Oliver Cromwell

by Samuel Rawson Gardiner

The difficulty was the greater because in the summer of 1656 it appeared that the plan of policing the country by a militia under Major-Generals had broken down financially. Meetings of officers were summoned in June to discuss the situation, and though the Protector was at first inclined to raise fresh taxation on his own sole authority, he soon recognised that such a step would be too unpopular to meet with success, and resolved that another Parliament must be summoned. Before the new Parliament met, Oliver had recourse to one of those startling privileges which the Instrument might be quoted as having conferred on his Government. That constitution assigned to the Council the right of examining and rejecting such members as might be elected without possessing the qualifications imposed by it on members of Parliament, a right which the Council now exercised in the rejection of at least ninety-three hostile members. In the case of Royalists chosen by constituencies the Council was undoubtedly in the right in annulling their elections, at least so far as the constitution was concerned. In refusing admission to Republicans like Scott and Hazlerigg it was compelled to have recourse to a quibble. It was true that the Council was empowered by the Instrument to reject members who were not 'of known integrity'. That body with at least the tacit approval of the Protector now interpreted those words as giving them power to reject members not of known integrity to the existing constitution. For once in his life Oliver demeaned himself to act in the spirit of a pettifogging attorney. Base as the action was, it was only possible because the greater number of those admitted to their seats, whether through the pressure put upon the country by the Major-Generals, or because they looked with more hopefulness to the Protector, were now prepared to give him their support. In the speech with which Oliver opened the session on September 17, he did his best to rouse the indignation of his hearers against Spain. "Why, truly," he urged, "your great enemy is the Spaniard. He is a natural enemy. He is naturally so; he is naturally so throughout—by reason of that enmity that is in him against whatsoever is of God." It was the key-note of Oliver's feeling in this matter in his more exalted mood. His sentiments as a patriotic Englishman found vent in a long catalogue of wrongs suffered at the hands of Spaniards from Elizabeth's time to his own. His defiance of Spain was followed by an attack on Charles Stuart,—now dwelling on Spanish soil, and hopefully looking to Spain for troops to replace him on the throne—in which he referred to him as 'a captain to lead us back into Egypt'. Then came a retrospect on the Cavalier plots and a justification of the Major-Generals, who had been established to repress them. The war with Spain must be prosecuted vigorously—in other words, money must be voted to maintain the struggle at home and abroad. Oliver's speech did not all turn upon what ordinary men term politics. "Make it a shame," he cried, "to see men bold in sin and profaneness, and God will bless you. You will be a blessing to the nation; and by this will be more repairers of breaches than by anything in the world. 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, a 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." It was the voice of the higher—because more universal—Puritanism which rang in these words, a voice which soared to worlds above the region of ceremonial form or doctrinal dispute, echoing, as from the lips of a man of practical wrestlings with the world, the voice of the imaginative poet who, in the days of his youth, had taught that

So dear to Heaven is saintly chastity
That, when a soul is found sincerely so,
A thousand liveried angels lackey her,
Driving far off each thing of sin and guilt,
And in clear dream and solemn vision
Tell her of things that no gross ear can hear,
Till oft converse with heavenly habitants
Begin to cast a beam on the outward shape,
The unpolluted temple of the mind,
And turns it by degrees to the soul's essence
Till all be made immortal.

Oliver had to touch earth again with a financial statement and to crave for Parliamentary supplies. A demand for money was not particularly welcome to the members, and they preferred to wrangle for some weeks over the case of James Naylor, a fanatic who had allowed himself to be greeted as the Messiah by his feminine admirers. In October news came that Stayner, in command of a detachment from Blake's fleet, had destroyed or captured a part of the Plate Fleet off the Spanish coast, and in the following month the carts were rolling through the London streets on their way to the Tower with silver worth £200,000. Emboldened by this success, Oliver's confidants brought in a bill perpetuating the decimation of the Royalists by act of Parliament. The bill was rejected, and hard words were spoken of the Major-Generals. Oliver accepted the decision of the House, and the Major-Generals were withdrawn.

There is good reason to believe that Oliver consented willingly to the vote. He was never one to persist in methods once adopted, if he could obtain his larger aims in some other way. The debates had revealed that the house was divided into two parties, a minority clinging to the army as a political force, and a majority calling for the establishment of the government on a civil basis. The latter was even more devoted to the Protector than the former, and Oliver, who in his heart concurred with their views, was prepared, as indeed he had been prepared in 1654, to submit the Instrument to revision. The difference was that he was assured now—as he had not been assured then—that Parliament would sustain the fundamental principles which he regarded as the most precious part of the constitution.

In January, 1657, a fresh attempt to assassinate the Protector—this time by Miles Sindercombe—gave reason, or perhaps excuse, for loyal demonstrations, and a month later the House entered upon the discussion of a proposal for a constitutional revision, ultimately known as The Humble Petition and Advice, of which the article which attracted the most general attention was that which reconstituted the Kingship in the person of Oliver, with the power of nominating his own successor. The demand for the revival of the Kingship was no mere work of zealous flatterers. The crown was held in the House to be the symbol of civilian as opposed to military government, but for this reason the offer of it was assailed by the leading officers, headed by Lambert who, in 1653, had offered the crown to the man to whom he now refused it. So far as the officers were concerned, they appear to have been actuated, in part at least, by a dread that a Parliamentary Protectorate would in the end turn out to be other than a Puritan Protectorate. Lambert's own motives were somewhat more difficult to unravel. Possibly he regarded a Kingship by the grace of Parliament less of a boon than a Kingship by the grace of the army. Still more probably was he moved by a personal grievance in seeing Fleetwood, who had now returned from Ireland, higher than himself in the favour of the Protector, perhaps even in the favour of the army. In any case he carried on the campaign with consummate skill, keeping aloof from the constitutional question, and throwing all his strength into the argument—which the rudest soldier could understand—that the army had not rejected one king in order to set up another. When he won over Fleetwood and Desborough, the son-in-law and brother-in-law of the Protector, to his side, he had practically won the game, especially as he was able to back a petition against a revival of the Royal title by the subscription of a hundred officers. Oliver kept up the negotiation with Parliament as long as he could, but in the end he refused the crown offered to him rather than alienate the army. The remaining articles of the Humble Petition and Advice were then agreed to, and on June 26 Oliver was solemnly installed as Protector, under a Parliamentary title, with all but Royal pomp at Westminster Hall.

Too much has been made by some modern writers of Oliver's defeat on the question of the Kingship. The title, as he himself truly said, would have been but a feather in his cap. It is doubtful whether its acceptance would have disarmed a single enemy. The rocks upon which the Protector was running were of a far too substantial character to be removed by the assumption of an ill-fitting symbol. Whether he wore a crown or not, no one could have regarded Oliver as Charles I. had been regarded; or even as William III., who in some sort continued the Protector's work, came afterwards to be regarded.

Apart from the really unimportant question of the crown, the military party had for the time been beaten all along the line. Not only had the Major-Generals disappeared, and Lambert himself, driven to surrender all his offices, military or civil, retired to the cultivation of tulips at Wimbledon; but the Humble Petition and Advice, that is to say, a Parliamentary constitution, had entirely displaced the Instrument of government as the fundamental law of the three nations. The more important of the stipulations of the new constitution were necessarily of the nature of a compromise. In return for the establishment of a second House composed of his own nominees, the Protector was able to abandon the claim of the Council to exclude members of what must now be regarded as the House of Commons—seeing that a vote with which he was dissatisfied would be of no avail if it was no more than the vote of a single House. Nor was it only an occasional check on the old House that he had gained. The new House, nominated by himself in the first place, was endowed with the right in the future of excluding from its benches any new member nominated by himself or by a future Protector. As he took care to name none who were not strong Puritans and devoted to the Protectorate, he expected that the new House would be able, for all time, to reject legislation contrary to the interests of Puritanism or to the Protectoral constitution. The question of finance, which had wrecked the last Parliament, was settled in a way equally satisfactory to the Protector. The number of soldiers to be kept on foot was passed over in silence, whilst the same sum, £1,800,000, which had been approved by the first Protectorate Parliament as needful for the wants of the army and navy together with those of the domestic government, was now granted, not for five years as had been proposed by the former Parliament, but till the Protector and the two Houses agreed to alter it. The scheme by which the Instrument had fixed the strength of the army at 30,000 men, and had then left the Protector and Council free to levy whatever supplies they thought needful for its support, was deliberately left out of account. On paper, the terms of agreement showed fairly enough. England had at last got a constitution which was no production of a military coterie. Protector and Parliament were at last at one. Unfortunately, those who had welcomed this fair concord took little account of the forces which were likely to govern events in the not far distant future—the force of the army, whose handiwork had been set at nought—the force of the Parliamentary tradition strengthened by the work of the Long Parliament—and, above all, the force of discontent with the shifting sands on which the new Government was built, a discontent which might easily show itself in a national call for the restoration of the Stuart King—not because his person was loved, but because he would bring with him what appeared to be the strong basis of old use and wont.

Oliver was not wholly absorbed in constitutional struggles or in foreign conflicts. In administration his Government stands supreme above all which had preceded it, because no other ruler united so wide a tolerance of divergencies of opinion with so keen an eye for individual merit. He could gather round him the enthusiastic Milton to pen those dignified State Papers in which he announced his resolutions to the Powers of Europe; Andrew Marvell, the most transparently honest of men, who, with all his admiration for Oliver, had mingled in the verses written by him as a panegyric on his patron those lines recording Charles's dignified appearance on the scaffold, which will be remembered when all his other writings in prose or verse are forgotten. In Oliver's Council sat Bulstrode Whitelocke, the somewhat stolid lawyer, who, too cautious to give a precedent approval to Oliver's revolutionary acts, was always ready to accept the situation created by them, and yet sufficiently inspired by professional feeling to resign his post as Commissioner of the Great Seal rather than accept the Protector's reforms in the Court of Chancery. There too sat Nathaniel Fiennes, the second son of Lord Saye and Sele, not indeed a statesman with broad views, but ready at any moment to pen State papers in defence of a Government which had rescued him from the neglect into which he had fallen—probably undeservedly—in consequence of his hasty surrender of Bristol in the Civil War. Amongst Oliver's diplomatists were Morland and Lockhart. Amongst his admirals, the honoured Blake and the ever-faithful Montague. Amongst those who at one time or another were his chaplains were Owen, the ecclesiastical statesman, and Howe, whose exemplary piety led him to doubt whether the Protector's household was sufficiently religious, and whose broad-minded charity prepared him to abandon the Church of the Restoration, not because it was un-Puritan, but because it was exclusive.

Yet, after all is said, the list of ancient allies driven by the Protector from public life, and in some cases actually deprived of liberty, was even more noteworthy. The most placable of men could hardly have avoided a quarrel with John Lilburne, of whom it was said that if he alone were left alive in the world, John would dispute with Lilburne and Lilburne with John; but it is at least remarkable that under Oliver's sway Vane, whom he had long dealt with as a brother; Harrison, who had fought under him from the very beginning of the Civil War, and who had stood by his side when the members of the Long Parliament were thrust out of doors; Hazlerigg, who had kept guard over the English border in the crisis of Dunbar; Okey, who had led the dragoons at Naseby; Overton, the trusted Governor of Hull, next to London the most important military post in England; Lambert, who had taken a foremost part in the preparation of the Instrument of Government; Cooper, who had been one of his most trusted councillors—to say nothing of confidants of less conspicuous note—were either in prison or in disgrace. When the second Protectorate, as it is sometimes called, was launched on its course, the only man not connected with the family of the Protector, who still occupied anything like an independent position, was Monk, the Governor and Commander-in-Chief in Scotland, and it is probable that he owed his authority to the distance which kept him from interfering in English politics. The true explanation appears to be that the men from whom Oliver parted were men not merely of definite principles, but of definite ideas. Each one had made up his mind that England was to be served by the establishment of some particular form of government, or some particular course of action. Oliver's mind was certainly not without the guidance of definite principles. He could not conceive it to be right to abandon religion to men who, whether Episcopalian or Presbyterian, would impose fetters on the freedom of 'the people of God'. He could not admit the claim of an hereditary monarch or of an elected Parliament to decide against the best interests of the country. Within these limits, however, his mind was more elastic than those of his opponents. Steadied by his high aims, he could vary the methods with which he combated each evil of the day as it arose. Those who attached themselves to him in his struggle against the King or against the different Parliaments of his time, or against the military power, were as incapable as he was capable of facing round to confront each new danger as it arose. From the moment that each partial victory was won, the old friends had to be reasoned with, then discarded, and at last restrained from doing mischief. As years went on, Oliver, in spite of the abilities of those still serving under him, became increasingly an isolated man. Not only did his strong sense of religion in its Puritan form alienate those who were not Puritans or not religious, but his frequent changes of attitude bewildered that easy-going mass of mankind which sticks to its own theory, more especially if its own interests are embodied in it, and regards all change of political method as a veil intended to conceal moral turpitude. Oliver had decidedly lost adherents since the establishment of the Protectorate.

It was probably the increasing sense of the untrustworthiness of political support, rather than nepotism in its ordinary sense, which led the Protector to rely more and more on the services of members of his own family. His younger son, Henry Cromwell, was now Lord Deputy of Ireland. His son-in-law, Fleetwood, was not only a member of the Council, but, now that Lambert was in disgrace, the most influential officer in the army, marked out for its command if Oliver were to pass away. His brother-in-law, Desborough, occupied a position hardly inferior. Two other brothers-in-law, Colonel John Jones and Colonel Valentine Wauton, were members of the Council in England or Ireland. Lockhart, one of the few Scotchmen who had rallied to the Protectorate, and who was engaged as a diplomatist in riveting the bonds between France and England, took to wife the Protector's niece. A son-in-law, John Claypole, was now Master of the Horse. In the army, Whalley and Ingoldsby were his cousins. Not one of these, however, failed to occupy with credit the position he had acquired, whilst Oliver's reluctance to push forward Richard, the elder of his surviving sons, may be taken as evidence that his affection for his family did not override his devotion to the State. Richard's tastes lay in the direction of dogs and horses. He had recently broken his leg, hunting in the New Forest, and, upon his recovery, was brought up to Westminster to assume his place, on the establishment of the second Protectorate. Before that time, only two of the Councillors not holding other office, Lambert and Strickland, had received the title of "Lord," probably having it verbally conferred upon them, and certainly not, as has been sometimes said, in connection with any Household appointment. Officials of high rank had—like the Lord Deputy and the Lord Keeper of the old monarchy—been entitled Lords, as in the case of Whitelocke, now Lord Commissioner of the Treasury, and Fiennes, Lord Commissioner of the Great Seal. Gradually usage, quickly sanctioned by official notice, gave the title of Lord to the Protector's sons and sons-in-law, and of Lady to his daughters. The Lord Richard was only admitted to the Council on the last day of 1657, and was treated with some of the observances due to the heir, but till the last his father held back from exercising that power of nominating a successor which had been conferred on him by the latest constitution.