OLIVER CROMWELL - HERO OR VILLAIN? PART 7
OLIVER CROMWELL – HERO OR VILLAIN? PART 7
Oliver called his third parliament in January 1658, but by then his health was failing. For all his unquestionable abilities on the battlefield his health had always been suspect. He was often unwell when a major decision had to be made, or before a battle, although sickness never caused him to miss one. This may have been psychosomatic, and he did exhibit some of the traits of what today we would call the manic depressive, with alternating bouts of extreme exhilaration followed by depression. He could be violent towards someone who would not accept his opinions and scathing towards those whom he felt fell short of the standards of military command or government that he demanded. He was particularly affected by the death of his favourite daughter, Elizabeth, who had married John Claypole, a Parliamentarian captain of horse, raised to the peerage by Oliver on his marriage. Elizabeth had often interceded with her father to ameliorate the plight of royalist prisoners, she had a sense of humour and was also somewhat of a snob. At a dinner for the major generals someone enquired where were their wives? Elizabeth replied that they were at home washing the dishes as they always used to do. She was only twenty-nine when she died on 6 August 1658, probably of cancer.
Although Oliver was only fifty-eight increasing bouts of illness made it clear to his immediate circle that he was not long for this world, and this brought the question of the succession to the fore once again. Parliament had baulked at making the office of the Protector hereditary, but they had enacted that he could nominate his own successor, which he had up to now steadfastly refused to do. Once more rumours of a Cromwellian kingship began to circulate and Mary Cromwell’s husband, Lord Fauconberg, encouraged Henry in Ireland to state his claim, which Henry was sensible enough not to do.
Oliver never really recovered from Elizabeth’s death and his intense grief would not have helped his physical health. On 17 August he complained of severe pain in his bowels and lower back and took to his bed, although unable to sleep. He suffered from a succession of what were described as ‘fits’ – fevers – which may be attributable to malaria which was still prevalent in Europe and England until well into the nineteenth century. Although this was not the type of malaria that often caused death, it did weaken the constitution and it is highly possible that Oliver caught it either as a child brought up near the Fens of East Anglia, or in the marshes of Ireland during his 1649 campaign. Eventually he was drifting in and out of consciousness, sometimes awake and able to converse lucidly, other times muttering about what might happen to his soul. We know that he had long suffered from recurrent kidney stones, and it is probably septicaemia caused by them that ultimately killed him.
On 30 September there was a mighty storm, the like of which had not been seen in England for hundreds of years. Great trees were blown down, horses drawing coaches were unable to make headway against the wind and a teenaged Isaac Newton tried to measure the force of the wind by jumping against it and then with it. The superstitious took the storm as God’s warning that the great Lord Protector was about to pass away. Still no successor had been nominated, and on Thursday 2 September members of the council clustered round Oliver’s bed and asked him to name one. What happened next has been disputed. Some sources say that Oliver named his eldest son, Richard, some say that Richard’s name was put to him and he made no answer, but that when the name was put a second time he whispered ‘yes’. Others say that he named no one and that Richard was decided by the Council after the Protector’s death. Whatever the truth of the matter, Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland, died in the afternoon of 3 September 1658, the anniversary of his great victories of Dunbar and Worcester.
A post mortem was carried out the following day, when the surgeon found Oliver’s spleen to be enlarged and badly infected. Embalming followed but could not disguise the stench of the rotten spleen, so the body was swiftly coffined and buried without ceremony in Henry VII’s chapel in Westminster Abbey. This was not as unusual as it may sound, for traditionally the actual burial of kings and the state funeral were separate affairs. The lying in state took place in Somerset House, where an empty coffin was displayed with a wax effigy of the Protector above it. The room was hung with black velvet tapestries and the banners and armorial bearings of the Cromwell family, the bier lit by candles in huge silver candlesticks, with official mourners stationed at each corner. What was usual for a king but not for someone who had refused the crown, was a model of the imperial crown above the effigy.
The funeral procession with the coffin and effigy took place on 23 November, by which time the Protector had been dead and buried for twelve weeks, and took seven hours to wend its way slowly and solemnly to Westminster Abbey, with the streets lined by soldiers, their red coats adorned with black facings and black buttons. On arrival at the Abbey the coffin and effigy was left for curious members of the public, who could view them at an admission fee of 2/6d or 12½ p.
The transfer of power to Richard Cromwell passed without fuss or disturbance. Originally a younger son who had remained very much in the background, and whose only official position had been as a rural JP, he was propelled into the public gaze by the death of his two older brothers, when his father appointed him to various committees and he sat as an MP firstly for Hampshire and then for Cambridge University. By all accounts a kind and amiable person, he was somewhat extravagant and found it difficult to live within his means. Once in office he clashed with the army who objected to his position a commander in chief when he had no military experience. Richard told the army that while he was happy to leave the everyday running of the army to the senior professional officer, Lieutenant General of the Army Charles Fleetwood, who had married his sister Bridget when her first husband, Henry Ireton had died in 1651, he would retain the post of commander in chief which was written into the constitution. Fleetwood had served with Oliver Cromwell in Ireland, had been his lieutenant general of horse at Dunbar and intimately involved in the planning for the Battle of Worcester. During the rule of the major generals he had been responsible for the largest of the areas, comprising seven counties, and he had enormous prestige within the army.
It was soon apparent that Richard, for all his wish to reconcile the opposing factions in the country, lacked both the prestige nationally of his father and his father’s abilities. Oliver could be ruthless when he had to be: Richard found it difficult to insist upon anything. The long running war with Spain was expensive, as was the upkeep of the professional army, and increasingly there was mutual suspicion of Parliament and the army of each other. The recalled Rump Parliament, increasingly conservative and with a number of closet royalists in the Other House had since the rule of the major generals a dislike of standing armies, something that continued until 1955 when the army existed only for a year at a time, requiring the annual passing of the Army Act by Parliament to remain in existence. The army, on the other hand, resented the increasing move towards aspects of the old order, suspected that Parliament would like to disband it, and worried that toleration of non-conformist religious practices might end. They also, of course, were concerned about arrears of pay which amounted to something like two million pounds in 1658. When Oliver was alive he could keep these opposing views in check, but increasingly Richard was unable to do so. The army was demanding the right to petition parliament directly, and unrest was encouraged by the more radical members of parliament who were opposed to the Protectoral constitution. Richard refused to allow the army to approach parliament directly, and more and more officers were questioning why this young man with no military experience and surrounds by dubious civilian allies, should be their commander in chief. When parliament showed no sign of meeting the army’s request for the payment of arrears, and suspecting that the regiments would be disbanded or reduced to be replaced by the militia which would be under the control of parliamentary nominees, disagreement seemed incapable of being resolved. The final straw was when Parliament proposed to prosecute an army officer for ill-treating a royalist prisoner, and the generals demanded the dissolution of parliament and began to mass troops around St James. On 22 April Richard saw no option but to agree, and ordered the dissolution. Now power rested with the army.
Richard lingered on for a while, a virtual prisoner in Whitehall, still Lord Protector in name but without any control over events. The commanders of the armies in Ireland, his brother Henry, and Scotland, General George Monck, declined to support him and on 25 May 1659 he resigned the office, with a recalled Rump Parliament agreeing to pay off his debts, and provide him with a residence and an annual pension. There was now a real danger that the country would once again descend into civil war between the radical elements of the army, the royalists and the conservative republicans. Some form of government that would unify the nations of England, Scotland and Ireland was sorely needed and in many sober and thinking men’s eyes that could only be a restored monarchy. From Scotland General Monck began to march towards London. Troops sent to stop him simply melted away or changed sides. On 26 April 1660 Monck called a new parliament, well stocked with royalists, who declared that Charles II had been king of England since the death of his father on 30 January 1649. On 25 May Charles landed at Dover and on 23 April 1661 he was crowned king. It was as if the last twenty years had never happened and nothing had changed.
In fact everything had changed. English monarchs would now rule with the consent of the ruled, and while the law of the land was still their law, no longer would they flout it with impunity. Charles promised to respect the customs and usages of the nation, to permit liberty of conscience in religious affairs and to pardon all those who had taken up arms against his father, the only exception being the ‘regicides’ who were exempted from any pardons. Of the fifty-nine commissioners who had signed the late king’s death warrant thirty-one were still alive. All were tried and found guilty of treason and of these twelve were sentenced to death and drawn, hung and quartered, that is they were dragged to Tyburn or Tower Green on a hurdle, hanged, cut down while still alive, disembowelled with their intestines burned in front of them and their body divided into four parts, with their heads exhibited on a pike. The solicitor who prosecuted the king and the commanders of the guards at the trial and execution were similarly dealt with and the remaining nineteen commissioners sentenced to life imprisonment. Oliver Cromwell, Henry Ireton and Colonel Bradshaw were disinterred from Westminster Abbey and their corpses hung and exhibited in chains. Oliver’s head remained on a pike at Westminster near where the king had been executed, and eventually was buried in secret at his old college, Sidney Sussex Cambridge, where it still is. Otherwise a deliberate policy of reconciliation was embarked upon until today, only 360 years later, hardly any of us know on which side we stood during that fateful period of English history.
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As for Oliver’s legacy, his statue stands outside the Houses of Parliament, the institution that he took up arms to defend against an autocratic monarch. There can be no doubt that he was a man of great charisma and a natural soldier. Very few men can turn themselves into a military leader without training for the job, but Oliver in one sense was lucky in that he was not involved in the early battles and had time to ponder and learn from them. Commanders who had far more experience than he yielded to him and he retained the confidence of the army throughout. He was not the first man to create a professional British army, such had existed long before Oliver, although not for the previous two hundred years, and it was Thomas Fairfax who was the designer and creator of the New Model Army and not Oliver, but Oliver supported him in that and many of Oliver’s ideas about training and tactics were incorporated in it. His major contribution to the English way of warfare of the time was his insistence that war must be waged to the utmost, regardless of any other consideration.
In Ireland the memory of the ‘curse of Cromwell’ still lingers, but in his campaign there he behaved no worse than French, or Russian, or Prussian or Austrian generals had in territories in open revolt. One also has to remember the general attitude of most Englishmen of the time towards the Irish, and it was the king’s attempts to obtain Irish troops during the civil wars that turned many otherwise neutral against him. After the Battle of Naseby when Fairfax’s cavalry caught up with the royal baggage train they cut off the noses of the Welsh speaking camp followers and when called to account said they were frightfully sorry but they thought they were Irish!
Oliver was not a desecrator of cathedrals and churches as is often claimed; indeed he did his best to preserve that which was historically significant. The damage wrought was either done by radical bishops before Cromwell ever came on the scene or by soldiers whose commanders had lost control. In religious matters he espoused toleration. He hated ‘popery’ but not Catholics, except Irish Catholics whom he assumed were royalist – as most in fact were. His foreign policy laid the foundations of the later British Empire and although Oliver was not an intellectual, being much more a practical man than a thinker, he was adamant in his support of education, being an enthusiastic and supportive Chancellor of Oxford University from 1650 until his death, and founding the University of Durham. Perhaps his greatest mistake was in not planning for the succession. Whether he nominated his son or it was decided by the Council, Richard was not the man for the job. His other son, Henry, a major general commanding in Ireland would have been a better choice, although it has to be said that he was not popular with the army, as would General John Lambert, fit, energetic and competent albeit out of favour with Oliver, or the effective commander in chief of the army, Charles Fleetwood. All might have been able to hold the conflicting elements in check, but it is a characteristic of dictators – and Oliver was a dictator, albeit of the benign variety – that they do not nominate their successors too early, for they might then decide to anticipate the succession.
Oliver Cromwell cut off a king’s head, but it is because he did so that we still live happily under a monarchy today.