Oliver Cromwell

by Samuel Rawson Gardiner

Oliver's whole scheme can only be described as the product of consummate ignorance—ignorance in supposing that Charles X., aggressive, self-centred and careless of everything but his own interests as a king and as a soldier, was another Gustavus Adolphus—or rather another such disinterested enthusiast as Gustavus Adolphus appeared in the imagination of Englishmen—ignorance too in fancying that either Austria and Poland on the one hand, or Brandenburg and Denmark on the other, were likely to govern their movements by religious rather than by political motives.

The crisis came in 1657, the year in which Oliver was raised by Parliament to the constitutional Protectorate. Charles X. having secured a hold on the mouth of the Vistula by his occupation of Western Prussia had naturally become an object of suspicion to Frederick William of Brandenburg—the Great Elector, as he was subsequently styled—who saw with displeasure the growing power of Sweden on the Baltic coast and who was urged by every consideration of policy to secure for himself the strip of land which intervened between part of his own possessions and the sea. Frederick III. of Denmark again, fearing the ultimate loss of his own territory beyond the Sound, took the opportunity of declaring against Charles, and both Brandenburg and Denmark, Protestant as they were, looked for the support of Leopold, who had just succeeded to the Austrian hereditary estates. Leopold, however, instead of hurrying to the assistance of these two States, was held back by purely political interests, and showed little inclination to assist them. Charles X. took the opportunity and led his army through Holstein into Schleswig and Jutland without difficulty, thus gaining possession of the whole of the Continental States of the King of Denmark.

The Swedish King had been ready to fool Oliver to the top of his bent. Though he had nothing of the spirit of the crusader, he was quite prepared to gain what advantage he could out of Oliver's enthusiasm. Happily for England, he had rejected the Protector's proposal—made in the spring of 1657—to take over the secularised Archbishopric of Bremen as a security for a loan, the Archbishopric being required by Oliver as a basis for an advance into Germany in an attack upon the German Catholic States, a project far more unwise than the occupation of the Flemish ports, and one which, if it had been carried into effect, would have left little room for Oliver's panegyrists to dwell upon the excellence of his foreign policy. For the remainder of the year Charles was quite ready to discuss the Protestant alliance, if only he were not required to carry it into immediate action. No doubt he would be ready at some future time to attack Austria or any other country if there was anything to be gained by it. For the present he was occupied with his quarrel with Denmark, and till that had been brought to a conclusion, there was nothing else to be done.

It was at this moment that Oliver opened the second session of his second Parliament. Full of satisfaction with his own foreign policy, he was also full of grieved surprise at the misconduct of Frederick of Denmark and of Frederick William of Brandenburg, who, not without the good will of the Dutch Republic, had thrown themselves in the path of the new Gustavus Adolphus. Within a few days of the opening of the session, Oliver held up to Parliament a picture of Papal Europe seeking 'everywhere Protestants to devour'. "What is there in all the parts of Europe," he asked at last, "but a consent, a co-operating, at this very time and season, to suppress everything that stands in the way of the Popish powers?" "I have," he added, "I thank God, considered, and I would beg you to consider a little with me, what that resistance is that is likely to be made to this mighty current which seems to be coming from all parts upon all Protestants? Who is there that holdeth up his head to oppose this danger? A poor prince; indeed poor; but a man in his person as gallant, and truly I think I may say, as good as any these last ages have brought forth; and a man that hath adventured his all against the Popish interest in Poland, and made his acquisition still good for the Protestant religion. He is now reduced into a corner; and what addeth to the grief of all—more grievous than all that hath been spoken of before—I wish it may not be too truly said—is, that men of our religion forget this and seek his ruin." The cause of Charles X. had become very dear to Oliver, and ought, he imagined, to be very dear to the English people. The 'Popish plot' against the Swedish king loomed largely in his eyes. "It is a design," he continued, "against your very being; this artifice, and this complex design against the Protestant interest—wherein so many Protestants are not so right as were to be wished! If they can shut us out of the Baltic Sea,"—with Oliver the consideration of material prosperity was never far distant from his spiritual enthusiasm—"and make themselves masters of that, where is your trade? Where are your materials to preserve your shipping? Where will you be able to challenge any right by sea, or justify yourselves against a foreign invasion on your own soil? Think upon it; this is the design! I believe if you will go and ask the poor mariner in his red cap and coat, as he passeth from ship to ship, you will hardly find in any ship but they will tell you this is designed against you. So obvious is it, by this and other things, that you are the object; and, in my conscience, I know not for what else, but because of the purity of the profession amongst you, who have not yet made it your trade to prefer your profit before your godliness, but reckon godliness the greater gain."

It was Oliver's head—not his heart—that was at fault. But a few days after these words were spoken, Charles X. was tramping with his army over the ice of the two Belts, in that marvellous march which landed him in Zealand, and compelled Frederick III. to sign the Treaty of Roeskilde which abandoned to Sweden the Danish possessions to the east of the Sound. What then were Oliver's Ambassadors doing when that treaty was negotiating? They were but arguing as any Dutchman or Brandenburger might have argued, on behalf of the material interests of their own country. They favoured Charles's wish to annex the Danish provinces beyond the Sound, because it would leave the passage into the Baltic under the control of two Powers instead of one. They opposed his wish to annex more than two provinces of Norway, in order that the monopoly of the timber trade might not fall into his hands. Of the Protestant alliance not a word was spoken.

For all that, the Protestant alliance had not passed out of Oliver's mind. Now that Denmark was crushed, Charles professed himself to be quite ready to attack Leopold of Austria, if only he were allowed to crush Brandenburg first; and in May an English Ambassador was sent to Berlin to plead with the Elector of Brandenburg to join England and Sweden against Leopold, to whose support Frederick William was looking against an unprovoked attack from Charles. Happily for England, Frederick William refused to countenance this insane proposal, and in August Charles renewed the war against Denmark, with a fixed determination to bring the whole of the Scandinavian territory under his own sway, before he involved himself in those further complications in Germany, in which Oliver, supported by Mazarin, was anxious to involve him. "France," said the King of Sweden, "wants to limit me and to prescribe the course I am to take, and England attempts to do the same, but I will put myself in a position to be independent of their orders." His Ministers spoke even more openly of their future plans. When Denmark and Norway had been annexed, and the Baltic brought under the undisputed control of Sweden, Courland and West Prussia must inevitably pass into their master's hands. Then with an army of 40,000 men, supported by a navy of 100 ships, the Swedish army would march through Germany into Italy, visit the Pope, and plunder Rome. "Their first thought is pillage," added the French Ambassador who reported these vapourings perhaps not without exaggeration. Charles X. was a great soldier, but he was by no means the oppressed saint of Oliver's imagination.

There can be little doubt that the maintenance of a war in the heart of Germany, even with a Swedish ally, would have been far beyond Oliver's means. The occupation of the Flemish ports had taxed his resources to the uttermost. In the speech in which he had sung the high praises of the Swedish king, he had been obliged to plead the necessities of the army as a ground for his demand for fresh supplies. The pay of the army was far in arrear, and it was on the army that he depended to keep down hostile parties at home and to stave off a Royalist attack from abroad. Nor was that army needed for purposes of mere defence. Picturing to himself the majority of the Continental nations as actuated by a wild desire to assail England, he inferred that attack was the best defence. "You have counted yourselves happy," he said to Parliament, "in being environed with a great ditch from all the world beside. Truly you will not be able to keep your ditch, nor your shipping, unless you turn your ships and shipping into troops of horse and companies of foot; and fight to defend yourselves on terra firma."

This then was what Oliver's much-lauded foreign policy had come to—more regiments, and even higher taxation than what the vast majority of Englishmen believed to be far too high already. A great Continental war, with all its risks and burdens, was dangled before the eyes of a Parliament to which such an outlook had no attractions. That Parliament was no longer the body which had voted the new constitution. Not only were there now two Houses, but the composition of the older House had been significantly altered. The most determined supporters of the Protectorate had been withdrawn to occupy the benches of the new House, whilst the clause of The Humble Petition and Advice, which prohibited the Protector from ever again excluding members duly elected from what had now become the House of Commons, opened its doors to his most determined enemies. The men who now found their way to their seats, such as Hazlerigg and Scott, were opposed heart and soul to the whole system of the Protectorate, and longed for the re-establishment of Parliamentary supremacy. Such men were the more dangerous because they were sufficiently versed in Parliamentary tactics to know the advantage of a rallying cry which would bring the lukewarm to their side. The powers and attributes of the other House were ill-defined in the constitutional document to which it owed its birth, and it was easy to gain adherents by urging that it was not entitled either to the name or the privileges of the House of Lords of the Monarchy. After some days of wrangling, the Protector resolved to put an end to the debates. It was hard, he complained, to have accepted a constitutional settlement on the invitation of that very Parliament, and then to have it brought into question. "I can say," he continued, "in the presence of God—in comparison with whom we are but like poor creeping ants upon the earth—I would have been glad to have lived under my wood side to have kept a flock of sheep, rather than to have undertaken such a government as this. But undertaking it by the advice and petition of you, I did look that you who had offered it unto me should make it good."

Such language must appear to those who judge by the recorded words and actions of this Parliament to be without adequate justification. It is undeniable that the constitution contained no definition of the powers of the new House, and if there had been no other than the ostensible question at issue, it would have been unreasonable in Oliver to hurry on a crisis before attempting, directly or indirectly, to suggest terms of compromise. As a matter of fact this question of the other House was very far from covering the whole ground of debate. A petition to which thousands of signatures were appended was being circulated in the City, asking for a complete restitution of Parliamentary supremacy and—no doubt to catch the support of a certain section of the army—for an enactment that no officer or soldier should be cashiered without the sentence of a court martial. Oliver was perfectly right in holding that the attack on the other House was equivalent to an assault on the constitutional Protectorate. He had himself looked to that House as restoring to him in another form the powers which he had abandoned when he let fall the Instrument. By keeping in his own hands the selection of its members, and providing that that House should have a veto on subsequent nominations—the principle of inheritance being totally excluded—he imagined that he had sufficiently provided for the future. His objects in so doing may be taken as those set forth by a writer who had ample means of gathering his intentions. "It was no small task for the Protector to find idoneous men for this place, because the future security of the honest interest seemed—under God—to be laid up in them; for by a moral generation, if they were well chosen at the first, they would propagate their own kind, when the single person could not, and the Commons, who represented the nation, would not, having in them for the most part the spirit of those they represent, which hath little affinity with a respect of the cause of God." It is easy to criticise such a principle from a modern point of view. Yet if the morality of Oliver's political actions are ever to be judged fairly, it must never be forgotten that the right of an honest Government to prevent the people from injuring themselves by out-voting the saner members of the community was—rather than any democratic or Parliamentary theory—the predominant note of his career. It is this at least which explains his assent to the choice of the nominated Parliament, as well as his breach with the Parliaments which he dismissed in 1655 and 1658.

Such views could not but lead the Protector to a breach with his second Parliament as well. The men who were grumbling at the insolence of his new lords were, as he well knew, prepared to follow up their attack by another more directly aimed at his own authority. The remainder of the Protector's speech is only intelligible on this supposition. Professing his intention to stand by the new constitution, he accused his opponents of a design to subvert it. "These things," he asseverated, "lead to nothing else but to the playing of the King of Scots' game—if I may so call him—and I think myself bound before God to do what I can to prevent it; and if this be so, I do assign it to this cause—your not assenting to what you did invite me to by your Petition and Advice, as that which might prove the settlement of the nation; and if this be the end of your sitting, and this be your carriage, I think it high time that an end be put to your sitting. And I do dissolve this Parliament! And let God be judge between you and me!"