The great career, the incidents of which we have been following, was now, however, drawing to a close. Cromwell’s health had long been impaired by the hardships of campaigning. Now at the age of 58 he was already old, and his firm, strong signature had become feeble and trembling. The responsibilities and anxieties of government unassisted by parliament, and the continued struggle against the force of anarchy, weighed upon him and exhausted his physical powers. “It has been hitherto,” Cromwell said, “a matter of, I think, but philosophical discourse, that a great place, a great authority, is a great burthen. I know it is.” “I can say in the presence of God, in comparison of whom we are but like poor creeping ants upon the earth, I would have lived under my woodside to have kept a flock of sheep rather than undertook such a government as this.” “I doubt not to say,” declared his steward Maidston, “it drank up his spirits, of which his natural constitution afforded a vast stock, and brought him to his grave.”
Domestic bereavements added further causes of grief and of weakened vitality. On the 6th of February 1658 he lost his favourite daughter, Elizabeth Claypole, and he was much cast down by the shock of his bereavement and of her long sufferings. Shortly afterwards he fell ill of an intermittent fever, but seemed to recover. On the 20th of August George Fox met him riding at the head of his guards in the park at Hampton Court, but declared “he looked like a dead man.” The next day he again fell ill and was removed from Hampton Court to Whitehall, where his condition became worse. The anecdotes believed and circulated by the royalists that Cromwell died in all the agonies of remorse and fear are entirely false. On the 31st of August Death. he seemed to rally, and one who slept in his bedchamber and who heard him praying, declared, “a public spirit to God’s cause did breathe in him to the very last.” During the next few days he grew weaker and resigned himself to death. “I would,” he said, “be willing to be further serviceable to God and his people, but my work is done.” For the first time doubts as to his spiritual state seemed to have troubled him. “Tell me is it possible to fall from grace?” he asked the attendant minister. “No, it is not possible,” the latter replied. “Then,” said Cromwell, “I am safe, for I know that I was once in grace.” He refused medicine to induce sleep, declaring “it is not my design to drink or to sleep, but my design is to make what haste I can to be gone.” Towards the morning of the 3rd of September he again spoke, “using divers holy expressions, implying much inward consolation and peace,” together with “some exceeding self-debasing words, annihilating and judging himself.” He died on the afternoon of the same day, his day of triumph, the anniversary both of Dunbar and of Worcester. His body was privately buried in the chapel of Henry VII. in Westminster Abbey, the public funeral taking place on the 23rd of November, with great ceremony and on the same scale as that of Philip II. of Spain, and costing the enormous sum of £60,000. At the Restoration his body was exhumed, and on the 30th of January 1661, the anniversary of the execution of Charles I., it was drawn on a sledge from Holborn to Tyburn, together with the bodies of Ireton and Bradshaw, accompanied by “the universal outcry and curses of the people.” There it was hanged on a gallows, and in the evening taken down, when the head was cut off and set up upon Westminster Hall, where it remained till as late as 1684, the trunk being thrown into a pit underneath the gallows. According to various legends Cromwell’s last burial place is stated to be Westminster Abbey, Naseby Field or Newburgh Abbey; but there appears to be no evidence to support them, or to create any reasonable doubt that the great Protector’s dust lies now where it was buried, in the neighbourhood of the present Connaught Square.
As a military commander Cromwell was as prompt as Gustavus, as ardent as Condé, as exact as Turenne. These, moreover, were soldiers from their earliest years. Condé’s fame was established in his twenty-second year, Gustavus Cromwell’s military genius. was twenty-seven and Turenne thirty-three at the beginning of their careers as commanders-in-chief. Cromwell, on the other hand, was forty-three when he fought in his first battle. In less than two years he had taken his rank as one of the great cavalry leaders of history. His campaigns of 1648 and 1651 placed him still higher as a great commander. Worcester, his crowning victory, has been indicated by a German critic as the prototype of Sédan. Yet his early military education could have consisted at most of the perusal of the Swedish Intelligencer and the practice of riding. It is not, therefore, strange that Cromwell’s first essays in war were characterised more by energy than technical skill. It was some time before he realized the spirit of cavalry tactics, of which he was later so complete a master. At first he speaks with complacence of a mêlée, and reports that he and his men “agreed to charge” the enemy. But before long he came to understand, as no other commander of the age save Gustavus understood it, the value of true “shock-action.” Of Marston Moor he writes, “we never charged but we routed them”; and thereafter his battles were decided by the shock of closed squadrons, the fresh impulse of a second and even a third line, and above all by the unquestioning discipline and complete control over their horses to which he trained his men. This gave them not merely greater steadiness, but, what was far more important, the power of rallying and reforming for a second effort. The Royalist cavalry was disorganized by victory as often as by defeat, and illustrated on numerous fields the now discredited maxim that cavalry cannot charge twice in one day. Cromwell shares with Frederick the Great the credit of founding the modern cavalry spirit. As a horsemaster he was far superior to Murat. His marches in the eastern campaign of 1643 show a daily average at one time of 28 m. as against the 21 of Murat’s cavalry in the celebrated pursuit after Jena. And this result he achieved with men of less than two years’ service, men, too, more heavily equipped and worse mounted than the veterans of the Grande Armée. It has been said that his battles were decided by shock action; the real emphasis should be laid upon the word “decided.” The swift, unhesitating charge was more than unusual in the wars of the time, and was possible only because of the peculiar earnestness of the men who fought the English war. The professional soldiers of the Continent could rarely be brought to force a decision; but the English, contending for a cause, were imbued with the spirit of the modern “nation in arms”; and having taken up arms wished to decide the quarrel by arms. This feeling was not less conspicuous in the far-ranging rides, or raids, of the Cromwellian cavalry. At one time, as in the case of Blechingdon, they would perform strange exploits worthy of the most daring hussars; at another their speed and tenacity paralyses armies. Not even Sheridan’s horsemen in 1864-65 did their work more effectively than did the English squadrons in the Preston campaign. Cromwell appreciated this feeling at its exact worth, and his pre-eminence in the Civil War was due to this highest gift of a general, the power of feeling the pulse of his army. Resolution, vigour and clear sight marked his conduct as a commander-in-chief. He aimed at nothing less than the annihilation of the enemy’s forces, which Clausewitz was the first to define, a hundred and fifty years later, as the true objective of military operations. Not merely as exemplifying the tactical envelopment, but also as embodying the central idea of grand strategy, was Worcester the prototype of Sédan. The contrast between a campaign of Cromwell’s and one of Turenne’s is far more than remarkable, and the observation of a military critic who maintains that Cromwell’s art of war was two centuries in advance of its time, finds universal acceptance.
At a time when throughout the rest of Europe armies were manœuvring against one another with no more than a formal result, the English and Scots were fighting decisive battles; and Cromwell’s battles were more decisive than those of any other leader. Until his fiery energy made itself felt, hardly any army on either side actually suffered rout; but at Marston Moor and Naseby the troops of the defeated party were completely dissolved, while at Worcester the royalist army was annihilated. Dunbar attested his constancy and gave proof that Cromwell was a master of the tactics of all arms. Preston was an example like Austerlitz of the two stages of a battle as defined by Napoleon, the first flottante, the second foudroyante.
Cromwell’s strategic manœuvres, if less adroit than those of Turenne or Montecucculi, were, in accordance with his own genius and the temper of his army, directed always to forcing a decisive battle. That he was also capable of strategy of the other type was clear from his conduct of the Irish War. But his chief work was of a different kind and done on a different scale. The greatest feat of Turenne was the rescue of one province in 1674-1675; Cromwell, in 1648 and again in 1651, had two-thirds of England and half of Scotland for his theatre of war. Turenne levelled down his methods to suit the ends which he had in view. The task of Cromwell was far greater. Any comparison between the generalship of these two great commanders would therefore be misleading, for want of a common basis. It is when he is contrasted with other commanders, not of the age of Louis XIV., but of the Civil War, that Cromwell’s greatness is most conspicuous. Whilst others busied themselves with the application of the accepted rules of the Dutch, the German, and other formal schools of tactical thought, Cromwell almost alone saw clearly into the heart of the questions at issue, and evolved the strategy, the tactics, and the training suited to the work to which he had set his hand.
Cromwell’s career as a statesman has been already traced in its different spheres, and an endeavour has been made to show the breadth and wisdom of his conceptions and at the same time the cause of the immediate failure of his Cromwell’s statesmanship. constructive policy. Whether if Cromwell had survived he would have succeeded in gradually establishing legal government is a question which can never be answered. His administration as it stands in history is undoubtedly open to the charge that after abolishing the absolutism of the ancient monarchy he substituted for it, not law and liberty, but a military tyranny far more despotic than the most arbitrary administration of Charles I. The statement of Vane and Ludlow, when they refused to acknowledge Cromwell’s government, that it was “in substance a re-establishment of that which we all engaged against,” was true. The levy of ship money and customs by Charles sinks into insignificance beside Cromwell’s wholesale taxation by ordinances; the inquisitional methods of the major-generals and the unjust and exceptional taxation of royalists outdid the scandals of the extra-legal courts of the Stuarts; the shipment of British subjects by Cromwell as slaves to Barbados has no parallel in the Stuart administration; while the prying into morals, the encouragement of informers, the attempt to make the people religious by force, were the counterpart of the Laudian system, and Cromwell’s drastic treatment of the Irish exceeded anything dreamed of by Strafford. He discovered that parliamentary government after all was not the easy and plain task that Pym and Vane had imagined, and Cromwell had in the end no better justification of his rule than that which Strafford had suggested to Charles I.,—“parliament refusing (to give support and co-operation in carrying on the government) you are acquitted before God and man.” The fault was no doubt partly Cromwell’s own. He had neither the patience nor the tact for managing loquacious parliamentary pedants. But the chief responsibility was not his but theirs. John Morley (Oliver Cromwell, p. 297) has truly observed of the execution of Charles I., that it was “an act of war, and was just as defensible or just as assailable, and on the same grounds, as the war itself.” The parliamentary party took leave of legality when they took up arms against the sovereign, and it was therefore idle to dream of a formally legal sanction for any of their subsequent revolutionary proceedings. An entirely fresh start had to be made. A new foundation had to be laid on which a new system of legality might be reared. It was for this that Cromwell strove. If the Rump or the Little Parliament had in a business-like spirit assumed and discharged the functions of a constituent assembly, such a foundation might have been provided. It was only when five years had passed since the death of the king without any “settlement of the nation” being arrived at, that Cromwell at last accepted a constitution drafted by his military officers, and attempted to impose it on the parliament. And it was not until the parliament refused to acknowledge the Instrument as the required starting point for the new legality, that Cromwell in the last resort took arbitrary power into his hands as the only method remaining for carrying on the government. For much as he hated arbitrariness, he hated anarchy still more. While therefore Cromwell’s administration became in practice little different from that of Strafford, the aims and ideals of the two statesmen had nothing in common. It is therefore profoundly true, as observed by S. R. Gardiner (Cromwell, p. 315), that “what makes Cromwell’s biography so interesting in his perpetual effort to walk in the paths of legality—an effort always frustrated by the necessities of the situation. The man—it is ever so with the noblest—was greater than his work.” The nature of Cromwell’s statesmanship is to be seen rather in his struggles against the retrograde influences and opinions of his time, in the many political reforms anticipated though not originated or established by himself, and in his religious, perhaps fanatical, enthusiasm, than in the outward character of his administration, which, however, in spite of its despotism shows itself in its inner spirit of justice, patriotism and self-sacrifice, so immeasurably superior to that of the Stuarts.
Cromwell’s personal character has been inevitably the subject of unceasing controversy. According to Clarendon he was “a brave bad man,” with “all the wickedness against which damnation is pronounced and for which hell fire Personal character. is prepared.” Yet he cannot deny that “he had some virtues which have caused the memory of some men in all ages to be celebrated”; and admits that “he was not a man of blood,” and that he possessed “a wonderful understanding in the natures and humour of men,” and “a great spirit, an admirable circumspection and sagacity and a most magnanimous resolution.” According to contemporary republicans he was a mere selfish adventurer, sacrificing the national cause “to the idol of his own ambition.” Richard Baxter thought him a good man who fell before a great temptation. The writers of the next century generally condemned him as a mixture of knave, fanatic and hypocrite, and in 1839 John Forster endorsed Landor’s verdict that Cromwell lived a hypocrite and died a traitor. These crude ideas of Cromwell’s character were extinguished by Macaulay’s irresistible logic, by the publication of Cromwell’s letters by Carlyle in 1845, which showed Cromwell clearly to be “not a man of falsehoods, but a man of truth”; and by Gardiner, whom, however, it is somewhat difficult to follow when he represents Cromwell as “a typical Englishman.” In particular that conception which regarded “ambition” as the guiding motive in his career has been dispelled by a more intimate and accurate knowledge of his life; this shows him to have been very little the creator of his own career, which was largely the result of circumstances outside his control, the influence of past events and of the actions of others, the pressure of the national will, the natural superiority of his own genius. “A man never mounts so high,” Cromwell said to the French ambassador in 1647, “as when he does not know where he is going.” “These issues and events,” he said in 1656, “have not been forecast, but were providences in things.” His “hypocrisy” consists principally in the Biblical language he employed, which with Cromwell, as with many of his contemporaries, was the most natural way of expressing his feelings, and in the ascription of every incident to the direct intervention of God’s providence, which was really Cromwell’s sincere belief and conviction. In later times Cromwell’s character and administration have been the subject of almost too indiscriminate eulogy, which has found tangible shape in the statue erected to his memory at Westminster in 1899. Here Cromwell’s effigy stands in the midst of the sanctuaries of the law, the church, and the parliament, the three foundations of the state which he subverted, and in sight of Whitehall where he destroyed the monarchy in blood. Yet Cromwell’s monument is not altogether misplaced in such surroundings, for in him are found the true principles of piety, of justice, of liberty and of governance.
John Maidston, Cromwell’s steward, gives the “character of his person.” “His body was compact and strong, his stature under six foot (I believe about two inches), his head so shaped as you might see it a storehouse and a shop both of a vast treasury of natural parts.” “His temper exceeding fiery, as I have known, but the flame of it, ... kept down for the most part, was soon allayed with those moral endowments he had. He was naturally compassionate towards objects in distress even to an effeminate measure; though God had made him a heart wherein was left little room for fear, ... yet did he exceed in tenderness towards sufferers. A larger soul I think hath seldom dwelt in a house of clay than his was. I believe if his story were impartially transmitted and the unprejudiced world well possessed with it, she would add him to her nine worthies.” By his wife Elizabeth Bourchier, Cromwell had four sons, Robert (who died in 1639), Oliver (who died in 1644 while serving in his father’s regiment), Richard, who succeeded him as Protector, and Henry. He also had four daughters. Of these Bridget was the wife successively of Ireton and Fleetwood, Elizabeth married John Claypole, Mary was wife of Thomas Belasyse, Lord Fauconberg; and Frances was the wife of Sir Robert Rich, and secondly of Sir John Russell. The last male descendant of the Protector was his great-great-grandson, Oliver Cromwell of Cheshunt, who died in 1821. By the female line, through his children Henry, Bridget and Frances, the Protector has had numerous descendants, and is the ancestor of many well-known families.[6]
Bibliography.—A detailed bibliography, with the chief authorities for particular periods, will be found in the article in the Dict. of Nat. Biography, by C. H. Firth (1888). The following works may be mentioned: S. R. Gardiner’s Hist. of England (1883-1884) and of the Great Civil War (1886), Cromwell’s Place in History (1897), Oliver Cromwell (1901), and History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate (1894-1903); Cromwell, by C. H. Firth (1900); Oliver Cromwell, by J. Morley (1904); The Last Years of the Protectorate, 1656-1658, 2 vols., by C. H. Firth (1909); Oliver Cromwell, by Fred. Harrison (1903); Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, by T. Carlyle, ed. by S. C. Lomas, with an introd. by C. H. Firth (the best edition, rejecting the spurious Squire papers, 1904); Oliver Cromwell, by F. Hoenig (1887); Oliver Cromwell, the Protector, by R. F. D. Palgrave (1890); Oliver Cromwell ... and the Royalist Insurrection ... of March 1655, by the same author (1903); Oliver Cromwell, by Theodore Roosevelt (1900); Oliver Cromwell, by R. Pauli (tr. 1888); Cromwell, a Speech delivered at the Cromwell Tercentenary Celebration 1899, by Lord Rosebery (1900); The Two Protectors, by Sir Richard Tangye (valuable for its illustrations, 1899); Life of Sir Henry Vane, by W. W. Ireland (1905); Die Politik des Protectors Oliver Cromwell in der Auffassung und Tätigkeit ... des Staatssekretärs John Thurloe, by Freiherr v. Bischofshausen (1899); Cromwell as a Soldier, by T. S. Baldock (1899); Cromwell’s Army, by C. H. Firth (1902); The Diplomatic Relations between Cromwell and Charles X. of Sweden, by G. Jones (1897); The Interregnum, by F. A. Inderwick (dealing with the legal aspect of Cromwell’s rule, 1891); Administration of the Royal Navy, by M. Oppenheim (1896); History of the English Church during the Civil Wars, by W. Shaw (1900); The Protestant Interest in Cromwell’s Foreign Relations, by J. N. Bowman (1900); Cromwell’s Jewish Intelligencies (1891), Crypto-Jews under the Commonwealth (1894), Menasseh Ben Israel’s Mission to Oliver Cromwell (1901), by L. Wolf.