Cromwell at War

The Lord General and his Military Revolution

Martyn Bennett

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781784535117
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786722478
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military Biographies
• Index: History

Martyn Bennett here provides the first military biography of Cromwell in the context of the seventeenth century Military Revolution. After commanding a small troop in 1643 and, without prior military experience, Cromwell rose to lead the cavalry regiments of the Eastern Association Army and the New Model Army to final victory at Worcester in 1651 and sealed the victory of the Parliamentary forces in Ireland and Scotland, becoming Lord General in 1650. Martyn Bennett analyses Cromwell's military talents and generalship, in addition to his well-attested powerful and even brutal discipline and religious fervour. He examines the controversial Irish campaigns as well as modern accusations of genocide. In providing new perspectives on Cromwell's military career, Bennett adds to our understanding of England's only non-royal head of state.

1

CROMWELL THE MAN

For most of his life Oliver Cromwell lived away from the public gaze. Not only did he not play any role in military affairs before 1642, for much of his life he held only minor public office and even then this was sporadic rather than constant. Only partly was this due to the social position into which he was born – sometimes it was because of the precarious nature of his status when an adult, and sometimes due to Cromwell's own failings when in office. Looking back on his life, when he was the Lord Protector, Cromwell rightly said of his origins that he was ‘by birth a gentleman living neither in any considerable height, nor yet in obscurity’.¹ It was quite an apt description of the station he was born into, and like each social stratum in life his carried certain obligations. Following the death of Cromwell's father and Cromwell reaching the age of 21, and even more so once he was married, there were major family obligations. He had seven sisters and would go on to have a large number of children of his own, and in the 1620s there were the requirements of urban government to attend to. Whilst familial duties remained with Cromwell all of his life, a drop in social status in his early thirties meant a hiatus in socio-political obligations for several years. The rules and regulations of military life were something which did not impinge upon Cromwell until after he was 43 years of age. By then his public and political life had accelerated rapidly beyond the confines of small-town eastern England and even the university town of Cambridge, where he had become an MP at the age of 40. This chapter explores the early years of Cromwell's life from birth until his incorporation into oppositionist politics.

Cromwell was born on 25 April 1599, the second child of Robert and Elizabeth Cromwell of Huntingdon.² Their first male child had died during infancy and this, in a society which practiced male primogeniture, made Oliver the son and heir to the majority of the family estate at birth. His family were members of what in England is known as the gentry, that is, they had no aristocratic titles themselves, although they had relatives who were in the nobility, and neither were they were members of the ‘middling sort’ of yeoman or husbandmen who farmed and still may have worked on their lands themselves. The male members of the family would be entitled to be addressed as Mister (Mr) and the women Mistress (Mrs): and they could have a coat of arms. Cromwell's father was, later in his life, referred to as an esquire, which implied that he was a gentleman of superior status, but this was because of his father's and his brother's social positions rather than an achievement of his own. Cromwell's grandfather, Sir Henry Cromwell, was the wealthy owner of the nearby mansion of Hinchingbrooke and vast estates beside, but Cromwell's father, Robert, was not his eldest son, which meant that he was not in line to inherit the majority of Sir Henry's estate: that would go to Robert's older brother Oliver. Mr Robert Cromwell was Sir Henry's second son and as such his part of the family wealth was relatively small and not enough in itself to justify the rank of esquire. Indeed, an estate of £300 a year could be a gentleman's lot but it would be unlikely to be an esquire's; such an estate could even be enjoyed by a yeoman and his family. However, when Sir Henry died in 1603 and Robert's brother Sir Oliver, after whom young Oliver was presumably named, became the owner of Hinchingbrooke and the majority of the family's other estate, Robert's own status had improved: he had his inheritance from his father, but his uncle's elevation in status through knighthood also dragged Robert in its wake. Whereas at Cromwell's baptism in 1599 Robert had been referred to in the church register as a gentleman, at the baptisms of Oliver's younger siblings he was referred to as esquire.³ The inheritance Robert received from his father was small for a gentleman, consisting principally of a house opposite St John's Church and an estate which generated an income of £300 a year.⁴ The house was a former friary fronting on to the north end of Huntingdon's High Street near its junction with Balms Hole. Three hundred pounds a year was not really an income sufficient for an esquire to fulfil the obligations of the rank, and yet Robert was expected to continue playing a public role because of his membership of the Cromwell family. Robert Cromwell had already been an elected MP back in 1593, he was also a justice of the peace for the county of Huntingdon and served as a town councillor in Huntingdon: in short he was playing the social and political roles expected of one of the Cromwells. Robert's older brother Oliver, whilst still the heir to Sir Henry's lands and property, was also an MP in 1593 but unlike Robert this would not be his only stint in Westminster. Oliver was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1598, and at the coronation of King James VI of Scotland as King James I of England he was made a Knight of the Bath. In that same momentous year when Sir Henry died, Sir Oliver succeeded to Hinchingbrooke, Ramsay Abbey and the rest of Sir Henry's estate.

Oliver's mother, Elizabeth, was born a Steward, another gentry family, which farmed the estates of Ely Cathedral. Like the Cromwells, the Steward family had profited from the Reformation, the dissolution of the monasteries and the sales of former church property that followed. For Elizabeth her marriage to Robert was her second: her daughter and first husband had both died in the 1580s, and into her second marriage, to Robert, she took £60 a year and a small brewery. The Reformation had literally made the Cromwell family in more ways than wealth: the Cromwell name was in their case a product of the Reformation. The family had previously been called Williams, and occasionally their original name would appear in legal documents even during Oliver Cromwell's adulthood. In the early sixteenth century the Welsh lawyer Morgan ap William had married Katherine Cromwell, daughter of a blacksmith and the sister of lawyer Thomas Cromwell, who worked for Cardinal Thomas Wolsey. After Wolsey's fall from grace, Thomas Cromwell had served King Henry VIII in various offices until he too fell from grace in 1540. By this time, Katherine and Morgan's son had been adopted by Thomas Cromwell and had taken the surname Cromwell. Richard Cromwell married well: his wife Frances's father had been Lord Mayor of London. Working closely with his uncle Thomas, Richard put the dissolution of the church establishments into effect in the Huntingdonshire and Cambridgeshire region. As monasteries, nunneries, chantries and other religious organisations were wound up, their lands were sold off by the king. Those involved in these financial deals made money and gained lands themselves: thus by such means Richard Cromwell gained Hinchingbrooke Nunnery, Ramsey Abbey, Sawtry Abbey, St Neot's Abbey and Huntingdon's Priory and its friary: these became the core of the Cromwell lands: of which Oliver Cromwell's immediate family inherited a small portion.

Four days after his birth, Cromwell was baptised across the road at St John's Church.⁵ He was his mother's sixth child. Elizabeth Cromwell's first daughter Katherine had died and was buried with her father, Elizabeth's first husband, in Ely Cathedral. Her second child, Joan, died before she was ten. Her third child, Elizabeth, was born in 1593, son Henry (born in 1595) died in infancy, Catharine was born in 1597, followed two years later by her brother Oliver. A sixth Cromwell child and Elizabeth's eighth experience of childbirth, Margaret, was born in 1601. She was followed by Anna (1602), Jane (1605), Robina (1607) and Robert in 1609, who lived for just a few months. In all, Elizabeth gave birth to 12 children, of whom seven survived infancy. Husband Robert himself was one of the ten children of Sir Henry, the ‘Golden knight’, and the marriages of his siblings and their children would be important in Cromwell's own life, as they married into the Hampden, Whalley and St John families, members of which would become important figures in either the opposition to Charles I, the parliamentarian cause or the protectorate. On the other hand, family marriages would tie the Cromwells into families that would espouse the royalist cause in the ensuing civil war.

Cromwell's parents and his sisters lived in the friary. It was, of course, a perk of the Reformation. The friary was sited next to a common drain on Fryer's Lane on the east side of the town.⁶ There is very little evidence of the life of Cromwell as a child and a great deal of speculation – a number of stories exist about his youth, none of them of any substance.⁷ When Cromwell was old enough he went to school, just a few yards from his home at Huntingdon Grammar School, another building recycled from the pre-Reformation town – it was the former Hospital of St John the Baptist and thus associated with the church where Cromwell had been baptised. The headmaster there was the minister of the town's main parish, All Saints, Dr Thomas Beard. Much has been made by earlier historians of Beard's influence on the religious development of his charges. He was for many years identified by them as a ‘puritan’, and it was therefore inferred that he awoke in Cromwell the religious radicalism which marked Cromwell's adult political and religious outlook. This is a good example of reading history backwards when dealing with Cromwell: Beard's religious outlook was as much coloured in the eyes of later observers by his association with Cromwell rather than the other way round. In work by John Morrill, Thomas Beard has been shown to be a trimmer, adopting the appropriate proclivities to suit the diocesan regime. Moreover, although he had critiqued the Pope in The Theatre of God's Judgement, Beard was not a radical. Moreover, he was a pluralist – he would hold more than one living or parish: as well as All Saints and the school mastership, he was master of the town's hospital; he held the living of the parish of Kimbolton, and later that of St John's opposite Cromwell's house. Plurality was something frowned upon by the ‘puritans’ he was supposedly counted amongst, as it meant that the word of God was being inefficiently propagated. As Professor John Morrill has shown, Beard was unlikely to have been much of an influence on the young Cromwell, and in any case years later Beard would be involved in the painful and humiliating end of Cromwell's life in Huntingdon.⁸ We thus know little of what the young Cromwell was like as a schoolboy and whether or not he was a conscientious student; he did not discuss it much as an older man and rarely gave clues as to the sources of his knowledge, beliefs or inspiration – other than the influence of God and interpretations of God's intentions through providence.⁹

On 23 April 1616, just short of his seventeenth birthday, Cromwell was recorded as having matriculated at Sidney Sussex College Cambridge. Matriculation, whilst sounding like some form of qualification, actually means little more than enrolment. That Cromwell progressed to Cambridge does not, in itself, prove that he was a good scholar – attendance at one of Britain's six universities was for many a social rite rather than a career path, as indeed was later progression to one of the Inns of Court for legal training. If we know little of the course of Cromwell's school life, we also little of Cromwell as a student; the master of his college was Dr Samuel Ward, like Beard later identified as a ‘puritan’ who influenced Cromwell. Ward is more easily assimilated into the milieu of reformers than Beard, yet how much influence he had is difficult to assert.¹⁰ However, he too had establishment credentials, having been one of the team responsible for the Authorised Bible published just four years earlier, and would in two years' time be a member of the delegation to the synod of Dort, part of King James's ecumenical desire to unite the churches of Protestant Europe as a preparatory move towards uniting Christendom.¹¹ The timing of the synod was unfortunate, coinciding with the continent's descent into a war which would last for most of the remainder of Cromwell's life.¹² Yet the college, with its plain glass-windowed chapel, was noted later by William Laud (who went on to become Archbishop of Canterbury) as a ‘hotbed of puritanism’.¹³ In any case, how much time does the head of a university's college (even a small one) get to spend with any one undergraduate? In Cromwell's case Ward had little time because Robert Cromwell died in 1617, less than a year after his son and heir had gone to Cambridge. In any case, Abbott's assertion that Cromwell was surrounded by, if not imbued with a puritan ethos can be questioned as the delegation James sent to Dort was not remarkable for its radicalism, and the king had even negated the influence of his home church, the Scottish Kirk, by appointing an Anglican as its representative at the synod.¹⁴ The social aspect of university attendance is underlined by the fact that Sidney Sussex was associated with the Montagus, relatives of the Cromwells and from the same area of the country. On the other hand, none of Cromwell's contemporaries there played any great role in his later life.

Cromwell's university career was brief; just a year after starting at Cambridge the death of his father meant that he had to leave university and return home. It seems that there was no consideration of him returning after having gone back to Huntingdon for the funeral and settling of affairs. Just as John Morrill has suggested with regard to the schooling under Beard, it seems that the university life that Cromwell was exposed to had little effect on him.

With a lack of money in this rapidly expanding family, it was obvious that Cromwell would have to earn a living, and it is possible that going to Cambridge had been planned as the first stage of getting him an education to suit a gentleman in a business or profession. Attending university in the seventeenth century was not necessarily about getting a degree: there were other facets of university life which were important, although some aspects of undergraduate life, centred on alcohol and dancing, have remained common over the centuries. There was also great emphasis on family links – there was often a strong intergenerational link to particular colleges, and meeting and making socio-economic connections with other undergraduates and their families was important too, although as we have seen, other than the Montagu connection to the college, Cromwell was not able to develop strong links with the families which had sons there at the same time.

After Robert's death there are three years in which Cromwell largely disappears from view.¹⁵ Rumours persist about his having attended one of the four Inns of Court – the ‘training colleges’ for the legal profession in England. But there is no strong evidence to support that, although there is nothing to rule it out completely. There is speculation that he went to Lincoln's Inn, which given that the Inns like universities had familial and regional links, would not be out of the bounds of possibility.¹⁶ Legal knowledge would be useful to a member of the gentry, especially one who had rural property. Buying, selling and entailing property required legal expertise, and an awareness of the processes involved would enable a gentleman to make the right decisions and lessen his reliance on a paid lawyer's expertise. There was also the same potential to forge friendships and the sort of economic and social ties which a gentleman would find of use later in life regarding land management and government at local and central level. Thus even a man with an incomplete undergraduate education might find his way to one of the four Inns of Court – Gray's, Lincoln's or the Middle or Inner Temple – all clustered north of the Chancery in London. The Inns had regional links too, as students from particular areas of England and Wales tended to gravitate to particular Inns, and the same was true of families. In the years after Cromwell's estate had been settled, Gray's Inn was, in Abbott's phrase, ‘a list of his relatives, friends and later dignitaries’.¹⁷ As the list of associates included the future president of the court that would try Charles I, two of Cromwell's major generals, the speaker of Cromwell's parliament and three members of his Council of State, such a venue would have catered for a convocation of the future protectorate. However, Cromwell was not amongst them, so despite the social introductions which could have potentially smoothed working relationships in Cromwell's future, formally at least Cromwell was not there, even if the Inn did recruit traditionally from East Anglian families.¹⁸ Speculation instead has Cromwell at Lincoln's Inn, and there are similar familial links: his father and two uncles had been there, and three of his later associates were there at the same time as Cromwell could have been there. The second and third of Cromwell's biographers claim that he was there, and both assert that he combined the social skills of a gentlemen on the path to adulthood whilst undertaking the required levels of scholarship.¹⁹ The only issue is that there is no solid evidence: there is no entry in the Inn's documentation and Cromwell himself never referred to having been there, and nor does he ever appear to have mentioned having any legal training. Nor, apart from two early biographers, does anyone else.

During the three ‘missing years’ of Cromwell's life – those which followed his inheritance and that cover the period when, it is speculated, he attended one of the Inns of Court – Cromwell seems to have made use of his broader family connections in London and the home counties.²⁰ Possibly through his auntie, Joan Barrington, Cromwell met Elizabeth Bourchier, daughter if the London furrier and former Lord Mayor, Sir James Bourchier, and neighbour of aunt Joan, sister of Cromwell's father. It has been suggested that Cromwell stayed with the Barringtons when in London, but it is possible that he also accompanied them to Essex, where the Bourchiers had a country seat. Whatever the case, the couple met and married in the City of London at the Church of St Giles, Cripplegate, on 22 August 1620.²¹ Cromwell, now of age, was able to settle the parsonage of Hartford on his new bride: the estate was now his. The Cromwell family proceeded to grow. Together, Oliver and Elizabeth had nine children between 1621 and 1638; five boys and four girls, most surviving into adulthood, although the first-born, Robert, died in childhood during the 1630s, as did the last son, James. Alongside Cromwell's sisters and his mother, Oliver, wife Elizabeth and their growing family crowded, until 1631 at least, into the old friary.²²

LOCAL POLITICS AND GOVERNANCE

Like his father, Cromwell served on the town council of Huntingdon and would represent the town in parliament once. We know little of Cromwell's work in town govern...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Plates
• List of Maps
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1. Cromwell the Man
• 2. Cromwell and the Coming of War
• 3. Captain Cromwell: The Making of the Soldier
• 4. Cromwell the Tactician: Edgehill to Winceby
• 5. Cromwell the General, 1644
• 6. The Politics of War, 1644–7
• 7. Cromwell in Command
• 8. Cromwell Alone: Ireland, 1648–9
• 9. The Lord General
• 10. Cromwell at War
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Plates
• Back Cover