Electing Cromwell

The Making of a Politician

Andrew Barclay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317324126
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Popular interest in Cromwell has often exceeded the originality of what has been written about him. Barclay's study comes out of meticulous research on a huge range of newly discovered primary sources, transforming our understanding of the life and career of Oliver Cromwell during the period from his birth in 1599 until 1642.

1 THE MAN FROM HUNTINGDON

Why was Oliver Cromwell elected as MP for Cambridge in 1640? This simple question continues to perplex historians. Cambridge was a prestigious constituency, seat of one of the two English universities, and its townsmen had always found it easy to attract prominent public figures to represent them. Instead the voters in 1640 chose a little-known country gentleman for whom the highpoint of his political career had been a brief and undistinguished stint in the 1628 Parliament. Some might have thought of him as a bit of a failure. Cromwell was not even really a local man. The most that could have been claimed for him was that he was originally from Huntingdon in the neighbouring county and that in recent years he had been living at Ely, the cathedral city fifteen miles to the north. He seemed to offer them none of the qualities usually sought in a candidate, such as detailed knowledge of the town’s affairs, extensive parliamentary experience, useful political contacts, a big name or promising prospects. One has to wonder how many of the Cambridge voters had so much as heard of him before he stood. Even so, he was elected. Not once, but twice.

This is why John Morrill, the leading authority on this period of Cromwell’s career, has admitted that the elections of the future lord protector at Cambridge in 1640 remain ‘the greatest of all puzzles of his early life’.¹ All the other experts agree. What one might expect should be a significant, formative episode in the life story of one of the towering figures of the seventeenth century, a man whose career continues to be the subject of much passionate debate, is a large, embarrassing biographical gap. It does not help that most of what evidence there is seems fragmentary and uninformative. Historians really only know that Cromwell was elected, first on 25 March 1640 for the Short Parliament and again on 27 October 1640 for the Long Parliament. With so little to go on, doubt and mystery seem inescapable. Why after all should we expect that an answer can be found at all? Might this not be one of those historical questions that must remain unanswered?

This uncertainty has not meant that writers have passed over the issue in silence. Biographers, whether of Cromwell or any other historical figure, are not exactly known for their restraint in discussing what they cannot substantiate. Bold speculation, their favourite ruse when faced with an apparent absence of evidence, has regularly been used to fill this most obvious of gaps. Over the centuries various theories have been suggested, none of which can be considered wholly convincing. Some have assumed that Cromwell was an important local figure after all, while others have seen his opposition to the draining of the Ely fens as the crucial factor. His possible disapproval of other royal policies, such as ship money or Laudian ceremonialism, has also been cited. More oft en than not his biographers have hedged their bets by running all these explanations together. Sometimes they seem desperate to make Cromwell’s early life appear more interesting than perhaps it was.

The apparent narrative arc of Cromwell’s career has also imposed its own distortions. Such is the power of hindsight that it has been difficult to see his electoral successes at Cambridge as anything other than the first steps on his rise to greatness. When biographers have speculated about the Cambridge elections, they have mostly done so based on what is known about his later life. This has, if nothing else, made for a neater story. A further distorting narrative device has been the assumption that the Cambridge elections must have reflected the national results of the two 1640 general elections. Historians have found it easier to discuss the results at Cambridge in terms of what may have made them typical rather than to consider what it was about them that may have been distinctive. They have tended to play down or ignore the local context. The temptation to construct the story so that the events of Cromwell’s life exemplify wider national developments has always been a strong one. It has been all the more so, the less evidence there appears to be to go on. Unconsciously or not, the implication can be that what happened to Cromwell before he became famous had some larger significance.

All this has come to look very dated. Historians’ ideas about Cromwell’s life before 1640 have begun to shift. Now, where once confident assumptions were glibly repeated by each successive biographer, doubts prevail. The older explanations no longer convince. That Cromwell was an important local figure, that he opposed the draining of the fens or that he disapproved of any of Charles I’s other policies are facts that may not be facts at all. Morrill’s careful re-examination of what little evidence there is has dissolved many of the old certainties. Basic assumptions have been challenged. Historians are now far less confident than any of their predecessors that they know who or what Cromwell was in 1640.

The most important conundrums have therefore become, if anything, all the more puzzling. Who was Cromwell and what did he stand for? What were his political and religious views in the 1630s? How did he embark on his journey to greatness? Can the real Cromwell be found by looking for him in the records before he became famous? These are all valid questions. But to answer them we must look beyond what we think we already know.

Historians have failed to explain Cromwell’s elections in 1640 – and thus misunderstood much about his early life – mainly because they have overlooked lots of the relevant evidence. It is not that previous scholars can be accused of failing to search the records. On the contrary, many fine historians have devoted much effort to combing a wide range of archives and what they found there remains the indispensable foundation for any study of Cromwell. Only a handful of new references to him will appear here for the first time. Instead what will be revealed will be plenty of fresh material about those around him. Too often earlier historians made the mistake of searching the records only for references that explicitly mentioned Cromwell. In the case of the standard editions of documents compiled by Thomas Carlyle and W. C. Abbott, that was pretty much the benchmark used to determine which documents got included and which were omitted.² Neither Carlyle nor Abbott ought to be criticized for having adopted that approach; the work of compilation would have been even more heroic had it not been limited in that way. The more serious fault has been that, by relying so heavily on those editions, later historians have unwittingly perpetuated that limitation. Biographers, naturally enough, tend to be more interested in documents that actually mention the person whose biography they are writing. But the results can be rather boring. Almost without exception, historians since the mid-nineteenth century have discussed Cromwell’s early life only on the basis of the same limited number of documents, all of which have been easily available in print.

Then there has been understandable pressure always to foreground Cromwell himself. Too much of what has been written about Huntingdon, St Ives and Ely in this period has been based on what little we know about Cromwell. Even less satisfactorily, those conclusions have then been fed back into the biographies to construct backgrounds against which Cromwell is supposedly to be understood. A little material has been made to go a long way. This, it is true, has been less of a problem with respect to his later career. Not only was Cromwell by then a genuinely central figure, the immense quantity of research by historians on so many other aspects of the Civil War and Interregnum has helped ensure that he can no longer be seen in isolation. A start has also been made by Morrill and others in properly contextualizing his early life. That process can now be extended much further. By uncovering the lives of those individuals Cromwell knew, whether as friends, relatives or colleagues, we can discover much more about his world before he took his seat in the Long Parliament. The facts that can be recovered about him during those years are not quite so few as has hitherto been supposed.

It may even be that this will help us understand more about the man himself. One reason why Cromwell continues to fascinate is that he seems to resist simple interpretation. Few would claim to understand his complex character in its entirety. The archetypal man of action, his words were often opaque, his thinking seemingly muddled and the motives behind those actions, then as now, open to wildly different interpretations. One of his more recent biographers has rightly complained that historians have been too quick to gloss over the complexities of his career with the lame conclusion that he and his achievements were ‘paradoxical’.³ For historians uncomfortable with notions of great men and of historical greatness, it has been easier to imply that Cromwell’s greatness defies analysis and then leave it at that. They have either tried to explain too much or too little. Neither approach does him full justice. There have, it is true, been exceptions and those have been the historians who have produced the best of the recent work about him. Blair Worden, John Morrill, J. C. Davis and others have shown Cromwell to have been a man who struggled to understand and hold his own against the events of the 1640s and the 1650s.⁴

Cromwell, no less than his modern biographers, was engaged on a search for consistent meaning in his life. If he failed to comprehend the real significance of all the confusing events he was living through, not one of his contemporaries fully understood them either. What Cromwell arguably did do was to weather those events better than anyone else. In this he was helped by his strong providentialism, as his desire for decisive action existed in tension with his willingness to await God’s verdicts. His search for meaning, for an understanding of his remarkable fate, gave his personality a stability it might otherwise have lacked. Success, instead of corrupting him, confirmed him in his conviction that he was no more than an instrument for God’s hidden purposes. He never forgot how far he had come. That distance was the measure of how much he thought he owed to his divine benefactor.

*

Even during Cromwell’s lifetime others commented on the contrast between where he had come from and where he had ended up. This quickly became a cliché and the fall of the republic only made it a more attractive one. That Cromwell had been a nobody whose unnatural ambitions had upset the political order of the kingdom was too useful an interpretation of recent history not to be recycled again and again after the Restoration. This was the perfect warning to be used against those who sought to challenge the social hierarchy. In 1685 one of the prebends of Westminster Abbey, Robert South, a preacher most famous for his flippant wit, summed up the late Stuart view. South used the example of Cromwell to illustrate the unexpected effects of chance on human affairs.

And who that had beheld such a Bankrupt, Beggarly fellow as Cromwell, first entring the Parliament-House with a Threadbare, Torn Cloak, and a Greasy Hat, (and perhaps neither of them paid for) could have suspected that in the space of so few years, he should, by the Murder of one King, and the Banishment of another, ascend the Throne, be invested in the Royal Robes and want nothing of the state of a King but the changeing of his Hat into a Crown?⁵

South’s former patron, the first Earl of Clarendon, had also been impressed by how Cromwell had been able to rise ‘from a private and obscure birth, (though of a good family,) without interest of estate, alliance or friendships’.⁶ Abraham Cowley thought it remarkable that ‘a person of mean birth, no fortune, no eminent qualities of Body (which have sometimes) or of Mind (which have oft en raised men to the highest dignities)’ should have been able to overthrow the monarchy.⁷ This was less of a surprise to one of Cromwell’s earliest biographers, possibly Nathaniel Crouch, who hinted at a link between Cromwell’s financial condition and his political ambition. He was not so quick to play down either Cromwell’s inherited position or his natural abilities.

For his private Fortunes they were competent, a Mediocrity betwixt Riches and Poverty; the one blunting the Edge of Wit and Industry, the other, by its Hardship, whetting it quite away. But what was wanting in his Estate, was supplied in the greatness of his Mind, which put him upon high Attempts, which proved so successful, that at last they placed him at the Helm of Government.⁸

It was easier to demonize Cromwell if he was seen as ambitious only for himself. Some took it for granted that he had favoured a vigorous conduct of the war against the king because any peace would have exposed his overstretched private resources.⁹ If Cromwell had been merely power-crazed or grasping, more searching questions about the 1640s and the 1650s could be avoided.

In fact, Cromwell’s obscurity before 1640 was stressed as much by those who wished to celebrate his achievements as by those who wanted to present him as an upstart. Whether they saw him as a hero or as a villain, both sides wanted to present him as extraordinary. Unsurprisingly, it was the positive interpretation which appeared the more dominant while Cromwell was still alive and in the immediate aftermath of his death. Andrew Marvell’s broadly celebratory Horatian Ode exploited the idea of him as the reticent farmer who had since become the conquering soldier.

’Tis Madness to resist or blame

The force of angry Heavens flame:

And, if we should speak true,

Much to the Man is due.

Who, from his private Gardens, where

He liv’d reserved and austere,

As if his highest plot

To plant the Bergamot,

Could by industrious Valour climbe

To ruine the great Work of Time,

And cast the Kingdome old

Into another Mold.¹⁰

Both Samuel Carrington and Edmund Waller compared him to David, the shepherd boy who had risen to rule Israel.¹¹ Cromwell himself had toyed with the idea that he was Gideon, that other Old Testament figure who had been called by God from his rural labours to historic greatness.¹²

This former insignificance served to throw into even greater contrast Cromwell’s later achievements, although, for another of the poets who paid tribute, this was all just an optical illusion.

His grandeur hee deriv’d from Heav’n a...