The huge scale and unique nature of Cromwell’s achievement speaks for itself: he was a soldier who never lost a battle or failed in a siege, the only commoner ever to be offered the Crown of England, and the only person ever to be offered that crown who preferred to rule without it. He also remains one of the most puzzling people in British history.
John Morrill has carried out the only genuinely original research into Cromwell’s career in recent times, dedicated to the period before he came to power, and decided that three successive experiences formed him as a man. The first was loss of status, when a promising early public career, sponsored by a rich uncle, ended in 1630 with Oliver being reduced to a working tenant farmer. The second was religious conversion, to a classic Puritanism, which brought him to the attention of godly aristocrats and assisted his political and social rehabilitation. As a result, he became a zealous Parliamentarian at the outbreak of war and underwent his third experience, of rapid promotion to a general’s rank and national fame. He emerged with a powerful sense of having been given a special mission by his God, and with the devoted loyalty of the army which was to make the English Revolution.
As Colin Davis has demonstrated, it is hard to define precisely the sort of religion in which Cromwell believed, within the broad spectrum of mainstream English Puritanism. He patronized all kinds of Protestant clergy who were prepared to accept the Church as reformed after the Civil War, and was also committed to liberty of conscience for godly Protestants who wanted to contract out of it. He was never interested in programmes, forms, creeds, structures or disputations, and was not a theologian any more than he was an intellectual in general. He was no stereotypical Puritan, having a personal love of dancing, music, smoking and practical jokes, and was unusual among the godly of his time in failing to give much importance to the devil. Instead he had a vivid personal relationship with an all-powerful God, and was prepared to recognize that some religious opponents had godliness in them that might leave them open to salvation. When Protestant extremists were locked up for attacking orthodox doctrine or disturbing ministers, he tried to release them as soon as possible or to ensure that they were kept in comfortable conditions. Catholics fared even better under his rule than they had under that of Charles I; only one priest was executed in the course of it, and that was against Cromwell’s will. His dislike of persecution seems therefore to have been deep and genuine, as was his desire for the comprehension and reconciliation of different Protestants; the real problem was, as said, that his regime failed to persuade the nation to embrace either.
As a statesman, he had little interest in theories of government, and never drew up a blueprint for one. That had the defect of making him completely reliant on others for ways and means to rule the land, and when those around him ran out of ideas, he was politically paralysed. He embraced the broad principles of the Parliamentarian cause, and of the New Model Army, respecting the existing ranks of society but believing that godliness and goodness could be found in all, and vaguely recognizing the need for a better provision of education and of legal and social justice. He was prepared to work with or lead any form of government which seemed likely to fulfil the ideals of his soldiers and their civilian allies, and which placed restrictions on the power of the head of state; and he welcomed and emphasized those restrictions just as avidly when he himself was that head.
All this seems admirable, if woolly. The associated problem, which has made Cromwell’s career endlessly controversial, is in attempting to discern where flexibility and open-mindedness shade into duplicity, deviousness and manipulation. He was a brilliant politician, whose success, like that which he enjoyed as a soldier, depended on confusing and outmanoeuvring his opponents before launching a decisive strike. His classic pattern of behaviour was to conceal his thoughts and intentions during a long period in which he took opinions and considered options, and then take sudden dramatic action. Repeatedly, he allied with individuals and groups at particular periods, only to discard them when they became inconvenient or redundant, and to blame them for failures of policy. He had the habit of giving people of widely differing views the impression that he sympathized with each of them, inevitably embittering many when his subsequent actions proved otherwise. He altered the tone of his speeches significantly according to the audience at which they were aimed, portraying himself as a godly radical at one moment and a conservative the next. He kept altering his public representation of key events in his own career, such as his expulsion of the remnant of the Long Parliament in 1653, to suit the political needs of the moment. When he favoured a policy which he found to be unpopular, such as the legal readmission of Jews to England, he first tried to get somebody else to take responsibility for it and then removed it from public debate while enacting it by indirect means. While preserving Catholics from persecution in practice, he was quite capable of whipping up feeling against them in Parliament when he seemed likely to gain political advantage by doing so.
Historians can often, quite genuinely, know more about people who are long dead than those who lived alongside them could do. Cromwell is not one of these. Very few of his contemporaries doubted the sincerity of his religious faith and of his commitment to liberty of expression for a broad spectrum of Protestant belief and to limitations on the powers of those who governed in church and state. What troubled many of them was the extent to which these ideals became tainted by the ruthlessness and cunning with which he wielded authority and steered his way through politics. In an age in which public life was full of able, self-made newcomers thrown up by civil war and revolution, Cromwell stood out to his contemporaries as somebody whom others found unusually unpredictable, inscrutable and slippery. Many of them remained uncertain of how self-centred, self-deceiving, exploitative and untrustworthy he really was; and so must we be.
Cromwell and Posterity
In the generation after his death, Oliver Cromwell had virtually no friends at all; he had managed to pull off the unfortunate trick of becoming the leader of a lost cause without seeming romantic. He had died in office rather than as a martyr or war hero, and those who had supported him could make him a scapegoat for the failure of the republic. He had in fact no influential admirers for well over a century, until the American Revolution rekindled an interest in republicanism in the English-speaking world; the Evangelical Revival made a strenuous, godly Protestantism socially respectable again; pious army officers began to feature as heroes of the expanding British Empire, and independent Protestant churches expanded enormously in number and political power. All this recreated a natural constituency of support for the Protector, and it was supplied with its key text in 1845 by Thomas Carlyle, who had grown up in an independent Church with a Calvinist belief in a predestined number of godly in each generation. To Carlyle, the Puritans had been the creators of Britain’s subsequent greatness, and Cromwell literally the chosen of God. Carlyle’s edition of Cromwell’s letters and speeches established him for all time as a sincerely religious man with an acute desire to do right. It revealed his fears and doubts, his moments of elation and depression, and made him accessible to a modern age in a way in which most previous rulers, who have left no such personal records, are not. It became the bedrock on which future biographies of him were built, and also, with Paradise Lost and The Pilgrim’s Progress, one of the three classics of Puritan literature.
As a result, Cromwell became the towering figure of seventeenth-century English history, a moral success even though a political failure, who had saved his country from tyranny and shown it a dream of a better future which eventually it achieved. He was a champion of the people who had yet not threatened the rich and titled, and a defender of freedom and tolerance who had also acted as a defence against real revolution. As such he was pretty well the perfect hero for middle-class England in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and could be appropriated by a string of authors with widely differing political views. To be sure, some conservatives, at all social levels, still remembered him as bad man, a few extreme socialists regarded him as a person who had betrayed a revolution by preventing genuine social reform, and Irish nationalists increasingly demonized him as a conqueror and a butcher. In Britain, however, his popularity only increased with time: with the coming of the third millennium he came third in the national poll to find the greatest Briton of the entire second millennium.
The online database available in 2008 had more than 2,000 titles that included his name, and there were more than 160 biographies of him held in British copyright libraries. To specialists, however, only five really mattered, and all those have been published since 1991: by Barry Coward, Peter Gaunt, Colin Davis, John Morrill and Martyn Bennett. What was really significant about them was their virtual unanimity: although they made different emphases, they showed us the same Cromwell, who is the one who has dominated the British imagination ever since the time of Carlyle. The reason for this is very simple: he is the man who features in his own letters and speeches, and what historians are doing is accepting the image that Cromwell presented of himself. Of all of them, it has been John Morrill who has perceived this problem most clearly, and posed the question why modern biographers always believe Cromwell rather than his critics, seeing him as a genuinely admirable person who movingly reveals his true thoughts, rather than as a master of spin. Professor Morrill himself could not reach an answer, and the solution may be simply that biographers make the letters and speeches the central evidence for their interpretation and work outwards from them. It is especially interesting to see what changes when scholars approach the man from a different direction. Sean Kelsey has published a deeply sympathetic portrait of the Commonwealth government of 1649–53, which shows Cromwell and his army, by contrast, as perpetrating a series of acts of injustice and misrepresentation. Christopher Durston, looking at the regime of the Major-Generals, has suggested that the Protector was an inept and unreliable leader, whom events took by surprise and propelled from one policy to another.
What is needed is somebody prepared to reverse the usual construction of a study of Cromwell: to start by recovering the context of his actions and seeing how everybody else involved in it viewed them. Only at the end would such an exercise consider his self-representation, in the light of the other perceptions and as a process of engagement with them. Such a method is clearly unworkable for a biography, being just too big a job: it needs to be applied to specific important episodes instead. In default of it, the Victorian Cromwell will continue to dominate both the scholarly imagination and the national one in the near future.
