OLIVER CROMWELL - HERO OR VILLAIN? PART ONE
OLIVER CROMWELL – HERO OR VILLAIN?
EARLY DAYS
Oliver Cromwell was born on 25 April 1599 in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire. He was the third of ten children of Robert and Elizabeth Cromwell, and the only surviving son. As such Oliver was brought up as the focus for all the family’s hopes and ambitions, surrounded by a supportive network of his sisters. Robert Cromwell was a descendant of Thomas Cromwell who had been born in 1485. Thomas was of humble origins – his father was either a blacksmith, a brewer or in the cloth trade, depending which source one consults – but he was an intelligent young man who obtained a good education and was successively a soldier of fortune in France, a cloth merchant, a property speculator and a lawyer. It was in this latter capacity that he came to the attention of Cardinal Wolsey, King Henry VIII’s Chancellor, and he acted for him in the dissolution of the monasteries, being responsible for administering the process of their closure, the receipt of their funds and the pensioning off of their monks.
In 1529 Wolsey fell out of favour, largely through his inability to persuade the pope to grant a dissolution of the king’s twenty-four year marriage to Catherine of Aragon, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella whose marriages united the Spanish kingdoms of Castile and Aragon. Henry desperately wanted a son to ensure the Tudor succession but Catherine had only produced a daughter, the future Mary I. Catherine had been married to Henry’s elder brother, Arthur Prince of Wales when she was sixteen years of age and he fifteen. Arthur died shortly afterwards of the ‘sweating sickness’ (possibly malaria) and a dispensation was granted by the pope for her to marry Henry, now the heir to the throne. Canon law forbade a man from marrying his brother’s widow but as a marriage was not considered to be valid until consummated, the pope was informed that Arthur and Catherine had never had intercourse (which seems unlikely). Wolsey’s attempts at obtaining an annulment failed partly because having originally had the ban on marrying a brother’s widow set aside, he could not now have that decision overturned, but also due to the influence of the Holy Roman Emperor who was Catherine’s nephew.
Thomas Cromwell now feared for his own position, but survived despite refusing to abandon his old master, largely because he was able to negotiate the process of having King Henry recognised by the English bishops as head of the church (the church in England, not yet the church of England), owing no obedience to the pope in Rome. He was then able to persuade the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cranmer, to pronounce the marriage to Catherine unlawful. This left the path clear for Henry to marry Anne Boleyn, supported and encouraged by Thomas. Thomas, now entirely in the King’s confidence, was rewarded by ennoblement and promotion to various influential offices of state, including Lord Privy Seal. He became King Henry’s chief minister, although he was never Chancellor, as Wolsey was. Queen Anne was very much a reformer in matters of religion, whilst Thomas, although unquestionably of reformist tendencies himself, wished to tread a middle course, between the conservatives who wished to retain as much as possible of the Catholic doctrine, and those who regarded much of it as idolatrous and who wanted to sweep away relics, rood screens and effigies. Eventually the differences between Thomas Cromwell and the Queen’s faction became irreconcilable and to protect himself Thomas engineered the arrest of the queen and had her accused of adultery with one of her musicians and incest with her brother. All this was quite possibly a put up job, as the evidence was flimsy, but the queen, increasingly out of favour with the king as having failed to produce a son but only a daughter, the future Elizabeth I, was found guilty of treason and beheaded on Tower Green.
Thomas now persuaded the king to marry Anne of Cleves, and that is what did for him, for on seeing her the king was furious – she looked nothing like the picture that Holbein had painted of her and she neglected basic bodily hygiene and smelled. While the king had to marry her, he would have nothing more to do with her and he blamed Thomas. This was the opportunity that Thomas’s enemies, who had never been reconciled to this low born interloper, were waiting for and Thomas found himself tried for treason and heresy, amongst other high crimes, and executed.
By the time that Oliver, great-great-great nephew of Thomas, was born, fifty-nine years after the erstwhile chief minister’s execution, Thomas’s direct descendants had lost much of their land and perquisites (and would fight on the royalist side in the Civil Wars), but the junior line, of which Oliver was a part, was still influential in the county. Oliver’s father was the second son of a knight and Oliver’s godfather – after whom he was christened – was his uncle, Sir Oliver Cromwell. In later years many stories inevitably became attached to Oliver’s childhood, some of which may even be true. On one occasion he is said to have been tickling trout in the local river when he got out of his depth and was only saved from drowning by a young curate who heard his cries and fished him out. Many years later the curate, now a senior vicar, is supposed to have accosted the then Colonel Cromwell and told him that he wished he had left him to drown rather than see him take up arms against his betters. He is accused of having a violent temper, which flared up in an instant where he could not get his own way, and as quickly evaporated. This, at least, is probably true, for in later life his remonstrations directed at the idle or incompetent were legendary.
When Oliver was born the reign of the great Queen Elizabeth had four more years to run. She had done her best to unite the nation after the cataclysmic effects of her father’s split from Rome and did her best to steer a middle way, declaring that she had no intention of opening a window into men’s souls. She had only persecuted Catholics reluctantly, and then only Catholic priests or those who harboured them, and then only when she had been convinced that her life was in danger from Jesuit assassins. She had defeated the superpower, Spain, had tried (largely unsuccessfully) to balance the books and had made England a major player in European and world affairs. Elizabeth never married, and steadfastly refused to do so. The only possibilities were foreign princes who would have expected to be made king, or at least to wield the power behind the throne, unacceptable to the great men of the kingdom, or a member of the English nobility which would have aroused jealousy in the families not so favoured.
Elizabeth steadfastly refused to nominate her successor, although she almost certainly knew who it would be. Her nearest male protestant relative already ruled as James VI of Scotland, son of Mary Queen of Scots who had fled to England and whom Elizabeth eventually had executed for treason. James was a direct descendant of Henry VII from Henry’s daughter Margaret and was of impeccable Presbyterian upbringing and well educated. He had a wife, Anne of Denmark, and two sons to ensure the succession, the elder Henry Prince of Wales who died of typhoid in 1612, aged eighteen, and the future Charles I. James was delighted to escape from Scotland where he had been twice kidnapped and had to skulk around a gloomy palace in constant fear of assassination.
On arrival in England James inevitably found himself embroiled in the religious questions that had been kept more or less under control by Elizabeth, but which now resurfaced after her death. English Catholics had, in the main, survived because they were English first and Catholic second, but the post reformation Protestant church was split into a number of factions. On the one hand there were those who, while accepting that the king was the head of the church and that the pope had no jurisdiction, retained much of the Catholic ritual – of vestments, incense, the Latin mass and the hierarchical governance of bishops and archbishops. At the other extreme were puritans who thought that the Reformation had only gone so far and that the form of worship should be simplified as a matter of direct communion with God by the worshiper, in the vernacular and without the go between of the bishopric, and who regarded the Catholic rituals as akin to idolatry. James, who had forced the Scottish church to accept bishops, refused the English Puritans’ petition to abolish them – ‘No bishop, no king’ he is alleged to have said – but he was clever enough to avoid a direct confrontation. While he was idle and extravagant he did end the long running war with Spain, he paid for British mercenaries to support the Protestant cause in the Thirty Years War, and he was instrumental in the introduction of the King James Bible which the Church of England uses to this day. He certainly believed in the divine right of kings but was careful not to insist upon it further than Parliament would allow.
Oliver grew up during James’s reign and he attended the local grammar school in Huntingdon. Oliver’s parents were of the puritan tendency and so was the headmaster of Huntingdon school, the Reverend Dr Thomas Beard, a Cambridge graduate and the author of a number of books espousing the simplified form of the protestant religion and attacking the pope, one particularly inflammatory rant being dedicated to Sir Oliver Cromwell. Beard believed that God, rather than being a remote deity that did not interfere with the affairs of man on earth, actually observed what was going on and meted out punishment to wrongdoers in this life, in the form of lost battles, sickness or failed crops. It is difficult for us at this distance to know whether men like Beard – intelligent, educated – really believed in the god that they espoused, or whether they used it as a medium of control over their less inquisitive fellows, but there is no question that religion permeated every aspect of English life, of both the high and mighty and the lowly. The reformation had, of course, been much more about power – who rules England, the king or the pope? – than about theology, but delusional or not men were prepared to give their lives for their religious beliefs. The last man to be executed as a heretic in England was Edward Wightman, burned at the stake at Lichfield in April 1612, when Oliver was a schoolboy of thirteen, but burning of heretics in Europe went on until well into the eighteenth century.
Given his parents’ beliefs and the influence of his headmaster it is not surprising that Oliver grew up with a strong religious faith, opposed to ritual and clerical extravagance. He was not regarded as academic but more concerned with physical fitness rather than book learning, but he cannot have neglected his studies completely for he went up to Sidney Sussex College of Cambridge University in 1616 aged 17. Accounts of Oliver’s time at Sidney Sussex are vague, but it appears that he did not entirely conform to either the letter or the spirit of the rules. He is supposed to have been involved in brawling in the town, to have been a regular drinker at the various ale houses, and on one occasion to have leaped into the saddle of a horse from a first floor window in the college. Anyone who is familiar with horses will know that this tale, at least, is nonsense (although it might just be possible if the horse was a Shire).
In any event Oliver’s sojourn at the university was a short one, for he left after only a year, because his father died, leaving Oliver as the sole male in a household of women and girls. Despite his responsibilities as effectively a landowner – although as still a minor his widowed mother was technically the owner – Oliver behaved as any young man of his period did. While unquestioningly tending towards puritanism in matters of religion he still drank alcohol, socialised and enjoyed the company of young women - indeed according to some accounts he was a notorious flirt. It is difficult to evaluate the stories about Oliver at this stage of his life, for some were circulated by supporters who wished to show him as having a human side, others by opponents attempting to vilify him. The likely truth is that he was a typical product of his class and time, with the virtues and flaws that went with it.
Having ensured that the family holdings in Huntingdon would continue to be well managed, and his widowed mother established with the ownership of a brewery (then an occupation reserved for women), Oliver went to London in 1618 to study at the Inns of Court, probably Lincoln’s Inn, where his grandfather, father and uncles had been. It was then not unusual for young men to attend one of the Inns, not necessarily with a view to following the law as a career, but simply as an adjunct to an education – rather like studying Latin today, never to be used except in numerous expressions (ad nauseam, sine die, etcetera) but a good academic discipline nevertheless. It was in London that Oliver met his future wife, Elizabeth Bourchier, one of twelve children of Sir James Bourchier, a wealthy merchant and a stout protestant. They were married in St Giles Cripplegate in August 1620, when Oliver was twenty-one and his bride twenty-three. That Elizabeth was a sobering influence on Oliver is evident in that from the time of his marriage onwards there are no more tales – true or otherwise – of excessive drinking, getting into fights or general bad behaviour.