THE DEATH OF CROMWELL
1658–1660
To contemporaries, the Protectorate had never seemed stronger than it
did in the summer of 1658. “From the dissolution of Cromwell’s last
Parliament,” writes Clarendon, “all things at home and abroad seemed to
succeed to his wish, and his power and greatness to be better
established than ever it had been.” Military mutiny, royalist
insurrection, projected invasion—the three dangers which threatened his
rule in the spring—had all been successfully overcome. The conspiracies
were frustrated by the timely arrest of their leaders. Some disaffected
officers lost their commissions, a few of the Fifth Monarchy men were
imprisoned, while about a dozen Royalists were tried by a High Court of
Justice, of whom five suffered on the scaffold or the gallows. Abroad,
the victory of the Dunes and the capture of Dunkirk shed new lustre on
English arms, and raised Cromwell’s fame still higher in Europe, while
the splendid reception of Lord Fauconberg at the French Court, and the
complimentary mission sent by Louis XIV. to the Protector, attested the
value which the most powerful sovereign in Europe set on Cromwell’s
friendship.
Modern historians have taken a less favourable view of the situation
than contemporaries did. Some have assumed that Cromwell’s power was
tottering to its fall, and that he must have succumbed to the
difficulties which surrounded him. He was faced, it has been said, by
the certainty of bankruptcy without a supply from Parliament, and the
certainty of overthrow if he summoned Parliament. Both statements are
exaggerated, for neither difficulty was insuperable. Cromwell had been
faced by both ever since he began to rule, and his Government had
contrived to live through them.
In 1658, the financial difficulty was more serious than the
parliamentary difficulty. When the Long Parliament was expelled, the
national finances were in a state of chaos. The monthly property tax had
risen to £120,000 per mensem, there was a debt of about £700,000, and
the Crown lands, Church lands, and confiscated estates—which were the
great resource of the treasury in emergencies—had almost all been sold.
During the Protectorate the financial administration was improved,
public money thriftily husbanded, and taxation reduced. The monthly
assessment was lowered first to £90,000, then to £60,000, and finally to
£50,000. But as the reduction of the expenditure of the state did not
proceed at the same pace, the receipts did not balance the outgoings.
The income of Cromwell’s Government for 1657–1658 may be estimated at
about £1,900,000, while its expenses were about £400,000 more. The army
cost about £1,100,000, the navy about £900,000, and the civil government
about £300,000. The causes of this large deficit were two. One was the
cost of holding down Ireland and Scotland, the revenues of which were
insufficient to defray the cost of their garrisons, so that the English
treasury had to supply about a quarter of a million a year for that
purpose. The second cause was the Protector’s foreign policy. It was
calculated by financiers that less than half a million was enough to
maintain a fleet sufficient for defensive purposes. But a navy strong
enough to fight Spain for the mastery of the Western seas, blockade the
Spanish coasts, and interfere in the disputes of the Baltic powers, cost
twice that sum. The consequence of this was that the Protector’s
Government was always embarrassed for money, and that a considerable
debt accumulated. By the spring of 1659, that debt amounted to about a
million and three quarters. Had the financiers of the Protectorate, like
the financiers of the time of William III., adopted the device of
funding the debt, and raising loans to cover the deficits caused by war,
the difficulty would have been temporarily solved. But as the conditions
of the time and the want of skill amongst Cromwell’s financial advisers
prevented the adoption of that plan, the only course was to reduce
expenditure, or to obtain larger supplies from Parliament, neither of
which things was easy, but neither impossible. After the successful
campaign of 1658, it became evident that Spain would be forced to make
peace, and a reduction both in naval and military expenditure became
feasible. In the opinion of the French Ambassador (a shrewd observer,
and deeply concerned in forming a right estimate of the question), there
was nothing in the financial embarrassments of the Government to
endanger its stability. As little danger, according to his view, was
there of its overthrow by Parliament. The temporary success of the
Republicans in the second session of the last Parliament was due to a
cause which would not recur, that is, the weakening of the Government
majority by the withdrawal of forty of its supporters to form the new
Second Chamber. The Protectorate had gained, rather than lost,
parliamentary strength. While the result of the Parliament of 1654 had
been to weaken the authority of the Protector, the result of that of
1656 had greatly increased it. In the summer of 1658, therefore, the
Protector resolved to summon another Parliament towards the close of the
year, and but for his death the intention would have been fulfilled. It
was confidently expected on all hands that the offer of the Crown would
have been renewed by that body, and, as the elections of December 1658
proved, the Government would have had a majority of at least three to
two. The support which Richard Cromwell obtained from Parliament
negatives the theory that the opposition would have succeeded in the
attempt to overthrow his father.
Events proved clearly that the maintenance of the Protectorate depended
on the fidelity of the army. At the commencement of the Protectorate, it
numbered not less than sixty thousand men. In December, 1654, there were
still fifty-three thousand men in arms in the three nations, in spite of
recent reductions. By the end of the Protectorate it numbered, including
the troops employed in Flanders and Jamaica, about forty-eight thousand
men. During this period a considerable change had taken place in its
character and composition. Officers opposed to the Government had been,
one after another, deprived of their commands: Harrison in December,
1653, Overton and four other colonels in 1654, Lambert in 1657, Packer
and five captains of Cromwell’s own regiment in the spring of 1658. By
1658 the superior officers were generally either personal adherents of
the Protector or professional soldiers who took little interest in
political questions. Men of the type of Monk had taken the place of men
of the type of Harrison. Amongst the subordinate officers and
non-commissioned officers there were many Republicans, but they were
without sufficient influence to be dangerous. All Anabaptists and Fifth
Monarchy men had been purged out of the ranks; private soldiers in
general looked to military service as a livelihood, and might become
mutinous if their pay was too much in arrears, but hardly for the sake
of maintaining political principles.
The history of the Protectorate is the history of the gradual
emancipation of the Protector from the political control of the army.
Twice he had successfully frustrated attempted alliances between the
parliamentary opposition and the malcontents in the army, and each
attempt had strengthened his authority over the army.
It was this sense of the hopelessness of insurrectionary movements, so
long as Cromwell lived, which caused the repeated conspiracies of
Royalists and Levellers for Cromwell’s assassination. In 1654, some of
the people round Charles II. issued a proclamation in the King’s name
offering five hundred pounds, knighthood, and a colonel’s commission, to
any one who succeeded in killing “a certain mechanic fellow” called
Oliver Cromwell, “by pistol, sword, or poison.” Charles was cognisant of
these plots, and stipulated only that the Protector’s assassination
should be connected with a general royalist rising, not an isolated act.
There were many subsequent designs of the same nature, especially after
the alliance between the Levellers and the Royalists. Lieutenant-Colonel
Sexby, once a soldier in Cromwell’s own regiment, undertook to arrange
the assassination of the Protector, and was supplied with money by the
Spanish Government for that purpose. Sindercombe, whose plot was
detected in January, 1657, was his agent. In the following May, Sexby
published a tract entitled _Killing No Murder_, the object of which was
to prove that it would be both a lawful and a glorious act to kill the
Protector. “Let every man,” said he, “to whom God hath given the spirit
of wisdom and courage be persuaded by his honour, his safety, his own
good, and his country’s, to endeavour by all rational means to free the
world from this pest. Either I or Cromwell must perish,” announced
Sexby. But, visiting England in disguise to make further arrangements
for this purpose, Sexby was arrested, and died a prisoner in the Tower.
Cromwell was kept well informed of these designs by his police, and
spoke of them with great contempt. “Little fiddling things” he termed
them in one of his speeches. “It was intended first for the
assassination of my person,” he told Parliament of the plot of 1654,
“which I would not remember as anything at all considerable to myself or
to you, for they would have had to cut throats beyond human calculation
before they could have been able to effect their design.”
As a precaution against such designs, the Protector’s life-guard, which
had originally consisted simply of the forty-five gentlemen forming the
life-guard of the Commander-in-chief, was raised in 1656 to 160 men.
Royalist accounts say that during the last months of his life Cromwell
was “much more apprehensive of danger to his person than he had used to
be,” and that in consequence he surrounded himself with guards, never
returned from Hampton Court by the road by which he went thither, and
rarely slept twice in the same bed. These are legends for which there is
no solid foundation. The Protector took reasonable, but not exaggerated
precautions. He was not a man whose nerves could be shaken by threats,
but he knew as well as his enemies did how much depended on his life,
and how little the permanence of his work was assured.
The real danger to the Protectorate was that Cromwell was growing old.
He was now in his fifty-ninth year. The fatigues of campaigning had
injured his health before he began to rule. He had one dangerous illness
in the spring of 1648, and another in the spring of 1651. “I thought I
should have died of this sickness,” he said of the latter. Under the
fatigues of government, his health was still more impaired. The
despatches of foreign ambassadors have frequent references to the ill
health of the Protector as one of the causes which retarded their
negotiations. The difference between his signatures in 1651 and in 1657
is very remarkable. The bold firm hand of the first date becomes shaky
and feeble six years later. His speeches prove that he felt the weight
which rested upon his shoulders. “It has been heretofore,” he said in
1657, “a matter of, I think, but philosophical discourse, that a great
place, a great authority, is a great burden. I know it is.” Danton,
disillusioned by failure, cried that it was better to be a poor
fisherman than a ruler of men. Cromwell sometimes regretted the quiet
country life he had exchanged for the cares and vicissitudes of supreme
power. “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 is.”
[Illustration:
FACSIMILE SIGNATURE OF OLIVER CROMWELL.
OCTOBER 19, 1651.
]
[Illustration:
FACSIMILE SIGNATURE OF OLIVER CROMWELL.
AUGUST 11, 1657.
]
He met each new difficulty with his old resourcefulness and courage, but
when one was overcome another rose before him, and the incessant
struggle made increasing demands upon his vital forces. In the opinion
of his steward, Maidston, “being compelled to wrestle with the
difficulties of his place as well as he could without parliamentary
assistance,” after the dissolution of his second Parliament, was a fatal
addition to his burdens. “I doubt not to say it drank up his spirits, of
which his natural constitution afforded a vast stock, and brought him to
his grave.”
Private griefs also contributed their share to his load. In February,
1658, Robert Rich died, the husband of Cromwell’s youngest daughter
Frances, married only four months earlier. On the 6th of August
following, died Elizabeth Claypole, his favourite daughter, after a long
and painful illness. The Protector was much with her in her last days,
and his “sense of her outward misery in the pains she endured took deep
impression upon him.”
A little time after his daughter’s funeral, Cromwell fell ill of an
ague, or intermittent fever, but in a few days he seemed to shake it off
and to regain strength. On August 20th, George Fox, going to Hampton
Court to plead with the Protector “about the sufferings of Friends,” met
him riding in the Park at the head of his guards. “Before I came to
him,” says Fox, “I saw and felt a waft of death go forth against him,
and when I came to him he looked like a dead man.” The next day Cromwell
fell sick again, but he felt certain that the prayers put up for him
would be answered, and was assured that he would recover. “Banish all
sadness from your looks, and deal with me as you would with a serving
man,” he said to a doubting physician. “You may have skill in the nature
of things, yet nature can do more than all physicians put together; and
God is far above nature.” When the fit was past, his physicians ordered
him to remove to Whitehall, thinking that he would be benefited by the
change of air.
At Whitehall, his condition became worse instead of better: he was
racked by alternate heats and chills; all recognised that the danger was
great; “our fears are more than our hopes,” wrote Thurloe to Henry
Cromwell. On Tuesday, the last day of August, the French Ambassador told
his Government that the Protector was at death’s door, but the same
evening he rallied, and hope gained the upper hand again. That night,
one who watched in Cromwell’s bedchamber heard him praying, and remarked
that “a public spirit to God’s cause did breathe in him to the very
last.” For he prayed, not for himself or for his family, but for
Puritanism and for all Puritans—for “God’s cause” and “God’s people.”
“Thou hast made me,” he said, “though very unworthy, a mean instrument
to do them some good, and Thee service. And many of them have set too
high a value upon me, though others wish and would be glad of my death.
But, Lord, however Thou dost dispose of me, continue and go on to do
good for them. Give them consistency of judgment, one heart, and mutual
love, and go on to deliver them.... Teach those who look too much upon
Thy instruments to depend more upon Thyself. Pardon such as desire to
trample upon the dust of a poor worm, for they are Thy people too. And
pardon the folly of this short prayer, even for Jesus Christ’s sake, and
give us a good night, if it be Thy pleasure.”
Cromwell hourly grew weaker. Through the night of Thursday, the 2nd of
September, he was very restless, speaking often to himself in broken
sentences difficult to hear. “I would be willing,” he said once, “to
live to be further serviceable to God and His people, but my work is
done.” “God will be with His people.” He resigned himself to die.
A physician offered him something to drink, bidding him to take it, and
to endeavour to sleep, but he answered: “It is not my design to drink or
to sleep, but my design is to make what haste I can to be gone.” Towards
morning he spoke again “using divers holy expressions, implying much
inward consolation and peace,” and with them he mingled “some exceeding
self-debasing words, annihilating and judging himself.” After that he
was silent, and at four o’clock on the afternoon of Friday he died.
It was the 3rd of September, his fortunate day, the anniversary of
Dunbar and Worcester.
As Marvell sang:
“No part of time but bare his mark away
Of honour—all the year was Cromwell’s day,
But this, of all the most auspicious found,
Thrice had in open field him victor crowned,
When up the armèd mountains of Dunbar
He marched, and through deep Severn, ending war:
What day should him eternise, but the same,
That had before immortalised his name?”
Sometime during his illness Cromwell had verbally nominated his eldest
son as his successor, so, about three hours after Oliver’s death,
Richard was proclaimed Protector. Addresses from counties, cities, and
regiments poured in to the new ruler, and foreign powers hastened to
congratulate and to recognise him. There was no more opposition than if
he had been the descendant of a long line of hereditary sovereigns.
“There is not a dog that wags his tongue, so great a calm are we in,”
wrote Thurloe to Henry Cromwell.
Richard’s first care was his father’s funeral. The body of the late
Protector was embalmed and removed from Whitehall to Somerset House,
there to lie in state, as that of James I. had done. His waxen effigy,
clad in royal robes of purple and ermine, with a golden sceptre in the
hand and a crown on the head, was for many weeks exhibited. The corpse
was privately buried in the chapel of Henry VII., in Westminster Abbey,
on September 26th, but the public funeral took place with extraordinary
pomp on November 23rd. All the great officers of state and public
officials, with officers from every regiment in the army, walked in
solemn procession from Somerset House to the Abbey, through streets
lined with soldiers in new red coats with black buttons.
The funeral ceremonies cost sixty thousand pounds, and this profusion,
which the Government could ill afford, excited angry criticism amongst
the Republicans. Their dissatisfaction would have mattered little, but
there were already signs of coming trouble in a more dangerous quarter.
A quarrel began between the civil and the military faction in the
Protector’s council. Oliver had been Commander-in-chief, as well as
Protector, but now the superior officers demanded a commander-in-chief
of their own choosing, and put forward Fleetwood as their candidate.
Their aim was to shake off the control of Richard’s civilian advisers,
and make the army independent of the civil power. Richard firmly refused
their demand, and the storm seemed to blow over, but the officers only
waited for a more convenient opportunity.
In January, 1659, the necessity of providing money for the public
service obliged Richard to call a Parliament. All the Republican leaders
obtained seats, but more than two-thirds of the members elected were
supporters of the Government. There was a long struggle over the
recognition of Richard as Protector, followed by excited debates about
the right of the members for Scotland and Ireland to sit in Parliament,
and over the old question of the House of Lords. On all these points,
the Government carried the day, but in the meantime the agitation in the
army had begun again, and a council of officers repeated the demands
made in the previous autumn. The Protector, backed by his Parliament,
which was indignant at military dictation, ordered the council to cease
meeting. The military leaders, allying themselves with the Republican
minority in the House, refused obedience. A few colonels adhered to the
Protector, and obeyed his orders, but they were deserted by their men,
and all the regiments in London gathered round Fleetwood at St. James’s.
On behalf of the council of officers, Fleetwood and Desborough demanded
the immediate dissolution of Parliament. “If he would dissolve
Parliament,” said Desborough, “the officers would take care of him; if
he refused, they would do it without him and leave him to shift for
himself.” Richard might have resisted with some chance of success, for
Monk and the army in Scotland remained faithful, and Henry Cromwell,
with the Irish army, would have supported him. But he trusted the
promises of his uncles, and, whatever the result to himself, he shrank
from beginning a civil war. “I will not have one drop of blood spilt for
the preservation of my greatness,” he is reported to have said. Yielding
to the pressure put upon him, he dissolved Parliament (April 21, 1659),
and a fortnight later he had ceased to reign.
Thus the Protectorate fell before that alliance between the Republicans
and the malcontents in the army which Cromwell had always been strong
enough to prevent. Fleetwood had no wish to overthrow his
brother-in-law, Desborough no animosity to his nephew; they meant to
make him their tool, and to govern under his name. But the inferior
officers declared for the restoration of the Republic, and threw over
the House of Cromwell. On May 7th, the Long Parliament was restored to
power by the men who had expelled it in April, 1653, and the Revolution
was completed.
There was no real union between these temporary allies. The fifty or
sixty members of the Long Parliament who governed England in the name of
the Republic had learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. The soldiers,
conscious that the Government could not live for a day without their
support, grew restive and indignant when their claims were ignored and
their requests slighted. After the suppression by Major-General Lambert
of a royalist insurrection in August, 1659, Parliament and army came to
an open breach. Parliament cashiered Lambert and eight other officers
for promoting a petition which it had declared seditious, and Lambert
retaliated (October 13, 1659), by putting a stop to its sittings.
Lambert—the real leader of the army, though Fleetwood was its nominal
head—stood now in the position which Cromwell had occupied in April,
1653; but this time the army was divided. In Scotland, Monk declared for
the restitution of the Parliament, and by dilatory negotiations kept
Lambert and Fleetwood from acting until the desertion of their soldiers,
the defection of the fleet, and the opposition of London obliged them to
give way. At the end of December, 1659, the Long Parliament was a second
time restored, and Monk, with six thousand men, entered England
unopposed. It was not zeal for that assembly which caused its
restoration, but hostility to military government. Under the opprobrious
nickname of “The Rump,” Parliament was the laughing stock of every
ballad-maker, but for the moment it represented all that was left of the
constitution. Weary of experiments, and most weary of the rule of the
sword, the English people wished to return to the known laws and the old
government. As Monk marched to London, petitions poured in urging him to
declare for a free Parliament, and every petitioner knew that a really
representative Parliament meant the restoration of Charles II. Monk
answered by protesting unalterable fidelity to the Republic, but made up
his mind to use his power to let the nation determine freely its own
future. When he reached London he availed himself of the disaffection of
the City to oblige Parliament to readmit the Presbyterian members whom
Pride had expelled in 1648 (Feb. 21, 1660). Having thus secured a
majority ready to do his bidding, he obliged the House to vote its own
dissolution, and issue writs for the calling of a free Parliament (March
16, 1660). As commander-in-chief, he maintained the freedom of the
elections, kept the army under control, and watched over the peace of
the nation.
Monk’s greatest service to England was not the restoration of Charles
II. After the breach between army and Parliament that was inevitable.
“The current,” said Cowley, “was so irresistible, that the strongest
strove against it in vain, and the weakest could sail with it to
success.” Monk’s merit was that he brought about the Restoration without
a civil war. His dexterous and unscrupulous policy blinded the
Republicans to his intentions till it was too late for them to resist,
and made the army instrumental in effecting what the bulk of it would
have fought to prevent. But for him, England would have been, in
Cromwell’s phrase, “one Cain.” Thanks to him, the transition from the
government of an armed minority to the government which an overwhelming
majority of the nation desired was a peaceable and constitutional
revolution. So the rule of Puritanism, founded with blood and iron, fell
without a blow. The alliance between the Presbyterians and the
Royalists, begun thirteen years ago, was now at last completed. The once
triumphant Independents were divided and powerless. Maidston, the
steward of Cromwell’s household, in a letter to John Winthrop, wrote the
epitaph of militant Independency.
“The interest of religion lies dreadfully in the dust, for the
eminent professors of it, having achieved formerly great victories
in the war, and thereby great power in the army, made use of it to
make variety of changes in the government, and every one of those
changes hazardous and pernicious.... They were all charged upon the
principles of the authors, who, being Congregational men, have not
only made men of that persuasion cheap, but rendered them odious to
the generality of the nation.”
At the end of April, 1660, a free Parliament met, the first for twenty
years. On May 29th, Charles II. re-entered London “with a triumph of
above twenty thousand horse and foot, brandishing their swords and
shouting with inexpressible joy; the ways strewed with flowers, the
bells ringing, the streets hung with tapestry, the fountains running
with wine.”
“I stood in the Strand and beheld it, and blessed God,” wrote John
Evelyn. “And all this was done without one drop of blood shed, and
by that very army which rebelled against him; but it was the Lord’s
doing, for such a restoration was never mentioned in any history,
ancient or modern, since the return of the Jews from the Babylonish
captivity; nor so joyful a day, and so bright, ever seen in this
nation, this happening when to expect or to effect it was past all
human policy.”
In the constitutional settlement which followed the King’s return,
England reverted to the state of things which had existed before the
Civil War began. Cromwell’s legislation and all the laws made by the
Long Parliament were regarded as null and void. There was a general
amnesty for all political offenders excepting the Regicides and a few
persons regarded as specially dangerous. Twelve Regicides suffered the
penalties of high treason, and Hugh Peters and Sir Henry Vane shared
their fate. About twenty escaped into foreign parts, and about five and
twenty were imprisoned for life. After the punishment of the living,
came vengeance against the dead. In November, 1660, a bill for the
attainder of Cromwell and other dead Regicides was introduced into the
House of Commons. During its progress, Captain Titus stood up and
observed,
“that execution did not leave traitors at their graves, but followed
them beyond it, and that since the heads of some were already put
upon the gates, he hoped that the House would order that the
carcases of those devils who were buried at Westminster—Cromwell,
Bradshaw, and Ireton—might be torn out of their graves, dragged to
Tyburn, there to hang some time, and afterwards be buried under the
gallows.”
It was voted without any opposition, though many present must have
agreed with Pepys, whom it “troubled, that a man of so great courage as
Cromwell should have that dishonour done him, though otherwise he might
deserve it well enough.”
Accordingly, on Saturday, January 26, 1661, the bodies of Cromwell and
Ireton were disinterred from their graves in Westminster Abbey, and on
the Monday conveyed from Westminster to the Red Lion Inn, in Holborn.
Finally, on the morning of January 30th, the twelfth anniversary of the
execution of Charles I., their bodies, and that of Bradshaw, were drawn
upon sledges from Holborn to Tyburn. “All the way, as before from
Westminster, the universal outcry and curses of the people went along
with them.” “When these three carcases were at Tyburn,” continues the
newspaper, “they were pulled out of their coffins, and hanged at the
several angles of that triple tree, where they hung till the sun was
set; after which they were taken down, their heads cut off, and their
loathsome trunks thrown into a deep pit under the gallows.” The common
hangman took the heads, placed them on poles, and set them on the top of
Westminster Hall, Bradshaw’s head in the centre, Ireton’s and Cromwell’s
on either side.
Yet, though all this was done in the face of day, as many places claim
to be Cromwell’s sepulchre as once contended for the honour of being
Homer’s birthplace. Strange rumours spread abroad that the body
subjected to all these indignities was not Cromwell’s. Two years later,
a French traveller in England was told that Cromwell had caused the
royal tombs in Westminster Abbey to be opened and the bodies transposed,
so that none might know where his own body was laid. Pepys repeated the
story to one of the late Protector’s chaplains, who answered, “That he
believed Cromwell never had so poor a low thought in him as to trouble
himself about it.” Another rumour was that Cromwell’s body was secretly
conveyed away, and buried at dead of night on Naseby Field. According to
a third, Cromwell’s daughter, Lady Fauconberg, foreseeing changed times,
had ere this removed her father’s body from Westminster, and reinterred
it in a vault at Newburgh Abbey, in Yorkshire. All these stories found,
and find, believers, but there is no reasonable ground for doubting that
it was Cromwell’s body which hung on the gallows at Tyburn, or that it
was duly buried in the pit beneath them. Where Connaught Square now
stands, a yard or two beneath the street, trodden under foot and beaten
by horsehoofs, lies the dust of the great Protector.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]