Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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‘thee’. Such feelings were strongly shared by Colonel Francis Hacker, a

Presbyterian ofﬁcer who had commanded the guard at the king’s execution

and was now responsible for security in Leicestershire. He saw Fox’s

meetings in the county as a threat to the state, and sent him and others up to

London in custody. Cromwell interviewed the Quaker leader while he was

still dressing, and listened patiently to a long harangue. He treated Fox with

true courtesy, but taxed him with his people’s behaviour towards the clergy.

A long exchange was broken off as more and more people came into the

room, but before Fox left Cromwell caught him by the hand and said,

with tears in his eyes, ‘Come again to my house, for if thou and I were but an

hour in a day together we should be nearer one to the other’.

He gave

orders that Fox should be given dinner with his entourage in the Banqueting

Hall, though the invitation was declined. He not only released him, but

left him at liberty to address meetings in London or wherever he would.

Fox returned more than once to Whitehall and preached to Cromwell’s

household and gentlemen of the guard, among whom he made several

notable converts.

It is remarkable that Cromwell found time for these long interviews with

the Fifth Monarchist leaders and Fox, considering how the evidence was

pouring in of an imminent royalist rising. So many enemy agents were cross-

ing the Channel both ways that he ordered the port authorities early in

February to let no one leave the country without a license from himself or the

council, and to examine any suspects who tried to enter it very strictly. But

royalist leadership and organization in England were not in good shape. Since

late in 1653 the king had committed the sole authority to raise his supporters

in arms to a group of six men who called themselves the Sealed Knot. They

had all held commands under his father, and were highly placed socially. The

fathers of Lord Belasyse, Lord Loughborough, Sir William Compton, and

John Russell were respectively Lord Fauconberg, the Earl of Huntingdon, the

Earl of Northampton, and the Earl of Bedford. Edward Villiers was a nephew

of the ﬁrst Duke of Buckingham, and of the six only Sir Richard Wyllis, the

former governor of Newark, had no close aristocratic connections. They got

the king to agree that their activities should be known only to himself and

Hyde and Ormond, and that he should countenance no other designs besides

theirs without consulting them. They hardly deserved so exclusive a trust, for

several reasons. They were cautious to excess; the time for them was never

ripe. They were hostile to royalist groups outside the Hyde–Ormond ambit,

especially to Rupert and the ‘swordsmen’ and to the Louvre circle attached

to Henrietta Maria. There was bad blood between them and various other

618 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658

The account of the interview is of course Fox’s own: The Journal of George Fox, ed. J. L.

Nickalls (1975), pp. 198–202.

ch20-22.y8 27/9/02 12:02 PM Page 618

English-based royalists who might have done the king good service, and one

of them was to prove a traitor.

At least the Knot discountenanced wildcat plots, of which there had been

more than one during 1654. The most serious of them, in May, centred

around some kinsmen of Lord Gerard and had links with Rupert and the

Louvre set, though most of its participants were more obscure. The design

was to ambush Cromwell’s coach and murder him as he drove from White-

hall to Hampton Court for the weekend, but Thurloe had some inkling of it

and Oliver changed his route, travelling as far as Chelsea by boat. The plan

was changed to seizing him in his chapel a week later, but it was all uncovered

within days and many were arrested, perhaps several hundred. These

counter-measures were unpopular among the largely Presbyterian citizenry,

so a High Court of Justice was set up to try the chief conspirators, the ﬁrst of

only two such tribunals under the Protectorate. It sentenced only two of them

to death, John Gerard, a royalist colonel, and Peter Vowell, an Islington

schoolmaster, and even they were spared the barbarities of hanging, drawing

and quartering, the law’s ancient penalties for treason. A few other plotters

were transported to Barbados. Many royalists had held aloof from the whole

conspiracy, some because of an honourable aversion to assassination, others

because many of its promoters were dubious adventurers, and because the

plans for following up the Protector’s murder with a national uprising were

so patently half-baked.

From the king’s point of view the worst effect of this botched and some-

what disreputable enterprise was to shrink the snail-like Knot further back

into its shell. So far the Knot had formulated virtually no concrete plans for a

general rising, and its continued inactivity caused such widespread dissatis-

faction among committed royalists that a new leadership emerged, in rivalry

with it. These activists, as they may be called (they had no special appellation

at the time), were not as tightly organized as the Knot, nor so aristocratic.

Most were country gentlemen of local rather than national social standing,

though they did include Sir Hugh Pollard and Sir John Grenville in the West

Country, the second Lord Byron in the Midlands and Sir Philip Musgrave in

the north. The king, despite his ill-advised pledges to the Knot, was happy to

listen to them, and though they would have done better with closer co-

ordination at home and more regular contact with his ministers abroad, several

brave agents passed increasingly frequently between England and the exiled

court. Unlike the Knot, the activists were very ready to enlist the support of

political presbyterians who had come over to the king since the ﬁrst Civil

War, and they were keener to engage former Levellers and other disaffected

Cavaliers in Arms, Swordsmen in the Saddle 619

For a masterly account see David Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy in England 1649–60

(New Haven, 1960), esp. chs. 5 and 6.

ch20-22.y8 27/9/02 12:02 PM Page 619

elements in the army and the ﬂeet. The mutual jealousy between them and

the Knot was predictably intense, but their plans and proposals were sufﬁ-

ciently advanced to be smuggled over to the king in two papers, in July and

August 1654.

Thereafter they went ahead with preparations for a national rising, enlist-

ing men, collecting arms, and allocating commands and areas of responsibil-

ity. They had very limited success with disaffected presbyterians; they won

fairly positive undertakings from Major-General Richard Browne and

Colonel John Booth, but Lord Willoughby of Parham blew hot and cold, and

persistent attempts to engage Fairfax came to nothing. The king, despite his

pledges to the Knot, in September 1654 commissioned Henry Wilmot, Earl of

Rochester, his companion during his fugitive wanderings after Worcester, to

command all such forces as should appear for him in England. But while the

activists were urging Charles to order immediate action, the Knot sent him a

deeply pessimistic report on 3 December, dismissing their rivals’ sanguine

assurances as illusions. Thurloe had his ear to the ground, and during the sec-

ond half of the month the Knot’s fears were conﬁrmed as 3,000 troops were

called home from Ireland, fresh regiments were brought into London, the

Tower garrison was trebled, and artillery was positioned around Whitehall

and St James’s. The sharp action taken against Overton and his accomplices

killed the activists’ hopes of subverting any considerable elements in the army

and the ﬂeet. On New Year’s Day Thurloe’s ofﬁcers made a major break-

through when they uncovered and broke that part of their organization that

was gathering and distributing arms in the Midlands.

Yet still Charles went on urging his supporters to action, and they duly

ﬁxed 6 February as the date for a general rising; it would have coincided with

the dissolution of the parliament if Cromwell had let it run its ﬁve-month

course. The hard-drinking Rochester was slow to take his leave of the taverns

of Dunkirk, and did not sail for England until the 19th. Meanwhile the many

adverse signs made the activists postpone the rising until the 13th, and they

sent again to the king for his approval of their plans. Against the advice of

Ormond, and despite a warning from all six of the Knot that an attempt at

this time would destroy his friends, he readily gave it, though he failed to send

positive orders to the Knot to give it all their support. He himself moved to

Middelburgh on the Dutch coast at the end of February, hoping to put him-

self at the head of the insurgents as soon as they got under way, though he

could bring them neither troops nor arms and supplies. Meanwhile the rising

was again postponed, this time until 8 March, though the message failed to

reach some of its intended leaders in Somerset and Wiltshire. They attempted

to rendezvous in Salisbury on 12–13 February. Many arrests followed; one of

the prisoners confessed all he knew of the design and its leadership, so in what

was to have been one of its main centres it was already past saving.

620 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658

ch20-22.y8 27/9/02 12:02 PM Page 620

What ensued on 8 March was predictable. Rochester had planned a great

rally on Marston Moor, preparatory to an attack on York, but only about

150 men appeared, and on the approach of Colonel Lilburne’s troops they

rode off in such a hurry that they left four cartloads of arms behind them.

Rochester made his escape disguised as a grazier, but other northern cavaliers

were not so lucky. Even fewer men gathered for the intended attacks on New-

castle and Chester, and none at all for that on Hull, where recent reinforce-

ments had killed any hopes of success. The largest turn-out—some 200 or

300—was in Nottinghamshire, but the expected commanders in the Mid-

lands, Lord Byron and Sir George Savile (the future Earl of Halifax), stayed in

London, so these men too ditched their arms and made for home. London

itself stayed quiet, not only because of the powerful counter-measures already

described, but because Cromwell had asked the Lord Mayor and corporation

on 15 February to raise a special militia, and about 5,000 were swiftly

embodied. Londoners had resented the number of arrests following the

Vowell–Gerard plot, but a renewal of civil war by cavaliers in arms was the

last thing that most of them wanted. Timely warnings from central govern-

ment enabled local commanders to frustrate intended rendezvous in Shrews-

bury and along the Welsh border, while Portsmouth and Plymouth slept

undisturbed because the men who were to have attempted them were already

prisoners.

Strangely enough it was in Salisbury, where the abortive rendezvous in

mid-February might have seemed fatal to any further action, that one small

body of royalists succeeded in getting under arms. The recent debacle did not

deter Sir Joseph Wagstaff, a soldier of fortune who had fought for both sides

in the ﬁrst Civil War but had latterly shared the king’s exile. He came over

with Rochester and joined John Penruddock, the local royalist entrusted with

the command in Wiltshire and adjacent parts. Their plan for 8 March was to

enter Winchester and capture the assize judges who were there on circuit, but

they were thwarted by the arrival of a troop of horse, so they postponed it for

a few days and switched the venue to Salisbury, the next assize town. They

entered the city with about 180 mounted men in the small hours of the 12th,

seized the many horses belonging to visitors attending the assizes, broke open

the jail, enlisted and mounted most of the prisoners, and dragged the two

judges and the high sheriff from their beds. Wagstaff wanted to hang all three

on the spot; Penruddock with difﬁculty dissuaded him. They rode westward

out of Salisbury with somewhat less than four hundred men, including the

jailbirds, counting on the promised support of the great Marquis of Hertford.

But he never stirred, nor did the thousands that they had hoped to recruit in

Dorset. Their numbers indeed shrank through desertion as their march into

Devon became a ﬂight, and they were ﬁnally routed in South Molton by a

single troop of horse under Captain Unton Croke. They put up a ﬁght, but

Cavaliers in Arms, Swordsmen in the Saddle 621

ch20-22.y8 27/9/02 12:02 PM Page 621

Croke took more prisoners than he had men. Wagstaff made his escape, but

Penruddock to his honour would not abandon his men, and was taken.

Cromwell promptly sent Major-General Desborough to subdue the West

Country, but he found when he got there that there were really no embers to

stamp out. Many more prisoners were taken after Croke’s original haul, and

Desborough wrote that he could have brought in many more still of the mean-

er sort. But he sent in a list of 139, including 43 ofﬁcers and gentlemen, hop-

ing (he said) that these would sufﬁce to be made an example of. Less than a

third even of these were put on trial, and a fair trial is what they got—not by

a high court of justice, but by judge and jury under a special commission of

oyer and terminer. Of the thirty-nine who were sentenced to death for trea-

son more than half were reprieved; Thurloe reported the number to be exe-

cuted as fourteen or ﬁfteen, including of course Penruddock, and even they

were spared the butchery of hanging, drawing, and quartering. Nationwide

there was a much larger number of prisoners, including those arrested before

8 March or taken when ﬂeeing from abortive rendezvous in the north and

Midlands. The majority of these were freed during the summer and autumn

on giving bonds for their good behaviour, though a few were punished with

ﬁnes. About seventy, including some taken with Penruddock, were trans-

ported to Barbados as indentured servants, with the prospect of regaining

their freedom if they survived their term of servitude. When one compares

this retribution with the hundreds who were summarily hanged after the

rebellion of the northern earls in 1569, or the 250 hanged, drawn, and quar-

tered after Monmouth’s rebellion in 1685, Cromwell’s lenience is striking.

Penruddock’s rising was of course a smaller affair, but it would not have been

if all the men who conspired to take up arms and raise their tenantry had

actually done so.

Many factors contributed to the failure of the royalist effort in 1655: the

penetrating skill of Thurloe and his network of intelligences, the strong nerve

and vigorous counter-measures of Cromwell’s government, the lack of co-

ordination and mutual trust within the royalist leadership, the Knot’s near-

defeatism, the folly—encouraged by the king—of persisting with the rising in

face of growing evidence that many of the plans for it had been unmasked,

and the failure of nerve that made so many who had pledged their participa-

tion wait and see how the ﬁrst few days went before risking their necks. The

activists, especially some agents of the exiled court like Daniel O’Neill, had

wildly overestimated both the popular appeal of the king’s cause and the sup-

posed unpopularity of the Protectoral regime. Even in the mainly royalist ter-

ritory through which Penruddock marched, not only did he fail to raise the

622 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658

For the attempted risings and their suppression see Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy, ch. 7,

Gardiner, Commonwealth and Protectorate, ch. 39, and for a briefer survey A. H. Woolrych,

Penruddock’s Rising 1655 (Historical Association Pamphlet, 1955, repr. 1968).

ch20-22.y8 27/9/02 12:02 PM Page 622

countryfolk, but over 2,000 of them came into Taunton to help keep the

peace against him, while 400 pro-government volunteers mustered in

Gloucestershire, and a militia regiment was rapidly raised in Devon. Such

responses, coupled with London’s readiness in enlisting a special militia,

might have encouraged Cromwell to make a virtue of clemency and pursue a

steady policy of winning the positive support of former neutrals and moder-

ate ex-royalists.

Instead, he threw the opportunity away within a few months by instituting

the regime of the major-generals. It was almost certainly the biggest mistake

of his political career, but it was not incomprehensible, and it should not be

judged too hastily in the light of hindsight. The royalists’ blunders in the early

months of 1655 had been so crass that their potential for resistance had real-

ly not been measured. Cromwell was not to know that they would fail while

he lived to heal the breaches in their own ranks, construct an effective under-

ground organization, or ﬁre something like the spirit of 1660 among the

king’s friends. Furthermore, however satisfying it was that Penruddock’s fol-

lowers had been dealt with by due process of law, there were other signs dur-

ing the spring and summer that the Protectorate could not totally rely on the

judiciary to support it. Parallel to the commission of oyer and terminer in the

west, another such commission had been issued for the trial of the prisoners

taken in the north and Midlands. But the three chief commissioners—two

judges and a serjeant-at-law—proved reluctant to execute it. After taking

refuge in legal technicalities, they admitted to doubts as to whether the

offences charged against the prisoners constituted treason in law. That was to

call in question the legality of the 1654 Treason Ordinance, and by implica-

tion that of the government itself. The two judges, Francis Thorpe and

Richard Newdigate, were called before the council and dismissed from their

posts. The prisoners were eventually tried before the assize judges, who

imposed no heavier sentences on those found guilty than ﬁnes for riot or

misdemeanour.

Three other challenges to the government’s legality discomﬁted it in the

course of the spring and summer. In April it felt that it could leave the reform

of the Court of Chancery in abeyance no longer, so the three Commissioners

of the Great Seal, Lisle, Whitelocke, and Widdrington, together with William

Lenthall, Master of the Rolls, were summoned before the council and ordered

in the Protector’s name to implement the reforms prescribed in the ordinance

of the previous year. Whitelocke and Widdrington resigned rather than com-

ply, but Cromwell was so loath to lose such able and basically loyal servants

that he appointed them both as Commissioners of the Treasury.

The other two cases were quite different, but they are interesting in show-

ing further the genuine difﬁculties that senior lawyers experienced in execut-

ing the Protectorate’s ordinances and commissions, and the genuine efforts

Cavaliers in Arms, Swordsmen in the Saddle 623

ch20-22.y8 27/9/02 12:02 PM Page 623

that Cromwell and the council made to respect the law’s processes. That of a

London merchant called George Cony had begun in November when he

refused to pay duty on some silk that he had imported, and then violently

threw out the customs ofﬁcers who came to distrain on his goods. Fined £500

by a committee of the council, he had refused to pay that either, and was duly

imprisoned—whereupon he sued out a writ of habeas corpus. Being rich, he

took three of the most distinguished lawyers in the country as his counsel,

John Maynard, Thomas Twysden, and Wadham Wyndham. They were reluc-

tant to engage in direct confrontation with the government and argued on

points of procedure for as long as they could, but on 8 May they were

driven to plead that the ordinance under which customs duty was levied and

the ﬁne imposed on Cony had no force in law. The case was heard before

Chief Justice Rolle, who was one of the judges recently seized in Salisbury and

one of those who subsequently tried Penruddock and his fellow insurgents.

He made no demur at the argument of Cony’s counsel, and was promptly

summoned before the Council of State. The three counsels were separately

brought before it, and on refusing to retract were brieﬂy imprisoned, though

they soon made their submission and were freed. Rolle agreed to adjourn the

case until the following term, but he resigned his ofﬁce before it came up. He

may well have wanted no further part in this dubious quarrel; he was about

66, and he died a year later. Cony, seeing that the game was up, paid his ﬁne

and was released.

The third case was simpler but odder. In July 1655 Sir Peter Wentworth, a

former Rumper and a friend of Milton, had the collectors of the assessment in

Warwickshire arrested and prosecuted. He was brought before the council,

and there told Cromwell to his face that ‘by the law of England no money

ought to be levied upon people without their consent in parliament’.

This

was ironical, since twenty years earlier, as sheriff of Oxfordshire, he had been

collecting Ship Money for Charles I. Cromwell asked him whether he would

withdraw his action, to which he replied ‘If you will command me, I must sub-

mit’. He had made his gesture, and submit he did; the assessors were set free

to go about their business, and that was the end of the matter. These various

cases did not seriously shake Cromwell’s hold on power, but since his ﬁrst

parliament had fallen short of ratifying his authority it was uncomfortable to

have his right to it questioned from so many quarters, and to have to rely on

a judiciary that was reluctant to recognize that one cannot make revolutions

without breaking a few constitutional eggs. It was probably his evident difﬁ-

culty in putting the legal basis of his authority beyond doubt that led to a

spate of rumours that he was about to assume the crown; indeed a large

624 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658

Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, III, 862–3, quoting Cal.S.P.Dom.

(1655), pp. 296–7, 300, and Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, I, 413–14.

ch20-22.y8 27/9/02 12:02 PM Page 624

crowd gathered in Westminster on 1 June in the expectation that he would

announce his royal title that day. There was probably nothing behind such

stories but speculation and the tattle of foreign diplomats. In an affectionate

letter to his son-in-law Fleetwood, in which he was clearly baring his heart, he

wrote that ‘The noise of my being crowned &c. are like malicious ﬁgments’,

though he lamented that ‘The wretched jealousies that are amongst us, and

the spirit of calumny, turns all into gall and wormwood’.

From the spring to the autumn of 1655 Cromwell and the council were very

much occupied by dramatic developments in Britain’s foreign relations which

called for major decisions of peace or war. These will be described shortly,

but they help to explain why so many months elapsed between Penruddock’s

rising and the full establishment, between August and October, of the most

controversial phase of Cromwell’s rule, the regime of the major-generals. At

any rate it was not a hasty decision, or a mere reaction to royalist insurrec-

tion. Cromwell was aware of three main problems on the home front, and he

hoped that by a single expedient he could go a long way to tackling them all.

His most obvious need was for security against further royalist conspiracy,

for it would be tempting providence to expect the king’s supporters to bungle

their opportunities so feebly a second time round. He needed the protection

of his army, but his second major problem was that he could not afford to

maintain it at its current strength, because he had progressively reduced the

monthly assessment from £120,000 to £60,000 and his government was

falling steadily further into debt. His third great concern was over the lack of

progress in ‘the reformation of manners’, that moral regeneration of the

nation that he hoped would attend upon the better preaching of the gospel.

He publicly asserted that ‘the suppressing of vice and encouragement of

virtue [were] the very end of magistracy’,

and he knew all too well that most

JPs rarely concerned themselves with lapses in personal morality unless they

threatened a breach of the peace. ‘Really,’ he told his next parliament, ‘a just-

ice of peace shall from the most be wondered at as an owl, if he go but one step

out of the way of his fellow justices in the reformation of these things.’

It was

here, in his beliefs regarding government’s duty in the sphere of private

morality, that Cromwell’s views stood furthest from those of the western

world in the twenty-ﬁrst century, but to puritans then it did not seem so

wildly inappropriate to employ senior military ofﬁcers as vice squad chiefs.

Cromwell was impressed by Desborough’s efﬁciency in reducing the

West Country to order and obedience, but months before he set up a similar

Cavaliers in Arms, Swordsmen in the Saddle 625

Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, III, 756. I ﬁnd it surprising that Gar-

diner believed, on highly dubious evidence, that a proposal to make Cromwell king was serious-

ly considered by both the Council of State and the Council of Ofﬁcers: Commonwealth and

Protectorate, III, 155–8.

Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, IV, 112.

Ibid., p. 494.

ch20-22.y8 27/9/02 12:02 PM Page 625

organization nationwide he started raising a new mounted militia, quite sep-

arate from the old trained bands, who fought on foot. It was to be a step

towards reducing the regular army, whose cavalry was its most expensive

component. Its captains were appointed by the council in May, and they

enlisted their men, all volunteers and many of them old soldiers, during June.

They were organized in troops by counties, and they numbered 6,520 in all.

They were on call at forty-eight hours’ notice, and on active service they were

to be paid as regular cavalry; otherwise they were due a retainer of £8 a year

(though whether they got it was another matter). It was primarily to co-

ordinate the operations of this militia and of the regular forces that England

was divided into ten (later eleven) districts, including Desborough’s, each

under a major-general. The ﬁrst ten were appointed in August, and their

instructions were ﬁnalized in October. Besides their obvious military duties,

they were to disarm all Roman Catholics, all who had fought for or assisted

the king, and ‘all others who are dangerous to the peace of the nation’. They

were to take bonds of all heads of families in these categories for the good

behaviour of their whole households, and they did so in the case of over

14,000 former royalists, normally for £5,000 if they had borne arms for the

king. They returned full lists of these men to a central register in London,

where visiting royalists had to check in, after ﬁrst reporting their intended

movements to the local major-general before leaving home. They were to

maintain a ban on horse races, cock-ﬁghts, bear-baitings, and stage plays, and

to seek out robbers and highwaymen in their respective areas.

But their instructions went far beyond the spheres of security and police.

They were directed that ‘They shall in their constant carriage and conversa-

tion encourage and promote godliness and virtue, and discourage and dis-

countenance all profaneness and ungodliness’;

and in company with the JPs

and other local ofﬁcers they were to ensure that the laws against drunkenness,

swearing, blaspheming, sabbath-breaking, stage plays, and other such abom-

inations were more effectually enforced. They were to close down all out-of-

town alehouses, reduce their number everywhere, and suppress all gambling

dens and brothels in and around London. They were to put their weight

behind the enforcement of the ordinances for ejecting scandalous ministers

and schoolmasters, and to report regularly to the Protector and council on the

progress made therein.

In these various functions they were assisted by commissioners, appointed

by the council for each county, and to these some major-generals added

nominees of their own. In total about a thousand commissioners had been

626 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658

Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, III, 845; the full instructions are on

pp. 844–8. I am greatly indebted to Dr Christopher Durston for enabling me to read his

authoritative study, Godly Governors: The Rule of Cromwell’s Major-Generals, ahead of pub-

lication. The following pages owe much to his work.

ch20-22.y8 27/9/02 12:02 PM Page 626

named by the end of 1655, though not all were willing to act. They were never

intended to supplant the existing magistracy, though there was a large over-

lap in function and in personnel between the new commissioners and the local

bench. In Staffordshire, where they have been particularly closely studied,

fourteen of the twenty-two commissioners were already JPs. They also over-

lapped considerably with the ofﬁcer corps of the local militia, both old and

new. Most were to be identiﬁed with the ‘godly interest’, though few were

fanatics; among Staffordshire’s twenty-two, for instance, only two were sep-

aratists, and they were balanced by two of Anglican sympathies. Their social

status varied from region to region and covered quite a wide spectrum. In

Staffordshire, at least six ranked as middling gentry or above and four more

as lesser gentry, while another nine claimed gentry status through success in

trade or a profession. In neighbouring Cheshire the commissioners included

a higher ratio of the county elite, but also a larger military presence. By con-

trast in Kent, Sussex, and Hampshire, where royalism had been predominant

and the wounds of the second Civil War still throbbed, the proportion of

lesser gentry and men of the middling sort was higher, and the same was gen-

erally the case in the West Country.

Although the commissioners were unpaid, the organization as a whole cost

a lot of money, and the method of ﬁnancing it was one of its most unpopular

features. The main charges were the salaries of the major-generals them-

selves, the ofﬁcers of the county troops and the civilian staffs of the commis-

sioners; together these came to about £80,000 a year. Cromwell took the

view that since royalist conspiracy had necessitated the regime, royalists

should pay for it, and the result was the notorious decimation tax. All who

had adhered to the king in any way, and who possessed land worth £100 a

year or more or personal property worth at least £1,500, were made liable,

though Cromwell’s declaration which announced the scheme on 31 October

held out the hope of exemption to those who testiﬁed to a genuine change of

heart and fully accepted the present government. Otherwise they had to pay

£10 a year for every £100 of landed income or £100 for every £1,500-worth

of personal property. The obvious objections to the decimation were that it

had no sanction from parliament and took no account of whether the deci-

mated had actually engaged in plotting. The great majority who paid had

been committed royalists in the wars, though a signiﬁcant number had been

only nominally attached to the king’s side and a few had stayed neutral. How

many had been active for him since 1648, or even 1646, was a large question.

Some of the major-generals’ commissioners who were otherwise loyal and

willing subjects of the Protectorate were deeply unhappy about subjecting

Cavaliers in Arms, Swordsmen in the Saddle 627

See John Sutton,‘Cromwell’s commissioners for preserving the peace of the Common-

wealth: a Staffordshire case study’, in I. Gentles, J. Morrill, and B. Worden (eds.), Soldiers, Writ-

ers and Statesmen of the English Revolution (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 151–82.

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