Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

inveterate procrastination and their skill in spinning out the discussion of

technicalities. The only one that actually passed—and that was just twelve

days before Cromwell sent the Rump packing—was an act that established a

court for probate of wills.

Social reform fared no better. There was a clamour for the improvement of

poor relief, but though the parliament-men spoke compassionate words they

were collectively far more concerned with the interests of wealthy merchants

than with those of the underprivileged. Apart from one minor act, which was

conﬁned to London, the Rump did nothing for the poor, and the only reason

why the really needy did not suffer more in those depressed times was that the

JPs in most counties cared more about relieving them than the national gov-

ernment did. Nothing was done, either, to remedy the arbitrary disadvan-

tages suffered by copyholders; landlords’ self-interest joined hands with

lawyers’ conservatism to frustrate any progress on that front.

The army’s chief grievance against the Rump, however, came to centre on

its failure to make satisfactory provision for the election of a new parliament,

and here there is rather more to be said on its side. One can understand why

the ofﬁcers disliked Vane’s scheme for ‘recruiter’ elections, which would have

ﬁlled only the vacant seats while the sitting members went on sitting, but they

did not appreciate as the Rumpers did that a genuinely free general election

would in all likelihood return a parliament more conservative and anti-

military than the present House—one indeed in which a majority might be

opposed to a republic as such. Members would admittedly have had to take

the Engagement before standing, but that pledge had already been taken

already by so many who were no friends to the Commonwealth that as a shib-

boleth it was of little use. These were objections which very much deserved to

be considered, but what rankled with the army was that the question of how

to provide for future parliaments had so rarely been considered at all.

Cromwell’s dispatch from Dunbar had revived discussion of it, and the

House had then opted for recruiter rather than general elections. But it had

resolved to decide ﬁrst how constituencies should be redistributed among

counties and towns, and it was still at this task six months later. It took even

longer in going through the names of all the members who had voluntarily

absented themselves since Pride’s Purge, in order to determine which should

keep their seats, and it spared so many that recruiter elections would have

wrought even less change in the personnel and temper of the House than

might reasonably have been expected. In the summer of 1651 it laid even this

unﬁnished business aside in face of the impending Scottish invasion.

518 The Commonwealth 1649–1653

Underdown, Pride’s Purge, pp. 275–80; Worden, Rump Parliament, ch. 6; Mary Cotterell,

‘Interregnum law reform: the Hale Commission of 1652’, English Historical Review LXXXIII

(1968); S. E. Prall, The Agitation for Law Reform During the Puritan Revolution (The Hague,

1966); D. Veall, The Popular Movement for Law Reform 1640–1660 (Oxford, 1970).

ch16.y8 27/9/02 11:45 AM Page 518

Cromwell’s victory at Worcester, however, had such an effect that on the

very day he received the House’s thanks it voted to take the provision of ‘an

equal representative in parliament’ into consideration on the morrow. After

three days’s debate it resolved by thirty-three votes to twenty-six to bring in a

bill which would set a date for its own dissolution and provide for the election

of a new parliament. It was a narrow majority in a typically thin House, but

the tellers for the ayes were Cromwell and his future opponent the republican

Thomas Scot; the lines of division that were to bring the Rump to a violent

end were not yet fully drawn, and that outcome was still quite unforeseen.

The bill was introduced on 8 October and debated intensively in grand com-

mittee over the next ﬁve weeks. Many of the more dilatory members, alerted

to the threat that they might really have to face their electors again, took to

attending more often. Cromwell made a long speech on 14 November, urging

that it was high time for the present parliament to ﬁx a date beyond which it

would not sit, and he secured a vote in favour, but only by forty-nine voices

to forty-seven. When the House voted four days later on what the date should

be, it plumped without a division for 3 November 1654, all but three years

ahead.

By that time many members would have held their seats unchallenged for

fourteen years, many constituencies would have had no opportunity to

choose their representatives for as long, and many would have had no repre-

sentative at all since Pride’s Purge, all but ﬁve years ago. This went ill with the

parliament’s claim to wield supreme authority by virtue of the suffrages of the

sovereign people. A case could be argued that early general elections would

have been extremely hazardous, and that a space was needed for the Com-

monwealth to win new friends and reconcile old enemies before it went to the

people. But during the next two years the Rump did practically nothing of the

kind; indeed it gratuitously offended its radical critics without doing anything

substantial to mollify its moderate ones. The impetus towards reform that the

victory at Worcester generated soon lost momentum, as the earlier one after

Dunbar had done. The bill to provide for the propagation of the gospel on a

nationwide scale was revived on 1 October 1651, but was quietly dropped

after a few weeks. It was not until February 1653 that the Rump took up the

relatively conservative but nevertheless reforming scheme of Owen and his

colleagues. As for healing old wounds, the successive acts for the sale of delin-

quents’ estates often contravened the spirit and sometimes the letter of the

terms of surrender that military commanders had negotiated with their roy-

alist opponents, and the wretchedly imperfect Act of Oblivion increased the

ofﬁcers’ suspicion of the Rumpers’ motives.

The suspicion was reciprocated, and the Rump showed a particular animus

against Harrison, whom hostile members too readily blamed for the malver-

sations charged against the Commission for the Propagation of the Gospel in

The Commonwealth in Crisis 519

ch16.y8 27/9/02 11:45 AM Page 519

Wales. He lost his place on the Council of State in the annual election in

November 1651, and there was even a move to expel him from parliament.

This was foolish as well as unjust, for although Cromwell did not share Har-

rison’s Fifth Monarchist beliefs there were still strong ties of mutual trust and

friendship between the two men. And while Harrison’s treatment particular-

ly incensed the religious enthusiasts in the army, another case involving John

Lilburne roused the anger of those ofﬁcers and men whose radicalism was of

a more secular cast. Its details were complex, but it concerned a coalmine in

County Durham, the property of a royalist delinquent, who had leased the

greater part of it to one George Primate long before the Civil War. Primate

had subleased it to Lilburne’s uncle George and to another man, but after the

war the whole estate had been sequestered, and in 1649 Haselrig, who was

using his privileged position to amass royalists’ as well as bishops’ lands,

acquired the lease of the colliery at an advantageous rate. Primate and George

Lilburne tried to assert their continuing right to the lease, and George

employed his nephew John as his counsel, but after long debate in the latter

weeks of 1651 the Committee for Compounding found in favour of Haselrig.

As the law then stood the decision may have been a sound one, whatever the

equity of the case; but John Lilburne published a vitriolic attack on Haselrig

and the Committee, accusing his old enemy of abusing his political position

in order to obtain a corrupt judgment in his own favour. The Rump reacted

furiously, and took the case into its own hands. The issue consequently was

no longer who had the right to the coalmine but breach of privilege, so the

members could pass what sentence they pleased, without worrying about any

niceties of the law, or even hearing the accused. John Lilburne and Primate

were punished with ﬁnes and damages totalling £7,000 each, a sum which

would have taken Milton thirty-ﬁve years to earn from his salary as Secretary

for Foreign Tongues. Haselrig had the decency not to enforce payment of his

share of Lilburne’s damages, but the Rump further passed an act of banish-

ment against Lilburne, decreeing the death penalty if ever he set foot in

England again. Granted that his attack on Haselrig had been extremely

intemperate and perhaps ungrounded, his punishment was grossly dispro-

portionate to his offence and smacked of vindictiveness. It was foolish too,

for whereas there had been little Leveller activity in the army since the 1649

mutiny it reawakened the sympathy with Lilburne’s sufferings that many sol-

diers and junior ofﬁcers had shown in 1647–8. Cromwell did not share their

feelings, but many caught the same whiff of parliamentary tyranny that had

roused them to resistance in that earlier phase.

520 The Commonwealth 1649–1653

On the Lilburne–Primate affair see Pauline Gregg, Free-Born John (1961), pp. 309–11;

Worden, Rump Parliament, pp. 282–4; Barry Denton, Only in Heaven: The Life and Campaigns

of Sir Arthur Hesilrige (Shefﬁeld, 1997), pp. 163–72.

ch16.y8 27/9/02 11:45 AM Page 520

For over a year after his return from Worcester, Cromwell strove continu-

ously to avert a political polarization, whether between the army and the par-

liament or between the conservative and reforming factions within the

House. About three weeks after the Rump had voted to give itself (if need be)

until November 1654 before dissolving, Cromwell arranged a meeting of

some leading MPs and ofﬁcers at the Speaker’s house, to consider whether

they might put life into the almost deadlocked debate on the future govern-

ment of the country by offering some jointly agreed proposals. They soon

concurred that the central question was whether to aim at a pure republic or

a mixed constitution with a monarchical element in it. The lawyers present,

including Whitelocke, St John, Lenthall, and Widdrington, favoured the

latter, and many were for crowning Charles I’s youngest son, the twelve-year-

old Duke of Gloucester, under ﬁrm constitutional restraints. Nearly all the

ofﬁcers present were ﬁrmly opposed to kingship in any form, but Cromwell

himself took the view ‘that a settlement with somewhat of monarchical

power in it would be very effectual’.

There is no sign that at this stage he had

any serious thought of setting up as king for himself, and his words may hint

at a possibility that the monarchical role need not necessarily be assigned to

an individual. If one can judge by certain strands that ran fairly consistently

through his political thinking from at least 1647 onward, he probably hoped

that a monarchical element, however embodied, would serve three main

functions: to act as the guarantor of an accepted constitution while elected

assemblies came and went, to check the evident tendency of an all-powerful

single-chamber parliament towards electoral dictatorship, and to secure for

the executive a degree of independence from the legislature. As Protector he

was to be a strong believer in the separation of powers.

He did not ﬁnd it easy to pursue a moderating course. It brought him under

the suspicion of such inﬂuential millenarian preachers in London as Christo-

pher Feake, Walter Cradock, Vavasor Powell, and the radical Independent

John Goodwin, who all had a considerable following in the army. The open

hostility of many Rumpers, especially the thorough-paced republicans,

towards army ofﬁcers did not help him. Skippon, a moderate if ever there was

one, was dropped from the Council of State at the same time as Harrison,

leaving the army almost insultingly under-represented. Then Lambert,

who had deserved more from the Commonwealth than any soldier other

than Cromwell for his service in the Dunbar and Worcester campaigns, was

The Commonwealth in Crisis 521

B. Whitelocke, Memorials of the English Affairs (1682), pp. 491–2. The account in The

Diary of Bulstrode Whitelocke, p. 273, is much shorter and does not reproduce Cromwell’s or

any other participant’s actual words, but it states that ‘their debate . . . is more largely inserted in

Wh[itelocke’s] larger book’, so I see no reason to doubt the authenticity of the record. I also ﬁnd

Whitelocke’s date for the meeting (10 December) entirely plausible, but cf. Worden, Rump

Parliament, p. 276.

ch16.y8 27/9/02 11:45 AM Page 521

gratuitously offended. After Ireton’s death, parliament named Lambert to

succeed him as Lord Deputy in Ireland, where he would have had almost vice-

regal powers as well as the command of the armed forces, since Cromwell

himself was the absentee Lord Lieutenant. There could have been no ﬁtter

appointment. Yet after Lambert had spent £5,000 on ﬁtting out a suitable

equipage for his post, he learnt in May 1652 that parliament had abolished it,

along with the Lord Lieutenancy itself. Lambert, in deep offence, declined the

far less prestigious post of commander-in-chief in Ireland, and became a lead-

ing spirit among those in the army who were pressing for the dissolution of

the Rump. The Irish command went to Fleetwood, who in June married Ire-

ton’s widow, and so became Cromwell’s son-in-law.

Far more than personalities, however, were involved in the army’s mount-

ing hostility towards the parliament, which by the summer was rising beyond

Cromwell’s power to restrain it. There was pressure within the army for a

comprehensive statement of its desires, and Cromwell and the Council of

Ofﬁcers held a nine-hour meeting on 2 August, the ﬁrst of several, in order to

frame it. A listing of the ofﬁcers’ demands was published on the 10th in the

form of a declaration of the army addressed to Cromwell, but a revised

version, probably bearing the marks of his restraining inﬂuence, was pre-

sented to parliament by six senior ofﬁcers, all but one of them staunch

Cromwellians, as a petition from his Council of War. Much has been made of

the fact that he did not expressly put his name to it, but that was probably

because of the delicacy of his position as a member of parliament and coun-

cillor of state. Since he presided over the Council of Ofﬁcers there is no doubt

that he countenanced it, and indeed he cited it as authoritative on two import-

ant occasions in 1653.

The petition was respectfully phrased and contained few requests that the

army had not advanced before. The ﬁrst, predictably, was for the removal of

unworthy parish ministers and their replacement by godly preachers, main-

tained by some more acceptable means than tithes. It called for the reform of

the law and the speedy enactment of the Hale Commission’s recommenda-

tions. It wanted profane, scandalous, and disaffected ofﬁcials removed, and

public ofﬁce entrusted solely to ‘men of truth, fearing God and hating cov-

etousness’. Reﬂecting the army’s distrust of parliament-men, it called for a

commission of non-members to investigate monopolies, pluralism, unneces-

sary ofﬁces, and excessive salaries. It expected the rectiﬁcation of abuses in the

management of the public revenue, especially in the hated excise, and it pro-

posed a total reorganization of the ﬁnancial system under a single national

522 The Commonwealth 1649–1653

Gardiner and Abbott are both somewhat misleading on this important document: For its

provenance and progress see Worden, Rump Parliament, pp. 306–9; Woolrych, Soldiers and

Statesmen, pp. 39–44; Gentles, New Model Army, pp. 419–20, 553. Strangely, the text of the

petition, which is brief, has not been reprinted since 1652.

ch16.y8 27/9/02 11:45 AM Page 522

treasury. It demanded better provision for the poor, the old and inﬁrm, for

soldiers crippled by their war wounds, and for the widows and orphans of the

fallen. It reiterated the old grievance of the men’s arrears of pay, and it asked

again that terms of surrender granted by commanders in the ﬁeld should be

honoured. But it left till last the matter that had come to preoccupy the ofﬁ-

cers most, namely the speedy provision for elections to a new parliament,

under such qualiﬁcations that only ‘such as are pious and faithful to the inter-

est of the Commonwealth’ should serve in it. According to a newswriter’s

report, this formulation was arrived at after Cromwell objected to a peremp-

tory demand ‘that a new representative be forthwith elected’, but it poses

some problems of interpretation. It suggests perhaps an attempt to accom-

modate both the moderate majority who believed (like Cromwell) that the

‘representative of the people’ should consist of members whom the people

(however deﬁned) freely chose, subject only to safeguards necessitated by the

times, and the minority who held (like Harrison) that only those who could

be counted among God’s saints were qualiﬁed to bear rule in his dawning

kingdom. This potential rift in the ranks was to open much wider in the year

ahead.

Neither the politicians nor the ofﬁcers foresaw what a crisis lay ahead when

this petition came under debate, but in fact it heralded the third of those

phases of accelerated and largely unplanned political change that I have

called climacterics. As in the crises of 1641–2 and 1648–9, the consequences

of the quarrel that developed in the winter of 1652–3 were neither desired nor

foreseen by the participants. The great majority of them, however great their

differences, expected them to be resolved eventually within the framework of

the existing republic, ruled as it was by a sovereign single-chamber parlia-

ment. All now accepted that the Rump would have to make way for a succes-

sor before too long, however they might disagree over the time-table and how

it was to be chosen. There seemed to be promising ways ahead on the nation-

wide provision of a preaching ministry in the parishes and on the reform of

the law, if the Rump would only overcome its inertia. No one before the end

of 1652 plotted or even desired what actually happened in 1653: the forcible

expulsion of the Rump by the army, its replacement by a pseudo-parliament

nominated by the Council of Ofﬁcers, and after that failed the establishment

of a quasi-monarchy with Cromwell as head of state under a written consti-

tution. Yet all that was to ensue within a year, the climacteric year 1653.

There was nothing inevitable about such an outcome, and for a month or two

the Rump made promising efforts to avert a breach. It set up a powerful and

broad-based committee to report what progress had been made in the matters

raised in the ofﬁcers’ petition and what more needed to be done to bring them

under speedy consideration. The committee’s chairman was the radical John

Carew; it included his friend and fellow-millenarian Harrison, Cromwell,

The Commonwealth in Crisis 523

ch16.y8 27/9/02 11:45 AM Page 523

Colonel Rich, and two other ofﬁcer-MPs, along with several men who would

be prominent in Barebone’s Parliament and the Protectorate Council of State.

Naturally they were balanced by members who were hostile to any pretension

by the military to a voice in politics, but the army’s arch-opponents Haselrig

and Vane were conspicuously absent. (Cromwell and Vane, who had once been

so close, had been moving apart, largely because of the army’s challenges to the

Rump.) Carew reported from this committee in mid-September that the bill for

a new representative, which had gone to sleep in the committees of the whole

House, would be better expedited by a select committee, whereupon his own

committee was promptly entrusted with it. The committee sat daily at ﬁrst, but

before the end of the year it sank into inactivity. So did the committee entrust-

ed with preparing measures for the national propagation of the gospel. As for

improving the relief of the poor, the House debated a bill to that end on

12 October, but when it was due for further consideration on 11 November,

Haselrig moved to put it off, and it never got any further. The little burst of

reforming activity begotten by the army petition was sputtering out, just as in

the aftermaths of Dunbar and Worcester. The Rumpers could not plead

pressure of other business as an excuse for their dilatoriness, for they were

currently sitting as a House on only four mornings a week. There was a motion

on 11 November to restore Monday and Saturday sittings until the end of the

year, but it was narrowly lost. Haselrig, who did not attend a single meeting of

the Council of State between 27 July and 26 October, was a teller against it.

When the House did sit it spent day after day in selecting one by one the 678

unlucky royalists whose estates were to be put up in their third Act of Sale. This

in itself angered the army ofﬁcers, for the victims included many who had sur-

rendered on a promise that their estates would not be forfeit. An Act of Articles,

intended to conﬁrm surrender terms granted by military commanders, had long

been under debate, but when it ﬁnally passed on 28 September it was so clogged

with provisoes that neither ofﬁcers nor royalists felt reassured. Worse still, a

rider was added in November which excluded all those named in the Act of Sale

from its beneﬁts. The army’s sense of honour was deeply offended, and after its

coup in 1653 a number of the royalists concerned had their lands restored by a

committee of ofﬁcers.

Cromwell still went on striving to prevent an open breach. By his own

account he arranged ten or twelve informal meetings between leading ofﬁcers

and MPs during the last six months of the Rump’s rule. At some point, prob-

ably late in 1652, he complained to Quartermaster-General Vernon ‘that he

was pushed on by two parties to do that, the consideration of the issue

whereof made his hair to stand on end’.

He named the two parties’ leaders:

524 The Commonwealth 1649–1653

Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, I, 346. Ludlow, with hindsight, believed Cromwell’s words

to be hypocritical, but they were probably perfectly sincere.

ch16.y8 27/9/02 11:45 AM Page 524

Lambert, who headed those whose more secular outlook saw the Rump as

clinging to power for selﬁsh reasons while doing little to deserve it, and Har-

rison, whose faction lamented that its aversion to the work of reformation

was obstructing the fulﬁlment of the promised kingdom of Christ. On one

ﬁne November afternoon Cromwell and Whitelocke happened to meet in

St James’s Park when both men were taking the air after their day’s work.

Cromwell dismissed his attendants so that he could seek Whitelocke’s frank

advice on what to do about the growing political impasse and the rifts which

were splitting apart those to whom God had given victory over their enemies.

He complained of the Rumpers’ neglect of duty, their pursuit of power and

proﬁt, and the arrogance and corruption of many of them. But since they had

constituted themselves the supreme authority, what other way was there to

control them but by force? Whitelocke predictably argued that force could

not safely or honourably be applied by the army. Cromwell then shocked him

by suddenly asking ‘What if a man should take upon him to be king?’ He

replied that if Cromwell took such a step it would do him more harm than

good, since he already had as much honour and power as if he were king, and

most of his ofﬁcers and the dominant party in both the parliament and the

City were for a commonwealth. If he took the crown he would change the

question from whether England should be a republic or a monarchy to

whether the king should be a Cromwell or a Stuart, and he would suffer a

great loss of support thereby. Cromwell granted that Whitelocke spoke sense,

and pressed him long and hard as to what line of action he would advise. With

much hesitation, and under pledge of secrecy, Whitelocke suggested that

Cromwell might consider ‘bring[ing] in him that hath the legal right to be

king, upon such conditions as you shall think ﬁt, whereby you may secure the

interest of yourself, and of your posterity and of your friends, and of the cause

in which we are engaged’.

Whitelocke sensed a cooling in Cromwell

towards him after this, but he continued to enjoy high public employment

under the Protectorate, and less than ﬁve years after this conversation he was

to play a prominent role in a parliamentary committee appointed to persuade

Cromwell to accept the crown.

The interesting question, of course, is whether Cromwell was seriously

thinking of assuming it towards the end of 1652. Whitelocke thought that he

was, but his reading of Cromwell’s motives, written up long after the event,

was heavily coloured by hindsight, as in the case of that earlier meeting in the

Speaker’s house. It would be naive to suppose that the idea had not crossed

Cromwell’s mind, but he was to show a sincere aversion to the royal title in

1653 and 1657, and it is unsafe to conclude that he was actively seeking it

while the Rump was still sitting. His whole conduct after the dissolution

The Commonwealth in Crisis 525

Diary of Bulstrode Whitelocke, pp. 281–2.

ch16.y8 27/9/02 11:45 AM Page 525

indicates the contrary, as we shall soon see. There were several other occa-

sions on which he threw ideas into the air to see how his friends and associ-

ates would react to them, and he was probably drawing out Whitelocke

because he knew him to be a shrewd and inﬂuential fellow-councillor with a

special skill in public law. He cannot have relished the suggestion of a deal

with Charles II, but he probably respected it as honest advice, honestly given.

By the turn of the year increasing numbers of ofﬁcers were gathering in

London, far beyond the membership of the Council of Ofﬁcers, and meeting

almost daily to seek the Lord in prayer and fasting. Radical ministers in the

capital were preaching incendiary sermons against the Rump. Rumours, true

or false, were feeding the discontent. Bordeaux heard in mid-December from

a prominent MP’s son-in-law that there was a plan afoot in the House to

remove Cromwell from the generalship, and there were other reports of a

design to recall Fairfax. On the last day of the year parliament voted to sell off

Hampton Court, which it had ﬁtted up as a residence for Cromwell after his

return from Worcester. It had the crushing cost of the Dutch war as a pretext,

but Ludlow thought it was because his fellow-members saw the palace as a

temptation to ‘some ambitious man to ascend the throne’.

Material griev-

ances aggravated the army’s discontent. Although the monthly assessment

was raised in December to £120,000, a full third of it was earmarked for the

navy, and each month the army’s pay was falling a further £31,000 in arrears.

There was disquiet too over disbandments. Since Worcester the land forces in

England and Scotland had been brought down from 45,000 to 31,500—a

wholly justiﬁed reduction, but it still hurt. Freedom of expression was also

under threat, for The Faithful Scout, the newspaper which spoke for the

army’s interests and had recently become critical of the parliament, was sup-

pressed after its issue for 18–25 December. The Rump could not look to

popular support to shield it from the army’s rising anger, since on top of the

unprecedented weight of taxation the price of Newcastle coal, on which Lon-

don absolutely depended to keep warm, was being driven up to unaffordable

heights by the Dutch ﬂeet’s presence in the North Sea, and all through the

winter naval press gangs were roaming the streets at night and dragging men

from their beds.

It was therefore no single grievance that was heating the army’s temper

towards ﬂash-point at the beginning of 1653, but the greatest one remained

the Rump’s apparent reluctance to proceed with its bill for a new representa-

tive. Presumably in the hope of mollifying the ofﬁcers, it put Harrison in

charge of the bill on 6 January, in place of Carew, and ordered that it should be

brought in speedily. This is puzzling, because Carew and Harrison were soon

to be close allies, if they were not so already. Both were Fifth Monarchists, and

526 The Commonwealth 1649–1653

Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, I, 347.

ch16.y8 27/9/02 11:45 AM Page 526

they were to be jointly in trouble in 1654 for opposing the Protectorate,

chieﬂy on the grounds that ‘it had a parliament in it, whereby power is derived

from the people, whereas all power belongs to Christ’.

Harrison took no

notice of the Rump’s order, and seems to have done nothing at all about the

bill. Probably he had already lost all faith in elected parliaments, for he was

soon to believe that government should be vested in a Sanhedrin of godly

men, chosen solely by the saints. When the House eventually heard a report

on the bill on 23 February, including some amendments to it, the spokesman

for the committee was the army’s arch-enemy Haselrig. How he came to take

charge of the committee is a mystery, for there is no record of his ever having

been appointed to it; nor is it known what the proposed amendments were.

They seem not to have been good news to the army, which far from moderat-

ing its agitation soon stepped it up. But at least Haselrig got the bill moving

again, and thereafter the parliament spent every Wednesday except one in

debating it in grand committee. Few members, however, troubled to attend:

just forty-two on 23 March, for instance, and forty-four a week later.

By then Cromwell himself had almost certainly come to regard the Rump

as incorrigible, though he went on resisting the army’s growing pressure to

put an end to it. On 11 March he and Desborough only just managed to dis-

suade an enlarged Council of Ofﬁcers from voting to expel it forthwith. One

reason he gave, surely a sincere one, was that it was working towards a peace

with the Dutch. He was also troubled to know what to put in its place. Sum-

mon a new parliament, the ofﬁcers said; but if they did that, he replied, ‘then

the parliament is not the supreme power, but this is the supreme power that

calls it’.

Nevertheless there were signs that he was coming to the end of his

patience with the Rump, for he never again attended the Council of State after

8 March and he stopped coming to the House soon after. It seems that he was

going through a phase similar to that which had preceded Pride’s Purge and

the trial of the king, in which he was convinced that the way things were run-

ning was wrong and ought to be stopped—the treaty of Newport then, the

Rump’s clinging to power now—but was not yet certain that he had a clear

call to perform the violently unconstitutional act that seemed requisite to

set the ship of state on a better course. As before, it was a period of soul-

searching and prayer, and this time he had to think hard how to provide for

the Commonwealth’s future government if he did dissolve the parliament by

force. The puzzle is to explain why in the end he expelled it before he had

decided what should take its place, and historians have differed quite widely

in their attempt to solve it. Any such attempt is bound to involve a fair

amount of hypothesis, since the evidence is inconclusive, if not contradictory.

The Commonwealth in Crisis 527

Clarke Papers, II, 244.

Newsletter quoted by C. H. Firth in ‘Cromwell and the expulsion of the Long Parliament

in 1653’, EHR VIII (1893), 527–8.

ch16.y8 27/9/02 11:45 AM Page 527