Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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government. The House was very receptive to such advice, for if Cromwell

had hoped that the recognition would render it compliant he was soon disap-

pointed. At ﬁrst it gave him hope. It endorsed the ﬁrst of his fundamentals

without demur; it renounced self-perpetuation by accepting triennial elec-

tions, and it conﬁrmed Cromwell’s power to dispose of the forces by sea and

land during his lifetime, subject to parliament’s consent when it was sitting.

Thereafter things went less well, for although the recognition kept out Hasel-

rig, Scot, Bradshaw, and other diehard republicans, there still remained a

majority who were suspicious of military inﬂuence, unsympathetic towards

toleration of the sects, and keen to tilt the constitutional balance in parlia-

ment’s favour. It was soon clear that the parliament saw its main business to

be not just to debate, approve, and if necessary amend the Instrument, but to

redraw the whole map of government in a constitutional bill of its own, with-

in the broad outlines of Cromwell’s four fundamentals. It has been argued

that he was naive to hope to get what he wanted from the House without

putting a more speciﬁc programme before it and constantly keeping it on

course through well-briefed managers within it. To this he might have offered

two answers. First, he regarded the Instrument and the supplementary ordin-

ances as sufﬁcient agenda in themselves, and though they were open to

amendment he hoped that in their essentials they would be self-justiﬁcatory

to men of goodwill. Secondly, his unwillingness to intervene too closely in

parliament’s proceedings sprang from principle rather than from inexperi-

ence or negligence. One of his serious complaints against the Rump had been

of ‘how hard and difﬁcult a thing it was to get anything to be carried without

making parties, without things indeed unworthy of a parliament’, and when

he ﬁnally came to dissolve the present one he made a great virtue of never

having interrupted or interfered in its business.

It is ironic that the man so

often branded as a military dictator should come in for criticism as

over-respectful of parliament’s freedom of debate. Perhaps we should

suspend both judgements.

One bone of contention was over the succession to the Protectorship, and

an accident that Cromwell suffered on 29 September brought the question

into prominence. He was enjoying a drive with Thurloe in Hyde Park, the

more so because his coach was drawn by six grey Frieslands recently present-

ed to him by the Count of Oldenburg. Always a lover of horseﬂesh, he took

the driver’s seat for a spell, but he used the whip too freely and the horses

bolted. He was pulled to the ground with a foot caught in the reins, and

dragged along for some short distance. He had a loaded pistol in his pocket,

and the impact ﬁred it. He was lucky not to be seriously hurt, but he was kept

in bed for two or three weeks and was lame for several more. The succession

608 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658

Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, III, 57, 580–1.

ch20-22.y8 27/9/02 12:02 PM Page 608

was not the burning issue that it might have been, for parliament had already

agreed with the Instrument that it should be elective, despite a long speech

from Lambert advocating that it should be hereditary. But whereas the

Instrument ﬁrmly entrusted the election of a new Protector to the council,

parliament claimed the power to determine the manner of his choice if the

vacancy occurred while it was sitting.

More disturbing was the debate in November on the control of the armed

forces after Cromwell’s death, and the vote on the 20th, without a division,

that they should be disposed of by parliament as it thought ﬁt. It was becom-

ing clear that a large number of members, perhaps the majority, were bent on

reducing the standing army immediately to the minimum of 30,000 speciﬁed

in the Instrument, and entrusting most of its defensive role to the militia. An

irresponsible vote on the 21st to reduce the monthly assessment from

£90,000 to £30,000 was seen as even more hostile to the army, though in the

event it was not put into effect. These moves caused growing resentment

among the senior ofﬁcers, thirty or forty of whom met at St James’s on the

25th to stand up for the Instrument unchanged, as Lambert and his colleagues

had devised it. Four days later they passed a resolution to live and die with his

Highness and ‘the present government’.

The army, however, was not unanimous in its support of the Protectorate.

The Fifth Monarchist faction was a dwindling force within it since 1653,

though Harrison, Rich, and Robert Overton were still capable of arousing

disaffection. Rather more of a threat lay in a minority of rigid republicans or

commonwealthsmen who clung to a belief in the unfettered sovereignty of the

people’s representatives. In October the council got wind of a petition to

which three colonels, John Okey, Thomas Saunders, and Matthew Alured put

their names, intending that it should be circulated throughout the army for

signatures. But they did not write it. Its author was John Wildman, the former

Leveller, and it stemmed from meetings which had begun in September (if not

earlier) and included not only the three colonels but Vice-Admiral John Law-

son, who was in effective command of the ﬂeet in the English Channel. It

would be interesting to know who sought out whom, for there was soon evi-

dence of a wider web of conspiracy than the three colonels are likely to have

spun on their own, and Wildman was never one to miss a chance to make

trouble for Cromwell and his fellow-grandees. The three were arrested and

their petition seized before it could be sent out for signatures, but it was never-

theless published as a broadsheet on the 18th, doubtless by Wildman, and

packets of it were dispatched to army units in England, Scotland, and Ireland.

Some batches were accompanied by copies of a pamphlet, probably also by

Wildman, entitled Some Mementos for the Ofﬁcers and Soldiers of the Army,

‘A Single Person and a Parliament’ 609

Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, III, 59–60.

ch20-22.y8 27/9/02 12:02 PM Page 609

which interspersed gobbets from the petition with inﬂammatory exhort-

ations to stand up for the people’s rights and freedoms and not ‘to settle the

powers of tyranny’.

The petition itself portrayed the Protectorate as at least

potentially a military tyranny, since for two and a half years in every three it

gave supreme power over the armed forces to a single person and a council

‘whom he may control by a negative voice at his pleasure’. It urged that the

settlement of the Commonwealth should be entrusted to ‘a full and free par-

liament’, on the lines proposed to the Rump by the General Council of Ofﬁ-

cers in their version of the Agreement of the People nearly six years earlier. Its

specious rhetoric passed over the poor record of parliaments over the last ﬁve

years in caring for the people’s freedoms and their frequent hostility towards

the army itself. It ignored the danger that a truly ‘full and free parliament’

would bring back the king, as was to happen little more than ﬁve years later.

It was particularly disingenuous in looking to such a parliament as the guar-

antor of liberty of conscience, for although Cromwell was not a total toler-

ationist he strove for a broader religious freedom than any parliament of the

Interregnum would endorse—or indeed any parliament at all before 1689.

The colonels were lucky that Cromwell was reluctant to punish old com-

rades. Okey was court-martialled, found not guilty of treason, and set free

upon surrendering his commission. Saunders resigned his without demur,

and suffered no further penalty. Only Alured, who had been sent home from

Ireland for trying to stir up disaffection in the English forces there, was

imprisoned, and he was released after little more than a year.

There was a parallel movement of republican discontent in the forces in

Scotland, where it was headed by Colonel Robert Overton, who was a special

friend of Milton. He is also an example of the way in which the republican

and Fifth Monarchist strains of opposition could merge. He had been sec-

onded in 1653 to serve (as he had done earlier) as governor of Hull, and he

had written to congratulate Cromwell in his expulsion of the Rump. But he

was known to be unhappy when Barebone’s gave way to the Protectorate,

and of his own accord he went to London to see Cromwell personally. He

told him frankly of his misgivings, but promised to inform him if ever his con-

science should forbid him to serve him further. Cromwell cordially took his

word and sent him back to Scotland, where he repeated his undertaking to

Monck. Before leaving London, however, he conferred with Wildman. Dur-

ing late October and November hostile pamphlets, including the three

colonels’ petition and Wildman’s Some Mementos, were found circulating

among the regiments in Scotland, and in December a group of disaffected

610 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658

Quoted by Barbara Taft in ‘The Humble Petition of Several Colonels of the Army: causes,

character and results of military opposition to Cromwell’s Protectorate’, in Huntington Library

Quarterly XLII (1978), 15–41. This is much the most thorough account of the whole episode,

though Dr Taft evaluates the petition itself more kindly than I do.

ch20-22.y8 27/9/02 12:02 PM Page 610

ofﬁcers was meeting at Overton’s headquarters. He did not inform Monck,

and he countenanced the summoning of a more general meeting of ofﬁcers,

planned to be held in Edinburgh on 1 January in order ‘to assert the freedoms

of the people in the privileges of parliament’. Thurloe received intelligence

that he intended to seize Monck and march the army in Scotland (or as much

of it as would follow him) into England, there to join up with forces raised by

Haselrig and Bradshaw. No evidence survives to substantiate this allegation

and the extent of Overton’s engagement in sedition must remain uncertain,

but Cromwell had totally ceased to trust him and wrote to Monck on Christ-

mas Day to order his arrest.

Wildman is again the common denominator that links these ripples of

unrest with that in the navy. Vice-Admiral Lawson had not only been meet-

ing with him and the three colonels in September, but as a member of the cor-

poration of his native Scarborough he had done much to get Wildman elected

to parliament for that borough. He was a Baptist and a Leveller sympathizer,

and he was currently in effective command of the Channel ﬂeet because Blake

was in Plymouth, preparing to sail to the Straits of Gibraltar, and Penn was

ashore, planning the ill-fated ‘Western Design’ (of which more anon). At

about the same time as the three colonels’ petition was being hatched, Law-

son encouraged (and very possibly drafted) a petition of the seamen in his

squadron which besides expressing their more material grievances carried

strong republican overtones. On 17 October he presided over a council of

war on Penn’s ﬂagship off Spithead and persuaded the assembled captains to

uphold the men’s right to petition and to support their requests. Cromwell

sensed the danger and sent Desborough to join with Penn in investigating its

source. A prompt and generous distribution of pay allayed the seamen’s dis-

contents, and the crisis blew over. Remarkably, Lawson was allowed to

retain his vice-admiralship, but he was an able and popular ofﬁcer, and

Cromwell decided to give him another chance. It was a gesture of conﬁdence

that Lawson did not repay.

During December Cromwell’s relations with parliament remained under

strain, partly through lack of communication, but they did not seem yet to be

pointing inexorably towards a breach. He still had his supporters in the

House, and the balance between them and his opponents ﬂuctuated. It has

often been said that the members spent nearly all their time on redrawing the

map of government according to their own desires, to the neglect of all other

public needs, but this is not true. This was a hard-working parliament, which

sat morning and afternoon on six days a week, sometimes till late at night.

Although the constitutional bill was by far its greatest business, it gave con-

sideration to at least twenty-seven other public bills, thirteen of which

‘A Single Person and a Parliament’ 611

Ibid., pp. 37–9; Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, III, 557.

ch20-22.y8 27/9/02 12:02 PM Page 611

received one or more readings. None of them, however, not even an assess-

ment bill, got as far as being passed.

As the year 1654 neared its end, hopes

were still alive that Cromwell and the parliament might come to agreement.

On 23 December Anthony Garland, a regicide member, moved that

Cromwell should be offered the title of king. Henry Cromwell and Sir An-

thony Ashley Cooper spoke in support, but the general feeling of the House

was so clearly against the motion that it was withdrawn without being put to

the vote. It is surprising, however, that at this stage it was made at all; sur-

prising too that it made so little stir, and not least surprising that Cooper and

Cromwell’s son supported it. Oliver himself cannot have approved it, for he

said in his speech at the dissolution that ‘if . . . this government should have

been placed in my family hereditary, I would have rejected it’.

As for

Cooper, what was the future Earl of Shaftesbury and arch-Whig up to in

proposing a Cromwellian dynasty? He had once been a royalist, certainly, but

now, after serving for a year as a loyal and busy councillor, he was moving

towards opposition. He may have thought that making Cromwell king under

a constitution that limited his powers more strictly than the Instrument had

done, as the bill under debate promised to do, would be the best guarantee

against the regime turning into a military dictatorship. Whatever his motives,

he attended the council for the last time on 28 December. It may well have

been at that meeting (the next was not until 5 January) that Cromwell

broached the idea of dissolving parliament after ﬁve lunar rather than calen-

dar months, and that for Cooper may have been the last straw.

By that time Cromwell must have decided that some provisions in the con-

stitutional bill were quite unacceptable unless he could get them modiﬁed.

The established parochial clergy and the limits of religious toleration came

much under debate during December, and parliament clearly intended to

draw the lines more strictly than the Instrument had done. It proposed to

allow the Protector no more than a twenty-day suspensive veto over any acts

it might pass to restrain ‘damnable heresies’, as well as ‘atheism, blasphemy,

popery, prelacy, licentiousness and profaneness’, and it intended to specify

precisely what ‘damnable heresies’ came under its ban.

This could have been

a persecutor’s charter, and when, as a very late insertion on 12 January, the

Protector was admitted to a share in enumerating the damnable heresies, the

concession came too late. Parliament also busied itself over the case of John

Biddle, the Socinian, and on 13 December committed him to prison.

Cromwell’s own tolerance did not extend to those who denied the divinity of

Christ, as Socinians did—not at least until he readmitted the Jews—but as he

612 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658

Peter Gaunt, ‘Law-making in the ﬁrst Protectorate parliament’, in C. Jones, M. Newitt, and

S. Roberts (eds.), Politics and People in Revolutionary England (Oxford, 1986), pp. 163–86.

Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, III, 589.

Gardiner (ed.), Constitutional Documents, p. 443. The whole bill is printed on pp. 427–47.

ch20-22.y8 27/9/02 12:02 PM Page 612

was to show in the case of the Quaker James Nayler two years later, he object-

ed to parliament acting as a court of ﬁrst instance in such matters, and assum-

ing the roles of prosecutor, judge, and jury.

Probably the most seriously objectionable provision in the constitutional

bill, as it took all but ﬁnal shape towards the end of 1654, concerned the

choice and tenure of the council. Under the Instrument, when a vacancy in the

council occurred parliament was to nominate six candidates, the council was

to select two of them, and the Protector was to choose the one he preferred;

but once chosen a councillor’s appointment was to be permanent, unless he

was convicted of corruption or other serious misconduct. Under the bill,

however, new councillors were to be nominated by the Protector and

approved by parliament; but the whole council was to be subject to fresh

approval by each triennial parliament within forty days of its meeting. This

arrangement, taken together with parliament’s claims to determine how a

new Protector should be chosen if the vacancy occurred while it was sitting,

and to dispose the control of the armed forces as it thought ﬁt under

Cromwell’s successors, made nonsense of the quest for a balance between the

legislative and executive powers, and for a measure of independence between

them. The bill would have subordinated the executive to the legislature. Its

ﬁnancial provisions were less grossly inadequate than parliament had at times

threatened, but they fell far below the government’s current needs, and by

implication conﬁrmed the intention to reduce the standing army to the Instru-

ment’s minimum of 30,000 at an early date. Cromwell currently had about

57,000 men under arms, the majority of them garrisoning Ireland and

Scotland.

It became a crucial question whether parliament was prepared to negotiate

with him before ﬁnalizing the bill. Until a late stage he hoped, and his sup-

porters urged, that the House would appoint a committee to treat, or at least

to hear him, on the points of controversy. This was refused; the bill was to be

presented to him for acceptance as it stood, and if he did not agree to every

article in it, it was to be void. Furthermore, parliament decided not to put any

other bill before him until he had passed its new constitution, so unless he did

so he could get none of his ordinances conﬁrmed, or even the monthly assess-

ment authorized.

Whether this uncompromising attitude would by itself have led to an early

dissolution cannot be known, but the situation was inﬂamed by the number

of plots which were threatening the government from more than one quarter.

Royalist conspiracy was now better organized and more widespread than

ever before, and by early January Thurloe and Cromwell knew for certain

that it would not be long before the king’s friends attempted a general rising.

It was essential therefore that discipline and obedience in the armed forces

should be complete, but commonwealthsmen and Leveller sympathizers were

‘A Single Person and a Parliament’ 613

ch20-22.y8 27/9/02 12:02 PM Page 613

planning to raise unrest among the soldiery and link it to that of the seamen.

Unauthorized rendezvous on Marston Moor, Salisbury Plain, and other sites

were being planned for January, and Overton’s activities in Scotland were

plausibly seen as part of the same picture. Such subversive movements took

encouragement from the fact that a parliament was not only sitting but striv-

ing to reduce Cromwell’s powers, and when he dissolved it he more than

hinted that some of its members had been working with the conspirators to

pervert the army.

He wrote a self-revealing letter to his friend Lieutenant-Colonel Wilkes in

mid-January, telling him how deeply saddened he was by the continuing

opposition of men he had hoped to ﬁnd on the same side as himself. His

efforts to resolve the differences between ‘the several interests of the people of

God’, had brought him ‘reproaches and anger from some of all sorts’.

the 22nd, the day on which ﬁve lunar months elapsed since the parliament

ﬁrst met, he dissolved it, though not without ﬁrst subjecting it to two hours of

reproaches. Thomas Carlyle, who ﬁrst presented Cromwell’s speeches to a

wide readership, enthused about this one, but his hearers must have found

most of it rather predictable, as well as very long. This passage conveys its

main burden:

Instead of peace and settlement, instead of mercy and truth being brought together,

righteousness and peace kissing each other, by reconciling the honest people of these

nations, and settling the woeful distempers that are amongst us, . . . weeds and nettles,

briers and thorns, have thriven under your shadow; dissettlement and division, dis-

content and dissatisfaction, together with real dangers to the whole, has [sic] been

more multiplied within these ﬁve months of your sitting, than in some years before.

He spoke of the royalists’ preparations to rise in arms, and accused ‘that party

of men called Levellers, and who call themselves commonwealthsmen’, of

colluding with them. He defended the present constitution as in its essentials

‘most agreeable to the general sense of the nation, having had experience

enough by trial of other conclusions, judging this most likely to avoid the

extremes of monarchy on the one hand, and democracy on the other, and yet

not to found dominium in gratia’ (as the Fifth Monarchists sought to do, by

conﬁning political participation to the ‘saints’). He professed his continuing

faith in the people of these nations as ‘a people blessed by God . . . by reason

of that immortal seed, which hath been and is among them, those regener-

ated ones in the land, who are all the ﬂock of Christ, and lambs of Christ,

though perhaps under many unruly passions and troubles of Spirit’.

Almost

by way of conclusion he referred to the design to seize Monck and march the

forces in Scotland into England as though it were a fact, which he believed it

614 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658

Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, III, 572.

Ibid., p. 582.

Ibid., pp. 587, 590.

ch20-22.y8 27/9/02 12:02 PM Page 614

to be. With that and other conspiracies afoot, and all taking comfort from the

differences between the parliament and himself, he did not believe the coun-

try to be safe.

Parties in opposition have a way of ﬁnding more in Common than when

they have to bear the burden of government, especially when they have a com-

mon bugbear, which in this case was the political inﬂuence wielded by the

army. Military dictatorship is a great evil, though how far the Protectorate

deserved such an appellation is a question best considered after describing

how it ran its whole course. Much of Cromwell’s problem lay in the sheer

range of opposition that he faced: royalists, Presbyterians, Rumper oligarchs,

populist commonwealthsmen, proponents of a rule of the saints. None of

these except the ﬁrst was likely to command as much support or make a

better ﬁst of governing than he did, but they made it very hard for him to

achieve what he really desired, ‘a government by consent’.

As for the royal-

ists, a plebiscite (if such an anachronism can be imagined) might have brought

back the king, but the next ﬁve years would show how few were prepared to

risk their lives for him. When a genuine tide of popular sentiment did urge in

favour of returning to monarchy, it was in reaction not to the rule of a

Cromwell but to that of the restored Rump.

‘A Single Person and a Parliament’ 615

Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, II, 11.

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twenty-one

Cavaliers in Arms,

Swordsmen in the Saddle

Much the most imminent threat that Cromwell faced when he dissolved par-

liament came from the royalists who were planning an early general rising,

and it will soon be shown how he countered it. But he also had to protect his

back against other sorts of opponents. He knew very well that if the royalists

had not enlisted the old Levellers in their cause it was not for want of trying.

John Wildman was arrested on 10 February in the act of dictating a declar-

ation calling upon the people to take up arms against him. Sexby, even deeper

in conspiracy, escaped to the continent from Portland, abetted by the mayor

of the town and governor of the castle, who actually arrested the party of sol-

diers sent to apprehend him because they had no written warrant. Leveller

renegades, however, posed no serious menace.

The Fifth Monarchists were less of a thorn in Cromwell’s ﬂesh than they

had been a year earlier and he treated them as gently as he dared, but he could

not ignore their persistent incitements to disown and disobey his government.

John Rogers and Christopher Feake were still in conﬁnement, Rogers at

Lambeth. Early in February a dozen members of Rogers’s church came to

Whitehall to plead for the two pastors’ release, and Cromwell accordingly

summoned Rogers and a few of his friends to a conference with himself and a

group of councillors and ministers. It did not help that Rogers came attended

by an uninvited retinue of about 250. Cromwell nevertheless reasoned with

him long and patiently, seeking an undertaking from him to live peaceably

under his government; such a pledge could have released both preachers long

ago. But Rogers would yield nothing; the issue, he said, was not between man

and man but between Christ’s government and Cromwell’s. He demanded

that he be brought before a regular court of law on a formal charge, well

knowing Cromwell’s reluctance to subject men to the rigour of the treason

laws for their religious convictions. That same evening, Harrison, Rich,

Carew, Hugh Courtney, Arthur Squibb, and Ireton’s younger brother

Clement came to Whitehall together and urged Cromwell to free ‘the prison-

ers of the Lord’. He replied that if Rogers and Feake were truly the Lord’s

ch20-22.y8 27/9/02 12:02 PM Page 616

prisoners they would soon be at liberty, but that in fact they were in prison for

railing, reviling, uttering falsehoods, and stirring up the people to arms. But

this was at the end of a long day, and he said he would speak further with Har-

rison and his companions shortly. When he gave them an appointment two or

three days later, however, they failed to keep it. He then summoned them by

a written warrant to undergo interrogation by himself or the council on mat-

ters concerning the peace of the nation, but again they failed to appear. It was

high time, he decided, to bring them to heel, so he had the ﬁve arrested and

brought before him in custody. In this crucial confrontation he had with him,

besides the council, the ministers Walter Cradock, Joseph Caryll, and Thomas

Brooks, while the ﬁve prisoners were granted their request to have John Simp-

son and other Fifth Monarchist pastors present. Asked why they had refused

the Protector’s previous summons, they frankly said that by obeying it ‘they

should acknowledge the government, which they could not do, it being a gov-

ernment set up against the will of God, and in opposition to the kingdom of

Christ, and was antichristian and Babylonish, and that they did expect God

would pour out his wrath upon it’. Carew added that when Barebone’s Par-

liament was dissolved Cromwell ‘took the crown off from the head of Christ,

and put it upon his own’. They ﬂatly refused to pledge themselves not to dis-

turb the peace, saying ‘that the present authority is no authority, nor to be

obeyed, and consequently arms may be taken up against it’. Their strongest

objection to the Protectoral constitution was that ‘it had a parliament in it,

whereby power is derived from the people, whereas all power belongs to

Christ’.

Cromwell conferred with the council, and then, despite their deﬁ-

ance, made them a generous offer: if they would retire to their native counties

and promise not to leave them without permission, they would not be pros-

ecuted further. They utterly rejected it, so they were committed to widely sep-

arated prisons, though not without hope of release. Harrison, for example,

was freed after little more than a year and Rogers early in 1657, though both

men were soon in trouble again.

Ten days after his clash of wills Cromwell gave a very different reception to

a man who was widely regarded as quite as dangerously subversive as any

Fifth Monarchy man. George Fox was in the midst of his strenuous evangel-

izing journeys round the Midlands and northern England, where he and his

fellow Quakers were notorious for interrupting church services. This was

reasonably resented as a breach of the law that could easily lead to a breach

of the peace, but Quakers were perhaps even more widely abominated for

challenging the very principles of social rank and deference by refusing

‘hat-honour’ and addressing all and sundry with the familiar ‘thou’ and

Cavaliers in Arms, Swordsmen in the Saddle 617

The above quotations are from Thurloe’s report of the interview to Monck, in Clarke

Papers, II, 242–6, reprinted in Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, III, 618–20.

ch20-22.y8 27/9/02 12:02 PM Page 617