Oliver Cromwell

by Theodore Roosevelt

John Pym.
From the portrait by Cornelius Janssen at the Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington.

Cromwell showed himself to be a man of mark in this Parliament; but he was not among the very foremost leaders. He had no great understanding of constitutional government, no full appreciation of the vital importance of the reign of law to the proper development of orderly liberty. His fervent religious ardor made all questions affecting faith and doctrine close to him; and his hatred of corruption and oppression inclined him to take the lead whenever any question arose of dealing, either with the wrongs done by Laud in the course of his religious persecutions, or with the irresponsible tyranny of the Star Chamber, and the sufferings of its victims. The bent of Cromwell’s mind was thus shown right in the beginning of his parliamentary career. His desire was to remedy specific evils. He was too impatient to found the kind of legal and constitutional system which could alone prevent the recurrence of such evils. This tendency, thus early shown, explains, at least in part, why it was that later he deviated from the path trod by Hampden, and afterward by Washington and Washington’s colleagues: showing himself unable to build up free government or to establish the reign of law, until he was finally driven to substitute his own personal government for the personal government of the King whom he had helped to dethrone, and put to death. Cromwell’s extreme admirers treat his impatience of the delays and shortcomings of ordinary constitutional and legal proceedings as a sign of his greatness. It was just the reverse. In great crises it may be necessary to overturn constitutions and disregard statutes, just as it may be necessary to establish a vigilance committee, or take refuge in lynch law; but such a remedy is always dangerous, even when absolutely necessary; and the moment it becomes the habitual remedy, it is a proof that society is going backward. Of this retrogression the deeds of the strong man who sets himself above the law may be partly the cause and partly the consequence; but they are always the signs of decay.

The Commons had passed a law authorizing the election of a Parliament at least once in three years: which at once took away the King’s power to attempt to rule without a Parliament; and in May they extorted from the King an act that they should not be dissolved without their own consent. Ship Money was declared to be illegal; the Star Chamber was abolished; and Tonnage and Poundage were declared illegal, unless levied by Act of Parliament. Then the Scotch army was paid off and returned across the Border. The best work of the Commons had now been done, and if they could have trusted the King it would have been well for them to dissolve; but the King could not be trusted, and, moreover, the religious question was pushed to the front. Laud’s actions—actions taken with the full consent and by the advice of the King—had rendered the Episcopal form of Church government obnoxious. The House of Commons was Presbyterian, and it speedily became evident that it wished to establish the Presbyterian system of Church government in the place of Episcopacy; and, moreover, that it intended to be just as intolerant on behalf of Presbyterianism as the King and Laud had been on behalf of Episcopacy. There was a strong moderate party which the King might have rallied about him, but his incurable bad faith made it impossible to trust his protestations. He now made terms with the Scotch, in accordance with which they agreed not to interfere between himself and his English subjects in religious matters. He hoped thereby to deprive the Presbyterian English of their natural allies across the Border. This conduct, of itself, would have inflamed the increasing religious bitterness; but it was raised to madness by the news that came from Ireland at this time.

Inspired by the news of the revolt in Scotland and the troubles in England, the Irish had risen against their hereditary oppressors. It was the revolt of a race which rose to avenge wrongs as bitter as ever one people inflicted upon another; and it was inevitable that it should be accompanied by appalling outrages in certain places. It was on these outrages that the English fixed their eyes, naturally ignoring the generations of English evil-doing which had brought them about. A furious cry for revenge arose. Every Puritan, from Oliver Cromwell down, regarded the massacres as a fresh proof that Roman Catholics ought to be treated, not as professors of another Christian creed, but as cruel public enemies; and their burning desire for vengeance took the form, not merely of hostility to Roman Catholicism, but to the Episcopacy, which they regarded as in the last resort an ally of Catholicism.

In November, 1641, the Puritan majority in Parliament passed the Grand Remonstrance—which was a long indictment of Charles’s conduct. Cromwell had now taken his place as among the foremost of the Root and Branch Party, who demanded the abolition of Episcopacy, and whose action drove all those who believed in the Episcopal form of Church government into the party of the King. He threw himself with eager vehemence into the Party of the Remonstrance, and after its bill was passed told Falkland that if it had been rejected by Parliament he would have sold all he had, and never again seen England.

For a moment the Puritan violence, which culminated in the Grand Remonstrance, provoked a reaction in favor of the King; but the King, by another act of violence, brought about a counter-reaction. In January, 1642, he entered the House of Commons, and in person ordered the seizure and imprisonment in the Tower of the five foremost leaders of the Puritan party, including Pym and Hampden. Such a course on his part could be treated only as an invitation to civil war. London, which before had been wavering, now rallied to the side of the Commons; the King left Whitehall; and it was evident to all men that the struggle between him and the Parliament had reached a point where it would have to be settled by the appeal to arms.

In August, 1642, King Charles planted the royal standard on the Castle of Nottingham, and the Civil War began. The Parliamentary forces were led by the Earl of Essex. They included some 20 regiments of infantry and 75 troops of horse, each 60 strong, raised and equipped by its own captain. Oliver Cromwell was captain of the Sixty-seventh Troop, and his kinsfolk and close friends were scattered through the cavalry and infantry. His sons served with or under him. One brother-in-law was quartermaster of his own troop; a second was captain of another troop. His future son-in-law, Henry Ireton, was captain of yet another; a cousin and a nephew were cornets. Another cousin, John Hampden, was colonel of a regiment of foot; so was Cromwell’s close friend and neighbor, the after-time Earl of Manchester, who was much under his influence.

It was nearly a hundred years since England had been the scene of serious fighting, and Scotland had witnessed nothing more than brawls during that time. Elizabeth’s war with Spain had been waged upon the ocean. However, thousands of English and Scotch adventurers had served in the Netherlands and in High Germany under the Dutch and Swedish generals. In both the Royal and Parliamentary armies there was a sprinkling of men—especially in the upper ranks of the officers—who had had practical experience of war on a large scale. The English people offered exceptionally fine material for soldiers; the population was still overwhelmingly rural and agricultural. In the cities the hardy mechanics and craftsmen were accustomed to sports in which physical prowess played a great part. The agricultural classes were far above the peasant serfs of Germany and France; and the gentry and yeomanry were accustomed to the use of the horse and the fowling-piece, and were devoted to field-sports. In courage, in hardihood, in intelligence, the level was high.

Although gunpowder had been in use for a couple of centuries, progress toward the modern arms of precision had been so slow that close-quarter weapons were still, on the whole, superior; and shock tactics rather than fire tactics were decisive. Artillery, though used on the field of battle, was never there a controlling factor, being of chief use in the assault of fortified places. The musketeers took so long to load their clumsy weapons that they could be used to best advantage only when protected, and they played a less important part on a pitched field than the great bodies of pikemen with which they were mingled. In England the cavalry had completely the upper hand of the infantry. It was used, not merely to finish the fight, but to smash unbroken and unshaken bodies of foot; and so great was its value in the open field that every effort was made by the commanders on both sides to keep it at the largest possible ratio to the whole army. Every decisive battle of the Civil War was made such by the cavalry. The arrangement of the armies was, invariably, with the infantry in the centre, the pikemen and the musketeers ordinarily alternating in clumps, while the cavalry was on both wings. The dragoons, though mounted, habitually fought on foot with their fire-pieces. Lancers were rarely used. The heavy cavalry were clad in cuirasses, and armed with long, straight swords and pistols. The light cavalry usually wore the buff coat, sometimes with a breast-piece, always with a helmet; and in addition to their sword and pistols, carried a carbine.