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OLIVER CROMWELL
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[Illustration: Printed in Paris
OLIVER CROMWELL
_From the Original Panel by Samuel Cooper at Sidney Sussex College,
Cambridge._]
OLIVER CROMWELL
by
SAMUEL RAWSON GARDINER, M.A.
Hon. D.C.L. Oxford: Litt.D. Cambridge: LL.D. Edinburgh
Ph.D. Göttingen: Late Fellow of Merton College
Honorary Student of Christ Church
Fellow of King's College, London
With Frontispiece
New Impression
Longmans, Green, and Co.
39 Paternoster Row, London
New York, Bombay, and Calcutta
1909
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I.
KING AND PARLIAMENT. 1
CHAPTER II.
THE NEW MODEL ARMY AND THE PRESBYTERIANS. 56
CHAPTER III.
THE NEW MODEL ARMY AND THE KING. 101
CHAPTER IV.
THE LAST YEARS OF THE LONG PARLIAMENT. 166
CHAPTER V.
THE NOMINATED PARLIAMENT AND THE PROTECTORATE. 213
CHAPTER VI.
A PARLIAMENTARY CONSTITUTION. 264
PREFACE.
The following work gives within a short compass a history of Oliver
Cromwell from a biographical point of view. The text has been revised
by the author, but otherwise is the same in a cheaper form as that
which was published by Messrs. Goupil with illustrations in their
Illustrated Series of Historical Volumes.
OLIVER CROMWELL.
CHAPTER I.
KING AND PARLIAMENT.
Oliver Cromwell, the future Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of
England, was born at Huntingdon on April 25, 1599, receiving his
baptismal name from his uncle, Sir Oliver Cromwell of Hinchingbrooke, a
mansion hard by the little town. It was at Huntingdon that the father
of the infant, Robert Cromwell, had established himself, farming lands
and perhaps also adding to his income by the profits of a brewhouse
managed by his wife, Elizabeth--a descendant of a middle-class Norfolk
family of Steward--originally Styward--which, whatever writers of
authority may say, was not in any way connected with the Royal House of
Scotland.
"I was," said Cromwell in one of his later speeches, "by birth a
gentleman, living neither in any considerable height nor yet in
obscurity. I have been called to several employments in the nation,
and--not to be overtedious--I did endeavour to discharge the duty of
an honest man in those services to God and His people's interest, and
to the Commonwealth." The open secret of Cromwell's public life is set
forth in these words:--his aim being: first, to be himself an honest
man; secondly, to serve God and the people of God; and thirdly, to
fulfil his duty to the Commonwealth. In this order, and in no other,
did his obligations to his fellow-creatures present themselves to his
eyes. For the work before him it could not be otherwise than helpful
that his position in life brought him into contact with all classes of
society.
What powers and capacities this infant--or indeed any other infant--may
have derived from this or the other ancestor, is a mystery too deep for
human knowledge; but at least it may be noted that the descent of the
Cromwells from Sir Richard Williams, the nephew of Thomas Cromwell,
the despotic Minister of Henry VIII., brought into the family a Welsh
strain which may have shown itself in the fervid idealism lighting up
the stern practical sense of the warrior and statesman.
Of Oliver's father little is known; but his portrait testifies that
he was a man of sober Puritanism, not much given to any form of
spiritual enthusiasm--very unlike his elder brother, Sir Oliver, who
had inherited not only the estate, but the splendid ways of his father,
Sir Henry Cromwell--the Golden Knight--and who, after running through
his property, was compelled to sell his land and to retire into a
more obscure position. As the little Oliver grew up, he had before
his eyes the types of the future Cavalier and Roundhead in his own
family. So far as parental influence could decide the question, there
could be no doubt on which side the young Oliver would take his stand.
His education was carried on in the free school of the town, under
Dr. Beard, the author of _The Theatre of God's Judgments Displayed_,
in which a belief in the constant intervention of Providence in the
punishment of offenders was set forth by numerous examples of the
calamities of the wicked. Though Oliver afterwards learned to modify
the crudeness of this teaching, the doctrine that success or failure
was an indication of Divine favour or disfavour never left him, and he
was able, in the days of his greatness, to point unhesitatingly to the
results of Naseby and Worcester as evidence that God Himself approved
of the victorious cause.
In 1616 Cromwell matriculated at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge,
where his portrait now adorns the walls of the College hall. After a
sojourn of no more than a year, he left the University, probably--as
his father died in that year--to care for his widowed mother and his
five sisters, he himself being now the only surviving son. It is said
that not long afterwards he settled in London to study law, and though
there is no adequate authority for this statement, it derives support
from the fact that he found a wife in London, marrying in 1620, at
the early age of twenty-one, Elizabeth Bourchier, the daughter of a
City merchant. The silence of contemporaries shows that, in an age
when many women took an active part in politics, she confined herself
to the sphere of domestic influence. The one letter of hers that is
preserved displays not merely her affectionate disposition, but also
her helpfulness in reminding her great husband of the necessity of
performing those little acts of courtesy which men engaged in large
affairs are sometimes prone to neglect. She was undoubtedly a model of
female perfection after the Periclean standard.
Of Cromwell's early life for some years after his marriage we have
little positive information. His public career was opened by his
election in 1628 to sit for Huntingdon in the Parliament which insisted
on the Petition of Right. Though his uncle had by this time left
Hinchingbrooke, and could therefore have had no direct influence on the
electors, it is quite likely that the choice of his fellow-townsmen
was, to a great extent, influenced by their desire to show their
attachment to a family with which they had long been in friendly
relation.
Even so, however, it is in the highest degree improbable that Cromwell
would have been selected by his neighbours, to whom every action of
his life had been laid open, unless they had had reason to confide in
his moral worth as well as in his aptitude for public business. Yet
it is in this period of his life that, if Royalist pamphleteers are
to be credited, Cromwell was wallowing in revolting profligacy, and
the charge may seem to find some support from his own language in a
subsequent letter to his cousin, Mrs. St. John: "You know," he wrote,
"what my manner of life hath been. Oh! I lived in and loved darkness,
and hated light. I was a chief--the chief of sinners. This is true,
I hated godliness, yet God had mercy upon me." It has however never
been wise to take the expressions of a converted penitent literally,
and it is enough to suppose that Cromwell had been, at least whilst
an undergraduate at Cambridge, a buoyant, unthinking youth, fond of
outdoor exercise; though, on the other hand, whilst he never attained
to proficiency as a scholar, he by no means neglected the authorised
studies of the place. Much as opinion has differed on every other point
in his character, there was never any doubt as to his love of horses
and to his desire to encourage men of learning. It may fairly be argued
that his tastes in either direction must have been acquired in youth.
One piece of evidence has indeed been put forward against Cromwell. On
the register of St. John's parish at Huntingdon are two entries--one
dated 1621, and the other 1628--stating that Cromwell submitted in
those years to some form of Church censure. The formation of the
letters, however, the absence of any date of month or day, and also the
state of the parchment on which the entries occur, leave no reasonable
doubt that they were the work of a forger. It does not follow that the
forger had not a recollection that something of the kind had happened
within local memory, and if we take it as possible that Cromwell was
censured for 'his deeds,' whatever they may have been, in 1621, and
that in 1628 he voluntarily acknowledged some offence--the wording
of the forged entry gives some countenance to this deduction--may we
not note a coincidence of date between the second entry and one in
the diary of Sir Theodore Mayerne--the fashionable physician of the
day--who notes that Oliver Cromwell, who visited him in September of
that year, was _valde melancholicus_. Even if no heed whatever is to
be paid to the St. John's register, Mayerne's statement enables us
approximately to date that time of mental struggle which he passed
through at some time in these years, and which was at last brought
to an end when the contemplation of his own unworthiness yielded to
the assurance of his Saviour's love. "Whoever yet," he wrote long
afterwards to his daughter Bridget, "tasted that the Lord is gracious,
without some sense of self, vanity and badness?" It was a crisis in his
life which, if he had been born in the Roman communion, would probably
have sent him--as it sent Luther--into a monastery. Being what he was,
a Puritan Englishman, it left him with strong resolution to do his work
in this world strenuously, and to help others in things temporal, as he
himself had been helped in things spiritual.
English Puritanism, like other widely spread influences, was complex
in its nature, leading to different results in different men.
Intellectually it was based on the Calvinistic theology, and many were
led on by it to the fiercest intolerance of all systems of thought
and practice which were unconformable thereto. Cromwell's nature
was too large, and his character too strong, to allow him long to
associate himself with the bigots of his age. His Puritanism--if not as
universally sympathetic as a modern philosopher might wish--was moral
rather than intellectual. No doubt it rendered him impatient of the
outward forms in which the religious devotion of such contemporaries
as George Herbert and Crashaw found appropriate sustenance, but at
the same time it held him back from bowing down to the idol of the
men of his own party--the requirement of accurate conformity to the
Calvinistic standard of belief. It was sufficient for him, if he and
his associates found inspiration in a sense of personal dependence on
God, issuing forth in good and beneficent deeds.
When, in 1628, Cromwell took his seat in the House of Commons he
would be sure of a good reception as a cousin of Hampden. There is,
however, nothing to surprise us in his silence during the eventful
debates on the Petition of Right. He was no orator by nature, though
he could express himself forcibly when he felt deeply, and at this
time, and indeed during the whole of his life, he felt more deeply
on religious than on political questions. The House, in its second
session held in 1629, was occupied during the greater portion of its
time with religious questions, and it was then that Cromwell made his
first speech, if so short an utterance can be dignified by that name.
"Dr. Beard," he informed the House, "told him that one Dr. Alablaster
did at the Spital preach in a sermon tenets of Popery, and Beard being
to repeat the same, the now Bishop of Winton, then Bishop of Lincoln,
did send for Dr. Beard, and charged him as his diocesan, not to preach
any doctrine contrary to that which Alablaster had delivered, and
when Beard did, by the advice of Bishop Felton, preach against Dr.
Alablaster's sermon and person, Dr. Neile, now Bishop of Winton, did
reprehend him, the said Beard, for it."
The circumstances of the time give special biographical importance to
the opening of this window into Cromwell's mind. The strife between
the Puritan clergy and the Court prelates was waxing high. The latter,
whilst anxious to enforce discipline, and the external usages which,
though enjoined in the Prayer Book, had been neglected in many parts of
the country, were at the same time contending for a broader religious
teaching than that presented by Calvin's logic; but knowing that they
were in a comparatively small minority they, perhaps not unnaturally,
fell back on the protection of the King, who was in ecclesiastical
matters completely under the influence of Laud. The result of Charles's
consultations with such Bishops as were at hand had been the issue of
a Declaration which was prefixed to a new edition of the articles, and
is to be found in Prayer Books at the present day. The King's remedy
for disputes in the Church on predestination and such matters was to
impose silence on both parties, and it was in view of this policy
that Cromwell raked up an old story to show how at least twelve years
before, his old schoolmaster, Dr. Beard, had been forbidden to preach
any doctrine but that which the member for Huntingdon stigmatised
as Popish, and this too by a prelate who was now seeking, in a less
direct way, to impose silence on Puritan ministers. Other members of
Parliament had striven to oppose the ecclesiasticism of the Court by
the intolerant assertion that Calvinism alone was to be preached.
Cromwell did nothing of the kind. He did not even say that those who
upheld what he calls 'tenets of Popery' were to be silenced. He merely
asked that those who objected to them might be free to deliver their
testimony in public. There is the germ here of his future liberal
policy as Lord Protector--the germ too of a wide difference of opinion
from those with whom he was at this time acting in concert.[A]
[A] My argument would obviously not stand if the remainder
of the speech printed in Rushworth were held to be
genuine. There is, however, good reason to know that it
is not (_Hist. of Eng._, 1603-1642, vii., 56, note).
Little as we know of Cromwell's proceedings during the eleven years in
which no Parliament sat, that little is significant. His interference
in temporal affairs was invariably on the side of the poor. In 1630
a new charter was granted to Huntingdon, conferring the government
of the town on a mayor and twelve aldermen appointed for life. To
this Cromwell raised no objection, taking no special delight in
representative institutions, but he protested against so much of the
charter as, by allowing the new corporation to deal at its pleasure
with the common property of the borough, left the holders of rights
of pasture at their mercy; and, heated by a sense of injustice to
his poorer neighbours, he spoke angrily on the matter to Barnard,
the new mayor. Cromwell was summoned before the council, with the
result that the Earl of Manchester, appointed to arbitrate, sustained
his objections, whilst Cromwell, having gained his point, apologised
for the roughness of his speech. It is not unlikely that it was in
consequence of this difference with the new governors of the town that
he shortly afterwards sold his property there, and removed to St.
Ives, where he established himself as a grazing farmer. Nor was he
less solicitous for the spiritual than for the temporal welfare of his
neighbours. Many Puritans were at this time attempting to lessen the
influence of the beneficed clergy, who were, in many places, opposed to
them, by raising sums for the payment of lecturers, who would preach
Puritan sermons without being bound to read prayers before them. The
earliest extant letter of Cromwell's was written in 1636 to a City
merchant, asking him to continue his subscription to the maintenance of
a certain Dr. Wells, 'a man of goodness and industry and ability to do
good every way'. "You know, Mr. Story," he adds, "to withdraw the pay
is to let fall the lecture, and who goeth to warfare at his own cost?"
In 1636 Cromwell removed to Ely, where he farmed the Cathedral tithes
in succession to his maternal uncle, Sir Thomas Steward. Soon after
he was settled in his new home, there were disturbances in the fen
country which the Earl of Bedford and his associates were endeavouring
to drain. On the plea that the work was already accomplished, the new
proprietors ordered the expulsion of cattle from the pastures scattered
amongst the waters. The owners, egged on by one at least of the
neighbouring gentry, tumultuously resisted the attempt to exclude them
from their rights of commonage. We are told, too, that 'it is commonly
reported by the commoners in the said fens and the fens adjoining, that
Mr. Cromwell, of Ely, hath undertaken--they paying him a groat for
every cow they have upon the common--to hold the drainers in writ of
law for five years, and that in the mean time they should enjoy every
foot of their commons'. That Cromwell should have taken up the cause
of the weak, and at the same time should have attempted to serve them
by legal proceedings, whilst keeping aloof from their riotous action,
is a fair indication of the character of the man. No wonder he grew in
popularity, or that in 1640 he was elected by the borough of Cambridge
to both the Parliaments which met in that year.
In the Short Parliament Cromwell sat, so far as we know, as a
silent member. Of his appearance in the Long Parliament we have the
often-quoted description of his personal appearance from a young
courtier. "I came into the House," wrote Sir Philip Warwick, "one
morning well clad, and perceived a gentleman speaking whom I knew
not, very ordinarily apparelled, for it was a plain cloth suit which
seemed to be made by an ill country tailor; his linen was plain, and
not very clean; and I remember a speck or two of blood upon his little
band, which was not larger than his collar. His hat was without a
hat-band. His stature was of a good size; his sword stuck close to
his side; his countenance swollen and reddish, his voice sharp and
untuneable, and his eloquence full of fervour, for the subject matter
would not bear much of reason, it being on behalf of a servant of Mr
Prynne's who had dispersed libels against the Queen for her dancing
and such like innocent and courtly sports; and he aggravated the
imprisonment of this man by the council-table unto that height that
one would have believed the very Government itself had been in great
danger by it. I sincerely profess it lessened much my reverence unto
that great council, for he was very much hearkened unto; and yet I
lived to see this very gentleman whom, by multiplied good escapes,
and by real but usurped power, having had a better tailor, and more
converse among good company, appear of great and majestic deportment
and comely presence." Curiously enough the so-called servant of
Prynne--he was never actually in Prynne's service at all--was no other
than John Lilburne, who was such a thorn in the flesh to Cromwell
in later years. In undertaking the defence of the man who had been
sentenced to scourge and imprisonment for disseminating books held
to be libels by Charles and his ministers, Cromwell announced to his
fellow-members his own political position. In life--and above all in
political life--it is not possible to satisfy those who expect the
actions of any man to be absolutely consistent. Later generations may
be convinced not only that Charles was sincere in following a course
which he believed to be the right one, but that this course commended
itself to certain elements of human nature, and was, therefore, no
mere emanation of his own personal character. It nevertheless remains
that he was far from being strong enough for the place which he had
inherited from his predecessors, and that in wearing the garments of
the Elizabethan monarchy, he was all too unconscious of the work which
the new generation required of him--all too ready to claim the rights
of Elizabeth, without a particle of the skill in the art of government
which she derived from her intimate familiarity with the people over
which she had been called to rule.
Charles's unskilfulness was the more disastrous, as he came to the
throne during a crisis when few men would have been able to maintain
the prestige of the monarchy. On the one hand the special powers
entrusted to the Tudor sovereigns were no longer needed after the
domestic and foreign dangers which occupied their reigns had been
successfully met. On the other hand, a strife between religious parties
had arisen which called for action on lines very different from
those which had commended themselves to Elizabeth. In throwing off
the authority of the Roman See, Elizabeth had the national spirit of
England at her back, whilst in resisting the claims of the Presbyterian
clergy, she had the support of the great majority of the laity. By
the end of her reign she had succeeded in establishing that special
form of ecclesiastical government which she favoured. Yet though the
clergy had ceased to cry out for the supersession of episcopacy by the
Presbyterian discipline, the bulk of the clergy and of the religious
laity were Puritan to the core. So much had been effected by the
long struggle against Rome and Spain and the resulting detestation
of any form of belief which savoured of Rome and Spain. During the
twenty-two years of the peace-loving James, religious thought ceased
to be influenced by a sense of national danger. First one, and then
another--a Bancroft, an Andrewes, or a Laud, men of the college or
the cathedral--began to think their own thoughts, to welcome a wider
interpretation of religious truths than that of Calvin's Institute,
and, above all, to distrust the inward conviction as likely to be
warped by passion or self-interest, and to dwell upon the value of
the external influences of ritual and organisation. To do justice to
both these schools of thought and practice at the time of Charles's
accession would have taxed the strength of any man, seeing how
unprepared was the England of that day to admit the possibility of
toleration. The pity of it was that Charles, with all his fine feelings
and conscientious rectitude, was unfitted for the task. Abandoning
himself heart and soul to the newly risen tide of religious thought,
his imagination was too weak to enable him to realise the strength
of Puritanism, so that he bent his energies, not to securing for his
friends free scope for the exercise of what persuasion was in them, but
for the repression of those whom he looked upon as the enemies of the
Church and the Crown. With the assistance of Laud he did everything in
his power to crush Puritanism, with the result of making Puritanism
stronger than it had been before. Every man of independent mind who
revolted against the petty interference exercised by Laud placed
himself by sympathy, if not by perfect conviction, in the Puritan ranks.
Neither in Elizabeth's nor in Charles's reign was it possible
to dissociate politics from religion. Parliament, dissatisfied
with Charles's ineffectual guidance of the State, was still more
dissatisfied with his attempt to use his authority over the Church to
the profit of an unpopular party. The House of Commons representing
mainly that section of the population in which Puritanism was the
strongest--the country gentlemen in touch with the middle-class in
the towns--was eager to pull down Laud's system in the Church, and to
hinder the extension of Royal authority in the State. To do this it was
necessary not only to diminish the power of the Crown, but to transfer
much of it to Parliament, which, at least in the eyes of its members,
was far more capable of governing England wisely.
That Cromwell heartily accepted this view of the situation is evident
from his being selected to move the second reading of the Bill for the
revival of annual Parliaments, which, by a subsequent compromise, was
ultimately converted into a Triennial Act ordaining that there should
never again be an intermission of Parliament for more than three years.
The fact that he was placed on no less than eighteen committees in
the early part of the sittings of the Parliaments shows that he had
acquired a position which he could never have reached merely through
his cousinship with Hampden and St. John. That he concurred in the
destruction of the special courts which had fortified the Crown in the
Tudor period, and in the prosecution of Strafford, needs no evidence to
prove. These were the acts of the House as a whole. It was the part he
took on those ecclesiastical questions which divided the House into two
antagonistic parties which is most significant of his position at this
time.
However much members of the House of Commons might differ on the
future government of the Church, they were still of one mind as to
the necessity of changing the system under which it had been of late
controlled. There may have been much to be said on behalf of an
episcopacy exercising a moderating influence over the clergy, and
guarding the rights of minorities against the oppressive instincts of a
clerical majority. As a matter of fact this had not been the attitude
of Charles's Bishops. Appointed by the Crown, and chosen out of one
party only--and that the party of the minority amongst the clergy and
the religious laity--they had seized the opportunity of giving free
scope to their own practices and of hampering in every possible way
the practices of those opposed to them. It was no Puritan, but Jeremy
Taylor, the staunch defender of monarchy and episcopacy, who hit the
nail on the head. "The interest of the bishops," he wrote, "is conjunct
with the prosperity of the King, besides the interest of their own
security, by the obligation of secular advantages. For they who have
their livelihood from the King, and are in expectance of their fortune
from him, are more likely to pay a tribute of exacted duty than others
whose fortunes are not in such immediate dependency on His Majesty.
It is but the common expectation of gratitude that a patron paramount
shall be more assisted by his beneficiaries in cases of necessity than
by those who receive nothing from him but the common influences of
government."
As usual, it was easier to mark the evil than to provide an adequate
remedy. The party which numbered Hyde and Falkland in its ranks, and
which afterwards developed into that of the Parliamentary Royalists,
was alarmed lest a tyrannical episcopacy should be followed by a still
more tyrannical Presbyterian discipline, and therefore strove to
substitute for the existing system some scheme of modified episcopacy
by which bishops should be in some way responsible to clerical
councils. Cromwell was working hand in hand with men who strove to meet
the difficulty in another way. The so-called Root-and-Branch Bill,
said to have been drawn up by St. John, was brought to the House of
Commons by himself and Vane. By them it was passed on to Hazlerigg,
who in his turn passed it on to Sir Edward Dering, by whom it was
actually moved in the House. As it was finally shaped in Committee,
this bill, whilst absolutely abolishing archbishops, bishops, deans
and chapters, transferred their ecclesiastical jurisdiction to bodies
of Commissioners to be named by Parliament itself. Cromwell evidently
had no more desire than Falkland to establish the Church Courts of the
Scottish Presbyterian system in England.
This bill never passed beyond the Committee stage. It was soon
overshadowed by the question whether Charles could be trusted or
not. The discovery of the plots by which he had attempted to save
Strafford's life, and the knowledge that he was now visiting Scotland
with the intention of bringing up a Scottish army to his support
against the Parliament at Westminster strengthened the hands of the
party of Parliamentary supremacy, and left its leaders disinclined
to pursue their ecclesiastical policy till they had settled the
political question in their own favour. Important as Charles's own
character--with its love of shifts and evasions--was in deciding
the issue, it must not be forgotten that the crisis arose from a
circumstance common to all revolutions. When a considerable change is
made in the government of a nation, it is absolutely necessary, if
orderly progress is to result from it, that the persons in authority
shall be changed. The man or men by whom the condemned practices have
been maintained cannot be trusted to carry out the new scheme, because
they must of necessity regard it as disastrous to the nation. The
success of the Revolution of 1688-89 was mainly owing to the fact that
James was replaced by William; in 1641 neither was Charles inclined
to fly to the Continent, nor were the sentiments of either party
in the House such as to suggest his replacement by another prince,
even if such a prince were to be found. All that his most pronounced
adversaries--amongst whom Cromwell was to be counted--could suggest was
to leave him the show and pomp of royalty, whilst placing him under
Parliamentary control and doing in his name everything that he least
desired to do himself. It was a hopeless position to be driven into,
and yet, the feeling of the time being what it was, it is hard to see
that any remedy could be found.
Before Charles returned from Scotland, which he had visited in the vain
expectation of bringing back with him an army which might give him the
control over the English Parliament, an event occurred which brought
to light the disastrous impolicy of his opponents in leaving upon the
throne the man who was most hostile to their ideas. The Irish Roman
Catholic gentry and nobility, having been driven into Royalism by fear
of Puritan domination, had agreed with Charles to seize Dublin and to
use it as a basis from which to send him military aid in his struggle
against the Parliament of England. In October 1641, before they could
make up their minds to act, an agrarian outbreak occurred in Ulster,
where the native population rose against the English and Scottish
colonists who had usurped their lands. The rising took the form of
outrage and massacre, calculated to arouse a spirit of vengeance in
England, even if report had not outrun the truth--much more when
the horrible tale was grossly exaggerated in its passage across the
sea. Before long both classes of Roman Catholic Irishmen, the Celtic
peasants of the North and the Anglo-Irish gentry of the South, were
united in armed resistance to the English Government.
It was a foregone conclusion that an attempt to reconquer Ireland would
be made from England. Incidentally the purpose of doing this brought to
a point the struggle for the mastery at Westminster. If an army were
despatched to Ireland it would, as soon as its immediate task had been
accomplished, be available to strike a decisive blow on one side or the
other. It therefore became all-important for each side to secure the
appointment of officers who might be relied on--in one case to strike
for the Crown, in the other case to strike for the Commons. Pym, who
was leading his party in the House with consummate dexterity, seized
the opportunity of asking, not merely that military appointments
should be subject to Parliamentary control, but that the King should
be asked to take only such councillors as Parliament could approve of.
Cromwell was even more decided than Pym. The King having named five new
bishops, in defiance of the majority of the Commons, it was Cromwell
who moved for a conference with the Lords on the subject, and who, a
few days later, asked for another conference, in which the Lords should
be asked to join in a vote giving to the Earl of Essex power to command
the trained bands south of the Trent for the defence of the kingdom,
a power which was not to determine at the King's pleasure, but to
continue till Parliament should take further order.
Cromwell was evidently for strong measures. Yet there are signs that
now, as at other times in his life, he underestimated the forces
opposed to him. His allies in the Commons, Pym and Hampden at their
head, were now bent on obtaining the assent of the House to the Grand
Remonstrance, less as an appeal to the King than as a manifesto to the
nation. The long and detailed catalogue of the King's misdeeds in the
past raised no opposition. Hyde was as ready to accept it as Pym and
Hampden. The main demands made in it were two: first, that the King
would employ such councillors and ministers as the Parliament might
have cause to confide in; and secondly, that care should be taken
'to reduce within bounds that exorbitant power which the prelates
have assumed to themselves,' whilst maintaining 'the golden reins of
discipline,' and demanding 'a general synod of the most grave, pious,
learned and judicious divines to consider all things necessary for the
peace and good government of the Church'. So convinced was Cromwell
that the Remonstrance would be generally acceptable to the House, that
he expressed surprise when Falkland gave his opinion that it would
give rise to some debate. It was perhaps because the Remonstrance
had abandoned the position of the Root-and-Branch Bill and talked
of limiting episcopacy, instead of abolishing it, that Cromwell
fancied that it would gain adherents from both sides. He forgot how
far controversy had extended since the summer months in which the
Root-and-Branch Bill had been discussed, and how men who believed that,
if only Charles could be induced to make more prudent appointments,
intellectual liberty was safer under bishops than under any system
likely to approve itself to a synod of devout ministers, had now
rallied to the King.
It was, by this time, more than ever, a question whether Charles could
be trusted, and Cromwell and his allies had far stronger grounds in
denying than their opponents had in affirming that he could. After all,
the ecclesiastical quarrel could never be finally settled without
mutual toleration, and neither party was ready even partially to accept
such a solution as that. As for Cromwell himself, he regarded those
decent forms which were significant of deeper realities even to many
who had rebelled against the pedagogic harshness of Laud, as mere
rags of popery and superstition to be swept away without compunction.
With this conviction pressing on his mind, it is no wonder that, when
the great debate was over late in the night, after the division had
been taken which gave a majority of eleven to the supporters of the
Remonstrance, he replied to Falkland's question whether there had been
a debate with: "I will take your word for it another time. If the
Remonstrance had been rejected, I would have sold all I had the next
morning, and never have seen England any more; and I know there are
many other honest men of the same resolution."
There was in Cromwell's mind a capacity for recognising the strength of
adverse facts which had led him--there is some reason to believe[B]--to
think of emigrating to America in 1636 when Charles's triumph appeared
most assured, and which now led him to think of the same mode of escape
to a purer atmosphere if Charles, supported by Parliament, should
be once more in the ascendant. On neither of the two occasions did
his half-formed resolution develop into a settled purpose, the first
time because, for some unknown reason, he hardened his heart to hold
out till better times arrived; the second time because the danger
anticipated never actually occurred.
[B] See the argument for the probability of the traditional
story, though the details usually given cannot be true,
in Mr. Firth's _Oliver Cromwell_, 37.
In the constitutional by-play which followed--the question of the
Bishops' protest and the resistance to the attempt on the five
members--Cromwell took no prominent part, though his motion for an
address to the King, asking him to remove the Earl of Bristol from
his counsels on the ground that he had formerly recommended Charles
to bring up the Northern army to his support, shows in what direction
his thoughts were moving. The dispute between Parliament and King
had so deepened that each side deprecated the employment of force by
the other, whilst each side felt itself justified in arming itself
ostensibly for its own defence. It was no longer a question of
conformity to the constitution in the shape in which the Tudors had
handed it down to the Stuarts. That constitution, resting as it did on
an implied harmony between King and people, had hopelessly broken down
when Charles had for eleven years ruled without a Parliament. The only
question was how it was to be reconstructed. Cromwell was not the man
to indulge in constitutional speculations, but he saw distinctly that
if religion--such as he conceived it--was to be protected, it must be
by armed force. A King to whom religion in that form was detestable,
and who was eager to stifle it by calling in troops from any foreign
country which could be induced to come to his aid, was no longer to be
trusted with power.
So far as we know, Cromwell did not intervene in the debates on the
control of the militia. He was mainly concerned with seeing that the
militia was in a state of efficiency for the defence of Parliament. As
early as January 14, 1642, soon after the attempt on the five members
had openly revealed Charles's hostility, it was on Cromwell's motion
that a committee was named to put the kingdom in a posture of defence,
and this motion he followed up by others, with the practical object
of forwarding repression in Ireland or protection to the Houses at
Westminster. Though he was far from being a wealthy man, he contributed
£600 to the projected campaign in Ireland, and another £500 to the
raising of forces in England. Mainly through his efforts, Cambridge
was placed in a state to defend itself against attack. Without waiting
for a Parliamentary vote, he sent down arms valued at £100. On July 15
he moved for an order 'to allow the townsmen of Cambridge to raise two
companies of volunteers, and to appoint captains over them'. A month
later the House was informed that 'Mr. Cromwell, in Cambridgeshire,
hath seized the magazine in the castle at Cambridge,' that is to say,
the store of arms--the property of the County--ready to be served out
to the militia when called upon for service or training, 'and hath
hindered the carrying of the plate from that University; which, as was
reported, was to the value of £20,000 or thereabouts'. Evidently there
was one member of Parliament prompt of decision and determined in will,
who had what so few--if any--of his colleagues had--the makings of a
great soldier in him.
When at last Essex received the command to create a Parliamentary army,
Cromwell accepted a commission to raise a troop of arquebusiers--the
light horse of the day--in his own county. He can have had no
difficulty in finding recruits, especially as his popularity in the
fen-land had been, if possible, increased by his conduct in a committee
held in the preceding summer, where he bitterly resented an attempt
of the Earl of Manchester to enclose lands in defiance of the rights
of the commoners. He was, however, resolved to pick the sixty men he
needed. We can well understand that in choosing his subordinates he
would be inspired by an instinctive desire to prize those qualities
in his soldiers which were strongly developed in his own character,
in which strenuous activity was upheld by unswerving conviction and
perfervid spiritual emotion. He could choose the better because
he had neighbours, friends and kinsmen from whom to select. The
Quarter-master of his troop was John Desborough, his brother-in-law,
whilst another brother-in-law, Valentine Wauton, though not actually
serving under Cromwell, rallied to his side, and became the captain
of another troop in the Parliamentary army. To the end of his career
Cromwell never forwarded the prospects of a kinsman or friend unless
he was persuaded of his efficiency, though he never shrank from the
promotion of kinsmen whom he believed himself able to trust in order to
shake off the charge of nepotism from himself.
The sobriety of Cromwell's judgment was as fully vindicated by his
choice of the cavalry arm for himself, as by the selection of his
subordinates. If the result of the coming war was to be decided by
superiority in cavalry, as would certainly be the case, the chances
were all in favour of the Royalist gentry, whose very nickname of
'cavaliers' was a presage of victory, and who were not only themselves
familiar with horsemanship from their youth up, but had at their
disposal the grooms and the huntsmen who were attached to their
service. "Your troops," he said some weeks later to his cousin Hampden,
after the failure of the Parliamentary horse had become manifest,
"are most of them old decayed serving men and tapsters, and such kind
of fellows; and their troops are gentlemen's sons and persons of
quality. Do you think the spirits of such base and mean fellows will
ever be able to encounter gentlemen that have honour and courage and
resolution in them?... You must get men of spirit, and, take it not
ill what I say--I know you will not--of a spirit that is likely to go
on as far as gentlemen will go, or else you will be beaten still." The
importance of a good cavalry was in those days relatively much greater
than it is now. A body of infantry composed in about equal proportions
of pikemen and musketeers, the latter armed with a heavy and unwieldy
weapon, only to be fired at considerable intervals, and requiring the
support of a rest to steady it, needed to be placed behind hedges to
resist a cavalry charge. It was a recognised axiom of war that a foot
regiment marching across open country required cavalry as a convoy to
ward off destructive attacks by the enemy's horse. So unquestioned was
the inferiority of infantry, that unless the horsemen who gathered
round Charles's standard when it was displayed on the Castle Hill at
Nottingham could be overpowered, the resistance of the Parliamentary
army could hardly be prolonged for many months. That they were
overpowered was the achievement of Cromwell, and of Cromwell alone.
It was something that Cromwell had gathered round him his sixty
God-fearing men. It was more, that he did not confide, as a mere
fanatic would have done, in their untried zeal. His recruits were
subjected to an iron discipline. The hot fire of enthusiasm for the
cause in which they had been enlisted burnt strongly within them.
They had drawn their swords not for constitutional safeguards, but in
the service of God Himself, and God Himself, they devoutly trusted,
would shelter His servants in the day of battle against the impious
men who were less their enemies than His. It was no reason--so they
learnt from their captain--that they should remit any single precaution
recommended by the most worldly of military experts. Cromwell almost
certainly never told his soldiers--in so many words--to trust in God
and keep their powder dry. Yet, apocryphal as is the anecdote, it
well represents the spirit in which Cromwell's commands were issued.
The very vividness of his apprehension of the supernatural enabled
him to pass rapidly without any sense of incongruity from religious
exhortations to the practical satisfaction of the demands of the
material world.
When on October 23, 1642, the first battle of the war was fought
at Edgehill, Cromwell's troop was one of the few not swept away by
Rupert's headlong charge, probably because coming late upon the field
he did not join the main army till the Royalist horse had ceased to
trouble it. At all events, he took his share in the indispensable
service rendered by the little force of cavalry remaining at Essex's
disposal, when in the opposing ranks there was no cavalry at all. It
was the co-operation of this force which, by assailing in flank and
rear the King's foot regiments, whilst the infantry broke them up in
front, enabled the Parliamentary army to claim at least a doubtful
victory in the place of the rout which would have befallen it if
Rupert, on his late return, had found his master's foot in a condition
to carry on the struggle. Whatever else Cromwell learnt from his first
experience of actual warfare, he had learnt from Rupert's failure
after early success never to forget that headlong valour alone will
accomplish little, and that a good cavalry officer requires to know
when to draw rein, as well as when to charge, and to subordinate the
conduct of the attack in which he is personally engaged to the needs of
the army as a whole.
Many months were to pass away before Cromwell was to measure swords
with Rupert. He remained under Essex almost to the end of the year, and
was present at Turnham Green, when Essex saw Charles, after taking up a
position at Brentford in the hope of forcing a passage to London, march
off to Reading and Oxford without attempting to strike a blow. Towards
the end of 1642, or in the early part of 1643, Cromwell had work
found for him which was eventually to breathe a new spirit into the
Parliamentary army. Enormous as was the advantage which the devotion
of London conferred upon Parliament, London by no means exercised that
supreme influence which was exercised by Paris in the times of the
French Revolution. Both parties, therefore, put forth their efforts
in organising local forces, but of all the local organisations which
were brought into existence, the only one entirely successful was the
Eastern Association, comprising Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridge
and Herts, and that mainly because Cromwell was at hand to keep it
up to the mark. There was to be a general fund at the service of the
association, whilst the forces raised in the several shires of which it
was composed were to be at the disposal of a common committee.
In England generally the first half of 1643 was a time of desultory
fighting, alternating with efforts to make peace without the conditions
which might have brought peace within sight. It was not to be expected
either that Parliament would accept Charles on his own terms, or that
Charles would bow down to any terms which Parliament was likely to
offer. Cromwell, at least, took no part in these futile negotiations,
and did all that in him lay to clear the counties of the Eastern
Association from Royalists, and to put them in a state of defence
against Royalist incursions. At some time later than January 23, and
before the end of February, he was promoted to a colonelcy. In March he
was fortifying Cambridge, and urgently pleading for contributions to
enable him to complete the work. Again we find him sending to arrest
a Royalist sheriff who attempted to collect soldiers at St. Alban's,
and then hurrying to Lowestoft to crush a Royalist movement in the
town. After this no more is heard of Royalism holding up its head in
any corner of the association, and to the end of the war no Royalist
in arms again set foot within it. By the end of May it was joined by
Huntingdonshire, the county of Cromwell's birth.
Cromwell's superabundant energy was employed in other ways than in
contending against armed men. Laud's enforcement of at least external
signs of respect to objects consecrated to religious usage had provoked
a reaction which influenced Puritanism on its least noble side. A
certain Dowsing has left a diary, showing how he visited the Suffolk
churches, pulling down crosses, destroying pictures and tearing up
brasses inscribed with _Orate pro animâ_, the usual expression of
mediæval piety towards the dead. At Cambridge, Cromwell himself,
finding opposition amongst those in authority in the University, sent
up three of the Heads of Houses in custody to Westminster, and on a
cold night in March shut up the Vice-Chancellor and other dignitaries
in the public schools till midnight without food or firing, because
they refused to pay taxes imposed by Parliament.
Nor was it only with open enemies that Cromwell and those who
sympathised with him had to deal. Of all forms of war civil strife is
the most hideous, and it is no wonder that the hands of many who had
entered upon it with the expectation that a few months or even weeks
would suffice to crush the King were now slackened. Was it not better,
they asked, to come to terms with Charles than to continue a struggle
which promised to drag out for years? Negotiations opened at Oxford
in the spring failed, indeed, to lead to peace, because neither party
had the spirit of compromise, but they were accompanied or followed by
the defection from the Parliamentary ranks of men who, at the outset,
had stood up manfully against the King, such as Sir Hugh Cholmley,
who hoisted the royal colours over Scarborough Castle, which had been
entrusted to him by the Houses; and the Hothams, father and son, who,
whilst nominally continuing to serve the Parliament, were watching for
an opportunity of profitable desertion. Such tendencies were encouraged
by the vigour with which the King's armies were handled, and the
successes they gained in the early summer. On May 16 the Parliamentary
General, the Earl of Stamford, was defeated at Stratton, with the
result that Sir Ralph Hopton was able to overrun the Western counties
at the head of the Royalist troops, and though defeated on Lansdown by
Sir William Waller, was succoured by a Royalist army which, on July 13,
crushed Waller's army on Roundway Down; whilst on July 26 Bristol was
taken by Rupert, and the whole of the Southern counties thrown open
to the assaults of the King's partisans. Farther east, though Essex
succeeded in capturing Reading, his army melted away before disease
and mismanagement. On June 18 Hampden was mortally wounded at Chalgrove
Field. Lord Fairfax and his son, Sir Thomas Fairfax, were with
difficulty holding their own in the West Riding of Yorkshire against
a Royalist force under the command of the Earl of Newcastle. By the
middle of the year, the Parliamentary armies were threatened with ruin
on almost every side.
The one conspicuous exception to these tales of disaster was found in
the news from the Eastern Association, where Cromwell's vigour upheld
the fight. Yet Cromwell had no slight difficulties against which to
contend. When, by the end of April, he had cleared the shires of the
association from hostile forces, he made his way into Lincolnshire,
and called on the neighbouring military commanders of his own party
to join him in an attack on the Royalist garrison at Newark, from
which parties issued forth to overawe and despoil the Parliamentarians
of the neighbourhood. Those upon whom he called--Sir John Gell at
Nottingham, the Lincolnshire gentry, and Stamford's son, Lord Grey of
Groby, in Leicestershire, were in command of local forces, and placed
the interests of their own localities above the common good. Stamford's
mansion at Broadgates, hard by Leicester, was exposed to attack from
the Royalist garrison at Ashby-de-la-Zouch, and consequently Lord Grey
hung back from joining in an enterprise which would leave Leicester at
the mercy of the enemy, and his example was followed in other quarters.
"Believe it," wrote Cromwell wrathfully, "it were better, in my poor
opinion, Leicester were not, than that there should not be found an
immediate taking of the field by our forces to accomplish the common
ends." To subordinate local interests to the 'common ends' was as much
the condition of Cromwell's success as the discipline under which he
had brought the fiery troops under his command.
The result of that discipline was soon to appear. On May 13 he fell
in near Grantham with a cavalry force from Newark far outnumbering
his own. Taking a lesson from Rupert, who had taught him at Edgehill
that the horse, and not the pistol, was the true weapon of the mounted
horseman, he dashed upon the enemy, who weakly halted to receive the
charge, and was thoroughly beaten in consequence. Cromwell, as usual,
piously attributed his success to the Divine intervention. "With this
handful," he wrote "it pleased God to cast the scale."
The success of Cromwell's horse was all the more reason why financial
support should be accorded to its commander. Voluntary contributions
were still the backbone of the resources of Parliament, though a system
of forced payments was being gradually established. "Lay not," wrote
Cromwell to the Mayor of Colchester, "too much on the back of a poor
gentleman who desires, without much noise, to lay down his life and
bleed the last drop to serve the cause and God. I ask not money for
myself; I desire to deny myself, but others will not be satisfied."
Cromwell once more called on the local commanders to gather their
forces, not for an attack on Newark, but for a march into Yorkshire to
the relief of the Fairfaxes. Early in June some 6,000 men were gathered
at Nottingham. Once more the effort came to nothing. The commanders
excused themselves from moving, on the plea that the Fairfaxes did
not need their help. One of their number, the younger Hotham, was
detected in an intrigue with the enemy. Mainly by Cromwell's energy
he was seized, and ultimately, together with his father, was sent
to London, where they were both executed as traitors. In Yorkshire
the tide was running against the Fairfaxes. On June 30 they were
defeated at Adwalton Moor. The whole of the West Riding was lost, and
the commanders forced to take refuge in Hull. Newcastle, with his
victorious army, would soon be heard of in Lincolnshire, where Lord
Willoughby of Parham had lately seized Gainsborough for Parliament.
Among the troops ordered to maintain this advanced position was
Cromwell's regiment, and on July 28 that regiment defeated a strong
body of Royalist horse near Gainsborough. Later in the day news was
brought that a force of the enemy was approaching from the North.
Cromwell, whose cavalry was supported by a body of foot, went out to
meet it, only to find himself face to face with Newcastle's whole
army. Though the Parliamentary infantry took flight at once, the horse
retired by sections, showing a bold front, and regaining the town with
the loss of only two men. This cavalry, which combined the dash of
Grantham with the discipline of Gainsborough, spelt victory for the
Parliamentary side.
Yet, at the moment, the prospect was gloomy enough. On July 30
Gainsborough surrendered, and unless Cromwell's forces could be
augmented, there was little to intervene between Newcastle's army and
London. "It's no longer disputing," wrote Cromwell to the Committee at
Cambridge, "but out instantly all you can. Almost all our foot have
quitted Stamford; there is nothing to interrupt an enemy but our horse
that is considerable. You must act lively. Do it without distraction.
Neglect no means."
Cromwell knew that more than his own name was required to rally the
force needed at this desperate conjuncture. At his instance Parliament
appointed the new Earl of Manchester--who, as Lord Kimbolton, had
been the one member of the House of Lords marked out by the King for
impeachment together with the five members of the House of Commons--as
Commander of the Eastern Association, and ordered an army of 10,000
men to be raised within its limits. Whilst in the South, Essex
raised the siege of Gloucester, and was successful enough at Newbury
to make good his retreat to London, Manchester's new army, in which
Cromwell commanded the horse, defeated a party of Royalists at Winceby,
compelled Newcastle to raise the siege of Hull, and retook Lincoln,
which had fallen into the hands of the enemy. Lincolnshire was now
added to the Eastern Association, the one part of England on which the
eyes of the Parliamentary chiefs could rest with complete satisfaction.
Sooner or later Cromwell would have to face other questions than
those of military efficiency. When Pym and his supporters drew up
the Grand Remonstrance, they did not contemplate the introduction of
any principle of religious liberty. The Church was to be exclusively
Puritan, on some plan to be settled by Parliament upon the advice of an
Assembly of Divines. That Assembly met on July 1, 1643, and if it had
been left to itself, would probably have recommended the adoption of
some non-episcopalian system of Church-government; whilst Parliament,
faithful to the traditions of English governments, would have taken
care that the clergy should be placed under some form of lay government
emanating from Parliament itself. In the summer of 1643 it was
impossible to separate questions of ecclesiastical organisation from
those arising out of the political necessities of the hour. It was
known that Charles was angling for the support of Ireland and Scotland,
and if Parliament was not to be overborne, it was necessary to meet
him on the same ground. In Ireland Charles was fairly successful.
On September 15 his Lord Lieutenant obtained from the Confederate
Catholics, who were in arms against his Government, a cessation of
hostilities, which would enable him to divert a portion of his own
troops to the defence of the King's cause in England; ultimately, as he
hoped, to be followed by an army levied amongst the Irish Catholics.
Charles's attempt to win Scotland to his side was less successful. The
predominant party at Edinburgh was that led by the Marquis of Argyle,
who had climbed to power with the help of the Presbyterian organisation
of the Church, and who justly calculated that, if Charles gained his
ends in England, the weight of his victorious sword would be thrown
into the balance of the party led by the Duke of Hamilton. That party
however, embracing as it did the bulk of the Scottish nobility, would
not only have made short work of Argyle's political dictatorship, but
would have taken good care that the Presbyterian clergy should, in some
way or other, be reduced to dependence on the laity. When, therefore,
English Parliamentary Commissioners arrived in Edinburgh to treat for
military assistance, they were confronted by a demand that they should
accept a document known as the Solemn League and Covenant, binding
England to accept the full Scottish Presbyterian system with its
Church Courts, claiming as by Divine right to settle all ecclesiastical
matters without the interference of the lay government. It is true that
this demand was somewhat veiled in the engagement to reform religion in
the Church of England, 'according to the example of the best reformed
Churches,' so as to bring the Churches in both nations to the nearest
conjunction and uniformity. The leading English Commissioner, however,
the younger Sir Henry Vane, was one of the few Englishmen who at this
time championed a system of religious liberty, and he now succeeded in
keeping a door open by proposing the addition of a few words, declaring
that religion was to be reformed in England according to the Word of
God, as well as by the example of the best reformed Churches. In this
form the Covenant was brought back to Westminster, and in this form it
was sworn to by the members of Parliament, and required to be sworn to
by all Englishmen above the age of eighteen. Few indeed amongst the
members of Parliament willingly placed their necks under the yoke. It
was the price paid for Scottish armed assistance, simply because that
assistance could be had on no other terms. The alliance with the Scots
was the last work of Pym, who died before the Scottish army, the aid of
which he had so dearly purchased, crossed the Borders into England.
There were two ways of opposing the Scottish system of Divine-right
Presbyterianism, the old one of the Tudor and Stuart Kings, placing
the Church under lay control; and the new one, proclaiming the right
of individuals to religious liberty, which was advocated by Vane, and
was in the course of the next few months advocated by a handful of
Independent ministers in the Assembly of divines, and by writers like
Roger Williams and Henry Robinson in the press. Like all new doctrines,
it made its way slowly, and for long appeared to the great majority of
Englishmen to be redolent of anarchy. The freedom from restraint which
every revolution brings, together with the habit of looking to the
Bible as verbally inspired, had led to the growth of sects upholding
doctrines, some of which gave rational offence to men of cultivated
intelligence and encouraged them to look for a remedy to the repressive
action of the State. On the other hand, a small number of men, most
of them attached to the Independent or Baptist bodies, fully accepted
the principle of religious liberty, at least within the bounds of
Puritanism. For the present the question was merely Parliamentary; but
it might easily be brought within the sphere of military influence,
and it was not without significance that, though Essex and Waller, who
had comparatively failed as generals, were on the side of Presbyterian
repression, Cromwell, who had shown himself to be the most successful
soldier in England, declared himself on the side of liberty. In
the sectarian sense indeed, Cromwell never attached himself to the
Independent or to any other religious body. In firm adherence to the
great doctrine of toleration, which spread abroad from the Independents
or from the Baptists, who were but Independents with a special doctrine
added to their tenets, Cromwell was the foremost Independent of the day.
Not that Cromwell indeed reached his conclusions as did Roger Williams,
by the light of pure reason. The rites prescribed in the Prayer Book
were to him a mockery of God. On January 10, 1644, he ordered a
clergyman, who persisted in using the old service in Ely Cathedral,
to leave off his fooling and come down from his place. But he had no
liking for the Covenant, and avoided committing himself to it till the
beginning of February, 1644, when he swore to it on his appointment
as Lieutenant-General in Manchester's army, doubtless laying special
stress in his own mind on the loop-hole offered by Vane's amendment.
The cause of religious liberty appealed to him on practical grounds.
How was he to fight the enemy, unless he could choose his officers for
their military efficiency, and not for their Presbyterian opinions? The
Major-General of Manchester's army--Crawford, a Scot of the narrowest
Presbyterian type--had objected to the promotion of an officer named
Packer, who was an Anabaptist. "Admit he be," wrote Cromwell in reply,
"shall that render him incapable to serve the public?... Sir, the State
in choosing men to serve it takes no notice of their opinions. If they
be willing faithfully to serve it--that satisfies. Take heed of being
sharp, or too easily sharpened by others, against those to whom you
can object little but that they square not with you in every opinion
concerning matters of religion."
It might be that religious liberty would in the long run suffer more
than it would gain from military support, just as the principles of
Andrewes and Laud suffered more than they gained by the support of
Charles. Already the regiments under Cromwell's command swarmed with
enthusiasts who spent their leisure in preaching and arguing on the
most abstruse points of divinity, agreeing in nothing except that
argument was to be met by argument alone. Their iron discipline and
their devotion to the cause permitted a freedom which would have been
a mere dissolvent of armies enlisted after a more worldly system.
As Cromwell stepped more pronouncedly to the front, his advocacy of
religious liberty would become well-nigh irresistible.
On January 19, 1644, the Scottish army, under the Earl of Leven,
crossed the Tweed. Newcastle was pushed back into York, where he was
besieged by the combined forces of Leven and the Fairfaxes. On May 6
Lincoln, which had been regained by the Royalists, was retaken by
Manchester, who together with Cromwell pushed on to join in the siege
of York. Rupert, however, having been sent northward by Charles,
succeeded in raising the siege; and on July 2 a battle was fought on
Marston Moor, in which the Royalist army, successful at first, was
utterly crushed by Cromwell's skill. Having routed Rupert's horse,
he drew bridle and hurried back to the assistance of the Scottish
infantry, which was holding its own against overwhelming numbers of
the enemy. The King's regiments of foot were routed or destroyed by
his impetuous charge. Cromwell had redeemed the day after the three
generals, Leven, Manchester and the elder Fairfax, had fled from that
which they deemed to be a complete disaster. Before long the whole of
the North of England, save a few outlying fortresses, was lost to the
King.
In the South, matters were going badly for Parliament. Waller's
army, checked at Cropredy Bridge, melted away by desertion; whilst
Essex, attempting an inroad into Cornwall, was followed by the King.
Essex himself and his cavalry succeeded in making their escape, but
on September 2 the whole of his infantry surrendered to Charles
at Lostwithiel. Unless Manchester came to the rescue, it would be
impossible to avert disaster. Manchester, however, was hard to move.
Between him and his Lieutenant-General there was no longer that good
understanding which was essential to successful action. Manchester,
longing for peace on the basis of a Presbyterian settlement of the
Church, could not be brought to understand that, whether such an ending
to the war were desirable or not, it could never be obtained from
Charles. Cromwell, on the other hand, aimed at religious toleration
for the sects, and that security which, as his practical nature taught
him, was only attainable by the destruction of the military defences
in which Charles trusted. That those defences were the ramparts of
the city of destruction, he never doubted for an instant. Writing in
his most serious mood immediately after the victory of Marston Moor,
to the father of a youth who had there met his death-wound, his own
losses rose before his mind. Of his four sons, two had already passed
away:--Robert, leaving behind him a memory of unusual piety, had died
in his schoolboy days; whilst Oliver, who had charged and fled at
Edgehill had lately succumbed to small-pox in the garrison at Newport
Pagnell. Yet it was not only to the example of his own sorrow that
Cromwell mainly looked as a balm for a father's bereavement. "Sir," he
wrote, "you know my own trials this way, but the Lord supported me with
this that the Lord took him into the happiness we all pant for and live
for. There is your precious child full of glory, never to know sin or
sorrow any more. Before his death he was so full of comfort that to
Frank Russell and myself he could not express it, 'it was so great
above his pain'. This he said to us--indeed it was admirable. A little
after, he said one thing lay upon his spirit. I asked him what that
was? He told me it was that 'God had not suffered him to be any more
the executioner of his enemies'." Between a Cromwell eager to destroy
the enemies of God and a Manchester eager to make peace with those
enemies no good understanding was possible, especially as in the eyes
of Manchester the prolongation of the war meant the strengthening of
that sectarian fanaticism to which Cromwell looked as the evidence of a
vigorous spiritual life.
In Manchester the desire for peace showed itself in sheer reluctance to
make war. Cromwell fumed in vain against the Scots and their resolution
to force their Presbyterianism upon England. "In the way they now carry
themselves," he told Manchester, "pressing for their discipline, I
could as soon draw my sword against them as against any in the King's
army." "He would have," he added at another time, "none in his army
who were not of the Independent judgment, in order that if terms were
offered for a peace such as might not stand with the ends that honest
men should aim at, this army might prevent such a mischief." This
attack on the Scots led to an attack on the English nobility, amongst
whom the sects found scant favour. He hoped, he said in words long
afterwards remembered against him, to 'live to see never a nobleman
in England'. He is even reported to have assured Manchester that it
would never be well till he was known as plain Mr. Montague. Manchester
persisted in doing nothing till a distinct order was given him to march
to the defence of London, now laid open by Essex's mishap.
Manchester's reluctance to engage in military operations was probably
strengthened by the knowledge that Vane, who, since Pym's death in
the winter of 1643, was the most prominent personage amongst the war
party at Westminster, had come down to York, at the time of the siege,
to urge the generals, though in vain, to consent to the deposition of
the King, and he could not but suspect that the arrival of Charles
Louis, Elector Palatine, the eldest surviving son of Charles's sister
Elizabeth, on August 30, had something to do with a design for placing
him on his uncle's throne. The design, if it really existed, came
to nothing, probably because it was hopeless to carry it out in the
teeth of the generals. It was only with the utmost difficulty that
Manchester's hesitation was overcome, and that he was induced to face
Charles's army at Newbury. The battle fought there on October 27 was a
drawn one. That it did not end in a Parliamentary victory was mainly
owing to Manchester's indecision. When, a few days later, the King
reappeared on the scene, he was allowed to relieve Donnington Castle,
in the immediate neighbourhood of Newbury, no attempt whatever being
made to hinder his operations. In the controversy which followed,
Manchester went to the root of the matter when he said, "If we beat
the King ninety and nine times, yet he is King still, and so will
his posterity be after him; but if the King beat us once we shall
all be hanged, and our posterity made slaves". "My Lord," answered
Cromwell, "if this be so why did we take up arms at first? This is
against fighting ever hereafter. If so, let us make peace, be it never
so base." Each of the two men had fixed upon one side of the problem
which England was called upon to solve. Manchester was appalled by the
political difficulty. There stood the Kingship accepted by generation
after generation, fenced about with safeguards of law and custom, and
likely to be accepted in one form or another by generations to come. A
single decisive victory gained by Charles would not only expose those
who had dared to make war on him to the hideous penalties of the law of
treason--but would enable him to measure the terms of submission by his
own resolves. If Manchester had had the power of looking into futurity,
he would have argued that no military success--not even the abolition
of monarchy, and the execution of the monarch--would avail to postpone
the restoration of Charles's heir for more than a little while.
Cromwell's reply did not even pretend to meet the difficulty. It
was not in him to forecast the prospects of kingship in England, or
to vex his mind with the consequences of a problematical Royalist
victory. It was enough for him to grasp the actual situation. It is
true that, at this time, he had not got beyond the position from which
the whole of the Parliamentary party had started at the beginning of
the war--the position that the war must be ended by a compact between
King and Parliament. To Cromwell, therefore, whose heart was set upon
the liberation of those who in his eyes were the people of God, and the
overthrow of ceremonial observances, the immediate duty of the moment
was to secure that, when the time of negotiation arrived, the right
side should be in possession of sufficient military force to enable it
to dictate the terms of peace. It was his part not to consider what the
King might do if he proved victorious, but to take good care that he
was signally defeated. Strange to say, the folly of the Presbyterian
party--strong in the two Houses, and in the support of the Scottish
army--was playing into Cromwell's hands. On November 20, ten days
after Cromwell's altercations with Manchester, Parliament sent to
Oxford terms of peace so harsh as to place their acceptance outside the
bounds of possibility. The royal power was to be reduced to a cipher,
whilst such a form of religion as might be agreed upon by the Houses
in accordance with the Covenant was to be imposed on all Englishmen,
without toleration either for the sects favoured by Cromwell, or for
the Church of Andrewes and Laud which found one of its warmest and most
conscientious supporters in Charles. Every man in the three kingdoms,
including the King himself, was to be bound to swear to the observance
of the Covenant. Such a demand naturally met with stern resistance.
"There are three things," replied Charles, "I will not part with--the
Church, my crown, and my friends; and you will have much ado to get
them from me." It needed no action on the part of Cromwell to secure
the failure of such a negotiation, and, so far as we are aware, no word
passed his lips in public on the subject.
On November 25 Cromwell appeared in Parliament to urge on the one
thing immediately necessary, the forging of an instrument by which
the King might be ruined in the field. The existing military system
by which separate armies, to a great extent composed of local forces,
and therefore unable to subordinate local to national objects, had
been placed under commanders selected for their political or social
eminence, had completely broken down. So well was this recognised that,
two days before Cromwell's arrival at Westminster, a committee had
been appointed without opposition to 'consider of a frame or model of
the whole militia'. It was perhaps to assist the committee to come to
a right conclusion that, upon his arrival at Westminster, Cromwell
indignantly assailed Manchester as guilty of all the errors which had
led to the deplorable result at Newbury. Manchester was not slow in
throwing all the blame on Cromwell, and it seemed as if the gravest
political questions were to be thrust aside by a personal altercation.
So angry were the Scottish members of the Committee of both kingdoms,
a body which had recently been appointed to direct the movements of
the armies, that they won over the Presbyterian leaders, Essex and
Holles, to look favourably on a scheme for bringing an accusation
against Cromwell as an incendiary who was doing his best to divide
the King from his people, and one of the kingdoms from the other. At
a meeting held at Essex House the Scottish Earl of Loudoun asked the
English lawyers present whether an incendiary who was punishable by the
law of Scotland was also punishable by the law of England. The English
lawyers threw cold water on the scheme, Whitelocke asking to see the
evidence on which the charge was founded, whilst Maynard declared that
'Lieutenant-General Cromwell is a person of great favour and interest
with the House of Commons, and with some of the Peers likewise,
and therefore there must be proofs, and the most clear and evident
against him, to prevail with the Parliament to adjudge him to be an
incendiary'. Neither Whitelocke nor Maynard was eager to bell the cat.
Cromwell replied by a renewed attack on Manchester's inefficient
generalship. Yet it was not in accordance with the character of the man
who had stopped the headlong rush of his squadrons at Marston Moor to
allow a great public cause to be wrecked by personal recriminations.
On December 9 Zouch Tate, himself a strong Presbyterian, reported from
a committee which had been appointed to consider the questions at
issue between the two generals, 'that the chief causes of our division
are pride and covetousness'. It is immaterial whether Tate had or had
not come to a previous understanding with Cromwell to damp down the
fires of controversy which threatened to rend the Parliamentary party
into warring factions. What was of real importance is that Cromwell
followed with an admission that, unless the war was brought to a speedy
conclusion, the kingdom would become weary of Parliament. "For what,"
he added, "do the enemy say? Nay, what do many say that were friends
at the beginning of the Parliament? Even this, that the members of
both Houses have got great places and commands and a sword into their
hands, and, what by interest of Parliament, and what by power in the
army, will perpetually continue themselves in grandeur, and not permit
the war speedily to end, lest their own power should determine with it.
This I speak here to our faces is but what others do utter behind our
backs." Then, after calling for the more vigorous prosecution of the
war, and advising that all charges against individual commanders should
be dropped, he proceeded to express a hope that no member of either
House would scruple to abandon his private interests for the public
good. Later in the day, Tate gave point to Cromwell's suggestion by
moving that so long as the war lasted, no member of either House should
hold any command, military or civil, conferred on him by Parliament.
The idea struck root. It satisfied those who misdoubted Essex and
Manchester, as well as those who misdoubted Cromwell. That Cromwell was
in earnest in proposing to exclude himself is evident. The majority
in both Houses was Presbyterian, and if the so-called Self-Denying
Ordinance brought in to give effect to Tate's proposal by refusing to
members of either House the right of holding commands in the army or
offices in the State had been passed in the form in which it was drawn
up, nothing short of a repeal of that ordinance could have enabled him
to command even a single troop.
That a door was left open was entirely the fault of the House of Lords
in rejecting this ordinance on January 13, 1645. By this time both
parties in the Commons were of one mind in pushing on an ordinance for
a new model of the army, from which it would be easy to exclude peers,
whether the Self-Denying Ordinance were passed or no. On January 21
the Commons named Fairfax as General and Skippon as Major-General of
the new army. The post of Lieutenant-General, which carried with it
the command of the Horse, was significantly left open. No legislation
now barred the way to Cromwell's appointment, but the House thought
it desirable to make their action in the matter dependent on the line
finally taken by the Lords. On February 15 the Lords passed the New
Model Ordinance. A few days later, the negotiation with the King which
is known as the Treaty of Uxbridge, came to an end, and Parliament
was now committed to the design of meeting Charles in the field with
an army commanded by professional soldiers, and withdrawn from local
and political influences. In such an army nothing more would be heard
of the dangers of success which had loomed so large before the eye of
Manchester. Apparently to save the Parliamentary officers from the
indignity of tendering the resignation of their commissions, a new
Self-Denying Ordinance was passed on April 3, by which members of
either House were discharged from their military or civil posts within
forty days afterwards. There was nothing to prevent the reappointment
of Cromwell on the one hand, or of Essex or Manchester on the other, if
the two Houses should combine in doing so.