CROMWELL alias WILLIAMS, Henry (1625-73), of Bodsey House and later of Ramsey Abbey, Ramsey, Hunts.

The Cromwells of Hinchingbrooke and later of Ramsey represented the senior line of the family, being the heirs of Sir Richard Williams†, who had assumed the surname of his uncle Thomas Cromwell†, later 1st earl of Essex, when that uncle had been at the height of his power in the 1530s.19Vis. Hunts. 1613 (Cam. Soc. xliii), 79-80; Familiae Minorum Gentium, 435-6. The estates in Huntingdonshire acquired by Sir Richard as a result of his uncle’s dissolution of the monasteries ensured that the family’s new-found fortunes survived Thomas Cromwell’s fall from favour. For just over a century from the 1530s the Cromwells were one of the leading families of the county. On succeeding to these lands in 1604, this MP’s grandfather, Sir Oliver Cromwell†, became the most powerful man in Huntingdon, which was why he was able to represent the county in all but one of the Parliaments called between 1589 and 1625. The future lord protector was originally no more than one of their poor relations, being the son of Sir Oliver’s younger brother Robert†. Yet during the half century in which Sir Oliver presided over its fortunes the fate of this branch of the Cromwells was sealed. The parliamentary career of his grandson between 1654 and 1673 would amount to no more than the dying embers of their once-dominant interest. Already in the 1620s the indebtedness which would eventually cripple them was evident and as early as 1627 Sir Oliver was forced to sell the family seat at Hinchingbrooke to Sir Sidney Montagu*.20HMC Buccleuch, i. 266, iii. 319; VCH Hunts. ii. 136. This was a symbolic moment, for within two generations the Cromwells had disappeared and the Montagus had claimed the leading position within the county which had once been theirs.

The young Henry Cromwell alias Williams had little prospect of succeeding his grandfather, given that his father, also Henry, already had two older sons, James and Pembroke, who had survived infancy. With the sale of Hinchingbrooke in 1627, the family moved to Ramsey Abbey, a substantial house in the north-east corner of the county on the edge of the fens. However, in 1626 our MP’s father Henry had been provided with an estate of his own nearby by his uncle, Sir Oliver’s younger brother Henry Cromwell† of Upwood, who, in return for a promise of payment of the marriage portions for his two daughters and his granddaughter, Anna Cromwell, leased his lands to his nephew.21Add. Ch. 53656-53667. Since Henry the uncle died four years later, it was in the house at Upwood, a couple of miles to the south west of Ramsey, that Henry the future MP was brought up.22Add. 34397, f. 32v. In 1631 his father granted the reversion on the lands at Upwood to his cousin, Oliver Cromwell*, for a nominal sum of money.23Add. Ch. 53668.

The sympathies of the Cromwells of Ramsey were clearly with the king from the outset of the civil war. At an early stage of the conflict, Sir Oliver’s refusal to support the work of his nephew Oliver Cromwell resulted in his house being plundered and his estates sequestered.24Warwick, Mems. Charles I, 278; CCC 90, 979. Sir Oliver’s son Henry raised a regiment of horse whose attempt to remove the plate of the Cambridge colleges to York in August 1642 was famously intercepted by Oliver Cromwell, Francis Russell* and Valentine Wauton*.25Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 188. This Henry was later taken prisoner, whereupon his eldest son, James, succeeded him as the regiment’s colonel.26CCC 979; P.R. Newman, Royalist Officers in Eng. and Wales (London and New York, 1981), 95. The war certainly prevented Henry junior completing his education and it would be unsurprising if instead he served in his father’s regiment. As the second brother, Pembroke, was already dead, the death of James Cromwell in 1646 now placed Henry junior in line to inherit the Cromwell estates.27Add. 33463, f. 44. However, the inheritance was diminishing fast.

The war had done nothing to help the Cromwells’ financial difficulties. The tales of woe told by Sir Oliver and Henry senior to the Committee for Compounding, while no doubt exaggerated to gain sympathy, reveal just how big the problem was. According to Sir Oliver, his income was £1,200, but half of that had been used to raise a mortgage of £2,000 while he owed debts of £2,440. His son painted a similar picture, claiming that his debts amounted to £6,000, with the result that most of his annual income of £700 had been mortgaged for that sum. By May 1649 the total for the debts Henry senior asked to be taken into consideration had risen to over £11,000.28CCC 978-9. On this occasion Henry senior was able to make good use of his kinship ties, for it was as a favour to Oliver Cromwell that the Commons agreed on 9 July 1649 to remit the fine which had been imposed and to discharge his sequestration.29CCC 979; CJ vi. 256a.

There is no doubt that the Cromwells were indeed facing financial ruin. As early as 1646 there was speculation that they might be forced to sell Upwood and by 1649 they had parted with it to Stephen Phesant*.30Add. 33463, f. 38; VCH Hunts. ii. 238. Equally drastic was the decision in 1648 to sell their lands at Broughton to Henry’s brother-in-law, William Hetley, for £4,700. This was probably no more than a legal fiction intended to underwrite a mortgage, but, if so, it proved insufficient and these lands had to be sold off to Sir Robert Barkham three years later.31Add. 34401, f. 119; C6/138/110; VCH Hunts. ii. 160. It was also in 1648 that they were forced to sell the manor of Wistow to Nicholas Pedley* to raise £3,500.32Hunts. RO, Acc. 848/5; Acc. 783/7; Add. 33462, f. 140; Lansd. 921, f. 79v. Their decision to proceed with the drainage of the fenlands at Ramsey in 1652 thus has the appearance of a desperate attempt to extract as much profit as they could from the lands they still held, although that particular scheme soon involved them in an expensive boundary dispute with the proprietors of the Bedford Level.33VCH Hunts. ii. 114-15; Add. 33462, ff. 141-155. Although she was nominally a sole heiress, the marriage of Henry junior to his second cousin, Anna Cromwell, was in fact further evidence of their distress.34Familiae Minorum Gentium, 435. Anna Cromwell was the granddaughter for whom Henry senior had become responsible as part of the deal by which he had been bequeathed Upwood. Marrying her to Henry junior amounted to an admission that he would be unable to raise the portion of £1,000 he had promised her. She also shared his royalist sympathies.35Harl. 2311. What is unclear is how far the decision by the Cromwells of Ramsey to side with the king had been the decisive factor in pushing their already overstrained finances beyond recovery. At the very least it can be noted that the civil war had broken out just at the point at which the family probably needed to exercise the greatest prudence.

Despite the protection it would have offered them against their creditors, Sir Oliver Cromwell’s great age and our MP’s record in the civil war ruled both of them out for election to the 1654 Parliament, so it fell to Henry junior to uphold the family interest. His election for one of the three county seats on 12 July 1654 spoilt the plan of Edward Montagu II* whereby he and Phesant would have been joined by Griffith Lloyd*. Phesant’s election in third place behind Cromwell was a stark demonstration of how, with the sales of their estates, the Cromwells’ position in the county was passing to others. Cromwell’s role in this first Parliament seems to have been confined mainly to a handful of committees.36CJ vii. 374a, 380a, 381a, 399b. There was only one issue on which he is known to have taken a clear stance. In what was an unusual step for a novice MP, he was a teller, supporting the suspension of the act for the relief of creditors in the division on 25 October 1654.37CJ vii. 378b. His family’s indebtedness is a sufficient explanation for that involvement. His interest in fen drainage likewise explains why he was named to the committee to consider the petition from the syndicate who had undertaken to drain the Lincolnshire fens.38CJ vii. 380a. Two years later an army officer, John Balleston, would claim that Cromwell, Philip Wodehouse* and Henry Cromwell* had spoken about introducing a motion in favour of ‘prelacy’ during this Parliament, although it would seem that neither of the Cromwells were being serious when they had discussed this.39TSP v. 370.

Cromwell probably faced few difficulties in gaining re-election to Parliament in 1656. By now he was being accorded the title of ‘Colonel’ (in contexts which leave is no doubt that it was he rather than his father or Henry Cromwell), which suggests that he had already been appointed to that position in the Huntingdonshire militia.40CJ vii. 438a, 520b, 611a; Burton’s Diary, i. 147, 154; iii. 49, 249, 253; iv. 97, 106; Clarendon SP, iii. 469. If so, he was, for the first time, showing a willingness to hold local office, and, even more significantly, the authorities were now willing to trust him with it. But he did not therefore simply follow a preferred government line in Parliament. He quickly proved himself able to act as his own man, and, more often than not, his views on particular measures were very much dictated by his own personal interests. Thus, the renewed attempt to legislate on behalf of creditors was as unwelcome to him as the previous one had been and on 1 November 1656 he again acted as teller accordingly. His own experience of litigation may also have made him sympathetic towards the moves to reduce the numbers of attorneys and solicitors.41CJ vii. 438a, 449a. It is rather less clear why he was one of the tellers in the vote on 29 November on whether to reject the bill declaring the jurisdiction of the court of admiralty; he sided with those who got the bill defeated.42CJ vii. 461b. With regard to the Naylor case, there is no doubt that he favoured tough action. On 15 December he argued against the moves by John Lambert* and George Berkeley* to impose a snap vote on the subject and the following day voiced the view that Naylor should be whipped from Westminster to Aldgate as the most appropriate punishment for his heresies.43Burton’s Diary, i. 147, 154.

Cromwell caused a fuss on 21 January by intervening in the debate on the militia bill which proposed to continue the decimation tax. Responding directly to William Boteler*, the major-general whose territories included Huntingdonshire, Cromwell dared to suggest that some of the major-generals had ‘acted unjustly and against law’. On being challenged by another major-general, Thomas Kelsey*, to name names, he declared himself only too willing to do so, whereupon he was silenced by order of the House.44CJ vii. 481b; Burton’s Diary, i. 369; TSP vi. 20-1. It was at this point that he made most use of his connections with the lord protector, for, fearing recriminations from some of the major-generals, he obtained an audience with Oliver Cromwell on 26 January to substantiate his claims. According to Vincent Gookin*, the protector refused to take this meeting seriously and showed that there was no hard feelings between them by presenting Henry with his cloak and gloves. Henry took great delight in showing off these gifts in the Commons the following day.45Bodl. Carte 228, f. 86v; TSP vi. 21. The subtext of his comments on 21 January had been the unfairness of the decimation tax and on 29 January he had the satisfaction of acting as a teller for those who succeeded in halting the militia bill’s passage.46CJ vii. 483b. The decision to refuse his request for leave on 4 March confirms that he had succeeded in making himself unpopular with some of his colleagues.47CJ vii. 498b; Burton’s Diary, i. 381.

For Cromwell alias Williams the kingship question could never be considered as simply a matter of state. As his audience the previous January had shown, his connections could always be used to obtain an entrée to the lord protector in ways which could be used for the family’s benefit. Their surname might offer protection against their rivals or indeed their creditors. For this reason, if for no other, it was in his interest to entrench Oliver Cromwell in power and it does seem likely that Henry voted for the kingship and thus the full provisions of the Humble Petition and Advice.48CJ vii. 520b, 521a; Narrative of the Late Parliament (1657), 22 (E.935.5). That support was to carry over into the next Parliament.

The death of the first Protector Cromwell and his succession by his son, Richard*, did little to alter our MP’s calculations, and once again saw him returned to Parliament. So long as the new lord protector clung on to power, his second cousin seems to have remained loyal to him. In the Commons he played his part in upholding the view that the new Parliament had been properly constituted. He took offence on 3 February 1659 when Sir Arthur Hesilrige* made an aside in the debate on Robert Overton’s imprisonment implying that Overton was not the only person who had dabbled in plotting (he may have been alluding to George Villiers, 2nd duke of Buckingham). Cromwell seems, for some reason, to have misunderstood Hesilrige to mean those MPs who, like himself, were the sons of royalists, and he angrily retorted that it was ‘a great honour to them that they were sent by their country here’. Once it became clear that the House thought Cromwell had a point, the moment was allowed to pass.49Burton’s Diary, iii. 49. Lest it be thought that he was himself a closet royalist, Cromwell took care nine days later to move that the former royalist Robert Danvers alias Villiers* be imprisoned as well as expelled from the Commons.50Burton’s Diary, iii. 249, 253. The same sort of thinking can be seen in Cromwell’s attitude towards the Other House. Not only did he support the motion on 8 March that the Commons should transact business with the Other House, thereby upholding the terms of the Humble Petition and Advice, he was also anxious to preserve the claims of the peers, assuming, that is, that they had supported Parliament. When the Commons proceeded to add that caveat to this motion, it was Cromwell, along with Sir John Copleston*, who counted the votes for the yeas.51CJ vii. 611b-612a. The following day (9 Mar.) he made a couple of interventions in debate to defend the presence of the Scottish and Irish MPs, again because that formed part of the constitutional settlement which had been laid down in the Humble Petition.52Burton’s Diary, iv. 97, 106. Given his implied criticisms of him in the 1656 Parliament, Cromwell was an obvious person to sit on the committee to prepare the impeachment article against Boteler (12 Apr.).53CJ vii. 637a.

The fall of Richard Cromwell* in late April 1659 removed the final incentive to dissuade Henry from supporting the return of the king. Almost immediately he made contact with royalist agents, making sure that they took notice of him by telling them that he could win over the deposed protector to their side. On 11 May 1659 John Mordaunt reported to Charles that Henry proposed to do this ‘to serve his family’.54Clarendon SP, iii. 469. In the event, this plan came to nothing, but after the Restoration this was probably enough to earn him his nomination as a knight of the Royal Oak.55Burke Commoners, i. 689. As it was, his loyalty then led him to be appointed to all the major local commissions, giving him at last the full role in county government which he no doubt thought his due. The claim that he responded to the Restoration by reverting to the name of Williams can be overstated.56Whitelocke, Diary, 611. The family had long used ‘Williams alias Cromwell’ and ‘Cromwell alias Williams’ interchangeably as the most formal versions of their surname and it was the ‘Williams alias Cromwell’ form which appears in the Ramsey manorial records in the period immediately after Henry had taken possession of the family estates in 1657.57Add. 33454. All that seems to have happened after 1660 was that Henry, for obvious reasons, preferred to use ‘Williams’ rather than ‘Cromwell’ as the usual shortened form.

Whatever name he used, his financial difficulties remained the same. With many of the other manors already sold or mortgaged, the core estates at Ramsey were now under threat. One of Henry’s first actions on succeeding his father in 1657 seems to have been to sell some of the land at Ramsey to his stepmother, Lady Elizabeth Ferrers, presumably with a view to paying off his creditors.58PROB11/299/34. The valuation of £2,000 a year against his name in the order of the Royal Oak list must be an exaggeration.59Burke Commoners, i. 689. Complete bankruptcy could for time being only just about be staved off. Even so, his local standing seemed unaffected by this shrinkage of the family estates and he was able to claim one of the county seats in both 1660 and 1661.60HP Commons 1660-1690. His loyalty to the court in the Convention gained him a court office as a gentleman of the privy chamber in 1671 and a commission as a captain in the Grenadier Guards in 1672.61Carlisle, Privy Chamber, 188; CSP Dom. 1671-2, p. 249. All this served to give him additional protection against his creditors. With his death in 1673 any further struggle to keep the estates together became pointless, especially as he had left no male heir.62Harl. 2311, ff. 136-137v. What remained passed to his two surviving sisters, Karina Hetley and Elizabeth English, who sold up, whereupon the lands at Ramsey were bought by Silus Titus†.63VCH Hunts. ii. 194. To blame Henry Cromwell for this final misfortune would be unfair. The real damage had been done by his immediate forebears well before his much-diminished inheritance had passed to him in 1657 and, whatever he did, the spiral of debt condemned him to eventual bankruptcy. From the 1650s onwards the fall of the senior branch of the Cromwells had been only a matter of time.