King Charles or King Oliver?

KING CHARLES OR KING OLIVER?

Tim Venning

First published by Sea Lion Press, 2017

SECTION ONE: OLIVER CROMWELL

1. Was political deadlock inevitable in 1653-8? Could it have been prevented by a different course of events in 1653 to 1657?

Oliver Cromwell’s position was strong in the summer of 1658, despite the alienation of many civilian Commonwealth supporters in April 1653 and the disappointment of religious radicals with the dissolution of the ‘Nominated Parliament’ in December 1653. He had seen off all military and foreign challenges, the last serious one in England having been Penruddock’s poorly-supported Royalist rising in 1655. He was under no imminent threat despite the financial problems of his regime, the unpopularity of arbitrary and expensive military rule – which the open use of ‘Major-Generals’, instead of the usual civilian county officials, to run the local administration in 1655-6 had exacerbated – and the constitutional problems with Parliament. The threat of a Royalist rising, or of foreign (Spanish) assistance to an invasion, was minimal – as the events of winter 1657-8 had shown, when his alliance with France led to Philip IV of Spain (with whom France was at war) lending assistance to the exiled Charles II, who it had invited to Bruges. This amounted to only half a dozen ships, which were supposed to sail into Ostend harbour to pick up an invasion force of Royalists plus Spanish troops from the Spanish Netherlands, but were intercepted and mostly sunk by Cromwell’s navy; thereafter Cromwell’s army was active in Flanders in alliance with the French army, taking all the coastal towns (starting with the best harbour, Dunkirk) and forcing the indebted and militarily enfeebled Spain onto the defensive. In any case, Cromwell’s spies reported that the English Royalists were too wary to rise until a large Spanish army landed, and the Spanish were too cautious to arrange a major invasion unless they were sure of a serious Royalist revolt – and both parties waited for the other to act first. Thus, Cromwell’s choice of alliance not war with Charles II’s most serious potential supporter, France, in 1655 (Charles’ mother’s nation, as she was Louis XIV’s aunt) had doomed the Royalist cause as a serious threat – as it was intended to do. Cromwell possessed an unprecedentedly large, apparently permanent standing army of around 36,000 men in 1658 (18 infantry regiments and 15 cavalry), already reduced from earlier levels. His military position was unchallengeable as long as the armed forces remained loyal – although there had been a few disciplinary problems recently with discontented radical officers, and even the generals had refused to go along with the proposal to make him King in 1657.

There was one problem, namely the cost; in 1658 the ‘defence’ budget was £2,197,985, of which £1,346,706 went on the Army and £599,108 on the Navy. The combined Anglo-Scottish state needed to maintain a large army in Scotland and an army of occupation in Ireland; it was also was at war with Spain and the exiled Stuarts (who had endeavoured to launch an invasion from the Spanish Netherlands early in 1658) following Cromwell’s attack on the Spanish Caribbean in 1655 and Spain’s treaty of alliance with Charles II in 1656. This entailed an offensive alliance with France, which had been feared by the English regime as a potent ally for Charles and needed to be tied into a pro-Cromwellian stance; in 1657 England duly joined France’s war with Spain over the Netherlands.[1] Thus cutting the cost of an expensive foreign policy by abandoning Continental commitments – Charles I’s solution to financial problems in 1629-40 – and then reducing the Army was not a viable short-term option.

The humiliating failure of all Royalist attempts at rebellion in England after the ‘Penruddock Rebellion’ in 1655, aided by Secretary John Thurloe’s spies’ penetration of the Royalist plotters’ networks, did not mean that the threat of revolt was ended. The hugely unpopular imposition of intrusive military rule across England by the ‘Major-Generals’ in 1655-7 brought the Stuarts new recruits, though this politically disastrous and inept experiment in centralised government (rare for decentralised England) was reversed when Parliament was called in 1657; Cromwell returned to playing up his role as a force for tradition and stability as his civilian advisers regained ascendancy. There were new recruits to the Royalist invasion-plot of winter 1657-8 who had not been ‘on the radar’ for Thurloe before, as the latter worried,[2] though in the event the plot was poorly-supported – and in any case ‘letting your guard down’ by reducing the size of the Army does not come naturally to any fearful, plot-threatened regime based on the ‘security establishment’, in the seventeenth or the twenty-first century. The Cromwellian regime was thus locked into costly military expenditure, though Cromwell did cashier several regiments on occasion.

Indeed, keeping Charles II’s ally Spain on the defensive required a joint Anglo-French military offensive in 1657-8, aimed at securing the vital port of Dunkirk – a pirate base damaging to Channel shipping – for England. This would mean a viable but expensive garrison being installed there, as was done when it finally fell in June 1658. English suspicion of French lukewarmness about the Spanish war (undertaken against co-religionists at the behest of ‘regicides and heretics’, so opposed by much of the Church) meant that even when the Royalist invasion-threat subsided the costly Netherlands campaign had to be kept up lest France agree to peace with Spain. Ostend, where Charles’ small squadron of hired shipping had been mustering in winter 1657-8 under English naval harassment, was to join Dunkirk in English hands as the French advanced along the coast. If France and Spain were at peace, not fighting each other, it would free the resources of either or both to aid Charles II, so England had an interest in keeping up their mutual hostility – and the eventual peace they signed in 1659 was an implicit threat to the Commonwealth.

The financial arrangements for Government revenue made under the ‘Instrument of Government’, the constitution of December 1653, were inadequate (though this was normal for a 17th century government and Charles II had similar problems). Quite apart from the difficulties of inaccurate accounting and estimating future costs, activists in the legislature from 1625 always preferred to keep the government dependent on them for money rather than be generous. The repeated interference in and purges of the Commons in 1647-53 added to this. A Parliamentary sub-committee of December 1654 reckoned the approximate revenue at £1,586,175 and expenditure at £2,877,079.[3] It did not help that many civilian MPs resented the spectre of Army predominance, even without the exceptional circumstances of the Major-Generals’ rule in 1655-7 that produced denunciations in the next Parliament over their interference in local government. The distrust of the executive among MPs – who were usually representatives of the local gentry and City – endemic in 17th-century English politics had been exacerbated by the military purges of June 1647 and December 1648, and by the forced dissolution of the ‘Rump’ by Cromwell’s musketeers in April 1653, which blackened his reputation and led to a boycott of his regime by many of the supporters of the 1649-53 government. The choice of MPs was now limited to men well-affected to the government who recognised the legitimacy of regicide, thus excluding much of the political ‘nation’ (not only Royalists), and those likely to be interested in taking up seats would be anxious about the primacy of civilian over military power and of control over an arbitrary executive. Indeed, the latter was the reason why their ‘party’ had gone to war with the King in the first place, and Cromwell had been acting on 20 April 1653 like the King did on 5 January 1642 in leading troops into the Commons. His Protectoral Parliaments both had to be dissolved early following attempts to claw back powers to the elected House from the nominated Protector and Council.

The constitutional order from December 1653. Potential agreements between Protector and Commons that failed – did they stand a realistic chance?

The overthrow of the allegedly corrupt and self-serving ‘Rump’ Parliament in April l653 removed the last vestige of traditional constitutional government in England after the Civil War. Parliaments had been closed down despite MPs’ protests before, e.g. in March 1629 by Charles I, but never at gunpoint by the commander of the Army, and arguably this ‘military coup’ (though the culprit Cromwell was anxious to downplay this interpretation) ruined Cromwell’s relations with the proponents of unfettered civilian rule thereafter. The unease that Cromwell and his radical allies in the Army and civilian/religious groups alike had felt with the Rump was at least partly due to their ‘ungodly’ and acquisitive behaviour, and the coup led to religious radicals hoping for a ‘rule of the Saints’ (in some cases as heralding the Second Coming of Christ). The resulting ‘Nominated Parliament’ of non-elected MPs, chosen by the Army and the radical Independent religious congregations, aroused hopes from radicals and fears from moderates of a new form of ruling, by and in the interests of religious idealists, and the lack of reform legislation and later collapse of the faction-ridden new body by December 1653 led to further splits among pro-Cromwellians. Had the Nominated Parliament (known to its Royalist critics as ‘Barebones’ after one notable London religious zealot who sat in it, Praise-God Barbon), been ‘betrayed’ by the enemies of ‘godly rule’, or was its closure a vote for common sense and constitutionalist moderation? The cries of betrayal were especially vehement among the small but vociferous religious groups on what would now be called the ‘far left’ of the regime, including the ‘Fifth Monarchists’, led by radical general Thomas Harrison (a leading figure in regicide in 1649 and to be hunted down and executed by Charles II in 1660); to them, any replacement of religious rule by a ‘godly’ Commons with a semi-monarchic ‘Lord Protector’ was blasphemy and a return towards the unholy Stuart monarchy. Given the speed with which a new constitution was announced after Cromwell’s allies under Speaker Francis Rous closed down the Nominated Parliament, it must have been in preparation for some weeks. The surprise move by Rous (the 1640s Parliamentary leader John Pym’s ageing Presbyterian stepbrother) and the ‘moderate’ faction of MPs to march out of the House and hand in their resignations to Cromwell at Whitehall was clearly arranged beforehand. Relatively moderate general John Lambert, Cromwell’s effective deputy, appears to have been the new constitution’s main author, as his rival republicans Sir Henry Vane and Sir Arthur Haselrig were to claim in 1659 without contradiction, and according to Ludlow’s later memoirs he said he had been at work on it for two months.[4] In other words, he had anticipated Parliament failing – so did his ‘moderate’ Cromwellians help this outcome? Cromwell himself told Parliament in September 1654 that he had not been privy to the plans, and indeed in February 1657 he was to tell the Army officers that the intention of the constitution’s framers had been to offer him the royal title – which he had refused. So did Lambert favour a monarchy for stability? (He did not in 1659-60; but then Charles II was the likely King.) Current rumours in November-December 1653 indeed referred to Cromwell becoming King, and Victorian historian Samuel Gardiner reckoned that a flurry of official interest in the form of past royal orders on 1 December indicates the failed attempt by Lambert’s group to persuade Cromwell to take the title.[5] In 1657 Cromwell was to angrily tell a gathering of his officers (then opposed to him becoming king) that in December 1653 ‘seven of them came to him with an Instrument of Government (with) the name of King in it’,[6] i.e. it had been their idea not his. A subsequent anonymous republican military complaint of 1655 maintained that, at the crucial officers’ meeting of 13 December where Lambert showed them the draft ‘Instrument of Government’ and successfully asked for support, the business was arranged by a ‘a few within’[7] the room and the rest were railroaded into going along with it – it was a fait accompli agreed beforehand by its proposers, not a democratic decision. If Cromwell had accepted the crown he would have been in a stronger legal position for future clashes with MPs or Royalists, as the traditional manner of governing in England – and the Law – recognised a King as ‘chief executive’ and thus the focus of obedience. He would have been acting within past precedent, always important in a legalistic age when much of the ‘political class’ (especially MPs) had had a legal training at the Inns of Court. Thus rebellion against him was treason – but was it legal to argue that rebellion against a ‘Lord Protector’ was treason? (The title had been used by a regent during a King’s minority, as by the future Richard III under Edward V and by the Duke of Somerset under his nephew Edward VI.) Some senior judges refused to serve an ‘illegal’ government in 1653-8; others had doubts as to the legality of declaring arrested Royalist rebels in 1655 guilty of ‘treason’, as they had not rebelled against a King, and they refused to convict them which hugely embarrassed the government. The same argument against Cromwell’s regime as illegal could be used by dissident MPs, so if Cromwell had accepted the royal title he would have been in a stronger position. Probably, as in 1657, his reliance on Providence in deciding a thorny issue of principle was behind it; he felt that God had declared against monarchy by allowing Charles I to be defeated and executed, so becoming King would be sinful.[8] But Cromwell had a notoriously elastic conscience, and could often justify his actions on religious grounds if he had a mind to find such a reason – and in his favourite Biblical terminology, there were examples in the Old Testament of a ‘godly’ usurper killing a tyrant and taking his crown (e.g. Jehu, who had overthrown King Ahab of Israel) .

As with Ireton and the ‘Heads of the Proposals’, Cromwell did not take the lead in the mechanics of creating a workable government – which ties in with his often muddled politico-religious thought and political hesitation. He was to keep to this line of having been shown the new constitution by its proposers and urged to accept it or face the threat of new bloodshed when he addressed Parliament in September 1654[9] – though this had the advantage of saving him from political opprobrium from the MPs for forcing a semi-monarchic constitution on them. Notably, he had not taken the lead in the major political actions of kidnapping Charles I from Parliamentary custody in 1647 or purging Parliament in December 1648 either – but he had stepped in afterwards to make the most of what others did. He aroused some charges of hypocrisy or cunning as a result, led by Royalists. The new constitution reflected a reaction to the muddled leadership of a failed Parliament and divided Council of State in April-December 1653, and installed a stronger executive with himself as a ‘constitutional monarch’, using the venerable title of the nation’s interim guardian – ‘Protector’ – during a royal minority for his new office. It was a return to relative normality and orderliness after the chaotic experiments and weak central government of 1649-53. But returning to the normal procedures of election for the new Commons in 1654 brought back social and religious conservatives determined to reassert the Commons’ power, including Presbyterians still brooding over the Army’s veto on their own desired politico-religious settlement in 1647-8.

Cromwell’s ebullient hopes of ‘healing and settling’ from reaching out to the leaders of local society in his Parliaments, as expressed in his usual rambling inaugural speeches to them, were undoubtedly genuine but naïve about the MPs’ priorities. For men like arch-republican Sir Arthur Haselrig, a civilian MP (though a regimental commander in the Civil War) deeply hostile to Cromwell for dissolving the previous legal Parliament by force, the assembly of a proper Commons had been an opportunity to claw back the influence of elected MPs by all means possible and make the ‘swordsmen’ concede the supremacy of the elected assembly.[10] They showed similar short-sightedness to the ‘junto’ of Cromwell’s senior officers, led by Fleetwood, Desborough, and Lambert, in summer 1659, so it was not merely a case of personal hostility to Cromwell for his military coup. The battles of 1647-8 (when the Army had stymied a potentially repressive Presbyterian-led Commons that would not accept religious toleration) were fought out again by civilian MPs obsessed by their past defeats and determined to reassert the dominance of civil over military authority, both with Cromwell in 1654 and with the ‘junto’ in 1659. The hostility between Protector and MPs over this issue of principle was inevitable given the ‘traumas’ of Pride’s Purge and the coup of April 1653, but was not sufficient to challenge the functioning of the constitution; the Protector and Council could govern by executive decrees if needed and the Commons had no mechanism except denial of financial supplies to stop this. In practice the regime was more autocratic than it was supposed to be according to the ‘Instrument’, where the Council functioned as the executive/legislature in the intervals between Parliamentary sessions. Cromwell supposedly needed ‘the advice and consent’ of his Council to initiate policy, but was able to overrule the opposition of substantial groups of Councillors over matters such as a colonial war with Spain in 1654.[11] The Council had no sanctions to control their chief, and equally the Commons had no sanctions against them or Cromwell beyond refusal of supply. The Royalists duly accused Cromwell of being as autocratic as the Turkish Sultan and governing by whim, aided by his military ‘toadies’ like Turkish ‘pashas’.

The precise balance of powers between Council of State and Commons remained unclear, with them supposed to co-operate. The ban on assorted elected Members taking their seats in 1654 and 1656, and the hostility of some who did to the Protector’s powers, indicated that the assertion of Army power over the legislature in April 1653 had not ended the struggle for power as far as many civilians were concerned. The 1654 Parliament’s vote to require Councillors to seek Parliamentary confirmation, thus instituting a degree of legislative control of the executive, had attempted to rein in the Council to the subordinate position of the ‘Derby House Committee’ and the pre-1653 Councils of State. This had never been enforceable in practice, and the Protector had refused to concede control of the militia or a reduction in the unprecedented size of the Army and Navy. Minor points such as his ‘monarchic’ summoning of the House to hear his addresses within the ex-Royal precincts of the Palace of Westminster (the Painted Chamber) rather than going to the Commons Chamber were less significant than issues such as the control or size of the military, and he had conceded that the Protectorship was to be elective not hereditary.[12] This would make it like the Dutch ‘Stadtholdership’, chosen by the provinces’ assemblies (and currently vacant). Nevertheless, the overall impact of the four-and-a-half months’ wrangling of 1654-5 had been that of an impatient autocrat rather than a respectful partner of the House – though he insisted that his stand and his eventual dissolution had been carried out in the interests of the nation as a whole, and some important Members (e.g. Haselrig and the former regicide judge John Bradshaw) had clearly aimed at imposing the House’s (i.e. their) will on him rather than compromising. The fact that Cromwell had the use of Whitehall Palace and Hampton Court like a monarch increased the perception of him as an autocrat, to which the Royalist pamphleteers gave gleeful expression with their imaginative accounts of Cromwell (alleged to be an ex-brewer) and his wife as jumped-up rural bumpkins.[13]

The failure of Parliament and Protector to reach a constitutional agreement on the revision of the ‘Instrument of Government’ in early 1654 preserved the perception of the latter as a one-sided creation by the ‘swordsmen’ imposed on the nation, thus aiding its irreconcilable critics from both republican and Royalist sides. Had Cromwell’s dissolution of the ‘Rump’ at gunpoint in April 1653 so disillusioned Sir Henry Vane, a crucial civilian leader and 1640s ally of his who he then called a ‘whoremaster’,[14] so badly that the latter would never trust him again? Ditto Haselrig? And did their alienation give a lead to truculent MPs? The desire of the Protector for the new Parliament of September 1654 to take a lead in ‘healing and settling’ turned into deadlock, even granted that those MPs who refused to sign a ‘Recognition’ accepting the new form of government – a ‘single person’ and the Commons – were not allowed to take their seats. The demands of MPs like Haselrig for the Protector and Council to be recognised as the delegates (or servants) not masters of the House, with nearly half of the Army only financeable by Parliamentary grant at their whim,[15] was due to principled demands for recognition of the supremacy of civilians (and the Law) over the ‘swordsmen’, as well as an attempt to blackmail Cromwell into following their agenda. There were also calls in the Commons in late 1654 to reduce the Army in size and/or replace it entirely with a more controllable local militia – with whichever was chosen to be answerable to Parliament, as the ‘Parliamentarian’ leadership had demanded of Charles I for his army/militia in any settlement in 1641-2 and 1645-8. Granting Parliament, not the Protector, supremacy in the constitutional order and making him its accountable chief executive would right the illegality done by repeated Army interference in Parliamentary affairs from 1647 to 1653, and end the threat of an autocratic chief executive as feared since 1641. But it would put Cromwell’s freedom of action in danger, and he dared not accept such constraints – his actions in tacitly accepting ‘Pride’s Purge’ of anti-Army MPs in December 1648 and then evicting the remaining MPs in April 1653 show that he distrusted the Members’ ability to govern adequately or in accordance with what he saw as God’s will (the crucial point seems to have been their attitude to religious toleration – the rights of the ‘people of God’ to freedom of worship was essential to him[16]). Also, in secular terms a weak and Parliament-run army or militia could fall prey to Royalist plots or invasion easier. The attitude of Presbyterian MPs to the extent of toleration in the new State Church meant that Cromwell could not concede such terms to men of such attitudes and satisfy his conscience and his role as protector of his co-religionists. The events of 1647-8 had already shown that a House dominated by Presbyterians could not be trusted to allow religious toleration, and Cromwell had served with such advocates of a disciplinarian State Church on the Committee considering the future of the Church in 1652-3. MPs seeking to attack toleration and curb the Army had precipitated earlier coups; this precedent loomed over events in 1654.

A struggle would have followed between MPs and Protector over toleration had he conceded their constitutional demands and so achieved the ratification of the ‘Instrument’ – and thus kept the House in being through 1655 rather than dissolving it. The religious issue has to be remembered in considering why Cromwell did not concede what Parliament demanded – he looked upon himself as the shield for his protégés, the sects, from the threat of a disciplinarian Presbyterian State Church which men like Haselrig, Denzel Holles, and Sir Philip Stapleton had attempted to set up in 1644-8. He could not trust the latter with extra authority over a Protector, while they looked upon him and his Army – the latter also the reason for excessive taxation – as the men who had prevented the retention of a centralised Church in the 1640s and who protected socially disruptive and anarchic zealots. The local JPs who persecuted the Quakers and other seeming anarchists through the 1650s and 1660s were from the same group of gentry who provided most MPs. Divergence between Protector and leading MPs over the toleration of the sects made long-term co-operation between them unlikely, and significant amounts of time were to be devoted to such seemingly minor (but talismanic) issues as the punishment to be meted out to the ‘blasphemous’ Quaker exhibitionist James Nayler – who entered Bristol on a donkey surrounded by ‘disciples’ in an evident blasphemous imitation of Christ entering Jerusalem – in 1656.[17] And as with any military regime, there was the excuse (realistic or not) of allowing civilian control meaning a danger of anarchy and revenge prosecutions. Cromwell thus ‘played safe’ – as did later generals-turned-rulers Franco and Pinochet.

The Major-Generals: unnecessarily worsening an already poor relationship with the provinces?

The political failure of 1654-5, reminiscent of the dissolutions of the House by James I and Charles I, was followed by another serious blow to chances of military-civilian reconciliation. Cromwell reawakened the memories of military control of the localities and determination of governmental policy with his imposition of the ‘Major-Generals’ in 1655, useful if not essential for security after a major plot but causing further antagonism. This was most apparent among the crucial class of county gentry, Presbyterian as well as Royalist and the main electors of MPs (many boroughs had been disenfranchised in 1654). The crucial trigger for the appointment of the Major-Generals was the Royalist ‘Penruddock revolt’ of March 1655, the first rising in England since 1648, after which Cromwell decided on a new co-ordinating body of capable regional commanders to take over the local militia and act swiftly against a repetition – and watch out for plots. Many of those appointed were already in local commands in the region they took over and/or came from the region, e.g. General John Desborough (his brother-in-law) in the South-West, Haynes in East Anglia, Kelsey in Kent, Worsley in Lancashire, and Charles Howard (the only Major-General from the established rural nobility) in Cumbria. They cut through the usually ineffective tangle of regional governance to act as the Protector’s personal agents, swiftly implementing orders from Whitehall, and most were well-known to him (some from service in his own regiment). Their initial role was effectively ‘policing’ against subversion – a seemingly major danger after the 1655 rising, when armed Royalists kidnapped government judges at gunpoint – and they relied on their troops to enforce order in a country already alienated by such blatant ‘force majeure’ by ‘swordsmen’ in 1642-8. This seemed a reversion to the worst excesses of the Civil War; only three of the Major-Generals came from the traditional county elites (one, Charles Howard, from the nobility) and most were zealously ‘godly’ and connected to Independent congregations. Some (not as many as alleged by Royalist propaganda) were of low social class – his enemies sneered that one, William Packer, had been ‘raised from a dung-hill’.[18] Not all were as suspiciously contemptuous of the local gentry as ‘ungodly’ potential subversives, as alleged, and they had reasons for suspicion, but their non-elite backgrounds and religious zeal made building bridges with the local civilian leadership difficult. Cromwell then made matters worse by issuing orders for ‘moral reformation’ and cracking down on ‘immoral’ activities,[19] showing how alien his mindset was to the people he needed to conciliate to broaden his base of support (or at least tolerance). Such centralised control of the localities was alien to England and was even narrower than the officious ‘county committees’ who had run local affairs in Parliamentarian areas in 1642-7; these had represented the ‘reliable’ local civilian elites. Now Cromwell ironically replicated the imposition of trusted regional governors (‘intendants’) sent from Paris to control the regions in 1630s Catholic France, and did not choose people likely to be socially acceptable either – though few of the latter professed his Independent religious sympathies or had backed his 1653 coup. The Royalists could portray them as the ‘bashaws’, i.e. Turkish regional military governors imposed and sacked at a whim by their autocratic, tyrannical Sultan. However effective and personally honest and incorruptible these men were, it was a public relations disaster – though deadlock between Cromwell and the county elites’ MPs over the nature of the regime was already apparent in 1654. The experiment did not change much politically, but had it not been attempted the arbitrary/military nature of the regime would have been less crudely illustrated and existing hostility had less to ‘fix’ upon.

Military rule and excessive taxation in the localities had already played a major role in sparking off revolt across former pro-Parliamentarian districts in 1648, and as then the justification for military control was hampered by there being no long-term excuse for drastic security-measures (once Penruddock had been captured in March 1655). In addition, the ‘Decimation Tax’ on Royalists targeted the people whose antagonism was least dangerous to the Government but revived old hostilities and hampered the possibilities for reconciliation. Even though Royalists themselves could not sit in Parliament and Secretary of State Thurloe, the regime’s spymaster, had thoroughly infiltrated the amateurish ‘Sealed Knot’ network of plotters, younger relatives of victimised Royalists were eligible to sit and would be equally antagonised by their families’ extra tax-burden. Sequestration and compounding-fines had been crippling enough already. Many of the new MPs in the Commons in the later 1650s would have been affected by the tax, and thus have had no reason to support the Government and its large military establishment. The tax was politically disastrous whatever its usefulness to State funds, and showed Cromwell’s naivety about the political necessity for his regime to broaden its base and to reach some compromise with the political ‘nation’ (as represented in the Commons) if the problems of 1654 were not to resume in every Parliament. The clause for exemption from the tax for those who could prove that they were well-affected to the Government was one element of amelioration, but open to abuse; the draconian religious order banning all ex-Anglican clergy from service as ministers or schoolmasters caused more unnecessary resentment.[20] In effect, the regime adopted a ‘siege mentality’ and abandoned conciliation; security was paramount. Did Cromwell listen too much to Thurloe and the generals?

The mixture of security measures and moral reformation that the new local governors were supposed to bring into effect added to antagonism beyond the body of actual or potential Royalists who were irreconcilable. The reality of rule by an unelected Army was brought into areas across the country, instead of being merely a debating-point for MPs eager to take revenge on the ‘swordsmen’ for Pride’s Purge. These intruders to political life in their large ‘provinces’ rarely had local connections apart from Lambert and Charles Howard (the only aristocrat involved) in the North, Fleetwood and his brother and deputy in the South-East Midlands, Goffe in Sussex, and John Barkstead (Governor of the Tower) in London. The low social rank of some generals (such as Berry) and the Independent religious zeal of most of them led to jeers that they were all uncouth yokels and fanatics lording it at the expense of their betters. Many were existing military governors in their areas, e.g. Haynes in East Anglia, and their unpopularity was shown by their failure to control the more democratic election-contests in 1656. The ‘bashaws’, as they were called in an allusion to the arbitrary military despotism of the Ottoman Sultan’s local governors, were a gift to Royalist propaganda and a cause of major discontent at the opening of the next Parliament in autumn 1656;[21] the Protector had to abandon the experiment. It had been a potent reminder of where his power ultimately resided, at a time when ‘healing and settling’ was impossible without playing this down – though even so, the amount of active Royalism seen in the winter 1657-8 invasion-plot, backed by Spain, was minimal. Had the experiment of open military rule not occurred, however, the Commons would still have seen attempts to control the executive, as in 1654, given that the same sorts of MPs resentful of Army coercion in 1647-53 would have been elected.

The House also expressed anger at the impertinence of the senior Army officers’ political role in vocally defending the Instrument in autumn 1654, implying unrealistically that it was none of their business. In reality, a united Army committed to defend the new semi-monarchical order under Cromwell’s control was in the interests of the existing MPs in 1654 – though they could not see it and persisted in trying to reduce the military establishment. Some militant officers were already disaffected with the concept of the Protectorate as too monarchical, and in autumn 1654 the ‘Three Colonels’ (Okey, Alured, and Saunders) launched a petition for a free Parliament in apparent association with Lilburne’s Leveller lieutenant John Wildman. Similar agitation was stirred up in the Channel fleet by Vice-Admiral Lawson, who was evidently too popular to be dismissed for his semi-rebellious behaviour.[22] But these foes of Cromwellian autocracy were in favour of a democratic Parliament elected by a far wider franchise in the manner of the ‘Agreement of the People’, and of toleration for all Protestant sects without a State Church, and thus diametrically opposed to the ideas of the conservative MPs. They had been at feud with Cromwell ever since his role in the Grandees’ suppression of Leveller agitation in the Army in autumn 1647, and Lilburne (sent into ‘internal exile’ on Jersey to remove his threat as a pamphleteer from London in 1654) had made him a regular target. The unlikely link-up of some of these democratic dissidents with the Royalists resulted from their disillusionment with Cromwell – despite the bizarre prospect of the arch-critics of Stuart autocracy in the 1640s now backing the exiled Charles II – and was cemented by the mid-1650s intrigues of disgraced and rather opportunistic republican ‘Leveller’ officer Colonel Sexby, who now turned on his ex-employer Cromwell and proposed to assassinate him. In modern terms, the Leveller ‘fringes’ turned to terrorism, as with the murder plot of Miles Sindercombe to shoot Cromwell en route to open Parliament or blow up part of Whitehall Palace in 1656[23] – with the possibility that one piece of luck could have given them success, at least in removing Cromwell and causing chaos.

Another missed chance for a monarchic settlement?

The idea of a monarchy as the guarantor of legality and stability had been discussed at a crucial ‘planning meeting’ of Cromwell and his senior associates as early as the end of 1651. Cromwell had favoured a government with ‘something of the monarchical in it’, and the conservative lawyers Bulstrode Whitelocke and Sir Thomas Widdrington (the latter to be chosen as Speaker of the 1656 Parliament) had been its main backers. At this early stage the notion of Prince Henry as King had been floated again, as in 1648[24] – the eleven-year-old Prince being a legitimate Stuart but too young to have been ‘in arms’ in 1642-6 like his brothers. Henry – who Charles I had warned not to accept the Crown on the eve of his execution – was noticeably kept in Commonwealth guardianship in 1649-52, in the custody of the Earl of Leicester (father of the Cromwellian Lord Lisle) at Penshurst in Kent. But the plan was eventually abandoned, with him being allowed to join his family abroad instead. Then the idea of restoring a monarchy – with the House of Cromwell replacing that of Stuart – had been briefly raised but abandoned in December 1653, and again in the 1654-5 Parliament. Its usefulness in returning to legitimate civilian rule – the aim of those MPs who sought to reduce military power by controlling Army funding and size – was shown by the fact that its sponsors included the future apostle of a limited and Commons-controlled monarchy, Anthony Ashley Cooper (then a Councillor, but shortly to resign and join the ranks of critical civilian MPs). Cooper, a man of intense ambition and unscrupulous realism who had abandoned the Royalist cause in Dorset for the winning side in 1644, had assisted in the ‘moderate’ closure of the Nominated Parliament in December 1653. He would not have taken such a line if it had not seemed feasible as a solution to current political tension, and arguably he was still pursuing the same ideal of a limited monarchy in the ‘Exclusion Crisis’ nearly 30 years later (Cooper had his own reasons for seeking to reduce the power of Cromwell’s military aides – his local Dorset Parliamentarian foe of 1644, William Sydenham, was one of Cromwell’s military Councillors and thus a probable block to his advancement). The ambiguous nature of the Protectorate was then exposed by the concern of senior judges about the legality of prosecuting a rebel against a non-royal Head of State for treason during the trials of the Penruddock rebels in 1655.[25] To make matters worse, the legal validity of current tax-arrangements and of State ordinances were then challenged in the Cony case and Chief Justice Rolle had to be removed; the senior Cromwellians Whitelocke and Widdrington preferred resigning as Commissioners of the Great Seal to compromising their consciences.[26] Some effective legal remedy was needed to the continuing dilemmas, and committing obstreperous arguers (lawyers included) to gaol was only a short-term answer which in itself showed that the Protectorate relied on force.

1657: Stability thwarted?

The idea of Cromwell as King was revived by leading pro-regime figures in 1656-7 as an answer to the problems of constitutional deadlock and a force for stability. The long-term monarchist Widdrington, now Speaker of the House, was joined by the government’s main City financier, Sir Christopher Pack; by Cromwell’s junior supporter and immanent ambassador to Denmark, William Jephson; and probably also by behind-the scenes civilian advisers such as Lord Broghill, Irish civilian head of the Scottish council from 1656 (for its chances of success and possible outcome in