Oliver Cromwell

In the Dutch war, which broke out in 1652, neither Cromwell nor his brother officers had much part. Ever since the beginning of the Commonwealth a maritime war with France had virtually existed under the pretext of reprisals for injury done by French ships to English trade. The seizure of French goods in Dutch vessels had irritated the Netherlanders, and the Navigation Act passed in 1651 had taken away much of the trade done by them in English ports. In May, 1652, Tromp, the great Dutch admiral, had been sent out with orders to resist the right of search, and on approaching an English fleet commanded by Blake, he had neglected to lower his flag, as required by English commanders in satisfaction of their claim to enforce the Sovereignty over the British Seas, a claim which the Commonwealth had received from the Monarchy. An action resulting brought on war between the two peoples. In this war, neither Cromwell nor the army sympathised. Holding as they did that the force of England, if used at all, should be used for the advantage of Protestantism, they disliked a war waged against a Protestant nation. On the other hand they had no wish to see the English navy playing a craven part; and believing that Tromp had kept his flag flying as a studied insult, they offered no direct opposition to the war. Yet, as long as it was in progress, whenever any overture likely to lead to peace was made, it was sure to have the support of Cromwell and the officers.

If the Commonwealth leaders were immersed in preparations for war, the officers of the army had not forgotten their demand for reforms in Church and State, and in contemplating the slackness of Parliament with regard to these reforms, their minds were again set on a dissolution of Parliament at a time far earlier than that which had been fixed by the House itself. Towards the end of July the Army Council – now composed of officers alone – had considered a petition to be addressed to Parliament, and had asked 'that a new representative be forthwith elected'. When the petition was finally submitted to Parliament, this clause had given place to another merely requesting Parliament to consider of some qualifications which would secure 'the election only of such as are pious and faithful in the interests of the Commonwealth to sit and serve as members in the said Parliament,' in this way shifting from a demand for a dissolution to be followed by a general election, to a demand for partial elections to fill up existing vacancies. Though no direct evidence exists, there are strong reasons for believing that this substitution was made in consequence of Cromwell's intervention. Even then he did not append his signature to the petition.

It was as a mediator – not as a partisan – that Cromwell bore himself at the time when the army – after an interval of more than two years and a half – once more began to put pressure on Parliament. On the one hand Parliament was not only discredited by its inability to undertake the reforms demanded, but still more by the widely spread belief that many of its members had made full use of their opportunities to feather their own nests. On the other hand, this discredited House, though, mutilated as it was, it had scarcely a semblance of constitutional right, was yet the only body remaining in existence to which even a semblance appertained. Cromwell might not be an authority on constitutional law, but he had an instinctive apprehension for the truth on which all constitutional law is based – that the first thing necessary in the institutions of any country is not that they shall be theoretically defensible, but that they should meet with general acceptance. Those who like ourselves can look back on that stirring time from the safe vantage ground which we occupy, can see that, so far as constitutional questions were concerned, the work of the men of the seventeenth century was to substitute Parliament for the Crown as the basis of authority, and we have, accordingly, considerable difficulty in placing ourselves in the position of those to whom only part of the drama had been unrolled. In 1652, at least, it was impossible to appeal to the truncated Parliament as in any way representing the nation. Yet how was it possible to base authority on any new Parliament which should even approximate to such a representation? Except with extreme theorists there was no desire to evoke such a spectre. Already in 1650 Vane, speaking on behalf of the Parliamentary majority, had advocated a scheme of partial elections which left the members in possession of their seats, and the army leaders now proposed to substitute for this a general election modified by qualifications which would exclude all men of Royalist proclivities. The question at this time dividing Parliament and Army was therefore merely the choice of the best means of controlling the national verdict. The plan on either side might be one that men might reasonably adopt according to different points of view. Neither was likely to excite enthusiasm or to be generally accepted as a new basis of authority round which the nation could be expected to rally. There is no reason to suppose that Cromwell had anything better to propose, and it is certain that the theory, accepted at the present day, that it is better to allow a nation to learn by experience of misfortune than to force it, even to its own benefit, in a given direction, had no supporters in 1652, and least of all was it likely to find an advocate in Cromwell.

Cromwell had the strongest faith in the virtue of conferences at which such problems could be threshed out by men of good-will separated only by intellectual differences. It had been by an appeal to a committee that he had surmounted the difficulties which had faced him when the Levellers, in 1647, called prematurely for the trial of the King. He now, in October, 1652, secured the meeting of a conference between the leading members of Parliament and the principal officers. "I believe," he afterwards declared, "we had at least ten or twelve meetings, most humbly begging and beseeching of them that by their own means they would bring forth those good things which had been promised and expected; that so it might appear they did not do them by any suggestion from the army, but from their own ingenuity, so tender were we to preserve them in the reputation of the people." Vane and Bradshaw, and even, politically speaking, Henry Marten, the champions of the existing Parliament, were men of the highest character, and were justly apprehensive of giving way either to a military dictatorship, or to a Royalist reaction. Cromwell, on the other hand, had his eye increasingly fixed on the immediate evils of the present system. "How hard and difficult a matter was it," he complained at a somewhat later date, "to get anything carried without making parties, without things unworthy of a Parliament." In November he opened his mind to Whitelocke. "As for members of Parliament," he said, "the army begins to have a strange distaste against them, and I wish there were not too much cause for it; and really their pride and ambition, and their self-seeking, engrossing all places of honour and profit to themselves and their friends, and their daily breaking forth into new and violent parties and factions; their delay of business and design to perpetuate themselves and to continue the power in their own hands; their meddling in private matters between party and party contrary to the institution of Parliament, their injustice and partiality in those matters, and the scandalous lives of some of the chief of them; these things, my lord, do give much ground for people to open their mouths against them and to dislike them; nor can they be kept within the bounds of justice and law or reason, they themselves being the supreme power of the nation, liable to no account of any, nor to be controlled or regulated by any other power; there being none superior or co-ordinate with them." Cromwell was evidently harking back to his proposal for mixing something of monarchy with the existing institutions. "Unless," he continued, "there be some authority and power so full and so high as to restrain and keep things in better order, and that may be a check to these exorbitances, it will be impossible in human reason to prevent our ruin." To Whitelocke's constitutional objections he replied sharply: "What if a man should take upon him to be a King?" Whitelocke replied that it would be better to recall Charles II. Cromwell's utterance was plainly unpremeditated, and may be taken as a sign that the idea of his own elevation was, even at this early date, present in his mind, at least as a possibility, though it was far from having as yet crystallised itself into a settled design.

It was no restoration of kingship, but the speedy choice of a new Parliament that was in the thoughts of Cromwell's subordinates. In January, 1653, a circular was sent by them to the regiments, asking the soldiers, as well as the officers, to approve of a petition for 'successive Parliaments consisting of men faithful to the interests of the Commonwealth, men of truth, fearing God and hating covetousness,' as well as for law reform and liberty of conscience. For some time it seemed as if Parliament would consent to hasten its own dissolution. In March, however, though a bill for new elections was considered, the pace slackened, and the hopes of the army again fell. In the army, indeed, there was far from being complete unanimity. A party headed by Lambert would have been content with a new Parliament from which members hostile to the Commonwealth were excluded, whilst the perfervid Harrison advocated the principles of the Fifth Monarchy, and asked that the government should be entrusted to moral and religious men, without recourse to popular election. Both Lambert and Harrison concurred in urging Cromwell to proceed to a forcible dissolution. Cromwell hesitated long. "I am pushed on," he complained, "by two parties to do that, the consideration of the issue whereof makes my hair stand on end."

If only Parliament could have been induced to clear the way for its successor on the terms proposed by the army, Cromwell would have been the first to rejoice. In the early part of April he was still prepared to stand by Parliament if it would proceed in earnest with the Bill for the new elections. Yet on the 6th, one of the days appointed for its consideration, the Bill was quietly passed over. By degrees it came out that the Bill, when completed, would be one authorising Vane's pet scheme of partial elections, the old members not only retaining their seats but forming an election committee with power to exclude any member whose presence was distasteful to them. There are even reasons to believe that it was intended that this arrangement should be a permanent one, and that each successive Parliament should have the right of shedding such members as were not to its taste. Moreover, as soon as the Bill was passed, Parliament was to adjourn till November, that it might be out of its power to repeal or amend the act under military pressure.

Such an arrangement must have irritated Cromwell to the uttermost. On April 15, having been absent from Parliament for a month, he returned to his place to plead against it. "It is high time," was the answer vouchsafed by one of the leading personages to his pleading for a new Parliament, "to choose a new general." Cromwell, in reply, offered his resignation, but as no officer could be found to take his place, the demand for it was soon dropped. Still anxious for a compromise, he made a fresh proposal. Why should not the difficulty be got over by a temporary suspension of the Parliamentary system, and a body of right-thinking men appointed to take into consideration the necessities of the time, and to prepare the way for its re-establishment. This proposal was taken into consideration at a meeting of officers and Parliamentarians on the 19th, but, as might have been expected, it provoked opposition and, after a sitting prolonged far into the night, the conference broke up on an undertaking given, as it would seem, by Vane, that the members of the House who were present would do their best to hinder the progress of the Bill on the following morning.

When the morning arrived, the House, taking the bit between its teeth, threw aside the engagements of its leaders and insisted on proceeding with the Bill. To the pecuniary interests of the Parliamentary rank and file it was far more important to escape the necessity of facing their constituents than it was to such men as Vane or Bradshaw, who would almost certainly be re-elected in any case. Yet it has never been alleged that either Vane or Bradshaw took steps to persuade the excited House to act in conformity with the promise given the evening before. Harrison at once despatched a message to Cromwell to warn him of the danger, and Cromwell evidently regarded the action of the members as a clear breach of faith on the part of Vane. Hurrying to the House, without giving himself time to change the plain black clothes and the grey worsted stockings which appear to have been considered unsuitable to a member in his place in Parliament, he sat for a while in silence. When the Speaker put the question that 'this Bill do pass,' he rose to speak. Dwelling at first on the pains and care of the public good which had characterised the early days of the Long Parliament, he proceeded to blame the members for their later misconduct, holding up to scorn 'their injustice, delays of justice, self-interest, and other faults … charging them not to have a heart to do anything for public good,' and to have 'espoused the corrupt interest of Presbytery and lawyers who were the supporters of tyranny and oppression'. Their last crime was the present attempt to perpetuate themselves in power. "Perhaps," he continued, his wrath growing upon him as he spoke, "you think this is not Parliamentary language. I confess it is not, neither are you to expect any such from me." Then striding up and down the floor of the House, he pointed to individual members, charging them with corruption or immorality. "It is not fit," he added, "that you should sit as a Parliament any longer. You have sat long enough, unless you had done more good." Then, upon a remonstrance from Sir Peter Wentworth, he took the final step. "Come, come!" he cried, "I will put an end to your prating. You are no Parliament. I say you are no Parliament. I will put an end to your sitting." Then turning to Harrison, he uttered the fateful words, "Call them in; call them in". The door was thrown open and thirty or forty musketeers tramped in. "This," exclaimed Vane, "is not honest, yea it is against morality and common honesty." It was to Vane's broken word that Cromwell, whether truly or falsely, attributed the necessity of acting as he was now doing. Doubtless with a touch of sadness in his voice, he addressed his old friend – his brother, as he had long styled him – with the veiled reproof: "Oh, Sir Henry Vane! Sir Henry Vane! The Lord deliver me from Sir Henry Vane!"

The hall of meeting was soon cleared. Harrison handed Speaker Lenthall down from the chair. Algernon Sidney had to be removed with some show of compulsion. Most of the members yielding to the inevitable trooped out without even this nominal resistance. "It's you," said Cromwell as they filed past him, "that have forced me to this, for I have sought the Lord night and day that He would rather slay me than put me upon the doing of this work." Glancing at the mace he asked "What shall we do with this bauble?" Ordering Captain Scott to remove it from the table, he bade him take it away. When all was over, carrying the Bill on Elections under his cloak, he returned to Whitehall. In the afternoon he dispersed – in like manner – the Council of State, assuring its members that they could sit no longer, the Parliament having been dissolved. "Sir," replied Bradshaw, "we have heard what you did at the House in the morning, and before many hours all England will hear it; but, Sir, you are mistaken to think that the Parliament is dissolved; for no power under heaven can dissolve them but themselves; therefore take you notice of that."