Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History (61 page)

Having brought Ireland to heel, Cromwell next dealt with Royalist rebellion in Scotland. In 1649–50, the Scots, horrified at the execution of Charles I, declared for his son, whom they proclaimed King Charles II – of Great Britain. In return, he repudiated his Church of England upbringing and agreed to the Covenant. Young Charles’s claim to rule the entire island challenged the Commonwealth. Once again, the New Model Army had to be called upon to remind everyone who had won the Civil Wars. Fairfax, who had opposed the king’s execution, resigned rather than invade Scotland, so it fell to Cromwell to plead with the Scots: “I beseech you in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.”
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(Clearly, he had more time for debate with fellow Protestants than with the Catholic Irish.) On September 3, 1650 he defeated the Covenanter army at Dunbar, in Scotland (see
map 11
). One year later to the very day he defeated a second invading force made up of Royalists and moderate Presbyterians under Charles himself, at Worcester in England (
map 11
). These victories finally sealed Parliament’s triumph in the Civil Wars and left the Royalist and Scottish forces in disarray for a decade. As for the young “king,” he was forced to hide in an oak tree (which would forever after be commemorated in British pub signs as “the Royal Oak”). Eventually, disguised and covertly assisted by a network of mainly Catholic families, Charles made his way to the continent. He would spend the next decade as the impoverished and harried guest of a variety of European rulers. He kept a small, shabby, peripatetic court populated by Royalist exiles and hangers-on who plotted with sympathizers in England to engineer a restoration. These plots were all doomed to failure, partly because neither the English people nor the continental powers had much will to restore the Stuarts, partly because the Commonwealth had infiltrated the Royalist court with spies.

Pacifying Ireland and Scotland should have bolstered the prestige of the Commonwealth. To an extent it did. Some Royalists and Covenanters now resigned themselves to rule by the Rump, taking an oath to be “faithful” to the English government “without a King or House of Lords.” This should, in turn, have enabled the Rump to enact the real reforms for which the Independents and the army had fought. As Cromwell, in one of his progressive moods, urged them after Dunbar, “relieve the oppressed, hear the groans of the poor prisoners …, be pleased to reform the abuses of the professions; and if there be any one that makes many poor to make a few rich, that suits not a commonwealth.”
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The Rump made some attempt to do all these things. For example, in 1650–1, it sought to improve the economy by encouraging trade. It passed the first of the Navigation Acts which forbade foreign powers from trading with England’s American colonies and required all such trade to be carried in English merchant ships with crews that were at least 75 percent English. The Rump also pursued reform of the law courts, the Poor Law, the clergy, and the moral character of the nation, passing harsh statutes against adultery, fornication, blasphemy, and swearing. Finally, its administration was more efficient and less corrupt than its Stuart counterpart.

In the long run, the Navigation Acts would revolutionize English colonial trade by protecting it from foreign competition while breaking the old system of trading monopolies. But in the short run they led to a trade war with the Dutch which the Commonwealth could ill afford, coming on the heels of the expensive Irish and Scottish campaigns. Lawyers and JPs held up legal and Poor Law reform as these promised to adversely affect their interests; while religious reform proved unpopular and unenforceable – the abolition of Christmas because of its pagan trappings was, unsurprisingly, a non-starter. In the end, the Rump’s record left many disillusioned, especially in the army.

In the spring of 1653 the Rump alienated its protectors further by considering a reduction in pay for the New Model Army and taking forever to dissolve itself and call new elections. Finally, on April 20, Oliver Cromwell, exasperated, entered the House with soldiers and dissolved the Rump:

[He] told the House, that they had sat long enough … that some of them were whore-masters … that others of them were drunkards, and some corrupt and unjust men and scandalous to the profession of the gospel, and that it was not fit that they should sit as a parliament any longer.
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Perhaps more telling, no one rose up to defend them; in Cromwell’s stinging recollection “when they were dissolved, there was not so much as the barking of a dog.”
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The Rump’s demise provided the army officers, most of whom were Independents, with the chance to nominate a legislature of their own liking. The result was sometimes called an “Assembly of Saints,” though it has come to be popularly known as “Barebone’s Parliament” after Praise-God Barebone (ca. 1598–1679/80), a London leather-seller and preacher who became a member. As this implies, some of its members belonged to radical sects, including the Baptists and Fifth Monarchy Men, and hoped to usher in God’s kingdom on earth. To the extent that these zealots came to dominate its proceedings, Barebone’s Parliament turned into a disaster, for they were long on ambitious plans, short on practical political experience. For example, following the lead of the Fifth Monarchy Men, one faction advocated replacing English common law with the law of Moses. While this Parliament passed some enlightened legislation to establish new procedures for the registration of births, marriages, and deaths, probate of wills, relief of creditors, and the incarceration of lunatics, its members also offended important segments of the country by seeking to abolish or reform the court of Chancery (upsetting lawyers), lay patronage of Church livings and purchase of tithes (upsetting landowners), and the collection of the Excise and monthly assessments (upsetting army officers). Cromwell, who was by now the most powerful man in the country, reacted with disgust, complaining that where before he had to deal with knaves, now he had to deal with fools. The godly reformer in him had initially welcomed the “Saints.” But the hard-headed country gentleman realized that government required prudence and practicality as well as religious enthusiasm and godliness. The rest of the ruling elite were coming to agree. In December, Cromwell’s supporters in the Assembly engineered their dissolution, fittingly, while the most godly members were attending a prayer meeting!

Plate 17
Oliver Cromwell, by Robert Walker, 1649. National Portrait Gallery, London.

Who would rule next? On December 12, 1653 an army delegation presented to General Cromwell the only written constitution ever implemented in England, the Instrument of Government. This named Cromwell as executive, giving him the title “lord protector.” Who was this man who had begun life “by birth a gentleman, living neither in any considerable height, nor yet in obscurity,” rising – as he saw it, through God’s “dispensations” – to equal any king?
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Oliver (see
plate 17
), a distant relative of Henry VIII’s minister Thomas Cromwell, was born in 1599 in tiny East Anglian Huntingdonshire. He was educated at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, a hotbed of Puritan thought. Still, he would have spent his life as an anonymous country gentleman of godly propensities and middling estate if the war had not uncovered his leadership ability and tactical skill, propelling him to the center of national affairs. Once it did so, his repeated successes convinced him that God had a special purpose for him. This is not to say that Cromwell was always sure of himself. Over the next decade he would sometimes be torn between the conservative instincts of an English landed gentleman and a Puritan zeal for godly reform in Church and State. However, once his mind was made up, his conviction of being God’s instrument became his greatest strength. Ironically, King Charles had, as we have seen, the same certainty of divine favor and purpose. But there was one significant difference between Charles I and Oliver Cromwell: Cromwell had a killer instinct. It was this killer instinct, along with his propensity for seizing the main chance, that enraged his enemies, whether Royalists, the Irish, or even former allies like the Levellers.

Advising Cromwell would be a Council of State, filled by generals and the protector’s nominees, which would share control of the government’s finances and armed forces. Legislation was to be made by a parliament elected every three years by those with estates worth over £200 a year. This was a far stiffer property qualification than the old franchise – an indication of just how conservative the ruling class had grown in the four years since the abolition of the monarchy. In fact, if this constitution looks suspiciously like the old one, with Parliament, Privy Council, and “king” in all but name, that was no accident. The only major difference, apart from the franchise, was that this time the ruler’s power would be backed up by a standing army. It was therefore little wonder that radicals viewed Cromwell’s acceptance of the Instrument of Government as a great betrayal; or that most members of the ruling elite – even Royalists – accommodated themselves to it.

Oliver Cromwell ruled as lord protector of England (and Wales), Scotland, and Ireland for a little under five years. In many ways, his regime contrasted favorably with that of the early Stuarts. It provided rational, efficient government with a minimum of corruption. It launched much needed law reform and sought to make education more accessible. It pursued a broadly tolerant religious policy which prescribed worship according to the Directory, but allowed for much individuality of practice among congregations. (Ironically, this led to great tensions
within
congregations as each tried to reach consensus on practice.) The regime did not tolerate Anglicans, Ranters, or Catholics, but left adherents of the old Prayer Book and even those of the pope to live in peace if they would live peacefully. The regime also allowed Jews to return to England for the first time since their official expulsion in 1290. It pursued an aggressive and largely successful economic and foreign policy. As we have seen, the Commonwealth’s Navigation Acts provoked a trade war with the Dutch which the Cromwellian regime won in 1654. Convinced of God’s favor, Cromwell next devised the Western Design to “liberate” Spain’s Caribbean colonies. This was, at best, a draw: a crushing defeat at Santo Domingo was only partly balanced by the acquisition of the not-yet-lucrative island of Jamaica in 1655. After striking an alliance with the French in 1657, Anglo- French forces won several victories against Spain in Flanders and at sea. The navy also safeguarded Mediterranean trade by attacking Royalist and Barbary pirates. Thus, English soldiers, sailors, and merchants finally had their aggressive Protestant foreign policy. Altogether, the Protectorate anticipated or pioneered many later developments which would make England the most progressive and powerful state in Europe by 1714.

But there were costs to such “big-government” successes. First, a more efficient government was bound to be more intrusive. The failed Western Design had necessitated the impressment of thousands of unwilling volunteers. In 1655, after an unsuccessful Royalist rising, Cromwell attempted to ensure local control by dividing the country into 12 military districts, each overseen by a major-general. Not unlike lords lieutenant, the major-generals enforced law and order, the Poor Law, and religious toleration; but they also spied on Royalists and Presbyterians, bullied JPs, and purged corporations of anyone suspected of disloyalty to the regime. In keeping with Puritan conviction that God’s judgment on the nation could only be averted by its moral reform, many major-generals also fought drunkenness, blasphemy, swearing, gambling, whoring, and indecent fashions wherever they found them. They also suppressed alehouses, playhouses, Sunday sports, and Christmas celebrations. Needless to say, the Protectorate did not succeed in stamping out any of these practices or institutions, but it did leave a lasting impression nevertheless. The major-generals and their Puritan supporters would long be remembered as prudes, kill-joys, and intruders into local communities, while standing armies generally would be associated with the oppression of English liberties, local autonomy, and even harmless fun.

The Protectorate was also expensive. A more efficient government, policing the nation at home and prosecuting war abroad via a standing army and permanent navy, had to be paid for. The average annual expenditure of the Cromwellian administration was nearly £2 million – far greater than that of Elizabeth I, James I, or Charles I at their respective heights. This necessitated, in turn, very high tax rates. Naturally, Cromwell continued the lucrative but unpopular Excise and monthly assessments and even extended the former. His government also sequestered Royalist lands, selling some and forcing proprietors to compound for (pay a high fee to reoccupy) others.
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None of this did anything for the regime’s popularity or the protector’s ability to get along with a parliament full of landowners who had to answer to other landowners back home. As a result, like his royal predecessors, he frequently found it necessary to prorogue or dismiss the Honorable Gentlemen.