Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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if he did not publish his intentions further. On 2 September, however, he was

clearly dying, and when asked in the presence of several councillors whether

he still wished Richard to succeed him he gave his assent—according to his

physician by a nod of the head. There can be no reasonable doubt that

Richard really was his choice, and the council accepted it unanimously. It was

doubtless a difﬁcult decision, but who else could he have chosen? Henry had

far more political talent than Richard, but there were question marks over his

temperament, and in those days it would have been very difﬁcult to advance

a younger brother above an elder. None of Cromwell’s civilian councillors

had the stature for the job, or could have managed the army, while in the

army itself Lambert had put himself in the wilderness and Desborough was

even more unthinkable than Fleetwood.

Here seems to be a good point at which to take stock of the regime that

Oliver bequeathed to his son. It has often been called a military dictatorship,

and it may be remembered that when the question arose earlier of whether it

deserved the description an answer was deferred until an account had been

given of its whole course. The reason for postponing it was that the Protect-

orate was in constant transition, and how far it constituted a dictatorship at

any one time is partly a question of degree. At a superﬁcial level it was always

a military dictatorship in that Cromwell was an active commander-in-chief as

well as head of state, but that is only a small part of the truth. In another sense

he was never a dictator, because his powers were always limited by a written

constitution, though the Instrument of Government was an imperfect one,

and devised by a small group of army ofﬁcers. With only slight over-simpliﬁ-

cation it can be said that Cromwell’s aim was to shed the military origins of

his government and to broaden its basis, both in its constitutional checks and

balances and in its acceptance by as much as possible of the political nation.

This process was temporarily interrupted during the regime of the major-

generals, when it lurched back somewhat towards military rule, though not

to the extent that its enemies claimed. From the autumn of 1656 the Protect-

orate resumed its progress towards civilian dominance and constitutional

propriety, in which the promulgation of a new frame of government devised

by a parliament marked a major step. When Cromwell died the Petition and

Advice had yet to be put to the test of a truly free parliament, but there were

strong indications that it would pass it.

Our present-day preoccupation with dictatorship is very much a product of

twentieth-century experience, and some of the things we associate with it are

of doubtful relevance to an age which knew nothing of mass media or con-

centration camps or professional state police, to mention only three phenom-

ena. But perhaps we need not be too nervous of falling into anachronism, for

Cromwell’s contemporaries had very clear ideas about what constituted

tyranny and how it differed from the rule of law, and their criteria were not

698 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658

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so very different from ours. To apply some common touchstones, there were

remarkably few political prisoners, and no one suffered death for his political

convictions unless he was taken in arms or actively conspired to overthrow

the state or assassinate the Protector. Unless they were active plotters, Britons

did not have to fear the knock on the door in the early hours of the morning.

Rebellion, when it was attempted, was punished more leniently than it had

been under the Tudors and would be again in 1685. Judicial torture to extract

confessions, which had last been authorized by Charles I’s own warrant in

1640,

passed out of use and was never again ofﬁcially authorized in Eng-

land. Throughout the Protectorate both civil and criminal jurisdiction

remained in the hands of the ancient common law, whose procedures were

marginally—many would have said insufﬁciently—reformed. The central

courts at Westminster were staffed by judges with a healthy sense of independ-

ence towards executive government, and their control of justice at the high-

est level was only twice breached during the Protectorate by the erection of

High Courts of Justice to try very speciﬁc conspiracies against the state or the

Protector’s life.

Enough has probably been said already about liberty of conscience in the

sphere of religion, whose breadth under the Protectorate contrasts starkly

with the straitjacket imposed by the post-Restoration Act of Uniformity. The

great limitation was the continuance of the Long Parliament’s formal ban on

the Book of Common Prayer, but the widespread de facto tolerance of Angli-

can forms of worship would doubtless have increased as their link with active

political royalism diminished in the course of time—had the Protectorate last-

ed longer. On the debit side the press was somewhat more closely controlled

than it had been before Penruddock’s Rising, and only the two ofﬁcial week-

ly newspapers were allowed to appear. But censorship was not strict—far less

so than it was to be under the Licensing Act of 1662. Pamphlets continued to

pour fairly freely from the presses, many of them unlicensed. There was only

one year (1658) in which the bookseller George Thomason, who tried to buy

every tract and news-sheet that appeared, collected fewer than 300 new titles,

and even then his count came to 282.

Chequered though Oliver’s relations with his parliaments had been,

Richard inherited a regime in which parliament had an assured place, and

larger powers than any predecessor had enjoyed prior to 1641. Parliaments

met more frequently in the 1650s than in the 1680s, and they were elected by

more rationally apportioned constituencies, on the basis of a more uniform

franchise, than at any time until far into the nineteenth century. Unfortun-

ately, Richard’s council was to jettison this very real achievement in parlia-

mentary reform. The council itself was given powers by the Petition and

Unﬁnished Business 699

Above, p. 140. On the use of judicial torture in England and its ending see John L. Lang-

bein, Torture and the Law of Proof (Chicago, 1977), esp. pp. 134–5.

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Advice that constituted a genuine check upon any tendency to dictatorship,

the more so because on contentious issues it rarely spoke with one voice. On

major decisions of policy Cromwell had his way, but recent research has

shown how much work was necessarily delegated to the council, and the sig-

niﬁcant number of occasions on which its collective decision or advice ran

counter to his own inclinations. Its real weakness lay not in subservience, nor

in its internal divisions (though these could be serious), but in its lack of ﬁrst-

rate talent. The men of real ability tended to be rather young, like Howard and

Wolseley, or very old, like Francis Rous, and they were greatly outnumbered by

mediocrities. Collectively they were to prove unequal to the heavy responsibil-

ities that Oliver’s death and Richard’s limitations were to lay upon them.

It is clear that the institutions and powers deﬁned by the Petition and Advice

were not those of a dictatorship, but it needs to be considered whether the

permeation of both central and local government by army ofﬁcers made it

one. Constitutional checks and balances do not necessarily tell the whole

story. At the highest level senior ofﬁcers always played a powerful role in the

council, though there was never a time when they were not outnumbered by

civilians. A simple head count, however, can be misleading, since the civilians

Walter Strickland and Sir Gilbert Pickering often supported the military fac-

tion, while Colonel Montagu, later General at Sea, tended to oppose it, and

Colonel Philip Jones was essentially an administrator. The army party

reached its peaks of inﬂuence when Cromwell accepted the Instrument of

Government and during the rule of the major-generals, but he signalled his

disillusion with it in the speech that he made to the hundred ofﬁcers in Febru-

ary 1657. The notion that he refused the crown because he feared the army’s

reaction dies hard, but it is surely implausible. In the remodelling of the privy

council under the Petition and Advice, the exclusion of Lambert and the

admission of Thurloe and Richard Cromwell shifted the balance decisively

against the military faction, but the process was already far advanced.

Cromwell had to respect the susceptibilities of his ofﬁcer corps, since there

was still a vein of republican sentiment running through its middle and junior

ranks, but he knew how to manage it. The trouble that the military grandees

made for Richard in the spring of 1659 does not testify to a continuing ascend-

ancy, but to the reaction of mediocre men smarting under a sense of defeat.

In the seventeenth century so much government was local government, and

so much justice was locally administered by unpaid magistrates, that any

appraisal of the quality of Cromwellian rule must take great account of the

commission of the peace. How freely did it function, and how representative

was it of local interests? Something has already been said of the military pres-

ence within it.

The county committees, which had encroached heavily on

700 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658

Above, pp. 582–3.

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the JPs’ authority during the war years, were a thing of the past in the 1650s,

and the county magistracy suffered only a partial and quite brief eclipse under

the major-generals. For most of the time thereafter, out of at least 2,500 JPs in

England fewer than 90 were serving ofﬁcers, and nearly half of these held pure-

ly local commands, as governors of towns, castles, and other strong points. A

signiﬁcant minority of ofﬁcer-JPs were of the social status to warrant inclusion

by any criteria, and they would have been shocked by the suggestion that the

profession of arms should disbar them from the commission.

As for the extent to which the bench represented the traditional elite of the

county communities, active royalists who had suffered sequestration or who

still openly upheld the king’s cause were of course excluded, and in most

counties that caused a certain drop in the social level of the bench. But it was

Cromwell’s policy from the time he ﬁrst became Protector to win the support

of the moderate gentry and broaden the social basis on which his government

rested. Not only did the JPs recover most of their old authority, but much of

the old social life of the country houses revived, often crossing the divide that

the Civil Wars had created. The crackdown on royalist suspects in 1655,

together with the major-generals and the decimation tax, reversed this trend

for a time, but from about the end of 1656 the process of reconciliation with-

in the gentry class was resumed at a greater pace. The old families returned to

the commission of the peace in larger numbers now, especially as active roy-

alists died out and were succeeded by sons who had been too young to take

part in the wars. Horse races, hunting, country-house parties, and intermar-

riages all helped to push the old divisions further into the past. The process

was of course incomplete, and it did not occur everywhere. In some counties

the government continued to rely on powerful local bosses, and Kent was

ruled by a narrow clique of rigid puritans, mostly relative newcomers to gen-

try status. But Kent’s social structure was atypical, and besides having been

the seedbed of rebellion in 1648 it was the county through which royalist

agents most frequently passed to and from the exiled court.

The decimation is a rare example of an arbitrary tax under the Protect-

orate, for most of its revenue was derived from sources devised by parliament

long before Cromwell became head of state. Taxation was fairly heavy, but it

was not unduly inequitable in its incidence. Except for those who had

suffered sequestration as royalists, people were secure in the enjoyment of

their property, and had ready access to the courts if they had need to defend

it. There were of course irksome aspects of Cromwellian rule, such as the

notorious ban on the public celebration of Christmas, but this too predated

his access to power, and the prohibition was widely ignored or deﬁed. As for

the folk memory of a civil populace groaning under the oppression of

Unﬁnished Business 701

David Underdown, ‘Settlement in the counties 1653–1658’, in Aylmer (ed.), Interregnum.

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red-coated soldiers, the presence of about 13,500 well-disciplined ofﬁcers

and men on English soil, amid a population of at least 5,000,000, was small

by the contemporary standards of continental Europe, and well below what

James II would have on foot in the year of Sedgemoor.

There was still a proportionately larger military presence in Scotland, but

nothing approaching a dictatorship, and little to give Richard cause for con-

cern. The Scots were enjoying a reasonable share in the government of their

own country, and their much valued judicial system was now secure. There

was a positive improvement in the quality and accessibility of the justice that

the public courts had to offer and, although strict Presbyterians deplored the

degree of religious toleration that prevailed, its beneﬁt to the greater part of

the nation seems incontestable. The indications are that the majority of Scots

had come to value the union with England, and would be loath to see it go.

The majority of the Irish were nothing like as fortunate, and no conceivable

regime in England was likely to reverse the fate that had befallen them. But

government in Ireland was stable, and much more representative of the older

protestant community than it had been before Henry Cromwell came to the

country. There was every prospect of his relative success continuing, so long

as his brother was not overthrown in England.

It has often been too easily assumed that only Oliver’s strong hand had held

the union and the Protectorate together, and that the collapse of both was

only a matter of time. His untimely death certainly bequeathed a precarious

situation, but it was an extraordinarily open one. There was always a possi-

bility, of course, that things would fall apart, but it was not a foregone conclu-

sion, and the manner in which they did so is full of interest. The tendency of old

textbooks to race through the twenty months between Cromwell’s death and

Charles II’s return as a period of predictable anarchy with an inevitable out-

come committed a serious distortion. Speculating again on what might have

happened if Oliver had lived a few years longer, with his faculties undimin-

ished and a competent successor, the net result might have been not unlike

what the so-called Revolution Settlement of 1689 achieved: a constitution

such as Europe came to envy, embodying as it did a guarantee of frequent par-

liaments and the rule of law, and a broad toleration for protestants of all

denominations. Whether or not it would have been a constitutional mon-

archy is of secondary importance. Oliver’s successor, or the successor of his

successor, might well have been persuaded in time to take the crown, and who

is to say whether a Cromwellian dynasty could not have been as acceptable as

a Hanoverian one? As things were, Oliver’s passing removed from English

government something that it was to lack for the next thirty years: a touch of

the heroic.

702 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658

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part v: further reading

S. R. Gardiner died when his great History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate

had reached the year 1656, at which point the thread is taken up by his pupil C. H.

Firth in The Last Years of the Protectorate (2 vols., 1909), which is perhaps even ﬁner

in its grasp and scholarship. There are valuable essays on the period in G. E. Aylmer

(ed.), The Interregnum (Problems in Focus series, 1972), especially by Ivan Roots on

Cromwell’s ordinances, Claire Cross on the church, and David Underdown on settle-

ment in the counties. Books on the central ﬁgure of Cromwell are legion; particularly

recommendable are C. H. Firth, Oliver Cromwell and the Rule of the Puritans in Eng-

land (1900), Christopher Hill, God’s Englishman (1970: controversial but stimulat-

ing), Barry Coward, Oliver Cromwell (1991), Peter Gaunt, Oliver Cromwell (1997),

J. C. Davis, Oliver Cromwell (2001), and the collections of essays edited by John Mor-

rill in Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (1990) and by Peter Gaunt in

Cromwell 400 (Cromwell Association, 1999). The latter contains a good up-to-date

select bibliography. Antonia Fraser, Cromwell, Our Chief of Men (1973) is not invari-

ably reliable but is on the whole a good popular biography. Roy Sherwood is infor-

mative about the Protector’s whole entourage in The Court of Oliver Cromwell

(Cambridge, 1989), but is sometimes more controversial in Oliver Cromwell: King in

All but Name (1997). Cromwell’s own major utterances are probably more accessible

to most readers in Ivan Roots (ed.), Speeches of Oliver Cromwell (1989) than in W. C.

Abbott’s massive edition, which is convenient for its completeness but mediocre in its

commentary. Among other interesting essays in Ivan Roots (ed.), Cromwell: A Proﬁle

(1973) is H. R. Trevor-Roper’s much discussed article on ‘Oliver Cromwell and his

parliaments’. Blair Worden’s long promised study of Cromwell’s life and work is still

eagerly awaited at the time of writing; meanwhile, appetite is whetted by his Round-

head Reputations: The English Civil Wars and the Passions of Posterity (2001), which

is specially illuminating on Cromwell’s posthumous reputation. Parliamentary diaries

for all three Protectorate parliaments are printed in J. T. Rutt (ed.), The Diary of

Thomas Burton (4 vols., 1828). Roots has written good short accounts of the major-

generals in his The Great Rebellion and in R. H. Parry (ed.), The English Civil War

and After (1970), but the deﬁnitive work on them is now Christopher Durston,

Cromwell’s Major-Generals: Godly Government during the English Revolution

(Manchester, 2001).

As in earlier periods, the versatile Bernard Capp remains the prime authority on The

Fifth Monarchy Men (1972) and on Cromwell’s Navy (1989). On foreign policy,

Firth’s full coverage in Last Years (above) may be supplemented by Steven C. A.

Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism (Cambridge, 1996), Timothy Venning,

Cromwellian Foreign Policy (1995), and Michael Roberts’s important article on

‘Cromwell and the Baltic’, reprinted in his Essays in Swedish History (1953). On the

political thought of the period I have attempted a brief survey in Chapter 2 of The Age

of Milton, ed. C. A. Patrides and R. B. Waddington (Manchester and Totowa, NJ,

ch23-24.y8 27/9/02 12:08 PM Page 703

1980), but for more searching treatments see Blair Worden’s chapters in David Woot-

ton (ed.), Republicanism, Liberty and Commercial Society (Stanford, Calif., 1994),

and J. G. A. Pocock’s introduction to his edition of The Political Works of James

Haprington (Cambridge, 1977). There is quite a large literature on Cromwell’s read-

mission of the Jews. Cecil Roth, A History of the Jews in England (Oxford, 1941) is a

standard work; it is valuably supplemented by David S. Katz, Philo-Semitism and the

Readmission of the Jews to England (Los Angeles and Oxford, 1982).

For Scotland, few readers will need to go beyond Frances D. Dow’s excellent and

comprehensive Cromwellian Scotland 1651–1660 (Edinburgh, 1979), but three vol-

umes published by the Scottish Historical Society furnish rich compendia of source

material with authoritative commentaries, two edited by C. H. Firth, Scotland and the

Commonwealth (1895) and Scotland under the Protectorate (1899), and the third by

C. S. Terry, The Cromwellian Union (1902). Ireland is equally well served by T. C.

Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland: English Government and Reform in Ireland

1649–1660 (Oxford, 2nd ed. 2000: with a valuable survey of the literature on the

subject published since 1975), while on a smaller scale Patrick J. Corish, ‘The

Cromwellian Regime, 1650–1660’, in A New History of Ireland, III (Oxford, 1976)

is highly recommendable. On the land settlement see Karl S. Bottigheimer, English

Money and Irish Land (Oxford, 1971).

704 Part V: Further Reading

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part vi

The Collapse of the

Good Old Cause

1658–1660

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twenty-five

The Overthrow of the Protectorate

Richard Cromwell’s brief tenure of the Protector’s ofﬁce began auspi-

ciously. The privy council accepted without question that Oliver had nomi-

nated him to it, and Fleetwood and the senior army ofﬁcers in and around

London were as prompt to recognize his title. The Lord Mayor and aldermen

of London were enthusiastically co-operative, and the proclamation of the

new Protector, performed with due pomp, was greeted with warm applause at

Whitehall, Westminster, Temple Bar, Cheapside, and the Royal Exchange. In

most provincial towns too the proclamation was celebrated with bell-ringing,

bonﬁres, parades, and cannon-ﬁre. Only in royalist Oxford do we hear of

students pelting the sheriff and his attendant troops with the tops of carrots

and turnips, but that tells us more about the agelessness of student protest

(probably directed there mainly against the military) than about the response

of the public as a whole. Addresses of loyalty and congratulation poured in

during the next three months from at least twenty-eight counties, twenty-four

towns (besides London), and half-a-dozen groups of ministers covering a wide

religious spectrum, as well as from the ﬂeet and sundry garrisons and other

outlying military units. There were the predictable hostile rumblings from a

few Fifth Monarchists and other seekers after a rule of the saints, but they

found no response outside their own diminished ranks. The exiled royalists,

who had hoped that Oliver’s death would herald a resurgence of the king’s

supporters in England, were deeply disappointed. Richard Baxter testiﬁes that

many who had regarded Oliver as a ‘traitorous hypocrite’ were prepared to

give allegiance to his son, since he had had no hand in the war, had never pur-

sued his own advancement, and was ‘now seeking to own the sober party’.

Richard himself was easy to like, for he was not at all the clownish ‘Tumble-

down Dick’ of royalist lampoons. He lived on the friendliest terms with the

Hampshire squirearchy, regardless of whether his neighbours’ background

was royalist or parliamentarian. His personal morality seems to have been

above suspicion, yet he had none of the proselytizing zeal for a ‘reformation

of manners’ that had grated so in recent years. His genuine affability struck

Reliquiae Baxterianae, p. 100, quoted in Godfrey Davies, The Restoration of Charles II

(San Marino, Calif., 1955), pp. 15–16.

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