Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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was sitting, and the sticking-points were not only the unacceptable English

demands, which included a partial fusion of sovereignties and the permanent

exclusion of the house of Orange from the stadholderate. There was a fear

abroad in the Netherlands that England intended to swallow them up as she

had swallowed Ireland and Scotland, and with this went a great surge of

Orangist feeling. Town after town witnessed popular demonstrations in

favour of the immediate revival of the stadholderate, even though William III

was still an infant, and some even set up irregular Orangist municipal gov-

ernments. Jan de Witt, the Grand Pensionary of Holland and chief proponent

of peace with England, narrowly escaped being lynched in the Hague. It has

been suggested that one reason why Cromwell and his colleagues stuck so

long to their proposal for a ‘coalition’ between the republics was the need

they felt to stem the pro-Orange, pro-Stuart tide that was running in the

Netherlands.

A sequence of events in the second half of 1653 opened the way to a peace

acceptable to both sides. The violently Orangist Admiral Tromp was killed in

action on 31 July, and his successor, the republican Jacob van Wassenaer,

Lord of Opdam, quickly made enough changes among his ships’ captains to

ensure the full loyalty of the ﬂeet to himself and the States-General. Soon after

Tromp’s death, Cromwell hinted to Beverning in an informal conversation

that he personally would be content with a treaty that did not encroach upon

Dutch sovereignty. The States party made a good political recovery, sweeping

away the violent Orangist factions from most Dutch towns and restoring the

dominant role of the States of Holland in the States-General. That body sent

Jongestal and Nieupoort back to England in October, but hopes of a peace

were dashed by the unrealistic terms presented to them by the Council of State

responsible to Barebone’s Parliament. These included not only such hardy

perennials as the exclusion of the house of Orange and the striking of the ﬂag

by Dutch ships in the ill-deﬁned British seas, but large reparations for English

losses in the war, a mutual limitation of naval strength in England’s favour

(sixty ships to forty, it was rumoured), and payment by the Dutch for ﬁshing

rights off all British waters. Understandably, the two Dutch envoys asked for

their passports, and they were only persuaded to delay their departure on

receiving private messages from Cromwell and others close to him early in

December, hinting that a change of government was imminent. As soon as

Barebone’s resigned, Cromwell sent to assure them that he truly desired a

peace and was now in a position to treat for it.

There were, however, still some quite formidable difﬁculties in the way of

it. The Dutch wanted their ally the King of Denmark included in it, but in

598 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658

Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism, pp. 140–8. Pincus is illuminating on the whole peace

process.

ch18-19.y8 27/9/02 11:57 AM Page 598

1652 he had detained twenty-two English ships in the Sound (the straits

between Denmark and modern Sweden, whose shores were then both in Dan-

ish territory), and Cromwell at this stage refused. The two Dutchmen did

return home early in January 1654, though they brought secret proposals for

a compromise from Cromwell to de Witt, who sent Beverning back to Lon-

don as his personal envoy before the month was out. Frederick III of Den-

mark eased the situation in February by sending an ambassador to England

to congratulate Cromwell on his elevation. A negotiation followed, whereby

eventually eighteen of the seized ships were freed and the fate of the other four

referred to Anglo-Dutch arbitration. Long before that, Nieupoort and

Jongestal returned with the States-General’s formal authorization to con-

clude a treaty, and a London crowd cheered them as they made their formal

entry. Both sides needed peace, but it took weeks of tough negotiation

between the three Dutchmen and six commissioners chosen by Cromwell

before the Treaty of Westminster was signed on 5 April. It proclaimed a ‘nearer

alliance, union and confederacy than heretofore’, but made no encroachment

on the actual sovereignty of either state. A compromise was reached on

reparations, somewhat in England’s favour, though the liability to pay them

applied to both sides. No more was said about limiting navies, and as for

saluting English men-of-war, Dutch ships were required to do so ‘in the for-

mer manner’, which was vague enough to leave the matter almost in the air.

Neither country was to allow the other’s rebels on its soil, which forced Eng-

lish royalists, including the Princess Mary, to depart from Dutch territory.

The most contentious issue was over England’s demand that the Prince of

Orange should be permanently excluded from the ofﬁces of Stadholder and

Captain-General. Cromwell gave way only to the extent of conceding that

this should be a secret article, but he insisted that it should be ratiﬁed by the

States-General. Perhaps he drove too hard, since it was as much in de Witt’s

interest as his to keep the Prince of Orange out of public ofﬁce, but de Witt

was new to his great ofﬁce and his full stature as a statesman had yet to be

revealed. The irony is of course that in the fullness of time the three-year-old

prince was to become not only Stadholder but King of England, Scotland, and

Ireland, and the champion of much that Cromwell believed in. Nevertheless,

the facts that Cromwell got his way in this, and that the Navigation Act

remained unrepealed, are measures of England’s victory in the Dutch war.

Within a week of the conclusion of the Treaty of Westminster, Bulstrode

Whitelocke completed a successful embassy to Queen Christina of Sweden.

The Rump had decided on the mission at the end of 1652, when there was a

real fear of a pact between the United Provinces and Denmark to close the

Sound to foreign and especially to English shipping, but its chosen ambas-

sador, Lord Lisle, procrastinated over his departure and ﬁnally resigned his

appointment, pleading ill-health. Whitelocke was Cromwell’s choice as his

The First Phase of Cromwellian Rule 599

ch18-19.y8 27/9/02 11:57 AM Page 599

replacement, and Christina received (and hugely charmed) him just a week

after the Protectorate was inaugurated. At that stage, with the Dutch war still

on and Denmark the Dutch republic’s close ally, Whitelocke was briefed to

seek an armed alliance. But Christina and her shrewd old chanceller Oxenst-

jerna chose to see how the Anglo-Dutch negotiation prospered before com-

mitting themselves, and the Treaty of Westminster quickly eased the way to a

satisfactory commercial treaty. Very shortly afterwards Christina abdicated

in favour of her cousin, who ascended the Swedish throne as King Charles X.

A similar treaty of commerce with Denmark followed in September, whereby

British shipping was to pass through the Sound on paying the same dues as all

other nations except the Swedes. This put them on equal terms with the

Dutch, who did not gain their right to compound for their Sound dues.

Britain’s freedom to trade in the Baltic was assured, and the shadows of war

in northern waters were lifted.

600 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658

ch18-19.y8 27/9/02 11:57 AM Page 600

twenty

‘A Single Person and a Parliament’

Although Cromwell and his councillors and diplomats got through an

impressive amount of work during his ﬁrst nine months as Protector, they all

knew that the regime would face a severe test when, as the Instrument of Gov-

ernment decreed, its ﬁrst parliament met on 3 September 1654, the anniver-

sary of Dunbar and Worcester. From July onward the ﬁrst general elections

for fourteen years were held in England, and the ﬁrst ever to a parliament of

all three kingdoms. The resultant assembly deeply disappointed Cromwell’s

hopes. It has been argued that he had largely himself to thank for this, since

he failed to understand that parliaments in his revered Queen Elizabeth’s days

had been rendered co-operative only through skilful management by a core of

privy councillors and other royal servants, who used their large electoral

inﬂuence to secure the return of a nucleus of grateful clients, and with their

support steered the House into voting the measures and the subsidies that the

government needed.

But granted that his expectations were a shade naive

and his mastery of the lower arts of politics limited, the kind of management

that the Cecils (for example) had practised was quite beyond his reach. They

and their kind had had power-bases in their counties such as Cromwell’s

councillors could not possibly match, partly through their personal territor-

ial inﬂuence and partly through their ability to deploy royal patronage in

bestowing local ofﬁces and dignities. Cromwell’s men mostly lacked that

kind of social and political standing, and he would have regarded the system-

atic manipulation of patronage for political purposes as an abuse. The large

number of borough constituencies with very small electorates had made elect-

oral inﬂuence relatively easy in pre-war parliaments, but the Instrument’s

multiplication of county seats and its restriction of direct borough represen-

tation to sizeable towns rendered it much harder. Above all, there had been a

broad consensus about what the ancient constitution was and how it oper-

ated within a hierarchical society, and no stirring of doubt about its

legitimacy until far into Charles I’s reign.

H. R. Trevor-Roper, ‘Oliver Cromwell and his Parliaments’, in Religion, the Reformation

and Social Change (1956); reprinted in Ivan Roots (ed.), Cromwell: A Proﬁle (1973).

ch20-22.y8 27/9/02 12:02 PM Page 601

Cromwell had none of these advantages. The legitimacy of his ofﬁce and of

the constitution under which he held it was highly questionable until an elec-

ted parliament conﬁrmed both. Consensus in the constituencies had been

destroyed by the Civil War and the successive political cataclysms that had

followed it. Widely preferable though his regime was to that of Barebone’s

Parliament, and probably (though less widely) to that of the Rump, this was

no guarantee that parliament would endorse it. He faced such a range of

opposition: overt and covert royalists, successors to the political presbyter-

ians, who had never aimed at abolishing the monarchy, republicans of the

stamp of Haselrig, Scot, and Bradshaw, who had never forgiven his expulsion

of the Rump, more populist ‘commonwealthsmen’ who included the rem-

nants of the Leveller movement and particularly distrusted military power,

and Fifth Monarchists who believed that he had usurped the authority that

belonged by right to Christ and his saints. The ﬁrst and last of these groups

posed little threat in this parliament, though a few royalists got in. All who

had fought or acted in any war against the parliament were debarred by the

Instrument from either voting or sitting unless they had subsequently demon-

strated their good affection, and the council was empowered to scrutinize the

returns to this and the next two triennial parliaments and exclude any mem-

bers who transgressed the prescribed qualiﬁcations. The council, however,

exercised this power very sparingly. It refused letters of admission to fewer

than a dozen members—probably no more than eight—and in nearly every

case local electors had petitioned against the admission of the candidate con-

cerned. At least half of the excluded had engaged in royalist activity since the

Civil War, though they also included a minor and a man notorious for whor-

ing, tippling, and swearing. Another to be debarred was the Leveller John

Wildman, who was already engaged in conspiracy against the government.

But the council gave the beneﬁt of the doubt to a few other members who

were petitioned against as royalist sympathizers.

Crypto-royalists, however, were nothing like such a threat to the parlia-

ment’s success (from Cromwell’s point of view) as the vociferous ex-Rumpers

led by Haselrig, who missed no chance to urge upon the many members who

were new to the House that there was no power in the land as high as that of

the people’s representatives. More than half of the members were in fact sit-

ting for the ﬁrst time, though 125 had been in the Long Parliament (about

two-thirds of them as recruiters), and 55 in Barebone’s. Eighteen members

were regicides.

That year 3 September fell on a Sunday, and the members spent much of the

day at worship in Westminster Abbey, so Cromwell addressed them in the

Painted Chamber only brieﬂy and bade them return there next morning to

602 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658

Peter Gaunt, ‘Cromwell’s Purge?’, in Parliamentary History VI (1987), 1–22.

ch20-22.y8 27/9/02 12:02 PM Page 602

hear him further. In that age when ceremonial bore such a weight of political

signiﬁcance, both English and foreign observers threw searching eyes on the

pomp and symbols with which he chose to surround himself. He seems to

have tried to strike a middle course, observing such formality as was proper

to a head of state on a major public occasion, while minimizing the military

origins of his authority and seeking to avoid any suggestion that he regarded

it as a step towards the throne. The day started with another service in the

Abbey, the preacher being the moderate Independent Thomas Goodwin, thus

balancing the moderate Presbyterian Stephen Marshall, who had preached

the day before. Cromwell rode the short distance from Whitehall Palace to

the Abbey in a coach of state, escorted by the Yeomen of the Guard, attended

also by his own life guard and other army ofﬁcers, on foot and bare-headed,

and followed in other coaches by his councillors and chief ofﬁcers of state.

Immediately before him Whitelocke carried the purse of state, containing the

Great Seal of the Commonwealth, and Lambert bore the sword of state, but

Cromwell himself wore unostentatious civilian clothes and conducted him-

self throughout the day with conspicuous modesty.

Hostile commentators

made what they could of his summoning the members of Whitehall to hear

him, rather than to the House of Lords as monarchs had done, but for him to

have addressed them in the chamber of the abolished Upper House would

have sent out quite the wrong signals.

The keynote of his speech, which Goodwin had already sounded in his

sermon (a case of collusion, perhaps?), was the duty of ‘healing and settling’.

He contrasted the state of the nation just before the Protectorate was estab-

lished with what it was now. Then, the strife within it had grown so high as

to threaten not only ordered government but the very fabric of society, ‘the

ranks and orders of men, whereby England hath been known for hundreds of

years: a nobleman, a gentleman, a yeoman’. This of course was exaggeration,

as even more was his allegation that ‘men of Levelling principles’ had been

undermining property itself and bidding ‘to make the tenant as liberal a for-

tune as the landlord’. He was to some extent playing upon his audience’s

prejudices, but he was quite sincere in presenting himself as a conservative

with regard to some very central principles: a hierarchical society, founded in

property, and a constitution geared to it, guaranteeing the rule of law, setting

safeguards against arbitrary power, and giving a voice to all well-affected

men of some small substance in choosing their legislators at regular intervals.

Turning to religion (and again exaggerating), he said it had been in an even

worse condition than the civil state, what with the unchecked preaching of

‘prodigious blasphemies’ and the invocation of so-called faith to justify the

‘A Single Person and a Parliament’ 603

A much fuller description of the ceremonial is in Sherwood, Oliver Cromwell: King in All

but Name, pp. 39–41.

Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, III, 435.

ch20-22.y8 27/9/02 12:02 PM Page 603

breaking of ‘all rules of law and nature’. He referred to the Ranters, though

he did not name them as such. Such horrors, he said, had brought to mind the

iniquities prophesied for ‘the last times’, for Christ returned to earth in judge-

ment. The power to check them had been undermined by a second sort of

men, who while not justifying such evils denied the civil magistrate any

authority to intervene, on the ground that matters of conscience and belief lay

outside his sphere. Cromwell reafﬁrmed his own commitment to liberty of

conscience, but defended the claim of the civil power to a role in promoting

true religion and punishing manifest wickedness. He upheld the right of godly

and gifted laymen to preach, but he repudiated the sectarian extremists who

denounced the whole concept of an ordained ministry as antichristian. He

adopted a gentler tone when he went on to condemn ‘the mistaken notion of

the Fifth Monarchy’, acknowledging that many honest, God-fearing men

adhered to it. It was one thing, however, to expect, as he hoped they all did,

‘that Jesus Christ will have a time to set up his reign in our hearts’, but quite

another for men upon their own conviction of God’s presence with them to

claim a sole right ‘to rule kingdoms, govern nations, and give laws to people’.

If these were but notions, they were to be let alone. Notions will hurt none but them

that have them. But when they come to such practices, as to tell us that liberty and

property are not the badges of the kingdom of Christ, and to tell us that instead of

regulating laws, laws are to be abrogated, indeed subverted, and perhaps would bring

in the Judaical law instead of our known laws settled amongst us,—this is worthy

of every magistrate’s consideration, especially where every stone is turned to bring

confusion.

Such people, he said, had not only threatened anarchy at home, but had

obstructed the work of settlement in Scotland and Ireland and hindered the

negotiation of peace with Holland, Portugal, and France.

To all these evils the present constitution and government had applied a

remedy. He took pride in its achievements so far: its measures to raise the

standards of the parish clergy, its conclusion of peace treaties with the

Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, and Portugal, and its reduction of the assess-

ment by £30,000 a month, among other things. Yet, he said, ‘these are but

entrances and doors of hope, wherein through the blessing of God you may

enter into rest and peace. But you are not yet entered.’

The completion of the

work lay with the parliament now assembled, and what he most needed was

its ratiﬁcation of the Instrument as the legal and binding constitution of the

three kingdoms. He was scarcely less anxious to obtain statutory authority

for the ordinances of the last nine months. It was uncomfortable for him to

have had to suspend the implementation of the reform of Chancery because

604 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658

Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, III, 437–8; emphasis added.

Ibid., pp. 439–42.

ch20-22.y8 27/9/02 12:02 PM Page 604

of the conscientious objections of such basically loyal men as Whitelocke,

Widdington, and Lisle, the Commissioners of the Great Seal. And if the ﬁnan-

cial provisions were not conﬁrmed, what was to stop ill-disposed people from

refusing to pay taxes and customs duties? This was to happen soon enough.

The ﬁrst few days’ business did not bode well. Cromwell is said to have wel-

comed the House’s election of Lenthall as Speaker, probably because he rep-

resented continuity with the constitutional past. But he must have been angry

when Haselrig, on the ﬁrst day of full business, proposed that parliament

should give priority to religion, and urged that it should settle on one good

form and suppress all the sects. This amounted to an outright rejection of the

religious provisions of the Instrument, and must have been seen as a veiled

attempt to restore the Presbyterian establishment formulated by the West-

minster Assembly of Divines. It was a tactic designed to appeal to the religious

conservatism of the majority of members and to encourage them to challenge

the whole authority of the Instrument. It was somewhat cynical because

Haselrig had in former times been accounted an Independent; he had married

the sister of Lord Brooke, who had greatly inﬂuenced him when younger.

Soon after this a member of the council, probably its president Henry

Lawrence, proposed that parliament should take the Instrument into consid-

eration as its ﬁrst major business. There was general agreement, including

that of the army ofﬁcers and lawyers in the House and the Cromwellians gen-

erally, so the prospects looked hopeful. But soon after the great debate began,

the House divided as to whether it should be conducted in its formal sittings

or in grand committee (i.e. committee of the whole House). Cromwell’s sup-

porters preferred the former course, hoping to get the Instrument (or most of

it) approved as it stood, but the vote went for a grand committee by 141

voices to 136, a narrow margin in a fuller than usual House. On the losing

side were those who, while believing in parliament’s paramount legislative

power, accepted its place within a balanced polity, whereas the majority,

without necessarily opposing the principle of a written constitution, upheld

the superior right of the people’s elected representatives to deﬁne its terms.

The ensuing days’ debates showed that many members regarded the consti-

tution as a tabula rasa. Two proposals in particular were contrary to the whole

spirit of the Instrument, one that the council should be elected afresh by each

triennial parliament, and the other that the Protector’s authority should be

conﬁned to civil affairs, while parliament appointed the commanders of the

forces. Those who proposed such fundamental changes were contravening

the indentures made at their election between the sheriffs, mayors, and other

returning ofﬁcers on the one part and the electors on the other, certifying (as

the Instrument prescribed) ‘that the persons elected shall not have power to

alter the government as it is hereby settled in one single person and a parlia-

ment’; but that did not trouble them. They would have replied that the

‘A Single Person and a Parliament’ 605

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people’s right to elect their legislators was fundamental, and that the authors

of the Instrument had had no right to set terms to it.

Cromwell felt he could not let this go on, especially when he heard that Har-

rison was organizing a mass petition in the army and elsewhere, calling on par-

liament to extirpate the present tyranny, as being worse than that of Charles I.

He had Harrison arrested, and on 12 September he summoned the members at

very short notice to hear him again in the Painted Chamber. There he

addressed them for an hour and a half, in one of his most self-revealing utter-

ances. When last he spoke, he reminded them, he had told them they were a

free parliament, but that had been on the assumption that they owned the gov-

ernment that summoned them. It implied some reciprocity, he said, and since

that was evidently lacking, ‘I see it will be necessary for me now a little to mag-

nify my ofﬁce, which I have not been apt to do’. He had not called himself to

it, he insisted, and ‘If my calling be from God, and my testimony from the

people, God and the people shall take it from me, else I will not part with it.’

He said that after Worcester he had begged again and again to be relieved of

his command and allowed to retire into private life, but his fellow MPs dis-

suaded him. He traced the steps which from then on had brought him to the

point when he had felt it to be God’s will that he should accept his present

ofﬁce. He had pressed the Rump repeatedly to make way for a more genuine-

ly representative parliament, but he had found it bent on a self-perpetuating

oligarchical dictatorship. Barebone’s might have been a mistake, but he had

known nothing beforehand of its resignation, and the framers of the Instru-

ment had not taken him into their conﬁdence until it was largely cut and dried.

He had ﬁnally accepted it because it put an end to the brief military dictator-

ship created by the Nominated Assembly’s resignation of its authority to him,

and because it set ﬁrm constitutional limits upon his own authority. This was

not of course the way in which his republican opponents viewed his ascent to

the Protectorship, but it was genuinely his own sense of the matter.

His arguments that the people had already accepted his government were

unlikely to convince the unconverted, but they were not wholly without sub-

stance. He cited the dignatories and ofﬁcers of state who had witnessed his

inauguration and oath of ofﬁce, the judges and JPs who had acted under his

commission, his feasting by a grateful City corporation, and the many

addresses of loyalty he had received from counties, cities, boroughs, and not

least from the army. The Instrument had been read out at all the recent elec-

tions, and the members themselves were committed to it by the indentures

signed at their return.

Nevertheless he was not proposing to close the constitution to parliamen-

tary debate. Many things in it were open to discussion, but he identiﬁed four

606 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658

Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, III, 452.

ch20-22.y8 27/9/02 12:02 PM Page 606

principles which were fundamental and unalterable. One was the vesting of

government in a single person and a parliament, neither of them absolute.

Another was ‘that parliaments should not make themselves perpetual’. Lib-

erty of conscience was a third, and the fourth was joint control of the armed

forces, by Protector and parliament when parliament was sitting, and by Pro-

tector and council in the intervals.

Interestingly he avoided the word Protect-

or all through the speech, preferring ‘single person’ or ‘chief ofﬁcer’, but that

should be taken to suggest that he was deliberately leaving the way open to

changing his title to king. He seems to have been uncomfortable about titles;

‘Lord Governor’ had been considered before he settled for ‘Lord Protector’.

He stressed the constitutional role of the council, who (he said) ‘are the

trustees of the Commonwealth in all intervals of parliaments, [and] who have

as absolute a negative over the supreme ofﬁcer in the said intervals, as the par-

liament hath whilst it is sitting’.

(But how absolute is that, members may

have asked themselves.) He ended with an eloquent plea for their co-

operation in giving the nation the peace and settlement that it desired and

deserved. Before parliament met, he had considered requiring members to

taking their seats, but had rejected the idea because he could not believe they

‘came with contrary minds’. But now, to his deep regret, he found it necessary

to require all members to sign the following ‘recognition’ before they resumed

their seats:

I, AB, do hereby freely promise and engage myself to be true and faithful to the Lord

Protector and the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland, and shall not

(according to the tenor of the indenture, whereby I am returned to serve in this present

parliament) propose, or give my consent, to alter the government, as it is settled in one

single person and a parliament.

About 140 members signed the recognition at once, and 50 more the next

day. The number stood at 240 (a clear majority) within a month, and in the

end only about 100 permanently absented themselves because they rejected it

on principle.

Cromwell tried not to widen the rift. He released Harrison on the day of his

speech and had him to dinner, but there was no mending the breach between

them. Three days later he made an even longer speech to the Lord Mayor and

corporation of London, enlarging on what his government had done to pro-

mote peace and free trade, and urging them to be on guard against three sorts

of men, the violent cavalier, the rigid Presbyterian, and the militant Anabap-

tist. But his religious position was too liberal for the City fathers, who

not long after petitioned parliament to make a ﬁrm settlement of church

‘A Single Person and a Parliament’ 607

Ibid., pp. 458–9.

Ibid., p. 460.

Ibid., p. 463.

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