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OLIVER CROMWELL


      *      *      *      *      *      *

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[Illustration: Printed in Paris

OLIVER CROMWELL

_From the Original Panel by Samuel Cooper at Sidney Sussex College,
Cambridge._]


OLIVER CROMWELL

by

SAMUEL RAWSON GARDINER, M.A.

Hon. D.C.L. Oxford: Litt.D. Cambridge: LL.D. Edinburgh
Ph.D. Goettingen: Late Fellow of Merton College
Honorary Student of Christ Church
Fellow of King's College, London

With Frontispiece

New Impression







Longmans, Green, and Co.
39 Paternoster Row, London
New York, Bombay, and Calcutta
1909




CONTENTS


  CHAPTER I.
    KING AND PARLIAMENT.                                 1

  CHAPTER II.
    THE NEW MODEL ARMY AND THE PRESBYTERIANS.           56

  CHAPTER III.
    THE NEW MODEL ARMY AND THE KING.                   101

  CHAPTER IV.
    THE LAST YEARS OF THE LONG PARLIAMENT.             166

  CHAPTER V.
    THE NOMINATED PARLIAMENT AND THE PROTECTORATE.     213

  CHAPTER VI.
    A PARLIAMENTARY CONSTITUTION.                      264




PREFACE.


The following work gives within a short compass a history of Oliver
Cromwell from a biographical point of view. The text has been revised
by the author, but otherwise is the same in a cheaper form as that
which was published by Messrs. Goupil with illustrations in their
Illustrated Series of Historical Volumes.




OLIVER CROMWELL.




CHAPTER I.

KING AND PARLIAMENT.


Oliver Cromwell, the future Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of
England, was born at Huntingdon on April 25, 1599, receiving his
baptismal name from his uncle, Sir Oliver Cromwell of Hinchingbrooke, a
mansion hard by the little town. It was at Huntingdon that the father
of the infant, Robert Cromwell, had established himself, farming lands
and perhaps also adding to his income by the profits of a brewhouse
managed by his wife, Elizabeth--a descendant of a middle-class Norfolk
family of Steward--originally Styward--which, whatever writers of
authority may say, was not in any way connected with the Royal House of
Scotland.

"I was," said Cromwell in one of his later speeches, "by birth a
gentleman, living neither in any considerable height nor yet in
obscurity. I have been called to several employments in the nation,
and--not to be overtedious--I did endeavour to discharge the duty of
an honest man in those services to God and His people's interest, and
to the Commonwealth." The open secret of Cromwell's public life is set
forth in these words:--his aim being: first, to be himself an honest
man; secondly, to serve God and the people of God; and thirdly, to
fulfil his duty to the Commonwealth. In this order, and in no other,
did his obligations to his fellow-creatures present themselves to his
eyes. For the work before him it could not be otherwise than helpful
that his position in life brought him into contact with all classes of
society.

What powers and capacities this infant--or indeed any other infant--may
have derived from this or the other ancestor, is a mystery too deep for
human knowledge; but at least it may be noted that the descent of the
Cromwells from Sir Richard Williams, the nephew of Thomas Cromwell,
the despotic Minister of Henry VIII., brought into the family a Welsh
strain which may have shown itself in the fervid idealism lighting up
the stern practical sense of the warrior and statesman.

Of Oliver's father little is known; but his portrait testifies that
he was a man of sober Puritanism, not much given to any form of
spiritual enthusiasm--very unlike his elder brother, Sir Oliver, who
had inherited not only the estate, but the splendid ways of his father,
Sir Henry Cromwell--the Golden Knight--and who, after running through
his property, was compelled to sell his land and to retire into a
more obscure position. As the little Oliver grew up, he had before
his eyes the types of the future Cavalier and Roundhead in his own
family. So far as parental influence could decide the question, there
could be no doubt on which side the young Oliver would take his stand.
His education was carried on in the free school of the town, under
Dr. Beard, the author of _The Theatre of God's Judgments Displayed_,
in which a belief in the constant intervention of Providence in the
punishment of offenders was set forth by numerous examples of the
calamities of the wicked. Though Oliver afterwards learned to modify
the crudeness of this teaching, the doctrine that success or failure
was an indication of Divine favour or disfavour never left him, and he
was able, in the days of his greatness, to point unhesitatingly to the
results of Naseby and Worcester as evidence that God Himself approved
of the victorious cause.

In 1616 Cromwell matriculated at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge,
where his portrait now adorns the walls of the College hall. After a
sojourn of no more than a year, he left the University, probably--as
his father died in that year--to care for his widowed mother and his
five sisters, he himself being now the only surviving son. It is said
that not long afterwards he settled in London to study law, and though
there is no adequate authority for this statement, it derives support
from the fact that he found a wife in London, marrying in 1620, at
the early age of twenty-one, Elizabeth Bourchier, the daughter of a
City merchant. The silence of contemporaries shows that, in an age
when many women took an active part in politics, she confined herself
to the sphere of domestic influence. The one letter of hers that is
preserved displays not merely her affectionate disposition, but also
her helpfulness in reminding her great husband of the necessity of
performing those little acts of courtesy which men engaged in large
affairs are sometimes prone to neglect. She was undoubtedly a model of
female perfection after the Periclean standard.

Of Cromwell's early life for some years after his marriage we have
little positive information. His public career was opened by his
election in 1628 to sit for Huntingdon in the Parliament which insisted
on the Petition of Right. Though his uncle had by this time left
Hinchingbrooke, and could therefore have had no direct influence on the
electors, it is quite likely that the choice of his fellow-townsmen
was, to a great extent, influenced by their desire to show their
attachment to a family with which they had long been in friendly
relation.

Even so, however, it is in the highest degree improbable that Cromwell
would have been selected by his neighbours, to whom every action of
his life had been laid open, unless they had had reason to confide in
his moral worth as well as in his aptitude for public business. Yet
it is in this period of his life that, if Royalist pamphleteers are
to be credited, Cromwell was wallowing in revolting profligacy, and
the charge may seem to find some support from his own language in a
subsequent letter to his cousin, Mrs. St. John: "You know," he wrote,
"what my manner of life hath been. Oh! I lived in and loved darkness,
and hated light. I was a chief--the chief of sinners. This is true,
I hated godliness, yet God had mercy upon me." It has however never
been wise to take the expressions of a converted penitent literally,
and it is enough to suppose that Cromwell had been, at least whilst
an undergraduate at Cambridge, a buoyant, unthinking youth, fond of
outdoor exercise; though, on the other hand, whilst he never attained
to proficiency as a scholar, he by no means neglected the authorised
studies of the place. Much as opinion has differed on every other point
in his character, there was never any doubt as to his love of horses
and to his desire to encourage men of learning. It may fairly be argued
that his tastes in either direction must have been acquired in youth.

One piece of evidence has indeed been put forward against Cromwell. On
the register of St. John's parish at Huntingdon are two entries--one
dated 1621, and the other 1628--stating that Cromwell submitted in
those years to some form of Church censure. The formation of the
letters, however, the absence of any date of month or day, and also the
state of the parchment on which the entries occur, leave no reasonable
doubt that they were the work of a forger. It does not follow that the
forger had not a recollection that something of the kind had happened
within local memory, and if we take it as possible that Cromwell was
censured for 'his deeds,' whatever they may have been, in 1621, and
that in 1628 he voluntarily acknowledged some offence--the wording
of the forged entry gives some countenance to this deduction--may we
not note a coincidence of date between the second entry and one in
the diary of Sir Theodore Mayerne--the fashionable physician of the
day--who notes that Oliver Cromwell, who visited him in September of
that year, was _valde melancholicus_. Even if no heed whatever is to
be paid to the St. John's register, Mayerne's statement enables us
approximately to date that time of mental struggle which he passed
through at some time in these years, and which was at last brought
to an end when the contemplation of his own unworthiness yielded to
the assurance of his Saviour's love. "Whoever yet," he wrote long
afterwards to his daughter Bridget, "tasted that the Lord is gracious,
without some sense of self, vanity and badness?" It was a crisis in his
life which, if he had been born in the Roman communion, would probably
have sent him--as it sent Luther--into a monastery. Being what he was,
a Puritan Englishman, it left him with strong resolution to do his work
in this world strenuously, and to help others in things temporal, as he
himself had been helped in things spiritual.

English Puritanism, like other widely spread influences, was complex
in its nature, leading to different results in different men.
Intellectually it was based on the Calvinistic theology, and many were
led on by it to the fiercest intolerance of all systems of thought
and practice which were unconformable thereto. Cromwell's nature
was too large, and his character too strong, to allow him long to
associate himself with the bigots of his age. His Puritanism--if not as
universally sympathetic as a modern philosopher might wish--was moral
rather than intellectual. No doubt it rendered him impatient of the
outward forms in which the religious devotion of such contemporaries
as George Herbert and Crashaw found appropriate sustenance, but at
the same time it held him back from bowing down to the idol of the
men of his own party--the requirement of accurate conformity to the
Calvinistic standard of belief. It was sufficient for him, if he and
his associates found inspiration in a sense of personal dependence on
God, issuing forth in good and beneficent deeds.

When, in 1628, Cromwell took his seat in the House of Commons he
would be sure of a good reception as a cousin of Hampden. There is,
however, nothing to surprise us in his silence during the eventful
debates on the Petition of Right. He was no orator by nature, though
he could express himself forcibly when he felt deeply, and at this
time, and indeed during the whole of his life, he felt more deeply
on religious than on political questions. The House, in its second
session held in 1629, was occupied during the greater portion of its
time with religious questions, and it was then that Cromwell made his
first speech, if so short an utterance can be dignified by that name.
"Dr. Beard," he informed the House, "told him that one Dr. Alablaster
did at the Spital preach in a sermon tenets of Popery, and Beard being
to repeat the same, the now Bishop of Winton, then Bishop of Lincoln,
did send for Dr. Beard, and charged him as his diocesan, not to preach
any doctrine contrary to that which Alablaster had delivered, and
when Beard did, by the advice of Bishop Felton, preach against Dr.
Alablaster's sermon and person, Dr. Neile, now Bishop of Winton, did
reprehend him, the said Beard, for it."

The circumstances of the time give special biographical importance to
the opening of this window into Cromwell's mind. The strife between
the Puritan clergy and the Court prelates was waxing high. The latter,
whilst anxious to enforce discipline, and the external usages which,
though enjoined in the Prayer Book, had been neglected in many parts of
the country, were at the same time contending for a broader religious
teaching than that presented by Calvin's logic; but knowing that they
were in a comparatively small minority they, perhaps not unnaturally,
fell back on the protection of the King, who was in ecclesiastical
matters completely under the influence of Laud. The result of Charles's
consultations with such Bishops as were at hand had been the issue of
a Declaration which was prefixed to a new edition of the articles, and
is to be found in Prayer Books at the present day. The King's remedy
for disputes in the Church on predestination and such matters was to
impose silence on both parties, and it was in view of this policy
that Cromwell raked up an old story to show how at least twelve years
before, his old schoolmaster, Dr. Beard, had been forbidden to preach
any doctrine but that which the member for Huntingdon stigmatised
as Popish, and this too by a prelate who was now seeking, in a less
direct way, to impose silence on Puritan ministers. Other members of
Parliament had striven to oppose the ecclesiasticism of the Court by
the intolerant assertion that Calvinism alone was to be preached.
Cromwell did nothing of the kind. He did not even say that those who
upheld what he calls 'tenets of Popery' were to be silenced. He merely
asked that those who objected to them might be free to deliver their
testimony in public. There is the germ here of his future liberal
policy as Lord Protector--the germ too of a wide difference of opinion
from those with whom he was at this time acting in concert.[A]

      [A] My argument would obviously not stand if the remainder
          of the speech printed in Rushworth were held to be
          genuine. There is, however, good reason to know that it
          is not (_Hist. of Eng._, 1603-1642, vii., 56, note).

Little as we know of Cromwell's proceedings during the eleven years in
which no Parliament sat, that little is significant. His interference
in temporal affairs was invariably on the side of the poor. In 1630
a new charter was granted to Huntingdon, conferring the government
of the town on a mayor and twelve aldermen appointed for life. To
this Cromwell raised no objection, taking no special delight in
representative institutions, but he protested against so much of the
charter as, by allowing the new corporation to deal at its pleasure
with the common property of the borough, left the holders of rights
of pasture at their mercy; and, heated by a sense of injustice to
his poorer neighbours, he spoke angrily on the matter to Barnard,
the new mayor. Cromwell was summoned before the council, with the
result that the Earl of Manchester, appointed to arbitrate, sustained
his objections, whilst Cromwell, having gained his point, apologised
for the roughness of his speech. It is not unlikely that it was in
consequence of this difference with the new governors of the town that
he shortly afterwards sold his property there, and removed to St.
Ives, where he established himself as a grazing farmer. Nor was he
less solicitous for the spiritual than for the temporal welfare of his
neighbours. Many Puritans were at this time attempting to lessen the
influence of the beneficed clergy, who were, in many places, opposed to
them, by raising sums for the payment of lecturers, who would preach
Puritan sermons without being bound to read prayers before them. The
earliest extant letter of Cromwell's was written in 1636 to a City
merchant, asking him to continue his subscription to the maintenance of
a certain Dr. Wells, 'a man of goodness and industry and ability to do
good every way'. "You know, Mr. Story," he adds, "to withdraw the pay
is to let fall the lecture, and who goeth to warfare at his own cost?"

In 1636 Cromwell removed to Ely, where he farmed the Cathedral tithes
in succession to his maternal uncle, Sir Thomas Steward. Soon after
he was settled in his new home, there were disturbances in the fen
country which the Earl of Bedford and his associates were endeavouring
to drain. On the plea that the work was already accomplished, the new
proprietors ordered the expulsion of cattle from the pastures scattered
amongst the waters. The owners, egged on by one at least of the
neighbouring gentry, tumultuously resisted the attempt to exclude them
from their rights of commonage. We are told, too, that 'it is commonly
reported by the commoners in the said fens and the fens adjoining, that
Mr. Cromwell, of Ely, hath undertaken--they paying him a groat for
every cow they have upon the common--to hold the drainers in writ of
law for five years, and that in the mean time they should enjoy every
foot of their commons'. That Cromwell should have taken up the cause
of the weak, and at the same time should have attempted to serve them
by legal proceedings, whilst keeping aloof from their riotous action,
is a fair indication of the character of the man. No wonder he grew in
popularity, or that in 1640 he was elected by the borough of Cambridge
to both the Parliaments which met in that year.

In the Short Parliament Cromwell sat, so far as we know, as a
silent member. Of his appearance in the Long Parliament we have the
often-quoted description of his personal appearance from a young
courtier. "I came into the House," wrote Sir Philip Warwick, "one
morning well clad, and perceived a gentleman speaking whom I knew
not, very ordinarily apparelled, for it was a plain cloth suit which
seemed to be made by an ill country tailor; his linen was plain, and
not very clean; and I remember a speck or two of blood upon his little
band, which was not larger than his collar. His hat was without a
hat-band. His stature was of a good size; his sword stuck close to
his side; his countenance swollen and reddish, his voice sharp and
untuneable, and his eloquence full of fervour, for the subject matter
would not bear much of reason, it being on behalf of a servant of Mr
Prynne's who had dispersed libels against the Queen for her dancing
and such like innocent and courtly sports; and he aggravated the
imprisonment of this man by the council-table unto that height that
one would have believed the very Government itself had been in great
danger by it. I sincerely profess it lessened much my reverence unto
that great council, for he was very much hearkened unto; and yet I
lived to see this very gentleman whom, by multiplied good escapes,
and by real but usurped power, having had a better tailor, and more
converse among good company, appear of great and majestic deportment
and comely presence." Curiously enough the so-called servant of
Prynne--he was never actually in Prynne's service at all--was no other
than John Lilburne, who was such a thorn in the flesh to Cromwell
in later years. In undertaking the defence of the man who had been
sentenced to scourge and imprisonment for disseminating books held
to be libels by Charles and his ministers, Cromwell announced to his
fellow-members his own political position. In life--and above all in
political life--it is not possible to satisfy those who expect the
actions of any man to be absolutely consistent. Later generations may
be convinced not only that Charles was sincere in following a course
which he believed to be the right one, but that this course commended
itself to certain elements of human nature, and was, therefore, no
mere emanation of his own personal character. It nevertheless remains
that he was far from being strong enough for the place which he had
inherited from his predecessors, and that in wearing the garments of
the Elizabethan monarchy, he was all too unconscious of the work which
the new generation required of him--all too ready to claim the rights
of Elizabeth, without a particle of the skill in the art of government
which she derived from her intimate familiarity with the people over
which she had been called to rule.

Charles's unskilfulness was the more disastrous, as he came to the
throne during a crisis when few men would have been able to maintain
the prestige of the monarchy. On the one hand the special powers
entrusted to the Tudor sovereigns were no longer needed after the
domestic and foreign dangers which occupied their reigns had been
successfully met. On the other hand, a strife between religious parties
had arisen which called for action on lines very different from
those which had commended themselves to Elizabeth. In throwing off
the authority of the Roman See, Elizabeth had the national spirit of
England at her back, whilst in resisting the claims of the Presbyterian
clergy, she had the support of the great majority of the laity. By
the end of her reign she had succeeded in establishing that special
form of ecclesiastical government which she favoured. Yet though the
clergy had ceased to cry out for the supersession of episcopacy by the
Presbyterian discipline, the bulk of the clergy and of the religious
laity were Puritan to the core. So much had been effected by the
long struggle against Rome and Spain and the resulting detestation
of any form of belief which savoured of Rome and Spain. During the
twenty-two years of the peace-loving James, religious thought ceased
to be influenced by a sense of national danger. First one, and then
another--a Bancroft, an Andrewes, or a Laud, men of the college or
the cathedral--began to think their own thoughts, to welcome a wider
interpretation of religious truths than that of Calvin's Institute,
and, above all, to distrust the inward conviction as likely to be
warped by passion or self-interest, and to dwell upon the value of
the external influences of ritual and organisation. To do justice to
both these schools of thought and practice at the time of Charles's
accession would have taxed the strength of any man, seeing how
unprepared was the England of that day to admit the possibility of
toleration. The pity of it was that Charles, with all his fine feelings
and conscientious rectitude, was unfitted for the task. Abandoning
himself heart and soul to the newly risen tide of religious thought,
his imagination was too weak to enable him to realise the strength
of Puritanism, so that he bent his energies, not to securing for his
friends free scope for the exercise of what persuasion was in them, but
for the repression of those whom he looked upon as the enemies of the
Church and the Crown. With the assistance of Laud he did everything in
his power to crush Puritanism, with the result of making Puritanism
stronger than it had been before. Every man of independent mind who
revolted against the petty interference exercised by Laud placed
himself by sympathy, if not by perfect conviction, in the Puritan ranks.

Neither in Elizabeth's nor in Charles's reign was it possible
to dissociate politics from religion. Parliament, dissatisfied
with Charles's ineffectual guidance of the State, was still more
dissatisfied with his attempt to use his authority over the Church to
the profit of an unpopular party. The House of Commons representing
mainly that section of the population in which Puritanism was the
strongest--the country gentlemen in touch with the middle-class in
the towns--was eager to pull down Laud's system in the Church, and to
hinder the extension of Royal authority in the State. To do this it was
necessary not only to diminish the power of the Crown, but to transfer
much of it to Parliament, which, at least in the eyes of its members,
was far more capable of governing England wisely.

That Cromwell heartily accepted this view of the situation is evident
from his being selected to move the second reading of the Bill for the
revival of annual Parliaments, which, by a subsequent compromise, was
ultimately converted into a Triennial Act ordaining that there should
never again be an intermission of Parliament for more than three years.
The fact that he was placed on no less than eighteen committees in
the early part of the sittings of the Parliaments shows that he had
acquired a position which he could never have reached merely through
his cousinship with Hampden and St. John. That he concurred in the
destruction of the special courts which had fortified the Crown in the
Tudor period, and in the prosecution of Strafford, needs no evidence to
prove. These were the acts of the House as a whole. It was the part he
took on those ecclesiastical questions which divided the House into two
antagonistic parties which is most significant of his position at this
time.

However much members of the House of Commons might differ on the
future government of the Church, they were still of one mind as to
the necessity of changing the system under which it had been of late
controlled. There may have been much to be said on behalf of an
episcopacy exercising a moderating influence over the clergy, and
guarding the rights of minorities against the oppressive instincts of a
clerical majority. As a matter of fact this had not been the attitude
of Charles's Bishops. Appointed by the Crown, and chosen out of one
party only--and that the party of the minority amongst the clergy and
the religious laity--they had seized the opportunity of giving free
scope to their own practices and of hampering in every possible way
the practices of those opposed to them. It was no Puritan, but Jeremy
Taylor, the staunch defender of monarchy and episcopacy, who hit the
nail on the head. "The interest of the bishops," he wrote, "is conjunct
with the prosperity of the King, besides the interest of their own
security, by the obligation of secular advantages. For they who have
their livelihood from the King, and are in expectance of their fortune
from him, are more likely to pay a tribute of exacted duty than others
whose fortunes are not in such immediate dependency on His Majesty.
It is but the common expectation of gratitude that a patron paramount
shall be more assisted by his beneficiaries in cases of necessity than
by those who receive nothing from him but the common influences of
government."

As usual, it was easier to mark the evil than to provide an adequate
remedy. The party which numbered Hyde and Falkland in its ranks, and
which afterwards developed into that of the Parliamentary Royalists,
was alarmed lest a tyrannical episcopacy should be followed by a still
more tyrannical Presbyterian discipline, and therefore strove to
substitute for the existing system some scheme of modified episcopacy
by which bishops should be in some way responsible to clerical
councils. Cromwell was working hand in hand with men who strove to meet
the difficulty in another way. The so-called Root-and-Branch Bill,
said to have been drawn up by St. John, was brought to the House of
Commons by himself and Vane. By them it was passed on to Hazlerigg,
who in his turn passed it on to Sir Edward Dering, by whom it was
actually moved in the House. As it was finally shaped in Committee,
this bill, whilst absolutely abolishing archbishops, bishops, deans
and chapters, transferred their ecclesiastical jurisdiction to bodies
of Commissioners to be named by Parliament itself. Cromwell evidently
had no more desire than Falkland to establish the Church Courts of the
Scottish Presbyterian system in England.

This bill never passed beyond the Committee stage. It was soon
overshadowed by the question whether Charles could be trusted or
not. The discovery of the plots by which he had attempted to save
Strafford's life, and the knowledge that he was now visiting Scotland
with the intention of bringing up a Scottish army to his support
against the Parliament at Westminster strengthened the hands of the
party of Parliamentary supremacy, and left its leaders disinclined
to pursue their ecclesiastical policy till they had settled the
political question in their own favour. Important as Charles's own
character--with its love of shifts and evasions--was in deciding
the issue, it must not be forgotten that the crisis arose from a
circumstance common to all revolutions. When a considerable change is
made in the government of a nation, it is absolutely necessary, if
orderly progress is to result from it, that the persons in authority
shall be changed. The man or men by whom the condemned practices have
been maintained cannot be trusted to carry out the new scheme, because
they must of necessity regard it as disastrous to the nation. The
success of the Revolution of 1688-89 was mainly owing to the fact that
James was replaced by William; in 1641 neither was Charles inclined
to fly to the Continent, nor were the sentiments of either party
in the House such as to suggest his replacement by another prince,
even if such a prince were to be found. All that his most pronounced
adversaries--amongst whom Cromwell was to be counted--could suggest was
to leave him