HISTORY: Cromwell as a conservative?
The rights of rulers and the ruled
It was not a dark thing done in a corner
—Maj-Gen Thomas Harrison on the Regicide.
I would not seek to set up that that Providence hath destroyed and laid in the dust, and I would not build Jericho again
—Cromwell on refusing the crown.
You are offended at a House of Lords. I tell you that unless you have some such thing as a balance you cannot be safe
—Cromwell’s speech to officers, February 1657
Christ, not Man, is King
—alleged inscription on Cromwell’s sarcophagus, now lost.
It was a time of religious ferment, of price inflation and of popular low-church revolt. The King, prone to homosexual favourites in his youth, had matured into a loving and devoted husband. He was a patron of the arts. But at the main business of monarchy, his obsession with his divine privileges was an excuse for miserable ineptitude. Both in France and in Ireland his attempts at waging war ended in disaster, and in both cases the area of English control shrank. His downfall came when, in pursuit of his goal of absolute monarchy, he moved clumsily against the five leading politicians who were trying to hold him to account in Parliament. The crisis which he unleashed cost him his throne, and in the end his life. He was imprisoned in Pontefract Castle, and there, the year after his deposition, starved to death — so crazed with hunger, if the more lurid accounts are to be believed, that he gnawed the flesh from his own arms.
A brief reflection on Richard II’s struggles with Lollards and Lords Appellant makes one suspect that there might be more to the story of “that Man of Blood”, Charles I, than is often supposed. Far from being the noble victim of a bourgeois revolution or of traitorous wickedness, he is perhaps better seen as part of a long tradition of inept rule reaping a sorry end. Yet the vision of his nemesis Oliver Cromwell as a uniquely wicked figure still looms in the popular imagination. Last year the familiar story was told in the film To Kill a King, whose cinema lifespan was brief, but which will no doubt grace Channel 4’s schedule one Christmas soon.
The film covers not the famous civil war, but its aftermath, focusing on the relationship between Lord General Fairfax (Dougray Scott) and his deputy Oliver Cromwell (Tim Roth), who have just defeated and captured King Charles I (Rupert Everett). Beginning as firm friends, they collaborate in using military force to overawe Parliament, when its leader Denzil Holles attempts to restore the King to power. Soon Cromwell and Fairfax, the latter spurred by the sense of propriety of his devoted wife Lady Anne (Olivia Williams), fall out, until Fairfax refuses to sign the king's death warrant. Cromwell, surrounded by sinister black-coated fanatics, first takes control of the army and then has himself “crowned” Lord Protector — dictator and King in all but name.
The film’s budget problems are painfully apparent. There are few extras (servants etc) in key scenes, whilst the budget (just over Ł12m) did not allow for battles — not even the key 1645 victory at Naseby, with whose aftermath the film opens. Compare that to Braveheart’s Ł46m, which allowed for a battle of 20,000 extras. Ewan McGregor, the original Cromwell, dropped out, which was perhaps just as well, as Cromwell was a middle-aged man — Brian Cox would have been nearer the mark. Less happily, North London’s best export Emily Watson, who has never been known to play a part without energizing it, dropped out of playing Lady Anne.
It really isn’t a very good film, and for reasons which can’t really be put down to lack of funding. Whilst the costumes and period detail are excellent, the script is so bad that one really wonders who wrote it, or what grade he or she got for the Civil War paper on their degree course. It isn’t just the arch dialogue (in the opening scene Lady Fairfax asks Cromwell who he is — he had been a prominent politician and soldier for three or four years by then), but the fact that the film oversimplifies or misses so many of the main issues. Fairfax is portrayed as a noble hero, which is hardly surprising as Dougray Scott had to put up Ł70,000 of his own money to get the film finished — unusually for a British film, it received no public backing. We have no sense of Cromwell’s military skill, or force of character — this was the man who trained his cavalry to regroup for further manoeuvre after each charge, and who quelled the Burford Mutiny by riding amongst the mob, selecting ringleaders to be executed. Roth hunches like Richard III (in fact his portraits suggest that Cromwell was well-built), and by the end is reprising his role as Thade in 2001’s Planet of the Apes, leaping around and headbutting walls in demented fashion.
For much of the film, the reason for Cromwell’s puppy-like adoration of Fairfax, and supposed jealousy of the latter’s happy marriage, is unclear, before the preposterous homo-erotic subtext is made plain. When Lady Anne suffers a miscarriage, Cromwell commiserates with her husband in a way which comes across as a little unmanly even by the standards of 2003 — there is no sense that the death of infants was a commonplace event until the twentieth century, let alone of the way in which a couple in 1648 would have berated themselves and wondered how they had failed to do God’s will. They even have a ludicrous reunion just before the death of Cromwell (absurdly hale and hearty, let alone aged by his responsibilities as his Protectorate portraits suggest).
Rupert Everett’s portrayal of Charles I doesn’t quite work either – he is portrayed as having a lascivious interest in Lady Anne Fairfax (poppycock!), and he lacks the regal dignity of Alec Guiness’ memorable portrayal. His attempt at a stutter comes across as doing a poor impersonation of our own Prince Charles. And a few obvious real events were missed: Lady Anne, masked, shouting abuse during the King’s trial (the act for which she is most famous), and Cromwell allegedly striking men and forcing them to sign the death warrant. There is no sense of the New Model Army as an autonomous, highly-politicized force, convinced that its victory proved it to be God’s instrument on earth. There is no mention of the religious disputes over which these people fought, as determined then as people are now to fight only when convinced they were morally justified to do so, (no mention that Lady Fairfax was a Presbyterian from about 1646 — no wonder Fairfax was so unenthused about invading Scotland, the reason for his resignation in 1650, which enabled Cromwell to succeed him as Lord General), which are instead attributed, with typical sixth-formish puerility, to Denzil Holles’ desire for “trading privileges”. There is no Second Civil War, no expedition to Ireland, and no long ongoing disputes over the constitutional status of the Rump.
In reality Denzil Holles, the villain of this film, was an interesting man — he was one of those who had held Speaker Finch down in his chair in 1629, and was one of the Five Members whom the King tried to arrest in 1642. He was by no means the civilian suggested by the film, having commanded a Parliamentary regiment at Edgehill while Cromwell had still been a captain. He had declined an army command during the war. And Waller, the former General in the West (whose botch of the Second Battle of Newbury had led to the setting-up of the New Model Army), was Holles' right-hand man — and like him later became a royalist. Even the Earl of Manchester, former commander of the Eastern Association Army, became more and more Presbyterian from 1644, seeing the retention of some kind of church organization as a bastion of social order. It is interesting to reflect how these unsuccessful early commanders, like General McClellan in a later civil war, were driven into opposition not only to all-out war but also to the political radicalism which it brought in its wake. But it is hard to take Holles, or the ideas for which he fought, seriously, when he is portrayed by that stalwart of Seventies sitcoms, James Bolam.
Oliver Cromwell is a Protean figure. He has been more biographised than any English monarch, and more mythologized, and linked with parts of the country which he never visited, than anyone else other than that sixth-century Romano-British chieftain known to posterity as Arthur. At Brampton Bryan, he is said to dance with the devil every 3rd September, the anniversary of Dunbar and Worcester, and of his own death. He is often confused in the popular imagination with Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s smasher of graven images. Like many “great men”, Cromwell is often personally blamed for things which were happening anyway — the slighting of royalist castles being a relatively trivial example (the execution of the King, to which fifty-nine others were also party, being a less trivial one), and is the butt of many dubiously attributed quotations or anecdotes (my favourite being the words put by Bulstrode into John Hampden’s mouth: ‘that slovenly fellow which you see before us, who hath no ornament in his speech . . . will be one of the greatest men of England’).
Every generation rewrites his story. In the eighteenth century, Cromwell’s press was uniquely bad — Whigs saw him as a hypocrite who had fought for, then betrayed, parliamentary government. Tories saw him as a wicked man who had slain the Lord’s anointed, a view which one occasionally still finds today. It was Carlyle who rescued Cromwell’s reputation. In the Thirties there was briefly a fashion for portraying Cromwell (like Julius Caesar) as a Man of Destiny, a precursor of the fascist dictators — at the time this was intended as a compliment. Nowadays writers tend to be more concerned to see him in the context of the religious beliefs of the time, and to stress the sincerity with which he sought God’s guidance before acting, or attempted to deduce God’s will as manifested in the course of events. It may be that this was in part an instinctive Gaullist ability to withdraw into silent contemplation, before acting with maximum theatrical impact. Part of the reason for withdrawing, a cynic might add, is to see which way the cat is going to jump — allowing others to exhaust themselves first, before helping to impose the solution.
Was he, as was argued in these parts some months ago, a ‘thug’? Power unregulated does tend to degenerate into thuggery and high-handedness, and this is as true in our own time as it was then. What about our own customs and excise, who when faced with a suspect who has breached their own “guidelines” on alcohol imports, were recently shown to have the charming habit of confiscating cars and selling them before the suspect has even had a hearing? This sort of behaviour, unless checked by rules and institutions, is a natural temptation of power. The point is that an England of the sort for which Cromwell aimed would, in the end, have had less thuggery and arbitrary high-handedness than an absolute Stuart monarchy.
The other great charge against Oliver Cromwell is the Irish campaign of 1649, during which he sacked the towns of Drogheda (killing 3,500 — but of these 2,800 were soldiers, many of them English Protestants) and Wexford. For these events he is remembered in Irish national myth “as if he were Hitler”, but they were if anything, unexceptionable compared to Prince Rupert’s sack of Bolton and the other Puritan towns in Lancashire, or to the Hapsburg sack of Rome in 1527, or the Spanish sack of Antwerp in 1576, in which 8,000 were massacred (that being merely one event in a long and horrible war), let alone to Tilly’s sack of Magdeburg in May 1631, which reduced the population of the town from 20 or 30,000 to 5,000 (a million Germans died in the Thirty Years War). Or what about Sir Richard Bingham’s cold-blooded executions of the Armada survivors on the shores of Connaught, even by the standards of 1588 a war crime so shameful that it was buried under the myth that the Armada survivors had been massacred by Irish savages (or the even dafter Irish myth that dark-haired Irishmen are of Spanish descent)? And there is no doubt that what was done to Drogheda and Wexford, apart from avenging the 12,000 settlers massacred in 1641, served its purpose: Cromwell was able to grant terms at Clonmel, and many other towns surrendered.
Putting to the sword a town which had resisted assault was perfectly acceptable according to the customs of warfare at the time. There is a reason for this. Close, hand-to-hand combat, fought with sword, pike or bayonet is surprisingly rare in any age. “Fighting through”, as it is nowadays called, requires men, in practice often fuelled by alcohol, to become murderously berserk. In those days the morale of the inferior side would usually break when faced with an enemy cavalry charge, or push of pike with a stronger enemy regiment. When the weaker side was inside a trench or fortification, they could stand their ground (at least, until the closing years of the First World War, when artillery barrages reached a ferocity which could suppress any defence). Put bluntly, an attacking force which was sufficiently fired up to storm a breach in a fortress wall (Cromwell himself had to take personal command of the third attack at Drogheda, after the first two had been beaten back) would probably be out of control by the time it fought its way through. As late as 1812 Wellington’s men, on storming the Spanish fortress of Badajoz, went berserk, shooting some of their own officers and giving themselves over to days of rape and looting, until Wellington restored order by erecting a gallows in the city. The similar behaviour of the Red Army in Eastern Europe in 1944-5, after a war far more bestial than that endured by the Western Allies, can perhaps be seen in the same light.
For all the calumnies laid against his name, Cromwell remains a very human character — how can one not sympathise with a Head of State who apologised that the April 1657 budget was ‘exceedingly past (his) understanding’? It is easy to imagine that he had little patience with the endless meetings and arguments, the need to be physically present and show one’s face whilst unimportant nonsense is discussed, the search for carefully-worded positions and formulae which can hold factions together and pin opponents into corners, which make up so much of politics, let alone the degree to which argument about such verbal positions takes precedence over action in the real world. Whilst he was not always able to find lasting solutions, he was at least occasionally able to cut through the Gordian Knot, and to scorn his own side’s shibboleths as ‘Magna Farta’ and the ‘Petition of Shite’. Like many people he probably entered public life with some ideals and illusions, but I doubt whether, after about 1644 at any rate, he would have had much patience with one of the Tony Benns of this world telling him that politics is about “ishoos” — hence, in part perhaps, his exasperation at men like Harry Vane.
Like Julius Caesar, Bismarck (who, like Cromwell, mastered and eventually acquired a considerable income from farming during his wilderness years), Charles de Gaulle or Dwight D. Eisenhower, Cromwell was a man who did not achieve fame until middle age. His character had been hardened by years of disappointment and obscurity, after he had been slung out of Huntingdon, for which he had been MP, over a land dispute in 1631, briefly imprisoned when he went to London to complain, and reduced briefly to being a tenant-farmer at St. Ives, although he later prospered. His religious conversion was some time after this, and he was supposedly disturbed by dreams that he would one day be King, if one chooses to believe that story. When power was thrust upon him (and few serious historians nowadays believe he consciously sought it), he was a grown-up man, his self-esteem not dependent on any position which he occupied in public affairs, and able to bring an outsider’s view to government. Perhaps this owed something to the critical eye and yet, at the same time, the assurance, of a wife who had endured him for a few decades before he amounted to anything.
Cromwell owed his thrust to power and fame to the accidental outbreak of civil war. No matter how deep the underlying causes, there was nothing inevitable about that event, and one can see the faint outline of how an absolutist Stuart monarchy might have evolved. Without parliament, county assizes would no doubt have taken up a role similar to that of the French parlements after the States-General went into abeyance in 1614. The position of the clergy would have been strong, (but given the English Low Church tradition, going back at least as far as the Lollards, it is hardly likely to have been very secure), there would have been clerics in government (the Bishop of London was Lord Treasurer in 1636), and sooner or later Roman Catholics would have been tolerated, to the disgust of Laud, it is fair to say. An “imperial” government of the three kingdoms would have made obsolete not just Parliament but also the Privy Council, which had no authority north of the Tweed.
Ship money, although disliked by Hampden and others, was relatively equitable (and was to be used by Parliament for the weekly levy in 1643), and the other main tax of the era, the subsidy, had become a joke as the gentry underrated themselves, one tenth of their worth in some cases. Was the King obligated to rule according to the ancient laws of the Kingdom? Many common lawyers (Ellesmere, Bacon, even Hobbes) were instrumentalists, who thought that the sovereign had the right to change the law for public good — which is precisely what Parliament (strictly speaking, the Crown in Parliament) nowadays does, although natural law precepts survive (in effect) in the presuppositions of judges’ rulings, and in the terms of debate when legislation is drafted.
For the first time since Edward II in the 1320s, there was beginning to be a tradition of military action without parliamentary authority: Queen Elizabeth had evicted the French from the Scottish Lowlands in 1559-60, and had sent forces to Le Havre in 1562, neither with the permission of Parliament. To invade Scotland in 1639, Charles I relied on scutage and border service to raise an army of 20,000 men — as many as the future New Model’s paper strength, and more than three times size of the army which Cromwell would deploy at Dunbar. The young Fairfax served with the royal army. There is little doubt that with better planning the King could have won his Scottish War without having to recall Parliament — considering how Scotland fragmented during the civil war, one really has to wonder at how Charles united all the factions against himself. But he threw it all away, and it was the Scottish defeat which unravelled all the threads. Arundel (an old enemy of Buckingham), Holland (an enemy of Laud) and Essex (son of the popular hero who had rebelled against the elderly Elizabeth in 1601) had all been leading generals in 1639, but were all dismissed in 1640 as part of a backlash. As every schoolboy knows, Parliament was recalled after the loss of the Scottish war, and Charles’ attempt to build an absolutist state unravelled.
If Charles’ regime had lasted a few years’ longer, it might have been more secure. Many of the original parliamentarians were old (Mulgrave had captained a ship against the Armada in 1588); Eliot died in the Tower in 1632, Coke in 1634, Pym in 1643, Essex in 1646. They were the generation which had grown up with the Spanish threat. (The Thirty Years War, a German civil war in which most of the continental powers were involved, had seemed an apocalyptic struggle against Hapsburg hegemony. It was the ending of the Spanish threat which would make Cromwell’s godly rule in the 1650s seem so outdated and hollow.) The judges who had found for Hampden in the Ship Money case were dead by 1641. So it was indeed now or never for Pym and his allies in 1640-1.
Having established the historical context for the crisis which enabled Cromwell to rise to power, it is now time to examine the period when his influence on political events was most crucial. The case for Cromwell as a conservative figure has to based on the period after the end of the Civil War, when Parliament and the Army were left squabbling for power. A more skilled ruler than Charles I could easily have safeguarded his position by negotiating some kind of constitutional settlement, leaving the way clear for a gradual resumption of power (the sort of crisis overcome by the French monarchy several times before and during the youth of Louis XIV). Any idea that Cromwell consciously sought after power is very hard to sustain. Cornet Joyce never claimed Cromwell’s authority for seizing the King at Holmby House (June 1647) — he said he was doing so on behalf of the Army. Throughout this time Cromwell worked for a compromise solution, trying to get the King to agree to the Heads of the Proposals, keeping the Army in being to protect liberty of conscience from the Presbyterians (who wanted minimal political change, but were intolerant of other religious sects) in parliament. The demand for a purge of Parliament came not from Cromwell, who was sceptical, but from the agitators — elected representatives of the enlisted men — at the Reading Debates of July 1647. It is often put about, nastily, that Cromwell “may have known about” Colonel Pride’s purge of the Commons before it happened, which is hardly surprising as the idea had been kicked around the Army for eighteen months beforehand. At the more famous Putney Debates that autumn, whilst maintaining the pretence of an open mind, he steered towards a rejection of the “Agreement of the People”, the Leveller/agitators’ plans for a draft constitution stressing popular sovereignty and downplaying the role of the monarchy and the House of Lords. When he was swept aside by the radical feelings of the Army — their demands for the extension of the franchise, and Cromwell’s exchanges with Colonel Rainborough are too famous to need quoting here — Cromwell and other senior officers restored order by ordering a General Rendezvous of the Army (requiring the Agitators to return to their regiments).
Even if the later story that King Charles’ intercepted letter to his wife showed his negotiations to be false, and that he planned to deal with the Scots, it is clear that by the start of 1648 he had lost any chance of holding on to power. Cromwell may have been exploring the option of deposing him in favour of his son. Not only was defeat in the Civil War God’s punishment for the King in the first place, but the Second Civil War, a defiance of God’s will, was the final straw — ‘because it is the repetition of the same offence against all the witnesses which God hath borne’. Cromwell’s letters to Hammond that autumn bear clear witness (amidst much quotation from Isaiah) to his mood — that it was sinful to defy God’s demonstrated will by treating any further with the King, or by permitting Parliament to stand in the way of the Army. Of course he worked actively for the King’s death by then — so did a lot of other people. A later generation might perhaps explore the issue of mass hysteria, the need for scapegoats, or the ancient human custom of ritually sacrificing the King.
It is true that Cromwell imprisoned men without trial and that by 1651 the tax burden was six or seven times what it had been in 1630s. But he usually pushed for liberty of conscience (for Protestants at any rate) — so they did not have to emigrate to the New World as he had nearly done — combined with a conservative settlement. In 1649 he may well have opposed the abolition of the House of Lords and tried to persuade some of the purged MPs to return. In the winter of 1652-3 he tried to restrain the Council of Officers from moving against the Rump, finally acting because its franchise plans were too wide (thus endangering the cause of Godly Reformation) or else because it aimed to renew itself by a crude recruiter clause, which would have created a self-perpetuating oligarchy.
What, finally, was the moral case for the actions of Cromwell and his henchmen? Tell a “freedom-fighter” that his rebellion is unlawful, and his answer may well be “by whose law?” As so often, the popular retort contains more sense than academic sophistry. Law cannot make itself lawful — there has to be some logically-prior method of recognising law and legality, what the Germans call a Grundnorm. In the seventeenth century, opinion-formers came to feel that the King was breaching ancient natural laws, and there was a very real fear that the Stuart Kings would establish themselves as absolute monarchs with standing (catholic) army and unhindered lawmaking and taxing powers. The King’s mystical beliefs (that Monarchy was permanently-ordained by God, even if usurped for a thousand years, and answerable to God alone, that his body natural was fused at the Coronation with the body politic like Christ incarnate in human form) did not serve him very well when monarchy had ceased to serve its practical purpose, had ceased to maintain the basis of consent. Ultimately, rule has to be based on the acquiescence of those whole are ruled.
If you argue that monarchy is divinely ordained, what, apart from blind belief (which is no answer to a man who has a different blind belief), is your proof? Kingship as we know it in western Europe being derived originally from the military force of the Dark Age barbarian chieftains, so if its longevity is evidence that it deserves to be preserved, that leaves no argument against any other man who claims that his success proves God’s support for his cause. Any workable conservative defence of a constitutional order ultimately boils down to pragmatism. Which is not much help when the institutions, or the men who operate them, have failed.
In France, absolute monarchy was established, with, in the long run, disastrous results. The nobility had to be bought off with tax privileges, which made the system impossible to reform by the 1780s. There was no way for the King to distance himself from bankruptcy and military failure. The same was true in the nineteenth century — the British way of government, evolved during the seventeenth century, was flexible enough to accommodate change and increased state spending without having to resort to the sort of cynical deals about tariffs and battleship-building with which German governments bought off domestic interests, buying domestic peace by making enemies abroad.
Cromwell was a man of paradox, both man of revolution and man of order. Apart from the makers of To Kill a King, few people have ever seriously described him as a mediocrity. It can plausibly be argued that without him Parliament would not have won the Civil War, and the Third Civil War would have dragged on with Scotland and Ireland surviving as unconquered bastions of royalism. He was certainly a Great Man on the criterion of putting a mark upon his times.
One of the seminal events of the twentieth century was the meeting of Churchill and President Roosevelt on board HMS Prince of Wales at Placentia Bay in August 1941. Together they drew up the Atlantic Charter, which encapsulated the principles of freedom for which the western democracies were fighting. For the religious service, the hymn, ‘Eternal Father strong to save’, was perhaps a predictable choice for a meeting at sea during the Battle of the Atlantic, in which the US Navy, still technically neutral, was increasingly involved. The other hymn which Churchill chose was no paean to British monarchy or to old forms of government preserved beyond their useful life. Instead, he chose a hymn which he thought represented the tradition of liberty for which English-speaking people on both sides of the Atlantic were fighting. It was ‘O God our Help in Ages Past’ — the hymn which the Ironsides had sung at Chalgrove Field in 1643, as they bore John Hampden’s body to the grave.
James Steerforth works in the City, and continues to gives thanks for Parliamentarism
James Steerforth, January 26, 2004 06:00 PM