Cromwell came into power as the nominee of the army, and in domestic affairs the programme which he set himself to carry out was that which the army had set forth in its petitions and manifestoes. For the moment he was invested with all the authority of a dictator. According to the “Instrument of Government,” the first triennial Parliament was to meet in September, 1654, and in the interval the Protector and his Council were empowered to issue ordinances, which had the force of law “until order shall be taken in Parliament concerning them.” Cromwell made a liberal use of this provision, and the period of nine months which followed his accession was the creative period of his government. Between December, 1653, and September, 1654, he issued eighty-two ordinances, nearly all of which were confirmed in 1656 by his second Parliament. Hallam, in a disparaging comparison between Cromwell and Napoleon, concludes by saying that Cromwell, unlike Napoleon, “never showed any signs of a legislative mind, or any desire to fix his renown on that noblest basis, the amelioration of social institutions.” In reality, nothing could be farther from the truth, and if Cromwell’s reforming zeal has left no trace on the statute book, the reason is that all the laws passed during the Protectorate were annulled at the Restoration.
All the leading principles of Cromwell’s domestic policy are contained in the small folio volume of his ordinances. A few are merely prolongations of expiring acts, others are personal or local in their application. There is an ordinance for the relief of poor prisoners, another codifying the law relating to the maintenance of highways, and there are three devoted to the reorganisation of the Treasury. The settlement of Ireland and Scotland, and the completion of the union of the three kingdoms, which the Long Parliament had left unfinished, form the subject of a third series. But none exhibit so plainly the Protector’s domestic policy as the three sets of ordinances dealing with the reform of the Law, the reformation of manners, and the reorganisation of the national Church.
Ever since 1647, the army had demanded that the laws of England should be so reformed, “that all suits and questions of right may be made more clear and certain in their issues, and not so tedious nor chargeable in their proceedings.” The Long Parliament took the task in hand, made some slight progress, and then stuck fast. The Little Parliament attempted it with so much rude vigour that it seemed likely to end in the subversion of all law. The Protector took up the work where the Long Parliament left off, and persistently pursued it as long as he ruled.
Cromwell realised its difficulty. “If any man,” he once said, “should ask me, ‘Why, how will you have it done?’ I confess I do not know.” All he could do was to select the best men for the purpose, and to leave them a free hand. Therefore he applied to the lawyers to co-operate, “being resolved to give the learned of the robe the honour of reforming their profession,” and hoping “that God will give them hearts to do it.” His chief assistant was Matthew Hale, who was made a judge by the Protector early in 1654. At the opening of Parliament in September, 1654, Cromwell announced that the Government had called together “persons of as great ability and great interest as are in the nation, to consider how the laws might be made plain and short, and less chargeable to the people,” and that they had prepared several bills. The most important of these schemes was the ordinance for the regulation of the Court of Chancery, published August 21, 1654, and confirmed by Parliament in 1656. It contained a reduced scale of fees, and embodied, according to modern lawyers, many valuable reforms. Contemporary practitioners, such as Whitelocke, held that there was much in the new procedure which it was impossible or undesirable to carry out, but with some subsequent modifications it was duly put in force.
Cromwell was equally zealous for the reform of the Criminal Law. In April, 1653, as soon as he had turned out the Long Parliament, he gave pardons to all prisoners sentenced to death except those guilty of murder. His object was to make the laws “conformable to the just and righteous laws of God.” Some English laws, he told Parliament, were “wicked and abominable laws.”
“To hang a man for six and eightpence and I know not what—to hang for a trifle and acquit murder, is in the ministration of the law through ill framing of it.... To see men lose their lives for petty matters is a thing God will reckon, and I wish it may not be laid on this nation a day longer than you have opportunity to give a remedy.”
To carry out these schemes required not merely the help of lawyers to devise them, but the co-operation of Parliament to make them law. The Protector’s first Parliament spent all its time in constitutional debates, and did nothing to reform the Law. His second, busy most of its existence in the like manner, discussed the bills introduced by the Government for the establishment of county registers and local courts, but allowed them to drop. It completed the abolition of feudal incidents which the Long Parliament had commenced, and which Charles II.’s Parliament finally placed on the statute book, but it left the harshness and cruelty of the criminal code for the nineteenth century to redress.
The “Reformation of Manners” was an object in which the Protector obtained more support from Parliament. All Puritans were eager for it, and the Long Parliament had made a beginning by acts enjoining the stricter observance of Sunday, punishing swearing with greater severity, and making adultery a capital offence. Of the Protector’s ordinances, one declared duelling “unpleasing to God, unbecoming Christians, and contrary to all good order and government.” A person sending a challenge was to be bound over to keep the peace for six months, and a duellist who killed his opponent was to be tried for murder. A second ordinance supplemented the act against swearing by special provisions for the punishment of carmen, porters, and watermen, “who are very ordinarily drunk and do blaspheme.” A third forbade cock-fighting, because it often led to disturbances of the peace and was accompanied by gaming and drunkenness. A fourth suppressed horse-racing for six months, not because of its accompaniments, but because the Cavaliers made use of race-meetings “to carry on their pernicious designs.”
When Cromwell’s second Parliament met, he appealed to it to further the work.
“I am confident,” said he, “our liberty and prosperity depend upon reformation. Make it a shame to see men bold in sin and profaneness and God will bless you. Truly these things do respect the souls of men, and the spirits, which are the men. The mind is the man. If that be kept pure the man signifies somewhat; if not, I would very fain see what difference there is betwixt him and a beast. He hath only some activity to do some more mischief.”