Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660
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proposed that it should abdicate. Speaker Rous was clearly in the plot, for he
allowed no hearing to those who wished to speak against the motion, and
when the resigners got up to leave the chamber he rose too and led them,
without putting any question. Those who followed him numbered between
forty and fifty, but they easily outnumbered the thirty or so members who sat
on in the House in protest. It being a Monday, some of the zealots were away
attending the weekly prayer meeting at Blackfriars. Two colonels and a file of
musketeers soon arrived and cleared the protesters from the chamber, for it
was as well not to let them reach a quorum. It looked as though Lambert had
the situation in hand.
Rous and the majority processed to Whitehall Palace, where they con-
sidered and signed a one-sentence document whereby they resigned to
Cromwell the powers that they had received from him. Late-comers soon
swelled their number, and when they were ready Cromwell received them. He
seemed surprised by their resignation, which he said placed a very heavy
burden on him, but he accepted it. He solemnly told his next parliament that
he had known nothing of it beforehand, and that was probably true, because
once Lambert and his colleagues had come up against his blank refusal to
dissolve the parliament by force it was only sensible for them and their friends
in the House to keep their plans from him. But he had been in close consulta-
tion with Lambert and his collaborators over the terms of their proposed
written constitution for several days before the resignation took place, so he
was clearly envisaging at least a possibility of its being implemented. And if
they found it politic not to tell him what they and their friends in the House
were up to, perhaps he was wise enough not to ask questions. There was
certainly no questioning the resignation itself, for within a couple of days
nearly eighty members had signed it. They deserved better than to have their
honest efforts for the Commonwealth wrecked by a wave of irrational
fanaticism, inside and outside the parliament-house, but many had a future in
the coming regime.
If the Rump had had few mourners but the Rumpers, Barebone’s had fewer
by far—not many indeed outside the ranks of the Fifth Monarchy men. There
were predictably some angry sermons from Feake and his kind, but there
were also bonfires in some of London’s streets to attest a spirit of positive
rejoicing. The question was how many of the gathered churches would align
with the Fifth Monarchists in opposing the imminent change in government,
and how the considerably larger number of Baptist congregations would
react; ‘Anabaptist’ was a generic label for extremist sectaries in the hostile
vocabulary of the time. But though some prominent Baptists such as Hanserd
Knollys and Henry Jessey remained suspicious of the Protectorate, three
others of high reputation, William Kiffin, John Spilsbery, and Joseph Fansom,
published a circular letter to the Baptist churches in January 1654, urging
558 The Commonwealth 1649–1653
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them not to engage against it, because the Blackfriars prophets and their
friends in Barebone’s Parliament had been bringing magistracy itself, which
was God’s ordinance, into disrepute. In asserting that the civil magistrate
must derive his power immediately from God, and be accountable to no one
else, they were echoing the claims of Charles I.
19
‘A Story of My Own Weakness and Folly’? 559
19
Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, pp. 349–50. The letter by Kiffin, Spilsbery,
and Fansom is in J. Nickolls (ed.), Original Letters and Papers of State . . . among the Political
Collections of Mr. John Milton (1743), pp. 159–60.
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part iv: further reading
On everything that concerns the government of the Commonwealth down to the
expulsion of the Rump, Blair Worden, The Rump Parliament (Cambridge, 1974) is
the prime authority. The fullest account of the next phase, through Barebone’s Parlia-
ment to the establishment of the Protectorate, is in the present writer’s Common-
wealth to Protectorate (Oxford, 1982; repr., 2000). For Scotland, where David
Stevenson, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Scotland (1977) leaves off, the
story is taken up by F. D. Dow’s equally excellent Cromwellian Scotland (Edinburgh,
1979). On the military campaigns we have John D. Grainger, Cromwell against the
Scots: The Last Anglo-Scottish War, 1650–1652 (East Linton, 1997). For Ireland, the
broad account in A New History of Ireland, III (Oxford, 1976) is filled out by Tom
Reilly’s spirited Cromwell: An Honourable Enemy (Dingle, 1999), J. Scott Wheeler’s
more critical Cromwell in Ireland (1999), and the essays edited by Jane Ohlmeyer in
Ireland, from Independence to Occupation, 1641–1660 (Cambridge, 1995). Ohlm-
eyer also gives the best concise account of ‘The Civil Wars in Ireland’, in The Civil
Wars: A Military History of England, Scotland and Ireland 1638–1660, edited by
John Kenyon and herself (Oxford, 1998).
On the challenge to successive Commonwealth governments by extreme millenar-
ians, see Bernard Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men (1972) and Murray Tolmie, The
Triumph of the Saints (Cambridge, 1977). For the controversies over tithes, lay
patronage, and clerical maintenance, Christopher Hill, Economic Problems of the
Church from Archbishop Whitgift to the Long Parliament (Oxford, 1956 and later
paperback editions) continues to be most helpful. Regarding the law, Donald Veall,
The Popular Movement for Law Reform 1640–1660 (Oxford, 1970) is the prime rec-
ommendation, but see also Stuart E. Prall, The Agitation for Law Reform in the Pur-
itan Revolution (The Hague, 1966) and Mary Cotterell’s seminal article in English
Historical Review LXXXIII (1968).
On the first Dutch War, Charles Wilson’s classic Profit and Power (1957) has been
modified but not superseded by Steven C. A. Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism:
Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650–1668 (Cambridge, 1996).
On the navy and naval operations, Bernard Capp, Cromwell’s Navy (Oxford, 1989)
continues to be the prime recommendation, but see also Michael Baumber, General-
at-Sea: Robert Blake and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution in Naval Warfare
(1989) and J. R. Powell, Robert Blake, General-at-Sea (1972).
For books on Cromwell see Further Reading for Part V.
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part v
Cromwell’s Protectorate
1653–1658
V
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w
eighteen
w
A New Order in Three Nations
With Barebone’s Parliament gone, nothing stood in the way of Lambert’s
Instrument of Government; indeed there was no other practicable way of
filling the constitutional hiatus, short of bringing back the king. The day after
the resignation, Lambert summoned a large concourse of army officers—con-
siderably larger, it appears, than the regular General Council—to the Coun-
cil Chamber in Whitehall, where he himself read the Instrument to them. He
asked for their assent so that it could be formally presented to Cromwell in
the name of them all. Some raised objections to it, as Harrisons’s Fifth
Monarchist faction was bound to do, but there may also have been a few
uncompromising republicans among the unconvinced. Some may have
remembered the many days spent in constitutional debate at Reading and
Putney years earlier. But he persuaded the company that this was not a time
for disputing over the document, for it had been under consideration for two
months already, and it was important to keep the present Interregnum as brief
as possible, with Feake and his brethren still ranting away and the cavaliers
awaiting their chance. He secured the meeting’s concurrence in general terms,
promising that any suggested amendments would be considered. Cromwell’s
acceptance was already assured, for his title and other matters had been
agreed in the course of close discussions with Lambert and his collaborators
over recent days. A few details still probably remained to be settled, as did the
important selection of the council, to which the constitution allotted a major
role. But the new government was publicly inaugurated only three days after
Lambert’s meeting with the officers, and Cromwell was solemnly admitted to
the office of Lord Protector on 16 December 1653.
The ceremony was staged in Westminster Hall, and its organizers took care
to involve the Lord Mayor and aldermen of London in it as prominently as
the new Council of State. Ranks of soldiers lined the route of the procession
from Whitehall, but Cromwell himself wore a plain black suit and cloak.
After the Instrument had been read out he took the oath prescribed in it,
swearing to observe all its provisions, and in all else to govern England, Scot-
land, and Ireland according to their respective laws, statutes, and customs.
He made a short speech, saying that his aim was that the gospel should shine
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in all its splendour and that the people should enjoy their just rights and prop-
erty; then the company took coaches to the Banqueting Hall and heard a ser-
mon. It is hard to gauge the public reaction to the day’s show. There was some
applause from those who turned out to watch it, but Bordeaux was not the
only foreign diplomat to remark the general silence and indifference with
which it was received. The ceremony was so little publicized in advance, how-
ever, that not many Londoners can have been fully aware of what was
happening and what it signified. The Fifth Monarchists, of course, thought
they knew perfectly. At Sunday service on 18 December Feake and Powell
denounced Cromwell from the pulpit as ‘the dissemblingest perjured villain
in the world’,
1
and at the next day’s prayer meeting at Blackfriars preacher
after preacher hurled Scripture-laden diatribes against him. Feake and Powell
were imprisoned for a few days and the Blackfriars exercises banned, only for
their brethren to shift their base to Christ Church in Newgate. But the Fifth
Monarchists’ excesses were losing them such public sympathy as they still
commmanded, and they ceased to be a serious danger when they lost their
places in the seats of power, both at Westminster and in the army. Harrison
was asked for an assurance that he recognized and would obey the new gov-
ernment, and was quietly cashiered when he declined. Only two or three
other officers of his persuasion resigned their commissions when faced with
the same choice. Three or four colonels nursed more secular reservations
about Cromwell’s elevation which would surface later, but the army as a
whole took it very quietly, and most of its senior officers welcomed it.
The constitution which defined Cromwell’s powers, and which was to be
the basis of Britain’s government for the next three and a half years, was an
honest and on the whole intelligent piece of work by Lambert and his collab-
orators, and not a mere cloak for a dictatorship. It did not establish a single
sovereign power, but distinguished and partially separated the legislative
authority and the executive.
2
The former was vested jointly in the Protector
and parliament, the latter in the Protector ‘assisted with a council’, numbering
not fewer than thirteen or more than twenty-one. The council was in fact
accorded as important a constitutional role as the parliament, and limited the
Protector’s powers far more than the pre-war privy council had limited the
monarch’s. He was required to govern by its advice in all matters, and deci-
sions of peace and war needed the consent of the majority of its members.
Upon the death of a Protector, the election of his successor was entrusted to
the council, and to the council alone. In exercising the all-important control
and disposition of the armed forces by sea and land, the Protector had to act
with the consent of the majority of the council when parliament was not
564 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658
1
Thurloe State Papers, I, 641.
2
Text in Gardiner (ed.), Constitutional Documents, pp. 405–17.
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sitting, and with parliament’s own consent when it was. No limit was set to
councillors’ tenure of office, and neither the Protector nor parliament could
dismiss them at pleasure, but an elaborate procedure was prescribed for
removing and punishing any who were found guilty of corruption or other
misconduct. When a councillor died or was dismissed, parliament was to
nominate six candidates, the council was to select two of them, and the
Protector was to appoint which of the pair he preferred. These provisions
concerning the appointment and tenure of councillors were to prove highly
controversial, and could have led to great friction if the Protector and parlia-
ment were ever at loggerheads, but they expressed Lambert’s and his fellow-
officers’ embittered memories of the total subordination of the council to
the Rump.
Parliaments were to be elected at three-year intervals, though the interval
was to be measured from the dissolution of the preceding parliament, not
from its election. This followed the precedent of the Long Parliament’s Tri-
ennial Act, which set up procedures to ensure that not more than three years
should elapse between one parliament’s end and another’s beginning. But
whereas the 1641 act had fixed fifty days as a parliament’s guaranteed min-
imum life, the Instrument protected it against dissolution (except by its own
consent) for five months, and it set no explicit limit to its sitting. This may
have been an oversight, because Cromwell certainly assumed that the consti-
tution prevented parliaments from perpetuating themselves. But the authors
of the Instrument were respectful towards the Long Parliament’s decisions,
including those of the Rump, whose abortive bill for a new representative
they followed with regard to both the franchise (vested in adult males owning
real or personal property worth £200) and the distribution of seats. There
were to be four hundred members for England and Wales and thirty apiece
for Scotland and Ireland. The English and Welsh constituencies were
radically reapportioned, with only the larger towns retaining separate
representation; county seats outnumbered those for cities and boroughs by
more than two to one. Roman Catholics and Irish rebels were permanently
disqualified from voting or standing; so for a limited period were former
active royalists, unless they had since ‘given signal testimony of their good
affection’. The council was empowered to scrutinize the returns to the next
three parliaments and to exclude members who fell outside the qualifications.
The first parliament of the regime was to meet on 3 September next, the
anniversary of Dunbar and Worcester, and until then the Protector and
council were given a purely temporary power to make ordinances, whose
continuance would be subject to parliament’s assent.
The tricky question of a veto was resolved in a liberal spirit by providing
that if the Protector did not consent to a bill within twenty days, and parlia-
ment then declared its wish to persist with it, the bill should become law,
A New Order in Three Nations 565
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unless it contravened anything contained in the Instrument itself. The latter
has been criticized for making no provision for its possible revision or amend-
ment, but it left the way open for this to be effected by mutual consent. On the
no less thorny matter of the revenue, it was written into the constitution that
the state should have enough to support an army of 30,000 (which was little
more than half the forces afoot late in 1653), ‘a convenient number of ships
for guarding of the seas’ (thus left conveniently vague), along with £200,000
a year for civil government; but any further taxation, including what was
needed to maintain ‘the present extraordinary forces, both at sea and land’,
required parliamentary consent.
On the most sensitive of all issues the Instrument laid down ‘That the
Christian religion, as contained in the Scriptures, be held forth and recom-
mended as the public profession of these nations’, and its authors probably
envisaged that a new confession of faith would be formulated, less rigid than
that of the Westminster Assembly. This was not attempted until 1658, but it
was intended to be binding only on the parochial clergy, whose funding from
tithes was to be replaced ‘as soon as may be’ by a less objectionable provision
(it never was). But though so much of an established church was to be
retained, no one was to be compelled to attend its services or bow to its dis-
cipline. All who professed faith in God by Jesus Christ were to be free to prac-
tise their religion, so long as they did not abuse it to the civil injury of others,
or disturb the peace, or invoke it to justify licentiousness. This liberty was not
to extend to ‘popery or prelacy’, but there was a widespread de facto toler-
ation of Anglican worship throughout the 1650s, and even towards catholics
Cromwell’s government was more indulgent than the letter of the law and
the constitution prescribed. He was consistently more tolerant than his
parliaments.
He certainly thought well of the constitution under which he ruled; he was
to defend it passionately when it came under parliament’s attack. But his
immediate reason for assuming the office of Protector was that he saw it as a
matter of necessity rather than choice, in order to prevent the country from
heading further towards anarchy. ‘I saw we were running headlong into con-
fusion and disorder’, he said in retrospect, ‘and would necessarily run into
blood, and I was passive to those that desired me to undertake the place that
now I have.’
3
At a deeper level he believed that after the failure of each succes-
sive regime since the first Civil War to achieve settlement, and in view of the
actual power and responsibility that he carried as commander-in-chief, divine
providence was directing him to accept the headship of the state, on the terms
that were so strongly pressed upon him. He felt the easier about it because
those terms set strict limits upon a power which, after Barebone’s resigned, he
566 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658
3
Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, IV, 470.
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had felt to be constitutionally unbounded. As he told his first parliament, ‘In
every government there must be somewhat fundamental, somewhat like a
Magna Carta, that should be standing and be unalterable’. For him the
Instrument filled that role. He endorsed the official apologia which Marcha-
mont Nedham wrote in January 1654 and published as A True State of the
Case of the Commonwealth; Cromwell expressly commended it to his first
parliament. Nedham eulogized the Protectoral constitution for embodying
elements of the three classic forms of government, monarchy, aristocracy,
and democracy, in perfect balance, each contributing its particular virtues
and restraining the possible abuses of the others.
In taking the council to represent aristocracy, Nedham was using the latter
word in its classical rather than its modern sense, but the actual composition
of Cromwell’s council, no less than the powers given to it and to the parlia-
ment by the Instrument, should help us to judge whether the Protectorate
deserves to be characterized as a military dictatorship, as it so often has been.
Fifteen councillors were appointed by name in the Instrument, and three
more were added during the next six months. Ten of the eighteen were civil-
ians, and only Lambert, Fleetwood, Desborough, and the elderly, semi-retired
Skippon were members of the field army. The remaining four were styled
colonel, but three of them were administrators rather than soldiers, like Philip
Jones, who commanded fifty men in Cardiff Castle but was really a sort of
unofficial minister for Wales. The fourth, Edward Montagu, who was soon
to be Pepys’s patron and later Earl of Sandwich, had last commanded a regi-
ment in 1645, though he was to become a General at Sea in 1656. Cromwell’s
council contained men of such diverse and independent views as Francis
Rous, Viscount Lisle, Sir Charles Wolseley (still only twenty-three), Sir
Gilbert Pickering, and Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper. Such a body of men was
unlikely to act collectively as a rubber stamp to a dictatorship, nor did it.
Cromwell wielded immense personal authority, and he would never have
become Lord Protector if he had not been Lord General. But he had a genuine
aversion to dictatorial power, and the constitution was genuinely designed to
prevent such a thing. How far he observed its letter and spirit, and how far his
rule can be characterized as military, can best be assessed when we have
watched it in action over the next five years.
If 1653 was a climacteric year in the English political scene, it also marked a
crucial phase in the resettlement of Scotland and Ireland, though in neither
country did the process fit so neatly within a twelvemonth.
It will be remembered that after Worcester the Rump had first intended to
annex Scotland to England, but had quite soon decided instead upon a union
between the two commonwealths. While its terms were being considered at
Westminster it sent eight commissioners north to lay the foundations of a
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