Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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As April went on, however, it required only a small trigger to release the

coiled spring of Cromwell’s frustration, which was being wound tighter by

the Rump’s animus against the sects and religious unorthodoxy in general. In

considering the proposals of its committee for the propagation of the gospel, it

threatened to place restrictions on lay preaching, in which many members of

the army had engaged. It gave a warm welcome to an orchestrated wave of

county petitions, urging it to uphold a godly learned ministry against sectaries

who were striking at the very roots of the established clergy, and calling for a

new assembly of divines to help mend the present sad divisions in England—

presumably by deﬁning permitted doctrine more strictly. But for many the

crux came when the Commission for the Propagation of the Gospel in Wales,

which had been established for an initial three-year term, became due for

renewal at the end of March. It had, as we have seen, become highly suspect

because of the extent to which it had been colonized by the Fifth Monarchists,

but the Committee for Plundered Ministers had cleared it of the charges of

misappropriating ecclesiastical revenue. Many senior ofﬁcers and garrison

commanders in Wales, not for the most part extremists, were engaged in the

commission’s work, and it really had been promoting the preaching of the

gospel in some rather dark corners of the land. On 1 April, the day appointed

for considering the renewal of the act on which its authority rested, the House

threw it out. Walter Cradock, the commission’s most famous and distin-

guished pastor, was to have preached before parliament later in the month,

but his engagement was cancelled. The anger of Harrison and his party can

be imagined, and Cromwell shared it, though his religious convictions stood

some way from theirs. When he explained his reasons for expelling the Rump

to the Nominated Parliament which succeeded it, he said that its treatment of

the Welsh Propagators ‘was as plain a trial of their spirits as anything, it being

known to many of us that God did kindle a seed there hardly to be parallelled

since the primitive times’.

The Rump’s historian has fairly commented that

‘In its later stages the House seems at times to have been possessed of a death-

wish’,

but if its refusal to renew the commission at just this time looks like a

piece of sheer folly, the blame for the impending crisis did not all lie on one

side. Cromwell and Harrison could not convincingly complain about deci-

sions that offended them when they had given up even trying to make their

own case heard in the House, and registering their own votes. Their non-

attendance may have led their opponents to believe that a violent end was

imminent anyway, and that there was no longer any point in making con-

ciliatory moves that went against their own convictions.

Debate on the bill for a new representative trickled on during March. On

528 The Commonwealth 1649–1653

Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, III, 57.

Worden, Rump Parliament, p. 286.

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the 30th the House voted to vest the franchise in all men possessing property,

real or personal, worth £200. The annual value of land worth £200 was com-

monly reckoned at £20, which was roughly equivalent to the old 40s. when

that rate was ﬁxed before the great inﬂation, and the time-honoured restric-

tion to freehold land was now removed. This cannot have been a bone of con-

tention between parliament and army, for the same franchise, and the same

redistribution of constituencies, were embodied in the written constitution

that the chief ofﬁcers presented to Cromwell eight months later. A week after-

wards, however, the regular Wednesday debate on the bill was laid aside to

make way for other business, and that may have been the last straw. The

debate was resumed on 13 April, when the House voted unexceptionably that

future members must be ‘persons of known integrity, fearing God, and not

scandalous in their conversation’. It may have meant this as a conciliatory

move, but if so it came too late, because Cromwell had decided to cut the

knot. Next day or the day after, he took his seat for the ﬁrst time in over a

month, and on the 18th and 19th he held crucial meetings of the Council of

Ofﬁcers, to which he put a drastic proposal for resolving what he saw now as

a hopeless impasse. After the second session he put his plan again to about

twenty ofﬁcers and a select group of MPs whom he summoned to his apart-

ments in Whitehall. What he proposed (if that is not too mild a word) was

that the Rump should appoint a caretaker government consisting of about

forty men, chosen from its own membership and from the army, commission

them to exercise the supreme authority until the country was deemed to be in

a ﬁt temper to elect a new parliament, and then dissolve itself. This startling

scheme had a mixed reception from the MPs present, but after it had been dis-

cussed far into the night Cromwell and his fellow-ofﬁcers believed that those

members had ﬁrmly agreed to get the next day’s scheduled debate on the bill

put off, and further proceedings on it suspended, until his proposals had been

fully considered. He invited those present to another conference next after-

noon or evening.

It seems strange that Cromwell counted on the score of members who came

to this meeting to persuade the House to lay aside its bid in favour of his

scheme, especially as they were by no means all won over to it; strange too

that he had no thought of taking his seat next day and commending it to the

rest of the members in person. He evidently counted on parliament to give it

full consideration, and perhaps chose not to sway the debate by the pressure

of his presence. At any rate he dressed simply and informally on the morning

of the 20th, and resumed discussion of his plan for an interim government

with a small group of members and ofﬁcers at his Whitehall lodgings. He was

taken totally by surprise when news was brought that the Rump was not

only busy on its own bill but was bent on passing it into law that very day. He

refused at ﬁrst to believe it, but after a second messenger and then a third

The Commonwealth in Crisis 529

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conﬁrmed it he gave orders to assemble a body of soldiers and hastened to

the House. There he found between eighty and a hundred members sitting,

double or more the number that had turned up for the recent weekly debates

on the bill. Obviously, those opposed to a dissolution had summoned all the

supporters they could muster, knowing that if they could get an act for the elec-

tion of a new parliament passed into law, a violent dissolution by the army

would be a very hard action to justify. It was such a plausible tactic that it

seems odd that Cromwell was so surprised at it, though he may have thought

it incredible that a bill which had been on the stocks for nineteen months

could be rushed through in two or three hours. He took his usual seat and lis-

tened in silence for a while. Only when the Speaker was about to put the ﬁnal

question, prior to the formal passing of the bill, did he rise and speak. He

began by praising the parliament’s care of the public good in the past, but

with mounting fury he castigated its subsequent neglect thereof, its denial and

delays of justice, its self-seeking, and its espousal of the corrupt, oppressive

interests of Presbytery and the lawyers. Then, putting on his hat, he strode up

and down the ﬂoor of the House, denouncing individual members as whore-

masters, drunkards, and a scandal to the profession of the gospel. ‘You are no

parliament’, he shouted at the climax of his wrath, ‘I will put an end to your

sitting’, and turning to Harrison, bade him ‘Call them in! Call them in!’ The

serjeant opened the doors, and in marched Lieutenant-Colonel Worsley with

thirty or forty musketeers. Vane, in shock, protested: ‘This is not honest, yea

it is against morality and common honesty.’ Cromwell turned on him, shout-

ing ‘Oh Sir Henry Vane! Sir Henry Vane! The Lord deliver me from Sir Henry

Vane!’ It seems likely that Cromwell thought he had a pledge from Vane to

use his inﬂuence to get proceedings on the bill suspended, for he called him a

juggler as he was leaving the House, and said he ‘might have prevented this

extraordinary course’.

Having ordered Worsley to clear the chamber, Cromwell laid hands on the

mace, the sacrosanct symbol that the Commons were in session. ‘What shall

we do with this bauble?’, he asked, then turning to a soldier said ‘Here, take

it away.’ Not all the members left willingly; the Speaker refused to leave his

chair until Harrison gave him an arm, as if to make him do so, and Algernon

Sydney had to be similarly stirred out of his seat. But there was no crude phys-

ical violence, and as the members ﬁled out Cromwell’s mood seemed to be

turning from anger to sadness. ‘It’s you that have forced me to do this,’ he told

them, ‘for I have sought the Lord night and day, that he would rather slay me

than put me upon the doing of this work.’

He may well have been unjust in

his bitter attack on Vane, who for all he knew may have tried and failed to

530 The Commonwealth 1649–1653

All the contemporary sources recording Cromwell’s words and actions on this day are

printed in Abbott, Writings and Speeches, II, 640–6. For valuable comments on them see Wor-

den, Rump Parliament, pp. 334–9, and Firth’s notes in Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, I, 351–7.

ch16.y8 27/9/02 11:45 AM Page 530

persuade the House to give his proposals a hearing. At a distance of three and

a half centuries those proposals look less plausible than they appeared to him.

His caretaker government of forty men, however honest, could not have

given the potential supporters of the Commonwealth the reforms that they

had long craved, and who were they to judge when and how elections to a

new parliament should take place? The decision was bound in practice to lie

with the army. But if Cromwell was looking for the one man who did most to

quash his scheme, rally his opponents, and try to force the Rump’s bill

through, that man was probably Haselrig. He had become the most implac-

able opponent of all challengers to the supreme power of parliament, whether

royalist or military. He had somehow taken charge of the committee entrust-

ed with the bill. He would lead the parliamentary attacks on the successive

constitutions of the Cromwellian Protectorate, and when the Rump was

restored in 1659–60 he would play a dominant role in it, pointing it on even

more suicidal courses than in 1652–3. Ludlow, who knew him well,

described him as ‘a man of disobliging carriage, sour and morose of temper,

liable to be transported with passion, to whom liberality seemed to be a vice’;

but he had no doubts whatever ‘concerning the rectitude and sincerity of his

intentions’.

Cromwell had not seen the last of Haselrig when he left the parliament-

house that day. On returning to Whitehall he found some resolute members

of the Council of State, including Haselrig, Scot, and Bradshaw, sitting in the

Council Chamber as usual, evidently determined to carry on some semblance

of constitutional government. Cromwell, accompanied by Lambert and Har-

rison, told them that if they met there as private persons they would not be

disturbed, but that since the parliament had been dissolved the council’s

authority had terminated with it. ‘Sir,’ replied Bradshaw, ‘we have heard

what you did at the House in the morning, and before many hours all England

will hear it: but, sir, you are mistaken to think that the parliament is dissolved,

for no power under heaven can dissolve them but themselves; therefore take

you notice of that.’

It is much easier to recount what happened on 20 April 1653 than to

explain why it happened; indeed historians still differ in their readings of

Cromwell’s motives, and acknowledge that an element of uncertainty

remains. Two time-honoured interpretations have to be discarded. One,

advanced by his opponents from an early stage, is that his coup was part of a

premeditated design to take the supreme power into his own hands. His sub-

sequent actions belie such a charge, no less than his words. If his breaking of

the Rump had been a deliberate step on the path to a dictatorship, he would

surely have planned the next step, but he clearly had not, and it is doubtful

The Commonwealth in Crisis 531

Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, II, 133.

Ibid., I, 367.

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whether his fellow-ofﬁcers would have stood for it if he had. He can be

accused of naivety in supposing that his scheme for an interim ruling council

of forty men would ﬁnd acceptance with the Rump, but all the indications are

that he saw it as a way forward to a resumption of government by a regular

session of elected parliaments. When its summary rejection drove him to

expel the Rump, it was an unpremeditated act, and he had so little idea of

what to do next that he sent for his fellow-members Salwey and Carew and

asked them to persuade St John, Selden, and other constitutional experts to

draw up ‘some instrument of government that might put the power out of his

hands’. But Salwey boldly yet respectfully advised him that the way out of the

temptations offered by the prospect of unrestrained authority was ‘to rest

persuaded that the power of the nation is in the good people of England, as

formerly it was’.

A much more enduring explanation of Cromwell’s action, accepted by all

historians until quite recently, was that the bill he was so desperate to prevent

from passing was not really for a new representative, but for ﬁlling up the

present one by means of elections only to the vacant seats. But though such a

recruitment scheme had been considered on and off for years, Blair Worden

has demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that the bill that was before the

House when Cromwell expelled it really did provide for general elections to a

new parliament, which was to meet in November.

This leaves us with the

problem of explaining why, when the Rump was apparently on the point of

doing what the army had been pressing for ever since Worcester, Cromwell

intervened so violently to prevent it. Worden’s suggestion is that Cromwell

had quite recently changed his mind about the desirability of a new parlia-

ment because he had become temporarily converted to Harrison’s and the

Fifth Monarchists’ ideal of a kingdom ruled for Christ by his saints. But there

are difﬁculties with the hypothesis that he had a rush of millenarian blood to

the head. There is no positive evidence for it, his conduct of national affairs

after the dissolution is inconsistent with it, and the Fifth Monarchists them-

selves had as yet no agreed model for an elitist rule of the saints. Harrison

himself claimed to have warned Cromwell, just as he rose to dissolve the

Rump, that ‘the work is very great and dangerous’, and that he should con-

sider seriously before he acted.

We are driven back to concluding that the main reason for his precipitate

action lay in the bill itself, or in what he thought was in the bill. But the bill

does not survive, for Cromwell seized it from the clerk’s table before he

532 The Commonwealth 1649–1653

Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, I, 358. We cannot be sure that these were Salwey’s precise

words at the time, but he was a very close associate of Ludlow, who records them.

Blair Worden, ‘The Bill for a New Representative: the dissolution of the Long Parliament,

April 1653’, EHR LXXXVI (1971), 473–96; Rump Parliament, Part 5, passim.

Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, I, 352.

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stormed out of the House, and it has never been seen again. He was to shift

his ground suspiciously as to what he found most wrong with it, but he was

consistent in some of his objections to it, and they were not groundless. One

was that it contained no adequate safeguards against the next and future par-

liaments being dominated by members who were uncommitted to a

Commonwealth, or even positively disaffected to it. He himself asked the

conference that he convened on 19 April ‘Whether the next parliament were

not like to consist of all Presbyters? Whether those qualiﬁcations [in the bill]

would hinder them? Or neuters?’

The bill by all accounts did disbar papists,

Irish rebels, and all who had fought for Charles I, and it required members to

take the Engagement to be faithful to the Commonwealth as it was estab-

lished without a king or House of Lords. But so much casuistry had developed

around the Engagement, and so many obvious non-republicans had taken it,

that it was not a trustworthy political test. The problem was not to exclude

royalists but to forestall the return of a majority of conservatives with irre-

proachable parliamentarian credentials who were opposed to religious lib-

erty, social and legal reform, and all that the army and its friends understood

by ‘a godly reformation’.

Then there was the larger question of who was to ensure that the qualiﬁca-

tions laid down for members, such as they were, were duly enforced. Nor-

mally the incoming House of Commons, and no one else, ruled whether its

members had a right to take their seats and determined disputed elections.

But it was evidently part of the Rump’s bill that it should reconvene immedi-

ately before the new representative took its place, obviously with the purpose

of determining whether the incoming members were duly qualiﬁed. The ques-

tion that the Speaker was about to put on 20 April when Cromwell inter-

rupted the proceedings was for appointing 3 November as the date of the

present parliament’s dissolution.

It seems to have been assumed that it

would adjourn for part of the intervening period, but nobody could know for

how long. Haselrig’s close ally Thomas Scot said in the House in 1659 that

they might have sat on for four or ﬁve months, to see the Dutch war to a con-

clusion.

But if the new House of Commons was unsympathetic to the qual-

iﬁcations laid down for its members, nothing could make it adhere to them

once the Rump had gone—nothing, that is, but the intervention of the army.

For its part, the army was all too conscious of recent rumours about an inten-

tion to remove Cromwell from the generalship and purge its senior ranks. By

November, it feared, it might have been in no condition to act. A glance ahead

to what was actually to happen in the spring of 1660 will show what it

The Commonwealth in Crisis 533

Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, p. 28.

See the letter from Marten’s unpublished papers quoted in Worden, Rump Parliament,

p. 365, and the speech by Reynolds in ibid., p. 366.

Diary of Thomas Burton, ed. J. T. Rutt (4 vols., 1828), III, 111–12.

ch16.y8 27/9/02 11:45 AM Page 533

genuinely had to fear. Before the restored Long Parliament ﬁnally dissolved

itself in March 1660, the act that it passed to regulate the elections to its suc-

cessor debarred not only all those who had fought against it in the 1640s but

their sons too, as well as all papists and participants in the Irish rebellion. Yet

the Convention Parliament ignored all such restrictions on its membership

and proclaimed King Charles II within a fortnight of its ﬁrst meeting. In

1653 there was of course no such tide of resurgent royalism running as in

Restoration year, but there was no great enthusiasm for the Commonwealth

either.

These considerations may be enough to explain why Cromwell thought it

so urgent to prevent the Rump’s bill from passing. A general election with

parliament and army in partnership to see it through safely was a risk worth

taking, but with the two at loggerheads, and with the Rump empowered to

vet the returns in the interests of its own kind, it certainly was not. Yet there

was probably something more to it than that. There are strong indications

that when Cromwell hurried to the House on 20 April he really believed that

the bill was somehow skewed to ensure that ‘these present members were to

sit and to be made up by others chosen, and by themselves approved of ’.

These were the words of the ﬁrst report of the dissolution, in the next days’s

issue of one of the two ofﬁcial newspapers, and they cannot have been pub-

lished without authority. It was quite uncharacteristic of Cromwell to put out

a direct falsehood, and it would have been damaging if its untruth could have

been immediately exposed. But the paper printed what seems to have been

generally believed at the time. On that same 21 April Bordeaux, the best

informed of the foreign diplomats (he was in personal touch with several

MPs), reported home that the Rumpers thought only about how to continue

their own authority, and were legislating for a new representative with such

conditions that they would be able to conﬁrm their own places in it, and

ensure that the army ofﬁcers had none.

But as soon as Cromwell and his

fellow-ofﬁcers had had time to study the bill they began to backtrack. The

declaration that they published on 22 April, to explain their action, said of

the bill that the members ‘resolved to make use of it to recruit the House

with persons of the same spirit and temper, thereby to perpetuate their own

sitting’

—an ambiguous allegation, but it marked the beginning of a retreat.

It may seem extraordinary to suggest that Cromwell was unfamiliar with

the contents of the bill when he interrupted its passage, but it really does seem

that he may have been surprised by what he read in it when he got it back to

Whitehall. One can only conjecture what lay behind the inconsistencies in his

534 The Commonwealth 1649–1653

Severall Proceedings of State Affairs no. 186, 14–21 April 1653, p. 2944; cf. Woolrych,

Commonwealth to Protectorate, pp. 80–1.

Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, p. 80.

Gardiner (ed.), Constitutional Documents, p. 401.

ch16.y8 27/9/02 11:45 AM Page 534

utterances on the subject, but one hypothesis—and it is no more—seems to

accord both with his own conduct and that of the bill’s promoters. It is that

when the bill was reintroduced by Haselrig in February 1653 it contained

some provision which, without going as far as substituting a mere recruit-

ment for a general election, nevertheless guaranteed a certain number of the

present members a seat in the new parliament, conceivably as supernumerary

county representatives. This would account for the army’s manifest dissatis-

faction with the bill from at least early March onward, especially if, as

Bordeaux reported, serving ofﬁcers were to be disqualiﬁed from standing.

Bordeaux was not alone in reporting at the time that the leading Rumpers

were bent on holding on to power. On our hypothesis Cromwell was aware

of this provision in the bill, and disliked it so much that he was determined to

prevent it from passing. His ultimatum on 19 April brought Haselrig hurry-

ing to London, where he was seldom seen these days except for the Wednes-

day debates on the bill. He and his like-minded fellow-members may have

then decided to rush the bill through without the offending clause, rather than

lose it altogether, even though it meant giving up a guaranteed seat in the new

parliament. This was perhaps preferable in their eyes to Cromwell’s scheme,

which threatened a large enhancement of the army’s power, removed the

Rump’s intended control over the electoral process, and postponed elections

indeﬁnitely. Cromwell, it is suggested, did not know of this last-minute deci-

sion to drop the provision of assured places for favoured Rumpers when he

went to the House on the 20th, and was surprised to ﬁnd it missing from the

bill when he read it back in Whitehall.

This would explain why Cromwell and the ofﬁcers had to beat an awkward

retreat from their ﬁrst allegations that the bill would have perpetuated the

Rumpers in power, and why he never published it. But the bill’s authors were

equally coy about publicizing its contents, either in 1653 or when they

returned to power six years later. Only one member is known to have record-

ed an express denial that the bill contained anything like a recruitment clause,

and he was describing it as it was when Cromwell seized it. His open letter

survives among Marten’s unpublished papers, and it may or may not have

been written by him. It reads as though it was written for publication, but it

was never printed. Professor Worden has fairly remarked that both sides may

have had something to hide.

Whatever the full explanation of the dissolution may be, it left Cromwell

with the practical responsibility for providing the country immediately with

some sort of government, and he seems to have had little idea in those ﬁrst few

days of how to go about it. The declaration which he and his ofﬁcers put on

The Commonwealth in Crisis 535

Worden, ‘The Bill for a New Representative’, p. 495. The ‘Marten’ letter is discussed there

and in Rump Parliament, pp. 364ff.; also by myself in Commonwealth to Protectorate, pp. 81–3.

ch16.y8 27/9/02 11:45 AM Page 535

22 April announced a vague intention ‘to call to the government persons of

approved ﬁdelity’, and went on to say ‘that as we have been led by necessity

and providence to act as we have done, . . . so we shall . . . put ourselves

wholly upon the Lord for a blessing’.

To profane ears that sounds very like

‘Lord only knows where we go from here’.

536 The Commonwealth 1649–1653

Gardiner (ed.), Constitutional Documents, p. 403.

ch16.y8 27/9/02 11:45 AM Page 536

seventeen

‘A Story of My Own Weakness

and Folly’?

Addressing members of another parliament four years later, Cromwell

described his attempt to set up a new supreme authority in place of the Rump

as ‘a story of my own weakness and folly’.

Perhaps he took too much of the

blame for what was really a collective decision, and perhaps he was rather

hard on himself.

He started off with some advantages. The country and the capital took his

coup very calmly, for the Rump had few mourners besides the Rumpers. He

hardly exaggerated when he said later that ‘there was not so much as the

barking of a dog’,

and a wag who pinned a notice on the door of the Com-

mons’ chamber reading ‘This House is to be let, now unfurnished’ caught the

public mood. One small petition apart, there were no demonstrations of

protest against the expulsion; the army was solidly behind Cromwell, and the

gathered churches were positively jubilant. But he and his fellow-ofﬁcers

were so unprepared for the responsibility they had undertaken that they

needed time to consider how to provide even temporarily for the government

of the country. Their public declaration of 22 April promised vaguely enough

to call to it ‘persons of approved ﬁdelity and honesty’, and privately they con-

sulted a number of the more sympathetic former MPs on how best to ﬁll the

constitutional vacuum. They took an early decision to set up a Council of

State, to carry on day-to-day administration and conduct relations with for-

eign powers. It was much smaller than the Rump’s council, numbering just

thirteen members. Cromwell and three others, Lambert, Harrison, and

Matthew Tomlinson, were ofﬁcers in the ﬁeld army. Colonels Philip Jones,

Robert Bennett, and Anthony Stapley were primarily administrators with

some authority over local garrisons, and the other six were civilians. Eight of

the thirteen had sat in the Rump and one more in the pre-Purge Long Parlia-

ment. Only four were regicides, and Harrison and Carew were the only Fifth

Monarchists. It was not an unbalanced body, or in temper a revolutionary

Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, IV, 489.

Ibid., III, 453.

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