Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660
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England reached him at last, and during the next two weeks he received
increasingly sure intelligence that sixteen vessels of the Plate fleet, seven of
them great galleons, had landed their treasure on Tenerife and lay at anchor
in the Bay of Santa Cruz. Despite a worrying report that de Ruyter was on his
way with sixteen warships to convoy them to Flanders, Blake sailed for the
Canaries with nearly all his own twenty-three ships. At Santa Cruz, however,
the harbour was so strongly defended with six or seven stone forts, and the
fire-power of the sixteen ships at anchor in it was so formidable, that the
Spaniards felt quite safe from attack. But Stayner formulated, and with
Blake’s approval executed, a bold and brilliant plan. On 20 April he led
twelve frigates straight into the harbour in line astern, trusting to the smoke
from his guns to protect him from the worst of the enemy musketry and
counter-fire. An extremely fierce fight ensued, but Stayner sank or burnt every
Spanish ship and lost none of his own, though his flagship, the Speaker, bare-
ly managed to limp away. Only about 50 of his men were killed and 120
wounded. Most of the treasure remained ashore in Tenerife, but Spain lacked
the available naval force to ship it to the mainland, and suffered very serious-
ly through the lack of it. Her land campaign against Portugal had been going
promisingly, and might have achieved outright victory within the year, but by
July her armies were disintegrating for lack of pay.
Parliament heard the news of the victory three days after Cromwell accept-
ed the Petition and Advice. It appointed a day of national thanksgiving and
voted Blake a jewel worth £500, but it gave nothing to Stayner. Cromwell,
however, knighted him as soon as he returned to England. Blake was called
home too, but he never quite made it. He had been subsisting for a year past
on ‘broths, jellies and cordials’, and he died within sight of Plymouth har-
bour. He was given a hero’s burial in Westminster Abbey, but he was not
allowed to rest there long. To the enduring shame of England’s new masters
in 1660, his remains were disinterred and cast into a common pit. He had
played no part in the trial and execution of Charles I.
By 1657 the centre of diplomatic and operational activity was shifting
nearer home. Mazarin had long been hoping to convert France’s treaty of
peace and commerce with England into an offensive alliance against Spain.
The distractions of the Fronde had set France back in her long war with Spain,
and territory that she had earlier won in the Spanish Netherlands had recent-
ly been lost again. Mazarin wanted both English naval support in the Chan-
nel and English land forces for a campaign in Flanders. Cromwell was the
more disposed towards such an alliance after Charles II signed his treaty with
Philip IV, and he was attracted by the prospect of acquiring a port and naval
base across the Channel, but he baulked for some time at committing English
troops to a continental campaign. Nevertheless he allowed his ambassador
Sir William Lockhart to come to an outline agreement with Mazarin in
678 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658
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November 1656 (and knighted him soon afterwards), and this ripened into a
formal treaty in March 1657. Cromwell had been angling for a league that
would unite England, France, Sweden, Denmark and the United Provinces
against both branches of the house of Hapsburg, but Denmark, and Sweden
were on the brink of war with each other—Denmark was to declare it in
May—and as Mazarin pointed out the Dutch were visibly more pro-Spanish
than pro-British. The cardinal gently brought the Protector to a sense of
diplomatic realities, and the treaty that they signed had the limited objectives
of joint attacks by land and sea on Gravelines, Mardyke, and Dunkirk. Eng-
land was to contribute a fleet and 6,000 infantry, France an army of 20,000
under Turenne. When captured, Dunkirk and Mardyke were to be awarded
to England, and Gravelines to France. On the sensitive matter of religion,
Cromwell agreed to guarantee both regular and secular clergy in possession
of their revenues and churches, as well as to preserve full freedom of catholic
worship, in such Flemish towns as fell under his authority.
Cromwell had no reason to fear the invasion proposed by Charles II’s
recent treaty, since Spain was no more able to find the 6,000 troops that it
promised than the English royalists were to seize the stipulated port for their
unopposed disembarkation. Spain concentrated her limited resources on
reinforcing Dunkirk and Gravelines against the Anglo-French threat, and she
did so to such effect that Turenne, with Mazarin’s approval, put off attacking
them for months in order to clear more of the territory inland of them. The
6,000 English foot joined him at St Quentin early in June. About a quarter
were drawn from the regular army; the rest were volunteers, raised by beat of
drum, and a mixture of old soldiers and raw recruits. Their commander was
Sir John Reynolds, the same man who as a captain in Cromwell’s own regi-
ment of horse had played a leading part in the agitator movement of 1647. He
had since earned a knighthood for distinguished service in Ireland, where he
was Commissary-General and a pillar of strength to Henry Cromwell.
He had married a sister of Henry’s wife, and he left Ireland reluctantly. His
second in command was Major-General Anthony Morgan, who had been
Monck’s right-hand man in the pacification of Scotland. Their soldiers all
wore the red coats of the New Model Army.
They performed in action to the admiration of the French commanders, but
their officers were bemused and then disgruntled at the type of warfare in
which they were engaged, with its endless sieges of minor strong points and
its studied avoidance of battle. ‘Fighting is not the fashion of the country’,
wrote Reynolds to Henry on 1 September, and he made no secret of his wish
to be recalled to his old employment. Sickness and desertion, he told him, had
reduced his 6,000 men to less than 4,000.
7
They were discontented with their
The Protectorate in Scotland, Ireland, and Europe 679
7
Firth, Last Years, I, 277, 279.
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small and irregular pay, and their health suffered from their poor rations,
mainly ‘ammunition bread’ of rye and bran. But Lockhart had already been
remonstrating at their misemployment, and a letter from Cromwell was on
the way, instructing him to threaten Mazarin with the withdrawal of the Eng-
lish forces if the French did not immediately strike against Dunkirk or Grave-
lines. Turenne in fact was already on the move. He set siege to Mardyke on 19
September, battered its main fortress into surrender within four days, and
promptly handed it over to the English. It was less than Cromwell wanted, for
he believed that Turenne could have taken Dunkirk if he had struck earlier.
But Mardyke was so much a part of Dunkirk’s outer defences that it had to
be taken first, and Spain cared enough about it to send Don Juan with over
4,000 men to try to recapture it. There was a brisk fight, notable because both
Charles II and his brother James Duke of York took part in it, but Mardyke
held out. The fortress, however, had to be considerably extended to hold its
English garrison, and the troops who had to dig entrenchments, raise pal-
isades, and build lodgings had a wretched time of it. Reynolds reckoned that
he had 1,000 men sick and only about 1,800 fit for service, and Cromwell’s
relations with Mazarin became very strained. He reproached France for fail-
ing to provide his troops with timber, fuel, shelter, and other necessaries;
Turenne laid the blame on their own laziness and the neglect and absenteeism
of their officers.
In mid-November a strange episode took place that was to have tragic con-
sequences for Reynolds. The Duke of York, who was now serving in Spain’s
Army of Flanders, was one of the most senior officers in Dunkirk, which was
only a stroll across the dunes away from Mardyke. Informal contacts
between the officers of the two garrisons took place frequently, especially
outside the campaigning season. One such meeting took place between
Reynolds and James, whether at Reynolds’s instance is not clear. Curiosity
was probably the main motive, and it was probably mutual, since James had
been lieutenant-general in Turenne’s army until Cromwell’s treaty with
France drove him out of the country. Nothing significant seems to have
passed beyond an exchange of civilities. But tongues began to wag, and some
officers in Mardyke reported the meeting to Cromwell, expressing doubts
about Reynolds’s loyalty. According to James’s own memoirs, Reynolds’s
chief accuser was Lieutenant-Colonel Frances White, who had very recently
been sent from England to be temporary Governor of Mardyke. White too
had been an officer-agitator, but he and Reynolds had taken very different
lines during the Leveller mutiny in 1649; perhaps there were old scores to
settle. At any rate, when White set out for England to inform against his com-
mander, Reynolds sailed in the same ship. He had obtained leave to pay a
short visit home, but whether his main reason was to plead the case of his
forces, or see to his private affairs, or clear himself from White’s charges, is
680 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658
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uncertain; probably something of all three. But the ship was wrecked on
the Goodwin Sands in a December storm, and all on board were drowned.
8
The command of the English forces in Flanders passed to the faithful
Morgan.
Cromwell reinforced the Mardyke garrison during December to a strength
of at least 2,500, which was more than the fortress could comfortably hold. He
met opposition in the privy council to the resources that he was pouring into
it, and it may well be asked why he was so keen to acquire continental terri-
tory that was almost sure to cost more to maintain and defend than it brought
in. There were several reasons. Prestige was one; all the major European
powers in his time shared the same acquisitive itch, and Cromwell felt a special
urge to redeem Mary Tudor’s loss of Calais. He also saw that a base across
the Channel would strengthen his splendid fleet’s position in the Narrow
Seas. In the short term, he intended to recall parliament soon, and he han-
kered after a triumph to put before it, because the session promised to be a dif-
ficult one. But perhaps more importantly, he had evidence through Thurloe’s
intelligencers that the Spaniards were now planning to honour their pledges
to Charles II, and that the royalists in England were plotting another rising
early in 1658. Nothing could deter a Spanish invasion more effectively than
the acquisition of Dunkirk, and the reinforcement of Mardyke was a prepar-
ation for just that.
Earlier in 1657 Dunkirk was not the only bait to attract Cromwell, for he
had expressed a serious interest in acquiring Bremen. To explain the full cir-
cumstances would take us deep into the complexities of the northern war that
Charles X of Sweden launched with his assault on Poland in 1655, and that is
not necessary because despite prolonged pressure Cromwell kept England
out of it. But his sympathies and those of most Englishmen were strongly on
Charles’s side, partly because of the golden aura that clung to the memory of
his kinsman Gustavus Adolphus and partly because the Swedes were a protest-
ant nation and the Poles a catholic one—though Cromwell would much
rather Charles had turned his sword against the Habsburg emperor. He
received a series of envoys from the Swedish king in the course of 1655–6, and
he treated them with exceptional cordiality and favour. His dream of a grand
protestant alliance against the catholic powers was still distorting his view of
Baltic politics. He signed a trade treaty with Sweden in July 1656 which
expanded the one negotiated by Whitelock two years earlier, and he allowed
2,000 English volunteers to be recruited for the Swedish army, but he stead-
ily resisted the envoys’ pleas to commit England to war by a full offensive
alliance. It would, he rightly feared, have provoked a closer accord between
The Protectorate in Scotland, Ireland, and Europe 681
8
On Reynolds and White, see (besides earlier references) Firth, Last Years, I, 294–8; Gentles,
New Model Army, pp. 320–1, 332–3, 340–7.
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Denmark and the United Provinces, thus etching deeper the line of division
within the protestant interest; it might have pushed the Dutch further into
friendship with Spain. It would have upset the balance in the Baltic, and so
jeopardized a vital source of England’s naval stores. He would have wel-
comed a treaty that also included the Dutch, but that was not on the diplo-
matic cards, and anti-Dutch feeling was strong in his own council.
From December 1656 Charles was pressing hard for a loan of £100,000,
and in January Cromwell replied that he would consider it if Sweden would
hand over the duchy of Bremen by way of security. This was a fairly prepos-
terous proposal—for one thing it would have made an enemy of the Great
Elector of Brandenburg—and it is hard to say how seriously Cromwell
intended it. He certainly could not afford to lend Charles £100,000, and he
may have thought that an impossible request was diplomatically preferable to
an outright refusal. He repeated it in May, when Denmark declared war on
Sweden and threw her for some time on the defensive. In the same month the
Archduke Leopold, who was shortly to be elected Emperor in succession to
Ferdinand III, signed a treaty with Poland, promising her 12,000 Austrian
troops. Charles’s grip on that country had already been seriously weakened
since his early conquests, and now he was simultaneously threatened not
only there but by three Danish armies, on two fronts in Sweden and in
Bremen and western Germany. War on this scale in the Baltic was most
unwelcome to Cromwell. His relations with the United Provinces were wors-
ening, and he felt bound to resist Sweden’s urgent and constant pleas to send
an English naval squadron to the Sound lest it should spark off another
Anglo-Dutch war.
When the feared attack by Denmark fell early in August, Charles sent
Cromwell some quite extraordinary offers. In return for substantial military
and naval aid, he proposed that Denmark, once beaten, should be parti-
tioned, with England taking a large part of Jutland along with East Friesland
and Münster, and Sweden annexing the rest. At one stage he was prepared to
throw in Iceland and Greenland too, and to offer a four-year alliance for a
joint war against Habsburg Austria as soon as Denmark had been disposed
of. Cromwell received all these propositions with profuse expressions of
goodwill, but his mind was really set on mediating between the warring king-
doms. For this purpose he sent the experienced diplomat Philip Meadowe to
Copenhagen and the bluff soldier Major-General William Jephson to the
Swedish king. Since Mazarin and de Witt were equally concerned to set
limits to the northern war and to broker a peace if they could, his policy of
reconciliation was in line with the best diplomatic minds in Europe, as well as
with England’s best interests.
9
He was well placed to help save Denmark from
682 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658
9
Michael Roberts, ‘Cromwell and the Baltic’, in Essays in Swedish History (1953).
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a humiliating peace when Charles X transformed the whole situation by his
devastating march across the ice against Copenhagen early in 1658, but that
sensational episode, and England’s reactions to it, will find their place in the
next chapter. Meanwhile the next chapter for Cromwell, and for Britain, was
to be his last clash with parliament.
The Protectorate in Scotland, Ireland, and Europe 683
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w
twenty-four
w
Unfinished Business
When Cromwell reopened parliament for its second session on 20 January
1658, it wore a very different aspect from the one it had presented when he
last addressed it. It now consisted, of course, of two Houses, but the Com-
mons themselves were transformed by two changes that were bound to make
them harder to manage. In the first place the Petition and Advice ruled that no
member could be excluded except by authority of the House itself, so all those
who had been excluded by the council in 1656 were free to take their seats,
and most did so. Secondly, thirty MPs had been nominated to the Other
House, and they included many of the Protectorate’s staunchest and ablest
supporters.
It had been given to Cromwell to name the members of the Other House,
subject originally to the approval of his nominees by the Commons; but in
subsequent negotiation he had obtained that the choice should lie solely with
himself and his successors. This concession had been won in a thin House by
ninety votes to forty-one. Three considerations probably swayed the major-
ity: approval by the Commons would have implied the elected chamber’s supe-
riority; it would have deterred the peers who had been faithful to parliament
in the wars from accepting membership (and there was a hope among con-
servatives that in time they might all have been incorporated); and on the
analogy of the peerage, sole choice by the titular head of state accorded with
ancient constitutional practice. There was probably also a fear that ambitious
MPs might exercise a right of approval in pursuit of their own self-
promotion. As Thurloe wrote to Henry Cromwell, the great difficulty was to
sift ‘those who are fit, and not willing to serve, and those who are willing, and
expect it, and are not fit’.
1
Cromwell did not seriously embark on the business of selection until
November, and he completed it on 10 December. He gave it much thought,
and his choice fell on sixty-three men (out of a permitted maximum of sev-
enty). Seven were peers of the realm, but only two of them took their seats:
Lord Fauconberg, who had recently married Cromwell’s daughter Mary, and
1
Thurloe State Papers, VI, 648, quoted in Firth, Last Years, II, 10.
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the impoverished Lord Eure, who had sat in Barebone’s Parliament and had
been elected to the Commons in 1654 and 1656. Those who declined or
ignored the summons included such close earlier associates of Cromwell as
Manchester, Saye and Sele, Warwick (whose grandson and heir had lately
married another Cromwell daughter), Wharton, and Mulgrave. They were
not necessarily disaffected towards the government, but with Cromwell visi-
bly ageing and the future uncertain they were probably reluctant to compro-
mise their future as peers by endorsing this dubious surrogate for the ‘real’
House of Lords. Seventeen of Cromwell’s nominees were serving army offi-
cers, but they included his sons Richard and Henry, as well as Monck and
Howard, all opponents rather than supporters of the military party as it had
evolved since 1654. That party was well represented by Fleetwood, Desbor-
ough, Hewson, Pride, Whalley, Berry, and Goffe (though not of course Lam-
bert), but its presence was not so large as to distort the balance of the House.
Among republicans, Haselrig received a summons (which he ignored), but
not Vane or Scot or Ashley Cooper or Marten, still less anyone associated
with the Leveller or Fifth Monarchy movements. Experienced middle-of-
the-road stalwarts such at St John, Pierrepont, Nathaniel Fiennes, Lenthall,
Whitelocke, Glyn, Wolseley, Montagu, Strickland, Sydenham, Lawrence,
Philip Jones, Francis Rous, and Broghill formed the core of the membership.
Exactly two-thirds of Cromwell’s nominees took their seats and were sworn
in, but the absentees included a few who were kept from attending by urgent
duties, such as Monck, Lockhart, and Henry Cromwell.
The address with which Cromwell opened the new session was the utter-
ance of a tired man in failing health, and he twice excused its brevity on
account of his ‘infirmities’. He spoke mainly on his old themes of ‘our civil lib-
erties as men, our spiritual liberties as Christians’, and he blessed God for the
Petition and Advice, which had done so much to secure both.
2
He left it to
Fiennes as Commissioner of the Great Seal to speak further about public
affairs. It had been the accepted practice for monarchs, at state openings, to
delegate to the Lord Chancellor (to whose office Fiennes’s corresponded) the
task of opening up in more detail the state of the nation and the work for
which parliament was called, but all that the members got from Fiennes was
more rhetoric about the virtues of the new constitution. They were told not a
word about the progress of the war with Spain, or the operations in Flanders,
or Britain’s position with regard to the northern war, or even the serious state
of the nation’s finances. And whereas Cromwell had informed the last parlia-
ment frankly about the imminence of a royalist rising, this one was told noth-
ing as yet about the preparations in progress for another. In his current ill
health he could not be blamed for not briefing it as a head of state should, but
Unfinished Business 685
2
Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, IV, 705.
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it speaks badly of the collective competence of his councillors that they failed
to see that this was done on his behalf. It was an unhappy omen for what
would happen when he died.
An early brush occurred when the Other House sent a message to the
Commons, asking their concurrence in calling the three nations to a day of
prayer and humiliation. The Speaker described it as coming from the Lords,
and it sparked off an immediate debate on how the new chamber was to be
addressed: as the House of Lords, as it appeared to be styling itself, or as the
Other House, as the Petition and Advice called it? Cromwell, perhaps because
he saw a constitutional row brewing, or perhaps because he sensed how inad-
equate his opening speech had been and was feeling better by the weekend,
summoned the whole parliament to the Banqueting House on Monday
25 January to hear a much longer and more specific address. Its theme, he
announced, was to be the dangers that faced Britain abroad and at home. He
claimed, with staggering over-simplification,
that the greatest design now on foot, in comparison with which all other designs are
but low things, is whether the Christian world should be all Popery; or whether God
hath a love to, and we ought to have a brotherly fellow-feeling of, the interest of all the
protestant Christians in the world.
The house of Habsburg on both sides of Christendom was in league with the
pope ‘to destroy the whole protestant interest’. Against this monstrous design
stood ‘a poor prince! Indeed poor, but a man in his person as gallant, and
truly I think I may say as good, as any these late ages have brought forth’—
and he was ‘now reduced into a corner’.
3
Cromwell knew enough by now
about Charles X and the tangled issues of the northern war to be aware that
he was presenting a distorted picture, but he was anxious to deflect the mem-
bers from their constitutional bickering and rouse them to face the serious-
ness of the international situation. He did not paint it all in black and white,
for he had kind things to say about France and harsh things about the Dutch,
who he said were pledged to transport a Spanish invading force to England in
support of Charles II. He appealed for money to defend the country. He was
briefer about the dangers at home, but he lamented once more the nation’s
internal divisions, ‘whether sects upon a religious account, or upon a civil
account’, each striving to get power into its own hands. Only two things kept
the peace in the three nations: the army—‘a poor unpaid army, the soldiers
going barefoot at this time, in this city, this weather, and yet a peaceable
people, seeking to serve you with their lives’—and the recent settlement of the
constitution that had vested power in the two Houses of Parliament and
himself. He had something to say about the progress made in Ireland and
686 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658
3
Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, IV, pp. 713–14.
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Scotland, and the blessings that six years of peace had brought to them and to
England. ‘We have peace and the gospel. Let us have one heart and soul, one
mind to maintain the honest and just rights of this nation.’
4
The latter part of the speech, pleading for unity and co-operation, was truly
eloquent and deeply felt, but it fell on many deaf ears. Haselrig, scorning his
summons to the Other House, led a concerted attack on it in company with
Thomas Scot, who on one occasion spoke for a whole morning. The two had
formed a partnership in the Rump and were to maintain an even stronger one
in 1658 and 1659. With the support of other ex-Rumpers like Ashley
Cooper and Weaver, they attacked the claim of any second chamber or any
other body whatever to set a check upon the sovereign authority of the
people’s representatives. There were cogent arguments on the other side,
notably from Serjeant Maynard, but defences of the Petition and Advice got
nowhere because the slender majority that had carried it was gone. The
republicans also borrowed from Harrington, who was widely read, the con-
tention that power follows property, and maintained that the members of the
Other House owned nothing like enough land between them to stand as a
balance to the Commons. That was true as far as it went, but if the constitu-
tion had been given longer to take root there was every prospect of the
membership being enlarged, with perhaps all the ‘faithful’ old peers incorpo-
rated in it. Moreover, as Major-General Boteler pointed out, there were other
qualifications besides broad acres, indeed even better ones, such as ‘religion,
piety and faithfulness to this commonwealth’.
5
Parliament was not the only platform from which the republicans pro-
moted their cause. They got up a petition which was designed to appeal to
commonwealthsmen and radical puritans in general and to members of the
army in particular. It was circulated for signatures within the army and among
the citizenry of London while the debates were in progress, and its authors
planned to present it to the House of Commons on 4 February. It was
addressed to ‘the Parliament of the Commonwealth of England’, as if the
Other House did not exist. It commands attention, not only because it led
directly to the dissolution of this parliament, but because it was revived and
presented to the next one a year later. It defined the tyranny against which
parliament had fought the Civil War as consisting in the king’s and the Lords’
power of veto, the king’s claim to control the armed forces, the exercise of
arbitrary powers over subjects’ persons and estates, and the raising of money
without parliamentary consent. It implied, of course, that the Protectorate
was perpetrating all these evils. Its requests covered them all, but its chief
Unfinished Business 687
4
Ibid., pp. 717, 720.
5
Diary of Richard Burton Esquire, ed. J. T. Rutt (4 vols., 1828) II, 409, quoted in Firth, Last
Years, II, 23–4.
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