A History of Britain, Volume 2 (28 page)

So was Oliver Cromwell Leviathan, the ‘artificial man' in whom all men were combined in one indisputable, unarguable sovereign? Later, when he was Lord Protector, his steward John Maidstone described his appearance as though it was indeed a one-man national monument: ‘his head so shaped, as you might see it a storehouse and shop . . . a vast treasury of natural parts'. But however slavish the sycophancy, it's to Cromwell's credit that he never quite seemed to fall for it. Nor is there any serious evidence that, from the beginning of the Commonwealth, Cromwell aimed at any sort of personal supremacy, regal or otherwise. Though those who came to hate him, like Edmund Ludlow, believed that his repeated declarations of aversion to high office were hypocritical, masking a monomaniacal ambition, there is good reason to believe them sincere. Cromwell certainly showed some of the symptoms of absolutism – colossal self-righteousness, haughty intolerance, a frighteningly low threshold of rage, a coarse instinct for bullying his way past any opposition. But he also lacked the one essential characteristic for true dictatorship: a hunger to accumulate power for its own sake. For Cromwell, the exercise of power was a necessary chore, not a pleasure. And it was not undertaken for personal gratification. Whatever his many failings, vanity was not one of them. He saw the warts clearly and without extenuation, and they were not merely on his face. Throughout his life as a public figure, Cromwell believed himself to be no more than the weak and imperfect instrument through which an almighty Providence worked its will on the history of
Britain. Often he sounded like the stammering Moses, drafted by an insistent Almighty into business he would rather leave to someone else.

But there was, as he wrote to Oliver St John in 1648, no shirking the call: ‘The Lord spake thus unto me with a strong hand and instructed me.' Cromwell, then, believed he worked for God. Real dictators believe they are God. It was those who fancied themselves little gods, from Charles I to the republican oligarchs of the Rump like Henry Marten and Sir Arthur Haselrig, who most aroused Cromwell's contempt. He mistrusted power-seekers and personal empire-builders and constantly questioned their motives, including his own. ‘Simplicity' was a word he used repeatedly of himself and his conduct, and it was the highest of moral compliments. Better, always, to be thought naïve than wickedly sophisticated. If he was no manipulator, then nor was Cromwell (unlike Ireton) much of an ideologist of the new Britain. Arguably, the survival of the republic was jeopardized by his complete indifference to creating anything like a true commonwealth culture to replace that of the defunct royal regime. In the last analysis Cromwell was not that far from Fox (whom he found both fascinating and repellent) in believing in the ultimate triviality of ‘carnal' forms of government. They were all, he said, following St Paul, ‘dross and dung in comparison of Christ'. This spiritual loftiness was personally admirable, but it was also politically fatal to the perpetuation of the Republic. To prolong itself, the Protectorate needed Cromwell to be more of a Leviathan, more of a ruthless sovereign, than he could ever manage to stomach. This is both his exoneration and his failure.

Though he is an obligatory fixture in the pantheon of heroes, along with Caesar, Napoleon and all the usual darlings of destiny, the wonder of Oliver Cromwell is that for so much of his life he showed absolutely no inkling of what awaited him, nor any precocious impatience to be recognized as exceptional. For the greater part of his fifty-nine years he toiled away in dim mid-Anglian obscurity, amid the cabbage fields, very much the provincial country gentleman-farmer. For most of his career the man who was to become the arbiter of power in Britain was breathtakingly innocent of it. Likewise, the greatest general of his age was completely unschooled and unpractised in the arts of war. Cromwell was not, then, someone who instinctively knew that he was fated to ascend. On the contrary, he thought of himself as a casualty of a triple fall – social, political and spiritual. His rise was the ungainly clambering of a man making his way up the forbidding stone face of Purgatory.

Socially, Cromwell spent most of his early life on the narrow edge of respectability rather than embedded comfortably within it, for he was the son of a second son. He was tantalizingly close to real fortune. His
grandfather, Sir Henry, had been sheriff of both Huntingdonshire and Cambridgeshire, a member of the Elizabethan parliament and opulent enough in his entertainments at least to be called ‘the Golden Knight' by the Queen. His oldest son (also called Oliver) also managed to cut a stylish figure both at court and in East Anglia: a herald at the funeral of James I; married into Dutch and Genoese banking money. All of which made the much more modest circumstances of Oliver's father, Robert, glaringly uncomfortable. Uncle Oliver's money was needed to keep the modest estate afloat and to send young Oliver (the only surviving boy in a family of seven children) to the Inns of Court in London. There, however, he made what seemed to be his saving fortune by marrying Elizabeth Bourchier, a wealthy London fur-trader's daughter. He seemed very much on his way up. With a legal education and some funds in hand he was elected to the parliament of 1628 which saw the dramatic struggle over the Petition of Right. But there was no sign, in that momentous year, that Oliver Cromwell was anything but a silent back-bencher while the debates over prerogative and the common law were thundering around him. All that is known of his presence amid the political furore was that the royal physician, Sir Theodore Mayerne, treated Cromwell for severe depression –
valde melancholicus
– a condition that would often revisit him. (In fact, his wild mood swings – from bursts of disconcerting laughter while praising the Lord for a particularly comprehensive annihilation of the enemy, to his descents into scowling gloom – suggest the classic symptoms of clinical depression.)

Whatever the cause, around 1629–30 Cromwell's fortunes seem to have collapsed. By 1631 his circumstances had become so parlous that he was forced to sell almost all of his land and transplant himself to St Ives in Huntingdonshire. There he farmed about 17 acres, not as the squire of the manor but as a yeoman tenant, leasing holdings from Cambridge colleges and working the land alongside his hired hands. Cromwell's social descent and his experience of rural toil in these years gave him a closeness to the speech and habits of ordinary people which became a priceless asset when he translated it into the charisma of military command. He never lost the soft East Anglian burr in his voice, and when he spoke about the ‘plain russet-coated captains', the ‘honest' men he wanted at the core of his army, Cromwell knew exactly what and whom he was talking about. Before his fall from genteel ease, he had also been on the losing end of a bitter local political dispute in Huntingdon when the royal government had changed the borough charter. Cromwell was among the local gentry discomfited by the changes and, for the first but not the last time, let the vainglorious winners feel the rough edge of his tongue. One of his
adversaries complained about the ‘disgraceful and unseemly speeches' he made against the mayor and recorder of Huntingdon, which were aggressive enough to get him reported to the Privy Council.

De profundis
, politically marginalized, socially demoted, submerged below sea-level in the sodden Fens, Cromwell was suddenly reborn. It was this conversion experience, so he believed (rather than a timely inheritance from a bachelor uncle), which started him on the road to redemption. A justly famous letter to his cousin, the wife of Oliver St John, written later in 1638, but recalling his redemption, is a classic of Pauline-Calvinist reawakening: ‘Oh, I lived in and loved darkness, and hated the light. I was a chief, the chief of sinners. This is true; I hated godliness, yet God had mercy on me. O the riches of His mercy!'

His political election – to the Short and then the Long Parliament in 1640 as member for Cambridge – was less important than his spiritual election to stand forth and do God's bidding. Or rather, political life for Oliver Cromwell
was
a spiritual office. Whatever accountability he might nominally have to his electors or to the king was as nothing compared to his accountability before God. Although he had become a man of some substance again, living in Ely, Cromwell still thought of himself as a marginal man in the world of the grandees. His distance from and deep scepticism of oligarchs and aristocrats, even those who professed proper parliamentary opinions, gave him the unwavering resolution they often lacked. While he was deeply committed (and would always be) to the prevailing social order, he did not believe it would be subverted by a forthright challenge to the king's presumptions. On the contrary, only by resisting those presumptions, the corrupt arrogance of a court, could this ancient and essentially benevolent English hierarchy be securely preserved. Unlike many, in and out of the parliaments of 1640–2, Cromwell was not afraid of a fight, always provided that it was for a godly cause. He was convinced, much earlier than most, that a great struggle between the forces of righteousness and unrighteousness was inevitable and that to pretend otherwise was false comfort. By knowing that it would be so Cromwell made it so, becoming the most vocal member of the Commons to demand that the authority to appoint Lords-Lieutenant and to muster militia be transferred from the king to parliament. As far as Cromwell was concerned, the war did not begin with the raising of the royal standard in Nottingham but much earlier, in the Irish rebellion behind which he saw the bloody hand of Stuart machination. Putting the country ‘into a posture of defence', he urged, with a clarity which Hobbes would have grudgingly admired, was no more than an act of timely self-preservation.

So where others dithered and hesitated, Oliver Cromwell acted. Having raised a troop of sixty horse in Cambridgeshire, he used it to seize Cambridge Castle for the parliament and to stop the removal of college and university plate to the king's war chest. Dead straight-ahead decisiveness was to be the hallmark of Cromwell's spectacular career during the war itself (in such contrast to his later indecisiveness in the world of pure politics). He had no time for those whom he suspected – first Denzil Holles, then the Earl of Manchester – who fought, always with an eye to negotiation rather than to total victory, or for those like Essex who he thought shrank from engagement. Equivocation was unworthy of the helmeted Jehovah who he knew fought on his side. Inside the hymn-singing, pocket Bible-carrying New Model Army, Cromwell turned Gideon: the leader of a godly troop. He played it for all it was worth, helping John Dillingham, editor of
The Parliament Scout,
to drum up the Cromwellian reputation as a general in his newsbook, because he undoubtedly believed that he had been designated by the Lord of Hosts to lead his captains and corporals. And Cromwell also understood that the rank-and-file soldiers would respond better to an officer who never betrayed any doubts about the rightness of the cause or the certainty of eventual victory. This spiritual armour-plating did not make Cromwell any less of an intelligent tactician, for all his lack of military experience or training. What he brought to Marston Moor and Naseby (and learned from the failure at Edgehill) was a cavalry strong enough to take the impact of an enemy charge and flexible enough to regroup for a counter-offensive to which an undeployed reserve could be added for additional force. He was also blessed with the one quality without which all paper planning would be useless: an infallible sense of timing. Cromwell could ‘read' a battle, right through the din and the choking smoke and the chaos, and have an uncanny sense of how to react to its ebb and flow. This did not mean, however, that he sat at a distance surveying the carnage with his perspective glass. On the contrary, he was usually to be found in the thick of it, leading charges, urging on pikemen and dragoons, risking (and sometimes taking) a wound but always surviving. His personal bravery and steely composure in the heat of battle won the trust of men who were being asked to put themselves in harm's way. How could they not believe in a general who never lost? (Even the indecisive second battle of Newbury was at worst an unsatisfying draw.) With every fresh victory, Cromwell's soldiers had proof that they were themselves protected by the general's close relations with Providence. Faith that his soldiers were truly doing God's work was not the same, though, as assuming that the army rather than parliament should dictate the political fate of the nation.

The two Cromwells – the socially conservative believer in the ancient constitution and the zealous evangelical reformer – were still at odds within his own personality. Despite the presence of true Puritans like Sir Robert Harley in the parliament, Cromwell, like Ireton, was unsure of its commitment to godly reformation. But the thought of imposing a settlement at sword point on parliament still made him uneasy, right through the crisis of the summer and autumn of 1647. A regime of generals, however pious, was not what he had fought for. A year later, though, many of these reservations had fallen away in the ferocity of the second civil war. Presbyterianism no longer seemed the vanguard, but the rearguard, of the pure. Its parliamentary champions such as Holles seemed frightened by true liberty of conscience and even prepared, like the Scots, to make a cheap bargain with the king to secure the interests of their own narrow Church. They had ‘withdrawn their shoulder from the Lord's work through fleshly reasonings', he wrote. So even though he let Ireton do the hatchet work and disingenuously remained at a distance from Colonel Pride's Purge, Cromwell was no longer a devout believer in the sacrosanct untouchability of the Long Parliament. He was already the sceptic of the mask of legalism. ‘If nothing should be done but what is according to the law,' he would say before yet another of the purges he sponsored (that of the second Protectorate parliament),'the throat of the nation may be cut while we send for some to make a law.' This is the rationalization of all
coups d'état
.