Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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he could persuade the House to stop pressing him over the crown, for the sake

of securing virtually all its other desires. The actual effect, however, was to

make the kinglings think that his keenness on the new constitution as a whole

was causing him to waver over the royal title. The wish was father to the

thought, for there is nothing in his recorded words, prolix and convoluted

though they sometimes were, to warrant such a supposition.

Parliament spent a whole week in considering his ‘objections’, and it met

his wishes on virtually all of them, including the vital matter of the revenue. It

then attended to the acts passed by Barebone’s Parliament and the ordinances

made by the Protector and council during 1654, whose legality had been

challenged by Cony, Wentworth, and others. It conﬁrmed all of them that

mattered, except that the act for civil marriages was extended for only six

months. The triers, whose work Cromwell valued so highly, obtained parlia-

ment’s blessing, though it asserted its right to approve future appointments to

their commission. Parliament presented the results of its deliberations to him

on 1st May, expressing a hope for his early decision on its whole offer. This

he promised to give, but nearly a week went by without further word

from him.

It is during these tense weeks of late April and early May that his thoughts

and intentions are hardest to read. Until only a day or two before his ﬁnal

decision he kept them very much to himself. Thurloe wrote to Henry

Cromwell on 21 April that his father was having ‘very great difﬁculties in his

own mind’ about the choice that faced him, and on 5 May he still did not

know which way it would go. It may be that Cromwell was having late doubts

as to whether he really would be following the guiding hand of providence by

refusing the crown, given the beneﬁts that would ﬂow from his reaching full

agreement with parliament over the constitution, the succession, and the rev-

enue. He may genuinely have wanted time for prayer and heart-searching

before ﬁnally committing himself. But another possibility, and perhaps the

likelier, is that he was taking time to gauge public reaction, and par-

ticularly that of the army, before choosing the moment to make his refusal

public. The view most widely taken by modern historians from Firth onward

is that he slowly made up his mind to accept the crown, but was deﬂected

from doing so by opposition from the army, most particularly from Desbor-

ough, Lambert, and Fleetwood. This was what the foreign diplomats and

many MPs believed, and the strongest evidence for it comes from Thurloe,

who reported to Henry that on 6 and 7 May Oliver privately told several

members that he was resolved to accept the Petition and Advice, royal title

and all. He certainly arranged a meeting with the House on the 7th, and then

countermanded it that same morning. But Thurloe’s evidence should be

treated with caution, for Cromwell made so many cloudy utterances

during these long negotiations, in afﬁrming his general goodwill towards the

658 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658

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parliamentary constitution, that without knowing his actual words to those

members on the 6th and 7th we should not attach too much weight to them.

He did not have to fear the army, but he did need to keep an eye on its reac-

tions, since its dissident elements were still capable of making mischief. It

remained divided during the crucial stages of the negotiation. Whalley

believed that the Petition and Advice held forth such prospects of settlement

that he would acquiesce in the royal title if need be, and he said so in parlia-

ment. He was one of many senior ofﬁcers on whose loyalty Cromwell could

rely; ‘great professions of ﬁdelity have been made very lately’, Thurloe report-

ed on 29 April.

But Pride and Desborough, always more intransigent (and

less intelligent), were so put out by what they, like others, assumed to be

Cromwell’s imminent acceptance of the crown that they went to John Owen

on 6 May and persuaded him to draft a petition, which they then circulated

among the ofﬁcers in and around London for their signatures. It was not a

direct challenge to Cromwell, for it was addressed to parliament and simply

begged it not to press him to assume a title that he had already refused. But

only about thirty ofﬁcers signed it, and at least half of them ranked no higher

than captain; only two were full colonels. On this same 6 May Desborough

met Cromwell as he was walking in St James’s Park and told him that if he

took the crown he would not act against him, but he would serve him no

further. Cromwell got the same message from Fleetwood and Lambert.

Naturally those ofﬁcers liked to think that they had made him change his

mind, and because of the widespread assumption that he was on the point of

becoming King Oliver they have received more credence than they deserved.

But they were most probably wrong. He had told the politicking ofﬁcers what

he thought of them in that memorable speech on 27 February, and when he

heard of the new petition drafted by Owen he was ﬁlled with fury. It may well

have been the reason why he cancelled his intended speech to parliament on

7 May. Supposing (as is supposed here) that he had been treading a diplo-

matic tightrope, waiting for his best chance of achieving his constant object-

ive of closing with the parliament on the rest of the new constitution without

having to change his title, the ofﬁcers’ intervention could have been gravely

prejudicial, because it would make it appear to the world that in refusing the

crown he was bowing to army pressure. That is what the world did assume,

and it was probably quite untrue. The ease with which he sent Lambert into

retirement shortly after this episode, and his devastating rebuke to Fleetwood

for another crass political intervention nine months later, would show how

little he felt he need defer to these ofﬁcers. If he had wanted to be king, a few

King or Constable? 659

Thurloe State Papers, VI, 281, quoted in Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, II, 25 n. 2. The

whole negotiation is discussed at length and fully documented in Firth, Last Years of the Protect-

orate, I, ch. 6, though Firth’s conclusions differ from mine.

Thurloe State Papers, VI, 243, quoted in Firth, Last Years, I, 189.

ch20-22.y8 27/9/02 12:02 PM Page 659

dismissals would have been necessary to bring the army completely to heel, as

in 1654 and again early in 1658, but that would have sufﬁced. Taken as a

whole it was a less political army than it had been in the late 1640s. It was still

capable of ideological arousal, as the events of 1659 would show, but for

most of the middle-ranking and junior ofﬁcers, and for nearly all the rank and

ﬁle, soldiering had become a career.

Damaging though the ofﬁcers’ attempt at intervention was, Cromwell

could not defer his answer to the parliament any longer. On 8 May he

addressed the members in the Banqueting House in a short, plain, and patent-

ly sincere speech. He again praised their efforts to provide for ‘the great

fundamentals’ of civil and religious liberty and declared ‘that, ceteris paribus,

no private judgement is to lie in the balance with the judgement of parlia-

ment’. But he had to ask of them the liberty to follow the dictates of his

conscience, indeed he had an overriding duty to do so. That being the case, he

said ‘I cannot undertake this government with that title of king’.

The House received his reply with shock and consternation; indeed the

members were so nonplussed that they did not take it into debate until the

13th, and then they spent three whole days on it. They were divided between

continuing to press the Petition as it stood or letting him retain the title of Pro-

tector, and again between leaving his ofﬁce as it was or deﬁning and restrict-

ing it further. Many were so frustrated that they ceased to come to the House;

attendances grew thinner and thinner. Once his continuance as Protector was

accepted, the question of his authority was referred to a committee. On the

22nd it recommended that he was ‘to govern according to this Petition and

Advice in all things therein contained; and in all other things, according to the

laws of these nations and not otherwise’.

This report was adopted, but only

by ﬁfty-three votes to ﬁfty, a paper-thin majority in a parliament shrunken to

well under a quarter of its nominal strength. But it sufﬁced. Cromwell, who

must have been in suspense as to whether his refusal had killed the Petition

stone dead, gave it his formal assent in its revised form on 25 May, and was

solemnly reinstalled as Lord Protector on 26 June.

This second investiture was a much more richly ceremonial occasion than

the ﬁrst, with the army much less in evidence; only the Yeomen of the Guard

and the Protector’s life guard attended the state coach to and from Westmin-

ster Hall. There he sat in the coronation chair—moved from Westminster

Abbey for the only time in its history—in which English monarchs had been

crowned since 1308. He rose from it to be invested by the Speaker with a robe

of purple velvet lined with ermine, and was girded with a rich sword of

justice. He bore a sceptre of solid gold weighing over ten pounds. Public reac-

tion to the ceremony was muted; the crowd that came to watch the procession

660 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658

Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, IV, 512–14.

Commons Journals, VII, 537.

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come and go from Whitehall was unusually silent, but how many in it, one

wonders, knew just what was going on? To the average citizen the changes in

the constitution made no great difference. The irrepressible Prynne had greet-

ed the ﬁrst appearance of the Petition and Advice with a piece entitled King

Richard the Third Revived, but during the ensuing spring there had been no

such pamphlet controversy as had attended earlier political changes since the

ﬁrst Civil War. How far this was due to lower public interest and how far to

tighter control of the press is hard to say; probably something of both. Mili-

tant opposition to the new government came from the expected quarters, the

Fifth Monarchists and their fellow-travellers, and the commonwealthsmen.

The government had released Feake and Rogers from prison in December

1656, and both promptly resumed their attack on it as fanatically as ever, in

print and from the pulpit. They did not stop at words, for they were intent on

overthrowing ‘Babylon’ by force. But they found their support much nar-

rower than in the heady days of Barebone’s Parliament, even among their

fellow Fifth Monarchists. Harrison and Carew would have nothing to do

with them, saying they ‘were not of a Gospel spirit’; nor would John Simpson

or the Baptists Jessey and Kifﬁn. In south Wales, once one of their heartlands,

Morgan Llwyd had renounced militancy, and even Vavasor Powell held aloof

from the current plans for a rising. Those plans centred on the congregation

of Thomas Venner, a cooper, lay preacher, and former Massachusetts

colonist, who had already been in trouble for plotting to blow up the Tower.

The would-be insurrectionists prepared a manifesto, entitled A Standard Set

Up, which comprehensively denounced Cromwell and his government and

sketched the primitive theocracy that they aimed to put in its place. Supreme

authority was to be vested in a Sanhedrin of saints, elected annually by ‘the

Lord’s freemen’, who were also to choose the judges and local magistrates.

There were to be no tithes, no excise, indeed in peacetime no taxes whatever.

This was offered as the constitution of the kingdom of Christ, but to the

uninitiated it must have looked ﬁtter for cloud cuckoo land. Venner’s military

plans were equally unrealistic, and Thurloe’s intelligencers were on to them.

When he and his comrades tried to rendezvous on 9 April, they were round-

ed up by a party of horse before they even laid hands on their modest store of

arms. Thurloe’s revelation of the whole affair to parliament two days later

earned him the thanks of the House and gave an unintended boost to the

kinglings. As another remarkable example of the government’s leniency,

Venner’s life was spared, though he was imprisoned in the Tower until

February 1659. Perhaps it wisely reckoned that the decline of the Fifth

Monarchist movement would best continue if it refrained from making mar-

tyrs of men who no longer posed a very serious threat.

King or Constable? 661

DNB; Firth, Last Years, I, 207–19; Capp, Fifth Monarchy Men, pp. 117–20.

ch20-22.y8 27/9/02 12:02 PM Page 661

The radical commonwealthsmen’s designs against Cromwell’s life had

been thrown into disarray when Sindercombe’s plot was uncovered, but

Sexby was still at large in Holland, and as murderous in intent as ever. He was

cogitating a printed piece that would justify the assassination of the Protector

as a patriotic act and a blow for the people, but he knew he lacked literary

skill and learning, so he enlisted one Captain Silius Titus as his co-author.

Titus had originally fought for parliament, but had converted to royalism

while attending upon Charles I in his captivity, and was now an active inter-

mediary between the exiled court and the former Levellers. Together they

concerted Killing No Murder, whose message was that to slay Cromwell, he

being a tyrant both through his unlawful acquisition of power and his despot-

ic exercise of it, would be no sin but an act of duty to God and man. It is a

thoroughly unpleasant piece, but written with a wit and eloquence well cal-

culated to appeal to all who shared its authors’ hatred, and the more danger-

ous because it particularly incited members of the army to act the part of

assassins. It was doubly disingenuous in that its title-page named as its author

Sexby’s old fellow-agitator William Allen, who had no part in it whatever.

Sexby reckoned on exploiting the army’s resentment at Cromwell’s assump-

tion of the crown, which he fully expected, but he did not get the printed

copies over from Holland until after Oliver had refused it. About 1,700 were

seized between 25 and 27 May, but a few probably escaped Thurloe’s watch-

dogs. Sexby himself risked coming to England a month later, but an accom-

plice betrayed him just as he was re-embarking for Holland. He spent the

short remainder of his life in the Tower, where he fell sick in mind and body

and died in January 1658.

Immediately after his re-investiture, Cromwell adjourned parliament until

January. It had been a long and strenuous session, and those who had sat it

out deserved a rest. It would consist of two Houses when it met again, and

since it had agreed to entrust the initial nomination of the Other House entire-

ly to him he needed time to make his choice. Meanwhile the newly constitut-

ed privy council met for the ﬁrst time on 3 July, though it was new only in

name. Thurloe was formally admitted to it on the 13th, though he had been

acting a councillor’s part for a long time. No other new member was added

until Cromwell’s elder son Richard was appointed on 31 December. But all

privy councillors were now required to take a lengthy oath, and since it was

prescribed in the Additional Petition and Advice that had been formulated

mainly in response to Cromwell’s ‘paper of objections’, it is quite likely that

he was its main instigator. Some councillors, mainly those of the military fac-

tion, jibbed at it, but only Lambert persisted in refusing to take it. One can

only speculate as to what he found so objectionable in it, but he was plausibly

rumoured to have his eye on the succession to the Protectorship. In a long

interview with him on 11 July, Cromwell strove to persuade him to take the

662 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658

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oath, but having failed, he ordered him two days later to surrender all his

commissions—not just as councillor but as major-general, as colonel of two

regiments, as Admiralty Commissioner, and as Lord Warden of the Cinque

Ports. But he did not part with his old comrade-in-arms in anger, for he grant-

ed him a handsome pension. He also retained him as one of the leading com-

missioners of the new University of Durham, whose establishment he had

formally inaugurated just two months earlier. But he could not tolerate Lam-

bert’s implied rejection of the constitution that he had so painfully negoti-

ated with the parliament, and he had to show the army who was master.

There was never any doubt. Of their own accord, the ofﬁcers of both

Lambert’s regiments pledged their loyalty to Cromwell in writing, and so,

unanimously, did a general meeting of the ofﬁcers in and about London on 27

July.

King or Constable? 663

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twenty-three

The Protectorate in Scotland,

Ireland, and Europe

If Scotland and Ireland have remained in the background through the last

three chapters, it is because their political role following the Cromwellian

conquests was mainly passive. Both countries were to play a dramatic part in

the restoration of Charles II, but throughout Cromwell’s Protectorate they

were subordinate to England, though in different degrees. Government in

Scotland was far more considerate of Scottish interests, and more open to

Scottish participation, than in Ireland.

Lord Broghill, it will be remembered, had stipulated when he accepted the

presidency of the Scottish council that he would serve no longer than a year,

and in August 1656 he duly departed. During his tenure the balance in Scot-

tish government shifted from a military to a civilian predominance, and

Monck, his right-hand man and commander-in-chief, who famously said on

a later occasion that he had learnt his trade in a commonwealth (the Dutch

republic) where soldiers obeyed orders but gave none, willingly concurred in

the trend. This is not to deny that English army ofﬁcers continued to be

involved in Scottish government at all levels from the council downward, but

they did not constitute a self-consciously military interest and they worked in

harmony with their civilian colleagues. The army played a necessary role in

countering conspiracy, maintaining law and order, and ensuring that deci-

sions taken by the Scottish council and the government in London were

implemented in the localities, but Scotsmen played a full part in the commis-

sion of the peace and the collection of the cess (the equivalent of England’s

monthly assessment) and the excise. Initially, the English council’s instruc-

tions were to assimilate legal procedures in Scotland to those of English law

‘as far as the rules of the court will permit’, but Scottish law and its processes

proved toughly resistant, and gradually won an impressive degree of accept-

ance from Westminster.

Broghill and Monck were of course always aware that the Scots had been

in arms against the English government in more years than not between 1648

and 1654, and that some elements in the nation would never bow to English

ch23-24.y8 27/9/02 12:08 PM Page 664

dominance or renounce the house of Stuart. But they made it as easy as they

could for all those who were prepared to accept the new order to ﬁnd a place

in it. Cromwell and the English council passed an Ordinance of Pardon and

Grace for Scotland in 1654, but it excluded from its beneﬁts 24 leading roy-

alists whose entire estates were declared forfeit, and 73 who were subject to

punitive ﬁnes. Of the 24, however, eight won a total reprieve and others a par-

tial one, while 55 of the 73 were let off with paying only a third or less of their

nominal ﬁnes and none paid more than half. Resistance among the dwindling

numbers of the irreconcilable was stiﬂed by an effective military presence and

an intelligence network that watched their movements and monitored their

contacts with the exiled court.

The biggest single obstacle to Scottish acceptance of English overlordship

lay in its cost, and the army was far and away the largest item of expenditure.

The Scots were a poor nation compared with the English, and ﬁfteen years of

intermittent ﬁghting from the Bishops’ Wars to Glencairn’s rising had further

impoverished them. During that rising England had had over 20,000 ofﬁcers

and men in Scotland, and though they had been reduced to about 12,450 by

October 1655, and fell by a further 3,000 or so by 1659, they were still cost-

ing over £270,000 a year to maintain when the Protectorate came to an end.

There was never a chance of meeting their cost from revenue raised in Scot-

land. That revenue came from four main sources, the estates of the Scottish

crown, the customs, the excise, and the cess. The value of the crown lands was

much diminished by what Charles I and his son had granted away to their

loyal supporters, and the attempt to recover the income from these estates

caused keen resentment among the nobility. The odium fell upon the radical-

ly reorganized Scottish Exchequer and its newly erected Exchequer Court,

which were among Broghill’s more impressive creations. Scottish nobles, like

their counterparts elsewhere in that age, hated carrying their share of the ﬁs-

cal burden, and by the spring of 1658 the crown estates were still bringing in

only £5,300 a year. Duties on imported goods were yielding about £12,800

in 1656, another disappointing ﬁgure, but the new excise on beer, ale, and

spirits which the Scottish council introduced and farmed out to the highest

bidder, county by county, was producing a total of just over £35,000 in

1656–7, and more than £47,000 by 1659.

The cess was the largest source of revenue, and the most unpopular, partly

because the Scots were not accustomed to regular direct taxation on such a

scale and partly because it was earmarked for the upkeep of an occupying

army. The government did constantly reassess the quotas imposed on the

local communities in an effort to match its demands to their capacity to pay,

The Protectorate in Scotland, Ireland, and Europe 665

H. M. Reece, ‘The military presence in England, 1649–60’ (Oxford, D.Phil. thesis), p. 287;

Dow, Cromwellian Scotland, p. 219 and passim. I am much indebted to Dr Dow’s work for all

that concerns Scotland in this chapter.

ch23-24.y8 27/9/02 12:08 PM Page 665

and with the aim of involving the Scottish gentry in rating their neighbours

and dependents it required all JPs to act ex ofﬁcio as assessment commission-

ers. This, however, caused a mild setback to the laudable introduction of the

commission of the peace to Scotland, because it made many lairds refuse to

serve in either capacity. Broghill and Monck clung as long as they could to a

target of £10,000 a month for the cess, for even if it had been attainable it

would have covered nowhere near half the cost of the army in Scotland. But

they came to accept that the ravages of war had put it beyond reach, and with

Monck’s full agreement parliament reduced it in 1657 to a more realistic

£6,000. Scottish revenue never met half the costs of governing, defending,

and policing the country. Just before the Protectorate was overturned in

1659, a parliamentary investigation showed a total annual expenditure on

Scotland of £307,271, and a total Scottish revenue of £143,652; the balance

fell on the English taxpayer. The Scots felt that they were heavily taxed, but

the burden was not intolerable, and the government strove in association

with local interests to ensure that it fell as equitably as possible on the various

sectors of the community.

One way and another, Scotland was making steady progress from the sta-

tus of a conquered country towards partnership in the Commonwealth of

Great Britain. The process was very incomplete when Cromwell died, and the

partnership was never likely to be an equal one. But the involvement of nobles

and lairds in local administration and justice through the commission of the

peace was a real blessing, and the regime’s increasing respect for the distinct-

ive principles and procedures of Scottish law was to its credit. Scotland’s rep-

resentation in the Westminster parliament, though limited to thirty members,

became more of a reality in 1656–7 than it had been in 1654. In the ﬁrst Pro-

tectorate parliament it had not been found possible to ﬁll even thirty seats; we

know the names of only twenty-two members, and nine of them were Eng-

lishmen. But in the second, all the Scottish seats were ﬁlled, fourteen of them

by Scotsmen, and these were men of real political and social weight. The Eng-

lishmen holding Scottish seats included ﬁve councillors and several other

high-ranking ofﬁcials; only four were serving army ofﬁcers. The Scottish

council was indeed severely depleted during parliament’s session, and the

new Exchequer Court was rendered inquorate.

Civil jurisdiction at the highest level was committed to eight Commission-

ers for the Administration of Justice. Two of them were returned to parlia-

ment, and the death of two others reduced their number also below a

quorum, just before the summer session of 1657. It was not very easy to

replace them, because most learned English men of law were reluctant to

wrestle with an alien and complex legal system in a far-away country, and

many able Scots were unwilling to compromise the law of their fathers. Grad-

ually, however, the government both in Edinburgh and Westminster eased up

666 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658

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on trying to assimilate Scottish procedures to English and came to trust Scots-

men to administer Scottish law, at least in civil actions. The change of attitude

was reciprocated. That fascinating diarist Alexander Brodie of Brodie had, as

a Scottish patriot, refused Cromwell’s invitation to advise him on the Ordin-

ance of Union, declined his seat in Barebone’s Parliament, and turned down

a judgeship early in 1657. But he accepted one in January 1658, and thereby

Scottish judges (in the civil sphere) came to outnumber English by ﬁve to four.

They were a distinguished group. The number of cases that the commission-

ers adjudged rose steeply in 1657–8, which strongly suggests that people were

engaging in litigation more willingly because they trusted the justice that the

court was dispensing.

The government was understandably slower to entrust Scottish judges with

the exercise of criminal jurisdiction, for in a country so lately subdued and

paciﬁed there were bound to be strict limits to the civilianizing trend so far

described. Most crimes above the petty level were tried by the circuit judges,

and the cases that they dealt with were presented to them by the justices of the

peace. The commission of the peace was one of the success stories of the

Cromwellian regime. The main reason why it throve now, after James’s

attempt to establish it had failed, was that in his time the nobility had cor-

rectly seen the JPs as a threat to their hereditary jurisdictions, whereas it was

a consistent policy of the Commonwealth and Protectorate to curb their

excessive powers. The majority of JPs were local lairds and other men of sub-

stance, but there were a few army ofﬁcers on the commission in every shire,

and the army played an essential part not only in keeping track of the gov-

ernment’s political enemies but in apprehending thieves, moss-troopers, and

other common law-breakers. The only major exception was in the Highland

regions, where Monck allowed the clan chiefs to deal with cattle-thieves and

other malefactors, and let them keep arms for the purpose. He kept as strict

an eye as he could on the passage of enemy agents from overseas and any stir-

rings of unrest among the Scots themselves, but he found himself with less and

less to worry about. Royalism was a declining force in Cromwellian Scotland,

partly because security was so effective, but partly because the maintenance

of the longed-for peace and the dispensing of even-handed justice gave it

little discontent to feed upon.

As to religion, Broghill had laid sound foundations by establishing a modus

vivendi between the government and the warring factions of Protesters and

Resolutioners. The presbyteries continued to enjoy their cherished right to

appoint ministers to parishes, subject only to a check that their candidates

were ﬁt for their trust and not positively disaffected towards the government.

The latter was attacked for its tolerance, not its intolerance, and posterity will

hardly be shocked, as the stricter brethren were then, that distinguished

Scotsmen felt free to convert to Independency and Quakerism. Indeed only

The Protectorate in Scotland, Ireland, and Europe 667

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