Oliver Cromwell

Barry Coward

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317874720
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Histoire
• Categoría: Histoire du monde

Oliver Cromwell is one of the most puzzling and controversial figures in English history. In this excellent introduction, Barry Coward uses Cromwell's own words and actions to analyse the life of Oliver Cromwell as a political figure and look at the historical problems associated with his exercise of power.

Chapter 1

The Unknown Cromwell (1599–1642)

When the English Civil War began in August 1642 Oliver Cromwell was forty-three years old, a man on the brink of middle age. Before that date historians know as little about him as did many of his contemporaries, for the simple reason that little source material on the ‘prehistoric’ Cromwell before 1642 has survived. However, this has not stopped people from inventing stories about him. ‘Legends always grow around the towering figures of history’, wrote H.N. Brailsford,¹ and Cromwell is no exception. A priority, therefore, for anyone attempting to discover what kind of man Cromwell was in 1642, before his rise began from obscurity to Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland, is to strip away layers of myths and legends about him, rather as an archaeologist seeking evidence of earlier peoples removes debris left by later civilisations. When that is done, what is left, as will be seen, is merely a tiny handful of disconnected ‘facts’ – the equivalent of the archaeologist’s pieces of broken pottery and other artefacts – from which to try to construct answers to the major questions that are vital to an understanding of Cromwell’s meteoric rise to power and greatness in the last sixteen years of his life. What kind of social and economic background did Cromwell come from? How wealthy and socially influential was he by the early 1640s? What were his religious and political views? How important was his role in the development of the powerful parliamentary opposition faced by Charles I in the period before the outbreak of the Civil War? What drove him to become in 1642 one of those whom Sir Simonds D’Ewes called the ‘fiery spirits’, who, brushing aside the risks he ran of losing his life and his property, unhesitatingly committed himself to fighting against the king, even before the official outbreak of hostilities on 22 August 1642?

The sources of many of the apocryphal stories of Cromwell before 1642 are hostile biographies, written just after the Restoration, which gleefully printed invented, scandalous stories about him in order to blacken his character and portray him as a life-long enemy of the monarchy. Typical of these is the tale of Cromwell and Prince Charles meeting as toddlers when James I and his court stayed at the house of Cromwell’s uncle, Sir Oliver Cromwell, at Hinchingbrook in the early 1600s, and Cromwell was said to have bloodied the young prince’s nose. James Heath, Cromwell’s most imaginative early biographer in his book, Flagellum, or the Life and Death, Birth and Burial of Oliver Cromwell, the Late Usurper, had no compunction in retailing invented stories of Cromwell’s youth. During his short stay as a student at Cambridge University Heath alleged that Cromwell ‘was more famous for his exercises in the Field than in the Schools (in which he never had the honour of, because no worth and merit to, a degree) being one of the chief match-makers and players at Foot-ball, Cudgels, or any other boysterous sport or game’.² After he left Cambridge, Heath described Cromwell neglecting his legal studies at one of the capital’s Inns of Court for ‘uncontrolled debaucheries … Drinking, Wenching, and the like outrages of licentious youth’.³ Heath’s diatribes are very quotable, but must be disregarded as malicious inventions that tell one far more about the overwhelming tide of hatred for Cromwell felt by many influential people in Restoration England (witnessed, for example, in the exhumation and ‘execution’ of Cromwell’s body in 1661) than they do about Cromwell’s early life. Equally interesting, but nevertheless of little value for an understanding of Cromwell’s career, are the folk-legends that have grown round Cromwell’s name. One example of this is the persistent myth of Cromwell the destroyer of churches, which seems to have originated in a confusion of Oliver with Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s agent in carrying out the dissolution of church property about sixty years before Oliver was born.

Other stories that have become attached to Cromwell cannot be treated quite so dismissively. In this category are the tantalising legends that Cromwell travelled on the Continent at some time in the 1620s or 1630s, not only meeting on his travels the Jewish leader, Menasseh ben Israel, with whom Cromwell corresponded later as Protector, but also serving as a soldier in a European army during the Thirty Years’ War. These (if true) would help to explain the difficult puzzles of Cromwell’s later conversion to the cause of the readmission of the Jews to England, as well as his remarkable success as a soldier in the Civil War and on later military campaigns in Ireland and Scotland. But for these stories – as well as for the legend that Cromwell in the 1630s once boarded a ship intending to emigrate to New England, but disembarked before it set sail – there exists no supporting evidence at all. There is some reason to accept later stories that Cromwell spent some time at one of the Inns of Court getting a smattering of legal knowledge, since it was not unusual for youths from Cromwell’s background to complete their education in this way. But it is by no means certain that he did so. There is no record of his name in any admissions register of an Inn of Court, and Cromwell himself later disclaimed any great knowledge of legal technicalities: ‘I have heard talk of “demurrers” and such like things as I scarce know of’, he told a Commons committee on 21 April 1657.⁴

Recently, too, other episodes that are well-entrenched as part of the Cromwell legend have been shown to have been misunderstood and will no longer bear the significance they once had. Perhaps the most surprising recent suggestion, made by John Morrill, is that it is highly unlikely either that Cromwell’s religious views were decisively shaped (as has long been assumed) by his Huntingdon schoolmaster, Dr Thomas Beard and by Beard’s book, A Theatre of Judgement, or that Beard was a Puritan role-model for his young pupil. Beard was ‘a greedy pluralist’, schoolmaster, vicar of All Saints parish in Huntingdon, warden of the hospital there and also vicar of Kimbolton. He later surrendered the latter office after becoming vicar of St John’s parish in Huntingdon in 1610. Morrill, with much patient detective work, has revealed that Beard in 1630 greedily tried to get his hand on a further source of income, a bequest given to the burgesses of Huntingdon by the London Mercers’ Company to establish a new preaching lectureship in the town, which supports his case that Beard ‘looks like a complacent Jacobean Calvinist conformist: not the man to ignite the fire in Cromwell’s belly’.⁵ Nor should much of later significance be read into the fragmentary evidence relating to Cromwell’s election to the parliament of 1628–29 as MP for Huntingdon. The incomplete versions of Cromwell’s only speech in that parliament, in which he seems merely to have described an incident that had happened at least ten years before in order to illustrate the fear he shared with other MPs of the spread of Arminianism among the episcopacy, suggest that he played a very minor part in the parliament that produced the Petition of Right. The evidence simply does not exist to support the notion that Cromwell’s first parliamentary experience presaged his later important role in parliamentary politics from the mid–1640s onwards. Moreover, when one looks closely at the legend of Cromwell’s political ‘opposition’ to the monarchy and established authority in the 1630s, the sources for it all but disappear. Brian Quintrell has shown that no evidence exists to suggest that Cromwell stood as a principled opponent of distraint of knighthood, one of Charles I’s new, unpopular financial levies during his Personal Rule after the dissolution of parliament in 1629.⁶ Moreover, the legend of Cromwell as ‘Lord of the Fens’, an opponent of the capitalist syndicates of merchants and aristocratic courtiers who in the 1630s were attempting to drain and enclose large tracts of fenland in and around Ely, is based mainly on one fragmentary report in 1638 that the inhabitants of the Ely fens had made an agreement with Cromwell: ‘they paying him a groat for every cow they had upon the common, to hold the drainers in suit for five years and in the meantime they should enjoy every foot of their common’.⁷ Even if this were true, it is not proof that Cromwell was against fen drainage. In fact he later supported it as Protector. Rather he was probably concerned to ensure that those dispossessed by the drainage schemes should be compensated. There are no real grounds for believing that Cromwell was a radical champion of popular rights or a leading opponent of Charles I’s fiscal expedients in the 1630s.

When these and other myths and legends are discounted one is left with a very sketchy curriculum vitae of the man who was elected as MP for Cambridge to the Short and Long Parliaments in the two elections of 1640. He was born on 25 April 1599 in Huntingdon, near Cambridge, in eastern England, the only surviving son of Robert and Elizabeth Cromwell, who also had seven daughters (Cromwell’s elder sisters, Joan, Elizabeth and Catherine, and his younger sisters, Margaret, Anna, Jane and Robina). He was educated at the local Huntingdon Free Grammar School, where Thomas Beard was schoolmaster, and then for just over a year at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge University, from April 1616 to June 1617. His university studies were cut short by his father’s death and he left Cambridge to take over the running of his father’s property in and around Huntingdon. In 1620 he married Elizabeth Bouchier, the daughter of a wealthy London fur-dealer and leather dresser, whom he may have met in London or in Essex where the Bouchiers had some property, including Little Stanbrook Hall near Felsted in Essex. All the evidence, including the births of eight children between 1621 and 1638 points to the fact that theirs was a close, warm relationship and no-one has found any evidence to substantiate later Royalist allegations about Cromwell’s marital infidelities.⁸

The only other major events in the lives of the Cromwell family before 1640 about which one can be certain is that they moved home twice: once in 1631 when Cromwell sold most of his property in Huntingdon and moved to St Ives, five miles away; and then again in 1636 when the family moved to Ely. Only twice are there undisputed records of Cromwell moving out of East Anglia before 1640, once when he went to London as MP for Huntingdon in the parliament of 1628–29, and again in 1630 when he appeared before the privy council concerning a local dispute over the Huntingdon town charter.

Cromwell later said (in a speech to parliament in 1654) that he was ‘by birth a gentleman living neither in considerable height nor yet in obscurity’.⁹ How accurate is that as an indication of what is now known of his economic and social standing before 1640? There is no doubt that Cromwell was ‘by birth a gentleman’. His grandfather and uncle, Sir Henry and Sir Oliver Cromwell, held substantial property in Huntingdonshire and elsewhere, including a great house at Hinchingbrook, just outside Huntingdon, and their lifestyles were appropriate to their positions as county magnates, serving as JPs and MPs. Cromwell had sound family connections: two of his aunts, for example, married into prominent gentry families, the Hampdens of Buckinghamshire and the Barringtons of Essex, and a cousin married Oliver St John. These also placed him, for most of his life before 1640, just above the greatest gulf in early modern English society: that separating gentlemen from the rest. The little that is known of Cromwell’s educational career is typical of that followed by sons of early seventeenth-century gentlemen, especially if Cromwell did study at an Inn of Court as well as at Cambridge University. Moreover, Cromwell’s marriage to the daughter of a wealthy and well-connected London merchant and Essex landowner consolidated his claims to gentility, which were also reflected in his election to parliament in 1628. However, Cromwell before 1640 was always on the fringes of East Anglian gentry society, and for a short time in the early 1630s he may have fallen into the ranks of the yeomanry, a reminder of the fact that the gulf between gentry and non-gentry was bridgeable downwards as well as upwards in the early seventeenth century. Cromwell’s status cannot fail to have been adversely affected by the fact that his uncle’s economic position declined sharply in the 1620s, signified by the sale of Hinchingbrook to the Montagues, who replaced the senior Cromwells as the leading patriarchs of the region. More importantly, his father’s inheritance, as a younger son in a society in which primogeniture was dominant among the propertied classes, was fairly small. When it was sold in 1631 for £1,800 it was probably worth only £90 a year (assuming the normal formula of assessing land prices was used, i.e. twenty times its annual gross value), making Cromwell only a very minor gentleman indeed when he inherited the property in 1617. What is more, fourteen years later, his economic situation took a sharp turn for the worse. His decision to move to St Ives in 1631 may have been occasioned by the backwash of a political controversy in which Cromwell became involved in Huntingdon, but the move was one of a family clearly sliding down the social scale. Cromwell sold all his property in Huntingdon (except seventeen acres) and became the tenant of a small farm in St Ives, adopting the lifestyle of a yeoman farmer rather than a landowning gentleman. In 1636 his economic fortunes were salvaged, when he became the major legatee of his mother’s brother’s will, inheriting tithes and glebe land in Ely and the house on the edge of the cathedral green in which his mother had been born (his mother and unmarried sisters joined him and his family there) with an income of about £300 a year. Though the evidence is sparse, it suggests that by the later 1630s Cromwell had clawed his way back into the ranks of the gentry – just.

There is, if anything, even less evidence on which to build a picture of Cromwell’s attitudes to politics before 1640. As has been seen, it is now no longer possible to portray Cromwell as a leading political activist against the policies of Charles I throughout the later 1620s and 1630s. In the 1630s Cromwell paid his ship money dues, as well as the fine for distraint of knighthood levied by the Crown. Nor does the quarrel he had in Huntingdon in 1630 with those who secured a new charter for the town seem to have been one in which Cromwell displayed principled opposition to oligarchic rule. Cromwell’s main complaint against the new charter when the case was heard before the privy council was that the new rulers of the town might use their influence to promote their own selfish purposes and, perhaps equally important, that he had not been appointed alderman under the new arrangements.

Why, then, was Cromwell a determined opponent of the king from the start of the first session of the Long Parliament in November 1640? One answer to this question is that Cromwell was politicised by his religious views. At some time before 1638 Cromwell was converted to a set of religious values that made him increasingly concerned at the religious policies pursued by Charles I. During his late twenties or early thirties he underwent a spiritual experience that convinced him that God had appointed him to be one of the Elect, chosen for eternal salvation. In one of his fullest early letters, written on 13 October 1638 to his cousin’s wife, Mrs St John, he describes his conversion in graphic terms:

God … giveth springs in a dry and barren wilderness where no water is. I live (you know where) in Mesheck, which they say signifies Prolonging; in Kedar, which signifies Blackness: yet the Lord forsaketh me not. Though He do prolong, yet He will (I trust) bring me to His tabernacle, to His resting-place. My soul is with the congregation of the firstborn, my body rests in hope, and if here I may honour my God either by doing or by suffering, I shall be most glad … the Lord accepts me in His Son, and give me to walk in the light, as He is in the light …. Blessed be His name for shining upon so dark a heart as mine! You know what my manner of life hath been. Oh, have I lived in and loved darkness, ...