The man known to history as Oliver Cromwell
was born on the 25th of April 1599 in Huntingdon in Cambridgeshire in England. His father Robert Cromwell was a local landholder,
one who served as a justice of the peace, a regional magistracy which made the Cromwells
well-respected within the local community. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, Robert
was also a member of parliament, sitting for Huntingdon in the 1593 parliament. The Cromwells were from the gentry class,
the equivalent of the middle class in early modern times, while they were also one of
the wealthiest families in the Huntingdon area. Oliver’s mother was Elizabeth Steward who
lived to see four of her children die before adulthood, including Oliver’s two brothers
who died in infancy, effectively making him the only son in a female dominated household. Elizabeth’s granduncle, Robert Steward,
became the first Dean of Ely Cathedral in 1541 which brought the family line wealth
through long term profitable leaseholds in the surrounding area. In 1636, Elizabeth’s brother, Sir Thomas
Steward, died, thereby passing the family wealth directly to her son Oliver which proved
a key turning point in the family fortunes. Elizabeth was married twice, marrying Robert
Cromwell in 1591 after her first husband died a year prior. Elizabeth died at eighty-nine years old, in
the year 1654, long after Robert had died in the year 1617 around his fiftieth birthday,
having fathered ten children with Elizabeth. The Cromwell family had a further royal connection
through Thomas Cromwell, the brother of Katherine Cromwell who married Oliver’s great-great-grandfather
Morgan ap William. Thomas Cromwell had been a powerful chief
minister to King Henry VIII back in the 1530s, one who had helped Henry to find a legal justification
for the annulment of his marriage to his first wife, Katherine of Aragon, paving the way
for Henry to marry Anne Boleyn in the mid-1530s. Thomas Cromwell had used his position to help
his wider family purchase cheap land seized by the crown during the dissolution of England’s
religious houses from 1535 onwards. This was all part of the inception of the
Protestant Reformation in England, as the Church of England split from the Roman Catholic
Church and then gradually adopted more and more Protestant rites and beliefs. Although Thomas Cromwell eventually fell from
favour and was executed on trumped up treason charges in 1540, his life influenced Oliver’s
well over half a century later in so far as the Cromwells had become relatively wealthy
from the lands the family acquired in the 1530s and also because the religious revolution
which was initiated under Cromwell continued to impact greatly on England’s social and
political life into the seventeenth century. However, the family’s ties to the disgraced
former chief minister still carried a stigma, generations later and so the family went by
the surname William rather than Cromwell during Oliver’s earliest years. The context of the early seventeenth century
in which Oliver grew up was one of considerable concern over the survival of Roman Catholicism
in England. Although the Protestant Reformation had made
great headway during the long reign of Queen Elizabeth I between 1558 and 1603, a large
Catholic minority survived in England and Wales and these had become radicalised as
a result of the Papal-led Counter Reformation. This explains the Gunpowder Plot which was
foiled on the 5th of November 1605 when Catholic plotters had aimed to blow up parliament during
its first sitting, attempting to kill King James I in the process. This Scottish-born monarch had ascended to
the throne following Elizabeth’s death in the spring of 1603, as the queen had never
married and did not produce any heirs. James and his son Charles were Protestants,
though not radical ones. Conversely, in large parts of England communities
of Puritans had emerged, they were radical Protestants who based their beliefs on the
theocracies which had grown up in cities like Geneva, under the minister Jean Calvin in
the mid-sixteenth century. These Puritans were rabidly anti-Catholic
and wanted a more radical form of Protestantism adopted by James. His failure to do so, and in particular, the
perceived crypto-Catholicism of his son Charles would contribute enormously to the outbreak
of the civil wars in England in the 1640s and the rise of Oliver Cromwell to prominence
in the country. James’s reign was significant as well in
terms of his relationship with the English parliament. James had inherited a healthy treasury in
England owing to the notorious parsimony of Queen Elizabeth, but the new king was no miser
and he spent lavishly on court festivities and on rewarding his court favourites. Within a few years the crown was in financial
difficulty and had to call on parliament’s financial aid. As a result, in 1610 Robert Cecil attempted
to exchange the king’s royal income for a fixed annual sum, effectively giving parliament
control of the monarch’s financial power which resulted in James dissolving parliament
in 1611, bringing Cecil’s so called ‘Great-Contract’ to an end. These religious and financial tensions foreshadowed
the clashes within England which would later create the civil war between King Charles
I and the English parliament. Oliver grew up against this backdrop. He attended grammar school for one year, before
going to Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge in 1616 until the death of his father when
he returned from college to look after his widowed mother and sisters and assumed the
household responsibilities. It is believed that during this time he studied
at Lincoln’s Inn in London, one of the inns of court where English lawyers trained in
early modern times, though one which became known as a hotbed of Puritanism. In 1620, Cromwell married Elizabeth Bourchier
who was the daughter of a merchant in the city of London, from a family that was very
active in the Puritan church. Owing to all of these influences and his own
increasingly Evangelical religious outlook Cromwell was a committed Puritan by the mid-1620s. Puritans such as Cromwell were English Protestants
who felt the Church of England was still too engrained with Roman Catholic practices and
superstition, notably in the elaborate decoration of English churches, the dress worn by priests
and certain doctrinal issues, Puritans believing the mass should be celebrated in a simple
unadorned manner in churches stripped of any signs of ostentation or riches. Doctrinally they favoured a precise reading
of the New Testament as the word of god and believed that the Christian faith had been
corrupted by decades of Papal invention of theological ideas which had no basis in the
doctrine of the Bible. The Puritans would form the backbone of the
opposition to the king and the royalists in the 1640s and Cromwell’s faith was central
to his entire life and career. In 1625 Charles I succeeded his father James
I. While there had always been conflicts between English monarchs and the English parliament
over a wide range of different matters, Charles’ reign would prove particularly problematic. In line with the growing view of absolutist
monarchy across Europe and the ‘divine right of kings’, Charles was disinclined to govern
England with the consent of parliament and instead from very early on established a pattern
whereby he sought to rule through a small clique of faithful administrators. From a young age, Charles looked frail and
is believed to have suffered from rickets which in the context of the age would have
been seen by some as a sign from God that he was ill fitted to his great responsibilities. In addition, marrying a Roman Catholic, Henrietta
Maria, the daughter of deceased King Henri IV of France and sister of King Louis XIII,
in the same year that he took the throne, created suspicions among England’s growing
number of Protestant Puritans that Charles had strong Catholic sympathies, while Charles’
support for clerics such as William Laud, who eventually became archbishop of Canterbury
and the leader of the Church of England, fuelled the mistrust many Puritans felt towards the
new monarch, as Laud was a religious traditionalist, a moderate Protestant who still welcomed many
of the trappings of Roman Catholicism in both the hierarchy of the church and the manner
in which the mass was celebrated. Three years later, in 1628, Cromwell was elected
to represent Huntingdon at Parliament, the same seat his father had briefly held 35 years
earlier. This widened his local focus onto the national
stage in a significant career progression, through which he often attacked the moderate
bishops appointed by the king by arguing prayer could establish direct contact to God without
the presence of the clergy. In his home in East Anglia, Cromwell made
determined attempts to safeguard the Puritan preachers threatened by Laud’s religious
reforms. Parliament at this time was divided into the
governing House of Commons and the House of Lords, with both houses discussing and approving
legislation and the Commons elected to debate and propose laws while the hereditary, selected
Lords would check and amend the bills. Establishing a reputation in the Commons as
a devout Puritan, Cromwell also advocated the rituals set out in the Book of Common
Prayer which was the service book authorised by the reigning monarch as head of the Anglican
Church, however the House was silenced when King Charles I suspended Parliament in 1629. He would not call another one for eleven years,
a period known as the ‘personal rule’ and during which the political community of
England accumulated countless resentments against crown rule which they could not seek
redress for through parliament according to tradition. As the reigning monarch of England, Scotland
and Ireland it was the prerogative of the King to call and close down Parliament largely
at his pleasure, which frustrated former members of parliament and wider public opinion. In 1631 the Cromwell family finances struggled,
and he was forced to sell his land and move to run a tenant farm in Saint Ives, Cambridgeshire. With a strong conscience towards his obligations
to his fellow man, Cromwell continued to focus on the affairs in his hometown and surrounding
areas. Moreover, while he had suffered through a
personal and spiritual battle in his earlier years, one which saw him believe that he was
quote ‘the chief of sinners’, unable to accept God without suffering from ‘self-vanity
and badness’, by the time he was in his thirties, he had begun to find peace in the
idea that he was actually one of God’s chosen few in England, charged with furthering the
cause of the Puritans against Catholics, Papists and moderate Protestants who were as bad as
Catholics in many respects. This view dominated Cromwell’s beliefs and
in examining his life one has to understand that he viewed himself as something of a religious
warrior in the 1640s and 1650s. Cromwell continued to develop a reputation
as an outspoken and sometimes impolite religious reformist, and although he was not necessarily
positioning himself as an enemy of the King in the late 1620s and early 1630s he continued
to attack the bishops appointed by the King. After his dip in fortunes in the 1620s, Cromwell
inherited some money from his uncle, which allowed the Cromwells to maintain a prominent
position in English county society throughout the 1630s. These were significant years for Cromwell
in so far as he was fostering growing ties to some of England’s most prominent Protestant
reformers and also members of the aristocracy such as the earls of Essex and Warwick who
were opposed to the perceived crypto-Catholicism of Charles and the Church of England. The 1630s were years of growing instability
across the three kingdoms of England, Ireland and Scotland. In England there was growing opposition to
Charles’s religious policies and his refusal to convene parliament again, while in Ireland
there were also tensions between the political community and Charles’ governor of the country,
the absolutist viceroy, Thomas Wentworth, who was determined to raise money in Ireland
for the crown while running roughshod over both the Roman Catholic majority and the minority
of Protestants and Presbyterians. However, it was in Scotland that the first
steps towards civil war and conflict were taken. The Scots overwhelmingly favoured a more radical
form of Protestantism known as Presbyterianism. The Scots were the equivalent of the Puritans
in England and believed in a decentralised church, one where local congregations were
headed by presbyters, with little interference from the central church authorities. Consequently, when Charles and Laud attempted
to enforce greater control over the Scottish church from 1637 onwards, it resulted in the
Scots revolting twice in clashes known as the First and Second Bishops War. The Bishops Wars were the spark which ignited
the English Civil Wars. Charles had tried to establish an absolutist
form of government in the 1630s, one in which he ruled through ministers like Wentworth
in Ireland and Laud over the church, but following the First Bishops War he had no choice but
to convene the first parliament in England in eleven years and request a financial subsidy
from them to pay for the war. Cromwell was returned to this parliament for
Cambridge, though in the event it only sat for a few weeks in the spring of 1640 before
Charles dissolved it, irked by parliament’s desire for political and religious reforms
before it would help the king pay for the war against the Scots. Consequently it became known as the Short
Parliament. However, when the Second Bishops War broke
out in the summer of 1640 and the Scots occupied northern England, Charles had to back down
and called another parliament. To this gathering, known as the Long Parliament,
Cromwell was yet again elected for Cambridge. It would sit throughout the 1640s, constantly
in conflict with the king. Matters culminated in 1641 when the opposition
to Charles in parliament, led by John Pym, presented the king with the ‘Grand Remonstrance’
which called for dozens of political, economic and religious reforms in return for parliamentary
aid against the Scots. But the king would not agree to it. At this stage Cromwell was just a small player
in the growing tensions, but in the course of the 1640s he would rise to prominence. In 1642 relations deteriorated further when
the King attempted to arrest five members of Parliament although Cromwell was not one
of the named, as his status was not yet prominent enough. The King left London to raise an army, effectively
triggering the start of the First Civil War between the parliamentarians and the royalist
supporters of Charles. The ensuing conflict provided Cromwell with
a stage from which to increase his power and influence. Although there is no evidence to suggest Cromwell
ever possessed aspirations of being a skilled military leader, in response to the King’s
departure on the 10th of January, he obtained permission from the House of Commons to form
an army for the defence of his Cambridgeshire constituency. Cromwell rode in person to the colleges in
Cambridge to prevent them melting down plates in order to help supply the king’s army
with musket balls and as the war ignited in August 1642 he enlisted a troop of cavalry
in his birthplace of Huntingdon. During the years which followed, he shrewdly
used his influence as an MP in the Long Parliament and successes as a military commander to help
boost his authority in order to fulfil the predetermined purpose he believed God had
given him. The Battle of Edgehill, the first major clash
between the crown and parliament during the war, took place on the 23rd of October 1642,
with Charles leading his army from Shrewsbury towards London attempting to force a quick
victory over Parliament. Robert Devereux, the third earl of Essex,
led the Parliamentarian army and met Prince Ruppert’s Royalist force midway between
Banbury and Warwick. Around 30,000 soldiers participated, with
the Royalists enjoying a small advantage in numbers over their opponents. In the course of the battle, the Royalists
had forced their way through to the road to London however the Earl of Essex regrouped
and ultimately the King’s plan to seize London failed. This resulted in the Battle of Edgehill being
generally regarded as inconclusive, with both sides suffering similar casualties and no
strategic gain at its conclusion. Cromwell was a Captain under the command of
the earl of Essex during these events, but he did not arrive in time with his detachment
for the Battle of Edgehill. Nevertheless, he commented in a letter that
the commanders Parliament had commissioned, were aged veterans from old European wars,
while the Royalists had the gentlemen’s sons and persons of ‘quality’. This was the beginning of a pattern of criticism
Cromwell often bore towards the parliamentary forces, a view which would eventually result
in him and the prominent parliamentary general, Sir Thomas Fairfax, developing the New Model
Army in the mid-1640s. As a civilian turned military commander Cromwell
was a natural born leader, who inspired men to follow, with a sense of religious duty
fuelling his own determination to defeat the Royalists. In his first small skirmish in Lincolnshire,
he described how he chased down the fleeing enemy and quote ‘did execution’ on them
for several miles. In his next skirmish, Cromwell led a cavalry
charge into the rear of a Royalist force, resulting in their commander being cut off
and surrounded, but rather than taking the defeated commander as a prisoner for ransom,
one of Cromwell’s men cut him down, before dispatching him as he lay wounded on the ground. Rather than regretting this, Cromwell describes
how his man had struck him under the ribs, equating it with the Old Testament idea of
striking people under the fifth rib, which showed that enemies of God deserved no mercy. All of this must be viewed in light of Cromwell’s
perception of the civil wars as a religious struggle and himself as a religious warrior. In February 1643 Cromwell’s military talent
was recognised when he was appointed to the position of colonel in the Eastern Association,
where he recruited a first-class cavalry regiment, clearly demonstrating his desire to ensure
well trained, disciplined and loyal men were fighting for the Parliamentary cause. Regardless of religious beliefs or social
status, Cromwell rewarded his men with regular payment, good treatment and the best weaponry
he could afford, while in return he expected the strictest of discipline. Cromwell fined men for swearing, ordered the
whipping of deserters and the stocks for those caught drunk. Royalist propaganda referred to the Parliamentarian
force as ‘Roundheads’ due to the shaved heads worn by many London apprentices who
supported their cause, yet for Cromwell this propaganda was not tolerated in his regiment,
and anyone using the term would be punished. Cromwell’s disciplined structure and leadership
resulted in devastating benefits on the battlefield, with his cavalry able to charge and quickly
reform during battle, whereas often enemy units were disorganised. For the rest of 1643, Cromwell continued to
serve in the eastern counties of England and the neighbouring area to where he grew up,
but as it was a Parliamentarian stronghold his skirmishes followed a predominantly defensive
strategy. Such was Cromwell’s determination to force
god’s will, that on the 28th of July, he counterattacked the advancing Yorkshire Royalists
by reforming his men at a critical point during the Battle of Gainsborough in Lincolnshire. Fighting alongside Fairfax, they not only
repelled the Royalist attacks in Lincolnshire but also advanced west and began to besiege
and consequently occupy Newark in Nottinghamshire. Still serving as an MP, these early victories
allowed Fairfax and Cromwell to persuade Parliament to invest in a new army that would not just
defend eastern England, but also provide a force that could adopt a more offensive strategy
in the civil war. Under the command of the second earl of Manchester,
Edward Montagu, this new army was formed during the spring of 1644. Around the same time Cromwell was becoming
ever more vocal in his criticism of the aristocratic commanders of the parliamentary forces, using
the House of Commons as his stage, Cromwell accused some of his fellow officers of poor
conduct and questionable competencies as he was frustrated by the prevailing defensive
Parliamentary approach. Some frowned upon him for using his position
as an MP to criticise those seen as competition to his ambitions, but Cromwell ultimately
gained enough support and was appointed Lieutenant-General, second in command to the earl of Manchester. Following success in the east, the earl of
Manchester’s army pushed the offensive and Cromwell joined the marched north into Yorkshire
where they met the Scottish Covenanters who were now broadly allied with parliament against
the crown. This brought Fairfax’s Parliamentary force
and the Scots combined army to 24,500 men. The Royalist commander-in-chief, Prince Ruppert,
attempted to lift the besieged city of York, and his army of 17,500 men successfully lured
the joint Parliamentary forces away from the city. On the evening of 2nd of July 1644, the opposing
sides clashed at the Battle of Marston Moor, in what would be the largest battle in the
civil war. The two forces were deployed on a wild meadow,
with the Royalists outnumbered, they gathered their tiered marching forces together, expecting
it was too late in the day for the enemy to attack following some ineffective artillery
exchanges. But at 7.30pm the Covenanter and Parliamentarian
forces launched a surprise attack after noticing a lack of preparation from their opposition
who had broken many of their ranks for supper. As thunder cracked Cromwell was positioned
on the left wing when the battle erupted, and he pushed back the opposing enemy ranks
leaving the field briefly to have a wound dressed which he had suffered on his neck
from a pistol ball. Prince Ruppert, who gave Cromwell the nickname
Ironside, saw the losses and led his bravest Royalist Cavalry unit to relieve the wavering
flank. Cromwell held firm in hacking with the enemy
sword to sword until he was relieved by a Covenanter regiment who attacked Ruppert’s
flank which would have resulted in the capture of the Prince had he not hid in a nearby field. As the moon rose in the night sky and the
thunderstorm ensued, the Royalists had gained ground on the opposite wing of the battlefield
by holding back a Parliamentary cavalry charge and then smashing into the main body of the
Covenanter infantry. Yet Cromwell was now free, having routed Ruppert’s
force and regrouping his disciplined cavalry led a charge into the rear of the Royalist
cavalry, thereby trapping them with the Covenanter infantry engaged on the opposite side. In the final stages of the battle Cromwell
then regrouped again and charged into the remnants of Royalist infantry who were engaged
in the centre of the battlefield resulting in Parliamentary victory at the cost of 4,000
Royalist casualties, with 1,500 captured in contrast to the 300 casualties the Parliamentarian
accounts claimed they had suffered. In what was a two-hour disorientating battle,
Marston Moor effectively secured Parliamentary control of the entire north of England. For Cromwell it ignited his reputation as
a brilliant military commander and began his rapid ascent to military and political power
in England. Following the battle Cromwell criticised Fairfax
for returning his forces back to the east of England rather than pressing on to tackle
further Royalist forces still present in the south. The rift between the two appeared to heal,
however on 27th October following the Second Battle of Newbury they clashed once more. Henceforth there was a clash between Cromwell
and Fairfax for pre-eminence within the Parliamentary cause, one which Fairfax began as the much
stronger party, but which would eventually result in Cromwell’s ascendancy as the most
powerful figure in England. Meanwhile, the first civil war with Charles
dragged on. Using a wide outflanking movement at Newbury,
the earls of Manchester and Essex split their forces and attempted to trap King Charles
I with the goal of ending the war, yet the battle was a stalemate which resulted in the
Royalists successfully withdrawing to form up with allied forces in Oxfordshire. Cromwell led a successful flanking attack
in the battle but felt Manchester did not show enough urgency in supporting him on the
field and taking the offensive initiative. Furthermore, Cromwell felt Manchester hesitated
too long when he asked for orders to take a party of horse to pursue the fleeing King,
and so when he was finally released by Manchester he was unable to catch him. Cromwell was convinced that Manchester did
not truly seek or believe in victory, but instead waited for a peaceful stalemate and
business as usual with the King. Together with other Parliamentarian supporters,
Cromwell campaigned against what he viewed as lethargic commanders and while he attacked
Manchester in the House of Commons, Manchester attacked Cromwell in the House of Lords. With their relationship at its lowest, there
was even a plan to impeach Cromwell for his provocative behaviour, a common theme throughout
his parliamentary career. In December 1644 Cromwell proposed that every
peer should forfeit either their position of command in the military, or their position
in the Parliamentary Houses due to a possible conflict of interest and monopoly of power,
which became known as the Self-Denying Ordinance. This was passed on 3rd April 1645. As Lords and Earls could not resign their
hereditary titles this effectively removed Manchester and the Earl of Essex from their
military positions and ensured that Cromwell and Fairfax emerged as the clear leaders of
the parliamentary military forces in 1645. Notably, the Self Denying Ordinance did not
forbid re-appointment to military position ‘if Parliament approved’, and so with
his military success Cromwell was soon reappointed as a commander serving also as an MP. Until 1645 it was common for bands of men
to be formed locally for the defence of the surrounding area, which created a reluctance
for both Royalist and Parliamentary armies to make major offensive advances far from
home and so Parliament agreed that a New Model Army of 22,000 foot and cavalry should be
created as part of the Ordinance reforms. Cromwell’s reappointment as Lieutenant-General
of it meant he was second in command of the army under the command of Fairfax. Formed of ranks from unsustainable local militias
such as the Eastern Association, the New Model Army was not restricted by geography or the
religious political views of the now largely decommissioned MPs and Lords once in command. Cromwell was Commander of the Horse and led
the ‘elite’ spear tip of the new force which was well equipped and disciplined beyond
their Royalist enemies. The New Model Army was also largely composed
of zealous Puritans and with its religious faith guiding it, led by exceptional military
commanders in the shape of Cromwell, Fairfax and Cromwell’s son-in-law, Henry Ireton,
it became the most effective fighting force in England, one which would ultimately win
the clash with the Royalists for parliament. In the summer of 1645 the climax of the First
Civil War arrived when Parliament ordered Fairfax to break his siege on the Royalist
capital Oxford and meet the King who had recently taken the city of Leicester. Therefore, on the 14th June 1645, the Battle
of Naseby saw the main Royalist force under the command of King Charles I meet Fairfax
and his New Model Army in the field. The Royalist army was 9,000 strong facing
up to 13,500 Parliamentarians, with both sides unable to see the enemy in the thick morning
fog. Despite the conditions, battle was joined
with central infantry divisions engaging each other following a Royalist offensive. Cromwell was on the right flank, and after
the infantry fought in the centre of the field he routed the delayed charge of his opposing
Royalist cavalry, before looping round with his secondary lines that were held back into
the rear of the engaged Royalist infantry. Trapped Royalists began to surrender as Prince
Ruppert’s Cavalry found themselves unable to relieve them, having charged down routing
Parliamentarians on the opposite flank into an isolated position near their baggage train
which effectively removed them from the ensuing battle. The King was convinced not to lead a desperate
charge at Cromwell to relieve the bloody slaughter of his infantry, and when Ruppert returned
to meet the devastation and the reformed lines of the Parliamentarians, he joined the Royalist
withdrawal. By the end of the clash at Naseby the Royalists
had suffered approximately 1,000 casualties, with 4,500 men captured, compared to just
400 killed or wounded Parliamentarians according to Parliamentary reports. When the Parliamentarians pursued and came
across the Royalist baggage train around 100 women were killed with many more mutilated
on their face with some arguing they were Welsh but mistaken as Catholic Irish or even
prostitutes who were armed with daggers. This is often remembered as one of the more
shameful acts of the entire civil war, but it is unclear if Cromwell was involved in
it. The following month the final Royalist remnants
were defeated at the Battle of Langport after another New Model Army victory, with Cromwell
pursuing the defeated Royalists until they broke, abandoning their arms and dispersing
where possible to safety. Charles I fled north to the Scots at this
point, where he hoped to find aid for his cause, however his plan to negotiate allies
failed and they handed him over to the English Parliament for a sum of money, thereby ending
the First Civil War. In January 1646 Cromwell was rewarded by Parliament
with a grant of lands worth £2,500 annually. In addition his commission in the New Model
Army was renewed for a further six months which allowed him to join Fairfax for the
Parliamentarians third siege of Oxford, where Royalist forces continued to hold out despite
the capture of the king. Cromwell was determined to carry out god’s
will with the capture of the Royalist capital and upon negotiating the fall of the city
into Parliamentarian hands, Cromwell was made Chancellor of the university and characteristically
filled several positions with his allies. Attempting to reward his loyal soldiers Cromwell
made appeals to Parliament to reward their service to God, but with the King’s army
defeated Parliament feared both the power and radical pockets within the army and paused
uncertain in what to do next. They soon decided to disband the army as efficiently
as possible and in March 1647 Cromwell was vocal about how it felt like a betrayal. Appointed as a Parliamentary Commissioner,
Cromwell spent his time attempting to find an agreement between the army and Parliament
but when Parliament hired Scottish soldiers for protection while attempting to start disbanding
the New Model Army, Cromwell left London on 4th June and declared his allegiance to the
army. Negotiations between the captured king and
parliament continued for much of 1647. Cromwell emerged during this period as something
of a moderate, opposing parliamentary calls in September to stop negotiating with the
King. In October he became the chair of the General
Council of the Army, where he offered reassurances that he was not biased toward a particular
form of government, and he was not formulating private dealings with the King. Such was his balancing act, Cromwell was also
vocal in warning against any overly radical reforms or a complete split from the concept
of monarchy, but ultimately Cromwell could not unify the views of Parliament, the army
or the King. At this stage his views remained set on the
idea of limiting severely the power of the crown, but retaining the monarchy in a reduced
fashion. This changed however in late 1647 when Charles
briefly escaped from his house arrest at Hampton Court and tried to negotiate with Scottish
commissioners to raise a new army against parliament. Though the king was soon recaptured and moved
to Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight for safekeeping, his actions convinced Cromwell
that no compromise could now be reached with him and when a vote was held in parliament
on the 3rd of January 1648 concerning further negotiations with the crown, Cromwell changed
his stance and agreed on a vote of ‘no address’ ending discussions with Charles I. In 1648 Cromwell and the New Model Army took
up arms to quell pockets of uprising in the months that followed, in what would be known
as the Second Civil War, brought about by Royalist uprisings following the breakdown
of talks between parliament and the crown. Fairfax ordered the army to South Wales where
Royalists had joined with discontented Parliamentarians unhappy over pay and the orders of disbandment. Campaigning along the southern coast of Wales
picking off or besieging fortified castles and towns, Cromwell finally arrived at Pembroke
in May 1648 where he supervised the siege, but it became clear that the medieval walls
made the Parliamentarian artillery ineffective while also proving their ladders were too
short, resulting in failed attempts of taking the town by storm. Around thirty of Cromwell’s own soldiers
were killed when the Royalists then sallied out and raided Parliamentary siege works yet
heavy siege equipment finally arrived having been delayed by storms at sea. Now under devasting bombardment, and with
a possible threat to water supplies, Cromwell’s final summons for surrender issued on the
10th of July was accepted by the besieged Royalists the next day. By the middle of July there was still the
threat of the King’s son, Charles Prince Of Wales, who was sailing from Holland, where
much of the Royal family and Royalist court was in exile, with the Royalist fleet around
the coast of Essex while pockets of resistance and sieges endured in the south-east. The rapid response on the Parliamentary side
had dowsed many of these uprisings and they began to smoulder away, however the continued
negotiations between King Charles I with the so-called Scottish ‘Engager’ faction began
to bear fruit with the Scots already forming up in northern England. Cromwell marched and would meet the opposing
commander Hamilton in a series of engagements from 14th – 17th August 1648 known as the
Battle of Preston. At this Cromwell was outnumbered with 8,600
troops compared to 18,000 enjoyed by Hamilton. The Parliamentary artillery was left trailing
behind in their haste to march north, but the Scottish forces were stretched back over
50 miles and suffered poor supplies and equipment shortages. Cromwell’s strategy of speed succeeded as
he took the initiative and attacked the Scottish advanced units before the forces in the rear
could properly form up and come to their aid. The following day he once again outmanoeuvred
Hamilton and attacked the rest of the Scottish army. During this the excellent skills and equipment
of the New Model Army were proved once again with the disordered enemy finally surrendering
at Warrington on the 19th of August, with 2,000 dead and 9,000 captured Royalists compared
to a reported 100 Parliamentarian casualties. Days later Fairfax took the last Royalist
Stronghold in the south-east, with the Prince of Wales now sailing back to the safety of
Holland on 31st August. Cromwell’s attitude during the second campaign
towards Charles I had shifted once again, with Cromwell now concluding that the King
would be able to incite schemes of war indefinitely even from the confines of his island prison
on the Isle of Wight if he was not dealt with in a lasting manner. Cromwell often wrote to the Governor of the
Isle of Wight who had been appointed to keep Charles I secure, and his letters echoed mistrust
of the King which was now shared by many of the other senior commanders of the army. Cromwell marched into Scotland restoring order
before coming back and subduing the wretched fleeing enemy with his command over the ongoing
Siege of Pontefract, which ended with the Royalist surrender in November 1648. In the same month, negotiations between the
King by some presbyterian Members of Parliament in Newport formally ended as a failure as
no agreement was met. Furthermore, the revelation that the king
had been offered attractive terms, including the mass restoration of royalist lands and
religious leniency, caused uproar in many circles, notably within the Puritan New Model
Army. With Parliament now seen as weak and uncertain,
Cromwell openly espoused his view that the army should be considered capable and lawful
in protecting the liberty and safety of all good Christians, with negotiations with the
king no longer an option. As Cromwell finished fighting in the north,
and Parliament negotiated in Newport with the King, Cromwell’s son-in-law Henry Ireton
was writing the army ‘Remonstrance’ which for the first time legally argued that even
as reigning monarch the King could go on trial for actions against subjects of the realm. Like many fellow soldiers, Ireton was suspicious
of Royalist support within Parliament and believed there had to be a purge which was
endorsed by Fairfax. Ireton, Fairfax and Cromwell were provoked
into action when Parliament refused to discuss Ireton’s ‘Remonstrance’. On the 2nd of December 1648, the New Model
Army marched and occupied London but surprisingly Parliament remained stubborn and voted to
continue to negotiate with the King and ignore the ‘Remonstrance’. In response, on the 6th of December, Ireton
ordered the physical removal of ‘Royalist’ and corrupt MPs from Parliament replacing
them with more radical counterparts sympathetic to the popular view of the army and uncompassionate
to the King. This was overseen by Colonel Thomas Pride,
a commander of the New Model Army, and as a result has become known as Pride’s Purge. Cromwell came to London the day after the
Purge of Parliament and supported it retrospectively although insisting he did not know about Ireton
and Pride’s plans in advance. The Purge of the Long Parliament to form what
became known as the Rump Parliament paved the way for legal proceedings against Charles
I and Parliament declared itself a ‘supreme power’ with the authority to pass acts and
laws without the consent of the House of Lords or the King. In turn, this then provided a sufficient legal
basis to bring the king to trial on the 20th of January 1649, with Cromwell one of the
135 High Court of Justice commissioners. Refusing to plea on the basis he did not recognise
the legal authority of the court, Charles I was found guilty of treason to his people
and sentenced to death on the 27th of January. Three days later, on the 30th of January 1649,
Charles I was beheaded with a single blow of the axe at Whitehall in London. Amongst his final words the King declared
that he would go from a ‘corruptible crown to an incorruptible crown, where no disturbance
can be’. On his death warrant, one of the 59 commissioners’
signatures was that of Oliver Cromwell. Ultimately Charles I’s great sin was that
he had tried to erect an absolutist form of monarchy in Britain. Absolutism was the political doctrine that
was spreading across Europe in the seventeenth century which held that monarchs were god’s
appointed representatives, destined to rule their kingdoms. As a result, they need have little recourse
to parliament or representative bodies, but could rule through a small clique of officials
who were faithful to them. This brand of authoritarian monarchy had always
been resisted in England, as far back as the early thirteenth century when the barons and
lords had forced concessions from the crown in the shape of the Magna Carta. The struggle of the 1640s, which Cromwell
had come to play such an important role in, was but the latest in these ongoing struggles
between the English crown and the political nation, though what was highly unusual in
the 1640s was that the crown’s main foe was parliament rather than sections of the
aristocracy. It was that which ensured Charles’ defeat. Had he not been defeated perhaps an absolutist
monarchy in the vein of Bourbon France would have ensued, a country where no parliament
was called for 175 years between 1614 and 1789 and where the long-lived King Louis XIV
proudly proclaimed, ‘L’etat c’est moi’, ‘I am the state’. What happened in England in January 1649 was
that the English parliament proclaimed that no monarch was more powerful than the collective
authority of parliament. With the House of Lords disbanded and Parliament
now a ‘one-chamber’ government, a Council of State within the house assumed the role
of the executive body and Cromwell served as first chairman of the Council declaring
the kingdom a republic known as the ‘Commonwealth’, a word which was derived from Renaissance
political writings concerning the ‘common weall’ or ‘common wellness’ of the people
of a political realm. Despite his accession to high office, military
life continued for Cromwell when he moved to suppress mutiny within the army led by
Puritan ‘Levellers’, radical religionists and political ideologues who wanted to see
the creation of an egalitarian society without social rank in a move which foreshadowed the
emergence of Communist thought two centuries later. The Leveller revolt and other tensions countrywide,
highlight the fact that while Charles was dead and the monarchy dissolved, the three
kingdoms were far from pacified and the wars continued into 1649 and the early 1650s. In September 1649 Cromwell sailed to suppress
several uprisings in Ireland. Ireland had also been a theatre of the wars
throughout the 1640s. Here a rebellion had been launched in the
autumn of 1641 as Irish Catholics sought to take advantage of Charles I’s growing difficulties
with Scotland and the English parliament to wrest control of the island from the English
minority and re-establish Catholic ascendancy across the country. They had failed to take Dublin and strike
a mortal blow against the royalist government there, but had secured control of much of
the rest of the island, with the western province Connacht and much of western Ulster in the
north, the midlands of the island and northern Munster in the south being secured for the
Catholic Confederate government which made its new capital at the town of Kilkenny in
the centre of the island. Owing to this extension of the conflict into
Ireland, British and Irish historians now tend to refer to the conflicts which raged
across Britain and Ireland between 1637 and the early 1650s as the Wars of the Three Kingdoms
rather than the somewhat misleading old term, the English Civil Wars. With parliament’s final victory over the
king in England in January 1649, Cromwell now became determined to end the Irish war
once and for all, which he viewed as a religious conflict fomented by dangerous Papists in
Ireland, ones who had called on Papal and Catholic aid from abroad throughout the 1640s. Cromwell and his son-in-law, Henry Ireton,
who intended to travel on campaign to Ireland with him, spent the spring and summer of 1649
preparing a large invasion force to retake Ireland. This done, they set off across the Irish Sea
and landed with a fleet and tens of thousands of soldiers of the New Model Army in the east
of the island in mid-August. The initial goal was to secure the entirety
of the east coast of Ireland where many towns that had been in royalist hands had renounced
their allegiance to the government in England when parliament executed Charles I. Accordingly,
Cromwell had to secure a number of walled towns along the eastern seaboard which were
now in revolt too against the parliamentary government and which lay dangerously close
to Dublin, where parliament’s writ still ran. Thus, with a force of some 12,000 men, Cromwell
headed north to the town of Drogheda, not far from Dublin, and lay siege to it in early
September 1649. It should be noted that when the siege commenced
Cromwell followed the accepted rules of warfare at the town and offered to spare the lives
of the soldiers defending Drogheda if they surrendered. They refused and a siege commenced. Faced with overwhelming odds, the garrison
could not withstand the onslaught for long. Thus, when Cromwell ordered a multi-pronged
attack in the evening of the 11th of September the walls were quickly compromised and the
New Model Army began pouring into Drogheda. What followed was one of the most infamous
atrocities in Irish history and a significant one in seventeenth-century European history. Over the next 24 hours approximately 3,500
people were massacred in Drogheda, of which about 2,800 were soldiers, but between 700
and 800 of which were civilians. Nor was this the only such atrocity. A month later when Cromwell captured the town
of Wexford in the south-east of Ireland thousands of people were again put to the sword, many
of them civilians once again. The massacres at Drogheda and Wexford have
strongly coloured views of Cromwell since the mid-seventeenth century. There is no doubt that these were bloody atrocities,
ones which contravened the rules of warfare in early modern times in so far as hundreds
of civilians were murdered in the aftermath of the fall of the towns. But Cromwell’s role in this needs to be
viewed in context. While he did issue an order that no quarter
was to be given to the soldiers who garrisoned the two towns and who constituted approximately
75% to 80% of those who were killed, this was within the rules of warfare at the time
as in both instances the garrisons had declined the New Model Army’s offer of surrender
before the towns fell. Similar massacres occurred across Europe during
the long and bitter Thirty Years War which raged between 1618 and 1648. The civilian atrocities were another matter
and while there is little evidence to suggest Cromwell ordered them to be murdered, he made
little effort to prevent it and failed to condemn it afterwards. What largely occurred was that a Protestant
army, fuelled by anti-Catholic propaganda through the London press during the 1640s
and wildly exaggerated accounts of Irish Catholic murders of English Protestants in Ireland,
decided to exact merciless revenge on the people of Drogheda and Wexford in the autumn
of 1649. Cromwell, who was himself an anti-Catholic
ideologue, does not appear to have pre-planned the atrocities or ordered them, but as the
commander of the Irish campaign he is certainly guilty of having failed to prevent the civilian
deaths, particularly so in Wexford when the example of Drogheda should have led to tighter
control having been kept over the troops in the aftermath of the town being breached. Thereafter the conduct of the war in Ireland
changed. When Cromwell captured the Irish Confederate
capital at Kilkenny in March 1650 no such atrocities were perpetrated and tighter control
was kept over the New Model Army when the town fell. Thereafter Cromwell left Ireland to deal with
affairs in Scotland, leaving Ireton to complete the conquest with a reduced military force,
which took until 1653 to finalise. As Cromwell was moving into the Irish midlands
to secure Kilkenny, Charles the former Prince of Wales, eldest son of Charles I and heir
to the vacant throne, was finalising plans of returning to England to claim the crown
as Charles II. Like his late father he looked north to the
Scots for support who had already declared him to be King Charles II, being appalled
that the English parliament had elected to kill his father, no matter what their religious
differences were. Hence, in May having returned from the Irish
campaign, Cromwell led an army into Scotland, fearing an invasion from the continent would
acquire support from the north. With Fairfax declining the command, Cromwell
was now appointed Captain General at the top of the military authority. The Scottish initially withdrew while stripping
the land of resources, but the two forces finally met at the Battle of Dunbar on the
3rd of September 1650 with Cromwell’s army of 11,000 just marginally outnumbered, yet
weakened by undernourishment and sickness. At 4am a night assault was initiated by the
Parliamentarian force which pushed back the Scottish left flank and with dawn breaking
this enabled Cromwell to order an outflanking manoeuvre which saw many Scots routed and
the left and centre ranks move into a fighting retreat. Cromwell continued what was a difficult campaign
deeper into Scotland, and despite personal illness over the winter of 1651 he steadily
captured key strategic cities and towns while the Scottish army commander David Leslie regrouped
in Stirling. When Charles II arrived in Scotland, he was
not in favour of the war being fought on Scottish soil, preferring instead to take London and
muster support from Royalists in England along the way. Although this was not Leslie’s preference
it was the strategy that the regrouped Scottish commander adopted, and they began to race
south calculating Cromwell’s force was already tied down by engagements in Scotland. Arriving at Penrith on the 8th August 1651,
Charles II and Leslie had made a remarkable head start on Cromwell for the crucial race
towards London. But Cromwell and the Council of State back
in Parliament had already foreseen the Scottish strategy, mustering the Trained Bands of London
alongside the militias from several English counties already marching to meet the Scots
at Warrington. When the two armies met, the English refused
to be drawn into a fight and fell back slowly on the road to London just in front of the
invading Scots. Cromwell meanwhile left some regiments to
finish the campaign in Scotland while he raced south in pursuit while also sending an advanced
group of horse to harass the Scottish rear-guard. With the route blocked and danger of being
trapped between the Parliamentary armies rising, the would-be King Charles II abandoned the
march to London and instead ordered the Scots to Worcester in hope that they would be reinforced
in what had traditionally been a Royalist area during his father’s campaigns. Arriving at the city on the 22nd of August
the support was not forthcoming as local support saw the Scottish army as a foreign invading
force as opposed to a Royalist army, while on the 25th of August Cromwell had destroyed
further Lancashire Royalist reinforcements coming from further afield in what was named
the Battle of Wigan Lane. Charles II and the Scots were surrounded,
isolated and possessing a force of 16,000 men against a Parliamentary force of 28,000. When Cromwell arrived and took command in
the Battle of Worcester on the 3rd of September 1651 he organised his forces in a crescent
shape that stretched for 4 miles before leading a charge over the pontoon bridges he had constructed
before battle. Despite attempts to break the Parliamentarian
flank from a Royalist sortie, Cromwell double backed spotting the threat and pushed them
back into the city with 3,000 Royalist casualties recorded and 10,000 captured. Many of the captured were subsequently deported
to work overseas in the English colonies as indentured servants, effectively a form of
slavery. A low figure of 700 Parliamentary casualties
was recorded in a clear victory ending the Third Civil War, although for some Republicans
it was perhaps blemished with the escape of Charles II who returned overseas to wait for
a future opportunity to reclaim his throne. In 1652 the campaigns in Ireland and Scotland
were now both over and Cromwell declared both countries part of the Commonwealth to be governed
in union with the English Parliament. As an amnesty was declared the army became
discontent, with a recurring view of inherent corruption in many Members of Parliament. As seen in the 1649 Purge of Parliament, Cromwell
adopted a neutral position initially but eventually backed his military comrades and on the 20th
April 1653 he ordered musketeers to help with the expulsion of those members accused of
corruption with the view to replace them with a small group of Puritans who would be accountable
to God. The Little Parliament, Assembly Of Saints
or Barebones Parliament, as the Rump Parliament became known after this further stripping
out of members, was viewed as the establishment of a republican government, but six months
after this was created, it was self-dissolved due to in-fighting and fears of destabilising
radical conflicts. Perhaps as a result of his experiences of
war, or perhaps due to the fear of more unrest following the demise of the monarchy, Cromwell
in his later years felt a largely moderate approach to governance stood the best chance
of rebuilding a divided country and so the Assembly failed, as had the lethargic and
corrupt Parliament it had replaced. On the 16th December 1653 Cromwell was invited
to become Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland. He accepted, though with some reluctance. Cromwell had resisted calls before but now
felt he had exhausted all other options and, as Parliament had appointed him the highest
rank of command in the Army, the decision was constituted under the Instrument of Government
ordinance. Cromwell would be supported and advised by
a Council of State and a Parliament which would be called a minimum of once every three
years. Cromwell and his Council introduced many ordinances
and reforms including the establishment of a Puritan Church, religious toleration, including
the readmittance of Jews into the country four centuries after the Jewish community
had been expelled from England during the High Middle Ages. There were also several moves to reform the
law with newly appointed judges. Additionally, Cromwell made positive reforms
to education, setting minimum standards in grammar schools and free schools across the
country, which were becoming more open to a growing middle class in England. Cromwell also continued to hold the position
of Chancellor of Oxford University, while in 1657 he issued letters patent for the creation
of the country’s third university at Durham in the north of the country. The man who became Lord Protector of Britain’s
short-lived experiment in republicanism in 1653 was something of an enigmatic figure. In private he was a devoted husband and father. He and Elizabeth had nine children and though
only one, a boy named James born in 1632, died in infancy, a much lower than average
percentage by early modern standards, they were nevertheless struck by grief in the late
1630s and early 1640s when their two eldest sons, Robert and Oliver, died in relatively
quick succession from failing health and disease. Oliver junior is believed to have died from
smallpox. He had been old enough to be enlisted in the
parliamentary army prior to this death. These losses, combined with his Puritan religious
views, partly explain Cromwell’s dour outlook, though this was also partly owing to a streak
of depression which he struggled with intermittently throughout his adult life. While he was respectful on a personal level
and a devoted father, in his political and military life he could be temperamental, known
for an abrupt nature and being uncommonly forceful in wanting his designs implemented. On occasion he treated parliament with disdain
when his wishes were not speedily implemented and prorogued the Barebones parliament when
it seemed overly quarrelsome about his ideas. In all of this, Cromwell could often resemble
the man whose death warrant he had signed in 1649, but in the end there is no doubt
that Cromwell was a pragmatic and effective administrator. It was not all easy for Cromwell as Lord Protector. One of the most pressing issues was that the
anarchic political and religious environment of the 1640s had facilitated the rise of all
manner of new religious sects and branches. Some of these were new scions of Protestantism,
with Puritanical groups emerging who had doctrinal and theological differences with the Puritans. These were often difficult to manage, but
they could be worked around, while victory in the civil wars and over the rebellion in
Ireland had crushed the Catholic threat throughout Britain and Ireland for some time to come. But there were new issues within the religious
landscape which Cromwell had to navigate, as radical new groups had emerged. These included groups that are well-known
today, such as the Quakers, who had emerged as part of the Anabaptist movement in the
early 1650s. Led by George Fox, these were very unconventional
Christians who did not celebrate any form of traditional mass, but rather came together
to simply reflect communally in religious spaces. Cromwell and the Puritans viewed them askance,
but left them undisturbed to the extent that Quakerism flourished in the decades that followed,
with one proponent of the movement, William Penn, eventually establishing Pennsylvania
in North America and the city of Philadelphia as a haven for religious dissenters from all
over Europe. Other groups which Cromwell had to confront
were far more radical, notably the Fifth Monarchists who picked up on elements of millenarian thought
from the Book of Daniel to suggest that the Last Days were at hand, while other radical
Adventist and Baptist groups were subject to crackdowns by Cromwell’s government over
time. In Ireland, of course, Cromwell’s administration
had to deal with the perennial problem of the Roman Catholic majority. After Cromwell had left the island following
his brief, but bloody campaign in late 1649, his son-in-law, Henry Ireton, had mopped up
the remnants of resistance in the west of the island in the early 1650s. Yet a problem remained. Most of the population of the island were
Catholics, either the ethnically Irish half or the very large minority of Old Englishmen
and women, descendants of the twelfth and thirteenth century Anglo-Norman colonists
who had refused to adopt Protestantism in the sixteenth century following the English
Reformation. Both of these groups had rebelled in the 1640s
and now the Cromwellian regime was determined to confiscate large amounts of their land
and plant them with New English colonists. The idea here was to secure the island by
introducing more loyal Protestants, but there were also large debts to be repaid. Back in the early 1640s when the civil wars
had been breaking out the English parliament had acquired huge sums of money from London’s
merchant community, ostensibly to raise an army to send to Ireland. In return, they had promised these merchants
extensive land in Ireland once the war was won there. In reality the army that was raised was never
employed in Ireland and had instead been diverted to fight at the Battle of Edgehill in the
autumn of 1642, but regardless those who had loaned money to the government back in 1642
now came looking for payment in Irish land. This situation was compounded by Cromwell’s
need to pay off the soldiers and army commanders of the New Model Army who by the early 1650s
were owed vast sums of money for years of service. Cromwell and his closest allies in government
determined that the best way to pay them was to give them extensive estates in Ireland
in lieu of money. Owing to these twin developments, one of which
Cromwell was responsible for and one of which had been determined way back in the early
1640s long before Cromwell ever became a significant figure in such deliberations, landholding
was transformed in Ireland. The Act of Settlement which was passed in
1652 paved the way for millions of statute acres of land there to be taken from the Catholic
Irish and Old English and given to Protestant army officers and adventurers who had loaned
parliament money back in 1642. The extent of this was shocking. The Irish and Old English, despite decades
of plantations in Munster and Ulster stretching back to the 1550s, had still controlled over
60% of the land in Ireland in 1640. As a result of the Cromwellian plantation
of the mid-1650s, this figure was reduced to just over 20%. Consequently, nearly 40% of all the land in
Ireland was transferred into the hands of supporters of the Cromwellian regime. Moreover, the Irish and Old English who were
allowed to retain some land were generally given new estates in the western province
of Ireland, Connacht. Here they were corralled into five counties
which were viewed as comprising the worst agricultural land in the country. Although he cannot be held entirely responsible
for it and the Cromwellian plantations were a continuation of a longstanding policy in
Ireland, the redistribution of land which occurred in Ireland under Cromwell’s Protectorate
was the most consequential land transfer in early modern Irish history. Back in England, Cromwell called his first
Parliament in September 1655 and justified the necessity and stability which he and his
Council of State had brought with the raft of ordinances and rewards already delivered,
but not all policies were popular, and Cromwell was frustrated with the strict republican
Parliamentarians focusing their debate on questions around the legitimacy of the current
administration as opposed to approving his legislative proposals. In addition, Cromwell did not trust the traditional
Lord-Lieutenants gentry to seek out and subdue the ever-present Royalist threat which had
started to reappear in pockets around the kingdom. Frustrated by the sluggish Parliamentary progress
and driven also by security concerns, Cromwell dismissed his first Parliament and moved to
a more radical structure when in 1655 England was divided into 12 regions of which Cromwell
appointed Major-Generals who were military governors that reported back to the Lord Protectorate. What became known as the ‘Major-General
Rule’ was, in essence, Cromwell focusing on keeping lingering Royalist elements in
check and collecting heavy taxes to pay for the post-war reconstruction. Major-Generals were picked by Cromwell and
they were all strict vocal Puritans who attempted to ban ceremonial traditions with any hint
of Papal influence. Under Cromwell’s directive the Major-General’s
spread the Puritan beliefs vigorously using their armed horse militia in support and so
this period of military dictatorship proved unpopular. When Cromwell called his second Parliament
in September 1656, challenges around his religious reforms ensued in addition to the rejection
of economic reforms such as a tax proposal to fund the war with Spain. Cromwell’s foreign policy was dominated
by two wars. The first of these was with the Dutch Republic. In the seventeenth century England and the
Dutch Republic were two of Europe’s smaller states, dwarfed by France and Spain, but they
were much more economically advanced. The first stirrings of modern capitalism had
emerged in London and Amsterdam from the late sixteenth century onwards, with stock markets
and corporations being founded in both cities, and by the mid-seventeenth century the two
countries played an outsized role in European and Atlantic trade. This made them rivals of each other as the
mercantilist economic ideology of the early modern era held that world trade was limited
and finite and so nation states had to fight each other in order to obtain a larger slice
of the finite pie. Hence, although England and the Dutch were
co-religionists and had been allied for decades against Catholic Spain during the Dutch war
of independence, in 1652 war erupted between Cromwellian England and the republican government
in Amsterdam following the passage of the Navigation Act by the Barebones Parliament,
which sought to block Dutch merchants from carrying out trade in English ports. Two years of conflict, mostly at sea as both
sides sought to strike at each other’s shipping, followed, but ultimately the First Anglo-Dutch
War ended in stalemate in 1654. Yet, this was just the first of three wars
which would be fought between the two nations between the 1650s and the 1670s, largely in
response to the Navigation Acts which Cromwell pioneered. Britain would eventually emerge as the larger
mercantile and naval power and in control of the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam in North
America, which was renamed New York. The other war which England engaged in during
Cromwell’s time at the head of its government was with Spain. Spain was a longstanding enemy of England’s
for over a century. This antipathy went all the way back to the
reign of Charles I’s great-great-great-uncle, King Henry VIII, and his spurning of his first
wife, Catherine of Aragon, who was the King of Spain, Charles V’s aunt. This had triggered growing Anglo-Spanish tensions
which were compounded in the decades that followed as England became one of Europe’s
first Protestant states, a change in religion which ultra-Catholic Spain under King Philip
II had tried to reverse in the second half of the sixteenth century. War broke out in 1585, a 19 year long conflict
which would see both countries send great armadas against each other’s nations. Although the First Anglo-Spanish War had ended
in 1604, the two countries remained rivals, in large part owing to England’s growing
colonial interests in North America and the Caribbean. Thus, Cromwell’s foreign policy aimed to
isolate Spain by allying England with France, the great continental rival of the Spanish
Habsburgs. France had been at war with Spain since the
late 1620s following the War of the Mantuan Succession and as such when Cromwell allied
with the government of King Louis XIV in Paris in 1654 it effectively pulled England and
Ireland into the conflict against Spain. The fighting between England and Spain in
the 1650s centred on Cromwell’s ‘Western Design’, his plans to expand the English
presence in the Caribbean where the potential for large profits from sugar cultivation had
become very clear in the first half of the seventeenth century. Thus, in 1655 the Lord Protector dispatched
a large armada to the West Indies. This consisted of a fleet of 30 ships and
approximately 8,000 men, the naval command being given to William Penn, father of the
famous Quaker, and the land forces under Robert Venables. Cromwell left the pair with clear instructions
to try to seize the island of Hispaniola, which today is split between Haiti and the
Dominican Republic, but which in early modern times was a large Spanish colony and one of
the foremost centres of settlement in the Caribbean. It proved too strongly defended in April 1655
when the English fleet arrived to capture it, but the ‘Western Design’ fleet instead
headed for Jamaica and captured that. This was ultimately the foremost military
result of the entire Anglo-Spanish War. Although fighting at sea and in the Spanish
Netherlands around modern-day Belgium continued intermittently until 1659 when England’s
ally France finally made peace with Spain, little else was achieved by either England
or Spain in their conflict with each other. However, the acquisition of Jamaica was relatively
significant. This left England with control of Jamaica,
Barbados, Nevis, St Kitts and Montserrat in the West Indies. Many of these were small islands, but they
were very valuable in terms of sugar cultivation and ownership of them left England well positioned
to continue to grow its overseas colonial trade into the second half of the seventeenth
century and beyond. In the spring of 1657 one of the most significant
episodes of Cromwell’s life occurred. That March, the English parliament presented
Cromwell with a document known as ‘The Humble Petition and Advice of the Knights, Citizens
and Burgesses Now Assembled in Parliament’ at an event in the Banqueting Hall at Whitehall. The document, which had been carefully prepared,
requested that Cromwell accept the title of King of England, Scotland and Ireland, effectively
restoring the monarchy after a hiatus of just eight years. This, it should be stressed, was not an offer
to create an absolutist monarchy of the kind which Charles I had sought to establish and
which parliament had so stringently opposed him over, but rather aimed to re-establish
a symbolic monarchy with parliament exercising a great degree of control over the running
of the government, taxation and other matters. As such, the proposal was that Cromwell, as
King Oliver I, would reign over a constitutional monarchy. Cromwell was conflicted over this offer and
asked to delay making a decision immediately. There followed weeks of debate within government
throughout April 1657 and reflection by Cromwell himself, but eventually, on the 8th of May
he gave parliament his answer. He would not accept their offer, arguing that
the title of Lord Protector was enough to signify the solemn authority which had been
vested in him. Cromwell’s decision was a noble act, but
the very fact that so many in parliament had been in favour of the move highlights exactly
how fractured the political landscape was even by 1657 and how many people believed
that only a restored monarchy could fully restore order in Britain. Despite his refusal of the kingly title, Cromwell
did concede to a lot of the other proposals made in the ‘Humble Petition’, including
the scrapping of the unpopular Major-General structure and restoring the House of Lords. On the 25th of May Cromwell ratified the ‘Humble
Petition’, having introduced revisions to continue as Lord Protector and naming his
son as his successor. He was awarded a ceremonial state re-installation
as Lord Protectorate the following month where he rather symbolically sat on King Edward’s
Chair. Republicans were unhappy with the new constitution
and preferred a single house structure with total authority on all state matters, while
radical reformers conflicted with the concessions over religion or absence of Leveller demands. When his third Parliament was called in January
1658 there was a barrage of opposition to Cromwell and the sessions saw much resentment
even from those who had previously been allies. With ongoing health issues, which had started
in the second half of the 1640s and deteriorated further in the early 1650s following years
of military campaigning, Cromwell deteriorated in the summer of 1658 with several spells
of illness perhaps triggered by the stress of politics. Believed to be caused by a kidney infection,
and a possible recurrence of malaria or dysentery, his condition further worsened around the
death of his daughter Elizabeth in August, which followed the death of her son Oliver
in June. Ultimately, as he neared his sixtieth year
these all proved too much. Cromwell died in Whitehall on the 2nd of September
1658. He received a State Funeral on the 23rd of
November at Westminster, with a coffin plaque that read; ‘Here is buried Oliver Protector
of the Republic of England, Scotland and Ireland’. It was perhaps fitting that the day of his
death shared the anniversary of two of his famous victories at Dunbar and Worcester. The political settlement which Cromwell and
many of his associates had strived so hard for during the 1640s did not long survive
him. Following his death his son Richard succeeded
him as Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland. But Richard did not possess the abilities
his father had and faced with a wide array of political, social, economic and religious
problems across the three kingdoms, he was unable to reconcile the various interest groups. His problems were made worse still when a
new parliament assembled early in 1659, one which was hugely influenced by religious dissenters
and crypto-Royalists. There were also stirrings of unrest within
the New Model Army. Richard could not attend to all of these issues
at once and faced with an impossible situation, one which had really only been held together
in the mid-1650s by Oliver’s reputation, he stepped down as Lord Protector in May 1659,
well shy of a year in the job. The political turmoil continued thereafter
and it was in this environment that supporters of the old Stewart monarchy began plotting
to bring about an end to England’s experiment in republicanism and restore the monarchy. By the autumn of 1659 they were in talks with
Prince Charles, who was in exile in the Hague in the Dutch Republic. Agreements were soon reached whereby if Charles
returned to England and became king he would not seek vengeance on those who had sought
the execution of his father and would also agree to govern England with the consent of
parliament. With this agreed, Charles returned to England
in the early summer of 1660 and was duly crowned as King Charles II. A constitutional monarchy would now be established,
one which over time would result in parliament becoming the dominant political body in England,
not the crown. As such, while the monarchy was quickly restored
following Cromwell’s death, the revolution of the 1640s which had brought about the Commonwealth
was not in vain and paved the way for constitutional democracy in Britain and Ireland. Oliver Cromwell is one of the most divisive
characters in early modern history. There is no doubting his brilliance. He was a formidable general, a shrewd politician
and an accomplished ruler, one who managed to briefly bring order to the anarchy which
had descended on Britain and Ireland in the course of the 1640s. What is more striking still is that he came
from relatively humble beginnings in order to do so. An average person, if stopped on the streets
of London in the 1630s, would scarcely have known who Oliver Cromwell was. Furthermore, for so much of the English civil
wars of the 1640s he was overshadowed by figures like parliamentary leader John Pym, the earls
of Manchester and Essex who led he parliamentary forces in the first half of the 1640s, the
head of the New Model Army, Thomas Fairfax, and even his own son-in-law, Henry Ireton. It was only at the very end of parliament’s
clash with Charles I that Cromwell took centre stage. When he did he proved himself more than capable
of uniting the disparate elements that had resisted crown absolutism into a working political
arrangement. To his credit, he also resisted the offer
to become King of England himself and instead stayed true to the goals of the Commonwealth. But there is the other side to Cromwell, a
ruthless general who used any and all means at his disposal to pacify the three kingdoms. Sometimes those means could be very harsh
indeed. In Ireland Cromwell is one of the most reviled
figures in the island’s history, a development owing both to the atrocities at Drogheda and
Wexford in late 1649, but also the subsequent land confiscations and plantations which occurred
in Ireland during the 1650s. This point shouldn’t be over extended. Exactly what happened at Drogheda and Wexford
remains open to debate, while the plantations which occurred in Ireland under the Commonwealth
were but the latest in a long series of plantations and dispossession of the Irish which had begun
a half a century before Cromwell was even born. These caveats aside, Cromwell was the general
in charge of the army in Ireland in 1649 and as Lord Protector of Ireland he could have
blocked the plantations of the 1650s. Yet his actions must be viewed in the context
of the mid-seventeenth century in Europe, an immensely troubled and bloody period in
early modern history. Ultimately, when viewed in this context Cromwell
shouldn’t be perceived as either the nationalist hero that many English people view him as
or the bogeyman of Irish history. He lay somewhere in between: a man trying
to bring order to a very disturbed political situation across Britain and Ireland who ultimately
had to use harsh measures in order to do so. What do you think of Oliver Cromwell? Did he save England from an absolutist monarchy
and should he be commended for refusing the title of King when given the chance or was
he merely a religious bigot and authoritarian ruler who brought the country he professed
to love, dangerously near to becoming a dictatorship through revolution which would later be repeated
across Europe? Please let us know in the comment section
and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.
