Oliver Cromwell

by Samuel Rawson Gardiner

The imposition of such restriction was doubtless condemnable on the principle that the will of the electorate expressed through its representatives must be taken as final in all disputes. Neither Cromwell, however, nor his opponents had recognised such a principle. Vane and Bradshaw had been ready to exclude Royalists, and other unfit persons, whilst the authors of the Instrument had imposed qualifications with a very similar object. If a test there was to be, the one now selected was not only the lightest possible, but it was one that had already been signed by each constituency on behalf of its members, without which formality they were not, according to the Instrument, entitled to take their seats. It left them perfectly at liberty to propose any amendment of the constitution, even to vote against any one of Oliver's fundamentals with the exception of the first.

It is impossible here to enter into details of the constitutional debates which followed. It is sufficient to say that the basis which Parliament proposed to substitute for the Instrument was the revival of the negative voice, so that no constitutional innovation could be made without the Protector's consent. Of the four fundamentals, the first two—the one relating to the position of the single person and the other refusing to Parliament the right of perpetuating itself—were accepted without opposition. The other two raised greater difficulties. The House was very far from being anxious to extend religious liberty as widely as the Protector desired, but it ultimately agreed to a form of words which practically left the decision in his hands. The absolutely insurmountable difficulty was found in the disposal of the army. In the first place, Parliament held out for the diminution of the numbers of the regular forces to the 30,000 men allowed by the Instrument, and required that if more were needed they should be raised in the form of a militia which would fall more readily under the influence of the local gentry. In the second place, the House resolved to limit its grant of supply to the taxation required for the maintenance of the army for a term of five years only, thus reserving to itself the ultimate financial control which spells sovereignty. Cromwell's whole soul recoiled from the acceptance of a scheme which would render nugatory the proposed constitutional restrictions of Parliamentary omnipotence, by enabling Parliament, at the end of the assigned term, to stop the supplies without which the army could not be maintained; unless indeed, when that term reached its end, the Protector chose to employ his army to crush the Parliament of 1659 as he had employed it to crush the Parliament of 1653. Parliamentary supremacy or military despotism were the alternatives which Oliver or his successor would have to face in the not very distant future.

If two men ride on one horse, one of them must ride in front, and this sober physical truth is equally applicable to the realm of politics. No paper constitution, however deserving of veneration, can prevent there being some force in every nation capable of making itself supreme if it chooses to do so. It may be the constituencies, as in England at the end of the nineteenth century; the people consulted in mass, as in the United States; or the army, as in England in the middle of the seventeenth century. Such supremacy may be subjected to the checks of written or unwritten constitutions, and may be thus thrust into the background till called forth by some special crisis; but in the long run it is impossible to prevent supreme power from exerting itself. The defect of Oliver's fourth fundamental was that it sought to divide the control of the army, or, in other words, Sovereignty, between Protector and Parliament, at a time when the Protector was powerless to act in defiance of the army. It is useless to deny that he was perfectly in the right in hesitating to hand over supreme power to a Parliament uncontrolled by the nation, and capable of using its financial authority to demolish any system of government that might stand in the way of the ambitions of its members. It is equally undeniable that, as he was unable to depend on the nation as a whole, he had nothing to fall back upon except a Protectorate which, in reality, was controlled by the will of the leading officers, who found in the provisions of the Instrument which they had themselves originated the means of perpetuating their own power by securing—irrespective of the concurrence of Parliament or nation—the levy of taxes, the amount of which was fixed by the Protector and Council alone.

Oliver having once made up his mind to refuse his consent to the new constitution, was anxious to hasten the dissolution of the Parliament. The Instrument having provided that the House should sit for five months, he opportunely remembered that the months by which the army's pay was regulated were lunar months; and on January 22, 1655, when five lunar months were expired, he pronounced its dissolution. The speech in which he announced his determination was stamped with vexation of spirit at the failure of his hopes, a vexation in itself by no means unjustifiable. The tragedy of the situation lay in the undoubted fact that however much they might differ on the means to be pursued, the end at which Protector and Parliament aimed was identical, namely, the conversion of the military into the civil state. Parliament had counted it well done to leave Oliver in possession for five years, whilst Oliver, conscious of his own rectitude of purpose, and ignoring the consideration that at the end of five years he might no longer be living, and that the Protectorate might have passed by demise into less worthy hands, complained that he was not trusted. Why, he asked, had they not come to him to talk the matter over? Why indeed, except that Parliaments have their pride as well as Protectors, and that this one had come to the conclusion that it was its duty to settle the constitution rather than to accept a settlement from a knot of soldiers. If it did not seek an opportunity to discuss such grave questions with Oliver in person, at least it had had the advantage of listening to what might be presumed to be his views when promulgated by those members of his Council who were also members of the House.

In an elaborate defence of the Instrument, Oliver put his finger on the real ground of offence. "Although," he declared in speaking of the rights of the Protector, "for the present the keeping up and having in his power the militia seems the most hard, yet, if it should be yielded up at such a time as this when there is as much need to keep this cause by it—which is evidently at this time impugned by all the enemies of it—as there was to get it, what would become of all? Or if it should not be equally placed in him and the Parliament, but yielded up at any time, it determines the Power," i.e., hinders the exercise of authority by the person in possession of power, "either from doing the good he ought, or hindering Parliaments from perpetuating themselves, or from imposing what religion they please on the consciences of men, or what government they please upon the nation; thereby subjecting us to dis-settlement in every Parliament, and to the desperate consequences thereof: and if the nation shall happen to fall into a blessed peace, how easily and certainly will their charge be taken off, and their forces disbanded; and then, where will the danger be to have the militia thus stated?"

It was impossible for the Protector to put his case more convincingly. Yet, admirable as a criticism pointing out the danger likely to follow on the adoption of the proposals of Parliament, Oliver's reasoning pre-supposed the acceptance by Parliament of his own conviction that an armed minority had the right to impose its principles on the unarmed majority—the very belief which the authors of the Parliamentary constitution were most determined to resist. Even if it had been possible for any Puritan party to look for a solution of the problem in an appeal to the unfettered judgment of the nation, it is evident that Oliver would never have agreed to such an arbitration. On the one side was the resolve to get what appeared to be the right thing done, if necessary by force. On the other side was the resolve to eliminate the element of force by subordinating it to the rule of Parliaments. For the moment the decisive word rested with Oliver. "I think myself bound," he said in conclusion, "as in my duty to God, and to the people of these nations, for their safety and good in every respect—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 longer, and therefore I do declare unto you, that I do dissolve this Parliament."

History has pronounced in favour of the view taken by Oliver's antagonists. The reliance on military power in which he had found his refuge did more than all other facts put together to establish, for good or for evil, a reliance on Parliament. It is the special mark of his greatness that he put his whole heart after the dissolution of his first Parliament into an effort to avoid the appearance even of a temporary dictatorship. He shrank from being a military ruler, even under the plea of the necessity of the times. His holding back the dissolution of Parliament till the fifth month—lunar month as it was—had been accomplished, offers the key-note of the position as he judged it. The Parliamentary constitution had perished stillborn. The constitution of the Instrument was in full force, and was to be observed, even though it were to his own detriment. The Instrument enabled the Protector and Council to levy such taxation as they thought fit for 30,000 men and for a navy sufficient for defence, whilst he had now on foot some 57,000 soldiers, and, in addition to the home fleet, two others had already been despatched—the one to the Mediterranean, the other to the West Indies. Yet the Protector was able to announce that he would content himself with levying the Assessment money at the low amount of £80,000 a month on the three nations, an amount which the dissolved Parliament had fixed as sufficient for the forces named in the Instrument. Such a decision left the Government with enormous forces—as forces were in those days reckoned—which it had no visible means of paying; but it was an announcement in the most practical form, that, as soon as the existing situation would admit, the military expenditure should be brought down to the requirements of the Instrument. The announcement was accompanied by a proclamation setting forth the principles on which the Protector had decided to act on the thorny question of religious liberty. There was to be complete freedom for all who contented themselves with setting forth their opinions, without 'imposing' on the conscience of others or disturbing their worship. The last clause, which was aimed at the new Society of Friends, commonly styled Quakers by the irreverent multitude, sought to put a stop to their practice of carrying on their polemics in churches where congregations were assembled. To the exhortations of George Fox himself the Protector listened with respect. "Come again to my house," said Oliver, "for if thou and I were but an hour a day together, we should be nearer one to the other. I wish you no more ill than I do to my own soul." A reverence for genuineness, in whatever shape, was not the least admirable of Oliver's characteristics.

The clause against 'imposing' was more widely sweeping in its aims. It struck at the claims of the Roman Papacy, and the English episcopacy, as well as at the designs of the late Parliament to establish lists of opinions to which toleration should be refused. It struck also at all attempts to snatch at political power with the object of serving religious ends. Oliver's breach with Parliament had roused attacks from every quarter. There were the Fifth Monarchy men who rejected every form of secular government and whose leaders were not to be silenced except by placing them under guard. Harrison himself had to be placed under arrest. It was not work that Oliver would have chosen. "I know," wrote Thurloe, "it is a trouble to my Lord Protector to have any one that is a saint in truth to be grieved or dissatisfied with him." The Cavaliers might be regarded as hereditary enemies. In the last summer a Cavalier plot to assassinate the Protector had been discovered, and two of the plotters, Gerard and Vowel, had been executed. Whilst Parliament was still in session, Thurloe's spies—who were to be found in every land in which their services were required—brought him news of a projected insurrection, and it had been one of Oliver's charges against the members, that their delay in settling the Government had fostered the plot. In March futile attempts to rise were made in various parts of the country, the only one which gained the dignity of an actual insurrection being that in which Penruddock and others gathered in arms at Salisbury, seized the judges of assize in their beds and marched off in the hope of rallying the scattered Royalists of the west. The insurgents, however, were dispersed in Devonshire, where many of them were captured. In the end a few of the ringleaders were tried and executed, whilst a large number of their adherents were transported without legal trial to Barbados. Such procedure, whether it be counted as an evasion or as a breach of the law, was evidence of the difficulty which Oliver would increasingly feel in meeting his enemies otherwise than by the exertion of arbitrary power.

A more difficult question arose when two judges sent to try Royalist prisoners in the north doubted their competency, on the ground that an ordinance defining the offences constituting treason, which the Protector, in accordance with the Instrument, had issued before the meeting of Parliament, could not make a rebellion against the Protectorate to be High Treason. The two judges were at once dismissed, and soon afterwards Chief Justice Rolle was compelled to resign office because he was unwilling to enforce the payment of customs upon a certain Cony; whilst the three lawyers who argued on Cony's behalf—one of them being Serjeant Maynard, who lived to welcome William III.—that he was not to pay duties imposed by Protector and Council without the consent of Parliament, were sent to prison till they had apologised. One historian after another has accompanied his account of these proceedings with the observation that there was here a conflict between law and the tyrant's plea, necessity. There was nothing of the sort. The question was whether the Instrument was a valid constitution. If it was, there could be no reasonable doubt that rebels against the Protectorate were legally traitors, or that customs-duties applicable to the payment of the army and navy were legally set, not by Parliament, but by Protector and Council.

If all that Oliver and his councillors had asked of the Instrument had been to enable them to carry on the government till the lapse of three years drove them to summon another Parliament, they might have been well content. They could not, however, forget that they were the leaders of the party of reform, and the Instrument itself had deprived them of the power of initiating reforms except through Parliament. The authority to issue ordinances with the force of law had ceased with the meeting of Parliament, and all that could now be done was to urge the Commissioners of the Great Seal to carry out the ordinance for the reform of Chancery, and, upon their refusal, to replace them by others likely to be more complacent. The result was a movement in opposition to the Instrument amongst some of Oliver's partisans, by which he was hampered as well as assisted. It was natural that such a movement should also have the character of opposition to the military party from whom the Instrument had proceeded. Already in the late Parliament an unsuccessful effort had been made to confer the title of King on Oliver in the hope that the civilian element in the Government would be thereby strengthened. In the summer of 1655 a petition was circulated in the City asking the Protector to assume legislative power on the invitation of the subscribers. Oliver was far too prudent to follow such a will-of-the-wisp, and the petition was suppressed by the Council. The needs that had called it forth could not so easily be dismissed, especially as the Protector's desire to reform abuses was strongly reinforced by his need of money—a need which was dramatically exhibited when the soldiers of his guard broke into his kitchen and carried off the dinner cooked for his own table, telling him to his face that as they had not received their pay, they had taken some of it in kind.