, and “tied all together by the point of liberty of conscience, which was the common interest in which they all did unite.”
Of this demand for freedom of conscience, Cromwell had ever made himself the spokesman. At the outset of the war, he and his officers had proposed to make their regiment “a gathered Church.” While he was governor of Ely, he and his deputy-governor, Ireton, had filled the island with Independents until people complained that for variety of religions the place was “a mere Amsterdam.” When he became Lieutenant-General of Manchester’s army, Independency had spread from his regiment to the rest of the troopers he commanded.
“If you look on his regiment of horse,” said an opponent, “what a swarm there is of those that call themselves godly men; some profess to have seen visions and had revelations. Look on Colonel Fleetwood’s regiment with his Major Harrison, what a cluster of preaching officers and troopers there is. To say the truth almost our horse be made of that faction.”