Cromwell Read online

  Politics the following year provided the solace of action rather than the deeper solace of satisfaction. The Short Parliament was marked by a demand by John Pym, firm but moderate in tone, for a new consideration of the rights of Parliament. The great parliamentary lion was now a veteran of fifty-five. In a speech of exceptional length for the times (nearly two hours) Pym called in the House of Commons for a general redress of grievances both religious and political, by the King. His speech began with the inspiring words: “the powers of Parliament are to the body politic as the rational faculties of the soul to man.” He ended by asking for annual Parliaments, whose present long intermittent sessions were “contrary to the two statutes yet in force”. When he sat down, the feeling of the House was clear, when “all cried out: ‘A good oration!’” For all the good oration, Parliament was dissolved a few weeks later, the King hardly accepting Pym’s view of the body politic.28

  Charles however was unable to patch up his differences with the Scots, and by the summer was once more engaged in military action against them in the shape of the Second Bishops’ War. In such an atmosphere of financial distress and suspicion, the absence of Parliament could not be maintained. In the autumn a new Parliament was summoned, and for this Oliver Cromwell was once more elected for Cambridge. This time however he was in tandem with a more Puritan-minded fellow member, for John Lowry, a local man and a member of the common council of twenty-four, defeated Meautys, the Government nominee. As a tiny detail, it may be seen as significant of the enormous importance attached by the party of opposition to the Court to the returns in this particular election.29

  On 3 November this crucial gathering, known to history as the Long Parliament, met for the first time. The date was the anniversary of that parliament of Henry vm in which Wolsey fell and the abbeys were dissolved, and some members tried to persuade Archbishop Laud that the date should be altered in view of the ominous coincidence. Laud, putting his trust in princes perhaps as Wolsey had once done, refused. The actual composition of the Parliament which now faced the King was obviously to be of vital importance. Recent research has produced some interesting statistics by which the typicality – or otherwise – of Cromwell in this gathering can be judged: he was after all the man who was to emerge at the end of this assembly – “that long, ungrateful, foolish and fatal Parliament” as John Evelyn called it – an unbelievable thirteen years away, as the undisputed ruler of England.30 The first thing to note is that Cromwell certainly cannot be counted among the Young Turks of the assembly. Cromwell was now a man of forty-one, which put him at least in the senior half of the members, half of whom were under forty. It was true that time would show that the average age of the Royalist MPs was considerably lower than that of their opponents – thirty-five to forty-one respectively – but the point remains that by 1640 Cromwell already fell into the category of an established politician. He was among those twohundred-odd members for example, who had already sat in a previous Parliament, and the fact that these experienced men were to prove quite predominantly Parliamentarian – one hundred and twenty-eight to seventy-five Royalists – was certainly a valuable strength to their leaders.31

  The main interest represented on both sides was landed, with lawyers and merchants following as the next most popular categories. Another aspect of English society demonstrated by the Long Parliament was its connected ramifications; an immense number of the members were related to each other, and no faction more so than that of Pym, to which, it has been stressed, Cromwell already belonged. With his educational record at the university and the law courts – about one hundred and fifty members like Cromwell had attended both – his membership of a political clique based on family alliance and geographical grouping, Cromwell was then in many ways at the outset a very typical member of this climactic Parliament, not a tyro, but not a leader.

  His first public outburst there was however more pregnant of future significance. Cromwell had chosen to take up the cause of a certain John Lilburne, ironically enough to be one of his most inveterate opponents in years to come, but now appearing to him in the guise of a martyr. Lilburne, a former cloth merchant’s apprentice, had been sentenced to be fined, whipped, pilloried and then imprisoned for distributing some unlicensed pamphlets, including one of William Prynne’s. In prison Lilburne showed something of his future mettle and justified one description of him as “a turbulent-spirited man that was never quiet in anything” by writing an account of his sufferings entitled The Work of the Beast which was then smuggled out. The atmosphere of the times may be judged by the fact that Bastwick, Burton and Prynne had returned recently to London “like three Conquering Caesars on horseback” as a contemporary pamphlet put it. Cromwell’s indignation burned at the idea that this young man Lilburne should have suffered such savage penalties and still he inprison to expiate his guilt, all for the mere distribution of unlicensed writing. He became a member of the committee of the House of Commons, including Pym, Hampden and St John, which considered the affair.32

  By dramatic chance Sir Philip Warwick, a Royalist who was both a politician and a historian, was an eye-witness of Cromwell’s speech to the committee and left an account of it in his memoirs for posterity. Going down to the House of Commons one day, he found a gentleman speaking who was a stranger to him. To Sir Philip, who was himself, as he was careful to note, “well clad”, the unknown’s appearance was not prepossessing. Although he was of good enough build, he was very ordinarily dressed in a plain cloth suit, which appeared to have been made by a bad country tailor. In addition his linen was plain, and not very clean; and there was even a speck or two of blood upon his neck-band, which was not much larger than his collar; the general carelessness of the outfit was completed by the fact that the hat was without a hat band. But the House of Commons, unlike Sir Philip, was apparently laudably indifferent to these sartorial details. The speaker’s eloquence, for all that his “countenance was swollen and reddish, his voice sharp and untunable”, was undeniably full of fervour.33

  Here, adding from other sources, we have a physical picture of Cromwell as he appeared then at the age of forty-one, and was to remain unchanged in most respects till late middle age. The first version of his portrait – by Robert Walker – dates certainly from 1649 although there are probably earlier versions of 1643 and 1646 (see plate facing p. 29), but that again shows little difference in essentials from the finer work of Cooper and Lely during the Protectorate. There was general agreement on the subject of Cromwell’s ruddy complexion. An unkind later commentator who may have been Samuel Butler talked of his face being “naturally buff” so that he needed no armour (“his skin may furnish him with a rusty coat of mail”) and compared him to a piece of wood or an unblanched almond. Richard Baxter, with more charity, merely described his complexion as being sanguine.34

  The Walker portrait however shows a face which was certainly not handsome, but equally by no means repulsive. Here was a man of middle height – say about five feet six inches or seven inches by the standards of the time – “rather well set than tall” wrote Flecknoe. He was “strong and robustuous of constitution, of visage leonine, the true physiognomy” added the biographer approvingly “of all great and martial men”. It is a high-cheek-boned face, framed by chestnut-brown hair which would grey a little as the years passed and slip back a little from the lofty domed forehead, but was still worn longish and not cropped. The mouth is curly and well formed. The famous warts, to be delineated most carefully by Cooper, were in the left eye-socket, beneath the lower lip and, most prominently of all, above the left eye-brow. As for the nose, later the target of satirists, it is indeed a fine big nose, bony across the bridge and undeniably long. But the impression it gives is perfectly felicitous, far from the evil proboscis of the caricaturists’ imagination. In fact it gives a good balance to a face which was, as Carrington pointed out, essentially masculine.35

  It is however the eyes not the nose which are the most remarkable feature of this face, those heavy-lidd
ed eyes, the colour between green and grey, whose “piercing sweetness” Marvell praised, eyes which were indeed in their own right beautiful. There is a nervous, almost apprehensive expression about the Walker portrait, quite at contrast with Flecknoe’s “great and martial” physiognomy. It is the melancholy introvert look of the pilgrim soul which looks out of these eyes, for all the surrounding paraphernalia of the bold and confident warrior, the sash, the armour, the baton and the sword. Oliver Cromwell in his prime was essentially a man of stature, a man of dignity, a man whose very indifference to the details of appearance (for he never lost much of the carelessness noted by Sir Philip Warwick) bred in observers a reluctant admiration and a sneaking suspicion that such niceties were not after all so important. Already in 1640 he looked a person of consequence, someone to catch the eye of an inquisitive fellow MP. On the other hand, through some vein of simplicity, uncertainty even, near the heart of his own nature, there was also quite a different sort of attraction about him. It was this strange charm, felt by those who were his intimates during his own lifetime, compounded of a mixture of authority and humility, which is so difficult for later generations to grasp, because they are inevitably influenced by the wealth of Royalist vilification both then and after the Restoration.

  At the beginning of the Long Parliament, it was not only his appearance, it was also his arguments which were beginning to attract attention. As Cromwell outlined the injustice done to Lilburne, in Warwick’s jaundiced words, “he aggravated the imprisonment of this man by the Council Table into the height, that one would have believed the very Government itself had been in danger by it”. Although Warwick ended by reporting that his own respect for the committee had been greatly lessened by the whole incident, it is more to the point that he admitted that Cromwell had been “very much barkened unto”. And such a passionate plea for justice, sufficient to elevate the cause of Lilburne to such a height that Warwick could mock at its absurdity, did not fail to leave its mark on Cromwell’s contemporaries.

  About the same time, and very probably just after the delivery of this same speech, Sir Richard Bulstrode observed an incident which he too related in his memoirs. Lord Digby, one of Hampden’s supporters, had noticed Hampden making after Cromwell as he lumbered down the steps of the House of Commons. Digby, who also seems to have criticized Cromwell’s untidy appearance, evidently asked Hampden who the man was, ending: “For I see he is of our side, by his speaking so warmly this day.” “That slovenly fellow which you see before us,” replied Hampden, “who hath no ornament in his speech; I say that sloven if we should come to have a breach with the King (which God forbid) in such case will be one of the greatest men in England.”35 It was a prophecy which bore witness to the vision ofjohn Hampden as well as to the growing authority of Oliver Cromwell.

  4 Grand Remonstrance

  I can tell you, Sirs, what I would not have; tho’ I cannot what I would.

  CROMWELL IN CONVERSATION IN 1641

  If the definition of an agitator is one who moves, shakes, disturbs and excites, then Oliver Cromwell surely acted as a political agitator in the twenty-two months from the inception of the Long Parliament to the outbreak of the Civil War. Far from being a season of relaxation before the battle, or a period of political obscurity for him as has sometimes been suggested, it was on the contrary a time of exceptional business, of ant-like activity. The record of the committees on which he sat, the details to which he attended, the subjects on which he expostulated, show that he became at least one of the most assiduous of Pym’s henchmen, and as such wellknown within the purlieus of Parliament, if not to the country at large.

  Some of those subjects in which he interested himself show a recognizable pattern, traceable to his own personal predilections – or prejudices. But the number and continuity of his interventions reveal that he was at the same time being employed, as it were, as a mouthpiece of his Parliamentary associates. It will be seen that Cromwell had other qualities beyond industry to commend himself to his colleagues: he had a streak of crudity in his speech, impatient, unpredictable, but curiously effective in a debate where the established authority was under attack. In such a context the broadsword could sometimes draw more striking attention to the iniquities of Crown or Church than the rapier.

  The origin of the committees of the House of Commons as a method of side-stepping royal control has been outlined earlier. As relations worsened between King and Parliamentarians, the importance of such committees increased; similarly their numbers proliferated. A keen member of the opposition group needed to be what we should now probably term “a good committee man”. Cromwell’s record shows that he certainly merited such a description. But of the many committees of which Cromwell formed part during this period, the first harked back to the past and showed that he had not altogether forgotten that old cause, the social injustice dealt out to the poorer dwellers of the Fens. Almost immediately on the opening of Parliament, he was named to a committee of thirty-two to consider claims arising from the Fen dispute, and in May the following year he took up vehemently once more the cause of the “poor commoners” of Ely and Huntingdon.

  These commoners had originally petitioned the House against certain enclosures carried out by Lord Mandeville* (* He succeeded his father as Earl of Manchester in November 1642, to become the well-known Civil War leader of that name; Viscount Mandeville was his courtesy title during his father’s lifetime, but as he had been raised to the House of Lords in 1625 in his own right as Lord Montagu of Kimbolton, he was also sometimes known as Kimbolton during this period.) in violation of the agreement, before the drainage had been completed, on land sold to him by Queen Henrietta Maria from her jointure. Now the barriers had been violently beaten to the ground by the commoners, taking the law into their own hands, despite the fact that their petition was still under consideration by the House. Mandeville then petitioned in turn to the Lords that the enclosures should remain in place, at any rate till the case was settled; at which point Cromwell resolutely defended the commoners’ rights and declared furthermore that the House of Lords, by ordering the possession not to be disturbed while the Commons considered the original petition, had attacked the privilege of the lower House. Three weeks later, having got no satisfaction on the subject of either the commoners or the Lords’ breach of privilege, Cromwell raised the matter again, pointing out that Mandeville’s father had sent out sixty writs against “the poor inhabitants in Huntingdonshire for putting down enclosures”. He asked that the Committee for the Queen’s jointure should be renewed, to consider the commoners’ petition.1

  On 29 June 1641, this committee was duly revived, with Cromwell as part of it, and Clarendon (then Edward Hyde) acting as chairman. He described the outcome later in his Life. From the first Cromwell was “much concerned to countenance [i.e. patronize] and help the Petitioners”, who were there in large numbers, together with their witnesses. First of all he directed both witnesses and petitioners how to proceed; he then seconded and enlarged upon what they said with great passion. The witnesses, encouraged no doubt by this helpfulness, and being in any case in Clarendon’s opinion “a very rude kind of people”, interrupted the counsel and witnesses on the other side with a fearful clamour whenever these latter said anything of which they did not approve. In the end Hyde felt obliged by his official position to reprove these noisy onlookers repeatedly and sharply. Whereupon Cromwell in a great fury accused Hyde of being partial and trying to put off his witnesses by the use of threats. When the committee refused to accept Cromwell’s view of Hyde’s behaviour, Cromwell, already half out of control with anger, became totally inflamed.

  In answer to Mandeville’s modest and calm speech relating the facts of the case – and Mandeville had been drawn into the Puritan element of the Lords by his marriage to the Earl of Warwick’s daughter – Cromwell replied to him “with so much indecency and rudeness, and in language so contrary and offensive … his whole carriage was so tempestuous, and his behaviour so insolent�
� that Hyde severely reprehended him. He also told him that if he continued in this vein, he would adjourn the whole committee and complain to the House about Cromwell’s behaviour the next morning.2 Although it is true that in this account Clarendon was certainly recollecting matters which had happened many years back, the picture drawn is none the less credible. This is the same Cromwell who attacked Barnard at Huntingdon with disgraceful and unseemly speeches, and attracted the attention of Sir Philip Warwick with his heated defence ofLilburne.

  The poor commoners of the Fens were a side cause, a product of private pity and public indignation. But the central portion of Cromwell’s committee work, to the end of 1641 at least, was on the subject of religion and the practices of the established Church, where his chief passion and interest lay. He acted for example on the special committee to consider complaints against the Bishop of Ely, an enthusiastic supporter of Laud and a vociferous opponent of the Puritans in the eastern counties. A later committee of which Cromwell was part considered “An Act for the Abolishing of Superstition and Idolatry, and for the Better Advancing of the True Worship and Service of God”, words overtly hostile to the Anglican Church. On 9 February 1641 he denounced Sir John Strangeways in a speech for his suggestion that the abolition of bishops and parity equality – in the Church would of necessity entail equality for all within the Commonwealth since bishops were part of the three estates, having seats in the House of Lords. To Cromwell, the argument was absurd, and he said so apparently with his customary force since he was interrupted and reproved for unparliamentary language. When it was further proposed to call him to the bar of the House to apologize, Pym and Holies sprang to Cromwell’s defence and suggested that it would be more sensible if he was asked to explain his words instead. This merely gave Cromwell the opportunity to reiterate his opposition to the episcopacy with added strength: not only could he see no reason for their great revenues, but “he was convinced touching the irregularity of Bishops than ever before, because, like the Roman hierarchy, they would not endure to have their condition come to a trial.”3