Oliver Cromwell

by Theodore Roosevelt

He first appeared before the Parliament, and in an exceedingly able speech announced his willingness to accept a Parliamentary constitution, provided that it contained four fundamentals not to be overturned by law. The fundamentals were, first, that the country was to be governed by a single person, by a single executive, and a Parliament; second, that Parliaments were not to make themselves perpetual; third, that liberty of conscience should be respected; fourth, that the Protector and Parliament should have joint power over the militia.

All four propositions were sound. The first two were agreed to at once, and the third also, though with some reluctance, the Parliament being less liberal than the Protector in religious matters. Over the control of the soldiers there was irreconcilable difference.

Cromwell was not content with arguments. He would not permit any member to enter the House without signing an engagement not to alter the government as it had been settled; that is, every member had to subscribe to the joint government of the Protector and the Parliament. A hundred members refused to sign. Three-fourths of the House did sign, and went on with their work.

Until the assembling of this Parliament, every step that Oliver had taken could be thoroughly justified. He had not played the part of a usurper. He had been a zealous patriot, working in the interests of the people; and he had only broken up the Long Parliament when the Long Parliament had itself become an utterly unrepresentative body. He had then shown his good faith by promptly summoning a genuinely representative body. It is possible to defend him even for excluding the hundred members who declined to subscribe to his theory of the fundamentals of government. But it is not possible to excuse him for what he now did. Parliament, as it was left after the Extremists had been expelled, stood as the only elective body which it was possible to gather in England that could in any sense be called representative, and yet agree to work with Cromwell. Had Cromwell not become cursed with the love of power; had he not acquired a dictatorial habit of mind, and the fatal incapacity to acknowledge that there might be righteousness in other methods than his own, he could certainly have avoided a break with this Parliament. His splitting with it was absolutely needless. It agreed to confirm his powers for five years, and, as it happened, at the end of that time he was dead. Even had he lived there could be no possible excuse for refusing such a lease of power, on the ground that it was too short; for it was amply long enough to allow him to settle whatever was necessary to settle.

The Great Hall, Hampton Court.
In this room the state dinners were given under the Protectorate.

Cromwell, and later his apologists, insisted that, by delay and by refusing to grant supplies until their grievances were considered, the Parliament was encouraging the spirit of revolt. In reality the spirit of revolt was tenfold increased, not by the Parliament’s action, but by Cromwell’s, in seizing arbitrary power. If he had shown a tenth of the forbearance that Washington showed in dealing with the various Continental Congresses, he would have been readily granted far more power than ever Washington was given. He could easily have settled affairs on a constitutional basis, which would have given him all the power he had any right to ask; for his difficulties in this particular crisis were nothing like so great as those which Washington surmounted. The plea that the safety of the people and of the cause of righteousness depended upon his unchecked control, is a plea always made in such cases, and generally, as in this particular case, without any basis in fact. The need was just the other way.

Contrast Cromwell’s conduct with that of Lincoln, just before his second election as President. There was a time in the summer of 1864 when it looked as if the Democrats would win, and elect McClellan. At that time it was infinitely more essential to the salvation of the Union that Lincoln should be continued in power, than it was to the salvation of the Commonwealth, in 1654, that Cromwell should be continued in power. Lincoln would have been far more excusable than Cromwell if he had insisted upon keeping control. Yet such a thought never entered Lincoln’s head. He prepared to abide in good faith the decision of the people, and one of the most touching incidents of his life is the quiet and noble sincerity with which he made preparations, if McClellan was elected, to advise with him and help him in every way, and to use his own power, during the interval between McClellan’s election and inauguration, in such a manner as would redound most to the advantage of the latter, and would increase, as far as possible, the chance for the preservation of the Union. It was at this time of Cromwell’s life that, at the parting of the ways, he chose the wrong way. Great man though he was, and far though the good that he did out-balanced the evil, yet he lost the right to stand with men like Washington and Lincoln of modern times, and with the very, very few who, like Timoleon, in some measure approached their standard in ancient times.

As the Parliament continued in session, the attitude of the Protector changed from sullen to fierce hostility. It was entitled to sit five months. By a quibble he construed this to mean five lunar months. On January 22, 1655, he dissolved it, after rating it in a long and angry speech. With its dissolution it became evident to the great mass of true liberty-lovers that all hope of real freedom was at an end, and the forces that told for the restoration of the King were increased tenfold in strength. Nevertheless, some of the purest and most ardent lovers of liberty, like Milton, still clung despairingly to the Protector. They recognized that, with all his faults, and in spite of his determination to rule in arbitrary fashion, he yet intended to secure peace, justice, and good government, and, alike in power and in moral grandeur, towered above his only possible alternative, Charles II., as a giant towers above a pigmy.