CROMWELL, Oliver (1599-1658), of Ely, Cambs., Drury Lane, King St. and the Cockpit, Whitehall, Westminster.

Oliver Cromwell and his son Richard Cromwell are unique not only in the 1640-1660 section of this History but in the entire series of History of Parliament volumes in being the only Members of the House of Commons ever to become English heads of state. Furthermore, few figures in English history have been more studied than Oliver Cromwell, and few have been more inclined to self-reflection and motivated by a sense of divine calling.123Barclay, Electing Cromwell, 4. Though historians may regret the lacunae in Cromwell’s correspondence, his public life when measured against the general standard of Parliament-men of the 1640s and 50s is richly documented; and despite the well-known doubts about his motives at particular crisis points, such as the regicide of Charles I and the expulsion in April 1653 of the sitting Parliament, he has left ample material to provide insights into his thoughts and actions. The difficulties faced by a parliamentary historian, and indeed any biographer of Cromwell, are the judgments of proportion and the pitfalls of hindsight, perils which attend the telling of every episode in his life. The first appearance of Cromwell in the House of Commons, in the 1628 Parliament, sitting as a burgess for Huntingdon, the town of his birth and residence, seems superficially to have set the pattern for his later parliamentary behaviour and concerns. On 11 February 1629, in what has been interpreted as a pre-arranged series of interventions, Cromwell spoke to denounce Richard Neile, bishop of Winchester, for protecting and promoting Arminian clergy, reporting information passed to him by his former schoolmaster, Dr Thomas Beard.124Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 61-2; HP Commons 1604-29, ‘Oliver Cromwell’. Hostility to the policies of the higher clergy and evidence of being part of a concerted group of activists are Cromwellian characteristics readily recognized from his later career.

His public life had begun modestly in Huntingdon. He signed the electoral return for the borough as a burgess there in 1621, and became a magistrate for the liberty of Huntingdon in 1624. The claim that he became bailiff (mayor) of the town in 1626 rests on a doubtful interpretation of a reference to Cromwell’s ‘under-bailiff’, which could mean a civic official, but just as equally, a farm servant.125HP Commons 1604-29, ‘Oliver Cromwell’; Ferrar Pprs. ed. Blackstone, 247-8. There is at least evidence of progress along the cursus honorum. The evidence suggests, however, that to Cromwell himself, the early 1630s marked a time of turbulence in his own mind, and in both his private and his public lives. This period in his life has been described by recent historians variously as his ‘lowest point’, ‘a low plateau’, a time marked by ‘mendacity’ on his part towards a senile uncle whose lands he might have hoped to inherit.126Oxford DNB; Barclay, Electing Cromwell, 10; S. Healy, ‘1636: the Unmaking of Oliver Cromwell’, in P. Little ed. Oliver Cromwell: New Perspectives (Basingstoke, 2009), 34. In May 1631, seemingly as a result of faction-fighting among civic leaders in Huntingdon over renewal of the town’s charter, in which Cromwell was the loser after a snub by Robert Bernard*, he removed from Huntingdon to St Ives, five miles distant. This was a change of status as well as of residence: he became a tenant farmer rather than a freehold proprietor. By January 1635 he had embraced a lively Christian faith after a conversion experience that probably coincided with a personal financial and existential crisis. By that time he could confidently write a bold, almost impertinent, letter to George Storie, a London merchant, to remind him to continue to fund a lectureship that Storie himself had established. Lectureships and the freedom of parishioners to fund godly sermons were to be a later special interest of Cromwell’s in Parliament. Another move of house, to Ely in 1636, brought immediate social recognition in the form of inclusion perhaps in the commission of the peace and certainly in the governance of an important local charity. By October 1638, his crisis was sufficiently in the past for Cromwell to be able to write to ‘Mrs St Johns’, possibly Elizabeth St John, recently become the second wife of Oliver St John*, and a kinswoman of Cromwell’s, to review his own progress from ‘chief of sinners’ to one trying ‘to walk in the light’. The letter included what was to become a familiar epistolary trope, lobbying again, this time it seems on behalf of a poor schoolmaster.127Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 80, 96-7.

John Williams, bishop of Lincoln, in a discussion with the king in 1645, recalled the Cromwell he knew in Huntingdonshire before 1640 as ‘a common spokesman for sectaries, [who] maintained their part with stubbornness’.128J. Hacket, Scrinia Reserata (2 vols. 1693), ii. 212. A recent appraisal of the evidence surrounding a contemporary story that Cromwell preached at a fenland conventicle in the 1630s concludes that he may have attended and spoken at such gatherings, even though it seems rather less likely that he delivered sermons.129Heath, Flagellum, 18; Barclay, Electing Cromwell, 31, 68-74. Modern authorities on his economic affairs in that decade are persuaded that older accounts which cast him as a straightforward opponent of government plans to drain the fens are mistaken. He is now thought only to have offered advice to those affected by the land improvement schemes, not to have aligned himself with any principled opposition to them, still less with direct action over them.130Lindley, Fenland Riots, 95-6; Oxford DNB; Barclay, Electing Cromwell, 75- 92. The popular notion of Cromwell as irretrievably at odds with the government of the 1630s is not borne out by evidence, which shows that on such contentious issues as Ship Money, distraint of knighthood and fen drainage he was essentially a conformist, and if indeed he frequented conventicles he was not apprehended or punished for it by the church courts.131Oxford DNB. Although a story from Cromwell’s political enemies reports how he would have left England had the Grand Remonstrance of November 1641 been thwarted, he is unusual among the propertied puritan activists with whom he was linked in having no known material stake in colonial ventures.132Clarendon, Hist. i. 420. Many of his extensive kinship group, which placed him on the margins of the political and religious circle of Robert Rich†, 2nd earl of Warwick, invested in the Providence Island Company, or the Saybrook Company. Among these were Oliver St John*, Sir Thomas Barrington*, John Hampden* and Sir Gilbert Gerard*. Cromwell by contrast cannot be shown to have invested a penny in colonial schemes, or to have expressed beyond any evidential doubt an interest in emigration to a specific colony in the New World.133Barclay, Electing Cromwell, 67; Heath, Flagellum, 16; S.K. Roberts, ‘“One that would sit well at the mark”: the early parlty. career of Oliver Cromwell, 1640-1642’, in Little ed. Oliver Cromwell: New Perspectives, 51. Taking his public and private life in the 1630s as a whole, he seems more typical of a minor gentleman or substantial townsman than he does of a member of the county gentry.

Parliamentary career, 1640-Feb. 1642

Superficially, it seems natural that Cromwell should have been a credible parliamentary candidate at Cambridge, which was only 17 miles from his home at Ely. But Cromwell’s election to the Short Parliament for Cambridge requires some explaining, since his links with the university town were not strong. Theories that he was drafted in because of his skills as an advocate against fen drainage or as a client of the earl of Warwick do not convince.134A. Barclay, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the Cambridge Elections of 1640’, PH, xxix. 155-6. The kernel of truth in the explicitly hostile post-Restoration biography of Cromwell, Flagellum, by James Heath, has been shown to provide a more persuasive explanation. It now seems likely that Cromwell was promoted to the corporation of Cambridge as someone who would represent the town vigorously at Westminster, promoted by a number of townsmen whose networks and views were demonstrably puritan.135Barclay, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the Cambridge Elections’, 158-9; Barclay, Electing Cromwell, 115-21. His fellow-burgess, Thomas Meautys, a nominee of the new lord keeper and the town’s high steward, Sir John Finch†, was an office-holder who could be relied upon to uphold the line of the government in any Parliament. Heath’s narrative seems all the more credible in outline, if not in detail, because it passes over in the most general terms the interval between Cromwell’s first electoral success in 1640 and the beginning of the civil war. As is the case with so many Members of the Short Parliament, Cromwell’s role in that assembly is unknown.

Cromwell’s second election for Cambridge in 1640 is as surrounded by unresolved doubts as the first. The only surviving indenture gives the name of an alderman whose election was evidently not judged good, and the townsmen rejected a restrained attempt by Finch to lobby on behalf of his brother, (Sir) Nathaniel Finch*. It is not known whether Thomas Meautys stood again in this contest, though it seems likely that he would have done, but in the event it was Cromwell and another Cambridge common council-man, John Lowry, who were returned and who took their seats in the Commons almost immediately. There was thus presumably a double return for Cambridge, but the committee of privileges of the Long Parliament seems never to have been asked to adjudicate on it.136Barclay, Electing Cromwell, 124-6. The effect of the election in Cambridge was to ensure that both its Parliament-men were now sympathetic to the ‘junto’, the group in both Houses of Parliament that opposed the policies of the king, and in Cromwell it seems probable that the town had returned a man opposed in particular to the Arminian regime of Matthew Wren, since 1638 bishop of Ely. The dean and chapter of Ely may at the very least have been content that the new lease of impropriated tithes, signed only days after the election, was to a new tenant, not to Cromwell, lessee since 1636. Recent research concludes that Cromwell sold his lease of the tithes, and that he entered the Long Parliament comparatively cash-rich.137Barclay, Electing Cromwell, 99-102, 142. It seems likely that the disposal of his most important financial asset and his entering the Commons for his third Parliament in November 1640 were linked; motivated by a sense of divine calling, Cromwell was intent on making an impact at Westminster.

Despite his determination, the Cromwell of November 1640 could not claim a central place in the opposition junto led in the Commons by John Pym*, but quickly showed himself an energetic advocate of cases associated with the godly interest. Between 3 November and the recess of September 1641 he was named to 22 committees. Within a few days of the Parliament’s opening (9 Nov.), he was named to his first, on the petition of Alexander Leighton, a Scots minister and bodily sufferer at the hands of the Caroline government. On the back of that nomination, he presented a parallel petition from the then obscure John Lilburne, the future soldier and Leveller. Cromwell’s intervention can be seen as part of an orchestrated plan to bring forward the sufferings of victims of the regime, not only in the interests of the individuals concerned, but also in order to embarrass and expose the government. There seems no reason to believe that Cromwell and Lilburne knew each other before this episode, though Lilburne considered Cromwell to be the ‘principal instrument’ by which he gained his freedom from prison.138Procs LP, i. 64, 66, 71; D’Ewes (N), 531; J. Lilburne, The Copy of a Letter (1645), 6 (E.296.5); Roberts, ‘Early Parlty. Career’, 40-1. Before the end of December, Cromwell had been named to other committees on petitions from other claimants against the government and its favoured patentees. One was a clergyman whose tithes had been lost to fen drainage; another claimed recompense for helping land improvers at Sedgemoor, Somerset. After these claims had been tabled in the House (3 Dec.), Cromwell was included in a committee investigating the prerogative courts of star chamber and high commission, after further petitions, including one from a servant of William Prynne*, had been aired.139CJ ii. 44a,b; Procs. LP, i. 435, 437-8. The punishment meted out to Prynne’s fellow-sufferer, John Bastwick, was the subject of a committee on 17 December.140CJ ii. 52b. He was also named to committees from corporate bodies: from the puritanically-inclined inhabitants of Hughenden, Buckinghamshire, from Northumberland and from Ipswich (19, 22 Dec.). The committee on Hughenden was given a broader brief, to consider the scarcity of preaching ministers in the country at large, while the target of the Ipswich petition was Wren, bishop of Ely. All were referred to a sub-committee including Cromwell, delegated from an earlier committee formed the previous week, which was itself not the first investigation into religious ‘innovation’ (Arminianism) to which he had been named.141CJ ii. 52b, 54b, 56a. On 28 November a committee had been assembled on religion at the universities, which explicitly focused on innovations and corporate discipline such as oaths.142Diary and Pprs. of Henry Townshend ed. S. Porter, S.K. Roberts, I. Roy (Worcs. Hist. Soc. n.s. xxv), 55.

On 30 December, it was Cromwell who moved the second reading of the bill for annual Parliaments, brought in by the junto sympathizer, William Strode I, a week earlier.143CJ ii. 60a; Procs. LP, ii. 63-4. There is no trace of his activity in Parliament for the whole of January 1641, suggesting possible absence from the House, but on 9 February he intervened in a debate on root-and-branch reform of the church. The junto-man Isaac Penington had spoken of the popularity of the London petition for religious reform, which encouraged other speeches critical of episcopacy. Sir John Strangways argued that the bench of bishops was an estate of the realm and beyond modification, provoking Cromwell into a rebuttal which drew calls for his appearance at the bar. Here, it was Cromwell who better read the mood of the House, as he attracted support from John Pym and Denzil Holles, escaped intervention from the Speaker and gained an opportunity to resume a trenchant speech critical of episcopal revenues and drawing comparisons between the English church hierarchy and that of Rome.144Procs. LP, ii. 398-9. He was among those named to the committee on a bill for abolishing idolatry and superstition (13 Feb.), but he introduced a motion of his own on 10 April, on public behaviour on Sundays. He spoke in favour of retaining the existing laws on profanation of the sabbath, not replacing them, but argued that they were in need of enforcement and strengthening. The background outside Parliament was unrest on the London streets, especially around Westminster, as fear of popery gripped the populace. The tone of the orders that resulted suggests that Cromwell’s intervention may have been opportunistic, a calculation that stiffening good order would appeal to fellow Members.145Procs. LP, iii. 496, 500.

He maintained an interest in the high profile victims of the personal rule of Charles I, joining (23 Feb.) a committee on the breaches of privilege that occurred when the Parliament was dissolved in 1629.146CJ ii. 91a. His was presumably a critical voice in committees on post office abuses and on the terms of the queen’s jointure (10, 17 Feb.).147CJ ii. 82a, 87b. In the latter case, it was surely the inclusion of the fen drainage project in the royal jointure, the potential profits of which had since been sold on, that particularly interested him.148Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 130. He made another speech about the sufferings of Alexander Leighton (21 Apr.) and was one of those who saw the Protestation of 3 May as a welcome echo of the Elizabethan oath of association.149Procs. LP, iv. 39, 181; CJ ii. 133a. Five days later, Cromwell joined with Lowry, his fellow-burgess for Cambridge, in writing to the corporation there, as the ‘body represented’, urging its members to ‘avow the practice of the representative’ and adopt the Protestation. The Cambridge mayor and aldermen were assured that ‘combination carries strength with it’, and in sending the Protestation to Cambridge Cromwell and Lowry were following the sense of the House that counties and boroughs should be encouraged to align themselves with the Commons in common cause, stopping short of compulsion.150Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 127-8; CJ ii. 135a.

It was long ago noted that Cromwell played no discernible part in the prosecution of Thomas Wentworth†, 1st earl of Strafford, a process which invoked two different parliamentary procedures, occupied a great deal of the time of the Commons leadership and culminated in the earl’s execution on 12 May. Rather fancifully, it has been suggested that Cromwell may have been secretly sympathetic to ‘Black Tom Tyrant’.151Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 122, 125. It seems more plausible to read his silence on Strafford as a measure of his marginal standing and relative inexperience in the Commons and as evidence of his preoccupation with other matters, notably religion. Cromwell had taken a serious and active interest in the intervention of the Scots in English politics since at least February 1641, requesting up-to-date information on their view in favour of religious uniformity between the nations prior to a Commons debate (3 Mar.) on the Treaty of London, which would cement the principle. 152Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 125-6; CJ ii. 96a. On 11 May he and the Barnstaple burgess, George Peard, each made more than one speech on the value of dean and chapter properties, producing calculations to support the case for selling them off to contribute to the £400,000 reckoned necessary for the government’s needs, and ten days later was associated with a bill for the destruction of the episcopate. His collaboration with Sir Henry Vane II* and Sir Arthur Hesilrige* in drafting a bill for the removal of episcopacy entirely from England’s religious governance, a bill turned over to a proxy, Sir Edward Dering*, on 21 May for presentation to the House, reveals the extent to which Cromwell had by this time entered the counsels of the bi-cameral opposition junto.153Procs. LP, iv. 320; E. Dering, A Collection of Speeches (1642), 62. This bill probably ran ahead of the thinking at the time of John Pym and John Hampden, whose targets were the current bishops and their constitutional function, rather than episcopacy itself, but on 27 May the bill for complete abolition passed a second reading in the Commons.154‘John Pym’ infra; CJ ii. 159a.

Ostensibly, it was Cromwell’s interest in rectifying abuses in parliamentary privilege that lay behind his involvement in the case of the Thynne brothers. Sir James Thynne* sued his younger half-brother, Henry Frederick Thynne, over their patrimonial inheritance. Sir James had claimed privilege when an order had been brought against him by his brother, but Cromwell on 22 May moved the privilege claim as an abuse. When the elder Thynne brought his own petition, Cromwell again intervened (31 May) to move that he should attend the Commons to account for himself. The view of Sir Simonds D’Ewes* that Thynne ‘should not lay down the suit when he pleased for his own advantage, and so abuse the privilege of the House to his own advantage’ seems to have been shared among Commons-men. Cromwell’s interest in this case may have owed something to the standing of Sir James Thynne as a relation by marriage of the junto grandee, the 2nd earl of Warwick, and his own wish to appear as a proxy agent of correction acting on behalf of the Warwick circle.155Procs. LP, iv. 525, 675, 681, vi. 20-1; ‘Sir James Thynne’ infra. By 20 July the case had evidently become a matter on which supporters of royal policy were ranged against its opponents, judging from a division in which Lucius Cary, 2nd Viscount Falkland [I] and Edward Hyde were tellers against John Maynard and Bulstrode Whitelocke. A committee was appointed that day, including Cromwell, his name mangled by the clerk, for further consideration of the matter; and another followed (6 Aug.), which also claimed his attention.156CJ ii. 217a, 239b.

The principle of upholding the privilege of the Commons against the Lords was also a notable element in the case of the enclosures in the Fens. On the day that Cromwell moved a breach of privilege in the Thynne case (22 May), Denzil Holles* spoke to uphold the status quo ante when introducing a petition by Sir Thomas Hatton and Edward Montagu†, Viscount Mandeville, complaining of the destruction of hedges around the enclosures at St Ives. Angry inhabitants had resorted to this action while their own petition rested with the Commons, but Cromwell in his speech revealed that a Lords order had upheld possession by the enclosers. While he was careful to emphasise that he ‘did not approve nor desire to justify’ their action, he sought to draw out this local episode as concerning ‘the privilege of this House and of all the Commons of England’. The ensuing debate was disrupted by a conference report on the Scots, but the effect of Cromwell’s intervention was to shift the focus away from punishing the enclosure rioters and on to the question of inter-cameral privilege.157Procs. LP, iv. 532-3, 538; Lindley, Fenland Riots, 118. On 1 June, a day when 30 committees were wound up as a way of streamlining parliamentary business, Cromwell spoke again on the St Ives enclosures, going so far as to assert that the Lords had approved an oppressive order, backed by the militia, that would ‘levy war on the subjects’, in the words of one diarist.158Procs. LP, iv. 679. On 9 June, it was Cromwell who called for the committee for the queen’s jointure to be revived to hear the case, and on or around 30 June it convened with Edward Hyde in the chair.159Procs. LP, v. 68, 72; CJ ii. 173a. Hyde’s recollection from memory was that Cromwell took the part of the inhabitants, and conducted himself with such passion that he had to be threatened with an adjournment, and in the light of the 1 June speech, that seems plausible; but Sir Simonds D’Ewes, present at the same meeting, left no record at all of that in his diary.160Clarendon, Life (3 vols. Oxford, 1761), i. 78-9; Lindley, Fenland Riots, 119.

The Cromwell of the early summer of 1641 was outspoken, if not angry, and ready to advance risky stances that marked him out from the consensus. As well as his boldness on the fen riots, on 29 May he was the only addition to a committee on obtaining a loan from the Merchant Adventurers, probably because of his hostility to them, or at least to their attempts to trade loans for privilege concessions. He was willing to allow negotiations to collapse, asserting that he himself could lend £2,000 of his own money and organise a loan elsewhere for £50,000.161CJ ii. 161b; Procs LP, iv. 648. He was later named to the committee on finding money for the government (28 July).162CJ ii. 228a. He was named to the committee for proceedings against the bishop of Bath and Wells, William Piers, once bishop of Peterborough in Cromwell’s fenland home territory (4 June), and just over a week later spoke in the committee of the whole House on the bill for abolition of episcopacy.163CJ ii. 166b; Two Diaries, 49. He was willing to pursue opportunistically the objective of ridding the Lords of bishops, as in a debate on 12 August when he argued for an ejection of the bishops from the Lords as a priority over dealing with the army plotters.164Procs. LP, vi. 382. Cromwell spoke to target certain procedures in the exchequer as abuses (4 June), and to remind the House that they had been questioned in Parliament previously; the resulting committee extended its brief to cover a petition from Cambridge.165CJ ii. 166b; Procs. LP, iv. 717.

The committee of 3 July, on a bill to allow for individual consciences of members in parliamentary proceedings, included a number of the most godly activists of the House, such as Sir Robert Harley and William Purefoy I, as well as earlier collaborators with Cromwell such as St John, Peard and Dering, but it also attracted some, like Sir James Thynne, who could hardly regard him an ally.166CJ ii. 198b. On this committee he was typical of the godly reformers, and he was completely in step with the junto in opposing the king’s visit to Scotland, arguing in a speech (9 Aug.) that Charles would be in physical danger and risked exacerbating factionalism in Ireland; but he went beyond consensus even among the king’s critics in calling for the 1st Viscount Saye and Sele (William Fiennes) and William Russell*, who had only weeks previously succeeded his father to become 5th earl of Bedford, to join the marquess of Hertford as governors of the prince of Wales. Saye had only a few days earlier spoken at a conference with the Lords in favour of Pym’s proposals for a custos regni. Cromwell failed to find a seconder, but his choice of peers confirms his allegiance by this time to junto thinking, and in August the young Bedford was again proposed for high office, this time as a representative of the English Parliament to the king when he was in Scotland. Cromwell wanted his powers to pass the highest authority, the great seal.167Procs. LP, vi. 216-7, 321, 322, 441.

On 24 August, Cromwell was required to request a conference with the Lords on progressing disbandment of the armies in the north. Pym reported the conference, one of 15 Commons-initiated conferences he managed in July and August 1641. That Cromwell was selected for this task is further evidence that he was recognized by the junto leadership at this point as a reliable collaborator, but not until March 1642 did he perform this inter-cameral task again.168CJ ii. 270a; LJ iv. 375a; Procs. LP, vi. 541; ‘John Pym’, infra. An elevation in standing is also suggested by the order of names in a committee the same day on hastening tax collection, when his name as burgess for Cambridge followed those of four knights of shires.169Procs. LP, vi. 538. In the final weeks before the king set off northwards to Scotland, on a journey which the Commons deplored, Cromwell addressed various topics of reform and responded to individual petitions. These included petitions from prisoners in London seeking to be allowed bail to the country in times of pestilence, which only ‘some few’ spoke to, besides Cromwell (28 Aug.); from Hertfordshire freeholders (30 Aug.); from a landowner in Ireland and victim of the earl of Strafford, Sir Frederick Hamilton (1 Sept.), forwarded from the committee for Irish affairs; and three petitions from a single individual, evidently a victim of star chamber jurisdiction (8 Sept.).170CJ ii. 274b, 276a, 279b: Procs. LP, vi. 592, 605, 687.

With Sir Thomas Barrington, Cromwell forced a critical critique of the Book of Common Prayer to a division (1 Sept.), which they won by 15 votes, and on 8 September he secured agreement for his own motion that not only could afternoon sermons be established in parishes where none were currently delivered, but also that they could be funded by the inhabitants themselves. This order was recorded by D’Ewes in his parliamentary journal in terms that made it seem punitive, but its intention was evidently permissive, and gave ammunition to godly parishioners seeking to challenge clergy who were inadequate or hostile to hotter varieties of Protestantism.171Procs. LP, vi. 635, 688. The order, larded with scriptural quotation and godly editorial comment, was printed on the authority of the Commons alone by a printer favoured by the Recess Committee, and it is tempting to conclude that Cromwell himself was the author of such fervent glosses as ‘The bishops sought to overthrow lectures, prohibiting it as unlawful to preach twice on the Lord’s day; what a misery was then coming upon us, likely to befall us!’172An Order made by the House of Commons (1641), 3 (E.172.1). The order was a concrete manifestation of Cromwell’s interest in the funding of lectureships evident since 1635. The same day this order was passed, and with critics of the government such as Henry Marten and John Wylde, he was added to the committee trying to thwart the levying of troops in Ireland for the use of the French and Spanish.173CJ ii. 284a. This concentrated burst of activity by Cromwell was doubtless conditioned by the guillotine that the imminent recess would bring with it; the limits of his influence in the House, however, are indicated by his failure to find a place for himself on the Recess Committee (9 Sept.-20 Oct.) which provided a proto-executive during the king’s absence from Westminster.

Soon after the House re-assembled on 20 October, Cromwell was prominent in the debate (26 Oct.) on removing the votes of bishops in the Lords. Sir Henry Vane II proposed that the Lords should be reminded that the oath imposed on bishops in the new Canons bound them never to consent to any Commons order that might remove their votes. Cromwell’s own suggested case to the upper House was that the Commons’ proposals were an interim measure until a bill passed, but D’Ewes quickly criticized this reasoning as implausible and smacking of bad faith.174D’Ewes (C), 40. Nothing daunted, Cromwell renewed the attack on the episcopate on the 29th, in support of a motion made by D’Ewes the previous day to halt the consecration of five new bishops. He was supported by Sir Walter Erle, but while the sceptical D’Ewes was now an ally, he encountered criticism from Sir John Hotham, who doubted the legality of halting a process that the king had already approved. D’Ewes noted how ‘bitterly’ Cromwell spoke in this debate against Dr Richard Holdsworth, vice-chancellor and master of Emmanuel, Cambridge and D’Ewes’s former tutor, presumably castigating his conservative puritanism.175D’Ewes (C), 52-3. After a long debate ended in a division, won by those wanting a conference with the Lords to try to stop the appointments, Cromwell was first-named to the committee to prepare for the meeting.176CJ ii. 298b; D’Ewes (C), 54. The following day, Hotham excused himself from acting with Cromwell in a disciplinary procedure of the House against Members not in their places prior to a conference on the safety of the kingdom.177D’Ewes (C), 59-60.

Cromwell’s championing of the Hertfordshire freeholders had evidently been in connection with irregularities at the by-election on 26 August for one of the county’s parliamentary seats, but the election of Sir Thomas Dacre was allowed to stand, and nothing came of a motion by Cromwell on the subject (27 Oct.).178D’Ewes (C), 42. Electoral matters were in any case swept aside by more urgent political considerations and tactics, in which Cromwell was fully aligned with the policies of the junto. On 4 November, against the background of news from Ireland of a rebellion threatening security on either side of the Irish Sea, he argued that because of continuing association between the leading army plotters, William Ashbournham*, Henry Wilmot* and Hugh Pollarde*, they should not be allowed freedom on bail but should be imprisoned, and two days later Cromwell moved that at a conference with the Lords it should be requested that the 3rd earl of Essex (Robert Devereux) be appointed commander-in-chief of trained bands south of the Trent. A draft ordinance for Essex’s appointment was in existence by the 15th.179D’Ewes (C), 97-8, 147. He was in favour of pressing on with the Grand Remonstrance, despite a view in the House that it was unseasonable after concessions made by the king by way of remedial legislation. Cromwell proposed adding commissions of sewers in a round-up of additional grievances tabled by Members (9 Nov.) and challenged Falkland (Lucius Cary*) over the latter’s wish to postpone the Remonstrance to a debate on a later date than 20 November, when it could have been progressed by means of a committee of the whole House. Edward Hyde believed that the junto calculated an easy passage for the Remonstrance, but the debate on the 22nd lasted 17 hours, and Cromwell apparently confided to Falkland that had it been rejected ‘he would have sold all he had the following morning and never have seen England more’.180CJ ii. 309a; D’Ewes (C), 111; Clarendon, Hist. i. 417-9, 420.

Cromwell brought evidence to the House on 27 November that a Member had claimed outside that the Commons were offended at the City’s entertaining the king against their instructions, the kind of concern for the reputation of the lower House regularly evinced by John Pym. And Pym, with Cromwell, was named in the committee of 6 December, challenging the overawing by Thomas Howard, 21st or 14th earl of Arundel, of the electors of that town, which resulted from Cromwell’s motion on the case. It was Cromwell who reported from the committee (10 Dec.) charged with investigating ways of preventing abuses in future elections.181CJ ii. 333a; D’Ewes (C), 202, 236, 260. In the closing days of 1641, it was the crisis in the three kingdoms that preoccupied Cromwell more than electoral anomalies. He was vocal and prominent in his lobbying on behalf of soldiers; he wanted Owen O’Connolly, a client of Sir John Clotworthy* and the man who had recently prevented the plot to capture Dublin Castle, to receive the military commission he had been promised in the expeditionary force to Ireland, and it seems likely that the case of this single favoured officer served as a useful tool to enable Cromwell to expose the persistent delay in despatching the army.182CJ ii. 360b, 361b, 365a; D’Ewes (C), 359-60, 371. He was a determined advocate of the removal of John Digby†, earl of Bristol, from the counsels of the king for advising on the use of military force.183D’Ewes (C), 357. All of this activity indicates the extent to which Cromwell had by this time become assimilated into the political outlook and behaviour of those leading opposition to royal policies.

Cromwell evidently appreciated the significance of the king’s attempt on the Five Members in January 1642 as fully as any Member, and on 14 January, after a conference with the Lords, he moved for a committee to put the country in a posture of defence, thus returning to his call in November for Essex to be appointed commander-in-chief. The resulting committee worked to draft what would become the Militia Ordinance.184PJ i. 67. Three days later, he and Valentine Wauton brought in a report of a Huntingdonshire magistrate alleged to have predicted civil war and a subsequent crushing of Parliament. Cromwell, supported by D’Ewes, was content for the miscreant to be bailed rather than gaoled, but on his motion the case was referred to the committee for intelligence, which later developed into the Committee for Examinations.185CJ ii. 386b; PJ i. 101, 114, 177-8. He was hostile to Sir Edward Dering*, once a leading reformer but now a defender of episcopacy, whose book Cromwell characterized as ‘impertinencies’; he called (7 Feb.) for D’Ewes to compose a refutation in print of Dering’s book, but the antiquary declined, advising Cromwell to do it himself. Cromwell contented himself with moving successfully that Dering’s book should be burned by the hangman.186PJ i. 255, 257, 264, 293.

Cromwell’s request that D’Ewes should refute Dering was made, as D’Ewes noted in his response, well into the evening of a long day, so it would be natural to interpret D’Ewes’s suggestion that Cromwell take up his own pen as a semi-facetious retort; but if Cromwell had played a leading part in drafting the order of 8 September on lectureships, the idea would not have seemed frivolous. Earlier on 7 February, Cromwell delivered a petition from Monmouthshire parishioners presented at assizes for frequenting sermons in parishes other than their own. On 29 March, he delivered in a certificate from godly ministers of that county on the threat from papists around Monmouth; and on 24 May he brought in a petition from the parish of Pennard, in Glamorgan’s Gower peninsula, in support of a lecturer settled by Parliament who faced stiff resistance from the incumbent minister.187PJ i. 302-3, ii. 104, 368. It has recently been suggested that these cases, the first in Wales to attract Cromwell’s attention, may have come his way because his vision of religious reform may have been more radical than that of Sir Robert Harley. Harley’s parliamentary seat was closer to Wales, and his commitment to Welsh religious reform of longer pedigree, than those of Cromwell, which makes the intervention of the burgess for Cambridge a surprise.188L. Bowen, ‘Oliver Cromwell (alias Williams) and Wales’, in Little ed. Oliver Cromwell: New Perspectives, 175-77.

Cromwell’s views were certainly more populist than Harley’s, but what also links these cases, and the cases of the sermons at Gray’s Inn (18 Feb.) and Cottenham, Cambridgeshire (4 May), which also drew his attention, is the subject matter of conflict between parishioners and beneficed clergy, which was at the heart of Cromwell’s order of 8 Sept. 1641.189CJ ii. 440a; PJ ii. 275. It seems likely that it was Cromwell’s newly-established authority on parliamentary support for parochial initiatives on sermons that made him an attractive sponsor for local activists in the country at large. In practice, the immediate beneficiaries of his interventions were not intended to be the whole populace of parishes, but the godly Protestant activists contending with authority. As someone whose instincts were to support petitioners in the godly interest, he was a teller (7 Mar.) in favour of the appointment of the Erastian Presbyterian, Thomas Coleman, to a lectureship in St Giles-in-the-Fields, and he introduced gentlemen from Cambridgeshire and townsmen from Cambridge (16 Mar.) seeking a lectureship for their home territory.190CJ ii. 470b; LJ iv. 648b; PJ ii. 47; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 162. His zeal for schemes to improve the quality of preaching in parishes and the quality of the clergy lay behind a number of other initiatives which claimed his attention. As burgess for Cambridge, Cromwell was a natural choice as one of a quartet of MPs, led by William Strode I, to write to the universities on complaints that degrees were being denied to those refusing to subscribe the now cancelled Canons of 1640 (10 Feb).191CJ ii. 424a. He was appointed to committees on innovations in religion (2 Mar.) and to the committee on curtailing the authority of bishops (5 Mar.).192CJ ii. 440a, 465b, 467b.

Ireland and the eve of the English Civil War, Feb.-Sept. 1642

Of greater consuming interest to Cromwell early in 1642 even than parish lectureships was the condition of Ireland, and he did as much as he could to encourage the despatch of the expeditionary force under Robert Sidney†, 2nd earl of Leicester. He sought to limit the size of the ancillary support for the army, but offered (1 Feb.) to lend £300 of his own money for the cause. He was named (5 Mar.) to the committee on the bill for reducing Ireland.193CJ ii. 468b. He was actively interested in the composition of the officer cadre, but despite the Irish emergency argued, with support from Sir Walter Erle*, that Sir John Clotworthy, a client of Pym’s who had been active in drafting the bill for the fund-raising scheme of the Irish Adventurers, should stay at Westminster rather than go to his military command in Ireland.194PJ i. 395 He was among the original nominees from the Commons (14 Feb.) for posts as Commissioners for Irish Affairs: his appointment passed the Lords on 14 March and appeared in the commission granted by the crown in letters patent on 4 April.195PJ i. 370-1, ii. 403; CJ ii. 453b; LJ iv. 644b. Of the 21 Members of both Houses who attended the meetings of the commission, Cromwell was among the most assiduous, his name recorded on 22 occasions in April and May, with only six attending a few more times than he did.196PJ ii. 469, iii. 438. He invested comparatively heavily in the Irish ‘adventure’: the £300 first promised in February, and a further £300 under the ordinance of 17 June for the ‘sea-adventure’. In June he would promise a further £500 for the defence of Parliament at home, pledges that it is now acknowledged were made feasible through the liquidation of his assets before this Parliament opened.197P. Little, ‘Cromwell and Ire. before 1649’, in Little ed. Oliver Cromwell: New Perspectives, 118-9, quoting Bottingheimer, Eng. Money and Irish Land, 70, 179. On 21 April he was listed among the commissioners given fresh responsibility for raising the expeditionary force that so far had proved beyond the capabilities of both king and Parliament.198CJ ii. 536b; LJ v. 15b.

On 3 May Cromwell clashed with D’Ewes over the security of English interests in Dublin, arguing for greater intervention by the commissioners for Irish affairs. D’Ewes smugly recorded how Cromwell’s motion was laid aside as ‘impertinent and useless’.199PJ ii. 268. He was soon (12,14 May, 2 June) named to further committees on Ireland, and on 26 and 30 May took messages to the Lords to ask them to expedite recruitment for the intended expeditionary force.200CJ ii. 569b, 571b, 588a, 590a, 594b, 600b; LJ v. 92a; PJ ii. 372. Though the Journal makes no mention of Cromwell’s involvement, D’Ewes recorded that it was he who successfully moved for a committee (including Cromwell himself) to draft a declaration on delays to the Irish expedition that could be attributable to the king, presumably with publication in mind, though nothing seems to have been sent to the printer.201PJ ii. 375; CJ ii. 588a. More certainly, it was Cromwell who moved the order for recruiting volunteers for Ireland (28 May), sought to encourage the Lords to put some of their number at the head of a voluntary army, and on 1 June delivered a petition from Scots in Ulster requesting supplies; Cromwell identified merchants willing and able to respond on the most favourable terms.202CJ. ii. 594b; LJ v. 92a; PJ ii. 384, 401. He was prominent in promoting the ordinance for the ‘sea-adventure’ in June, reporting on it with Edmund Prideaux I from a conference with the Lords, and delivering in the list of naval officers, all of whose names were accepted by the House (7 June). He was given the approved list, with latitude to perfect and complete it, and in due course persuaded the House to grant a month’s pay to the quartermasters, officers essential to keeping the troops supplied.203CJ ii. 605a, 607a, 609a; PJ iii. 14, 140. A few weeks later, he was again sent to the Lords with orders relating to this ordinance (17 June).204CJ ii. 627a, 629a; LJ v. 142a. It was Cromwell who ensured that the agreement of religious toleration by the Catholic 5th earl of Clanricarde [I] (Ulick Burke) for his co-religionists in Galway should be referred to committee, and on 25 June he returned again to the ill effects of the Catholic presence in Dublin, his motion on the subject strongly implying he remained in favour of expulsion.205CJ ii. 638a; PJ iii. 126, 134.

It is evident that by June 1642 at the latest, Cromwell had become particularly convinced that the re-conquest of Ireland would be best effected through an English invasion in the southern Irish province of Munster.206Little, ‘Cromwell and Ire.’, 119-21. This perception probably sprang from his despair at the continuing failure of the earl of Leicester to mobilize the army that had been approved after first news of the Irish rebellion reached London at the end of October 1641. The sea-adventure was intended as a fresh initiative with clear aims. On 7 June he and Sir Gilbert Gerard*, a leading figure in the junto, were empowered to encourage lending by the City livery companies for this purpose, and urgent meetings with the Lords (16, 19 July) that Cromwell helped manage were intended to expedite the campaign.207CJ ii. 361b, 610b, 672b, 673a, 680b: LJ v. 214b, 218b. His last intervention on Munster, and indeed Irish matters in general, before the outbreak of the English civil war came in the days after 20 July, when he lobbied hard for the relief of the besieged Duncannon Fort on the River Barrow opposite Waterford.208CJ ii. 680b, 683a, 684a, 685b; PJ iii. 245; LJ v. 229b.

Between October 1641 and August 1642 Cromwell’s work on parish lectureships and his vigorous lobbying in the interests of suppressing popery and rebellion in Ireland ensured that he became a much more prominent Member than hitherto. But these specialisms of his did not crowd out other interests. He was a teller in the debate on the Book of Rates that governed customs duties (17 Mar. 1642), voting against the proposals of London merchants for a double duty on sugar imports and thereby supporting the case of merchants from the provinces.209CJ ii. 482b; PJ ii. 51-2. On 4 April, he was a teller on another fiscal question, relating to collection of the subsidy from merchants.210CJ ii. 509b. He was prominent on matters relating to the growing tensions in England between supporters of the king and those of Parliament. He was quick to sense the significance of the Kentish petition, formulated at the assizes in Maidstone with the active assistance of Sir Edward Dering, newly released from the Tower. The petition was a statement of Kent gentry opinion unsympathetic to the junto in Parliament and wholly supportive of the king. On 31 March, Cromwell first moved for an order to prohibit high sheriffs from reading out declarations against the Militia Ordinance of 5 March, and then moved that Sir Henry Vane II be added to a committee on the Kentish petition.211PJ ii. 112, 113. A month later (28 Apr.), he asked the Lords to consider developments in Kent and the north of England, working with Vane II to orchestrate the responses of both Houses to news of a planned assembly at Blackheath in support of the Kentish petition.212CJ ii. 545b; PJ ii. 237; LJ v. 25a. This was days after the gates of Hull were closed against the king by Sir John Hotham* and his subsequent vindication by both Houses; and Cromwell’s interest over the coming months lay in ensuring that Hotham, governor of Hull, received adequate practical support from Parliament while the north of England as a whole was made secure, by means of money, committee structure and propaganda, in the parliamentary cause.213CJ ii. 555a, 583b; LJ v. 40a. Between the Hull episode and the outbreak of civil war in August, Cromwell took messages from the Commons to the Lords on at least 18 occasions, each mission concerning either Ireland or the composition of the militia, Parliament’s embryonic army, in a range of English counties sometimes far from his home territory.214CJ ii. 545b, 555a, 583a, 590a, 591b, 620b, 625b, 629a, 680b; LJ v. 25a, 79a, 85a, 92a, 103a, 125b, 163b, 172a, 214b, 229b.

Cromwell’s interventions on the militia were marked by his keenness to ensure that godly and reliable individuals were appointed deputy lieutenants. The nominees he favoured included Sir John Bampfylde* of Devon, and he urged that another parliament-man, William Purefoy I, should be allowed to return to Warwickshire to implement the Militia Ordinance.215CJ ii. 591b; PJ ii. 389. He was evidently reliant on faulty local intelligence rather than personal knowledge for some of the cases he adopted, since Sir Walter Pye*, the subject of an order he took to the Lords on (23 May), sided with the king rather than with Parliament later in 1642. Cromwell’s boldness was on display in some of his visits to the upper House, as when he called upon the Lords to summon Spencer Compton†, 2nd earl of Northampton, as a delinquent (27 June).216CJ ii. 583a, 641a; LJ v. 79a, 163b. He also involved himself in structural aspects of the new national militia in defence of Parliament. He was named to the committee on taking subscriptions (30 May), and on 11 June moved that MPs be pressed on making their own voluntary subscriptions, of which his own pledged £500 was one. It was on his motion (15 June) that magistrates in counties where there were no reliable deputy lieutenants were empowered to receive subscriptions on the Propositions of Parliament.217CJ ii. 595a; PJ iii. 61, 81, 472. The national scope of his interests is evident in matters that engaged him in July. With Sir William Lewis* he was tasked with bringing in instructions for the committee in Wiltshire, with a particular focus on preventing horses being sent to the king’s party in York (11 July), and he was added to a committee aimed at dispersing parliamentary orders in the country at large and with an immediate interest in securing the powder magazine at Dorchester.218CJ ii. 665b, 676a. Sir William Brereton* sent him details of a Cheshire man imprisoned for refusing to publish the king’s commission of array (30 July).219HMC Portland, i. 47. On his motion, private business in parliamentary committee, traditionally progressed in afternoon sittings, was prohibited on the grounds of public emergency (22 June).220PJ iii. 116.

From mid-June he was active in the most practical of ways in support of Parliament’s armed response to the king’s party. He encouraged the Lords to agree to the melting of plate on the Propositions (17 June), joined the committee identifying counties from which plate might be acquired (8 July) and from mid-July encouraged the sending of arms to Cambridge and the raising of two foot companies there.221CJ ii. 630b, 660b, 674a; LJ v. 142b; PJ iii. 219-20. As the English domestic crisis deepened, Cromwell turned his attention specifically to Cambridge, acquiring unambiguous authority for himself and four other gentlemen including Sir John Cutts* to raise money, plate and horses in Cambridgeshire. By 15 August he had seized the magazine at Cambridge and thwarted the king’s plan to appropriate the plate of the colleges and have it despatched to his headquarters at York. Cromwell ensured, with the support of Sir Robert Harley*, that Parliament indemnified him against prosecution for such a public act of defiance.222CJ ii. 698b, 720a, 726a, 729a; PJ iii. 299; LJ v. 307b; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 187-9. On the 19th, with (Sir) John Potts*, he was required by Parliament to guard the road between Cambridge and King’s Lynn, and four days later took the thanks of the Commons to Cutts and others for helping him in his initiative in securing Cambridge in the cause of defending the kingdom.223CJ ii. 306b, 734a. As part of a delegation of both Houses he met with the London common council on 6 September, to further the bringing in of more plate. The same day he was among those receiving instructions to return to their counties to prepare for civil war. It was his last known appearance in the Commons until January 1643.224CJ ii. 754b; LJ v. 342a. Between October 1641 and September 1642 he had been named to at least 34 committees, with a further 5 where he was delegated to act with a small number of other Members. He had played no part in the ‘paper war’ between king and Parliament that marked exchanges between the two parties in the first half of 1642, but his 18 visits to the Lords with messages to the Commons reveal him to have been an active as an executive in parliamentary procedure. In the whole of this Parliament up to this point, he was responsible for at least 44 motions in the Commons, and most of them were successful in that they led to debate or action.225Revisions of the figures in Roberts, ‘Early Parlty. Career’, 48. His visits to the Lords, in particular, imply that he was trusted by the leadership of the junto, but despite his growing prominence, it is important still not to exaggerate Cromwell’s standing in Parliament. He was not involved in the creation of the bicameral Committee of Safety, first announced on 4 July; nor was he ever included in its membership, which to December 1643 was subsequently augmented no fewer than 17 times.

The soldier Parliament-man, Sept. 1642-Feb. 1645

Cromwell’s determination and vigour were apparent in the speed with which he raised 60 men for Parliament in Cambridgeshire, a troop which included John Disbrowe*, his brother-in-law, and Edward Whalley*, his cousin. A little later, when Cromwell’s troop became a regiment, he was joined by his future son-in-law, Charles Fleetwood*. His actions at Cambridge in August were undertaken in a military capacity as a captain of harquebusiers, not as the parliamentary burgess for the town. By 18 August his troop was the subject of warrants for payment, and he was active in securing contributions on the Propositions.226SP28/1a/159, 271: G. Robinson, Horses, People and Parliament in the English Civil War (Farnham, 2012), 48. He joined the 3rd earl of Essex at Edgehill in October, and may have seen action there.227Oxford DNB, ‘Oliver Cromwell’. It seems likely, though not certain, that he remained with Essex until the confrontation between the forces of king and Parliament at Turnham Green, to the west of London, on 13 November. However, contrary to recent opinion that a return to the Commons seems implausible, Cromwell was back in the House by 6 January 1643, when he acted as a teller in a debate on peace proposals to the king. With the irascible war party figure, Walter Long, he opposed not only the motion for putting the main question, but doubtless also the whole concept of the treaty.228CJ ii. 917a; Oxford DNB, ‘Oliver Cromwell’. Cromwell’s appearances in the House at this point must however have been few in number, since on the 18th the Commons issued an order requiring him to collect contributions in Cambridgeshire towards the war effort, and on the 23rd he wrote, evidently from the county, to his old enemy Robert Bernard* in terms which managed in little more than a dozen lines to be polite, sententious and menacing in equal measure.229CJ ii. 932b; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 210. On 2 February he was asked to bring the Cambridge scholar Richard Holdsworth, of whom he had spoken ‘bitterly’ a few months earlier, before the House for publishing a book odious to the Commons; and Members responded positively to his suggestion that the Cambridgeshire gentry would be more likely to espouse the parliamentary cause if influential neighbours were released from detention and given encouragement rather than threats.230Harl. 164, f. 287b; CJ ii. 951b, 952a.

On 17 February, a letter from Cromwell and others of the Cambridgeshire county committee was read in the Commons. They proposed a tax on papists, ‘malignants’ and others refusing the Propositions, claiming that £2,000 a month could be raised by that means. In response, they were given a permissive order, Pym wrote them an encouraging letter, and the principle of taxing those who had not offered freely to contribute was later enshrined in the assessment ordinance of 7 May 1643.231Harl. 164, f. 299v; CJ ii. 968b. In the early months of the war, he was constructively critical of the recruiting policies of another cousin, John Hampden*, recalling in 1657 how he had advised Hampden against staffing his regiment with ‘old decayed serving-men and tapsters’.232Abbott, Writings and Speeches, iv. 471. His own efforts at recruiting, as is well known, were driven from the outset by an insistence where possible on the qualities of Protestant zeal, sobriety, self-discipline and enthusiasm for the parliamentary cause, a priority reiterated in his letters through 1643.233Manchester Quarrel, 71-2; Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell ed. T. Carlyle, S. C. Lomas (3 vols., 1904), i. 145-6, 154, 155, 161. By 6 February he had been commissioned as a colonel in the Eastern Association, on his way to building a double regiment.234Bodl. Tanner 14, ff. 125, 157; Perfect Diurnall no. 38 (27 Feb.-6 Mar. 1643, E.246.37); I. Gentles, Oliver Cromwell: God’s Warrior and the English Revolution (Basingstoke, 2011), 24. Strategically, one of Cromwell’s aims in the early spring of 1643, perhaps his principal aim, was to secure the northern boundary of the Eastern Association against incursions by the enemy, and in this he was successful.235Holmes, Eastern Association, 71-3, 75. Reports of his doings were relayed to the Commons, notably by Miles Corbett*, recorder of Great Yarmouth, but sometimes they were challenged, as when D’Ewes gave an alternative narrative of the attempted arrest of the son of Sir William Playters* (16 Mar.).236CJ ii. 1003a; Harl. 164, ff. 326v, 332. On 21 March, another of Corbett’s narratives of military exploits in East Anglia produced the thanks of the House for Cromwell.237CJ iii. 11b; Harl. 164, f. 337v.

Despite the plaudits of the Commons, Cromwell encountered problems in his command, notably a shortage of money to pay his soldiers. Friends of his, including Sir John Clotworthy and Sir Robert Harley, helped push through an ordinance on 25 April for this purpose. It passed the Lords on 2 May, and allowed the Cambridgeshire committee to extend its authority beyond malignants’ money, arms, plate and horses to all their property.238CJ iii. 58a, 60a, 63b, 64a, 67b; LJ vi. 22a, 25b, 26a. Even so, Cromwell was obliged to lobby for more money for at least the rest of the year, and the supply of money is a main theme of his surviving letters to a range of correspondents.239Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, i. 120-1, 127, 138, 155. The argument that Parliament consistently refused to respond to his needs may be somewhat overstated in the light of Commons orders for cannon (19 June) sequestrations (20 June), arms (31 July, 9 Aug.) and cash and free quarter (4 Aug.), all made for his benefit.240Holmes, Eastern Association, 76, 82, 98; CJ iii. 134a, 136b, 188b, 193b, 198a, 199a. There were military setbacks, also, such as Cromwell’s failure early in May to prevent the royalist munitions train reaching Oxford, and the plundering of Leicestershire and Northamptonshire. The Lincolnshire committee accused him of slowness to respond, while Cromwell himself blamed Thomas Grey*, Lord Grey of Groby.241CJ iii. 75a; Harl. 164, f. 384; Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, 132-3; Holmes, Eastern Association, 73. On 9 June, Sir Ferdinando Fairfax*, 2nd Baron Fairfax [S], wrote to the Speaker to ask what had happened to the troops of Cromwell’s he had been promised, which would have disrupted the queen’s journey south.242Harl. 165, f. 112; Holmes, Eastern Association, 73-4. There were balancing military successes, such as the siege of Crowland (25-28 Apr.) in Lincolnshire, and a cavalry skirmish near Grantham (13 May).243Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, 134-5; Gentles, Oliver Cromwell, 26-7. It was Cromwell’s ‘gallant service’ against William Cavendish†, earl of Newcastle, at Gainsborough (28 July) that transformed his military reputation. It was in fact at best a pyrrhic victory, since the town was in royalist hands again within a few days.244Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 240-6. But this did not dent Cromwell’s sense of assurance that 'God would have no lording over his people', and Bulstrode Whitelocke* marked this point as ‘the beginning of his great fortunes’, when he ‘began to appear to the world'.245Manchester Quarrel, 75; Whitelocke, Mems. i. 209.

A month before Gainsborough, Cromwell had been involved in the arrest of John Hotham*, who with his father, Sir John Hotham*, was among the most prominent and notorious turncoats of the civil war. To deflect the outrage felt at Westminster, John Hotham wrote to the Commons expressing indignation at his arrest at Nottingham, and in so doing introduced for perhaps the first time in public discourse the allegation that what marked out Cromwell’s officer corps was his commissioning of Anabaptists. The letter, read in the House on 27 June, was sufficient to persuade D’Ewes, by this time himself evidently less than enamoured of Cromwell, that former ‘oppositions and differences’ between Hotham and Cromwell had played a significant part in Hotham’s behaviour. 246CJ iii. 138b; Harl. 164, f. 234v; A. Hopper, Turncoats and Renegadoes (Oxford, 2012), 170-3; Holmes, Eastern Association, 74. It was certainly the case that Hotham disapproved of Cromwell as one who both ignored military orders in favour of harassing the royalist clergy, and who ‘scandalled his friends and then denied it’.247Hotham Pprs. 99-100. But Cromwell had by late July become the model military champion in the eyes of war party politicians in the Commons such as John Reynolds, Sir Henry Mildmay and William Cage, who wished to see him promoted as far as was possible under the earl of Manchester’s command.248CJ iii. 179a, 186a; Harl. 165, f. 129. On 25 July an ordinance for Manchester to augment and add to his horse regiments confirmed Cromwell as head of that division of the Eastern Association.249LJ vi. 150a. The lobbying of his parliamentary allies for him to become governor of Ely was predicated on his receiving a commission under the hand of the earl of Essex, a suggestion that the potential of the post for evading Manchester’s authority may have been appreciated by Cromwell’s supporters.250CJ iii. 186a. Certainly, Hotham had been able to play on local tensions between Cromwell and his less radical associates in Lincolnshire such as Sir Edward Ayscoghe* and Sir Christopher Wray*.251‘Sir Edward Ayscoghe’ supra; ‘Sir Christopher Wray’, infra.

Based in and around Lincolnshire in the last months of 1643, Cromwell pursued his policy of promoting vigorous regional commanders regardless of their factional religious loyalties, the allegations of Hotham notwithstanding. His backing of the ‘active’ but irascible and Presbyterian Col. Edward King, on the basis that he would probably deliver ‘mighty things’, was sustained in the face of fierce criticism from those in Manchester’s army who shared Cromwell’s own religious Independency. Making regimental appointments of Independents in an effort to counter- balance King’s rigid Presbyterianism was as far as Cromwell would go to placate his local critics, but this in itself was an early demonstration of how religious affiliations coloured his thinking.252C. Holmes, ‘Colonel King and Lincolnshire politics, 1642-6’, HJ xvi. 455, 457, 462; Holmes, Eastern Association, 200. Generally, the reports reaching the Commons of Cromwell’s doings, and the sum of newspaper coverage about them, were favourable to his reputation for valour and boldness, which was if anything enhanced by his injury at Winceby (11 Oct.).253Cromwelliana (1810), 6-7. The very occasional sour note could be struck by Essex, as on 31 August 1643; but the ‘resolution and honour’ attributed to Cromwell by Manchester (16 Oct.) was more typical, and the repeated messages from Cromwell that he ‘was convinced that it being God's cause he should prevail’ was a tonic not just to the diarist Laurence Whitaker* but to many other MPs unwilling to see a peace based on supine concessions to the king.254Harl. 164, f. 153; LJ vi. 256a; Add. 31116, p. 135. Cromwell was named as a member of the Committee for Foreign Plantations (2 Nov.) after an absence from the Commons of ten months; for him to have been included in what might have proved a lucrative scheme to re-colonize Bermuda is an indication of how far his political reputation had advanced in that interval.255Add. 18778, f. 78; LJ vi. 291b-292a. Quartered in the dean’s house at Ely early in January 1644, he was active in making the Isle of Ely ‘a place for God to dwell in’, probably allowing his troops some licence in acts of religious iconoclasm, certainly interrupting the liturgical office in the cathedral and reportedly bidding the officiating canon to abandon his ‘fooling’.256Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, i. 167; Manchester Quarrel, 73-4; G. Hart, ‘Oliver Cromwell, Iconoclasm and Ely Cathedral’, HR lxxxvii. 370-6.

Cromwell had written to Oliver St John* in September about the shortfall of money voted for his troops, declaring that the £1,100-£1,200 he had given of his own money to the service of the state had exhausted his personal resources.257Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, i. 155-6. Armed with this perception of injustice and a powerful sense of divine sanction for his efforts to make Ely a godly mini-commonwealth, he returned to the Commons in January 1644, making his first appearance there for a year. He exploited his enhanced standing in the House to plead for more money for his troops (17 Jan. 1644), and an ordinance aimed at improving the finances of the Association passed the Lords on 20 January. Any commander ‘in a strait for want of money’ might have been expected to do this, especially one who was now commissioned as lieutenant-general of the Association horse, but his political as well as his military stature also allowed him with credibility to launch the bitterest of attacks on the 5th Baron Willoughby of Parham (Francis Willoughby) in the same speech in which he successfully moved that Manchester’s command should extend to Lincolnshire and thus the entire Eastern Association (22 Jan.).258Add. 18779, ff. 24v, 49-50; Harl. 165, f. 280v; LJ vi. 385b-87a; Holmes, ‘Colonel King’, 458; Holmes, Eastern Association, 108-9. Essex had reported to the Lords a disabling jealousy between the forces commanded respectively by Cromwell and Willoughby nearly three months before this, seemingly occasioned by Cromwell’s greater success in obtaining pay for his soldiers.259Add. 18778, f. 80. The quarrel among the Eastern Association men was widening in more than one sense, Cromwell’s speech provoking even a brawl in Westminster between the sons of Sir Christopher Wray and the pugnacious and irascible war party man, Edward Bayntun*.260Add. 31116, p. 227.

In a short period of attendance at Westminster (perhaps as few as five appearances in the Commons) in January and early February 1644, Cromwell was named to just two committees. One was on the petition of the county committee of Leicestershire (20 Jan.) against the conduct of the local commander, Thomas Grey*, Lord Grey of Groby, the committee headed by either Sir Henry Vane I or II. The second was to examine the affair of the royalist approach to Sir Henry Vane II for a peace treaty, fronted by John Lovelace, 2nd Baron Lovelace. The latter was a crude attempt to drive a wedge between the English Parliament and their Scots allies, and in both these committees Cromwell is likely to have been working in the interest of the Vanes and in favour of prosecuting the war more vigorously rather than for peace.261CJ iii. 372b, 376a; Add. 18779, f. 51; ‘Sir Henry Vane I’, ‘Sir Henry Vane II’ infra. If Cromwell at this time harboured scepticism as to the value of the military implications of the Scots alliance, he made no fuss about taking the Solemn League and Covenant on 5 February, the last day he is known to have attended the House in this brief visit to Westminster.262CJ iii. 389a. These weeks are likely to have been much more important politically for Cromwell than his meagre tally of committees would suggest. Driven through by the leading anti-Essexian war party figures, including Sir Arthur Hesilrige and Vane II, an ordinance for a Committee of Both Kingdoms (CBK), a ‘small council of state’ in D’Ewes’s sceptical formulation, included Cromwell in its original membership (7 Feb.), reaffirmed in the renewal of the ordinance in May.263CJ iii. 391b, 504a, 392b; Harl. 166, f. 8v; LJ vi. 542b. It was in fact not until September 1644 that Cromwell attended any of the Committee’s meetings, but his ready access to executive authority was now at least assured.264‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’, supra. His influence must have been significant in attempts (29 Mar., 1 Apr.) to modify the ordinance supplying the Eastern Association, so that all taxes raised in the Isle of Ely, most controversially the excise, should benefit only that district, the case being advanced that the security of Ely was crucial to the survival of the whole Association. But Cromwell was not in the House to help push through the amendments, and they were recommitted.265CJ iii. 441b, 443a, Add. 18789, ff. 83v, 85; Harl. 166, f. 42a.

Cromwell left Westminster early in February for his military command, and on 4 March, with Sir Samuel Luke*, captured Hillesden House near Buckingham, taking among the prisoners Sir Alexander Denton* and William Smyth*.266Cromwelliana (1810), 8. Proceeding then to harass the royalists of Oxfordshire, he continued to remonstrate with elements in the Association on questions of personnel, notably with the principled Presbyterian Scot, Major-general Lawrence Crawford, who complained to Manchester about the religious tenets of his lieutenant-colonel, Henry Warner. Where previously Cromwell had tended to repudiate suggestions that he promoted Anabaptists, in his robust exchange with Crawford he now asserted that if the officer in question was indeed an Anabaptist, it made no difference to his suitability for the service: ‘The state in choosing men to serve them, takes no notice of their opinions, if they be willing faithfully to serve them, that satisfies’.267Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, i. 171. But back at Westminster, the Presbyterians were magnifying Cromwell’s confessional preferences into a ramifying plot. Henry Rich†, 1st earl of Holland, told D’Ewes on 15 April that not only was Cromwell filling Manchester’s army with Anabaptists, but that there were 30,000 Baptists and Independents in London, a dangerous conjunction the two men evidently found chilling.268Harl. 483, f. 55v. While Cromwell’s successes could be fed to the House in titbit letters by his friends, such as the one brought in by Vane II on 9 May, Cromwell’s attack on Willoughby and the plentiful supply of information from the querulous Edward King had gone to a committee, which kept the whole subject of political divisions in the Eastern Association alive through the first six months of 1644.269CJ iii. 500b; Harl. 166, ff. 58, 75. And not all observers took a sanguine view of Cromwell’s military abilities; some attributed the fall of Newark (21 March) to his dithering, while Holles, a political victim of Cromwell’s and a leading peace party politician, chose to represent him as an arrant coward.270Baillie Lttrs. and Jnls. ii. 153; D. Holles, Memoirs of Denzil Lord Holles (1699),15-17.

Cromwell commanded the whole of the Eastern Association horse at the battle of Marston Moor (2 July). Ever the providentialist, Cromwell was the first to see the victory there as ‘a great favour from the Lord … such as the like never was since this war began’, and in its immediate aftermath he wrote perhaps his most moving letter, to Valentine Wauton* on the death of his son from a cannon-shot. He was quick to see it as a victory explicitly for the ‘godly party’, a vindication of his own military philosophy. The contribution of the allies of the English he marginalised as that of ‘a few Scots’.271Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, i. 176-7. Modern historians seem uncertain as to whether or not the Scots in fact played a critical part.272Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, i. 176n; Gentles, Oliver Cromwell, 35; M. Wanklyn, Warrior Generals (2010), 105, 108. It can be argued that his report, in a private letter of condolence, could hardly be expected to include a judicious acknowledgment of their role in the battle, but little was made of it at Westminster either, when official despatches arrived. In line with other perceptions in the capital, D’Ewes recorded how Manchester and Cromwell ‘merited most’; how Cromwell was wounded in the neck, albeit slightly, and how disciplined his troops had been.273Harl. 166, ff. 88v, 89, 90v; Rushworth, Hist. Collections, v. 637.

The Scots themselves took immediate offence at the ‘vanity and falsehood’ of the Independents’ ‘disgraceful relation’, and believed themselves to be the victims of a deliberate propaganda campaign to glorify Cromwell, perpetrated by his co-religionists such as Thomas Harrison I*.274Baillie Lttrs. and Jnls. ii. 203, 208-9, 218. Illustrating the contested nature of the journalism, at least one newspaper was evidently prodded into redressing an alleged under-statement of Cromwell’s role.275Mercurius Britanicus no. 45 (22-29 July 1644), 353 (E.3.20). There were also cynics willing to believe that Cromwell’s injury had been sustained through the carelessness of his own men.276Whitelocke, Mems. i. 277. The complaints of the naysayers notwithstanding, the scale of the victory, entailing the destruction of the king’s army in the north, was transformative in its effect on Parliament’s relations with the king, and timely in terms of Cromwell’s reputation at Westminster, as it silenced, temporarily at least, his political opponents there. Elements of the London press henceforth depicted him as an avenging angel: ‘Sirrah, look about you, for the valiant Cromwell comes … and what will hinder that reformation should follow, where zeal, honour and resolution do lead the way?’277Mercurius Britanicus no. 53 (7-14 Oct. 1644), 418 (E.12.19). Marston Moor boosted Cromwell’s own self-belief still further: from this point onwards, his interest in working with the Scots in the army, and his willingness to compromise and court the Presbyterians it contained, dwindled.278Holmes, Eastern Association, 204. However, the Presbyterians were hardly going to concede political territory in Parliament to the Independents willingly, and the effect of the battle was to make heightened factional conflict at Westminster more rather than less likely.

When Cromwell wrote privately to Valentine Wauton early in September, ‘into the bosom of a friend’, it was to profess himself unable to offer much presently to mitigate the military disaster overwhelming Essex in the west. This curious letter, in much of which Cromwell used the first person plural, presumably unconsciously speaking for the Eastern Association army, or at least that part of it with which he identified, reveals him to be anxious to repudiate allegations of factionalism, to rebut slander and to assert his loyalty and subordination to Parliament

I profess I could never satisfy myself of the justness of this war, but from the authority of the Parliament to maintain itself in its rights, and in this cause I hope to approve myself an honest man and single-hearted.279Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, i. 181-2.

He later testified that it had been Manchester who at this point was set against any march west by the Association army, despite appeals to him by the CBK.280CSP Dom. 1644-5, p. 150. Robert Baillie believed that the Independents in Parliament were by this time beginning to consider Cromwell as a potential political leader.281Baillie Lttrs. and Jnls. ii. 218. On 13 September Cromwell paid a brief visit to the House, to support Oliver St John in obtaining a Commons order, in the event secured without a division, for the issue of religious toleration to be referred to a committee of both Houses, the so-called ‘committee for accommodation’.282CJ iii. 626a; Gardiner, Hist. Civil War, ii. 30; Baillie Lttrs. and Jnls. ii. 226. Taking advantage of the political manoeuvring space which Marston Moor had brought them, the Independents were now moving towards an open call for an accommodation for tender consciences, to the fury of Scots observers who had not yet ‘gotten anything for Presbytery’.283G. Yule, Puritans in Politics 1640-47 (1981), 138. Later that day, Cromwell received belated thanks for his ‘fidelity in the cause’ at Marston Moor, which could only have alienated still further any Scots at Westminster.284CJ iii. 626b. The sittings of the committee for accommodation, held in two phases from late 1644 and late 1645 were a standing challenge to the principles on which the Westminster Assembly had been brought into being, and its inclusive composition, involving clerics as well as Parliament-men and peers, gave it a solidity and viability that a purely parliamentary committee would have lacked.285Y. Chung, ‘Parliament and the Committee for Accommodation’, PH xxx. 289-91.

It was evident after the destruction of Essex’s army in the south west that the parliamentarian field commanders needed to set aside their quarrels and unite in their common interest against the king.286CSP Dom. 1644, p. 488, 491-2, 521; Baillie Lttrs. and Jnls. ii. 226, 229; M. Wanklyn, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the Performance of Parliament’s Armies in the Newbury Campaign, 20 Oct.-21 Nov. 1644’, History cxvi. 7-9. As this grew to be of paramount importance in military terms, so the likelihood of its being achieved receded as religious divisions intensified in the Eastern Association. On 12 and 14 September, Cromwell attended meetings of the CBK, the most energetic parliamentary agency working for unity. But at a meeting specially convened in order to reconcile Manchester and Crawford with Cromwell, the latter’s peremptory insistence on the termination of Crawford’s commission only served to intensify rivalries and to convince Presbyterians that Cromwell was seeking to supplant Manchester as general.287CSP Dom. 1644, pp. 495, 500, Baillie Lttrs. and Jnls. ii. 229-30. While Cromwell secured from the Commons a preferential ordinance for an improved supply of arms to his regiment, and was included in the sub-committee of the CBK set up as a council of war (14 Oct.) the business of the House itself still included active work on peace proposals to the king.288CJ iii. 652a, 661b, 662b, 667a; LJ vii. 23b, 24a. Meanwhile, in the field, the fruits of the failure of the generals to overcome their differences were only too visible at the second battle of Newbury (27 Oct.). The account of it to the Speaker, made by Sir William Waller* and Sir Arthur Hesilrige*, laboured to describe a victory for Parliament, and no place could be found in their narrative for any exploits by Cromwell; it was left to a Scot, ironically enough, to include Cromwell’s ‘very good service’ in his commendations to the CBK.289Harl. 166, ff. 139v-140v; Add. 31116, pp. 339, 340; LJ vii. 41a. The battle was duly celebrated by Parliament with thanksgiving sermons, but the king had withdrawn to Oxford, and the opportunity to complete the work of Marston Moor by destroying his southern army had been bungled. Generally, historians have tended to follow Cromwell’s vehement assertion that the failure at Newbury was to be laid at Manchester’s door, but recent analysis has questioned Cromwell’s own military judgment on that occasion, suggesting that he may have deliberately held his cavalry in reserve through disapproval and suspicion of Manchester’s intentions, or even (surely less plausibly) that it suited the Independents not to see an outright victory at this juncture lest it hasten a Presbyterian church settlement.290Wanklyn, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the Performance of Parliament’s Armies’, 14-15, 16, 20-2; Gentles, Oliver Cromwell, 38-9.

Cromwell remained with his troops around Newbury, entering the House on 22 November for the first time after the battle. It was noted that he and his companion and fellow-commander, Sir William Waller, were ‘not much welcomed nor spake anything touching armies’.291Harl. 166, f. 166. Their silence was ominous, and they were clearly intent on subjecting the command of the army to as much parliamentary scrutiny as possible, the following day receiving the approval of the House for an airing on the 25th of their grievances.292CJ iii. 703b; Harl. 166, f. 156. In the morning of that day, Cromwell launched into his vehement attack on Manchester: as though the peer were on trial, noted D’Ewes.293Harl. 166, f. 156; Harl. 483, f. 146v. The essence of Cromwell’s speech, which followed a less incendiary, and therefore less effective statement by Waller, was an accusation of habitual and principled reluctance on Manchester’s part to engage the enemy; born not out of incompetence or inadequate support, but of a rooted political objection to beating the king in a decisive manner. Manchester’s brother, George Montagu*, intervened to protest, and the matter was referred to the committee chaired by Zouche Tate on the mismanagement of Essex’s army. Tate was a fierce critic of Essex’s military record, and was by this time an advocate of re-modelling the armies, but his evident enthusiasm for a Presbyterian church settlement might have been calculated to disarm any who might have feared a whitewash in Cromwell’s favour.294Add. 311116, p. 350; Harl. 166, f. 156; CJ iii. 704b. On the 27th, Manchester made a defensive speech from the safety of the Lords, which presented Cromwell as a wayward, unresponsive and even rather insubordinate officer.295LJ vii. 76b; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 733.

The proceedings of Tate’s committee, which between 30 November and 6 January took depositions from witnesses on both sides of the quarrel, together with the Lords’ referral to the Commons of Manchester’s defence, provided MPs with a lurid sideshow on a number of afternoons.296LJ vii. 79a; Harl. 483, ff. 148v, 149v; CSP Dom. 1644-5, pp. 146-61. An attempt by the Essexians to have the matter transferred to the floor of the Commons failed (4 Dec.), and the affair opened up inter-cameral disputes which only worsened the in-fighting.297CJ iii. 713a, 713b, 714a; Harl. 483, f. 149v. The depositions taken by Tate’s committee ranged over the conduct of the whole war, and it is obvious that no attempt was made to rule any evidence as inadmissible. One deponent offered a coherent narrative to the effect that from 1642 Cromwell had selectively recruited sectaries; had attempted ruthlessly to turn Ely into a godly fiefdom under his own rule; had been indifferent to the financial plight of investors in fen drainage, viewing theirs as a sacrifice to the public good and his own profit; and had been hostile to the peerage: ‘God would have no lording over his people’.298Manchester Quarrel, 71-5. This critic has convincingly been identified as Lieutenant-Colonel William Dodson, who had been passed over for promotion by Cromwell, and whose allegations were both exaggerated and born of prejudice.299C. Holmes, ‘The Identity of the Author of the “Statement by an opponent of Cromwell”’, EHR cxxix. 1371-82. Further depositions pursued Manchester’s evidence that Cromwell was reluctant to commit his troops at Newbury, and that he abused procedures of military justice in order to favour sectaries and others conforming to his idea of godliness.300Manchester Quarrel, 60-70. In his defence, Cromwell, supported by a phalanx of Independent officers including Thomas Harrison I*, Hesilrige, Henry Ireton* and John Disbrowe*, reported Manchester’s argument at the council of war (c. 10 Oct.), that 'if we beat the king 99 times he would be king still, and his posterity, and we subjects still; but if he beat us but once we should be hanged, and our posterity be undone'.301Manchester Quarrel, 93, 96-9.

It has been plausibly argued that Cromwell’s pugnacious attack on Manchester was delivered when the widespread perception in Parliament was that neither man had done well at Newbury, and that it sprang from his sense of the weakness of his own position.302A.N.B. Cotton, ‘Cromwell and the Self-Denying Ordinance’, History, lxii. 223. Cromwell seems to have had close links with the journalist John Dillingham, in whose house he lodged during the period of the furore between him and Manchester. Reports favourable to Cromwell emerged from Dillingham’s newspaper.303J. Lilburne, Ionah’s Cry (1647), 8-9 (E.400.5); Cotton, ‘Cromwell and the Self-Denying Ordinance’, 218-9; J. Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers (Aldershot, 2004), 99n; J.S.A. Adamson, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the Long Parl.’, in J. Morrill ed. Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (1990), 57. He may or may not have worked on Dillingham to produce copy favourable to his position, but Cromwell was evidently building up a cadre of reliable supporters and apologists including William Stane*, the scoutmaster-general, Leonard Watson, and Nathaniel Rich*. John Lilburne warned Cromwell against these allies at the time of his attack on Manchester, and two years later (probably unhelpfully) reminded him of the turbulence of his relations with Rich.304Lilburne, Ionah’s Cry, 8, 9. As for the preponderance of surviving depositions, apparently in favour of Cromwell, the Commons could not examine a peer, and the confines of procedure together with the threat of an interminable dispute over privilege, were another demonstration of the restrictive but yet protracting effects of inter-cameral protocols.305Cotton, ‘Cromwell and the Self-Denying Ordinance’, 217.

It was Tate’s committee that acted decisively to try to terminate the hostilities. Tate reported (9 Dec.) that ‘the whole body of their army being infected, nothing would serve for their recovery less than the entire renewing of their constitution’.306CJ iii. 718a; Ludlow, Mems. i. 115. In the committee of the whole House, Cromwell portentously announced it was ‘now a time to speak or forever hold the tongue’, before delivering a passionate speech in support of new-modelling the army. He feared that a long and indecisive war would ‘make the kingdom weary of us, and hate the name of a Parliament’. He addressed public opinion that Parliament-men and peers had ‘got great places and commands’ and therefore might ‘spin out a war’, and that a war-sick people might force Parliament to ‘a dishonourable peace’; and called upon members of both Houses not to ‘scruple to deny themselves, and their own private interests, for the public good’.307Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, i. 186-7. In what was probably a separate intervention that day, Cromwell took care to insist to the House that his soldiers did not ‘idolize’ him, but were committed to the cause of Parliament.308Perfect Occurences no. 18 (6-13 Dec. 1644), no pag. or sig. (E.258.1). The vote for what became the Self-Denying Ordinance passed at the end of the long debate. D’Ewes and Bulstrode Whitelocke were certain that the whole démarche had been a contrivance of Cromwell’s allies, but it is hard to see why Cromwell, any more than Tate, would have wanted to spin out the conflict with Manchester endlessly and thus postpone further the conclusive military victory over the king that he consistently sought.309Harl. 483, f. 121v; Whitelocke, Mems. i. 349.

Cromwell’s speeches were probably made in full knowledge that Essex, some prominent Presbyterians, among them Denzil Holles*, Sir Philip Stapilton* and John Maynard*, together with some Scots commissioners, had met days earlier at Essex House to plot his removal on a charge of incendiary conduct. In Whitelocke’s account, Essex was the broker in this meeting, responding to an initiative by the Scots against the ‘darling of the sectaries’, but Maynard and Whitelocke advised firmly against the preference of Holles and Stapilton for an attempt at an impeachment, warning of Cromwell’s growing support in both Houses, ‘especially of late’.310Whitelocke, Mems. i. 343-7; Whitelocke, Diary, 161; Baillie Lttrs. and Jnls. ii. 245. In the eyes of some Scots observers, Cromwell was intent not only on damaging the alliance between the covenanting Scots and the English Parliament and on undermining the Westminster Assembly, but also on the destruction of the House of Lords. In the overall context of the internecine political conflict of the time, this seems to suggest more of the fear and dislike the Scots harboured towards Cromwell than of any view he himself can reliably be shown to have held in 1644.311Baillie Lttrs and Speeches, ii. 246. Only days after the failed plot to impeach Cromwell, Manchester repeated exactly the same allegations against him in a letter to the Lords.312‘A Letter from the Earl of Manchester to the House of Lords’ ed. S. R. Gardiner, Cam. Misc. viii. 2. A similar view of his implacable qualities, and hostility towards social superiors, was allegedly purveyed to the king at Oxford at this time by Archbishop Williams: ‘He never discoursed as if he were pleased with your majesty and your great officers; indeed he loves none that are more than his equals’, although Williams’s biographer had every reason after 1660 for exaggerating the prelate’s perspicacity.313Hacket, Scrinia Reserata, ii. 212.

After the political victory in establishing the principle of re-modelling, Cromwell showed no immediate inclination to leave Westminster. He was named to a committee to receive two peers bearing the king’s answer to the latest, Anglo-Scottish, peace proposals (16 Dec.), and three days later was a teller with Hesilrige for putting the question on an addition to the response of the House. In this division he and Hesilrige opposed Vane II and Glynne, the presence of the last-named rather implying that Cromwell is likely to have been hostile to the peace process.314CJ iii. 725b, 729b. Having argued for self-denial, he nevertheless recognized that some Members, particularly those plundered by royalists, deserved recompense from the public purse, and was called to the committee on the subject. Nothing immediate came of their deliberations, which were evidently conducted against the background of re-modelling army and offices. The committee was revived in February 1645, and eventually (14 May) produced an order for £4 per week for deserving cases.315CJ iii. 728b; iv. 62a, 141b. However sympathetic he may have been to Members who suffered for their loyalty to Parliament, it is unsurprising that he was completely deaf to pleas for a stay of Sir John Hotham’s execution, acting with William Strode I as a teller for the hawks (24 Dec.). The Lords had been more sympathetic to Hotham, but in order to allow his case to be re-opened in the Commons, an order made against admitting new private business would have had to be set aside. Not only did Cromwell successfully act as teller against a relaxation of the order (28 Dec.), he also, in the third of a series of divisions on the subject, told for the noes on an explicit motion to join with the peers to save Hotham’s life (30 Dec.).316CJ iii. 734b; iv. 4a,b; Juxon Jnl. 71.

In late 1644 and the first two months of 1645, Cromwell was a regular attender at meetings of the CBK, at a time when the factional composition of that body was mutating as a result of the new alliance between the Essexians and the Scots.317‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’, supra. Cromwell sat cheek-by-jowl with some of his most vehement opponents at this body, but he reported from it on a number of occasions, suggesting that political differences had not quite crippled its functionality or authority.318CJ iv. 37a, 37b. He was surely able to exert greater influence by visits to the Commons, the purpose of which was evidently by appeals to the House to push through the military re-modelling and to contribute to staving off the demands of the Scots as far as possible. He was included in what appears to have been a committee balanced with Presbyterian and Independent members to meet with the Lords on a letter to be sent to the Scots Parliament, about maintaining fraternal relations (28 Dec.). After Essex’s infantry had petitioned for pay on 8 January, and while pressure was being exerted on the Lords to pass the Self-Denying Ordinance, Cromwell complained to the House on the 10th that some of Manchester’s officers intended to present a petition in favour of abandoning army re-organization and retaining the earl’s command, on the grounds that political rivalries at Westminster would vitiate any attempt to make changes.319Harl. 166, ff. 173, 174, 175; Harl. 483, f. 134. Such was Cromwell’s authority in the House that orders for the arrest of the ringleader and an associate were immediately authorized, and the matter referred to Tate’s committee.320Add. 31116, p. 370; CJ iv. 16a. This re-affirmation of the principle of re-modelling was secured a week before a further airing of the competing narratives of Manchester and Cromwell on the problems of their army, particularly as they affected the retreat before Donnington Castle, Berkshire (18 Oct. 1644). In the skirmish in the Commons (20 Jan. 1645), the actions of the Lords in appointing a committee on a report by Denzil Holles were judged a breach of privilege because they touched on a Commons-man, Cromwell; and the affair was referred to a committee chaired by John Lisle, a staunch Independent, a year later listed as one of Cromwell’s ‘real friends’.321CJ iv. 21a, 23b, 25a,b; TSP i. 75. The following day, Vane II and Cromwell were the tellers for a motion that Sir Thomas Fairfax* should be the commander-in-chief of the new unified army, defeating the Presbyterians led by Holles and Stapilton, Cromwell’s chief political opponents, in a division of 101 votes to 69.322CJ iv. 26a.

The immediate military expression of new modelling the army was the despatch of Cromwell’s regiment to the west with Waller, while the re-organization proceeded. Orders were issued for payment for his soldiers’ pistols, and the CBK was required to provide marching orders.323CJ iv. 35a, 36b; CSP Dom. 1644-5, pp. 274, 278. By 14 February Waller was on the point of departing for the west, but reports of hostility between his soldiers and those of Essex, not to mention demands by some of Cromwell’s men to opt out of taking the Covenant, continued to overshadow debate in the Commons.324Harl. 483, f. 146v; Harl. 166, ff. 185, 185v; Whitelocke, Mems. i. 389. Cromwell was named to the committee on drafting instructions for the new army and its artillery train (25 Jan.), and was prominent in a number of debates about the legislation for the New Model army. He was among the first named to a committee on a proviso advanced by the Lords to the draft ordinance (5 Feb.), and was a teller on the losing side of a division (7 Feb.) on whether Fairfax should have the authority to nominate officers, subject to Parliament’s approval. Cromwell’s opposition to this presumably derived from a calculation that because of the Independents’ supremacy in the Commons at that point, it would be politically advantageous for nomination to remain in parliamentary hands. In a further division a week later, the Lords advanced a proviso that officers refusing the Covenant should be dismissed the service. Cromwell was naturally the teller for the noes, winning the division by 16 votes in a House of 104.325CJ iv. 31b, 42b, 43b, 48a. On 24 February, Waller reported insubordination among Cromwell’s soldiers, and two days later Cromwell was allowed to take Ireton with him to his soldiers ready for the march west. He gave a report from the CBK on the 27th, his last appearance in the House for over a year.326Harl. 166, f. 179v; Harl. 483, f. 179; CJ iv. 63b,

Reputation transformed, 1645-6

After Cromwell resumed his command, a pattern began to emerge by which negative assessments in the Commons of Cromwell’s military performance met refutation by positive reports from the field. There was a debate on Waller’s slowness and why Cromwell had not rendezvoused with him (1 Mar.), an order to them both to set aside excuses (4 Mar.), and a perception that their forces were weak by comparison with those of Sir Richard Grenville and George Goring* (9 Apr.). By 3 April the CBK, for its part, professed itself in the dark about Cromwell’s activities. 327Harl. 166, ff. 180v, 199v; CJ iv. 67b; CSP Dom. 1644-5, pp. 384, 393. To counter these perceptions, there were reports on action on the Wiltshire/Somerset borders, and a petition from Cromwell’s soldiers acknowledging that their refusal to march with Waller had been heinous (their contrite submission accepted in the House as attributable solely to Cromwell’s sway over them). There came a letter from Cromwell on 12 April urging money be sent them to relieve their dire necessities, only for there to be reports on the 28th of a success at Bletchingdon House in Oxfordshire, producing reflections on God’s mercies, after Cromwell himself declared how he had ‘had greater mercies, but none clearer’. A Commons order followed on 1 May for thanks to be given Cromwell, after what D’Ewes called ‘news of another victory of Cromwell’s’ had been read.328Harl. 166, ff. 188v, 189, 193v; CJ iv. 108b, 124b, 127b, 128a; LJ vii. 339a, 339b-340a; Harl. 483, ff. 198, 199; Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, i. 193. Not only was he conspicuous on active service, he was also becoming conspicuously successful, a point enshrined in the order Anthony Nicoll took to the Lords on 10 May, requesting that Cromwell be exempted from the provisions of the Self-Denying Ordinance, by which he was to surrender his commission on the 12th.329CJ iv. 138a,b; LJ vii. 364b, 365b. This was to be the first of five special dispensations by which Cromwell kept his command until July 1646.330Adamson, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the Long Parl.’, 63-5.

Holles’s later account of how Cromwell’s commission continued despite the Self-Denying Ordinance portrays it as a ‘trick’ by the Independents simply to purge non-Independents of their commands.331Holles, Memoirs, 174-5. He describes how a military threat to the security of the Isle of Ely was offered as the excuse to exempt Cromwell from the ordinance, but in fact the reason advanced on 10 May for Cromwell’s continuation was the need to counter the king’s strategy in the west, and on that occasion the commands of Ferdinando Lord Fairfax, Sir William Brereton* and Sir Thomas Myddelton* were also extended.332Holles, Memoirs, 35-6; Add. 31116, p. 417. It was on 26 May that the threat posed to Ely was considered sufficient to recall Cromwell to his governorship, an expedient which resolved a factional conflict over the post, which had apparently been in abeyance since Cromwell had returned to the field in February.333CSP Dom. 1644-5, pp. 523, 526, 531, 533, 534. On 3 May, Sir Peter Wentworth reported from the committee of both Houses on appointments of governors that their unanimous preference was for an Independent, Francis Russell*.334Harl. 166, f. 206v. The Commons adopted this proposal on the 7th, but it met with a counter-proposal by the Lords that the Essexian William Davies* be appointed instead. Absent though Cromwell was in the field, the refusal by the Independents to countenance the suggestion that Davies should share command with him at Ely was doubtless insisted upon with his approval. D’Ewes suspected the wisdom of sending Cromwell back to Ely, saying as much in a speech on 2 June which implicitly questioned the motive for the move. Holles’s conflation of the Ely governorship with Cromwell’s exemption from the Self-Denying Ordinance is understandable, as both matters were concurrent parliamentary business, both conditioned by factional partisanship and both prominently involving Cromwell.335Harl. 166, ff. 212v, 215; Add. 18780, f. 26v; CJ iv. 155a; ‘William Davies’, ‘Francis Russell’ infra. Regardless of Holles’s faulty chronology, his recollection of St John’s assertion that if no-one else would recall Cromwell after the special dispensation had elapsed, he would do so himself seems plausible: both in its suggestion of St John as a close ally of Cromwell’s, and as an illustration of the special pleading that was required to make an exception of the lieutenant-general.336Holles, Memoirs, 36. By August, after a period of tacit stalemate, the will of the Independent-dominated Commons prevailed, and Russell became governor of Ely.

Cromwell’s return to the Fens was financially well supported by Parliament, £2,000 being made available to him on the credit of the excise. The CBK let it be known that he should receive half as much again.337Harl. 166, f. 215; CJ iv. 155b, 162a; LJ vii. 406b. But the political influence of the CBK was in steep decline by the spring of 1645, and the fall of Leicester to the king (31 May), which came as a shock to Parliament and the City, stimulated some radical thinking in London. On 4 June the City fathers petitioned the Commons with a strategy to prevent the capital suffering the same fate as the east midlands town. In a direct attack on the CBK, they argued that the New Model should be brought up to full strength and that it should not be directed by ‘remote counsels’ (the CBK). D’Ewes’s note on the petition shows it included the request that Cromwell should command the horse regiments of the new army, a suggestion that immediately produced a claim of breach of parliamentary privilege, on the grounds that he was subject to the terms of the Self-Denying Ordinance. The petitioners were nevertheless given thanks, because the parliamentary cause looked so ‘doubtful’, and because of their warm assertion of loyalty to the Houses.338Harl. 166, f. 216. They were also permitted to petition the Lords. Their submission to the upper House the following day deplored that Cromwell had been drawn away from Oxfordshire back to Ely, but called for him to command not the horse of the New Model, but a temporarily life-extended Eastern Association. Both statements about Cromwell would have been acceptable to the Presbyterians of the Lords, and indicate the resistance there to any breach of the principle of Self-Denying in Cromwell’s favour.339LJ vii. 411b-412a. From the senior officers of the New Model itself, however, came a request on 10 June that Cromwell should fill the vacant post of lieutenant-general of horse, a vacancy which could be only damaging, in military terms, and the House acceded despite Presbyterian opposition.340LJ vii. 421a; CJ iv. 169b, 170b; Harl. 166, f. 217v; Add. 18780, f. 32v; Juxon Jnl. 79. Three days later, Cromwell’s close ally St John was named as one of a secret sub-committee of the CBK which had, without the knowledge of the Scots, held secret discussions with the renegade Lord Savile (Sir Thomas Savile†) on his assertions that Oxford would soon surrender. On the basis of this dubious intelligence, Fairfax and Cromwell had been drawn towards Oxford, allowing Leicester to fall to the king.341Harl. 166, f. 219; M. Mahony, ‘The Savile Affair and the Politics of the Long Parliament’, PH vii. 212-27.

A near-contemporary view that Cromwell had intended mastery of the New Model from the outset, and that he had welcomed Fairfax’s commission as commander-in-chief because he knew he could dominate him finds little or no confirmation in the contingent and protracted chain of events that led to Cromwell’s own commission as lieutenant-general.342D. North, A Narrative of Some Passages (1670), 66. Embroiled in protracted factional wrangling over army appointments despite the fresh start promised by new-modelling, subjected to conflicting military strategy that vitiated any prospect that he might have prevented the fall of Leicester, and with one of his closest political allies implicated in a political scandal, Cromwell might have been justified on 13 June in any sense of uncertainty he may have harboured. By the end of the following day, however, his reputation and standing had been transformed. Cromwell’s decisive and prime role in the momentous battle of Naseby has survived even the sceptical scrutiny of revisionist military historians.343Wanklyn, Warrior Generals, 161-6; Gentles, Oliver Cromwell, 43-8; A. Marshall, Oliver Cromwell Soldier (2004), 149-50. He himself understood the transformative potential of Naseby immediately, writing to the Commons before the day was out to assert the evident hand of God, to assure the Speaker (perhaps presumptuously) that Fairfax, his superior officer, conducted himself ‘with all faithfulness and honour’, and to goad his Presbyterian opponents: ‘He that ventures his life for the liberty of his country, I wish he trust God for the liberty of his conscience, you for the liberty he fights for’. The Commons saw fit to redact these words from the version it authorized for publication, the Lords being less punctilious or less attentive.344Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, i. 204-5. It was he and Ireton who overcame Fairfax’s reluctance to open the king’s captured correspondence, with its enormous potential for propaganda. It included what may have been a newsletter to the king reporting Cromwell’s standing in exaggerated terms; making him seem ‘omnipotent’ in the judgment of Sir Peter Wentworth.345Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vi. 49; Add. 18780, f. 52; J. Peacey, ‘The Exploitation of Captured Royal Correspondence and Anglo-Scottish Relations in the British Civil Wars’, SHR lxxix. 213-23. The victory drew forth the inevitable day of thanksgiving, and guaranteed an extension of Cromwell’s commission, first for three months (17 June), with a further month soon added (12 Aug.).346Harl. 166, f. 219v; CJ iv. 177a, 234b, 237b; LJ vii. 432b, 433a, 434a,b, 532b, 535b. He remained in the field, contenting himself with letters to the House calling for further recruitment to the New Model.347Harl. 166, f. 232; Add. 18780, f. 59. Richard Baxter, an orthodox Calvinist divine, first visited the camps of the New Model after Naseby, and professed himself shocked at the extent to which the sectaries dominated it, with the explicit encouragement and approval, he thought, of Cromwell. Baxter’s one-man mission to win back the army to orthodoxy was met ‘coldly’ by Cromwell, who had been forewarned of it by William Purefoy I*.348Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696), pt. 1, 50-1, 52.

Had Cromwell returned to Westminster, he would have been received with expressions of gratitude, no doubt, but he would also have been under closer political scrutiny. The Savile affair, which had not been dissipated by the successes of the New Model, continued to preoccupy the House. At the centre of it in the Commons was Denzil Holles, no friend of Cromwell’s, who was facing allegations made by Lord Savile, by this time in the Tower, that he and others had conducted secret talks, unauthorised by the Commons, with the king at Oxford in November 1644. Holles’s friends evidently decided that attack should be the best form of defence, and began to make counter-allegations against leading Independents. Testimony was drawn in from a wide range of witnesses. On 18 July, John Lilburne came to the bar of the House to assert that a messenger had opened a letter revealing Holles’s correspondence with Oxford. He also insisted that he had apprized both Vane II and Cromwell of this in April. Vane strenuously denied being told any such thing. Nothing came of Lilburne’s story, which he put before the House only a week after Cromwell had written to a Commons committee (not to the whole House surely, as the editors of his writings have it) to urge that attention be paid to Lilburne’s petition.349Add. 18780, f. 79v; Add. 31116 p. 442; ‘Denzil Holles’ infra; Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, iii. 325; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 363; Lilburne, The Copy of a Letter, sig. C2i; J.T. Peacey, ‘John Lilburne and the Long Parl.’, HJ xliii. 630. The implication that Cromwell had failed to pass on intelligence went unanswered. Not only was Cromwell absent from the House; news had arrived four days previously, brought by Thomas Harrison I*, of his latest military success, at Langport, which overshadowed even the in-fighting.350Add. 31116, pp. 440-1. Walter Yonge I recorded how Cromwell had pursued the royalists through fire. Another victory, another day of thanksgiving.351Harl. 166, f. 239v; Add. 31116, p. 440; Add. 18780, f. 74.

The New Model’s successful progress westwards allowed Cromwell to dilate on some of the broader principles of the conflict. His dealings with the clubmen of Dorset appear to have been conditioned by his sense of outrage that they had deliberately promoted themselves as a ‘third party’, to add to the contentions of king and Parliament. In his eyes a further offence of the clubman army, which in a letter to Fairfax (4 Aug.) he reckoned to number 2,000, was its allegiance to the episcopal churchmanship of ‘two vile ministers’ among its leaders. 352Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, i. 209-10. His abhorrence of any political or military action that by accident or design prolonged or inflamed civil conflict in England would become even more pronounced in the later 1640s. His letter of 14 September 1645 to the Speaker on the storming of Bristol was carefully composed four days after the event for consumption at Westminster. An appreciation of Bristol’s significance as ‘so famous a city’ (England’s third in importance, according to Edmund Ludlowe II*) lay behind his long despatch.353Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, i. 212-8; Ludlow, Voyce, 246. It mentioned 19 officers by name, describing their deeds mostly in heroic terms, and included a statistical summary (a garrison numbering 5,000 infantry, horse and auxiliaries taken at the cost of fewer than 200 parliamentarian soldiers) justifying Cromwell’s pugnacious assertion ‘That all this is none other than the work of God. He must be a very atheist that doth not acknowledge it’.354Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, i. 217. As at Naseby, he devoted a last section of his letter to an interpretation of the victory’s meaning. After some self-deprecating comment on behalf of the New Model, he attributed the outcome to ‘faith and prayer’ by ‘the people of God … all England over, who have wrestled with God for a blessing in this very thing’. In some unmistakeably ad hominem remarks to his Westminster readership, he went out of his way to emphasise that

Presbyterians, Independents, all had here the same spirit of faith and prayer; the same pretence [purpose] and answer; they agree here, know no names of difference: pity it should be otherwise anywhere.

The regiment of John Birch* (carefully included in Cromwell’s list), was outside of the New Model and probably represented the greatest concentration of Presbyterians among the victors at Bristol. Quoting the New Testament on the function of the civil power in punishing evil-doers and encouraging the good, Cromwell conceded the principle of religious uniformity only ‘as far as conscience will permit’. Once again, the version of his letter that reached the official record, in this case the Lords’ Journal, and the version the Commons authorised for printing, were redacted to omit Cromwell’s political reflections, though the historian’s claim that every mention of ‘the general’ in the letter was altered to make it appear indisputably a letter from Fairfax is an exaggeration.355Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, i. 217-8; LJ vii. 584b-86a; 1 Peter 2: 14. There followed a flurry of efforts to publicize Cromwell’s remarks on uniformity and conscience, with commentary for and against.356D. Buchanan, Truth its Manifest (1645), 122-9 (E.1179.5); The Conclusion (1645, 669.f.10.38); E. Bowles, Manifest Truth (1645), 70-2; Adamson, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the Long Parl.’, 66-8.

In October 1645, Lilburne thought that Cromwell, whom he still admired, was being deliberately kept in the field, away from Parliament, and that he was intending to move for a new committee to deal with complaints against MPs and committeemen.357J. Lilburne, Englands Birth-Right Justified (1645), 17, 31-2. The impact of his letter from Bristol shows how by this time he had become one of the few Parliament-men who did not need to be at Westminster to exert political influence. An immediate beneficiary of the ascendancy of the Independents represented by the fall of Bristol was Nathaniel Fiennes I*, whose political rehabilitation and vindication on charges of cowardice in surrendering Bristol in 1643 were successfully urged by New Model officers on the very day the city fell to Fairfax and Cromwell.358Vindiciae Veritatis (1654), 60-3; Juxon Jnl. 84. Further victories, at Winchester and Basing House, followed. Walter Yonge I noted that Winchester was the nineteenth garrison to fall since new-modelling. In London, comparisons were drawn between Cromwell and Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, to the chagrin of the Presbyterians who deprecated his achievements.359Add. 18780, f. 137v; Juxon Jnl. 88-9. Cromwell availed himself of the political authority given him by his success. After Winchester was taken, he sent along the eager Independent preacher, Hugh Peters, to the House (7 Oct.), to ventriloquize a request that ministers be sent to the towns captured.360Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, i. 222; CJ iv. 299b; Harl. 484, f. 36v. Unusually for an absent MP, he was named to a committee (8 Oct.) on a dispute between the borough of Cambridge and the university; two months earlier, the mayor had requested that Cromwell be asked to represent the civic case against the university heads of houses.361CJ iv. 301a; Harl. 484, ff. 17, 17v. After news of the taking of Basing House was read in the House (15 Oct.), it was a foregone conclusion that the Commons would wish to award him a further four months’ extension of his commission as lieutenant-general; the Lords dragged their feet, however, and had to be chivvied into completing the dispensation.362CJ iv. 309a,b, 312b, 325b; LJ vii. 653a, 656a. An even more telling expression of confidence in the leaders of the New Model was the sentiment in the House that they 'should be left to themselves, for the best advantage of the kingdom'.363Whitelocke, Mems. i. 525-6.

On 1 December, the Commons awarded Cromwell £2,500 in freehold lands for his ‘many great … and faithful services’, and a small committee, consisting mainly of his closest political allies, among them Hesilrige, Vane II and St John, was deputed to consider how best to make good the honour.364CJ iv. 360a, 360b. Later that day, as political reality receded from the vision of the House, Cromwell was marked down for a barony in a shower of peerages and land grants the king was expected to approve in the next round of peace negotiations, after it was solemnly agreed that Parliament should, as a preliminary, first honour its debts to soldiers deserving their pay. For his part, the king declared himself willing in a future settlement to entrust the army to commissioners including Cromwell (29 Dec.). 365CJ iv. 360b-361b; Add. 31116, p. 490; LJ viii. 72b; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vi. 217. ‘As a respect’, on 23 January 1646 the Army Committee awarded him £500 to furnish his cavalry; on the same day the House approved a further six months’ extension of his commission, and identified the confiscated Hampshire estates of Henry Somerset, marquess of Worcester, as appropriate satisfaction of part of the Commons’ grant of lands. The Army Committee was to seek out further lands and consider an interim ‘entertainment for his present subsistence’. 366CJ iv. 416a.

The committee which brought in the ordinance for the Hampshire lands was driven by St John, John Lisle and Robert Wallop*, the last two with roots in Hampshire, while further local advice came from Richard Norton*, whom Cromwell had known well for at least two years. At the end of January, Lisle brought in another ordinance, to add a further sequestered estate in Hampshire, the lands of John Paulet, 5th marquess of Winchester, to Cromwell’s portfolio. Winchester was the owner of Basing House, scene of one of Cromwell’s victories, so the lands made an appropriate trophy. The plan met with muted objections from the Lords, but was approved by 7 February.367CJ iv.418b, 420a, 424a, 424b, 426a, 430b, 431a; LJ viii. 134a, 144b, 146a; TSP i. 75; BL, MS Facs. Suppl. VII (q), 2. While these awards were going through the Houses, Cromwell was in Devon and Cornwall, where he spent the first three months of 1646 engaged in mopping-up operations against the king’s forces in the west. With Fairfax he was feasted by the corporation of Plymouth, which continued to send fees to its high steward, the Presbyterian, Lord Robartes.368Plymouth and West Devon RO, 1/132, f. 264. From around 12 December 1645 until 21 January 1646, there was discussion in Parliament as to who should be appointed lord lieutenant in Ireland, and Cromwell’s name figured in reports of possible candidates.369HMC Egmont, i. 268; ‘Philip Sidney, Viscount Lisle’ infra; Little, ‘Cromwell and Ire.’, 123-4. The choice eventually fell on Philip Sidney*, Viscount Lisle, so with the west of England secured and no further major military assignments, Cromwell returned to London. Because the west country campaign had by this time become a side-show in military terms, Cromwell would have been well placed to fill the vacancy in Ireland, but he may have indicated his reluctance to accept a commission so remote from where a political settlement for England would need to be achieved. Sir John Berkeley* believed in March that Cromwell was behind a scheme to replace Charles as king with the prince of Wales, but this surely smacks more of royalist perceptions of Cromwell’s influence than of any genuine political intrigue.370Bodl. Clarendon 27, f. 112v.

Cromwell’s visit to the Commons on 23 April 1646 was his first for 14 months, and made in very different circumstances from his return from the field in November 1644, when he had been ‘not much welcomed’. This time it was a triumphal entry, with ‘much rejoicing at his presence and welfare’. He received the formal thanks of the Speaker for his military achievements, but returned to the House the following day to ask for more money for the army in the west, stressing the iniquities of free quarter that would result if no help should be forthcoming.371CJ iv. 520a; Add. 31116, p. 531; Perfect Diurnall no. 143 (20-27 Apr. 1646), 1147 (E.506.35); Harington’s Diary, 22; Kishlansky, Rise of the New Model Army, 69. On the 25th he revealed to the Commons a letter written at Woodstock near Oxford by Henry Ireton, by this time commissary-general of the army, which imparted news passed on by two royalist colonels that Charles would be willing to surrender to Parliament, as long as he was allowed to remain king. The matter was referred to a committee of prominent Independents, including Hesilrige, St John, Henry Marten and Cromwell himself. Marten’s report from the committee prompted a flurry of Commons orders designed to close off avenues by which the king might approach the army independently of Parliament, but the episode more than hinted at the army’s potential for autonomous political initiative. Cromwell made a show of deploring Ireton’s conduct, which failed to convince the Presbyterians in the Commons. The next day, the marriage settlement was concluded between Ireton and Cromwell’s daughter, Bridget.372CJ iv. 523a, b; Add. 31116, p. 532; Harington’s Diary, 23; Juxon Jnl. 118; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 402. It was around this time that John Lilburne urged Cromwell to distance himself from those ‘two covetous earthworms’, St John and Vane II, indicating growing suspicion among radical elements close to the army about the political company Cromwell was keeping.373Lilburne, Ionahs Cry, 3. But whatever coup the Independents in the army might have been contemplating, on the 27th, the king slipped out of Oxford to make his way to surrender to the Scots at Newark. This changed the complexion of British politics completely, including English parliamentary politics, and it must only have deepened the mistrust Cromwell harboured towards the Scots. He was named only to one further Commons committee, on fen drainage (28 Apr.) before he resumed military operations, this time in the siege operations before Oxford, an assignment that hardly made the most of his genius for dynamic, mounted interventions in pitched battle, or indeed (with the king gone) of his political skills.374CJ iv. 525a. It was not unreasonable for the Scots commissioners to have believed erroneously that a watchful Cromwell was shadowing their army on its way north with the king.375Brereton Letter Bks. iii. 247.

With Cromwell again out of the House and back with the army, his most significant political activity in the spring of 1646 was in consolidating his grip on the officer cadre of the New Model. Baxter considered this to be a long-term, systematic tuning of the army,

So that by degrees he had headed the greatest part of the army with Anabaptists, Antinomians, Seekers, or Separatists at best: and all these he tied together by the point of liberty of conscience, which was the common interest in which they did unite. Yet all the sober party were carried on by his profession that he only promoted the universal interest of the godly, without any distinction or partiality at all: but still when a place fell void, it was twenty to one a sectary had it, and if a godly man of any other mind or temper had a mind to leave the army, he would secretly or openly further it. Yet did he not openly profess what opinion he was of himself: but the most that he said for any was for Anabaptism and Antinomianism, which he usually seemed to own.376Reliquiae Baxterianae, pt. 1, 57.

This was the perspective of someone hostile to Cromwell’s anti-formalism in religion, but Cromwell’s approach to matters of recruitment and reward in the army was consistent from his earliest commission in the army. Baxter’s perception that Cromwell’s personal faith was broad in scope and untrammelled by membership of any particular church or congregation was surely accurate, and has been vindicated by modern historians who note how his anti-formalist beliefs cannot be forced into the ‘sectarian grid’.377J. C. Davis, ‘Cromwell’s Religion’, in Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution ed. Morrill, 198. His providentialist interpretation of public events had been reinforced and vindicated by a string of military successes so decisive that there seems no reason to doubt he was sincere in his confident if not presumptuous assurances to Speaker Lenthall that God was ‘not weary in doing you good’.378Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, i. 221. In reality, the composition of the New Model in 1645-6 hardly matched Cromwell’s ideal of 1642-3, with pressed men, even including ex-royalists, apparently making up in particular the infantry regiments. The ‘middling sort’ remained dominant in the cavalry, however, to sustain the quality of his godly elite.379Gentles, New Model Army, 31-40. And although there were many elements of the parliamentarian armies less susceptible to Cromwell’s influence than the horse regiments of the New Model, he was surely held in higher regard than were commanders more remote or less responsive to their personal interests.

Reinforcing any loyalty Cromwell commanded because of his dogged advocacy in individual soldiers’ cases, or because of his fervent expressions of piety in favour of liberty of conscience, was the undoubted fact that the New Model, even its ill-assorted infantry, was better resourced than other units of the military. The Army Committee, created in 1645 specifically to service the New Model, and dominated by the Independents, bestowed far more on Fairfax’s army than the total amount authorized for the western brigade of Edward Massie*, the Northern Association and the army of the Scots combined.380Gentles, New Model Army, 41; ‘Committee for the Army’, supra. The effect of his own personal charisma, the shared ideology in the New Model and preferential resourcing was to create a potential for Cromwell at this point to command an extra-parliamentary political bloc unrivalled by any other Member of the Commons. In the army high command itself, a strategy group of Fairfax, Cromwell, Ireton, Fleetwood and John Lambert*, with civilian advice from Bulstrode Whitelocke (if Whitelocke himself can be believed) coalesced in the summer of 1646.381Whitelocke, Mems. ii. 19-20, 27, 44; Whitelocke, Diary, 186-7. He was also the most senior and politically astute New Model officer also serving as a parliament-man: a bridge to the Independents in both Houses.

Independent grandee, 1646-8

Cromwell made a few visits to Westminster in June 1646. On the 3rd, he was named to a joint committee of Lords and Commons on criteria for excluding individuals from the Lord’s Supper in parish worship. As someone never entirely in sympathy with the Presbyterian principles of the national church whose blueprint was still under discussion and now tainted by the rapprochement between king and Scots, he was unlikely to have been an enthusiast for the committee’s business. Even so, he is not known actively to have thwarted progress towards an Erastian, non-episcopalian national church and certainly had no alternative model of church government to promote instead. On 9 June, he joined a committee on which his fellow Independent grandees (Vane II, St John, Hesilrige) were evident, to prepare a declaration to the Scots, who had the king in their custody at Newcastle, on ‘complaints and jealousies’ arising from the now severely-strained Anglo-Scots alliance, specifically arising from the presence of the Scots army in England.382CJ iv. 562b, 570b. On the 22nd a committee on how best to send Parliament’s propositions to the king included Cromwell, and taking these committees together it is clear that he had broken off from supervising siege operations outside Oxford to participate in these debates.383CJ iv. 548b. He had returned to Oxford, a few days after the city surrendered to Parliament. On 10 July, a report reached royalist Worcester that he had torn up a petition of Independents brought to his camp outside Oxford rather than sign it. This must relate to the ‘black list’ identifying Presbyterian army officers, an incitement to purge the officer cadre of non-Independents, which Cromwell declined. 384Diary and Pprs. of Henry Townshend ed. Porter, Roberts, Roy (Worcs. Hist. Soc. n.s. xxv), 241, 249; Clarke Pprs. i. 424. With faction raging both in the army and Parliament, the Presbyterians enjoyed the upper hand, with the king beyond the reach of the New Model and the parliamentary Presbyterians enjoying better prospects of access to him by means of the Scots. The breakdown of health apparently suffered by both St John and William Pierrepont* and the rumour of Cromwell’s rejection of a paper put to him all suggest the difficulties being experienced by the Independents in adjusting to the new political circumstances.385‘Oliver St John’, ‘William Pierrepont’, infra.

By 11 July Cromwell had returned to London, to take up residence with his family initially in Drury Lane.386CJ iv. 615b; Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, i. 247. From then until mid-April 1648, when he was called from the House again to meet the military and political emergency of the second civil war, he was named to 40 committees. Vane II, in a steep decline from his earlier prominence, was named to 80 between May 1646 and December 1648, and Marten was named to 90 between January 1646 and July 1647, suggesting how Cromwell was hardly among the most prominent of the Independents in the committee chamber. Doubts remain as to Cromwell’s military status from July, since the last temporary extension of his commission as lieutenant-general of horse expired without further renewal by Parliament, but he himself seems to have been in no doubt that he continued in commission until at least late May 1647.387C. Hoover, ‘Cromwell’s Status and Pay in 1646-47’, HJ xxiii. 703-15. Cromwell’s speeches and letters relating to army matters were composed in a confident belief on his part that he remained lieutenant-general. He delivered a speech on 11 July in the Commons in defence of Fairfax and the New Model, against factional criticism that probably arose during the discussion of disbanding the brigade of the Presbyterian, Edward Massie*, in the west.388Add. 31116, p. 554; CJ iv. 617b. He deplored ‘faction or worse’ that raged at Westminster, but his contributions to parliamentary proceedings were inevitably strongly tainted with factional significance, and there is nothing to suggest he rose above the conflict. He was named to a committee that sought to stifle attempts by the Presbyterian City government to petition the king independently of the Houses (11 July), one on 23 July on how to deal with former partisans of the king, laymen or ejected clergy, particularly with regard to their property, and on the 31st he ‘pressed largely and passionately’ in favour of having the question of sending an army to quell Ireland referred to the committee of the whole House. In an obviously factional line-up, Hesilrige and Cromwell were tellers on the losing side against Holles and Stapilton. This defeat prompted a second division, in which the Presbyterians attempted to vote through the despatch of six New Model field regiments to Ireland, losing only by the narrowest of margins. 389Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, i. 240; CJ iv. 615b, 616a, 625b, 631b, 632a; Harington’s Diary, 30.

His committee appointments from August 1646, stretching into 1647, should be viewed as contributing to shoring up the cause of the wrong-footed Independents. From 31 July until the end of 1646, he was a teller on ten occasions (until then he had totalled nine tellerships since November 1640), and in all but one of these divisions he was paired with a staunch political Independent: Hesilrige, Sir Peter Wentworth, Vane II, William Purefoy I, Harbert Morley or Sir John Evelyn of Wiltshire.390CJ iv. 631b, 665b, 680a, 690a, 700b, 713b, 726b, v. 12a, 34b. His resistance to the adjournment of the House for a day, when his opponent as teller was Henry Marten (28 Aug.), was a rare example of a fissure in the usually solid Independent bloc in divisions.391CJ iv. 658a. Among the blatantly factional issues on which Cromwell worked to promote the Independent line against the Presbyterians were the nominations for the lord lieutenancy of Yorkshire (17 Sept.), the vote on retaining the great seal in the hands of Members of both Houses, which the Independents lost at the division (1 Oct.), and the vote on 10 October on offices and rewards. On that occasion, a debate on the pay of the major-generals outside the New Model widened into a broader discussion on perquisites; and a Presbyterian motion in favour of a ballot-box for secret voting on material rewards for servants of the state was resolutely opposed by the generously-rewarded Cromwell, and by Hesilrige, who would both have seen in the proposal a potential undermining of the Independents’ dominance of patronage.392CJ iv. 680a, 690a; Harington’s Diary, 37, 40, 42; Add. 31116, p. 570. Military affairs naturally figured prominently. A long-running feud between the Presbyterian Sir Richard Onslow* and the gadfly writer George Wither, once Onslow’s military subordinate, was the subject of a debate in the House on 7 August, when Hesilrige and Cromwell opposed Holles and Stapilton, and on the 11th he was named to a committee on borrowing money for the military expedition to Ireland, to which the political Independent Edmund Prideaux I was first-named.393CJ iv. 640a, 641b. He defended the New Model when ‘some heat’ blew up in the House on 9 October, and probably kept a suspicious eye on Edmund Harvey I, a Presbyterian, who was given charge of the committee (15 Oct.) for indemnifying the officers of the City militia (Cromwell was named third). This came only two weeks after the highly factionalized elections for lord mayor had deepened political tensions and divisions in the metropolis.394Harington’s Diary, 42; CJ iv. 694b; Juxon Jnl. 136-7. By contrast, the committee of 10 December, on arrears of pay endured by what was pointedly called the ‘whole soldiery’, seems to have been constructed in a grudging spirit of co-operation, since the Presbyterian John Birch and the Independent Cromwell were first-named, and the matter was referred to the particular care of Birch and Sir Thomas Wroth, also on different sides of the factional divide.395CJ v. 9b. This committee was later re-formed (25 Dec.) to respond to petitions from Massie’s disbanding western brigade.396CJ v. 28b.

Cromwell remained deeply critical and suspicious of the Scots. Conflict between the Houses intensified on 14 August, after the Lords, in response to complaints by the Scots commissioners, had sent down an ordinance to punish authors and printers of works against the Scots interest. After a debate which pitted Holles against Cromwell, the Commons voted against the Independents in favour of an ordinance widened to include scandalous books in general, and Cromwell was included in the resulting committee on punishing authors and publishers of offensive publications (14 Aug.), where he would have resisted the punitive policies of the Presbyterians. 397Add. 31116, p. 561; CJ iv. 644b; Harington’s Diary, 32. He was included in the committee of 24 September to meet with the Lords on how to discuss with the Scots commissioners the question of a treaty and the king’s return to London, and as a member of the now virtually defunct CBK was one of those tasked with informing the Scots of this development.398CJ iv. 675a, v. 38a.

He seems not to have dealt personally with the Scots, partly no doubt because he was virtually persona non grata in their eyes, but matters relating to the Scots military presence continued to engage him. On 14 August, Cromwell opposed Presbyterian efforts to increase the sum voted to disband the Scots army.399CJ iv. 644b; Harington’s Diary, 32. He quashed Sir John Clotworthy’s case for an immediate settlement of more than £100,000 on the Scots, but on 5 September was named to the delegation to the City to borrow the overall sum of £200,000 for this purpose. On the 10th Holles reported a paper from the City’s common council proposing that as security for the loan Parliament should grant the proceeds of the excise and the sales of bishops’ lands. In the knowledge that proceeds of the excise were already committed for years ahead, the Commons instead proposed the security of sums raised in sales of delinquents’ lands, and agreed to allow ‘doubling’ (further loans by existing lenders) to improve the return for existing loans on the public faith. Cromwell unsuccessfully opposed the despatch of these proposals to the Lords, perhaps moved by a perception in the Commons that big business interests were gaining preferential treatment, and a fear that while ‘those who had parted with all for the Parliament should be neglected, other[s] who have lent of their superfluity should be largely paid’.400CJ iv. 663a, 665a,b; Harington’s Diary, 35; Juxon Jnl. 134. It seems unlikely that he would have opposed the sale of lands of either delinquents or bishops, especially since sales of advowsons or impropriations were excluded, and would have rejoiced with the diarist Thomas Juxon that bishops were by this means ‘put out of all hope to be re-established’.401Juxon Jnl. 134. He was of course himself already a notable personal beneficiary of confiscated lands. In what was intended as the final chapter of the Anglo-Scots alliance, he was a signatory to the terms signed on 23 December by which the Scots were to quit England.402CJ v. 38a.

He continued, as ever, to be an active advocate and supporter of individuals and groups he thought worthy of promotion or succour. These included, as in the early days of this Parliament, parishioners taking initiatives on public worship, as at Tothill Fields in Westminster (4 Aug.) or the persecuted, godly folk of Hapton in Norfolk. Again as ever, those inside the army remained a significant group to benefit from his interventions. 403CJ iv. 632a; Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, i. 237, 238, 241, 243. His natural sympathies were in evidence on 9 October when he insisted, successfully, that awards to poor wives and widows of soldiers be prioritized, ahead of the City’s claims as lenders to Parliament, as charges on the excise.404CJ iv. 688b; Harington’s Diary, 42. In his time at Drury Lane, his door was open to a range of people, including radicals such as William Walwyn.405The Writings of William Walwyn ed. J. R. McMichael, B. Taft (1989), 391-3. In August he reported to Fairfax on progress in paying off Massie’s brigade in the west, but felt sufficiently detached from the inner circle of the high command of the New Model field army to need to reinforce his bond with the commander-in-chief, at least in jocular epistolary terms: ‘I hope you have not cast me off’.406Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, i. 241. His interest in the case of Sir Thomas Glemham, former royalist governor of Oxford, arrested and imprisoned for debt, was rooted in Cromwell’s instinct towards backing the integrity of the New Model’s surrender articles, which guaranteed freedom from arrest for six months and subjected Glemham to parliamentary privilege by extension. Cromwell was vocal in arguing for Glemham’s release from custody in the City, ordered on 20 August against significant opposition in the Commons, which showed itself generally much more sympathetic to City business interests than Cromwell ever was. Not only did this case have a strong factional component, it was also tinged with Commons-Lords procedural jealousies.407Add. 31116, pp. 562, 563; Harington’s Diary, 33, 34; CJ iv. 651b. Two more cases of this kind would arise later in the year, with the same response by Cromwell.408CJ iv. 696b, v. 12a.

The atmosphere of faction and conspiracy in London intensified in the second half of 1646, and it was not assuaged by the death of the earl of Essex (14 Sept.), around whom Presbyterian aspirations had coalesced. Cromwell was not immune to this sense of crisis. His instinct was impatiently to call for help from absent political allies, such as St John, who was away from London in August, probably ill.409Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, i. 240-1. He, Cromwell, was the New Model’s chief advocate in the Commons, evidently taking care to ensure that the assessment continued to be voted through.410Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, i. 245; CJ iv. 687a, 688b. His apparent opposition (3 Nov.) to bringing in an ordinance to extend the life of the Army Committee, the New Model’s principal parliamentary support agency, for a further ten months is hard to explain, and may have arisen from either a reluctance to antagonize the Lords (not something Cromwell was usually afraid of doing) or from dissatisfaction with the length of the proposed extension.411CJ iv. 731b, ‘Committee for the Army’, supra. If - as seems quite likely, to judge from reports from various sources outside Westminster - overtures were being made to the king in the closing months of 1646 by the Independents with a view to a settlement including ‘moderated episcopacy’ and liberty of conscience, Cromwell’s personal role in them is opaque.412Montereul Corresp. i. 277, 354; Colonel Joseph Bamfield’s Apologie (1685), 16-17; Hamilton Pprs. ed. Gardiner, 115, 123-6; Juxon Jnl. 139.

In his visible work in the House, he was named to a committee of both Houses, proposed by the Lords, on the numbers of disaffected individuals congregating in London and Westminster (7 Dec.) and to committees on printed books called into question in the Commons (12 Dec.) and in response to allegations that Evelyn of Wiltshire had suggested the New Model might march on the City to ‘quell the mechanics’ (17 Dec.).413CJ v. 4a, 10b, 11a, 17b; M. Mahony, ‘Presbyterianism in the City of London, 1645-1647’, HJ, xxii. 108. From London came an unofficial petition to the lord mayor from ‘Covenant-engaged citizens’ (2 Dec.), which the Commons sought to suppress, and another from the corporation (21 Dec.). The second petition incorporated much of the first, and encapsulated City resentment of the New Model, which it believed to be riddled with sectaries and ‘preaching soldiers’; a fear that City loans would be repudiated by an Independent-controlled Parliament; a belief that to return the king to his English throne would settle the kingdom, and an aspiration towards a City militia answerable only to an annually-elected City, therefore Presbyterian, committee.414CJ iv. 735b; To the Right Honourable the Lord Mayor (1646, misdated 1643 in EEBO, Wing T1658A); To the Right Honourable the Lords (1646, E.366.14); Juxon Jnl. 141-3.

Cromwell’s response to this sustained hostility to the army was restrained, at least in his report of it to Fairfax (21 Dec.). He resisted in a characteristically practical way a motion that confined preaching to ordained ministers, serving with Hesilrige as a teller for the noes, but lost heavily in the division (105 votes to 57). The motion may have been an explicit veto of an order he had given to the army, encouraging the expression of ‘gifts of the spirit’. He was evidently encouraged by the final terms with the Scots, expressing particular confidence in the New Model foot officer, Philip Skippon*, as the choice for command of the English regiment sent to fetch the king from Newcastle. He was equally staunch in support of another Independent, Sir James Harington*, as part of the reception committee for the returning monarch (7 Jan. 1647). 415Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, i. 248-9; CJ v. 34b, 45a; Clarke Pprs. i. 424. Further successes for the Independents were the committee to consider the proposals of the entrepreneur Andrewes Burrell for managing the navy, which forced Giles Grene* into publishing a self-exculpation from Burrell’s allegations of corruption (9 Jan.) and the committee put into the care of Francis Thorpe on nominations and instructions for circuit judges. Cromwell sat on both of these.416CJ v. 47a, 60a. He co-opted Edward Howard*, Lord Howard of Escrick, Roger Hill II*, John Gurdon* and Henry Darley*, all Independents, into a project to insinuate a friend into a clerkship at the office of what had formerly been the prerogative court of Canterbury (23 Mar. 1647), and in a case where the material beneficiary was only Cromwell himself, the Independents were confident enough to revive the ordinance for him to receive the lands of marquess of Winchester, an award evidently held up by the detail for nearly a year since it was first bestowed. The discovery that Winchester was only life tenant of the lands in question set off a hunt for other forfeited estates, specifically of papists, not thus encumbered.417CJ v. 44b, 57a; Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, iii. 328-9.

From late January 1647 until early April, Cromwell was absent from the House, apparently suffering from a serious illness, and royalist sources considered this to have weakened significantly the impact the Independents could bring to bear in the Commons.418Bodl. Clarendon 29, f. 97. By 11 March, or a few days later, he was sufficiently recovered to be able to write to Fairfax on political developments, in particular the attempt that day by petitioners from the county of Essex to prevent the New Model from quartering there. While resentful of those inside and outside Parliament having ‘so much malice against the army that besots them’, he omitted from his report the Presbyterians’ calculated insults of three days earlier, aimed at the army and against him in particular. The Commons had on that occasion resolved to limit the rank of any New Model officer to colonel, to prevent any Member of Parliament from commanding a garrison, and to insist that all officers should take the Covenant. Characteristically, Cromwell was undaunted by this, choosing to interpret the ramping-up of hostility towards the New Model as the dying spasm of the forces of evil – ‘surely the Devil hath but a short time’ – scoffing to Fairfax at the paranoid behaviour of the London authorities in raising soldiers to resist a march by the army on London.419Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, i. 252-3; CJ v. 107b-108a, 109b-110a; Gardiner, Hist. Civil War, iii. 220-1; Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, 29; Kishlansky, Rise of the New Model Army, 154-5.

And yet Lilburne, incarcerated in the Tower, claimed to have received news on 24 March that Cromwell had assured the Commons that the army would be ready to disband whenever required, and he was certainly willing to accept as beneficial the Commons’ imposition of a 25-mile cordon sanitaire between the army and the capital. The report from French diplomatic sources that a despondent Cromwell was willing at this point to leave England altogether to fight for liberty of conscience in the service of Charles Louis, the elector palatine, seems to exaggerate the scale of any sense of defeat being experienced in Independent circles, and fits ill with the potential for political manoeuvring that the situation allowed.420Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, i. 254; Lilburne, Ionahs Cry, 3-4; Gardiner, Hist. Civil War, iii. 222-3. The ‘Declaration of Dislike’ (29 Mar. 1647) against agitation in the army was easily pushed through the House by the Presbyterians, and the outcome would probably have been the same had Cromwell been present that day. The declaration was followed by the Presbyterians’ blatantly factional appointment of the physically weakened Skippon and the Presbyterian Massie to command in Ireland, ignoring Cromwell’s infinitely stronger merits for the commission. 421CJ v. 129a,b, 133b; Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, 39. The political tide was evidently running against the Independents, and Cromwell was willing to adopt so far as was possible the mantle of vigorous army champion, but the Independents had to content themselves with the occasional minor victory in divisions, as on 8 April when Cromwell and Sir William Masham were successful tellers on a motion to restrict allowances for servants of the Derby House Committee of Irish Affairs. His political enemies remained wary of fixing on his own regiment to disband, and on 8 April it was voted to be maintained.422CJ v. 137a, 137b. He was willing to be named to the large committee of 14 April charged with re-submitting to the king the Presbyterian-coloured Newcastle Propositions, and was called to the Independent-dominated small committee of the 20th to work on an ordinance on holidays, inspired by a petition of London apprentices. The leading part in constructing this ordinance seems to have been taken by William Ball, and the ordinance which passed the Lords in June substituted days of recreation for the former holy days, including Christmas. This parliamentary business proceeded against a background of renewed progress in the ordinance for rewarding Cromwell with grants of lands (15 Apr., 5 May), but royalist sources were convinced that he and the Independents were in retreat politically.423CJ v. 142b, 148b, 162b ; Add. 31116, p. 617; Bodl. Clarendon 29, ff. 165v, 193.

The committee (23 Apr.) to examine radical pamphlets emanating from the army included Cromwell, and a week later he was among the grandees to have received a letter from the army agitators, which complained of the plan to ship regiments to Ireland as a ‘design to ruin and break this army in pieces’. He duly reported it to the Speaker, the letter meeting with what John Harington* recorded as universal disapproval in the House. Later that day, with Skippon, Ireton and Fleetwood, he was sent by the Commons to the army, quartering at Saffron Walden, ‘to quiet all distempers’.424CJ v. 153a, 158a; Harington’s Diary, 48; Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, 58. A widely-circulating paper had been sent to Cromwell by Sir William Armyne*. It spoke of an approach to the king on behalf of the army, offering to restore him unconditionally if he would but surrender to it. This probably coloured Cromwell’s caution at Saffron Walden. There he delivered a ‘long grave speech’ to officers and representative troopers at a meeting chaired by a ‘favourite’ of his, Capt. John Reynolds*. He vindicated Parliament’s plan to despatch regiments to Ireland, justified the Irish expedition as a noble cause, gave assurances that an indemnity ordinance was progressing and promised that pay arrears would be met. A story that Cromwell was interrupted by an agitator, and that his apparent fury was a stage-managed pretence in order to conceal his sympathies with the army radicals has been discounted by the closest modern analyst of these events. A more reliable record of his pronouncements on 15 May suggests a placatory speech coupled with a warning against defying Parliament: ‘If that authority falls to nothing, nothing can follow but confusion’.425Clarke Pprs. i. 28, 72-3, 426-7; Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, 70, 73. The careful report made by Cromwell and his colleagues to the House on 21 May assured the Commons that the army was orderly and loyal, but left MPs in no doubt that grievances were real and persistent.426CJ v. 181b; Harington’s Diary, 53; Clarke Pprs. i. 94-9; Bodl. Clarendon 29, f. 220.

Although Cromwell was formally thanked by the House for his efforts with the army, he did not resume his seat in the Commons, and Saffron Walden marked the start of a shift in his political orientation. Not until mid-September was he named to another Commons committee. But his headquarters were not with the army, but his house in King Street (no longer Drury Lane, as is often said).427WCA, SMW/E/47/1580; Gentles, New Model Army, 169; Oxford DNB. In the garden of his Westminster town house on 31 May a meeting took place at which Cornet George Joyce told Cromwell of alarm in the army that the king was about to be moved as part of a Presbyterian coup which would create a new army and bring the king to London.428J. Harris, The Grand Designe (1647), sig. A3 (E.419.15); Windsor Projects (1648), 4 (E.442.10). On 3 June, Joyce, evidently acting with the solidarity of the New Model behind him, abducted the king, taking him from Holdenby in Northamptonshire to a house near Newmarket. Just as it seems incredible that the lieutenant-general should have explicitly authorized a cornet to undertake this pre-emptive strike (and in the process arrest the Presbyterian colonel guarding him), so it is also improbable that Cromwell was not fore-warned on 31 May as to what was about to occur.429Clarke Pprs. i. xxv-xxix; Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, 106-12. Sources in or close to the army asserted that he gave the order to seize the king, which he consistently denied.430Harris, Grand Designe, sig. A3; R. Huntington, Sundry Reasons (1648) 3-4 (E.458.3).

The most likely train of events seems that on the 31st he was told what would happen, and indicated either explicitly or tacitly that he would not intervene to prevent it. In effect, though reluctantly, he was now at the head of a force resolved to prevent a second war unleashed by Scots, City and Presbyterians in a new alliance. This was the essence of a version of events recounted by Sir Gilbert Pykeringe* after 1649.431TSP, v. 674. Cromwell arrived at Newmarket from London as soon as he could have done, not least to avoid the possibility of his own arrest, in the company of Leonard Watson, his scoutmaster-general, whom Lilburne would soon warn Cromwell against as unprincipled. According to one source, the lieutenant-general had just come from assuring the Commons that he had quelled all unrest in the army, winning the response from some Parliament-men that ‘he deserved a statue in gold’. At what must have been a tense interview between the king, Fairfax and Cromwell (7 June), the officers assured Charles that they knew nothing of Joyce’s project, allowed the king the servants and chaplains denied him by both Scots and the English Presbyterians, and gave him hopes of his restoration.432Merevale Hall, Dugdale mss, HT 10/8/11; Lilburne, Ionahs Cry, 8. On the 8th, Holles belatedly produced a letter in the Commons from Joyce, which implicated Cromwell, Hesilrige and Fleetwood in what had occurred, but the House’s despatch of Vane II, Skippon, Robert Scawen* and Thomas Povey*, Independents to a man, to the army, starkly indicated how far the Presbyterians had suddenly lost the initiative.433Add. 31116, p. 624. There seems no reason to doubt that since his recovery from illness in March Cromwell had been working towards reconciliation between Parliament and the New Model, and that the coup at Holdenby confirmed a change of political direction on his part.434Dyve Letter Bk. 57.

A letter was read in the House on 11 June, from the senior army officers, including Cromwell, to the London authorities. It assured the citizens of the army’s respect and good intentions towards them, but no-one could have missed the import of the remark that the army was ‘drawing near’ the City.435Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, i. 266-9; CJ v. 208a. It was alleged at the time that Cromwell personally drew up the impeachments of the Eleven Members, presented on 16 June to the Commons by the army, and later embellished and published. Direct evidence of his involvement, as with so many of the momentous events with which he was associated, is lacking. From a radical perspective, there were not enough names on the list of those charged, but the charges themselves were in most cases vague and general, and appear to be a compilation after a trawl though the ranks of the army for suitable content.436Putney Projects (1647), 7, 8-9 (E.421.19); CJ v. 214b; A Particular Charge or Impeachment (1647, E.397.17). The most that can be said about Cromwell’s involvement is that he knew the Eleven Members from long personal observation of them in the Commons, and might therefore have suggested the names, but even that goes beyond the evidence, and it seems more likely that as with Joyce’s abduction of the king he may simply have indicated assent to the proceedings. In any case, the impeachments were part of the wider package of army demands, which included the revocation of powers to the London militia commissioners.437Dyve Letter Bk. 60-1; Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, 155. At the first day of the general council of the army held at Reading on 16 July, Cromwell called for a committee to structure the debates, insisted that he would need to cogitate on the implications before he would consent to a march on London, but did not veto such a course.438Clarke Pprs. i. 177, 178, 179-80. At Reading he approved the impeachments, what he called ‘a purging of the House of Commons’, and declared that it was now the army’s responsibility to work for a treaty to settle the kingdom. On more than one occasion he expressed abhorrence at the prospect of a second or renewed war, which he thought was threatened by the behaviour of the Presbyterians.439Clarke Pprs. i. 184, 185, 186. He went out of his way to urge respect for the ‘reformed’ Parliament, drawing attention to the staunch endurance of Members who had not been seduced into self-seeking and corruption:

There is a party there that hath been faithful from the sitting of the Parliament to this very day; and we know their interests, and they have ventured their lives through so many hazards they came not to the House but under the apprehension of having their throats cut every day.440Clarke Pprs. i. 192.

To soldiers who objected that Parliament did nothing to combat publications hostile to the New Model, he insisted that Lords and Commons could no longer disown the army and that a wholesale forcing of the Houses to a settlement was inferior to one freely negotiated. Because of the Commons’ vote on 5 July which excluded those who had fought against Parliament and certain other groups from membership, he anticipated that 20 or 30 men would leave the House.441Clarke Pprs. i. 202-3, 205-6; CJ v. 233b. He rebutted alarmist calls to march on London to help beleaguered friends with a reminder that the army was there to settle the nation, not merely to satisfy particular elements: ‘what’s for their good, not what pleases them’.442Clarke Pprs. i. 209.

The drafting of the Heads of the Proposals, the army’s blueprint for a political settlement to be submitted to the king, in competition with Parliament’s Newcastle Propositions, was entrusted to Ireton and Lambert, both protégés of Cromwell. There is no doubt that Cromwell approved of the Heads, which opened for the first time, under pressure from the army rank and file, the dimension of popular grievances, such as forest laws, excise and monopolies. The Heads also included the replacement of the triennial act with plans for biennial Parliaments, and invested the army in the hands of Parliament for ten years. The latter clause was one of a number of points on which the Heads offered more accommodating terms to the king than had the Newcastle Propositions, which sought to bar the king from command of the armed forces for 20 years. On religious matters, the Propositions enjoined the abolition of episcopacy, the enforcement of the Covenant and uniformity of church government in England and Scotland. The Heads, by contrast, required only the coercive power of bishops to be abolished, and abandoned any effort to enforce the Covenant. In the conditions of summer 1647 the promise to restore the king and queen to a ‘condition of safety, honour and freedom’ and the prospect of the survival of bishops despite the Long Parliament’s repeated moves towards abolition, were bound to seem attractive to Charles. A case has been made for Cromwell’s interest in promoting ‘moderated episcopacy’ to the king from as early as September 1646, but in the context of his recent political defection from Parliament to army, not to mention his factionalized political behaviour in the Commons in 1646-7, the appeal of the Heads may have lain primarily in the extent to which they under-cut the Presbyterians and stole the initiative from them. 443Constitutional Docs. of the Puritan Revolution ed. Gardiner (1906), 316-26; D. Scott, ‘Rethinking Royalist Politics, 1642-9’ in J. Adamson (ed.), The English Civil War (Basingstoke, 2009), 54.

Any prospect of statesmanlike negotiations around the Heads of the Proposals was scotched by the tumultuous events in London, in which a Presbyterian counter-coup (26 July 1647) was thwarted by the advance of the New Model army to the capital after Independent Parliament-men had sought its protection. Cromwell was implicated in what might have been an explicit invitation by the army to MPs to take refuge with it, and he expostulated against the Presbyterian MPs remaining at Westminster: ‘Really, they should be pulled out by the ears’. In an unmistakeable show of strength, he rode at the head of the cavalry through London (7 Aug.) as the army made its way to quarter south of the Thames, and to the citizenry he was the visible commander, since the convalescing Fairfax rode in a coach.444Huntington, Sundry Reasons, 8; Clarke Pprs. i. 219n; Gardiner, Hist. Civil War, iii. 345. He was undoubtedly responsible for the manoeuvres of the horse regiments in Hyde Park on 20 August that made it inevitable that the proceedings of the Presbyterian-dominated Houses between 26 July and 6 August would be declared void, and may have sat in the House himself that day for a while, though this is far from certain.445Huntington, Sundry Reasons, 8; Gardiner, Hist. Civil War, iii. 350-1; Harington’s Diary, 58. Only from 15 September can Cromwell’s presence in the House again be taken as active and regular. He was named then to a committee to review ordinances on tithes and to redress grievances arising through them: in line with the priorities of the Independents, this was a very clear signal of an intention to remove or at least qualify the element of compulsion.446CJ v. 302a. He was never among the active core of legislator-Members. In the reforming period of 1640-2, he was associated with around a dozen bills or declarations, but with none more centrally than with the Commons order on lectureships (8 Sept. 1641).447CJ ii. 84b, 87b, 198b, 228a, 239b, 349b, 467b, 468b, 595a, 600b, 606b, 607a; Dering, Speeches (1642), 62; Procs. LP, vi. 688. Subsequently, he had been named to the ordinance for the New Model (5 Feb. 1645), an important piece of legislation, but in the period between April 1646 and May 1647, the ordinance on replacing saints’ days with days of recreation (20 Apr.) was the most significant of only five pieces of legislative business to command his attention.448CJ iv. 42b, 525a, 570b, v. 31a, 51b, 148b. His total number of tellerships, by contrast, indicates how significant he had become in the party contest. In the two months from mid-December 1644, he was a teller six times, and from the end of July 1646 until mid-October 1647, on 16 occasions.449CJ iii. 729b, 734b, iv. 4a, 4b, 26a, 43b, 631b, 665b, 680a, 690a, 700b, 713b, 726b, v. 12a, 34b, 45a, 137b.

Cromwell’s aims on his return to the Parliament, which had been purged by indirect force with his full approval, were to settle the kingdom by a personal deal with the king, while placating other political agencies by concessions. With the Presbyterians neutralized, there remained the Scots and the radical elements coalescing in the army and the London-based civilian Levellers. He was a successful teller on 22 September in favour of referring the question of the king (and hence a treaty) to the whole House, opposed by Thomas Rainborowe and Sir Peter Wentworth, who ominously personified forces in the House more sympathetic to radical solutions, and particularly to radical critiques emanating from the army, than he was. A personal quarrel between Cromwell and Rainborowe over command of the fleet had by this time erupted, to give an embittered edge to the division.450CJ iii. 312a; Dyve Letter Bk. 84-5, 89.

There followed a period in which parliamentary business was uncoupled from political reality, as the Commons debated not the Heads of the Proposals, but the revived Newcastle Propositions, in order to placate the Scots. Cromwell participated in the crude show of diplomacy. He was named to a committee to draft a proposal to the king on the Presbyterian church settlement (30 Sept.) and another on the same subject a week later, but with a brief that extended to drafting something on ‘tender consciences’.451CJ iii. 321b, 327b. On 13 October, he was a teller in three successive divisions, after John Birch reported on the matter. With Evelyn of Wiltshire he told for the yeas on a motion to limit the Presbyterian polity to three years, losing by three votes. Again with Evelyn he supported an unspecified time limit, this time successfully, but then lost the last division, for a limit of seven years. His fellow teller then was Henry Lawrence I, a reliable ally, and the divisions revealed the pressure on those Independents like William Purefoy I who were Presbyterians in religion. The resolution fixed upon was that the Presbyterian polity would expire at the end of the Parliament.452CJ iii. 332a. Some of Cromwell’s prominence in these debates must speak of his willingness to placate the Scots despite his own history of antipathy towards them, but there seems no need to doubt his sincerity or indeed his confidence in a Parliament now rid of the Presbyterian elements he had come to distrust so profoundly. Driven still by his sense of divine calling, he was surely filled with a sense that it fell to him to persuade the king to a settlement, and he supported active engagement with the king, where other MPs were more circumspect. His assurance to Fairfax (13 Oct.) of his almost daily attendance at the House, ‘where it’s very necessary for me to be’, captures some of this.453Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, i. 279; Huntington, Sundry Reasons, 8-9; CJ iii. 335b, 336a.

It must have been with Cromwell’s approval that the king was allowed so much latitude at his residence, now Hampton Court, convenient for visits by the army high command and, apparently, their families. Among royalist exiles there was a perception that English air was ‘now grown … temperate’, since the amity grown up between the king’s skeletal court and the army grandees.454Bodl. Clarendon 30, ff. 40, 164; J. Ashburnham, A Narrative (2 vols., 1830), ii. 96-7; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 497. The king knew perfectly well, however, that Cromwell’s position could be seriously undermined by the threat from the army radicals and Levellers.455Dyve Letter Bk. 77, 84. Cromwell himself was working to placate the radicals by early September, when he visited the Tower to win over the incarcerated Lilburne, who was convinced that the lieutenant-general was behind his continuing detention. Cromwell evidently considered Parliament rehabilitated since the Presbyterian leaders had been driven out, and was said to be urging Lilburne to think well and optimistically of it.456Dyve Letter Bk. 85-8; J. Lilburne, Two Letters (1647), 4, 8 (E.407.41). On 20 October, he was reported to have made a three-hour speech in the Commons in defence of monarchy, though no text has survived of it, and such pronouncements made Henry Marten consider him ‘king-ridden’.457Gardiner, Great Civil War, iii. 381; Mems. of the Great Civil War ed. Cary, i. 355. Four months later, his relations with Marten remained strained, at the very least.458Hamilton Pprs. ed. Gardiner, 154; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 587.

At the opening day of the celebrated debates at Putney (28 Oct.), Cromwell was the most senior officer present, Fairfax being ill. Within the previous ten days, the army radicals had published The Case of the Armie, a withering critique of the political behaviour of the grandees since June, which made it clear that the removal of the Presbyterian leadership from Parliament did not satisfy their demand for a purge of the Houses. His opening remarks at Putney exposed his defensiveness against not only The Case of the Armie but also Edward Sexby’s ad hominem remarks about his ‘blasted’ personal reputation. He sought to distinguish between his actions as a parliament-man and as a spokesman for the army, in the context of army opinion critical of his persistent willingness to continue talks with the king.459The Leveller Tracts 1647-1653 ed. W. Haller, G. Davies (New York, 1944), 66, 70-1; Clarke Pprs. i. 226, 227-8, 229-31. The effect of his insistence on respect for prior obligations (‘engagements’) was to highlight the differing commitments and priorities of army radicals and the civilian Levellers, but it was also an attempt to convince his audience that he had sealed no deal with Charles.460Clarke Pprs. i. 239, 248-9. While he professed himself willing to quit the army rather than obstruct a settlement, he sought to refute any suggestion in the radicals’ minds that he or his civilian or military allies had given a specific undertaking to safeguard the House of Lords.461Clarke Pprs. i. 251, 277-8. He approached the Levellers’ Agreement of the People cautiously, conceding first that it contained ‘many good things’, but immediately signalled – by citing his own inviolable conscience – that he was unlikely to be able to accept it. By 8 November he had abandoned ambivalence, and denounced the Agreement as tending to anarchy.462Clarke Pprs. i. 291, 309, 332, 381, 411.

Cromwell’s strategy at Putney was to attempt to shore up the fraying unity of the army, partly by emollient gestures towards those such as Rainborowe with whom his relations had become strained, and by frequent interventions in debate. He famously appealed for solidarity – ‘Let us be doing, but let us be united in our doing’ – and was apparently willing to enter the earnest debate on details of the Agreement, such as on the franchise.463Clarke Pprs. i. 247, 288-9, 341. He seized on points that all present could agree upon, such as the need to reform Parliament, and for his own part identified (seemingly with no sense of irony that might have arisen from reflection on the fate of the Presbyterian leaders) the return by boroughs of two burgesses rather than one to the Commons as ‘very illegal’. Moreover, he refused to repudiate Parliament as essential to a settlement and as a fixed pole of army loyalty: ‘Either they are a Parliament or no Parliament. If they be no Parliament, they are nothing and we are nothing likewise’.464Clarke Pprs. i. 328, 369, 370. He tried to maintain a fine course on the question of the ancient constitution and its replacement by a new settlement, in debate denying any absolute commitment to maintaining king and Lords while openly contradicting Col. Thomas Harrison I’s* assertion that the king was the biblical ‘man of blood’ worthy of condign punishment. In Cromwell’s conception of the monarch at this point, Charles was king by contract, a transgressor perhaps, but one with whom Parliament and army should continue to be patient.465Clarke Pprs. i. 368-9, 380, 382, 417. His impatience with Harrison was born of the failure of his own tactics to quell radical voices in the army general council. Outside of formal debate, and in the more relaxed setting of a private house, he is supposed to have opined some time in 1647 that ‘the Lords had as true a right to their legislative and jurisdictive power as he had to the coat on his back’.466The Antient Land-mark Skreen (1659), 12 (E.972.9).

On 12 November, a letter from Cromwell was read in the Commons, apprizing the House of the escape of the king from Hampton Court. Once again, Charles had apparently captured the political initiative and wrong-footed Parliament and army. Cromwell’s immediate fear was that the king was vulnerable to assassination by Leveller sympathizers.467CJ iii. 356b, 358a; Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, i. 283-5. A view at the time depicted the escape as ‘pretended’, a contrivance whereby Charles, panicked by the grandees’ talk of violent threats against him, fled in the direction helpful to the Independents in both Parliament and army: to the Isle of Wight, safely under the control of Cromwell’s close ally, Robert Hammond*. Some, though not all, modern historians continue to find that a plausible chain of causation.468Clarendon SP, ii. Appendix, p. xliii; J. Morrill, P. Baker, ‘The Case of the Armie Truly Re-stated’, in M. Mendle ed. The Putney Debates of 1647 (Cambridge, 2001), 123; P. Gaunt, Oliver Cromwell (Oxford, 1996), 87. Cromwell’s part in quelling unrest at the army rendezvous at Ware on the 15th has been disputed, but in the account nevertheless still found credible, he personally rode among Leveller-influenced troopers to quash their support for the Agreement.469M. Kishlansky, ‘What happened at Ware?’, HJ xxv. 827-39; Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, 283-4; Gentles, New Model Army, 219-24. His own report to the House four days later emphasized how ‘by the great mercy of God’ the army had been brought back to obedience to Parliament, and specifically made reference to the impact of the Agreement of the People on the soldiery.470CJ v. 364a; ‘Boys Diary’, 151. An indication of his prominence in the politically-sensitive aspects of parliamentary business came on 23 November, when he was the first named to a committee, finely-balanced in factional terms, given the task of opening correspondence to judge whether it was fit to be laid before the Commons.471CJ v. 367a. The committee was evidently a vehicle for pronouncing on the Agreement, and Cromwell spoke partly to explain his own permissive approach to debate at Putney, and partly to assure the House that it was the proposal to extend the franchise to those without property that compelled him towards a repudiation of Leveller ideas.472‘Boys Diary’, 152-3. His remarks were also a challenge to the small number of genuine out-and-out radicals in the House such as Henry Marten, Rainborowe and Thomas Harrison I, overtly hostile to the king.473Bodl. Clarendon 30, f. 171.

While Cromwell’s alienation from radical would-be statecraft in the army was evident, his view of the king at this time is more opaque. The story of the so-called ‘saddle letter’ recounts how Cromwell and Ireton, disguised as troopers, intercepted at The Blue Boar in Holborn a message from the king intended for the queen in France. The message conveyed Charles’s intention to close on a deal with the Presbyterians, and this intelligence has been taken as determining Cromwell’s abandonment of hopes of negotiating a settlement in which the monarch would play a part.474Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 564. The post-Restoration origins of this narrative, put into the mouth of Roger Boyle*, 1st earl of Orrery [I] by his chaplain, should put any historian on alert; Orrery, like so many after 1660, had every reason to exaggerate Cromwell’s devotion to regicide and his own loyalty to monarchy. Even so, there was no doubt that the king was beginning to incline towards the Scots as his saviours.475Bodl. Clarendon 30, ff. 205, 209v, 262, 279v. The general picture of the king’s engagement with the Scots and the rejection of Parliament’s Four Bills is sufficient to account for Cromwell’s alienation from Charles. His letter to Robert Hammond shows how heavily the possibility that the king might escape (or be sprung) from the Isle of Wight weighed on him in December.476Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, iii. 383. He spoke in the Commons debate on the vote of no addresses (3 Jan. 1648), which he understood as intended to isolate the king from all interference by political agencies.477Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, i. 290. In earlier debates on breaking off negotiations with the king, the leading Independents, including Cromwell, had agreed, according to John Wildman*, on arguments for continuing them.478Putney Projects (1647), sig. F3 (E.421.19). By 3 January he had shifted his position. Four reports of his speech survive, and all of them locate him as among the leading advocates of breaking off negotiations with the king. The least credible, that of Clarendon (Edward Hyde*), has him denouncing Charles as a dissembler; the most credible, that of John Boys*, recorded a reaffirmation by Cromwell: ‘We declared our intentions for monarchy, and they still are so, unless necessity force an alteration’.479Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 575-6; ‘Boys Diary’, 156. He may have been responding to a speech by Sir Simonds D’Ewes reminding the House that the army had often affirmed its support for the principle of monarchy.480‘Boys Diary’, 145-6. If in January 1648 Cromwell had indeed abandoned, for ever, the principle of a settlement in which the king, or at least a king, would figure, it is difficult to see what form of constitution he must have envisaged. There is evidence that late in January Cromwell and St John were behind a plan to send the 2nd earl of Denbigh (Basil Feilding) to negotiate with the prince of Wales as a replacement monarch, but the idea seems not to have been pursued.481Gardiner, Great Civil War, iv. 56-8

Cromwell was more transparent in his treatment of the radicals. A committee to consider not only popular grievances including legal abuses, but also principles such as liberties, on which he served (4 Jan. 1648) was an obvious effort to pre-empt the constituency of the Levellers, and on 18 January Hesilrige reported intelligence of a plot by Lilburne, Wildman and others with ‘blue ribands in hats’ against Cromwell and Ireton.482CJ v. 417a, 436b. In the days following the vote of no addresses, Parliament established the Derby House Committee as a successor executive body, shorn of the Scots and in practice of most of the Presbyterians, to the Committee of Both Kingdoms. For the first four months of its life, until he was called once again to military campaigning, Cromwell was a significant presence among the members of this body, a calculated repudiation of the Scottish interest.483‘Derby House Committee’, supra. Cromwell’s attendances at the Derby House Committee, which from its inception was pre-occupied with matters of military security, accorded with his own deep and well-attested abhorrence of any political intriguing that might re-open civil war in England. The hostile press depicted him as an anglocentric ‘St Oliver’ itching to attack the Scots, whom he allegedly demonized as ‘Antichrist in a blue bonnet’.484Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 26 (7-14 Mar. 1648), sig. B2 (E.432.3).

His appearances in the Commons chamber were sporadic. In February he was reported to have demanded that John Selden* be expelled the Commons for announcing he could find no basis for the enduring rumours implicating Charles in the alleged poisoning of James I. His denunciation found no seconders, and the outburst seems to have been born more of exasperation than of any principled antagonism to monarchy: that same month he was rumoured to be in favour of courting the king again. 485Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 583-4; Hamilton Pprs. ed. Gardiner, 161. He remained close politically to Oliver St John (his ‘bedfellow’) and needed to work to persuade Vane II of the correctness of his tortuous approach to keeping avenues open to the king, particularly after the vote on 3 January, of which Vane disapproved. His bestowing of the governorship of the vital garrison town of Berwick on Hesilrige (‘Sir Roger’ in Cromwell’s private code among his intimates) was a further token of his political associations.486Hamilton Pprs. ed. Gardiner, 148-9; ‘Sir Arthur Hesilrige’, ‘Sir Henry Vane II’, infra. It was a difficult course to steer, not least since a more radical, if small, group in the Commons could make common cause with the Levellers and their constituency in the army.487Hamilton Pprs. ed. Gardiner, 161, 170, 189, 196. Cromwell was named to committees on 1 and 8 March, but most of the formal parliamentary business involving him in the first months of 1648 was concerned with the details of the settlement upon him of £2,500 a year, and the award to him of much of the marquess of Worcester’s estate in Gloucestershire, Monmouthshire and Glamorgan.488CJ v. 475a, 482a, 484a, 484b, 486a; LJ x. 100a,b, 104a,b; CSP Dom. 1648-9, pp. 40-1. The ordinance (9 Mar.) and resulting conveyances were overseen by St John, and a few weeks later, Cromwell donated to Parliament £1,000 a year for five years in aid of the cause of re-conquering Ireland, while renouncing over £1,500 of pay owing to him as lieutenant-general and governor of Ely.489CJ v. 513a,b; Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, i. 300-1. Intertwined with this settlement were his protracted negotiations with Richard Maijor*, brokered by Richard Norton*, for a marriage between Richard Cromwell and Maijor’s daughter.490‘Richard Maijor’, ‘Richard Norton’, infra.

In April, Cromwell was plausibly alleged by the royalist press to be part of the group behind the despatch to Scotland of a delegation including Presbyterians such as William Ashhurst*, who was at this point evidently a client of the lieutenant-general. Its aim, if not advertised as such, was to forge links with the anti-Hamiltonian elements in Scotland, but nothing was achieved.491Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 3 (11-18 Apr. 1648), sig. C2i (E.435.42). Cromwell’s last recorded interventions in the Commons itself, before the simmering unrest erupted into renewed civil war, came on 18 April. He was required to punish perpetrators of the military disorder reported by John Wylde*, and to bring in an ordinance to allow an army officer to recoup his arrears of pay through discoveries of delinquents’ lands. Cromwell himself was doubtless the proposer of this expedient.492CJ v. 534b, 536a. Among his final engagements before taking to the field was the celebrated prayer meeting of the council of officers at Windsor, between 29 April and 1 May, where his contribution was in general terms to urge the seeking out of iniquity, so as to lift divine rebuke. According to the surviving narrative, the result was unanimity on the need to bring the king, the ‘man of blood’, to account, but there is no evidence that Cromwell himself articulated that conclusion.493W. Allen, A Faithful Memorial (1659), 3, 5 (E.979.3); Gardiner, Great Civil War, iv. 117n. It is difficult to corroborate any of the details of the meeting of competing political factions allegedly held under Cromwell’s auspices at King Street, with its story of his throwing a cushion at Edmund Ludlowe II*, beyond accepting that if it occurred at all, it would have been around this time. 494Ludlow, Memoirs, i. 184-5.

Cromwell’s journey through south Wales to reduce Pembroke castle took him through the lands recently awarded him by Parliament, and his character-sketches of insurgents like Sir Trevor Williams† suggest a somewhat closer interest in the personalities of south-east Wales than might be expected from a conquering military commander.495Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, i. 315-7; Bowen, ‘Oliver Cromwell (alias Williams)’, 180-6. Furthermore, the force he launched from Gloucester into south Wales was much larger in size than any he had commanded before: a unit of 6,500 men, which when he left the pacified principality was augmented further, to become a large army of 9,000 deployed decisively against the Scots at Preston (17 Aug.).496Gaunt, Oliver Cromwell, 95. With Cromwell’s expanding army came his own enhanced political authority. This was manifest in the readiness of the Commons to meet his logistical needs with less quibbling than in the first war.497CJ v. 566b, 588a, 608b, 650a, 682b, 684b. It had long been evident that he took a harsher view of those who had forsaken the parliamentary cause, and had thus ‘sinned against the light’ than he did of former royalists, and he explicitly said as much to the Speaker in a letter for the edification of the whole House (11 July).498Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, i. 324. Nor was Parliament inclined any longer to censor Cromwell’s letters before they were released for public consumption. His long narrative from Warrington (20 Aug.) challenged any to deny the hand of God, which might fall upon ‘even kings’; but for those willing to read his letter closely it contained a distinction, adumbrated in his other letters of the summer but not emphatically drawn until this point, between ‘the people of God … the apple of His eye’, and the ‘people of this land’, the beneficiaries of the work of the remnant.499Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, i. 323, 343. The mutual tokens of respect, esteem and thanksgiving between Cromwell and the Commons included official thanks to the lieutenant-general, a long providentialist declaration, echoing his own sentiments and in effect repudiating the Covenant, copied into the Journal; and a tangible reminder in the form of the tattered flags of the defeated Scots brought into the chamber.500CJ v. 680a,b, 682a, 685b. In this atmosphere, Major Robert Huntington’s decision to resign his commission and publicize it by means of a narrative charging Cromwell with perfidy, double-dealing and ambition failed to make much impact. Huntington timed it to inflict political damage on his target while he was absent on campaign, but even Cromwell’s enemies in the press could make little capital with the gesture, and Huntington’s pamphlet was rebutted with some restrained animadversions originating in Parliament.501Huntington, Sundry Reasons; LJ x. 408b-412a; Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 20 (8-15 Aug. 1648), sig. Y2vii (E.458.25).

Not until 7 December did Cromwell again return to Westminster. Until then he remained on active service in the north, and during those months his sense of personal calling and belief in a divine plan for God’s people intensified. A letter to St John of 1 September, sending good wishes to his friends and political allies Sir John Evelyn of Wiltshire*, Sir William Pierrepont*, Francis Russell* and Sir Gilbert Pykeringe*, dwelt on the unreliability for the godly of counsels and alliances. The context was the vote on 24 August to rescind the vote of no addresses, from an army perspective an astonishing rebuff after the hard-fought military campaign, and Cromwell was doubtless taking to heart the Geneva Bible’s gloss on a particular verse he commended from Isaiah, ‘To encourage me that I should not shrink for the infidelity of this people, and so neglect mine office’.502LJ x. 453a; Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, i. 350-1; Isaiah 8: 11 (Geneva Bible); J. Morrill, P. Baker, ‘Oliver Cromwell, the Regicide and the Sons of Zeruiah’, in The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I ed. J. Peacey (Basingstoke, 2001), 27-8. A rare show of unanimity between Lords, Commons and Derby House came on 28 September, when Cromwell was instructed to ‘prosecute the remaining party in the north, and not leave any of them (wherever they shall go) to be a beginning of a new army, nor cease to pursue your victory till you finish and fully complete it …’, a mandate bolstered by renewed parliamentary thanks.503CJ vi. 36b, 37a; LJ x.512b, 516b-518a, 519b, 520a,b. He quoted this commission to the Scots Committee of Estates as a warning (2 Oct.).504Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, i. 376.

Physically remote from Westminster though he was, Cromwell was far from neutralized as a politician in the minds of those nearer the capital. The royalist newsletters by this time saw him as a pivotal figure exerting influence from afar, variously capable of subjecting the City to his will or putting himself at the head of the newly-insurgent Levellers.505Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 21 (15-22 Aug. 1648), sig. Aa2ii (E.460.21); 23 (29 Aug. -5 Sept. 1648), sig. Ee2 (E.462.8); 28 (3-10 Oct. 1648), sig. Pp2viii (E.466.11). His letters of November to Robert Hammond*, nominally host of the negotiations with the king at Newport, have been read as an appeal to recognize the ineluctability of providence, and specifically the force of the Remonstrance of 16 November, published in the name of the army council of officers and written mainly by Ireton.506Morrill, Baker, ‘Oliver Cromwell … and the Sons of Zeruiah’, 28-9. The Remonstrance was a closely-reasoned address to the Commons, a rhetorical questioning ‘how far the public justice of the kingdom can be satisfied, the blood, rapine etc. avenged or expiated and the wrath of God for the same appeased without judgment executed against [the king]’.507A Remonstrance of His Excellency (1648), 24 (E.473.11). Cromwell’s letters also illustrate his persuasive powers from a distance, and the political and personal distance between Cromwell and Vane II (‘Brother Heron’) which had widened since the latter had gone to Newport among the parliamentary commissioners for a treaty with the king. The purpose of Cromwell’s letter of 6 November in general terms was to express scepticism of the proceedings on the Isle of Wight, whether on a treaty in general or on church polity in particular, with warnings that to ‘snatch’ a peace would offend God.508Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, iii. 389-92. By the 25th, this plea for reconsideration, while repeating familiar Cromwellian tropes such as expressions of unworthiness (‘you and I were never worthy to be doorkeepers in this service') had resolved into a firm belief in the army’s right to intervene in the ‘ruining hypocritical agreement’ at Newport, to over-ride the passivity of some misled into believing good could come through treating with the king, ‘against whom the Lord hath witnessed’.509Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, i. 394, 398-9. His outrage at the lenient treatment afforded a prominent Shropshire rebel of 1648, forcefully expressed (20 Nov.) to John Ashe* and Robert Jenner*, prominent members of the Committee for Compounding, is of a piece with this exasperation at Parliament’s conduct.510Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, i. 387.

Purge, regicide and Rump Parliament, 1649-53

Cromwell entered the Commons on the day after Pride’s Purge, to receive the predictable ‘hearty thanks’ of the House, prompted by Henry Marten.511CJ vi. 94a; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 151. Given the hardening of his attitude towards Parliament, his overwhelming belief in providence as not random but moving in a discernible direction of travel and his willingness in 1647 to contemplate without abhorrence a purging of Parliament, it seems more likely that while not its architect he tacitly approved of the force that had been deployed, than that he was undecided on any political course at all. Although it is true that he could have hastened to London to intervene personally in the weeks preceding 6 December, he was evidently content to lend support to other agents in the army as instruments of God’s justice. These were men more decided on the right political course than he was, and prominent among them was a member of his own family, his son-in-law, Ireton. 512Ludlow, Memoirs, i. 211-2; Gaunt, Oliver Cromwell, 102; Gentles, Oliver Cromwell, 75; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 148-50. In the fullest modern account of the purge, Cromwell is depicted as a force for moderation in the episode (though in fact it was Fairfax who was more visible in this respect), and his personal appearances in the Commons are proof in themselves that he retained some faith in the value of Parliaments.513Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 158, 164, 166; J.S.A. Adamson, ‘The Peerage in Politics, 1645-49’ (Cambridge Univ. PhD thesis, 1986), 260. A few months later, he was happy to talk of the purge as a positive intervention, and in July 1653, he would look back on it as a time when Parliament was ‘winnowed, sifted and brought to a handful’, in line with his belief in the providential agency of the remnant.514Whitelocke, Mems. ii. 540; Speeches of Oliver Cromwell ed. C. L. Stainer (1901), 89. In December 1648, however, he seems to have faded into the background for a few weeks, staying away both from the House and the army council of officers.515B. Taft, ‘Voting Lists of the Council of Officers, Dec. 1648’, BIHR lii. 138-54.

There are glimpses of Cromwell’s willingness to pursue various ways out of the crisis. If Whitelocke’s account is to be believed, his behaviour on 18-19 December, when he occupied one of the king’s ‘rich beds’ at Whitehall, indicated he was making the most of his pivotal role between army and Commons. With an aide-de-camp, Col. Richard Deane, he consulted Speaker Lenthall, and at various times met with two lawyerly politicians, Whitelocke and Sir Thomas Widdrington*, who took from the discussion a brief to find a means of restoring the secluded Members while satisfying and mollifying opinion in the army.516Whitelocke, Mems. ii. 477, 479-80. This initiative must have been conceived as complementing the mission of the earl of Denbigh to the king after a consultation with Fairfax, and royalist observers thought Cromwell was distancing himself from the army officers.517Bodl. Clarendon 34, f. 13; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 168-9. One newspaper reported this as the resolve of Cromwell and Fairfax to act against the king only in terms ‘agreeable to the known laws of the realm and the common rights of the people’; another, that on 25 December Cromwell argued against Ireton at Whitehall in favour of preserving the king.518New Propositions from the King (1648), 6 (E.477.2); Mercurius Melancholicus no. 1 (25 Dec. 1648-1 Jan. 1649), 7 (E.536.27). These discussions evidently failed, however, and Cromwell was named to the Commons committee required to bring in an ordinance by which the king would be tried (29 Dec.), but he was not active in it. He was added to the Army Committee (1 Jan. 1649) and to a committee charged with improving excise revenue, showing how readily he involved himself in the routine business of the purged House.519CJ vi. 106a, 107b, 113b. He was named to further committees (3 and 4 Jan.) in connection with the forthcoming trial of the king and the parliamentary declaration that sovereignty lay with the people and all power with the Commons.520CJ vi. 110b, 111a. By this time any doubts Cromwell might have harboured about the basis of the trial must have evaporated. He attended 21 of the 23 meetings of the high court commissioners, and his signature was third on the death warrant.521Muddiman, Trial, 193-230. There are various indications of his determination to see the trial through, though most are inevitably coloured by varying degrees of hindsight.522Sydney Pprs. ed. R. W. Blencowe (1827), 235; Muddiman, Trial, 133; C.V. Wedgwood, Trial of Charles I (1966), 174-6. He continued to attend the House during the trial, adding his weight to reviewing public accounts and expenditure (12 Jan.), the Navy Committee (13 Jan.), and efforts to somehow normalize relations with the Scots (17 Jan.).523CJ vi. 116a, 117a, 120a. On the 27th he was included in a committee that prohibited sheriffs from proclaiming anyone as king, and on the 29th registered his dissent to the vote of 5 December that the king’s answers to Parliament’s propositions at Newport were grounds for a settlement. On the day of the king’s execution, he was included in a committee required to review and repeal earlier legislation.524CJ vi. 124a,b, 126a. All of this indicates that he was making an effort to demonstrate that during these extraordinary events he remained a committed Commons-man, regardless of his seniority in the army. And as late as 6 February, apparently, he repeated an attempt he made a month earlier to save the House of Lords, by arguing in the House on behalf of the peers.525Ludlow, Memoirs, i. 220; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 202.

Between the declaration of popular sovereignty on 4 January and 9 July, when Cromwell made his last appearance in the unicameral Parliament before embarking on the punitive expedition to Ireland, he was named to 32 committees. Naturally, these included work on measures to secure the new regime in the wake of what he called ‘exemplary justice upon the prime leader of all this quarrel’.526Clarke Pprs. ii. 202. A few of these were broad in scope, with constitutional implications, such as the bill to abolish kingship (7 Mar.) and the bill of pardon and oblivion (4 July).527CJ vi. 158a, 250b. More, however, were concerned with practical problems of security: legislation to prevent ‘delinquents’ holding elected office and to outlaw preaching against the regicide (2 Feb.), reviewing the commissions of the peace and the judiciary (7, 8 Feb.) and intervening in elections in Norwich (28 Feb).528CJ vi. 130a, 131b, 134a, 134b, 153a. He was prominent enough in the committee on relations with the Scots to report from it (2 Feb.), but more promising diplomatic activity lay in the overtures to the Dutch, whose ambassador was received and later attended on by Cromwell and Skippon among others (17, 23 Feb.).529CJ vi. 130b, 131b, 145a, 149b. In the new council of state (14 Feb.), he was named first after the five peers and three judges, and for a short period became its chairman. Tellingly, neither Ireton nor Thomas Harrison I, the two most visible architects of the regicide among the army officers, found a place in the nominations to it. Five days later, Cromwell reported from council on progress introducing a loyalty oath expected of council members, and was responsible for negotiating through the House (22 Feb.) a watered-down Engagement which circumnavigated any explicit ownership of the regicide and abolition of the Lords by demanding a mere acceptance of the current form of government. According to Whitelocke, who benefited from this dispensation, Cromwell was satisfied with this arrangement as an expedient to secure the widest basis of political support, and two days later was evidently in buoyant mood.530CJ vi. 141a, 146b ; Whitelocke, Mems. ii. 536, 540; C. Walker, Hist. Independency (4 pts. 1661), ii. 129-30; Worden, Rump Parliament, 177, 180-1. He attended more meetings of the council in February and March than any other member, occasionally delivering reports from it to the House, on transferring crown property to the new state, on disbanding a regiment and on preparations for the Irish expedition.531CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. xlviii-li; CJ vi. 148b, 157b, 244a. The council was a natural successor to the Derby House Committee, of which he had been a prominent member since its inauguration.

Doubtless because of his commitments at the council of state and his continuing heavy military responsibilities, Cromwell took the leading part in none of the committees of the House, but whereas in the twelve month period from April 1646 he had been included in only five committees producing legislation, in the opening six months of the Rump Parliament he was involved in 15.532CJ vi. 106a, 110b, 124a, 126a,b, 127a, 130a, 147b, 153a, 158a, 190b, 196a, 237a, 245b, 250b. This is more revealing of the demands on parliamentary time in the new state than of Cromwell’s predilections, but he must certainly have favoured the bills for abolishing deans and chapters (20 Feb.), for releasing debtors in prison (31 Jan., 20 Apr.), for augmenting the preaching ministry by £20,000 (26 Apr.) and repealing the laws on compulsory church attendance (29 June).533CJ vi. 147b, 190b, 196a, 245b. His efforts on behalf of the state church were interpreted by a hostile commentator as extending to an effort to win over the Presbyterian clergy, allied to attempts to attract the secluded Members back to the House, but nothing came of any such schemes.534Walker, Hist. Independency, ii. 157; Worden, Rump Parliament, 191. Cromwell was active in the committee for complaints (petitions), reporting from it on 30 May and 22 June. He demonstrated a continuing interest in the scope, authority and integrity of articles of surrender, arguing in the House on 30 May that since Sir Hugh Owen of north Wales was included in such articles, he should be discharged from sequestration.535CJ vi. 202a, 220a, 240a. In the same period, he acted as a teller on three occasions, in two successive divisions on 8 March when with Hesilrige he opposed delays in capital justice against the leaders of the second civil war; and on 9 July, when he told with Ireton on the wording of tests that would be used to define the loyalty of preaching clergy.536CJ vi. 159b, 160a, 257a. His harshness against the rebel leadership tends to confirm hostile evidence that he personally tried without success to extract for retributive purposes from James, duke of Hamilton [S] a list of his English accomplices.537Walker, Hist. Independency, ii. 131.

Matters of state security were naturally of much greater import for Cromwell than his activities in the House. His break with the Levellers in 1647 had never been repaired, and when Lilburne and other Levellers were arrested in late March and examined before the council, he vehemently insisted

you have no other way to deal with these men but to break them in pieces; … if you do not break them they will break you; yea, and bring all the guilt of the blood and treasure shed and spent in this kingdom upon your heads and shoulders.538The Picture of the Councel of State (1649), 14-15 (E.550.14).

The Levellers, in his view like the leaders of the second civil war, not only threatened security but also defied the designs of providence, and he and Fairfax responded ruthlessly to the mutiny in the army, inspired by Leveller ideas and leadership, by crushing it after a short campaign in May.539Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 68-70. A much more momentous assignment lay in Ireland. Cromwell was appointed commander-in-chief on 30 March, and the preparations for the invasion were not only careful and protracted but drew upon his own experiences and insights acquired since the early 1640s, such as the need to cultivate and encourage Protestant supporters in Ireland and the significance of the province of Munster.540CJ vi. 176b; Little, ‘Cromwell and Ire.’, 132-4. He was clearly expecting by mid-February to be appointed to supreme command of the expedition, and his commission spurred on the sometimes irritable correspondence with Richard Maijor over Richard Cromwell’s marriage settlement, which he sought to conclude before leaving England. With the newly-acquired lands of the marquess of Worcester brought into the discussions, and the services of the high-flying lawyer, Matthew Hale*, involved, the settlement was beginning to seem dynastic in character, and his enemies would soon begin to assert that Cromwell sought to be lord protector of England.541Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, i.414-5, 424-7, 428-9, 434, 451; Mercurius Pragmaticus pt. 2, no. 18 (14-21 Aug. 1649), sig. S2 (E.571.8). He went to Ireland with the rank of lord lieutenant, by which title he appears in the Commons Journal from 29 June.

Cromwell took a ‘British’ view of the nation’s politics in 1649, opining to the council of officers (23 Mar.) in his usual qualified way on his own suitability for the task of quelling Ireland, and asserting how he would ‘rather be overrun with a cavalierish interest than with a Scotch interest … with a Scotch interest than with an Irish interest’, denouncing Irish ‘barbarism’.542Clarke Pprs. ii. 200-6. On the eve of the expedition, his belief in the onward march of providence was undimmed, and he hailed Col. Michael Jones’s victory at Rathmines over the marquess of Ormond [I] as ‘an astonishing mercy’ by which God was desirous that ‘we of this generation draw near him’.543Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, i. 451, 453. His speech in Dublin (15 Aug.) continued in this vein, in essence a manifesto for the transplanting of the dispensation God had revealed for England, ‘for the propagating of the gospel of Christ, the establishing of truth and peace and restoring that bleeding nation to its former happiness and tranquillity’ by force on to the ‘barbarous and bloodthirsty Irish’.544Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 107. He was in Ireland for 40 weeks, mainly engaged in sieges of towns, especially in Munster, and did not re-appear in the House until 4 May 1650.545Oxford DNB; Little, ‘Cromwell and Ire.’, 136; CJ vi. 418b. His absence from Parliament was qualitatively different from his earlier periods on campaign. At least 20 letters of his were regularly read in the House, many of them subsequently printed with official sanction, and there was no longer any question of his needs and wishes being ignored or carelessly treated.546CJ vi. 260b, 265a, 276b, 277b, 279a, 282b, 300b, 314b, 315a, 321b, 323b, 328a,b, 331b, 343b, 344a, 352a, 353b, 371a, 381b, 397b. On the eve of his departure, he was able with total authority to instruct English justices of the peace, and from Dublin virtually to instruct Speaker Lenthall to favour one of his clients.547Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 96, 109. While in Ireland he was able to secure parliamentary approval for Ireton’s appointment as president of Munster (10 Jan. 1650); kept his place and seniority in the council of state (10 Feb.); was awarded prime state lodgings at St James’ palace and park (25 Feb.); and the Long Parliament’s grant by ordinance of lands to him was confirmed in a bill passed on 31 May.548CJ vi. 344a, 345b, 361b, 371a, 471, 418a. By the end of the campaign, he could write to Richard Maijor with no intended offence that regular personal correspondence with him would be superfluous, as ‘when I write to the Parliament I usually am (as becomes me) very particular with them, and usually from thence the knowledge thereof is spread’.549Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, ii. 52. Parliament’s responsibility for Cromwell’s Irish campaign was limited to the support and deference it afforded him. Otherwise, as ever in his military operations, strategic decisions were his to make. The notorious episodes at Drogheda and Wexford in October 1649 were attributable only to Cromwell, and discussion of them is beyond the scope of this article.

After Drogheda and Wexford, Cromwell began to take initiatives on establishing a justice system in Ireland, ‘until the Parliament shall otherwise determine’, that presumed the country was ‘a clean paper’.550Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, iii. 267; Ludlow, Memoirs, i. 246. The same presumption of beginning afresh informed the Commission for Propagating the Gospel in Wales (Feb. 1650), which passed through the House while Cromwell was in Ireland, and both proposals were driven by the millenarianism which took hold of Cromwell in 1649, as it had already seized a number of senior army officers. In attempting to win back Lord Wharton to support of the Rump he tried to persuade him that the regicide was necessary violence that might find favour with God, and that despite gross imperfections in regulating Parliament’s composition, ‘the good kept out, the worst left in’, great things had been achieved.551Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, i. 521. Cromwell’s oldest and closest political allegiances, with Vane II, Hesilrige, St John and Pierrepont, seem to have survived the regicide more or less intact, but now the millenarian army officers added a new dimension to his political friendship network. Figures such as Thomas Harrison I assured him that he held responsibility for the 'life or death of the Lord's people'.552Original Letters ed. Nickolls, 10-11. Addresses to Cromwell in that vein, attributing to him a special and personal calling, increased in number, intensity and from a widening social spectrum during and after the Scottish campaign, the most remarked upon victory of which was the battle of Dunbar (3 Sept. 1650); but much of the radical euphoria and expectation lay outside Parliament, among army officers and separatist congregations.553Original Letters ed. Nickolls, passim; B. Worden, ‘Providence and Politics in Cromwellian Eng.’, P and P cix. 79-81. From this time, if not earlier, Cromwell can be said to have enjoyed a following, in a sense inapplicable to any other Member of Parliament, with acknowledgments of his special calling coming from leading politicians and political intimates such as Vane II and St John.554Original Letters ed. Nickolls, 19, 25-6.

Only when Fairfax finally renounced his commission did Cromwell acquire the title ‘captain-general and commander-in-chief’, in effect lord general. This appointment, which Cromwell retained for the rest of his life, was enshrined in an act passed on 26 June 1650, during his brief stay in London after returning from Ireland and before embarking on the campaign to quell the Scots under their covenanted king, Charles II.555CJ vi. 432a. In this short interlude, Cromwell attended virtually every meeting of the council of state (3-26 June), but the only business of the House to which Cromwell’s name was attached was a bill for suppressing atheistical opinions, in the care of John Weaver. Cromwell’s colleagues on the committee included his allies or clients Vane II, John Jones I, Philip Jones and Richard Salwey.556CSP Dom. 1650, pp. xxii-xxiii; CJ vi. 430b. Cromwell’s interest in this bill indicates that he was aware of the boundaries that an effective policy of toleration demanded, just as his interest a year earlier in augmenting the resources of the preaching ministry showed his awareness of the continuing value of a state church shorn of clerical hierarchy. His speech of March 1649 to the council of army officers suggests that his view of the Scots as imbued with ‘an angry, hateful spirit’ had hardly changed since his spats with Lawrence Crawford in 1644.557Clarke Pprs. ii. 203. He argued against the characteristically unconvinced Fairfax that war with the Scots was inevitable and that it would be better to have the war on Scottish soil rather than English.558Speeches ed. Stainer, 82-5. His celebrated letter to the general assembly of the Scots kirk (3 Aug. 1650), published ten days after despatch in the friendly London press, against ‘hard and subtle words’, can be read as a repudiation of state discipline of religion north and south of the border. Cromwell pointedly allowed trading of theological position papers between the opposing armies, urging the Scots to ‘think it possible you may be mistaken’.559Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 302-3.

To former close confidants like Hammond, who sought to scruple on grounds of conscience between fighting the Irish and fighting the Scots, Cromwell was confident in asserting that the struggle was ‘one common and complexed interest and cause’.560Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, iii. 432. By September 1650, he felt the need to apologise to the Speaker for having corresponded more frequently with the council than with Parliament, but through the victory of Dunbar (3 Sept.) was able to regain any moral territory conceded. News of the battle enabled him to vaunt God’s people, the remnant, as ‘the chariots and horsemen of Israel’, and to pronounce that Parliament’s mission was to ‘curb the proud and the insolent, such as would disturb the tranquillity of England … relieve the oppressed, hear the groans of poor prisoners … be pleased to reform the abuses of all professions; and if there be any one that makes many poor to make a few rich, that suits not a commonwealth’.561Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, ii. 102, 108. A further lesson Cromwell was keen to reinforce was that the Scots had meddled with worldly policies, choosing not to rely on the word of God, the content of which he himself was in no doubt.562Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, ii. 109. He confided to Hesilrige his belief that the covenanted Scots would now give up the struggle, leaving Charles Stuart to set up on his own account, which could only benefit the English republic. From the standpoint of one with by this time an absolute sense of assurance of God’s purposes, he engaged in a correspondence with the governor defending Edinburgh castle against him, explaining the superiority of the church-state model being adopted by the Rump Parliament, including the right of the laity to preach, the limits of freedom of the pulpit and the role of the civil power.563Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, ii. 122-3, 125-33. In the months before and after Dunbar, Cromwell was forced to think seriously about the divisions among Christians, not only in the public realms of the English and Scots nations, but among his friends in England; between such allies as Lord Wharton, Henry Lawrence I*, Hammond, Richard Norton*, Thomas Westrowe* and Edward Montagu II*, all of whom had struggled to accept the legitimacy of the army purge of Parliament in December 1648, and with all of whom Cromwell persisted in his attempts to win them back.564Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, ii. 119, 219.

Cromwell’s absence in Scotland was no obstruction to his being appointed chancellor of Oxford University (Jan. 1651), nor again to the council of state (7 Feb.) with only the judges taking precedence in the list of members.565CJ vi. 532a. While he self-deprecatingly resisted (unsuccessfully) the notion that his image should appear on the Dunbar commemorative medal, his expressions of unworthiness did not extend to turning down the invitation from Oxford, which had already awarded him an honorary degree. He was supportive of efforts towards creating a ‘seed and stock of piety and learning’ not only there, but also at Durham, the location of a mooted new college.566Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, ii. 175-6, 180-1, 186-7. He reported to John Bradshawe* in March that he had been ill, and two months later Parliament was concerned enough about his health to encourage him to quit Scotland for the more equable climate of England.567Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, ii. 188-9, 201; CJ vi. 579a. Readjustments of the award of lands to him from Parliament took place against the background of his ill-health. By mid-April he was warning his wife against the regular visits to the Cromwell household by Henry Somerset*, heir of the marquess of Worcester, lest it be thought that a deal was being struck (perhaps Cromwell feared premature rumours of a projected marriage alliance between the bachelor Somerset and one of Cromwell’s two unmarried daughters). With Cromwell’s evident forbearance, by parliamentary order Somerset recovered estates in Monmouthshire and elsewhere, while his own holdings were confirmed as essentially consisting of Tidenham Chase, Chepstow and Gower seignory, in Gloucestershire, Monmouthshire and Glamorgan respectively.568Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, ii. 190; CJ vi. 576b-577b, 601a-602a. Even after modifications to the grant, these were very extensive properties, encompassing much of west Glamorgan and including at least 31 advowsons.

Cromwell’s sense that the Scots were invading England from desperation in 1651 must account for his relatively relaxed briefings to Lenthall. His perception that a conclusive divine ‘mercy’ was in the offing encouraged his invitation to Parliament to activate the militia as an army of the people – and of God’s people. The victory of Worcester (3 Sept.), if not inevitable, was always the likely outcome, and the decisive role of the militia encouraged confidence in the people’s army in God’s service.569Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, ii. 213-5; Gardiner, Commonwealth and Protectorate, 43, 47. Within a week of the victory, Cromwell was formally invited by the Speaker to return to Westminster as a conquering hero, and on 12 September he entered London in a coach with Lenthall, heading a procession of 300 carriages amid a lavish display of military and civic pomp.570CJ vi. 13b, 14a; S. Kelsey, Inventing a Republic (Manchester, 1997), 72-3. A new allocation of lands worth £4,000 was bestowed on him. In marked contrast to the tortuous history of his earlier award of lands from the Raglan estate, on this occasion the grant was uncontentious, and the bill was engrossed on 24 December.571CJ vii. 15b, 52a, 53a, 56a. Cromwell listened to the Speaker’s ‘eloquent oration’ of praise on 16 September, and then resumed his seat in the House after an absence of 15 months. After he had honoured the Independent minister Joseph Caryl with an invitation to preach at a fast day, Cromwell’s first taste of practical Commons business came when a bill was proposed for setting a time limit for the Rump’s sitting (25 Sept.). He was a successful teller with Thomas Scot I for bringing in the bill. Given Cromwell’s extraordinary kudos and standing at this point, it was ominous that the division was won with only a majority of seven votes. St John was first named to the resulting committee, a sure sign of Cromwell’s approval.572CJ vii. 18b, 19b, 20a, 20b. The following day, Cromwell and the political heavyweight radicals Vane II, Marten and Richard Salwey were added to the committee, and he, Salwey, Thomas Scot I and Fleetwood were given charge of publishing the official narrative of the Worcester victory.573CJ vii. 20b, 22a. It was obvious that Cromwell wanted to identify a terminal date for the Rump, and he lent his weight to further divisions on the matter (14 Nov.), which were won by even slimmer margins, of four votes and then only two. In a four-day adjournment following these votes, a resolution was passed identifying 3 November 1654 as the final date beyond which the Parliament should not sit, but Cromwell is unlikely to have been pleased with a date so far ahead.574CJ vii. 36b, 37a; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 26-7. As he was capable of writing in euphoric terms about Worcester and its significance, especially for the churches - ‘How shall we behave ourselves after such mercies? What is the Lord a-doing? What prophecies are now fulfilling?’ – the only inference can be that he saw an alternative to the Rump as taking the Lord’s work forward.575Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, ii. 240-1. Whitelocke’s account of Cromwell’s musing around this time that ‘somewhat of monarchical power in it would be effectual’ in the constitution, if accurate, certainly does not preclude the likelihood that he had in mind a fresh representative body.576Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 507; Worden, Rump Parliament, 276; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 29n.

In elections among MPs on 24 November for the council of state, Cromwell topped the poll, but he never again joined the ranks of the council’s workhorses. From December 1651 until the expulsion of the Rump in April 1653 he attended just under half of the council’s meetings.577CJ vii. 42a; CSP Dom. 1651-2, pp. xxxv-xlvii, 1652-3, pp. xxviii-xxxii. However, he was named to a range of executive council committees, among the most important and demanding of which were on Irish affairs; examinations; the admiralty; disputes between the London common council and the livery companies; trade and foreign affairs; and on the deteriorating relations with the Dutch.578CSP Dom. 1651-2, pp. 43, 46, 56, 67, 278. Meanwhile, in order to pursue more radical legislative policies, he involved himself actively in the business of the House. Such was Cromwell’s profile that his presence in the chamber would have been remarked upon by all present, and he chose to espouse the causes popular among the officers and soldiers of the army. He was included in the important bill for sale of lands forfeit for treason (3 Dec.), and certificates he signed for the relief of widows of soldiers killed at Worcester were passed by the House and referred to the Army Committee (16 Dec.).579CJ vii. 46b, 51a, 117a. He was conspicuous as a teller in a series of eight divisions on the bill of pardon and oblivion (22, 29 Jan., 4, 6, 10, 23, 24 Feb. 1652), when his partners were Sir Henry Vane I (Vane II was in Scotland), Lord Grey of Groby, Sir John Danvers, Thomas Lister and Francis Allein. Except for his care to ensure that revenues of the abolished court of wards continued to reach the coffers of the state, the tenor of Cromwell’s intervention on this bill was to foreshadow his preference during the protectorate towards ‘healing and settling’, and he consistently voted against punitive exceptions to the principle of pardoning past political behaviour.580CJ vii. 76b, 79a, 84b, 85a, 86a, 88a, 96a, 160b. Law reform was another subject popular with soldiers. He was included in the committee put into the hands of Whitelocke and John Lisle (26 Dec. 1651), charged with identifying persons outside the House who might further a reform programme. This produced the so-called Hale commission of prominent lawyers outside the House, named after Matthew Hale*, already well known to Cromwell as a party to negotiations over his son’s marriage settlement. Further committees on related topics of great interest to the military were those on indemnity and on reforming the poor laws (27 Apr. 1652).581CJ vii. 58b, 127a.

On these subjects, the pronounced limits of the Rump’s willingness to gratify Cromwell have been well charted.582Worden, Rump Parliament, 275-85. None of the Hale commission’s proposals were implemented, despite the lobbying of Parliament by army officers led by Edward Whalley*, Francis Hacker*, John Barkstead*, John Okey*, William Goffe* and Henry Worsley* in August 1652 in favour of this and other aspects of the Cromwellian reform programme.583To the Supreame Authoritie (1652, 669.f.16.62). In July 1653 Cromwell would publicly associate himself with the officers and this petition, and identify the lack of parliamentary response as one of the frustrations precipitating the dismissal of the Rump.584Speeches ed. Stainer, 91-3. His disappointments in the period after Worcester became a defining feature of his own narrative of the events of the 1650s, and the disappointments over religious policy figured particularly strongly. John Owen*, a minister favoured by Cromwell and soon to be Oxford vice-chancellor, led a delegation to the House on 10 February 1652, and Cromwell was included in the small committee established to confer with them, the other members being all allies or friends of his.585CJ vii. 86b. Taking its title from other religious projects after 1649, the body became known as the committee for propagating the gospel. The proposals sparked immediate controversy, and as early as 30 March there were publications in favour of a broader understanding of toleration; while in December, Owen’s proposals were codified, conceding much to sectaries on the sacraments and the state’s willingness to consider churches as non-consecrated buildings, while adhering to a statement of orthodox, trinitarian Protestantism. They provoked from John Milton one of his most famous sonnets, ‘To the Lord General Cromwell, May 1652’, a plea for saving ‘free conscience’.586R. W. The Fourth Paper (1652, E.658.9); Proposals for the Furtherance and Propagation of the Gospell (1652, E.683.12); B. Worden, ‘John Milton and Oliver Cromwell’, in Soldiers, Writers and Statesmen ed. I. Gentles, J. S. Morrill (Cambridge, 1998), 243-9. Those who hoped for more latitude, a broader toleration, took comfort from reports that at the committee Cromwell asserted that ‘he had rather that Mahumetanism [Islam] were permitted amongst us than that one of God’s children should be persecuted’.587R. W. The Fourth Paper, preface. For anti-trinitarians like Milton and Roger Williams, the committee’s insistence on a core of orthodox doctrines that would or could satisfy Independents, Presbyterians and most Baptists was experienced as a betrayal, but, as has been pointed out, the ‘fundamentals’ contained nothing that would affront Cromwell’s conscience, and they were compatible with views he had held since the 1630s.588Worden, ‘John Milton and Oliver Cromwell’, 248.

This particular committee turned out to be an anvil on which at least one of Cromwell’s political friendships of long standing was eventually broken. Milton could hardly have been alone in identifying Vane II as holding out a brighter prospect for religious liberty than Cromwell. By the eve of the battle of Worcester Vane was appealing to him, in the name of their ‘ancient friendship’, not to listen to those who would divide them. He evidently understood more than Cromwell the difficulties in ‘settling’ that would lie ahead after the defeat of Charles Stuart, and was aware that he would be viewed as less sympathetic than the lord general to the Presbyterian clergy that Cromwell hoped to win over.589Original Letters ed. Nickolls, 78-9, 84. Three months after the committee came into being, Cromwell dined with John Harington I*, a Presbyterian secluded at the purge of December 1648, discussing with him how God ‘raiseth up the poor out of the dust, and lifteth up the beggar from the dunghill, to set them among princes’, suggesting that he continued to believe in a broad-based settlement. Furthermore, the breach with Vane should not be pre-dated: he and Vane remained on good enough terms to serve on the same side as tellers a month before the dissolution.590CJ vii. 266b; Harington’s Diary, 73. On religious matters, Cromwell and Hesilrige, who had been particularly close during the campaign against the Scots, remained in step, but signs of a future breach were visible in the divisions on the bill of oblivion in February 1652, in which Hesilrige took a less tolerant line, and in two further divisions (5 May 1652, 10 Mar. 1653) in which they were prominently on opposite sides.591CJ vii. 96a, 129b, 266b. Cromwell’s patience and indulgence are unlikely to have extended to Gregory Clement, expelled from the House for scandalous behaviour, whose case was referred to a committee to which Cromwell was called (19 Feb. 1652).592CJ vii. 93a.

As befitted someone who was responsible above all others for neutralizing the political threat from the Scots, Cromwell was involved in legislative activity intended to incorporate Scotland into the English state, by means of a forced union. It was he who presented formal thanks to the commissioners for managing Scottish affairs, while he was included in the committee on the bill to be drafted by Whitelocke and Lisle (13 Apr. 1652), and to another led by Richard Salwey and Whitelocke charged with scrutinizing the parliamentary declaration on the union. He was named eighth out of 12 commissioners appointed to meet Scots delegates (7 Oct.) with a view to hastening the union.593CJ vii. 106a, 118b, 189a, b. His involvement in Ireland was more passive, confined to nominal inclusion as a commissioner, by virtue of his continuing nominal military command; practical command of the army in Ireland was bestowed on his new son-in-law, Charles Fleetwood, who had married Henry Ireton’s widow. After a report by Vane II from the council of state, the House spent some time in the summer of 1652 regularizing and adjusting Cromwell’s commissions as they applied in Ireland.594CJ vii. 142a, 150a, 152a, 167b, 169b, 174a. In November, nine months after the committee for propagating the gospel had begun work, and three after the army officers had petitioned Parliament in favour of radical reform, Cromwell evidently remained willing to attend the House and lend his name to such measures that offered some hope of progress. He was included, albeit 26th in the list, in the committee to settle judges’ salaries and relieve the burden of legal fees on the people (12 Nov.), and was named third among those scrutinizing the bill in the care of Whitelocke on management of the admiralty and navy (9 Dec.). Given his supremacy in the army command, his appearance (for a second time) among those listed for the Committee for the Army (17 Dec.) was unsurprising, and he must surely have supported the army officers’ lobbying for godly appointments to be made to the military on land and at sea.595CJ vii. 215a, 227b, 230b; C.H. Firth, ‘Cromwell and the Expulsion of the Rump’, EHR viii. 527. During 1652 and the first two months of 1653, he was included in 9 committees on separate items of legislation, not much short of the dozen declarations and bills that drew his attention in the very different climate of the reform period of 1640-2.596CJ vii. 100a, 112a, 118b, 127a, 127b, 222b, 227b, 245a, 253b. He headed the poll for the elections to the council of state (24 Nov. 1652), but his attendances at its meetings declined steadily from 57 per cent of possible meetings in December 1652 to 25 per cent by the end of March 1653.597CSP Dom. 1652-3, pp. xxviii-xxxi.

Cromwell’s energies were almost certainly also being harnessed in now undocumented meetings between up to 20 of his allies in the House and his favourites in the army high command, meetings extra to those of the council of officers and held on his own initiative, probably at his lodgings in Whitehall. According to Cromwell himself these began in October 1652, and may have numbered a dozen in total.598Speeches ed. Stainer, 93-4; Constitutional Documents ed. Gardiner, 402. He was later keen to emphasize how strenuously he and his army colleagues worked to avoid a coercive atmosphere at these gatherings. In late January 1653, the army published another manifesto, nominally for circulation among the garrisons and regiments, but clearly intended to influence MPs, which included a call for ‘successive Parliaments consisting of men faithful to the interest of the commonwealth; men of truth, fearing God and hating covetousness’.599A Letter from the General Meeting (1653, 669.f.16.83). In March 1653 according to one commentator, his closest allies among the Parliament-men, strains among them notwithstanding, were taken to be Hesilrige, St John, Vane I and II, Lisle, Francis Allein, Thomas Scot I, Richard Salwey, John Carew, William Cawley I, Sir William Strickland and Walter Strickland. Lord Saye and Sele (William Fiennes) was another confidant. 600Firth, ‘Cromwell and Expulsion’, 530. His last legislative committee appointment came on 2 February, on a bill for devolving certain law court jurisdictions to counties; on 8 March he reported from the council on a diplomatic matter, and two days later he was a teller with Vane II against Hesilrige and John Gurdon on relations with the Dutch (he opposed the Dutch war). That marked his last appearance in the House, and a month later his conspicuous absence was being noted in newsletters sympathetic to the army.601CJ vii. 253b, 264b, 266b; Firth, ‘Cromwell and Expulsion’, 528. On 11 March he was reported to have restrained the army officers from expelling the Rump, disapproving of an army coup that in the interests of calling a new Parliament would put supreme power in the hands of the army, and urging the necessity of completing a treaty with the Dutch, then in progress.602Firth, ‘Cromwell and Expulsion’, 528.

On 20 April, Cromwell suddenly and dramatically abandoned his role as restraining influence. Modern historians have treated the episode of his expulsion of the Parliament, and its causes, authoritatively and in great detail.603B. Worden, The Rump Parliament; idem, ‘The Bill for a New Representative’, EHR lxxxvi. 473-96; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 25-102. The last of his meetings of soldiers and Rumpers took place at the Cockpit on 19 April, after his staying away for over a month from the House, and the likelihood is that he there unveiled a scheme for a dissolution managed by a caretaker body drawn from the two constituencies of army officers and Parliament-men, which would hold power until conditions were ripe for fresh elections.604Whitelocke, Mems. iv. 4; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 63. Cromwell evidently left the meeting on the 19th in the belief that he had secured at least a positive response to his proposals, if not explicit acceptance of them, as an alternative to the bill then proceeding through the House.605Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 64. The older view that the parliamentary bill in question contained a plan to recruit to the existing assembly, to keep the Rump in being, has been shown to be untenable.606Worden, ‘Bill for a New Representative’. It seems more likely that the bill included proposals for fresh elections but with no scope for the ‘men of truth, fearing God’, favoured by the army officers, to be guaranteed a role in the executive.

What in particular seems to have provoked Cromwell’s wrath was his surprise discovery on 20 April that despite his efforts of the previous day and the assurances that had been given him by ‘two or three of the chief ones, the very chiefest of them’ in the House, debate on the parliamentary bill had been re-opened and the main question about to be formulated: a turn of events he would in July gloss as ‘preposterous haste’.607Speeches ed. Stainer, 95, 102-3; Constitutional Documents ed. Gardiner, 403. In the celebrated scenes in the House on 20 April, when Cromwell terminally disrupted the proceedings with a file of musketeers, ‘chief ones’ were the MPs to bear the brunt of his uncontrolled anger, and it doubtless served only to upset him further that Vane II, Whitelocke, Marten, Wentworth and Hesilrige had been among his former close friends and allies.608Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 641-4; Firth, ‘Cromwell and Expulsion’, 532; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 65. He must have considered that pressure from the wing of the army led by Thomas Harrison I*, a colonel who accompanied him on his iconoclastic mission, had become irresistible, but there are grounds for believing that his familiarity with the contents of the bill which he seized and was never seen again was, at the very least, limited.609Worden, ‘Bill for a New Representative’, 495. Furthermore, reports that his denunciations of the Rump and its plans included attacks on ‘rotten Presbyters’ seem to fit rather uneasily with his efforts to tempt Presbyterians into the broad-based state church which John Owen and other orthodox clergy favoured by Cromwell had been working towards.610Firth, ‘Cromwell and Expulsion’, 532; Worden, ‘Bill for a New Representative’, 481. In his own retrospective commentaries on these events, Cromwell’s initial insistence that the bill had intended recruiter elections softened into a broader charge that it would have led to successive Parliaments with no balancing or interim executive to manage the elections and subsequent parliamentary business.611Speeches ed. Stainer, 321-3, 327; Worden, ‘Bill for a New Representative’, 484-5. He included as a further offence of the Rump that the tendency of its powerful executive committees had been to supplant the common law courts: ‘there was indeed some necessity of the business, a necessity of some committees to look to indemnity, but no necessity of committees instead of courts of justice’.612Speeches ed. Stainer, 325. He indulged in considerable ex post facto rationalization about his actions on 20 April, but coming from one with no significant involvement in the executive committees of the Long Parliament or the Rump, Cromwell’s distaste for these bodies seems authentic enough.

With the expulsion of the Rump, Cromwell’s own career in Parliaments, in those summoned by the ancient electoral arrangements at least, came to an end. In the days following the expulsion it was evident that he intended to wield interim supreme executive power with his council of officers, claiming an authority he believed not to be encompassed by the Rump’s bill for a future representative.613Constitutional Documents ed, Gardiner, 400-2. Among his first fiats was to encourage the commissioners for the propagation of the gospel in Wales to ‘go on cheerfully in the work as formerly, to promote these good things and protect good men’; the legislation authorizing their activities lapsed on 25 March 1653, after he had given up attending the House. He testily assured the City aldermen on 20 May that ‘the king’s head was not taken off because he was king, nor the Lords laid aside because Lords, neither was the Parliament dissolved because they were a Parliament, but because they did not perform their trust’.614Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, iii. 440-1. The mixed basis of the Rump’s successor, what became the Nominated Assembly or Barebones Parliament, has been comprehensively explored.615Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 103-43; idem, ‘The Calling of Barebone’s Parliament, EHR lxxx. 492-513. Cromwell himself is said to have declared

that if there were one man more faithful to the Saints and more suited to the work than another, and that had not been left behind in former dispensations by the blessing of God he should be chosen, and that relations, and all others not this qualified, should be rejected.616A Faithfull Searching Home Word (1659), 14 (E.774.1).

But there is evidence that even before the Nominated Assembly met, Cromwell’s inner circle still consisted of his friends of longest standing, John Lambert, John Disbrowe, Sir Gilbert Pykeringe, Edward Whalley, William Goffe and John Owen, whose friendship with him antedated the influence of the millenarians and who helped sustain a certain distance between the lord general and the radicals of Barebones.617A Faithfull Searching Home Word, 16.

On 6 June, invitations to individuals to attend the new assembly were issued in Cromwell’s name, and on 4 July he delivered a speech at its inauguration. His address was essentially a historical analysis of the workings of divine providence that had led the people of England to that point, and included a detailed commentary on the discussions preceding the Rump’s dissolution. Unable or unwilling to dictate the composition of the assembly, he hoped for men ‘of approved godliness for the generality of them; and very few (if any) liable to just exception’.618Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, iii. 443. He himself and eight others were co-opted to the assembly the next day, and he was the first person to be voted to be of the new council of state. He was also first named to the committee tasked with completing the council’s membership. 619CJ vii. 281a,b, 282a, 283a,b; Speeches ed. Stainer, 86-118. The assembly resolved on 6 July, after a division and by 65 votes to 46, to adopt for itself the title of Parliament.620CJ vii. 282a. On 9 July Cromwell was named to the committees for Scottish and Irish affairs, his only committee appointments by the House.621CJ vii. 286b. He was a regular attender at the council of state, however, appearing at 65 per cent of the recorded meetings. He once more topped the poll in elections to the council in November, but this was in the main a tacit recognition that the Parliament depended entirely on his patronage.622CSP Dom. 1652-3, p. xli; 1653-4, pp. xxxvi, xxxvii; CJ vii. 344a. He played no active part in the factional behaviour that led to the conservatives among the membership resigning their powers to him on 12 December. Except for a display of surprise, evident at the time and later confirmed by him as unfeigned, he accepted the closure of the Nominated Assembly with equanimity, and later chose to depict the whole episode of this Parliament as a tale of his ‘own weakness and folly’.623Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 345; Speeches ed. Stainer, 154, 328.

Lord Protector 1653-8

Though Cromwell never again sat in a representative assembly as a member, some limited discussion of his relationship with Parliaments while he was head of state seems appropriate. The Instrument of Government of December 1653, which bestowed the title of lord protector on Cromwell as chief magistrate, evidently owed much to the constitutional framework he had found attractive in the spring of the same year. He ruled with a council of state which held the reins of power and provided continuity in the intervals between the Parliaments which he never abandoned as an essential element in governance. The council which promulgated executive legislation before the first protectorate Parliament assembled in September 1654, as well as providing the necessary technical apparatus for legal and fiscal continuity, produced a number of ordinances embodying and progressing Cromwell’s long-held interests. Among these were laws regulating public behaviour (the ‘reformation of manners’) and several ordinances creating the state-sponsored preaching ministry which the Rump had skirted around for the duration of its rule. The first Parliament summoned by virtue of the Instrument of Government met on 4 September 1654, and one of the tasks that fell to it was to adapt and ratify the content of the Cromwellian ordinances so they could be engrossed as parliamentary acts.

In keeping with the quasi-civic conception of the lord protector as ‘chief magistrate’, and building on the precedent of his speech on 4 July 1653 as lord general, Cromwell delivered both inaugural and admonitory addresses to his Parliaments, much as a presiding judge would deliver a charge to a grand jury. On 4 September 1654 his conception of the Parliament’s purpose was that it should regulate ‘liberty of conscience and liberty of subjects’ to prevent the extremes by which preaching would either be confined to the ordained ministry, or be universally permissible, to the destruction of religious truth. He was emphatic in justifying the Instrument as in ‘the interest of the people, for the interest of the people alone and for their good’, with no qualifying reference to the religious remnant, and insisted he valued ‘a free Parliament … above my life’.624Speeches ed. Stainer, 133, 138, 140, 141. A little over a week later, Cromwell was obliged to address the Members again to admonish them for calling into question the Instrument. His defensive, self-exculpatory speech, coloured by restrained annoyance, sought to convince his audience that he was intent on diluting his own power by sharing it with Parliaments. He laid down ‘fundamentals’ of governance, among them Parliaments that were not self-perpetuating and which (despite the interim year-long conciliar legislation of 1653-4) would enjoy ‘an absolute legislative power’.625Speeches ed. Stainer, 148,158-60, 162, 163, 172.

The Parliament proved unresponsive to Cromwell’s pleas, however, and by the time he addressed it again (22 Jan. 1655), his mild irritation had given way to deep disappointment and ill-concealed anger. Declaring himself unable to fathom how the Members could have achieved so little, especially since security threats from disaffected groups, ‘weeds and nettles’, were springing up around them, he compared the assembly unfavourably with the Long Parliament, which he was confident would have availed itself both of the security, and also of the freedom to legislate, provided by the military state of 1654. He accused Members of failing to work actively with him in the interests of the people, describing them as ‘trustees’ of the people, who were the ‘foundation’ of sovereignty by their ‘acceptation and consent’ of the Instrument.626Speeches ed. Stainer, 177, 179, 191, 192, 195. In particular, the Cromwellian understanding of religious toleration, extending to varieties of Protestant, Trinitarian Christianity with minimal regard to doctrinal or liturgical differences, was now under threat from Parliament’s betrayal. In Cromwell’s eyes, this toleration, what he meant in this context by ‘religion’, was the crowning achievement of political struggle since 1642, being ‘no part of the contest we had with the common adversary, for religion was not the thing at the first contested for, but God brought it to that issue at last, and gave it to us by way of redundancy [abundance]’.627Speeches ed. Stainer, 188-9. Comparing the House to a self-indulgent, self-destructive householder who exercises liberty to walk in the fields while the house is ablaze, he dismissed it as unprofitable.628Speeches ed. Stainer, 205-6. Not a single piece of legislation had been passed.

That a second Parliament was called under these constitutional arrangements, against this background of failure, and after a period of heavy-handed executive interventionism by his major-generals, is indicative of Cromwell’s willingness to persist and a further proof of his enduring belief that a Parliament remained ‘the truest way to know what the mind of the nation is’.629Speeches ed. Stainer, 292. The vetting of Members prior to inauguration must have perturbed him little or not at all, given his earlier readiness to justify winnowing of membership of Parliaments by one means or another. His opening address recalled other Cromwellian sentiments of earlier times: he saw Parliament now in imperial terms, representing the people of ‘three nations, with all the dependencies thereof’. The imperial idiom clothed an invitation to vote taxes for a war against Spain, a state with which the Long Parliament had never concluded a peace, as Cromwell reminded his audience. His unfolding of the ‘complication … of interests’, by which papists and cavaliers at home and abroad were intertwined, echoed the parliamentary discourse of 1640-2, and re-affirmed his stated view of the previous year that ‘the peculiar interest all this while contended for’ was ‘liberty … to enjoy their own consciences’.630Speeches ed. Stainer, 212, 215, 222, 238. The programme he commended to the House, his insistence on toleration apart, was conservative and thus consistent with the defensive, inward-looking foreign policy: the retention of tithes, the reformation of manners and legal reform that now extended only to aspects of the criminal law. That Cromwell’s cautious approach to legislating coincided with the preferences of a majority in the Parliament could only bode well for the success of the legislative programme. His protracted vacillations over the offer of the kingship afforded him various opportunities for further public retrospective interpretations of his own political career, but to the end a number of distinctive political tropes that can be described as personal to Cromwell are visible: the distinction of the ‘two interests’ of the nation and the people of God, sometimes in his conception overlapping, sometimes distinct; his commitment to ‘settlement’ of the nation’s political conflicts and constitutional uncertainty; his growing attachment to the public preaching ministry; and above all, his belief that essential to true religion were amicable relations between what to most twenty-first century eyes seem narrowly-defined groups of Christian believers, under the benign protection of the state.

Cromwell’s experience of setbacks in both foreign and domestic policy from the mid-1650s tended at last to undermine his belief that divine providence was working unerringly to justify not only his own judgments but also the direction of national politics. Historians have come to accept that the office and title of king became identified in Cromwell’s mind as an ‘accursed thing’, although it has been recently argued that he was minded to assume the mantle of monarchy when it first came into public debate.631B. Worden, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the Sin of Achan’, in History, Society and the Churches ed. D. Beales, G. Best (Cambridge, 1985), 125-45; P. Little, ‘John Thurloe and the Offer of the Crown to Cromwell’, in Oliver Cromwell: New Perspectives ed. Little, 216-40. But it was without accepting the offer of the crown that Cromwell accepted the revised constitution of the Humble Petition and Advice on 25 May 1657, and the supplementary Additional Petition and Advice (26 June 1657). He closed the second, and last, Parliament of his protectorate on 4 February 1658. After a period of ill-health, he died on 3 September that year. His body was buried quickly in Westminster abbey, but as befitted the ruler of the British nations, an embryonic empire and a world power, there was a prolonged lying in state of an effigy and on 23 November a lavish state funeral. He was succeeded as lord protector by his eldest son, Richard Cromwell*; his second surviving son, Henry Cromwell*, lord deputy and lord lieutenant of Ireland, had sat in the Parliaments of 1653 and 1654. Cromwell’s person and estates were excepted from the act of indemnity and oblivion, which received royal assent on 29 August 1660. They were then subject to a separate posthumous act of attainder, by which his estates fell forfeit to the crown.632CJ viii. 26b, 177b, 197b, 201b, 202a, 207b, 208a. His corpse was disinterred on 26 January 1661 and with those of two other deceased regicides, Ireton and John Bradshawe, was hanged at Tyburn four days later, the anniversary of the death of Charles I. Before nightfall, the remains were thrown into the common burial pit at the spot, but the head, on a pike, was displayed on the exterior of Westminster Hall for decades. What is generally accepted as likely to be the skull is buried at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.633SR; Oxford DNB; F.J. Varley, Oliver Cromwell’s Latter End (1939), 40-58. His descendants known to have sat in later Parliaments include his grandson, Henry Ireton, who sat in three Parliaments between 1698-1711; his great-grandsons David Polhill, who sat between 1710 and 1754, and Frederick Meinhardt Frankland, who sat for Thirsk between 1734 and 1749; and Hans Winthrop Mortimer, Member for Shaftesbury, 1775-90.

Assessment

A well-known assessment of Cromwell’s relationship with Parliaments argued that he was ‘a natural backbencher … [who] never understood the subtleties of politics’.634H.R. Trevor-Roper, ‘Oliver Cromwell and his Parliaments’, in Cromwell: A Profile ed. I. Roots (New York, 1973), 133. He himself, especially in his later years, when a Calvinist sense of unworthiness was doubtless reinforced by a classical, humanist, civic rhetoric show of reluctance to assume office, tended to deprecate his own political skills. He presented himself as variously not worthy of being a doorkeeper; as one who did not call himself to office; as ‘a good constable set the keep the peace of the parish’; and as a warrior returning from campaign, ‘not … well skilled in parliamentary affairs, having been near ten years in the field’.635Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, i. 394; ii. 367, iii. 63, 89. In fact, his parliamentary skills were acquired early in his career at Westminster, and remained important in his wider understanding of the conduct of politics. Like many prominent Members in this period, he tended to specialize in particular parliamentary activities, and in his case he was a frequent teller (on 49 occasions), and for a short period in 1642 a messenger between the Houses 18 times. Between November 1640 and September 1642, at least 40 motions in the Commons can be attributed to him. He was absent from the House frequently and for long periods once civil war had erupted, with implications for his political career. These absences doubtless helped shape the pattern of his committee membership: he was named to ad hoc committees of the House and also the most powerful bodies supervising the war effort but never, until after Pride’s purge, to any of the specialist executive committees that marked the Long Parliament as exceptional, nor to the committees charged with producing complex legislation. Considered merely technically as a parliamentarian, Cromwell was much more at home on the floor of the House than he was in the backroom committees.

He was unusual among his contemporaries in his dedication to a particular ideal, that of the godly gathered community and its liberty of self-expression. His championing of parish lectureships, evident from the mid-1630s, carried him into the Commons and found expression in the Commons order he secured in September 1641, a modest enough achievement but one which won him admirers from far afield. His consistent, life-long advocacy on behalf of groups and individuals took various forms such as outspoken support for victims of royal government persecution; lobbying for unpaid soldiers; voicing policy concerns of parishioners; attempting to intrude clients of his into military and civil office. It all betokened shrewd and active engagement with people of a wide range of backgrounds and interests. Until the outbreak of civil war, he was moving rapidly from the periphery of the opposition junto’s circle of influence towards its centre, displaying interests recognizable to the historian in the reformation of manners, the drive to rid the church of episcopacy and the condition of Ireland; suspicion of moneyed interests in the City and a readiness to back the Commons in squabbles with the Lords.

No Commons-man responded to the call to arms in August 1642 with greater alacrity than Cromwell. The ideal of the select, godly community listening to the lecturer in the parish was transmuted into the ‘lovely company’ of ‘honest, sober Christians’ in the field.636Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, i. 155. Insofar as his military exploits can be treated as part of his parliamentary career, they are remarkable in that they served to enhance his standing in Parliament rather than diminish it. Crucial to the process over two years from July 1643 by which he established himself as a major military-political force were a determination to lobby Parliament assertively on behalf of his men, and an evident alertness on his part towards the propaganda potential of victory, if necessary at the expense of those officially his allies. His despatches to the Speaker from the field of victory were carefully-crafted contributions to parliamentary politics. His quarrel with Manchester proved a valuable test-ground for new-modelling the army, and his exemption from the Self-denying Ordinance was achieved by special pleading; but it was Naseby that secured his political and military future beyond hazard, and beyond the potential damage of repeated allegations that he was stuffing his troop, regiment or army with sectaries. By September 1645 he no longer needed to be in the Commons to achieve political impact, and by May 1646 he enjoyed an unparalleled degree of influence simultaneously in the Commons and the New Model.

From July 1646, his political aim was to prop up the Independent cause in the Commons, which led him into the factional politics of the House. In the immediate post-civil-war period, his instincts towards advocacy on behalf of interests outside Parliament were again evident, with indemnity for soldiers and the integrity of articles of surrender prominent among his interests, and a familiar suspicion of the City again on display. It was unrest in the army in the spring of 1647, and his part in quelling it, that marked the beginning of a re-orientation on Cromwell’s part, by which he began to recognize the potential of his own position vis-à-vis the army for political settlement and the furtherance of causes he favoured. He probably knew of, and approved, Joyce’s detention of the king at Holdenby, which transformed the pattern of high politics to the advantage of the Independents and the army. His willingness to countenance the expulsion of the Eleven Members, and to view the Commons as the better for their forced departure, set the pattern for future violations of parliamentary integrity, which to him could sit comfortably with historical observations he might make on electoral irregularity. He seems never to have regretted Pride’s Purge, and he delivered repeated, if evolving, justifications for the expulsion of the Rump.

From the summer of 1647, Cromwell’s over-riding political aim was to achieve a settlement with the king on the basis of the Heads of the Proposals, contrived as a means of outflanking his Presbyterian rivals, and both king and Lords were integral to that plan. Expressions of impatience apart, he was to adhere to the notion that the king should be part of the settlement until probably the period when he began, under pressure from elements in the army close to him, notably Henry Ireton, to see both Parliament and king as in need of drastic treatment, which we might date as late as November 1648. Even then, he was happy for those close to him to serve as the immediate agents of God’s plan, and his abandonment of the House of Lords came reluctantly and after the regicide. For all his reputation for dramatic, even brutal interventions, he worked hard to keep his friendships and alliances intact, and the seeds of his disillusionment with the Rump were sown in the immediate aftermath of the battle of Worcester, when the euphoria of the ‘crowning mercy’, as he called it, was punctured by Parliament’s evident unwillingness to contemplate its own dissolution.637Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, ii. 225-6. Even so, he persisted with involvement in parliamentary business consistent with his earlier interests (indemnity, a generous treatment of old foes, law reform) until his exasperation with the slow pace, the vested interests and the unresponsiveness of Parliament got the better of him in April 1653. His growing belief in the potential of a godly executive never destroyed completely his belief in the centrality of a representative assembly, however, and his willingness to work with the protectorate Parliaments was surely sincere.

A final word should be reserved for Cromwell’s driving political idea, that of a toleration in religion. This was entirely consistent with his earliest known beliefs, formed in the 1630s. Gathered communities of the godly were an ideal he worked to protect and encourage both in Parliament and army, even though no particular gathered church could claim him as a member. As one who felt himself to be under particular divine favour for most of the time he served as a parliament-man, he remained unwaveringly sympathetic to the theological and ecclesiological concept of the ‘remnant’, and the part such a remnant had to play in civil polity. These ideas evolved to become a commitment to a commonwealth of a plurality of doctrinal allegiances, under the protection of a benign sovereign executive. His view of himself as on a consistent path under divine favour towards this ideal, with its shorthand title ‘religion’, lay behind his remonstration to Parliament in January 1655 that God had ‘brought it to that issue at last’. For all its limitations and short duration, the church settlement that developed haltingly under the Rump Parliament and the protectorate can be said to embody Cromwell’s personal vision, and thus to deserve the adjective Cromwellian in its inspiration as well as its governance.