HISTORY: Repulsive and wrong
Oliver Cromwell and his Conservative friends
For if power without law may make laws, may alter the fundamental laws of the Kingdom, I do not know what subject he is in England that can be sure of his life, or anything he calls his own.
(King Charles I, 22 January 1649)
For the people truly I desire their liberty and freedom as much as anybody whatsoever; but I must tell you, their liberty and freedom consists in having government, those laws by which their lives and goods may be most their own. It is not their having a share in government; that is nothing appertaining to them. A subject and a sovereign are clean different things [...] Sirs, it is for this that I am now come here. If I would have given way to an arbitrary way, for to have all laws changed according to the power of the sword, I needed not to have come here.
(King Charles I, 30 January 1649)
I have a good cause and a gracious God on my side.
(King Charles I, 30 January 1649)
The past as a game to play on train journeys
When compelled by circumstances to travel long distances in the company of shy junior colleagues, an acquaintance of mine used to divert himself by cross-examining these young people on their historical allegiances: King John or the barons? Henry III or Simon de Montfort? Charles I or Oliver Cromwell? Whose side are you on?
Whatever entertainment this little game generated came not at all from the answers per se and not much from the calibre of argument lobbed out in support of each answer, which was often improvised and frankly defective, but rather from the vigour with which battle was joined and the tone in which it was prosecuted — for my acquaintance, preferring the role of devil’s advocate to his own persona, made a point of attacking, sometimes with very convincing ferocity, whichever choices his hapless junior colleagues tentatively advanced.
Having no great interest in events themselves, or at least no great faith in their recoverability, he had nonetheless found in history a functional language in which to conduct indirect yet revealing exchanges about things other than history. Whether this came across as frivolous — and indeed, whether the word ‘frivolous’ was pronounced in tones of complaint or oblique admiration — remains, inevitably, a matter of taste.
Of villains, and not just the comic book type either
Whether one regards Oliver Cromwell as heroic or, alternatively, as an unredeemable villain boils down, as much as anything else, to a matter of taste. And because of that — not despite it — enthusiasm for Cromwell is never without interest, especially when encountered in unexpected quarters.
Hence, in a confused sort of way, the success achieved by publicists in simulating something faintly resembling a public debate over, of all things, a forthcoming film. According to a recent Daily Telegraph article, ‘Cromwell turned into comic book villain’, the makers of To Kill a King, a ‘Ł20 million blockbuster’, stand accused of attempting to portray Cromwell — ‘one of the founding fathers of parliamentary democracy’, or so Charles Moore’s avowedly Conservative organ informs us — into ‘a caricature villain for American audiences’, no less.
Feeling bored already? Understandably so — the hackneyed choreography of such ‘debates’ is hardly new, and rarely diverting. All the same, for the sake of texture, if nothing else, it's worth quoting two examples of historians who, despite not having seen the film, nevertheless obediently rendered up their comments on it:
I worry enormously about the damage done to history by some films. I would have hoped we were above demonising Cromwell, but obviously we’re not ... There was no gulag; there were no killing fields. Cromwell is unpopular precisely because he tried to pursue a middle path an appease different sides. He’s not a comfortable man to understand, but to depict him as a monster is utterly wrong.
(Professor Richard Holmes)
Historical films have a duty to be compatible with the record and not deliberately go against the facts. Cromwell was capable of extreme ruthlessness, but almost always in the cause of long-term peace. He was far too complex to judge in this way on film.
(Lord Russell)
Much of the rest of the discussion, such as it is, hinges on a scene in which ‘Cromwell ... defends the execution of the King while standing over the body, his hands dripping with the monarch’s blood’. The historians gamely compete with each other in their eagerness to point out that this never really happened — although whether this exculpates Cromwell from all charges against him, or simply proves the abject wickedness of the film-makers, is left to the reader’s own sensibilities.
Category mistakes
There is no point in letting this weary little ritual detain us at any length, or in spending much time prodding away at its central defect. It is as self-evidently foolish to require subtle historical insights from a ‘Ł20 million blockbuster’ as it is to solicit profound spiritual consolation from an hour or two at Tate Modern or to hope to achieve sustaining human intimacy by watching ‘reality television’ regularly each evening. As most of us realised long ago, coincidences between art and life are possibly a matter for comment, but certainly not for congratulation. Or to put it another way, would Lord Russell ban Virgil’s Aeneid, half of Shakespeare’s tragedies and Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin on the grounds that each is based on history so sloppy that it wouldn't even fool even the stupidest undergraduate?
Yet the article is not without its accidental flashes of illumination, inadvertent as they obviously are — flashes that illuminate, if nothing else, the reflexive regard accorded to Cromwell by pretty much everyone who gets into print these days.
A few points serve to illustrate this. The glancing reference to ‘a caricature villain for Americans’ surely suggests that British readers will be so richly aware of Cromwell’s merits that no mere film could dent their confidence in his status as ‘one of the founding fathers of parliamentary democracy’ — categorised, in this context, as a Good Thing — and doubtless it is reassuring to be reminded that while he ordained the execution of his anointed sovereign (one whom, incidentally, he had promised to protect when he signed the National Covenant) he did not actually bathe his hands in his sovereign’s blood.
As far as his character goes, the historians all make clear that Cromwell was a very ‘complex’ character — complexity, in this context, also being a Good Thing, albeit a trait shared with, inter alia, Robespierre, Lenin and Heidrich. Vacillations, plain about-faces and a sort of crazed fatalism that has not aged well are recast here as tokens of a subtlety that not only absolves him from being a villain, but according to Professor Holmes, anyway, renders Cromwell unfit for cinemagraphic treatment. Similarly, or perhaps contrastingly, ruthlessness, as long as it is almost always in the pursuit of long-term peace, is proclaimed as a virtue by that herbivorous old Liberal peer Lord Russell. Finally, Professor Holmes, for his part, congratulates Cromwell’s regime on the fact that there were no ‘killing fields’ — something that might have surprised the 3,500 who died at Drogheda, most killed in cold blood — as if the semi-mechanised carnage of the twentieth century were the most reliable gauge by which to judge the events of the mid-seventeenth century. But then no one mentions Drogheda or Wexford, just as no one in this article discusses whether Royalists actually were persecuted over small acts of self-expression — another outlandish accusation, apparently, directed at Cromwell in the course of the film under discussion. Those poor old Yanks will believe almost anything, won't they?
But then indeed, the single oddest feature of the Daily Telegraph account reposes in what is not said. Where was the historian dragged onto stage to say something in favour of King Charles (killed at Cromwell’s instigation), the established church (left woefully battered at Cromwell’s instigation), the House of Commons (effectively neutered for more than a decade at Cromwell’s instigation), the House of Lords (temporarily crippled, again for more than a decade, at Cromwell’s instigation), legitimate and long-established forms of government (abolished by the Army for far too long, with at very least Cromwell’s cheerful complicity), or the hundreds of thousands of British men, women and children who were killed, injured, transported, robbed of their property and livelihood and generally ruined during the Civil Wars and the Interregnum (after the first few years of the war, certainly, entirely with Cromwell’s approbation)? It says something about Cromwell’s ‘achievement’ that after twenty years of the Interregnum, Britain slipped back with evident relief into the world of tradition, hierarchy and order from which it had so briefly and yet catastrophically been sundered — and it also says something about his ‘achievement’ that no progressive movement has ever looked back to the Interregnum as a beacon of success, a model to be emulated and as a portent of a bright future to come. But faced with a silly little story about a film, the Daily Telegraph, notionally a Conservative newspaper, did nothing to tarnish its Roundhead, radical, disestablishmentarian, regicidal credentials. And that, whether a failure of taste or something else, is at least in itself remarkable.
Cromwell and his Conservative friends
Thus are we led back, ineluctably, to another freezing January morning, another Westminster — and almost, but not quite another England. Three hundred and fifty four years ago tomorrow morning, King Charles made his way across an icy St James’s Park to an improvised scaffold in Whitehall, the scene of his judicial murder and of his translation, as he himself understood it, from ‘a corruptible to an incorruptible crown, where no disturbance can be’.
The sort of taste that governs these matters is lodged deep in matters of background, temperament and accidental contingency, which is what gives it its distinctively personal, and distinctively revealing character. Hence recourse to autobiography is inescapable here.
Never in my life — not even as a small child growing up in a far-away part of the world haunted by its own, more recent civil wars, which is to say a world away from the word ‘Tory’ let alone any cognisance of what such a word might entail — not as a guilty liberal, an energetic if unorthodox libertarian or an aging and increasingly weary Conservative — have I honestly, in my heart of hearts, been able to view that scene with anything other than an admixture of horror, compassion and wonder. There has never been a question in my mind, let alone my heart, that regicide is as black a crime as human ingenuity affords. There has never been a question as to whether King Charles — someone who, after all, had never asked for the Crown, but who resolutely refused to back down on a sacramental oath once it was undertaken — died bravely, admirably and unnecessarily. Nor has there ever been much question as to which side ‘won’ this terrible, pointless conflict. Indeed, I can remember reading, circa 1978 or so, a book called A Coffin for King Charles, and wondering idly to myself whether Russia — the obvious regicidal, tyrannical regime of my era — would ever wake to the dawn of its own happy, bloodless if episodic Restoration. These days, I find myself wondering what the future holds for portents of inevitable progress such as the 'reformed' House of Lords, the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly, the Northern Ireland Legislative Assembly and Britain's relationship with the European Union.
Failures of imagination are no source for self-congratulation. Still, I have to admit that the first time I met a Conservative who had anything good to say for Cromwell, it was — to coin a phrase — as if the world had turned upside down. A decade or so on, the incredulity is still there, accompanied by a sense of outrage that tests geniality sorely. How is it, after all, that Conservatives can admire a man like Cromwell? And insofar as any answer to that question has suggested itself to me, it is tripartite, provisional and probably ultimately inadequate — none of which qualities will prevent it, obviously, from being visited on the readers of ERO.
The first reason why Conservatives admire Cromwell is the most psychological, the least rational and hence in some ways the least susceptible to argument. It is, put plainly, Cromwell-worship recast as the refuge of the slighted second sibling desperate to identify with someone very much like his elder brother, the weedy inadequate who’d secretly love to be the school bully, the inconspicuous failure who can’t stop dreaming of being a world-historical figure. Such people are drawn to Cromwell as they are to Napoleon, Churchill and other faintly unlikely figures. Not least, this is because such figures tell a consoling story about the ability of the underdog to supplant established authority through qualities such as persistence, skill and ruthlessness. The question as to whether established authority really ought to be supplanted or not rarely features in these narratives, not least because those who are most intoxicated by them are more interested in personal aggrandisement than they are in the wellbeing of their fellow creatures, for whom they feel no particular responsibility; Conservatism does not conflict with Cromwellian radicalism simply because the tendency towards random hero-worship is perfectly capable of drawing such people towards Conservative heroes. And in fairness, because the compulsion here is so raw and so urgent, really there is little comment an outsider can make on it. We all have our wounds, some borne more bravely or proudly than others, and we all do what we can about them.
The second reason for Conservative Cromwell-worship is more complicated, if more interesting for what it says about the Conservative Party, although frankly for regular ERO readers it will not come as much of a surprise. More than anything, it rests on the logical extreme of the sort of pandemic liberalism that insists on inevitable historical progress towards an enlightened, tolerant, secular democracy. Or to put it another way, if you assume that the past three hundred years had to happen more or less as they did, Cromwell had to happen — even if, in practice, his Interregnum was a disastrous experiment that was jettisoned as soon as was humanly possible. But the practical problem here is exactly the sort of boring matter of fact that those historians mentioned in the context of the forthcoming film — how to make Cromwell an avatar of enlightenment, tolerance and secular democracy when in fact he was a doctrinaire, intolerant, illiberal tyrant with little time for democracy once any alternative offered itself? A man who did all he could to stamp out Levellers, Catholics, Quakers, Royalists, dissidents of any stripe? The way at least some Conservative Cromwell-enthusiasts deal with this paradox is to allude, as the far from Conservative Milton did, to the enlivening effect of bloody civil war on the English [sic] political imagination, as if this were something Conservatives ought to value. But clearly, for some, the ‘freedom’ to be what a radicalised and aggressive Army wanted one to be appears, at least at a distance, to be a significant and attractive one. To say anything else might involve standing up for something dauntingly illiberal and distinctively Conservative, which is to consign oneself to a state of freakish and general disapprobation more distressing than is easy to imagine, let alone embrace. And this, in turn, is the spectre that haunts even supposedly Conservative bastions such as the Daily Telegraph, and that ensures that any case made on Cromwell's behalf will get marginally more than a fair hearing.
In other cases a Conservative enthusiasm for Cromwell is phrased in terms of a tender solicitude for the rights and privileges of Parliament. In recent years, indeed, such a stance has coincided, not well or neatly but at least frequently, with a bit of light Blair-bashing. The implied argument runs that since Blair behaves in a high-handed way with Parliament, and since Charles I is also seen to have behaved in a high-handed way with Parliament, thus Cromwell is a sort of anti-Blair who deserves our belated approbation. If there is anything other than silliness in this stance, though, it lies in the backhanded compliment it offers to Blair's sometimes daunting and almost certainly short-term effectiveness. In fact, Cromwell not only had less patience with a robust, fractious House of Commons and an independent Lords than did the King, but had fewer inhibitions when it came to silencing what were even then two ancient branches of English goverment. The fact that anyone ever was allowed to erect outside the Palace of Westminster a statue of the architect of Pride's Purge and the man who eventually dismissed the wretched Rump Parliament shows a self-destructive streak on the part of our legislative bodies bordering on the farcical. Meanwhile, rhetorical Blair-bashing aside, Conservatives probably ought to pause and consider whether the preservation, defence, what have you — under the circumstances, the mot juste is hard to find — of Parliamentary prerogatives is really the greatest political good, or at any rate one worth the murder of a king, two bloody civil wars and the temporary destruction of Parliament itself. King Charles, after all, also spoke of freedom, by which he seems largely to have meant freedom from political interference — the interference of Parliament first and foremost. Those who enjoy that sort of thing might pause to consider whether such concerns have aged well or badly, and whether that sends any sort of message to Conservatives.
The final Conservative justification for Cromwell-worship is the most important, because it is the most firmly lodged in matters of faith. There is a particular strand of low-church protestantism that still objects to Queen Henrietta Maria, still thinks that popery might well be slavery and still feels that 1688 was basically the high point of British constitutional life. Taste is everything here. There is a lot of unfinished reformation business about — unfinished, perhaps, even today. And here, alas, there are only two points to make, one of which is a cheap undergraduate one and the other hardly a point at all. The first is that many of those who adhere to these residual low-church loyalties do not themselves attend organised worship, take an a la carte approach towards the Ten Commandments and seem particularly vague about the nature of the sin of pride. The second is that although such people ought, by the logic of their own supposed doctrinal position, embrace the prospect of a confessional state, in practice their stance has deteriorated so as to become a rancid distrust of anything other than a kind of flaccid and off-centre libertarian individualism fundamentally at odds with anything their seventeenth-century low-church predecessors might have recognised. But for them this is in no way problematic, because for them, as much as anyone, talking about the Civil War is really a way of talking about other things, including their own manifest righteousness in the face of a puzzling, unsatisfactory and deeply frustrating world. They welcome the word 'puritan' and cling to a doctrine of election. They hope and trust that God will reveal to them, sooner rather than later, their predestined and doubtless crucial role within British political and cultural life. But until then, it is the fantasies of retribution that keep them going, as they, like the rest of us, are forced to roll up their sleeves and engage with a far-from-perfect world.
Why Cromwell?
Cromwell, of course, was not without his qualities. He was complex. His Calvinist conversion of 1630 was undoubtedly real and important. Given his lack of training, he was surprisingly capable tactician. Even when he didn't benefit from superior numbers or better access to supplies, his qualities as a soldier were manifest. Marston Moor and Naseby were battles a worse commander might have lost; his victory at Dunbar verged on the miraculous. Unlike King Charles, who realised too late the gravity of his failure to stand up for Strafford, he was also a good judge of character who surrounded himself with good men. He had a shrewd and indeed rather Tory eye for the point at which one ought to embrace the world that is, and an equally shrewd eye for the points at indecision could be transmuted into something resembling, at least in the eyes of outsiders, a sort of inspired fatalism.
Yet he was also, for all his qualities, complexities and scruples, a thug. As Bishop Burnet was later to write of Cromwell and his intimates:
They believed there were great occasions in which some men were called to great services, in the doing of which they were excused from the common laws of morality: such were the practices of Ehud and Jael, Samson and David: and by this they fancied they had a privilege from observing the standing rules.
Ultimately, this explains why, in the end, for all those qualities, Cromwell came to be deserted by so many of his allies — not least, Algernon Sidney, Sir Henry Vane and Lord Fairfax. His ‘reign’ was a colossal failure. The only people who heckled King Charles at his ‘trial’ were a paid claque of soldiers; at his death there was nothing but a general ‘deep groan, such as I never heard before and desire I may never hear again’, whereas Cromwell’s own exhumation and exposure at Tyburn was greeted with nothing other than very general celebration — this, in his own puritan London!
The truth, whatever one thinks of it, is that Cromwell’s reign was nothing but an inglorious little coup d’etat, making no serious constitutional points and leaving little in its wake other than many thousands of cripples, a legacy of economic damage and a salutory if expensive horror of civil war. His decision to kill King Charles was as much an act of desperation as it was one of pique. The tribunal in front of which the King was tried had no legitimate authority, having been cobbled together out of stray members of the Rump Parliament and assorted hangers-on. And even if it had been better chosen, as the Earl of Northumberland rightly argued at the time, how on earth could a sovereign commit treason, when treason was defined as action taken against the sovereign? Charles’s subsequent trial was nothing but an early essay in that sad convention, the political show-trial, and his execution simply an assassination played out with all the tawdry trappings of bogus legality. Or to put it another way, to approve of Cromwell’s role in the killing of Charles I is to approve, tout court, of the arbitrary irruption of military force into normal political life. Whatever else this might be, it is not exactly redolent of Conservative principles. Neither were Cromwell’s assaults on an established and popular religion, nor his limited and half-hearted gestures at social levelling.
This is not a day for geniality
Against that, one can set King Charles' powerful arguments, not least the ones made in the week before he was sent to his death. Simply summarised, they boil down to a few points. The court that 'tried' him was not legitimate, but more to the point, if a soveriegn could be treated thus, what could the ordinary man hope for? If all the conventions grown up over thousands of years were overturned tomorrow, would the result naturally be better? If the world turned upside down, would we all land on our feet?
If I have written very little about King Charles here, it is not due to any lack of respect for him — rather, it is because I do not believe that the respect due to an annointed soveriegn ought to stem from the sovereign's personal qualities. King Charles could have been ten thousand times more flawed than he was (leaving him, it must be said, a much better person than many of us are) and still would not have deserved the treatment he received. That is not the point. Neither, in a way, are Cromwell's personal qualities. As Cromwell and the King both knew, more was at stake on 30 January 1649 than mere matters of personality. And similarly, more is at stake when talk turns to Cromwell than momentary diversion. Insofar as these things come down to a matter of taste, to voice enthusiasm for Cromwell is to say that if an existing situation is not perfect, it ought perforce to be suspended, interrupted, overturned, altered, revised according to today's whim and then again perhaps according to tomorrow's. It is also to bear the legacy of expectation that such revision will not, and cannot work. Cromwell's Conservative friends? Well, many of them are my friends, but today of all days they should not go unchallenged. In their support, however rhetorical and even playful, for this wicked man, they have adopted a stance that is not only far from right, but that — with its legacy of carnage and human suffering, violence and disorder — strikes me as inescapably repulsive, too.
Bunny Smedley, now ERO's arts editor, once dabbled in history; she regrets Cromwell's decision to sell off King Charles' collection of first-rate Titians.
Bunny Smedley, January 29, 2003 01:45 PM