Oliver Cromwell and the Rule of the Puritans in England

by C. H. Firth

CHAPTER XX
CROMWELL AND HIS PARLIAMENTS

From 1654 to 1658, the fundamental question of English politics was, whether Cromwell would succeed in securing the assent of the nation to the authority which the army had conferred upon him. Foreigners saw the situation clearly. After the famous Swedish chancellor, Oxenstiern, had heard Whitelocke’s account of the foundation of the Protectorate, he told him there was but one thing remaining for the Protector to do and that was “to get him a back and breast of steel.” “What do you mean?” asked Whitelocke. “I mean,” replied the Chancellor, “the confirmation of his being Protector by your Parliament, which will be his best and greatest strength.” Cromwell himself was not content to remain the nominee of the soldiers, and wished to govern by consent and not by force. But two great obstacles stood always in his way. One was the rooted aversion of Englishmen to the rule of the sword, which was the origin of his power. The other was the traditions of the House of Commons. In January, 1649, it had claimed to be the supreme power in the state in the right of the sovereign people it represented, and that claim, once made, could never be forgotten. To one section of the Republicans, the only legitimate Government was the expelled Long Parliament, granted by statute the right never to be dissolved but by its own consent. To another section, any elected Parliament was as all-powerful as the people from which its rights were derived. To admit the right of any external power to limit the authority of Parliament, seemed to both a betrayal of the liberty of the nation.

The first Parliament elected under the provisions of the Instrument of Government met in September, 1654. The majority of its members were Presbyterians or moderate Independents, for the extreme men of the Little Parliament had been rejected at the polls. It soon became evident that while the House was prepared to accept Cromwell as head of the state, it was not willing to accept the constitution which the officers had devised. Instead of contenting itself with the functions of a legislature, it claimed to be a constituent assembly. The Protector might exercise the executive power, provided the representatives of the people settled the terms upon which he held it. “The government,” ran the formula adopted, “should be in the Parliament and a single person limited or restrained as the Parliament should think fit.” The co-ordinate and independent power which the Instrument of Government gave the Protector was thus called in question, and Parliament once more laid claim to sovereignty.

Cromwell thought it necessary to intervene to maintain his own authority and that of the constitution. He offered a compromise. Parliament might revise the constitution if its essentials were left untouched. “Circumstantials” they might alter; “fundamentals” they must accept. Those fundamentals he summed up in four principles: government by a single person and Parliament; the division of the control of the military forces between Parliament and the Protector; limitation of the length of time which a Parliament might sit; and, finally, liberty of conscience. As for himself, Cromwell asserted that his title to rule had been ratified by the nation. The army, the City, most of the boroughs and counties of England had by their addresses signified their approval. The judges by taking out new commissions had accepted his authority. The sheriffs by proceeding to elections in accordance with his writs, and the members themselves chosen in those elections, had thereby owned it too. Either directly or indirectly therefore his power was founded on the acceptance and consent of the people. For the good of these nations and their posterity he would maintain the present settlement against all opposition. “The wilful throwing away of this Government, so owned by God, so approved by men,—I can sooner be willing to be rolled into my grave and buried with infamy, than I can give my consent unto.”

About a hundred members were excluded from the House for refusing to sign an engagement to be faithful to the Commonwealth and the Protector, and not to alter the government as settled in a single person and Parliament. The rest, accepting the Protector’s invitation, proceeded to revise the constitution. Many days they spent in these debates, wasting much time in futile disputes about words, but making some judicious amendments. They made the office of Protector elective, and the Council more dependent upon Parliament. On the other hand, they restricted the Protector’s veto over legislation, and sought to limit the toleration granted by the constitution. A list of damnable heresies was to be drawn up, and twenty articles of faith were to be enumerated, which no man was to be permitted to controvert. At this both the army and the Protector took alarm, and Cromwell was petitioned by the officers to intervene. In the end, it was agreed that the question of heresy should be left to the joint decision of Protector and Parliament, but another question remained behind, on which no compromise was possible. By the “Instrument,” the Protector was empowered to maintain a standing army of thirty thousand men, but at the close of 1654, the forces actually on foot in the three nations amounted to fifty-seven thousand. The annual expenditure of the state had risen to £2,670,000, while the revenue amounted only to two millions and a quarter. Parliament was eager to reduce taxation, and above all to reduce the cost of the army, which amounted to £1,560,000 per annum. It demanded the reduction of the army to the legal maximum, voted after much discussion a revenue of one million three hundred thousand pounds, which it held to be sufficient to maintain an army of thirty thousand, and promised to provide money to pay off the twenty-seven thousand men to be disbanded. At the same time, it insisted that the control of the military forces of the nation should belong to Parliament, not to the Protector. On this question Oliver could not yield. In his opinion and in the opinion of his Council, thirty thousand men were not sufficient to keep the three nations in peace.

The royalist rising in Scotland was only just put down, and Ireland, though subdued, was seething with discontent. In England, preparations for an insurrection were in progress, encouraged by the disputes between Parliament and the Protector. “Dissettlement and division, discontent and dissatisfaction,” he said, “together with real dangers to the whole, have been more multiplied within these five months of your sitting than in some years before. Foundations have been laid for the future renewing of the troubles of these nations by all the enemies of them abroad and at home.”

The Cavaliers, said Cromwell, had been for some time furnishing themselves with arms; “nothing doubting but that they should have a day for it, and verily believing that whatsoever their former disappointments were, they should have more done for them by and from our divisions than they were able to do for themselves.” The Levellers were working in concert with the Cavaliers, “endeavouring to put us into blood and confusion, more desperate and dangerous confusion than England ever yet saw.” Republicans of position were joining with the Levellers to create discontent and mutiny amongst the soldiers, and the delay to vote money for the payment of the army and the insufficiency of the sum yet voted had furthered these designs. The army in Scotland was thirty weeks behindhand with its pay, and in danger of being reduced to take free quarters. A plot had been discovered to seize Monk, make someone else general, and march the army into England to overthrow the Government. Under such conditions, it was impossible for the Protector to consent to so great a reduction of the army, or to give up the control of it. “If,” said he, “the power of the militia should be yielded up at such a time as this, when there is as much need of it to keep this cause, as there was to get it, what would become of us all?” Nor was it possible for him at any time to surrender the control of the army if the balance of the constitution was to be preserved. Unless that control were equally shared between the Protector and Parliament, said Cromwell, it would put an end to the Protector’s power “for doing the good he ought, or hindering Parliament from perpetuating themselves, from imposing what religion they please on the consciences of men, or what government they please upon the nation.” If this fundamental principle were abandoned, all the others would be endangered. “Therefore,” he concluded, “I think it my duty to tell you that it is not for the profit of these nations, nor for common and public good, for you to continue here any longer.”

The plots of which Cromwell had spoken were widespread and dangerous, but the vigilance of the Government nipped them in the bud. Major-General Overton, whom the Scottish mutineers had pitched upon as their leader, was imprisoned first in the Tower and then in Jersey. Major-General Harrison, whom the Fifth Monarchy men in England relied upon to head them, was sent to Carisbrooke Castle. Major Wildman, the chief of the Levellers, was arrested in the act of dictating a “Declaration of the free and well affected people of England now in arms against the tyrant, Oliver Cromwell.” The seizure of many royalist agents paralysed the plots of the Cavaliers. Their rising had been fixed to take place on February 13th, but it was adjourned for three weeks, and when March came, though there were gatherings in half a dozen places, so few obeyed the signal that the conspirators generally dispersed, and went home again. The only actual outbreak took place at Salisbury, where Colonel Penruddock and Sir Joseph Wagstaff got together three or four hundred men, and proclaimed Charles II. Then they made for Cornwall, where royalist feeling was still strong, but they were overtaken and routed by Cromwell’s soldiers at South Molton in Devonshire. Penruddock and a few others were executed, and some scores of their followers were transported to the West Indies to work in the sugar plantations.

As soon as the insurrection was over, Cromwell, to show his desire to diminish the burdens of the nation, and his wish to meet as far as possible the reasonable demands of the late Parliament, took in hand the reduction of the army. During the summer and autumn of 1655, ten or twelve thousand men were disbanded, and the pay of those maintained in the service was diminished. Then followed an extension of military rule which brought more odium upon the Protector than any other act of his Government. England was divided into twelve districts, and over each was set an officer with the local rank of major-general, and the special duty of maintaining the order of his district. He was charged to put in force an elaborate system of police regulations meant to prevent conspiracies against the Government, and to see to the execution of all laws relating to public morals. He had command of the local militia, and of a troop of horse raised in every county to supplement it.