Oliver Cromwell: Commander in Chief (Ronald Hutton)

Most know about the English Civil War, and that it ended with the execution of Charles I, in 1649. But this is not really true. That war, the First English Civil War, which alone killed, directly and indirectly, around five percent of the English population, was merely part of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, meaning among England, Ireland, and Scotland, lasting from 1639 to 1653. These complicated conflicts arguably made the West what it is, or was, and they therefore are worthy of much more study than we give them. Moreover, the crucial role played by Oliver Cromwell in nearly all these conflicts is further illuminating for our own time. Studying Cromwell is therefore something we should bring back into fashion.

A good place to start is Ronald Hutton’s trilogy biography of Cromwell. This is the second volume, just published, to be followed in a few years by the third. Hutton’s excellent first volume covered Cromwell’s early life, up until 1646 and the end of fighting in the First English Civil War, including his rise from obscure provincial to important military commander. This volume covers Cromwell’s involvement in the immediately-subsequent struggles between the New Model Army and Parliament; his involvement in the killing of King Charles; the reduction of Wales, Ireland, and Scotland; and almost up to his ascension to Lord Protector, the new head of state of the realm of England, in 1653. As he did in his first volume, Hutton writes expressively. Not only does he offer lush descriptions of landscape and wildlife, his geographic descriptions, particularly of cities, are also excellent. The reader almost feels like he is there; despite all the detail, this book is a delight to read.


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In 1647, when this book begins, Cromwell was forty-eight years old. He was living in London, as a member of Parliament, but his power base was the military. More precisely, it was the cavalry of the New Model Army, most of which Cromwell had commanded by the end of the war. Cromwell was not the leader of the New Model; that was Sir Thomas Fairfax, with whom Cromwell generally was on excellent terms. Fairfax, however, was much less political than Cromwell, who passed very easily between war and politics, operating in both at the highest level of competence.

What comes through most of all in these pages is how much of a political animal Cromwell was. Unlike many military men, he enjoyed the constant whirl of politics, what would today be called networking. He was good at it, too. Among many other skills, rarely found in combination, he frequently worked privately to adjust the behavior of opponents or problem-causers, striving to align them with his cause and himself, and only resorting to public action against them if absolutely necessary. This is even more impressive given Cromwell’s notoriously bad temper, which he managed to control much of the time by force of will (a characteristic he shared with George Washington, as it happens).

Similarly, he was an excellent bridge-builder and manager of men, often able to get men opposed to each other to cooperate to pursue joint ends, Cromwell’s ends. He himself was more than willing to reconcile with former enemies to achieve his goals. He was decisive, patient, flexible, and able to react to each moment, each surprise, with a fresh strategy. He was also slippery and more than once justly accused of duplicity. But he regarded all that he did as done in the service of God, so no doubt, this bothered him little. Unfortunately, his inner life is mostly opaque to us; he left no archive of letters, and he sent few letters that survive. Most of what we know we have to surmise from his actions, or view through claims made by others about what Cromwell said.

The problem the victorious Parliament faced in 1647 was like the old joke about the dog chasing the car—what does the dog do if he actually catches the car? The royalist forces had been defeated, and Charles was a prisoner of the Scots. But Parliament was unsure what to do with the country’s royalists, who were many, and several of whom were among the richest and most powerful landowners in the country (though many others, along with Charles’s wife and son, had wisely departed for France after Charles’s defeat). Parliament was unsure what to do with the royalists’ property, though the massive debts that Parliament owed, in particular to the soldiers, suggested confiscation and redistribution was the answer. Parliament was unsure what to do about the established church and hierarchy, and what forms of Christian belief and practice to allow. Parliament was unsure what to do about Scotland, which had joined Parliament in fighting the King, but was now in a prickly relationship, mostly because of religious differences. Parliament was unsure what to do about Ireland, where battles were being fought between Catholics and Protestants, and a royalist lord still held Dublin and the surrounding region. All of this led to an unstable situation.

As so often with Protestants, the victorious Parliament proved fissiparous in its religious beliefs. The basic split that became crucial as soon as the war was won (though it was visible before, certainly) was between “presbyterians,” who wanted a reformed church which still retained a national center and hierarchy, along with largely uniform liturgical practice and doctrine, and “independents,” who wanted near-total freedom of worship and organization on the parish, even individual, level. (Many of the Puritans of New England were essentially a type of independent.) The split was not always clear, however, and men moved from one position to another, depending on the specific issue at hand. This religious division was accompanied by another split, which came to the fore in these years. Some independents also wanted massive political change—increasing suffrage, ending the monarchy, eliminating the House of Lords, and other such changes.

Following such matters in this book is a little more difficult than it should be. Hutton, “as a matter of personal taste”, refuses to use many “insulting” traditional terms such as “Rump Parliament” or “Levellers.” This makes little sense; it may be that these terms were originally designed as polemics, but they have long since lost that force by passing into common usage. Unfortunately, his choice leads to some confusion for the casual reader, who is used to seeing those terms, and subconsciously looks for those terms to map onto his existing knowledge. This is not a fatal defect in the book, however.

In the nation as a whole, the presbyterians were far more popular and numerous. In Parliament they were the majority. However, in the army, the independents held the upper hand. Cromwell was an independent, and knew very well on which side his bread was buttered, given that his base of support was the New Model. But he was a moderate; he generally was willing to accept a presbyterian system if it gave latitude to those who wished to remain outside it.

The division between presbyterians and independents largely drove English history in these years. At this point, it meant that tension was increasing between Parliament and the army. The army wanted to be paid; Parliament wanted to shrink the army, both as a means of saving money, and because it was increasingly seen as a hotbed of problematic heresies, although it also wanted to use the army against potential enemies in Ireland and Scotland. A return to normalcy made sense, but many in the army, which was bored and was constantly whipped up by anonymous pamphlets and itinerant freelance preachers, saw no reason to return to normalcy until their desired goals were achieved.

In March of 1647, Parliament tried to disband much of the New Model, while promising they would be paid, and send the rest to Ireland to subdue the conflict there. The soldiers responded with a “petition,” a standard device of the time, in essence combining a refusal to obey commands with demands of their own. Parliament saw this as mutinous, logically enough. Still, they sent four members of Parliament to negotiate with the soldiers, one of whom was Cromwell. Negotiations were complicated by that they were typically framed in religious terms, but the material conditions of the soldiers, most of all their back pay, lurked in every discussion. If Parliament had been able to pay the soldiers, none of what transpired would probably have happened. Both sides were suspicious—the soldiers suspected that Parliament was trying to cut a deal with the King and disband them without fulfilling any of their demands, while Parliament was suspicious that the soldiers would mutiny and attack Parliament.

The first might have happened, but it was precluded by the second actually happening. It was triggered by Parliament formally voting to disband the New Model, and preparing to bring the London militia, almost as large as the New Model, but not as experienced, again to arms. Cromwell was later accused here of playing both sides, though Hutton thinks this unjustified. Regardless, he ultimately always sided with the army, which was inevitable, because that was his power base. Parliament might or might not have intended to arrest him, but Cromwell skipped town and joined the army in the countryside. The New Model, fifteen thousand strong, kidnapped the King (who had earlier been handed over to Parliament by the Scots) and prepared for renewed war. Parliament at first tried to mollify the soldiers; they quickly realized the army’s demands had escalated to a total purge of Parliament, so Parliament also prepared for war.

It quickly became evident that Parliament had a very inferior military position. Wisely, they sued for peace, including expelling MPs the army found particularly distasteful. This made the soldiers “an independent power in the land.” After some more negotiation, and attempts by Parliament to re-establish their primacy, the soldiers finally had enough, and marched into London to “liberate” it. There was little violence, because the London militia simply didn’t turn out to fight. What this meant, in practice, was that Parliament (minus some more members, and now dominated by independents) continued sitting, and various factions, from the King to the radicals, all competed to pass their own desired legislation or otherwise obtain their desired ends, while the soldiers chafed at the continued lack of pay, even as taxes rose ever higher to merely pay them a portion of their current wages.

In the following year, the spring of 1648, Welsh royalists rose in rebellion. Cromwell was sent with an army to defeat them, which he quickly and competently accomplished, setting the pattern for all of his activities for the subsequent years of his career. He had to wrap it up quickly, because a royalist Scots army invaded England in mid-summer, with the aim of establishing a presbyterian Church in England and reaching a settlement with the King. At this point the expectation of nearly all in England, including most of the independents, was that the King would be restored to his throne, after he had agreed to a wide range of restrictions on his power, as well as to relinquish much of his control over the Church. Nobody who mattered was openly talking about removing him from the throne permanently, much less executing him. Charles was a difficult man to negotiate with, however—he took very seriously his role as a monarch appointed by God, which meant he was obliged to maintain the power of the monarchy. Moreover, the multiplicity of parties involved made it easy for him to believe that he could play them off against each other to reach a favorable settlement for him, and for his many supporters in the war he had lost, some of whom were threatened with execution. Hutton spends quite a bit of time on the details of negotiations Charles had with all the relevant parties. Charles negotiated in good faith, for the most part, but was always looking for a better deal. Unfortunately for him, over time his position continuously eroded, and much of that was due to Cromwell’s defeat of those more favorable to the King, and Cromwell himself turning against the King.

At the Battle of Preston (really a series of battles in that general area), in northern England, Cromwell thumped the Scots, even though they had “superior numbers and no obvious weaknesses.” As always, Cromwell took this as an opportunity to write self-congratulatory letters of propaganda to Parliament, carefully cloaked in terms of personal modesty and giving thanks and credit to God, which were widely published and publicized by his allies in the press. Cromwell then marched into Scotland, and by the fall had forced a settlement on the Scots without more significant fighting, including removing from the Scots government those who had encouraged the incursion into England.

Meanwhile, the army still in England was becoming increasingly restless, perceiving no progress toward satisfying their religious and pecuniary demands. The New Model again occupied London, under the command of Fairfax, while Cromwell was still occupied in the north, reducing a royalist rebellion in Yorkshire, centered on the powerful Pontefract Castle—although there is some evidence Cromwell was involved behind the scenes in encouraging this second rebellion against Parliament’s authority. His own soldiers were among the most radical in the army, and Cromwell was himself dissatisfied with Parliament, so this seems very likely. In Pride’s Purge (again, a term not used by Hutton), in December, the army prevented all parliamentarians they regarded as not friendly to them from sitting in the Commons, creating the Rump Parliament that was wholly in sync with the army, and totally dominated by the independents. In practice this was a simply a military coup.

Parliament immediately moved to put Charles on trial, now with the general expectation that he would be executed as a result. Cromwell had returned to London, and was very active as one of the judges, while also conducting other parliamentary business, as well as suppressing independents deemed too radical (collectively now known as Levellers, but consisting of many different individuals and groups). On January 30, Charles was executed, something with which Cromwell was completely in agreement.

A matter Hutton does not remark on, but which is interesting to me, is that on many, many occasions Cromwell and others, facing a difficult decision, engaged in a “day of prayer and fasting” before making their choice. It is interesting because fasting has fallen so completely out of favor among Protestants, and has also nearly disappeared among Roman Catholics, although it is still a significant part of Orthodox practice. Certainly the New Testament is full of Christ and his followers fasting as a spiritual discipline, up to and including Christ declaring that certain demons can only be exorcised by “prayer and fasting.” Cromwell and his compatriots, obsessive readers of Scripture, no doubt fasted for this reason. But why Protestants later abandoned it, at least as a major, quasi-compulsory practice, I am not really sure.

In February, Cromwell was made president of the Council of State, the new chief executive body of the country, now declared a Commonwealth, making him officially the most powerful man in England. He was also now one of the richest men in England, because with each success of his, Parliament added more estates and income to his name. The new militant Parliament’s first order of business was permanently ending the Irish problem. Ireland had long been unsettled, a complex stew of Catholics combined with relatively recent Protestant settlers, with the latter divided among those with royalist and Parliamentarian sympathies, and a long history of accusation and counter-accusation of atrocities among the groups. In 1649 Cromwell was sent to Ireland with a large, well-funded, and well-equipped army. He remained in Ireland for a little more than year, having successfully attacked and captured several major cities, including Drogheda and Wexford.

The brutality of these battles, and the massacres that took place after them, are the most controversial aspects of Cromwell’s career, and Hutton goes into great detail about the evidence, both with respect to the degree of killing and the responsibility for it, essentially taking a middle position between those who see Cromwell as a bloodthirsty monster and those wishing to absolve him from responsibility, with a tilt toward the former. Cromwell, after all, was a Protestant ideologue, nearly a fanatic, and he was ruthless when faced with opposition he could not coopt or negotiate with. “[H]e was remaining perfectly true to his nature, because he had always been a killer,” a “born holy warrior.” Aside from that, these battles showed once again Cromwell’s extreme competence as a military commander, coupled with constant luck, though as it is said, luck is where preparation meets opportunity. But Cromwell saw his luck as Providence, which was a perfectly reasonable interpretation in the frame through which he viewed the world.

Parliament, and England, were thrilled with Cromwell’s success in Ireland. The Scots, however, were again preparing for war, even after Cromwell had remade their government. They were insulted by the regicide Parliament had committed—for, after all, Charles was separately King of Scotland, and nobody had asked their opinion about what should be done with him, or whether England should become a Commonwealth. In fact, the governing treaty between Scotland and Parliament, the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643, explicitly called for the monarchy to be preserved, and so the Scots declared Charles’s son (the later Charles II), abroad in France, to be the new king of not only Scotland, but also England and Ireland—although they made clear he would have to accept the presbyterian religious limitations demanded by the Scots before they would help install him.

The Scots had excellent commanders as well as a first-rate and experienced army. Parliament did not wait for the Scots to declare war; in 1650 they sent Cromwell north again to bring the war to the Scots. As Cromwell travelled north with a massive army and his second-in-command, John Lambert, the northern inhabitants cheered them. “Lambert took this as a sign that the nation had come round to support for the commonwealth. He recalled that the more politically experienced Cromwell replied that the crowds would cheer as loudly if the two of them were going to be hanged.”

It took some time, but Cromwell had his usual good fortune, and gradually reduced the Scots in a series of very bloody battles. It gives a flavor of Cromwell that after one victory, “In his victory dispatch to Parliament, Oliver concluded by boldly, if vaguely, admonishing the MPs to thank the Almighty by implementing long-overdue reforms to improve the lot of the English people: curbing the insolent, relieving the oppressed, helping poor prisoners, reforming the abuses committed by clergy and lawyers, and doing something to palliate social inequality and economic exploitation.” The war dragged on into 1651, and the future Charles II joined the Scots, although they were still less than fully embracing of him.

In a signature move, given that Charles II famously had a gambler’s personality, Charles led the Scots in an invasion of England while Cromwell was trying to keep them pinned down in Scotland. It might have worked; they might even have taken London. But they paused at the royalist stronghold of Worcester, and in a brilliant set of maneuvers, Cromwell utterly defeated the Scottish army. This was the battle after which Charles hid in the Royal Oak, barely managing to escape the country back to France (and the royalist family, the Penderels, that helped him is still paid an annuity by the English state to this day for their services). This was also the last battle fought between regular armies on English soil—or rather, the last to date, perhaps. The English mopped up Scotland, and ten percent of its adult male population died.

Parliament (which had abolished the House of Lords in 1649) was supreme in the Three Kingdoms, and Cromwell was “far and away the foremost citizen of the newly secured English commonwealth.” Yet the situation was still unsettled, because nobody knew how and to what ends precisely the Commonwealth should operate. The same questions of religion and property that existed in 1647 were still open, though the soldiers had mostly been paid, in part through mass confiscations of Scottish and, especially, Irish property. Cromwell continued to favor “reform,” meaning a broader franchise and religious latitudinarianism. Parliament, however, did essentially nothing, instead sitting around talking—not for lack of ability, but because they didn’t really want any more reforms. Rather, they wanted a return to stability.

They didn’t get it. Instead, they became embroiled in war with the Dutch, a major problem because the Dutch navy was able to impinge on English merchant shipping, a core support of the English economy. The army, despite representing only a small minority of public opinion, began to mutter against Parliament yet again, and taxes had to be raised more and more, including hugely-unpopular taxes such as those on private brewing. By early 1653, the army had given up hope that Parliament would enact the demanded changes. On April 20, perhaps by prearranged plan, perhaps not, Cromwell entered Parliament, with a body of soldiers in the lobby. After listening to various speeches, he rose and ordered Parliament to disperse. Surprisingly, or perhaps not given his attempt to omit traditional terms, Hutton does not quote his famous words. “It is not fit that you should sit here any longer. You have sat here too long for any good you have been doing lately. . . . In the name of God, go.” By December, Cromwell had been appointed Lord Protector. But that, and subsequent events, is a story for Hutton’s last volume.

Whatever one may conclude about the historical Cromwell, England today could certainly use a new Cromwell. He would have had no problem with dealing, for example, with the ubiquitous Paki rape gangs which have terrorized young white English girls in towns all over England for the past two decades, with the encouragement and connivance of the English ruling classes. He would have immediately hanged thousands of men and women, regardless of their standing or station, and praised God for the opportunity to bring His justice to the land. Cromwell, to the applause of all real Englishmen, would then have expelled every remaining Paki and other undesirable alien in England, posthaste, and ensured that anybody responsible in any way for imposing such invaders on Albion was served another heaping helping of justice.

Sadly, though, there is no Cromwell apparent in England today. On the other hand, as I noted earlier, until only a few years before he became Lord Protector, Cromwell was an utterly obscure man, nearly penurious, of no importance at all. Cometh the hour, cometh the man, and no example of that key driver of history is more resplendent than Cromwell and his works. We, or rather the English, can only hope that such a man soon arrives on the scene, before England passes forever from history.


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