CROMWELL Also by Ivan Roots THE CoMMITIEE AT STAFFORD (with D. H. Penmngton) THE GREAT REBELLION 1642-<io (published in the Vnited States of America as THE CoMMoN- WEALTH AND PROTECTORATE) CoNFLicTs IN TuooR AND STuART ENGLAND (editor) THE UTE TROUBLES IN ENGLAND Cromwell A PROFILE Edited by I van Roots WORLD PROFILES General Editor: A"ida DiPace Donald Palgrave Macmillan For Tegwyn For ••• everything ISBN 978-1-349-01481-1 ISBN 978-1-349-01479-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-01479-8 COPYRIGHT © 1973 BY IVAN ROOTS SOFI'COVER REPRINT OFTHE HARDCOVER 1ST EDmON 1973 978-0-333-13502-0 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 1973 FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE UNITED KINGDOM 1973 BY THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD LONDON AND BASINGSTOKE ASSOCIATED COMPANIES IN NEW YORK DUBLIN MELBOURNE JOHANNESBURG AND MADRAS SBN 333 13502 4 The portrait 01 Oliver Cromwell was done in r657 hy Edward Mascall and is used by the kind permission 01 the Cromwell Museum, Huntingdon, Englanti Contents Introduction vii Oliver Cromwell, I599-I658 xvii The Achievement of Oliver Cromwell 3 ERNEST BARKER Cromwell's Genius 20 H. W. KOCH Cromwell and the Royalists 30 PAUL H. HARDACRE Oliver Cromwell and the Rule of the Saints 50 AUSTIN WOOLRYCH Cromwell and Lambert, 1tl53-57 J2 GEORGE D. HEATH III Oliver Cromwell and His Parliaments 91 H. R. TREVOR-ROPER Industrial Laisser-Faire and the Policy of Cromwell 136 G. D. RAMSAY v Vl CONTENTS The Idea of a Protestant Foreign Policy 160 ROGER CRABTREE Providence and Oliver Cromwell 190 CHRISTOPHER HILL Cromwell and the Historians 221 D. H. PENNINGTON Bibliographical Note 231 Contributors 235 Introduction O LIVER CROMWELL (1599-1658) is among the best known of Englishmen as well as one of the least understood. Everything about him excites curiosity and controversy-his char- acter, his intentions, his impact on his age-so that even after three hundred years, interpretations of him can stir up the em- bers of the English Civil Wars. To draw a complete profile of this extraordinary man is, in effect, to reconstruct an image of his entire era-a virtually impossible task. We can, nevertheless, learn a great deal about Oliver Cromwell. We know more than a little of his day-to-day activities and jour- neyings, especially after 1642, when he began to emerge from com- parative obscurity. Much of his correspondence, personal and offi- cial, survives, and there are acceptable versions of many of his public utterances and of some of his private conversations. A num- vii viii INTRODUCTION her of men-men who served with him or against him, in politics or in the field, who hated him or loved him-have left their im- pressions. Some even sought an objective assessment of him. We also have the views of poets such as Milton, Marvell, Dryden, and Waller-all of them thoughtful and intelligent observers who, like Cromwell himself, had had "somewhat to do in the world." Por- traits of him exist (a few, like Robert Walker's, authentic) as well as life and death masks and what may well be his mummified, posthumously tortured head. (His remains were dug up during the Restoration, reviled, and cast into an unmarked grave at Ty- burn, in a futile gesture at consigning him to oblivion.) Many anecdotes and a few songs have passed into folklore. In addition there is an enormous historical literature, much of it ephemeral, or scurrilous, but some the work of able scholars. (It is commented upon by D. H. Pennington in the essay printed below, which was written to commemorate the tercentenary in 1958 of Cromwell's death.) Yet we do not have a really satisfactory, much less a de- finitive, biography. The best, that of Sir Charles Firth, appeared as long ago as 1900. The most recent (1970), by Christopher Hill (a chapter of which, "Providence and Oliver Cromwell," forms part of this Profile), though brilliant and perceptive, is hardly a biog- raphy at all, but a collection of more or less discrete studies. It may be said of Oliver Cromwell: "Others abide our question; thou art free." The formidable ambiguities and subtle ironies of Marvell's An Horatian Ode on Cromwell's Return from Ireland are no greater than those of the subject himself. Cromwell was inconsistent and ambivalent, diffuse and contradictory. His expression, though often direct and concrete, even epigrammatic, could be obscure and, per- haps deliberately, opaque. Obviously no man's motives can be taken at their face value. Pascal wrote, probably in Cromwell's life- time, that the heart has its reasons which reason does not know. We can only glimpse the processes by which he settled on a par- ticular action or withdrawal during the numerous crises of his career. Moreover, precisely what part he played in many of the episodes associated with his name cannot always be determined. There is a "cloud of detractions" lowering over his every move or moment of inertia. Even Marvell, who clearly admired him, Introduction ix thought that the trial and execution of the King (January 30, 1649) were the outcome of a Machiavellian plot, "twining subtile fears with hope," set off by "the wars and fortune's son." Yet the evi- dence we can at present assemble suggests strongly that Cromwell was in no way a party to Pride's Purge (December 12, 1648), the first step, that he was slow to back a trial and was a very late convert indeed to the notion of deposition and execution. Once resolved, however, he was vital in the action, and there is an elated almost hysterical air about his efforts to get signatures to the death warrant. So far from making bullets for other men to .fire, Crom- well took them from others and then either threw them away or fired them himself. Thus he was not the initiator of Cornet Joyce's removal of the King from Holdenby House (June 3, 1647), but once it had happened he acquiesced in it and worked to exploit its possibilities; to what end is an open question. The Barebone's Parliament six years later (June-December 1653) was not of his own devising, nor was the Instrument of Government (December 12, 1653), which established him as Lord Protector. Major General John Lambert was the true if not the only begetter of that constitution, and later betrayed in Parliament an author's sensitivity at criticism of it. The Heads of the Proposals (July 1647), the forerunner of the Instrument, had been the work not so much of Oliver as of his clearheaded son-in-law Henry Ireton, whom he obviously respected, and, again, of Lambert. The system, if it can be called that, of the major generals (May 1655-January 1657)-"a little, poor invention" was Cromwell's own phrase for it -was not conceived by the Protector but merely blessed by him. His interest in it was not passionate, and he was slow and stingy in his response to requests from individual major generals for let- ters of comfort or commiseration. When it failed he dropped it without a qualm. When, on February 27, 1657, a group of army officers protested to him about the introduction in the Commons of "the paper" which later became the Humble Petition and Ad- vice (May 25, 16:;7), he in his turn complained that they had made him their "drudge upon all occasions." His claim that he was not a party to the drafting of the new constitution rings true enough. But the Humble Petition, which in its original form proposed the kingship which he rejected, certainly emanated from among his