Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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twenty-two

King or Constable?

Whatever one may think of the Western Design or the regime of the major-

generals, neither fulﬁlled Cromwell’s hope that it would be self-ﬁnancing.

Consequently the most important question that faced him and the council

during the ﬁrst half of 1656 was whether to summon a parliament before the

appointed three-year interval had elapsed, and the main arguments for doing

so were to remedy the government’s growing indebtedness and to put its

ﬁnances on a sounder legal footing. But another matter that they considered

intermittently, and one that it would have been quite unproﬁtable to put

before parliament, was the possible readmission of the Jews.

Since they had been expelled in 1290 there had been no recognized Jewish

community anywhere in Britain. A small body of Jewish merchants did drive

their trade in Elizabethan and early Stuart London, but their status was that

of Spanish or Portuguese aliens, and their only synagogue was a private

house, where they worshipped very circumspectly. In Holland, however, there

was a tolerated and thriving Jewish community, and several factors inclined

its leaders in the early 1650s to apply for the right of Jews to resettle in Eng-

land. One was the Commonwealth’s growing reputation for religious toler-

ance, even though it was never formally extended to those who denied the

divinity of Christ. Another was the remarkable personality of the chief rabbi

of Amsterdam, Manasseh ben Israel, whose Spes Israeli, published in 1650,

was translated as The Hope of Israel and found a ready sale in England. The

persecution of Jews had been intensifying in Russia, and ben Israel’s hope

was that England would offer a new refuge to his people. Thurloe met him in

1651 when he was in Amsterdam as Oliver St John’s secretary, and he advised

him to apply on their behalf to the Council of State. Thurloe was probably

genuinely sympathetic, but he was also aware of the Jews’ value, through

their many commercial contacts, as expert purveyors of international intelli-

gence. Ben Israel duly petitioned the council, which set up a committee

(including Cromwell) to consider his appeal, but nothing came of it while the

Rump remained in power. After the Protectorate was established, however,

he decided to come to London and see Cromwell in person, and according to

a plausible hint from John Sadler, who was known and trusted by both men,

ch20-22.y8 27/9/02 12:02 PM Page 638

Cromwell himself may have invited him. At any rate, when he arrived in

September 1655 he did not stay with his fellow-Jews in the City but was ofﬁ-

cially lodged in the Strand, close to Whitehall. Cromwell received him per-

sonally, and ben Israel opened the interview with a glowing personal tribute

to his host. Cromwell responded warmly, and invited his visitor to dine with

him. But the eloquent petition that ben Israel presented required further con-

sultation, for it asked for the right of Jews not only to reside and trade freely

but to worship in public synagogues and have their own burial ground.

Cromwell referred it to the council, which appointed a sub-committee; but

its four members had grave doubts about it and felt the need to consult more

widely. So a conference was called that included a number of judges, minis-

ters of religion, university dons, and representatives of the City, besides the

four councillors. It met several times between 4 and 18 December, and

Cromwell, who was always present, addressed it eloquently in favour of read-

mitting the Jews. He had more than one reason for doing so. He was not indif-

ferent to the inﬂux of capital that they would bring with them, and like

Thurloe he appreciated their value as intelligencers, especially as many of

them were of Spanish birth. But what probably weighed most powerfully

with him were the scriptural prophecies that the coming of Christ’s kingdom

on earth would be preceded by the conversion of the Jews. That kingdom, he

believed, would come in God’s good time, but what a great work it would be

for England to provide a setting for that essential precursor! And where like-

lier were the Jews to be converted than in what he told the conference was ‘the

only place in the world where religion was taught in its full purity’?

But the

majority of the conference remained hostile. Many ministers, though not

Cromwell’s own chaplains, still regarded the Jews as a cursed people, from

whom Christians should be spared contact. It seems, however, that the

strongest opposition came from the mercantile community, who did not want

to be exposed to open competition from some of the most skilled bankers and

traders in the world.

For the conference’s ﬁnal debate, Cromwell threw the Council Chamber

open to the public, but he had misjudged the strength of popular anti-

semitism. The room was thronged with opponents of the petition. The con-

ference’s role was only advisory, but he never took the logical next step of

inviting the full council to pronounce on it, because he knew by now that its

decision would be negative. But prerogative action remained open to him, for

the two judges present at the conference had given their opinion that there

was no law against readmitting the Jews, since they had been expelled by

King or Constable? 639

Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, IV, 52; cf. pp. 18–19, 34–6, 45, 51–5.

On the readmission generally, see C. Roth, A History of the Jews in England (Oxford, 1941) and

David S. Katz, Philo-Semitism and the Re-admission of the Jews to England 1603–1655 (Los

Angeles and Oxford, 1982).

ch20-22.y8 27/9/02 12:02 PM Page 639

royal edict. So Cromwell assured their spokesmen, though only verbally, that

the recusancy laws would not be enforced against them. They duly purchased

a burial ground, and continued to worship without interference at their syn-

agogue in Creechurch Lane. A test case arose when a rich Jewish merchant

was denounced as a Spaniard and had his goods seized on the grounds that he

was an enemy alien. The council had them restored to him, and its decision

meant that Jews resident in England no longer had to assume the guise of

Spaniards or Portuguese. Reassured by this de facto toleration, more Jews

came to settle. There was no speciﬁc decree yet to legalize their readmission,

but Jewish historians have rightly dated it from 1656, as English contempor-

aries did. It is pleasant to recall that Sigmund Freud named one of his sons

Oliver, in acknowledgement of what Cromwell had done for English Jews.

At the Restoration there was a campaign in the City to get their rights with-

drawn, but Charles II, who had himself received Jewish assistance, would

have none of it. Formal legalization followed in 1664.

On the major question of whether to summon a parliament ahead of the

prescribed three-year interval, Cromwell was obliged to act ‘with the advice

of the major part of the council’. But the decision should have been a formal-

ity, since the Instrument of Government also directed that ‘in case of future

war with any foreign state, a parliament shall be forthwith summoned for

their advice concerning the same’.

He also needed parliamentary consent for

the upkeep of military forces in excess of 30,000, and his army, including the

garrisons in Ireland, Scotland, and Jamaica, far exceeded that number. At the

end of 1655 it was costing more than half his government’s total annual

expenditure of very nearly £2m., and outgoings were exceeding revenue at

the rate of over £230,000 a year. If these were not reasons enough, there was

according to the Venetian resident a public clamour for a parliament during

May 1656, and when the major-generals were called to London for a confer-

ence shortly after, they hammered home their difﬁculties in paying their mili-

tia and meeting their debts. Yet Cromwell was most reluctant to call a

parliament, and when he ﬁnally gave way he was clearly bowing to the coun-

cil’s collective advice. He had reason to fear that a House chosen that sum-

mer, if elections were at all free, would endorse neither the constitution under

which he ruled nor the policies he was currently pursuing, but he could not

debar them from debate by the people’s representatives indeﬁnitely. And

what were the alternatives, particularly with regard to ﬁnance? If he had

extended the decimation to non-royalists, as he reportedly proposed, he

could have wrecked his prospects of winning the broad support of the

political nation irreparably. At any rate it was publicly announced on 26 June

640 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658

I owe this information to the sympathetic account of the readmission in Antonia Fraser,

Cromwell Our Chief of Men (1973), p. 357 n.

Gardiner (ed.), Constitutional Documents, p. 412.

ch20-22.y8 27/9/02 12:02 PM Page 640

that a new parliament would meet on 17 September, and the elections

took place during August.

The opposition that he had most to fear in it was that of republicans of vari-

ous shades, and the main danger was that the experienced tacticians who had

never forgiven his expulsion of the Rump would go all out, as in the last par-

liament, to win over the many unattached but instinctively anti-military

members who were sure to be returned. The prospect of elections did indeed

generate a wave of republican activity, both in print and in behind-the-scenes

intrigue. One of the ﬁrst in the fray was Sir Henry Vane, who published

A Healing Question Propounded and Resolved in May. It was a subtle

piece, and it deserves attention both because it caused serious concern to

Cromwell’s government at the time and because it closely preﬁgured

the kind of opposition that was to bring down that of his son. Its purpose was

to provide a common platform for republican politicians of Vane’s own type,

commonwealthsmen of a more populist complexion, radical puritans who

were uncomfortable about Cromwell’s temporal power, and malcontents in

the armed forces. Its clever rhetoric threw a smokescreen of evasion over the

problems that faced and divided these interests. It centred on the concept of a

‘good old cause’ that had carried parliament to victory in the Civil Wars and

was still in essence as good as ever, though it had become perverted by ‘the

private and selﬁsh interest of a particular part’ of its original adherents. The

way to restore it was to declare sovereignty to lie in the whole body of those

adherents, and to vest ultimate authority in a succession of supreme repre-

sentative assemblies freely chosen by them. How ‘the honest party’ (or ‘the

good party’), as he called them, were to be identiﬁed at the polls was a prob-

lem that he did not address, and he simply ignored the extreme unlikelihood

that any truly free elections would return a republican majority in the fore-

seeable future. Over matters of religion he asserted that the civil magistrate

should exercise no coercive power, dodging the fact that most of the English

and Scottish peoples desired the retention of a public preaching ministry,

whose maintenance depended on the co-operation of the state. In asserting

that a selﬁsh interest was denying the honest party their due role in ordering

their government, ‘upon pretence they are not in a capacity as yet to use it’,

though really for that interest’s own advancement and self-enrichment, Vane

was careful not to identify the culprits with the army as such. The honest

party needed, at least in part, to assume a military posture, but that part must

serve the interests of the whole. For the day-to-day administration of the

country and the conduct of foreign relations, Vane proposed ‘a standing

council of state settled for life’, subject to overall direction by the representa-

tive assembly, ‘but of the same fundamental constitution with themselves’. It

would govern in the intervals between parliaments (a word Vane avoided),

and ﬁll any vacancies by the majority vote of its own members. So far, Vane

King or Constable? 641

ch20-22.y8 27/9/02 12:02 PM Page 641

had advocated what looks very like a one-party state with executive power in

the hands of a self-perpetuating oligarchy, but he envisaged a third element in

the constitution, subordinate to the supreme assembly but responsible for the

execution of the laws. This function could be entrusted to a single person or

to a greater number, as the supreme assembly should see ﬁt. This was a sop to

the many who admired Cromwell and recognized his indispensability, but

were unhappy about his present powers. Once he was dead and his son over-

thrown, the republicans, Vane included, would make the exclusion of any

single person from any high constitutional role their ﬁrst principle. In A Heal-

ing Question, however, Vane proposed that Cromwell, as general of the

army, should inaugurate the new order by summoning a constituent assem-

bly, to be chosen by the well-affected throughout the country.

Vane did not of course expect this to happen, but his tract was widely read

and discussed. In July a number of leading commonwealthsmen and Fifth

Monarchists, including Colonel Okey, Vice-Admiral Lawson, and Thomas

Venner, met to consider a proposal that it should form a basis for a union of

the two groups against the Protectorate, but they came to no conclusion, for

Vane’s model smacked too much of ‘carnal’ government for the extreme mil-

lenarians. So far the council had taken no formal notice of Vane’s pamphlet,

but after this meeting it interrogated Okey, Lawson, Venner, and one other,

though after examining them it let them go. It also sent for Vane, who at ﬁrst

ignored the order, as being contrary to the laws and liberties of England, but

upon a second summons he appeared before it on 21 August. It found his tract

subversive, and demanded a bond for £5,000 that he would ‘do nothing to the

prejudice of the present government, and the peace of the commonwealth’.

He indignantly refused, accusing it of following the absolutist practices of

Charles I. The council gave him two weeks in which to change his mind, and

then imprisoned him in Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight, which like

the other offshore islands was beyond the reach of the writ of habeas corpus.

But Vane was released at the end of the year.

Bradshaw and Ludlow were two other former Rumpers whose persistent

refusal to recognize the government’s legitimacy brought them before the

council, since they were still in places of authority. Bradshaw was dismissed

from his ofﬁce as Chief Justice of Chester and justice of three Welsh counties,

but he suffered no other penalties. Ludlow, who was still lieutenant-general

of the army in Ireland, had been circulating anti-Protectorate literature with-

in it, and Fleetwood as commander-in-chief and Lord Deputy had demanded

the resignation of his commission. Ludlow preferred to have it out with

Cromwell in person, who granted his wish and tried earnestly to persuade

642 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658

A Healing Question is reprinted in Somers Tracts, ed. Sir W. Scott, 13 vols. (1809–15), VI,

303–15.

ch20-22.y8 27/9/02 12:02 PM Page 642

him of what he saw as the error of his ways. ‘What is it that you would have?’,

he asked him; ‘what can you desire more than you have?’ ‘That which we

fought for,’ Ludlow replied, ‘that the nation might be governed by its own

consent’; to which Cromwell retorted: ‘I am as much for a government by

consent as any man, but where shall we ﬁnd that consent? Amongst the

prelatical, Presbyterian, Independent, Anabaptist, or Levelling parties?’

Ludlow’s own account of the long interview shows us two men of utterly

sincere convictions at irreconcilable odds, though experience had given

Cromwell a sharper sense of political realities than Ludlow ever had. As with

Vane, the council demanded of Ludlow a bond of £5,000 for his peaceable

behaviour, and like Vane he refused. The councillors differed as to what to do

with him; Lambert was for peremptorily insisting that he give the bond or

take the consequences, while Cromwell was prepared to send him back to Ire-

land. In the end he was allowed to retire to his brother-in-law’s house in Essex

without paying up. The reason for keeping him out of his native Wiltshire was

that a substantial party there wanted to re-elect him to parliament.

At the radical end of the spectrum some remnants of the Leveller movement

were still capable of giving a little trouble. Not all wished to, by any means;

Walwyn for example had withdrawn from political activity and started prac-

tising as a physician. John Lilburne had become a devout Quaker. He was still

formally a prisoner in Dover Castle, but he was often out on parole, free to

enjoy the company of his devoted wife and his children, and to preach to his

fellow-Quakers in various parts of Kent. He died on 29 August 1657. By con-

trast Edward Sexby, the former agitator, had been deep in intrigue with the

royalists when the 1655 risings were brewing, and only escaped arrest by ﬂee-

ing to Flanders. There he extended his royalist contacts and won the ear of the

Count of Fuensaldaña, the commander of the Spanish Army of Flanders.

That gullible ofﬁcer was so taken with his proposal for a joint enterprise by

Spain, the cavaliers, the commonwealthsmen, part of the ﬂeet (so it was

promised), and much of the army, to overthrow Cromwell and restore Charles II,

that he sent Sexby to Madrid to lay his scheme before the king and his minis-

ters. Needless to say, Sexby’s notion that he could persuade a large part of

Cromwell’s army to support a Spanish-backed royalist rising was as chimer-

ical as his supposition that Charles, in return, would implement a constitu-

tion modelled on the 1648 Agreement of the People. The Spanish government

shrewdly promised no more than ﬁnancial support, if and when a rising real-

ly got going in England, while Hyde and the wiser majority of exiled royalists

were as suspicious of Sexby personally as of his design to compromise the

monarchy. But in May 1656 Sexby got a letter through to John Wildman,

who was still in the Tower after being caught dictating the seditious

King or Constable? 643

Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, II, 10–14.

ch20-22.y8 27/9/02 12:02 PM Page 643

manifesto mentioned earlier. On 1st July Wildman was released on bail, and

his quite considerable estates were freed from conﬁscation. He almost cer-

tainly obtained his liberty by betraying to Thurloe what he knew of the

Leveller–royalist conspiracy and engaging to spy for him in the future. He had

no intention, however, of transferring his allegiance to the Protectorate.

Once out of prison he set about supplanting Sexby as the chief link between

the Levellers and the royal court, and he would soon be deep in a plot to

assassinate Cromwell.

In the same year in which Vane published his pragmatic blueprint of a com-

monwealth and the seedier remnants of the Leveller movement were com-

promising their former republican principles, James Harrington put the

ﬁnishing touches to the greatest work of republican political thought to be

written by an Englishman in the early modern period. He had been working

on The Commonwealth of Oceana for some years, and it appeared soon after

the new parliament met. Oceana was a transparent synonym for England.

Although it implied a deeply critical view of the Protectoral regime, it was not

in intention a subversive work and it contained no incitement to resistance.

The government kept a close eye on its printers and publishers while it was in

the press, probably suspecting that it might run in the same channel of repub-

lican opposition as that exempliﬁed by the three colonels of 1654 and by

Lawson and others more recently, but Harrington himself was never troubled

or interrogated over it while Cromwell lived. Oceana, for all its baroque extrava-

gance of detail, was a serious attempt to prescribe for Britain’s political needs

in his own time. It was widely read and discussed, and when the fabric of

government began to unravel after Oliver’s death Harrington campaigned

hard, and not without support, to get his solutions adopted.

Central to his argument was that the form of a country’s government, if it

is to be stable, must be matched to the distribution of property, especially

landed property, within it. Ownership of all the land by one man, for ex-

ample the Turkish sultan, results in absolute monarchy. Where most of the

land belongs to a feudal nobility, as in medieval England, the appropriate

form is a mixed monarchy, with the crown sharing power with the aristocracy.

Where ownership is much more widely distributed, or as Harrington put it

where the balance is popular, only a republic can provide durably stable gov-

ernment. He believed that this condition had been reached in England under

the Tudors, through various measures but especially through the vast sales of

monastic land. Queen Elizabeth, by ‘converting her reign through the perpet-

ual love tricks that passed between her and her people into a kind of

romance’, had concealed the mismatch between the ‘superstructures’ of gov-

ernment and its economic foundations, but the Stuarts, lacking her ﬂair, had

644 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658

M. Ashley, John Wildman, Plotter and Postmaster (1947), pp. 95–103.

ch20-22.y8 27/9/02 12:02 PM Page 644

left it increasingly exposed: ‘Wherefore the dissolution of this government

caused the Civil War, not the war the dissolution of this government’.

prevent the balance from ever swinging back to a dominant aristocracy, Har-

rington prescribed a fundamental ‘agrarian law’, whereby anyone who

owned or acquired land worth more than £2,000 a year would be compelled

to distribute the surplus among his younger children.

Another of his basic tenets was that the commonwealth should be defended

by a citizen militia and not by a professional army, so he linked political rights

with compulsory military obligation as well as with ownership of property.

He therefore divided Oceana’s population into three classes: those worth

upwards of £100 a year in land or goods, styled ‘the horse’ because they

would perform their military service as cavalry; those worth less but with a

modest competency, called ‘the foot’ because they would train and ﬁght as

infantrymen; and servants and the poor, who since they lacked economic

independence would share neither the obligations nor the political participa-

tion allotted to the other two orders. At the heart of Oceana’s constitution

was a legislature consisting of two elected chambers, a senate of 300 chosen

wholly from and by the horse, and an assembly of 1,050 composed of horse

and foot in the ratio of 3 to 4. The ﬁrst was supposed to embody the wisdom,

the second the interest of the commonwealth. That was a crude assumption,

but Harrington was far ahead of his time in requiring that the elections to

both chambers should be by secret ballot. Both were to remain continually in

being, for in place of general elections he prescribed a system of rotation

whereby a third of each body should retire each year. His most idiosyncratic

proposal was that the senate should have the sole right to propose and debate

measures; the more popular assembly was to ballot for or against them in

silence, without the right to discuss or amend them. As for day-to-day admin-

istration, the highest ofﬁces of state were to be elected by and from the senate,

but the ‘magistracy’ that executed the laws, from the national judges to the

local JPs, was to be quite distinct from the legislature. All its members were to

be publicly elected, and all subject to rotation. Some of the detail in Oceana

invited and received ridicule, but in Harrington’s lifetime it was more widely

read, and on the whole more respectfully, than Leviathan, and its relevance

was recognized anew during the American Revolution. Harrington believed

that the legislator who successfully devised the institutions appropriate to his

country’s needs was creating a work of art, but his insights into the relation-

ship between the structure of society and the structure of government place

him among the pioneers of politics as a science.

King or Constable? 645

The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), p. 25, reprinted in J. G. A. Pocock (ed.), The Polit-

ical Works of James Harrington (Cambridge, 1977), p. 198. For distinguished commentaries, see

Pocock’s introduction, and chapters 2 and 3 by Blair Worden in Republicanism, Liberty and

Commercial Society, 1649–1776, ed. David Wootton (Stanford, Calif., 1994).

ch20-22.y8 27/9/02 12:02 PM Page 645

However one may judge the relevance of Oceana to Britain’s problems in

1656, the parliamentary elections that were held while it was in the press

demonstrated that the country was still a considerable way from the degree of

consensus needed to make ‘a government by consent’ possible. The major-

generals, who devoted most of their energies to the elections during the sum-

mer, gave widely different predictions of their outcome. They all got

themselves elected, and all the rest of the council of state got in except Lord

Lisle and the Earl of Mulgrave, who probably did not stand. But such was the

outcry against ‘swordsmen and decimators’ during the electioneering period

and at the polls that the inﬂuence of the major-generals was on balance prob-

ably negative. They helped to get a disproportionate number of fellow army

ofﬁcers elected, but they were powerless to prevent the return of many repub-

licans, with Haselrig and Scot in the van.

The council felt driven to make full use of the power conferred on it by the

Instrument of Government to scrutinize the returns and exclude any persons

who fell under the disqualiﬁcations therein laid down. These were primarily

active royalists, Irish rebels, and Roman Catholics, but hardly any of those

debarred by the council fell into these categories, so it was left to be inferred

that they were not ‘persons of known integrity, fearing God, and of good con-

versation’.

This was insulting, and in most cases untrue. But the worst blun-

der was to exclude so many—just over a hundred of those elected, which

caused ﬁfty or sixty more to decline to take their seats in protest. Contempor-

ary allegations that many of the excluded were either not disaffected or of no

political weight were almost certainly correct. At least a third of them had not

sat in parliament before. Cromwell later declared that he had been against so

many exclusions, but he could surely have put his foot down more

ﬁrmly if he had felt that way at the time. All through its long ﬁrst session, this

was at best only two-thirds of a parliament.

The pageantry at its opening on 17 September was more military than in

1654. Only Lambert sat with Cromwell in his coach, and three hundred army

ofﬁcers marched in front of them from Whitehall to Westminster Abbey,

where Owen preached an adulatory sermon. Cromwell addressed the mem-

bers as before in the Painted Chamber, and despite its being very hot there he

spoke for two or three hours. He may have been aware afterwards that it was

not one of his best efforts, for it was not printed. Besides being too long for its

content, much of it was rather truculently defensive or jingoistic. He would

speak ﬁrst, he said, of what had been done out of necessity to preserve the very

being of the nation, and then of what was needed for its well-being—for the

fulﬁlment, that is, of the great things that God had in store for it. Under the

ﬁrst head he justiﬁed the war with Spain, ‘a natural enemy’, made so ‘by an

646 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658

Gardiner (ed.), Constitutional Documents, p. 411.

ch20-22.y8 27/9/02 12:02 PM Page 646

enmity put into him by God’. No honest or honourable peace was to be had

with such a power, for it would be ‘but to be kept so long as the pope said

amen to it’. As for England’s almost unprovoked aggression in the Caribbean,

‘Being denied just things, we thought it our duty to get that by the sword

which we could not otherwise do. And this hath been the spirit of English-

men’.

He furiously denounced Spain’s alliance with Charles II, not admitting

of course that it was a consequence and not a cause of the war in which he had

chosen to engage. It was a good thing that his actual conduct of foreign pol-

icy was becoming less crude than his public defence of it. He made all he could

of the attempted risings eighteen months ago, portraying the royalists as hand

in glove with papists, and both driven by the recently elected Pope Alexander

VII, whose design it allegedly was to unite the catholic interest against the

protestant throughout Christendom.

We need not follow his excoriation of the commonwealthsmen, whom he

described as ‘the Levelling party [going] under a ﬁner name or notion’. He fol-

lowed it with a lengthy justiﬁcation of the major-generals and of the decima-

tion tax that ﬁnanced them. Their regime had not only preserved the peace,

he said, but had ‘been more effectual towards the discountenancing of vice

and settling religion, than anything done these ﬁfty years’. The tone of his

speech took a turn for the better as he moved at last from the theme of ‘being’

to that of ‘well-being’. He made one of his more eloquent vindications of lib-

erty of conscience; he took pride in his government’s efforts to promote a

preaching ministry, regarding whose remuneration he said: ‘I should think I

were very treacherous if I should take away tithes, till I see the legislative

power to settle maintenance to them another way’. He then warmed to his

familiar theme of a reformation of manners, and linked it to his support for

the established social order. ‘We would keep up the nobility and gentry,’ he

said, ‘and the way to keep them up is not to suffer them to be patronizers or

countenancers of debauchery or disorders’. He appealed to the parliament to

be fellow-labourers in the good work: ‘Truly these things do respect the souls

of men, and the spirits, which are the men. If that be kept pure, a man signi-

ﬁes somewhat; if not, I would very fain see what difference there is betwixt

him and a beast.’ He urged the need to reform the law, not in its essence but

to ensure its more humane execution. It was abominable, he said, ‘to hang a

man for sixpence, threepence, I know not what; to hang for a triﬂe and par-

don murder’.

After a belated and all too brief mention of the government’s

present ﬁnancial plight, he ended with an exhortation based on the eighty-

ﬁfth Psalm to join with him in advancing the interest of the people of God.

It was only when the members went to take their seats in the House that

some of them learnt that they were to be excluded from it. At the door, a

King or Constable? 647

Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, IV, 261, 263.

Ibid., pp. 267–74, for all the quotations in this paragraph.

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