Oliver Cromwell and the Rule of the Puritans in England

by C. H. Firth

To contemporaries, the Protectorate had never seemed stronger than it did in the summer of 1658. “From the dissolution of Cromwell’s last Parliament,” writes Clarendon, “all things at home and abroad seemed to succeed to his wish, and his power and greatness to be better established than ever it had been.” Military mutiny, royalist insurrection, projected invasion—the three dangers which threatened his rule in the spring—had all been successfully overcome. The conspiracies were frustrated by the timely arrest of their leaders. Some disaffected officers lost their commissions, a few of the Fifth Monarchy men were imprisoned, while about a dozen Royalists were tried by a High Court of Justice, of whom five suffered on the scaffold or the gallows. Abroad, the victory of the Dunes and the capture of Dunkirk shed new lustre on English arms, and raised Cromwell’s fame still higher in Europe, while the splendid reception of Lord Fauconberg at the French Court, and the complimentary mission sent by Louis XIV. to the Protector, attested the value which the most powerful sovereign in Europe set on Cromwell’s friendship.

Modern historians have taken a less favourable view of the situation than contemporaries did. Some have assumed that Cromwell’s power was tottering to its fall, and that he must have succumbed to the difficulties which surrounded him. He was faced, it has been said, by the certainty of bankruptcy without a supply from Parliament, and the certainty of overthrow if he summoned Parliament. Both statements are exaggerated, for neither difficulty was insuperable. Cromwell had been faced by both ever since he began to rule, and his Government had contrived to live through them.

In 1658, the financial difficulty was more serious than the parliamentary difficulty. When the Long Parliament was expelled, the national finances were in a state of chaos. The monthly property tax had risen to £120,000 per mensem, there was a debt of about £700,000, and the Crown lands, Church lands, and confiscated estates—which were the great resource of the treasury in emergencies—had almost all been sold. During the Protectorate the financial administration was improved, public money thriftily husbanded, and taxation reduced. The monthly assessment was lowered first to £90,000, then to £60,000, and finally to £50,000. But as the reduction of the expenditure of the state did not proceed at the same pace, the receipts did not balance the outgoings. The income of Cromwell’s Government for 1657–1658 may be estimated at about £1,900,000, while its expenses were about £400,000 more. The army cost about £1,100,000, the navy about £900,000, and the civil government about £300,000. The causes of this large deficit were two. One was the cost of holding down Ireland and Scotland, the revenues of which were insufficient to defray the cost of their garrisons, so that the English treasury had to supply about a quarter of a million a year for that purpose. The second cause was the Protector’s foreign policy. It was calculated by financiers that less than half a million was enough to maintain a fleet sufficient for defensive purposes. But a navy strong enough to fight Spain for the mastery of the Western seas, blockade the Spanish coasts, and interfere in the disputes of the Baltic powers, cost twice that sum. The consequence of this was that the Protector’s Government was always embarrassed for money, and that a considerable debt accumulated. By the spring of 1659, that debt amounted to about a million and three quarters. Had the financiers of the Protectorate, like the financiers of the time of William III., adopted the device of funding the debt, and raising loans to cover the deficits caused by war, the difficulty would have been temporarily solved. But as the conditions of the time and the want of skill amongst Cromwell’s financial advisers prevented the adoption of that plan, the only course was to reduce expenditure, or to obtain larger supplies from Parliament, neither of which things was easy, but neither impossible. After the successful campaign of 1658, it became evident that Spain would be forced to make peace, and a reduction both in naval and military expenditure became feasible. In the opinion of the French Ambassador (a shrewd observer, and deeply concerned in forming a right estimate of the question), there was nothing in the financial embarrassments of the Government to endanger its stability. As little danger, according to his view, was there of its overthrow by Parliament. The temporary success of the Republicans in the second session of the last Parliament was due to a cause which would not recur, that is, the weakening of the Government majority by the withdrawal of forty of its supporters to form the new Second Chamber. The Protectorate had gained, rather than lost, parliamentary strength. While the result of the Parliament of 1654 had been to weaken the authority of the Protector, the result of that of 1656 had greatly increased it. In the summer of 1658, therefore, the Protector resolved to summon another Parliament towards the close of the year, and but for his death the intention would have been fulfilled. It was confidently expected on all hands that the offer of the Crown would have been renewed by that body, and, as the elections of December 1658 proved, the Government would have had a majority of at least three to two. The support which Richard Cromwell obtained from Parliament negatives the theory that the opposition would have succeeded in the attempt to overthrow his father.

Events proved clearly that the maintenance of the Protectorate depended on the fidelity of the army. At the commencement of the Protectorate, it numbered not less than sixty thousand men. In December, 1654, there were still fifty-three thousand men in arms in the three nations, in spite of recent reductions. By the end of the Protectorate it numbered, including the troops employed in Flanders and Jamaica, about forty-eight thousand men. During this period a considerable change had taken place in its character and composition. Officers opposed to the Government had been, one after another, deprived of their commands: Harrison in December, 1653, Overton and four other colonels in 1654, Lambert in 1657, Packer and five captains of Cromwell’s own regiment in the spring of 1658. By 1658 the superior officers were generally either personal adherents of the Protector or professional soldiers who took little interest in political questions. Men of the type of Monk had taken the place of men of the type of Harrison. Amongst the subordinate officers and non-commissioned officers there were many Republicans, but they were without sufficient influence to be dangerous. All Anabaptists and Fifth Monarchy men had been purged out of the ranks; private soldiers in general looked to military service as a livelihood, and might become mutinous if their pay was too much in arrears, but hardly for the sake of maintaining political principles.

The history of the Protectorate is the history of the gradual emancipation of the Protector from the political control of the army. Twice he had successfully frustrated attempted alliances between the parliamentary opposition and the malcontents in the army, and each attempt had strengthened his authority over the army.

It was this sense of the hopelessness of insurrectionary movements, so long as Cromwell lived, which caused the repeated conspiracies of Royalists and Levellers for Cromwell’s assassination. In 1654, some of the people round Charles II. issued a proclamation in the King’s name offering five hundred pounds, knighthood, and a colonel’s commission, to any one who succeeded in killing “a certain mechanic fellow” called Oliver Cromwell, “by pistol, sword, or poison.” Charles was cognisant of these plots, and stipulated only that the Protector’s assassination should be connected with a general royalist rising, not an isolated act. There were many subsequent designs of the same nature, especially after the alliance between the Levellers and the Royalists. Lieutenant-Colonel Sexby, once a soldier in Cromwell’s own regiment, undertook to arrange the assassination of the Protector, and was supplied with money by the Spanish Government for that purpose. Sindercombe, whose plot was detected in January, 1657, was his agent. In the following May, Sexby published a tract entitled Killing No Murder, the object of which was to prove that it would be both a lawful and a glorious act to kill the Protector. “Let every man,” said he, “to whom God hath given the spirit of wisdom and courage be persuaded by his honour, his safety, his own good, and his country’s, to endeavour by all rational means to free the world from this pest. Either I or Cromwell must perish,” announced Sexby. But, visiting England in disguise to make further arrangements for this purpose, Sexby was arrested, and died a prisoner in the Tower.

Cromwell was kept well informed of these designs by his police, and spoke of them with great contempt. “Little fiddling things” he termed them in one of his speeches. “It was intended first for the assassination of my person,” he told Parliament of the plot of 1654, “which I would not remember as anything at all considerable to myself or to you, for they would have had to cut throats beyond human calculation before they could have been able to effect their design.”

As a precaution against such designs, the Protector’s life-guard, which had originally consisted simply of the forty-five gentlemen forming the life-guard of the Commander-in-chief, was raised in 1656 to 160 men. Royalist accounts say that during the last months of his life Cromwell was “much more apprehensive of danger to his person than he had used to be,” and that in consequence he surrounded himself with guards, never returned from Hampton Court by the road by which he went thither, and rarely slept twice in the same bed. These are legends for which there is no solid foundation. The Protector took reasonable, but not exaggerated precautions. He was not a man whose nerves could be shaken by threats, but he knew as well as his enemies did how much depended on his life, and how little the permanence of his work was assured.

The real danger to the Protectorate was that Cromwell was growing old. He was now in his fifty-ninth year. The fatigues of campaigning had injured his health before he began to rule. He had one dangerous illness in the spring of 1648, and another in the spring of 1651. “I thought I should have died of this sickness,” he said of the latter. Under the fatigues of government, his health was still more impaired. The despatches of foreign ambassadors have frequent references to the ill health of the Protector as one of the causes which retarded their negotiations. The difference between his signatures in 1651 and in 1657 is very remarkable. The bold firm hand of the first date becomes shaky and feeble six years later. His speeches prove that he felt the weight which rested upon his shoulders. “It has been heretofore,” he said in 1657, “a matter of, I think, but philosophical discourse, that a great place, a great authority, is a great burden. I know it is.” Danton, disillusioned by failure, cried that it was better to be a poor fisherman than a ruler of men. Cromwell sometimes regretted the quiet country life he had exchanged for the cares and vicissitudes of supreme power. “I can say in the presence of God, in comparison of whom we are but like poor creeping ants upon the earth, I would have lived under my woodside, to have kept a flock of sheep, rather than undertook such a government as this is.”