Oliver Cromwell

Front matter

Class ^ P\42d=.

BY

JOHN MORLEY, M.P.

Prologue

THE figure of Cromwell has emerged from the floating mists of time in many varied semblances, from blood-stained and hypocritical usurper up to transcendental hero and the liberator of mankind. The contradictions of his career all come over again in the fluctuations of his fame. He put a king to death, but then he broke up Parliament after Parliament. He led the way in the violent suppression of bishops, he trampled on Scottish Presbytery, and set up a state system of his own ; yet he is the idol of voluntary congregations and the free churches. He had little comprehension of that government by discussion which is now counted the secret of liberty. No man that ever lived was less of a pattern for working those constitutional charters that are the favorite guarantees of public rights in our century. His rule was the rule of the sword. Yet his name stands first, half warrior, half saint, in the calendar of English-speaking democracy.

A foreign student has said that the effect that a written history is capable of producing is nowhere seen more strongly than in Clarendon's story of the Rebellion. The view of the event and of the most conspicuoiis actors was for many generations fixed by that famous work. Not always accurate in every detail, and hardly pretending to be impartial, yet it presented the great drama with a living vigor, a breadth, a grave ethical air, that made a profound and lasting impression. To Clarendon Cromwell was a rebel and a tyrant, the creature of personal ambition, using religion for a mask of selfish and perfidious designs. For several generations the lineaments of Oliver thus portrayed were undisturbed in the mind of Europe. After the conservative of the seventeenth century came the greater conservative of the eighteenth. Burke, who died almost exactly two centuries after Cromwell was born, saw in him one of the great bad men of the old stamp, like Medici at Florence, like Petrucci at Siena, who exercised the power of the state by force of character and by personal authority. Cromwell's virtues, says Burke, were at least some correctives of his crimes. His government was military and despotic, yet it was regular; it was rigid, yet it was no savage tyranny. Ambition suspended but did not wholly suppress the sentiment of religion and the love of an honorable name. Such was Burke's modification of the dark colors of Clarendon. As time went on, opinion slowly widened. By the end of the first quarter of this century reformers like Godwin, though they could not forgive Cromwell's violence and what they thought his apostacy from old principles and old allies, and though they had no sympathy with the biblical religion that was the mainspring of his life, yet they were inclined to place him among the few excellent pioneers that have swayed a scepter, and they almost brought themselves to adopt the glowing panegyrics of Milton. The genius and diligence of Carlyle, aided by the firm and manly stroke of Macaulay, have finally

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CHAPTER

I Early Life ....

BOOK ONE Bool^ Qnc

I WAS by birth a gentleman, living neither in any considerable height nor yet in obscurity." Such was Cromwell's account of himself. He was the descendant in the third degree of Richard Cromwell, whose earlier name was Richard Williams, a Welshman from Glamorganshire, nephew and one of the agents of Thomas Cromwell, the iron-handed servant of Henry VHI, the famous sledge-hammer of the monks. Cromwell's sister was married to Morgan Williams, the father of Richard, but when the greater name was assumed seems uncertain. In the deed of jointure on his marriage the future Protector is described as Oliver Cromwell alias Williams. Hence those who insist that what is called a Celtic strain is needed to give fire and speed to an English stock, find Cromwell a case in point.

What is certain is that he was in favor with Thomas Cromwell and with the king after his patron's fall, and that Henry VHI gave him, among other spoils of the church, the revenues and manors belonging to the priory of Hinchinbrook and the abbey of Ramsey, in Huntingdonshire and the adjacent counties. Sir Richard left a splendid fortune to an eldest son, whom Elizabeth made Sir Henry. This, the Golden Knight, so called from his profusion, was the lo OLIVER CROMWELL

father of Sir Oliver, a worthy of a prodigal turn like himself. Besides Sir Oliver, the Golden Knight had a younger son, Robert, and Robert in turn became the father of the mighty Oliver of history, who was thus the great-grandson of the first Richard.

Robert Cromwell married (1591) a young widow, Elizabeth Lynn. Her maiden name of Stew^ard is only interesting because some of her stock boasted that if one should climb the genealogical tree high enough, it would be found that Elizabeth Steward and the royal Stewarts of Scotland had a common ancestor. Men are pleased when they stumble on one of Fortune's tricks, as if the regicide should himself turn out to be even from a far-off distance of the kingly line. The better opinion seems to be that Steward was not Stewart at all, but only Norfolk Styward.

The story of Oliver's early life is soon told. He was born at Huntingdon on April 25, 1599. His parents had ten children in all ; Oliver was the only son who survived infancy. Homer has a line that has been taken to mean that it is bad for character to grow up an only brother among many sisters ; but Cromwell at least showed no default in either the bold and strong or the tender qualities that belong to manly natures. He was sent to the public school of the place. The master was a learned and worthy divine, the preacher of the word of God in the town of Huntingdon ; the author of some classic comedies ; of a proof in two treatises of the well-worn proposition that the Pope is Antichrist ; and of a small volume called "The Theater of God's Judgments," in which he collects from sacred and profane story examples of the justice of God against notorious sinners both great and small, but more especially against those high persons of the world whose power insolently bursts the

EARLY LIFE ir

barriers of mere human justice. The youth of Huntingdon therefore drank of the pure milk of the stern word that bade men bind their kings in chains and their nobles in links of iron.

How long Oliver remained under Dr. Beard, what proficiency he attained in study and how he spent his spare time, we do not know, and it is idle to guess. In 1616 (April 23), at the end of his seventeenth year, he went to Cambridge as a fellow-commoner of Sidney Sussex College. Dr. Samuel Ward, the master, was an excellent and conscientious man and had taken part in the version of the Bible so oddly associated with the name of King James I. He took part also in the famous Synod of Dort (1619), where Calvinism triumphed over Arminianism. His college was denounced by Archbishop Laud as one of the nurseries of Puritanism, and there can be no doubt in what sort of atmosphere Cromwell passed those years of life in which the marked outlines of character are unalterably drawn.

After little more than a year's residence in the university, he lost his father (June, 1617). Whether he went back to college we cannot tell, nor whether there is good ground for the tradition that after quitting Cambridge he read law at Lincoln's Inn. It was the fashion for young gentlemen of the time, and Cromwell may have followed it. There is no reason to suppose that Cromwell was ever the stuff of which the studious are made. Some faint evidence may be traced of progress in mathematics ; that he knew some of the common tags of Greek and Roman history; that he was able to hold his own in surface discussion on jurisprudence. In later days when he was Protector, the Dutch ambassador says that they carried on their conversation together in Latin. But, according to Burnet,

Oliver's Latin was vicious and scanty, and of other foreign tongues he had none. There is a story about his arguing upon regicide from the principles of Mariana and Buchanan, but he may be assumed to have derived these principles from his own mother-wit, and not to have needed text-books. He had none of the tastes or attainments that attract us in many of those who either fought by his side or who fought against him. The spirit of the Renaissance was never breathed upon him. Cromwell had none of the fine judgment in the arts that made King Charles one of the most enthusiastic and judicious collectors of paintings known in his time. We cannot think of Cromwell as Sir John Eliot, beguiling his heavy hours in the Tower with Plato and Seneca ; or Hampden, pondering Davila's new "History of the Civil Wars in France" ; or Milton forsaking the "quiet air of delightful studies" to play a man's part in the confusions of his time; or Falkland, in whom the Oxford men in Clarendon's immortal picture "found such an immenseness of wit and such a solidity of judgment, so infinite a fancy bound in by a most logical ratiocination, such a vast knowledge that he was not ignorant in anything, yet such an excessive humility as if he had known nothing, that they frequently resorted and dwelt with him, as in a college situated in a purer air." Cromwell was of another type. Bacon said about Sir Edward Coke that he conversed with books and not with men, who are the best books. Of Cromwell the reverse is true ; for him a single volume comprehended all literature, and that volume was the Bible.

More satisfactory than guesses at the extent of Oliver's education is a sure glimpse of his views upon education, to be found in his advice when the time came, about an eldest son of his own. "I would have him mind and understand business," he says. *'Read a little history; study the mathematics and cosmography. These are good with subordination to the things of God. . . . These fit for public services, for which man is born. Take heed of an unactive, vain spirit. Recreate yourself with Sir Walter Raleigh's History ; it's a body of History, and will add much more to your understanding than fragments of story." "The tree of knowledge," Oliver exhorts Richard to bear in mind, "is not literal or speculative, but inward, transforming the mind to it."

These brief hints of his riper days make no bad text for an educational treatise. Man is born for public service, and not to play the amateur; he should mind and understand business, and beware of an unactive spirit; the history of mankind is to be studied as a whole, not in isolated fragments ; true knowledge is not literal or speculative, but such as builds up coherent character and grows a part of it, in conscious harmony with the Supreme Unseen Powers. All this is not full nor systematic like Ascham or Bacon or Milton or Locke; but Oliver's hints have the root of the matter in them, and in this deep sense of education he was himself undoubtedly bred.

His course is very obscure until we touch solid ground in what is usually one of the most decisive acts of life. In August, 1620, being his twenty-second year, he was married to Elizabeth Bourchier at the Church of St. Giles in Cripplegate, London, where, fifty-four years later, John Milton was buried. Her father was a merchant on Tower Hill, the owner of land at Felsted in Essex, a knight, and a connection of the family of Hampden. Elizabeth Cromwell seems to have been a simple and affectionate character, full of homely solicitudes, intelligent^ modest, thrifty.

and gentle, but taking no active share in the fierce stress of her husband's hfe. Marriage and time hide strange surprises ; the Httle bark floats on a summer bay, until a tornado suddenly sweeps it out to sea and washes it over angry waters to the world's end. When all was over, and Charles II had come back to Whitehall, a paper reached the Council Office, and was docketed by the Secretary of State, "Old Mrs. Cromwell, Noll's wife's petition." The sorrowful woman was willing to swear that she had never intermeddled with any of those public transactions which had been prejudicial to his late or present Majesty, and she was especially sensitive of the unjust imputation of detaining jewels belonging to the king, for she knew of none such. But this was not for forty years.

The stories about Oliver's wicked youth deserve not an instant's notice. In any case the ferocity of party passion was certain to invent them. There is no corroborative evidence for them. Wherever detail can be tested, the thing crumbles away, like the more harmless nonsense about his putting a crown on his head at private theatricals, and having a dream that he should one day be King of England ; or about a congenial figure of the devil being represented on the tapestry over the door of the room in which Oliver was born. There is, indeed, one of his letters in which anybody who wishes to believe that in his college days Oliver drank, swore, gambled, and practised ''uncontrolled debaucheries," may if he chooses find what he seeks. "You know what my manner of life hath been," he writes to his cousin, the wife of Oliver St. John, in 1638. "Oh, I lived in darkness and hated light; I was the chief of sinners. This is true; I hated Godliness, yet God had mercy on me."

Seriously to argue from such language as this that

Cromwell's early life was vicious, is as monstrous as it would be to argue that Bunyan was a reprobate from the remorseful charges of "Grace Abounding." From other evidence we know that Cromwell did not escape, nor was it possible that he should, from those painful struggles with religious gloom that at one time or another confront nearly every type of mind endowed with spiritual faculty. They have found intense expression in many keys from Augustine down to Cowper's "Castaway." Some they leave plunged in gulfs of perpetual despair, while stronger natures emerge from the conflict with all the force that is in them purified, exalted, fortified, illumined. Oliver was of the melancholic temperament, and the misery was heavy while it lasted. But the instinct of action was born in him, and when the summons came he met it with all the vigor of a strenuous faith and an unclouded soul.

After his marriage Cromwell returned to his home at Huntingdon, and there for eleven years took care of the modest estate that his father had left. For the common tradition of Oliver as the son of a brewer there is nothing like a sure foundation. We may accept or reject it with tolerable indifference. Robert Cromwell undoubtedly got his living out of the land, though it is not impossible that he may have done occasional brewing for neighbors less conveniently placed for running water. The elder branch of his family meanwhile slowly sank down in the world, and in 1627 Hinchinbrook was sold to one of the house of Montagu, father of the admiral who in days to come helped to bring back Charles II, and an uncle of that Earl of Manchester by whose side Oliver was drawn into such weighty dispute when the storms of civil war arose. Decline of family interest did not impair Oliver's personal position in this town, for in the beginning of 1628 he was chosen to represent Huntingdon in ParHament.

This was the third Parliament of the reign, the great ParHament that fought and carried the Petition of Right, the famous enactment which recites and confirms the old instruments against forced loan or tax; which forbids arrest or imprisonment save by due process of law, forbids the quartering of soldiers or sailors in men's houses against their will, and shuts out the tyrannous decrees called by the name of martial law. Here the new member, now in his twenty-ninth year, saw at their noble and hardy task the first generation of the champions of the civil rights and parliamentary liberties of England. He saw the zealous and high-minded Sir John Eliot, the sage and intrepid Pym, masters of eloquence and tactical resource. He saw the first lawyers of the day — Coke, now nearing eighty, but as keen for the letter of the law now that it was for the people, as he had been when he took it to be on the side of authority; Glanvil, Selden, "the chief of men reputed in this land" — all conducting the long train of arguments legal and constitutional for old laws and franchises, with an erudition, an acuteness, and a weight as cogent as any performances ever witnessed within the walls of the Commons House. By his side sat his cousin John Hampden, whose name speedily became, and has ever since remained, a standing symbol for civil courage and lofty love of country. On the same benches still sat Wentworth, in many respects the boldest and most powerful political genius then in England, now for the last time using his gifts of ardent eloquence on behalf of the popular cause.

All the stout-hearted struggle of that memorable twelvemonth against tyrannical innovation in civil

From the portrait by Sir Peter Lely in the collection of the Rev. T. Cromwell Bush.

ELIZABETH, DAUGHTER OF SIR JAMES BOURCHIER, AND WIFE OF OLIVER CROMWELL.

things and rigorous reaction in things spiritual Cromwell witnessed, down to the ever-memorable scene of English history where Holies and Valentine held the Speaker fast down in his chair, to assert the right of the House to control its own adjournment, and to launch Eliot's resolutions in defiance of the king. Cromwell's first and only speech in this Parliament was the production of a case in which a reactionary bishop had backed up a certain divine in preaching flat popery at St. Paul's Cross, and had forbidden a Puritan reply. The Parliament was abruptly dissolved (March, 1629) and for eleven years no other was called together.

There is no substance in the fable, though so circumstantially related, that in 1636 in company with his cousin Hampden, despairing of his country, he took his passage to America, and that the vessel was stopped by an order in Council. All the probabilities are against it, and there is no evidence for it. What is credible enough is Clarendon's story that five years later, on the day when the Great Remonstrance was passed, Cromwell whispered to Falkland that if it had been rejected he would have sold all he had the next morning, and never have seen England more, and he knew there were many other honest men of the same resolution. So near, the Royalist historian reflects, was this poor kingdom at that time to its deliverance.

His property meanwhile had been increased by a further bequest of land in Huntingdon from his uncle Richard Cromwell. Two years after his return from Westminster (1631) he sold his whole Huntingdon property for eighteen hundred pounds, equivalent to between five and six thousand to-day. With this capital in hand he rented and stocked grazing-lands at the east end of St. Ives, some five miles down the river, and here he remained steadily doing his business and watching the black clouds slowly rise on the horizon of national affairs. Children came in due order, nine of them in all. He went to the parish church, "generally with a piece of red flannel round his neck, as he was subject to an inflammation in his throat." He had his children baptized like other people, and for one of them he asked the vicar, a fellow of St. John's at Cambridge, to stand godfather. He took his part in the affairs of the place. At Huntingdon his keen public spirit and blunt speech had brought him into trouble. A new charter in which, among other provisions, Oliver was made a borough justice, transformed an open and popular corporation into a close one. Cromwell dealt faithfully with those who had procured the change. The mayor and aldermen complained to the Privy Council of the disgraceful and unseemly speeches used to them by him and another person, and one day a messenger from the Council carried the two offenders under arrest to London ( November, 1630). There was a long hearing with many contradictory asseverations. We may assume that Cromwell made a stout defense on the merits, and he appears to have been discharged of blame, though he admitted that he had spoken in heat and passion and begged that his angry words might not be remembered against him. In 1636 he went from St. Ives to Ely, his old mother and unmarried sisters keeping house with him. This year his maternal uncle died and left to him the residuary interest under his will. The uncle had farmed the cathedral tithes of Ely, as his father had farmed them before him, and in this position Oliver had succeeded him. Ely was the home of Cromwell and his family until 1647.

He did not escape the pang of bereavement : his eldest son, a youth of good promise, died in 1639. Long afterward OHver lying ill at Hampton Court called for his Bible, and desired an honorable and godly person present to read aloud to him a passage from Philippians : "Not that I speak in respect of want : for I have learned, in whatsoever state I am therewith to be content. I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound : everywhere and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need. I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me." After the verses had been read, "This scripture," said Cromwell, then nearing his own end, "did once save my life when my eldest son died, which went as a dagger to my heart, indeed it did." It was this spirit, praised in Milton's words of music as his "faith and matchless fortitude," that bore him through the years of battle and contention lying predestined in the still sealed scroll before him.

Cromwell's first surviving letter is evidence alike in topic and in language of the thoughts on which his heart was set. A lecturer was a man paid by private subscribers to preach a sermon after the official parson had read the service, and he was usually a Puritan. Cromwell presses a friend in London for aid in keeping up a lecturer in St. Ives ( 1635). "^he best of all good works, he says, is to provide for the feeding of souls. "Building of hospitals provides for men's bodies; to build material temples is judged a work of piety; but they that procure spiritual food, they that build up spiritual temples, they are the men truly charitable, truly pious." About the same time (1635) Oliver's kinsman John Hampden was consulting his other kinsman, Oliver St. John, as to resisting the writ of ship-money. Laud, made Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633, was busy in the preparation of a new prayer-book for the regeneration of stubborn Scotland. Wentworth was fighting his high-handed battle for a better order in Ireland.

STUDENTS of the struggle between monarchy and Parliament in the seventeenth century have worked hard upon black-letter; on charter, custom, franchise, tradition, precedent, and prescription, on which the Commons defended their privileges and the king defended his prerogatives. How much the lawyers really founded their case on the precedents for which they had ransacked the wonderful collections of Sir Robert Cotton, or how far, on the other hand, their "pedantry'' was a mask for a determination that in their hearts rested on very different grounds, opens a discussion into which we need not enter here. What the elective element in the old original monarchy amounted to, and what the popular element in the ancient deliberative council amounted to; what differences in power and prerogative marked the office of a king when it was filled by Angevin, by Plantagenet, or by Tudor, how the control of Parliament over legislation and taxation stood under the first three Edwards and under the last three Henrys ; whether the popular champions in the seventeenth century were abandoning both the accustomed theory and the practice of Parliament from Edward I to the end of Elizabeth; whether the real conservative on the old lines of the constitution was not King Charles himself — all these and the kindred questions, profoundly interesting as they are, fill little space in the story of Cromwell. It was not until the day of the lawyers and the constitutionalists had passed that Cromwell's hour arrived, and "the meager, stale, forbidding ways of custom, law, and statute" vanished from men's thoughts.

To a man of Cromwell's political mind the ciuestions were plain and broad, and could be solved without much history. If the estates of the crown no longer sufficed for the public service, could the king make the want good by taxing his subjects at his own good pleasure? Or was the charge to be exclusively imposed by the estates of the realm? Were the estates of the realm to have a direct voice in naming agents and officers of executive power, and to exact a full responsibility to themselves for all acts done in the name of executive power? Was the freedom of the subject to be at the mercy of arbitrary tribunals, and were judges to be removable at the king's pleasure? What was to be done — and this came closest home of all — to put down cruel assumptions of authority by the bishops, to reform the idleness of the clergy, to provide godly and diligent preachers, and sternly to set back the rising tide of popery, of vain ceremonial devices, and pernicious Arminian doctrine? Such was the simple statement of the case as it presented itself to earnest and stirring men. Taxation and religion have ever been the two prime movers in human revolutions ; in the civil troubles in the seventeenth century both these powerful factors were combined.

II

In more than one important issue the king undoubtedly had the black-letter upon his side, and nothing is easier than to show that in some of the transactions, even before actual resort to arms, the Commons defied both letter and spirit. Charles was not an Englishman by birth, training, or temper, but he showed himself at the outset as much a legalist in method and argument as Coke, Selden, St. John, or any Englishman among them. It was in its worst sense that he thus from first to last played the formalist, and if to be a pedant is to insist on applying a stiff theory to fluid fact, no man ever deserved the name better.

Both king and Commons, however, were well aware that the vital questions of the future could be decided by no appeals to an obscure and disputable past. The manifest issue was whether prerogative was to be the basis of the government of England. Charles held that it had been always so, and made up his mind that so it should remain. He had seen the Court of Paris, he had lived for several months in the Court of Madrid, and he knew no reason why the absolutism of France and of Spain should not flourish at Whitehall. More certain than vague influences such as these, was the rising tide of royalism in high places in the church.

If this was the mind of Charles, Pym and Hampden and their patriot friends were equally resolved that the base of government should be in the Parliament and in the Commons branch of the Parliament. They claimed for Parliament a general competence in making laws, granting money, levying taxes, supervising the application of their grants, restricting abuses of executive power, and holding the king's servants answerable for what they did or failed to do. Beyond all this vast field of activity and power, they entered upon the domain of the king as head of the church, and England found herself plunged into the vortex of that religious excitement which, for a whole century and almost without a break, had torn the Christian world and distracted Europe with bloodshed and clamor that shook thrones, principalities, powers, and stirred the souls of men to their depths.

This double and deep-reaching quarrel, partly religious, partly political, Charles did not create. He inherited it in all its sharpness along with the royal crown. In nearly every country in Europe the same battle between monarch and assembly had been fought, and in nearly every case the possession of concentrated authority and military force, sometimes at the expense of the nobles, sometimes of the burghers, had left the monarch victorious. Queen Elizabeth of famous memory — "we need not be ashamed to call her so," said Cromwell — carried prerogative at its highest. In the five-and-forty years of her reign only thirteen sessions of Parliament were held, and it was not until near the close of her life that she heard accents of serious complaint. Constitutional history in Elizabeth's time — the momentous institution of the Church of England alone excepted — is a blank chapter. Yet in spite of the subservient language that was natural toward so puissant and successful a ruler as Elizabeth, signs were not even then wanting that, when the stress of national peril should be relaxed, arbitrary power would no longer go unquestioned. The reign of James was one long conflict. The struggle w^ent on for twenty years, and for every one of the most obnoxious pretensions and principles that were afterward sought to be established by King Charles, a precedent had been set by his father.