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| Oliver Cromwell Public domain |
The Commonwealth proclaimed
The putting to death of an anointed king was a shocking event, and no-one, either in Britain or Europe knew what was to happen next. The king had been executed by the orders of a minority of parliamentarians, probably against the wishes of the great majority of the people. To its enemies the new republic was a betrayal and a military tyranny. To its supporters such as the poet John Milton, it was a commonwealth whose achievements which would rival those of Greece and Rome. To others it was the beginning of true godly reformation.On 6 February the Commons abolished the House of Lords. In March two acts of Parliament gave statutory force to the abolition of the monarchy and the Lords. In May an Act of Parliament declared England a Republic or Commonwealth
‘governed by the representatives of the people in parliament … without any king or House of Lords’.This was untrodden ground and the propaganda war began early. Ten days after Charles’s execution, the royalist Eikon Basilike was published illegally and went into thirty editions within the year. On 13 February John Milton published The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. In it he argued that kings derived their power from the people and that men were born free. In October he responded to Eikon Basilike with Eikonoklastes, which helped ruin his failing eyesight.
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| Title page of Milton's Eikonoclastes |
The Council of State
From 7 February the government was in the hands of a Council of State, an executive body of forty-one members chosen by Parliament and set up to run the new Republic. On 10 March John Bradshaw was nominated president of the Council, a position he held until November 1651, when his office went into rotation. The Council was under the overall control of Parliament - the ‘Rump Parliament’ left over from the Civil War and Pride’s Purge (December 1648). It consisted of two hundred MPs, many of whom were readmitted after their expulsion in December 1648.The suppression of the Levellers
The defeat and execution of the king and the flight of many Royalists energised the radicals, but from the start they were disillusioned with the Commonwealth. Had they fought the war simply to reinstate the ruling classes?In February 1649 John Lilburne published a pamphlet, England’s New Chains Discovered, which called for the immediate dissolution of the Council of State, the abolition of the current parliament and the election of a new body. This was followed by Richard Overton’s The Hunting of the Foxes, a bitter denunciation of Cromwell and his son-in-law, Henry Ireton. On 24 March Lilburne published The Second Part of England’s New Chains. He was arrested and taken before the Council of State, where he allegedly heard Cromwell say ‘I tell you, you are meant to break them.’ He was committed to the Tower.
On 15 March 1649 Cromwell was named Commander-in-Chief for the Irish expedition. He accepted this commission on 30 March and began the painstaking preparations for his campaign. But before these could be properly set in motion, he had to crush Leveller-inspired army mutinies that had broken out in London, Banbury and Salisbury. At one stage at least 2,500 men were in active mutiny or on the brink of it. In May Cromwell and Fairfax in a rapid overnight march with 4,000 troops from Hampshire to Oxfordshire caught up with the Salisbury mutineers at Burford, where on 14 May three ringleaders were court-martialled and shot.
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| The plaque at Burford church commemorating the executed Levellers |
After this the Levellers lost coherence as a political movement and went into decline. Lilburne later became a Quaker.
In the weeks that followed the crushing of the Levellers, parliament found more funds to pay the army and by the summer a force had been raised ready to cross to Ireland.
The Diggers
The suppression of the Levellers did not mean the end of radicalism. In the spring of 1649 a splinter-group, the True Levellers or Diggers emerged under the charismatic leadership of Gerard Winstanley, a cloth-trader from Wigan. They were opposed to the private ownership of land, and saw the earth as a ‘common treasury’. They camped at St George’s Hill in Surrey and began to cultivate the land but they were dispersed by the security forces.The Engagement
In January 1650, while the army was engaged in Ireland, and rumours abounded of problems in Scotland, the Rumpers extended a new loyalty test, the Engagement, to all males over 18. Non-subscribers were barred from office and from legal proceedings. Although the Engagement led to few purges, it caused many agonies of conscience. It demanded more than passive acquiescence to the government and thus raised the whole question of the legitimacy of the Commonwealth.The Engagement was never tended in some counties, and in others it met with hostility, but the fact that Charles Stuart lacked popular support in his attempt to regain the throne suggests that the Commonwealth had won grudging acceptance - if only because of a general war-weariness.
Oliver Cromwell
From 1649 until his death in 1658, Oliver Cromwell was the dominating figure not just in English but also in British history.He was born into the minor gentry and was a product of East Anglian Puritanism. He was educated at Huntingdon grammar school and Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. He was elected MP for Huntingdon in 1628. With the collapse of the king’s government he was elected for the Long and Short Parliaments in 1640 as MP for Cambridge.
After a period of personal crisis in the 1630s, he had become ‘godly’. Politically, he could be pragmatic except when politics conflicted with his ambition to achieve the reign of Christ on earth. He believed that England faced a situation comparable to that faced by the Israelites in Old Testament days. To inherit the promised land of godly reformation, the English needed to undergo a spiritual cleansing.
He played an increasingly important role in the Civil War. By February 1643 he was a colonel in the Eastern Association, commanding his own regiment. He was rewarded in late January 1644 by being made Lieutenant-General of the Eastern Association. In July he made a major contribution to the parliamentary victory of Marston Moor. When the New Model Army was established he became second in command to Fairfax. In June 1645 his cavalry played a decisive role at Naseby.
With Ireton, he was a leading participant in the Putney debates, where his fundamental social conservatism became clear. He arrived back in London from a campaign in the north the day after Pride’s Purge - perhaps this was convenient timing? He was instrumental in securing the trial and execution of the king, which he afterwards defended as providential.
Ireland was now going to be his great test as a general.
Ireland
It was a matter of urgency to put an end to the disturbances in Ireland, where Irish Catholics and English Royalists had formed an anti-Parliamentarian Confederation. On 15 August Cromwell and his forces landed at Dublin. He brought with him siege guns that had not previously been seen in Ireland.On 3 September Cromwell arrived at Drogheda, the first major Confederate/Royalist stronghold. It was a walled town and its capture was the key to an advance into Ulster. On 10 September he delivered a letter to the governor, Sir Arthur Aston, urging surrender. When Aston refused, he was, according to the rules of war at the time, condemning his men to death.
Early on the following morning the assault began, in which his troops soon gained entry to the town. The garrison were killed along with an unknown number of civilians, perhaps as many as 3,000.
Cromwell then moved to Wexford and began the bombardment on 11 October. Parliamentarians broke into the town while negotiations were still taking place, and some 2,000 soldiers and 1500 townspeople were slaughtered.
A recent argument has suggested that Cromwell never ordered the indiscriminate massacre of civilians. It can also be argued that in the context of the seventeenth century, there was nothing unusual or even controversial about his actions. (There was far greater bloodshed after the fall of the German city of Magdeburg during the Thirty Years' War.) However, it is also clear that Cromwell saw himself as the instrument of God’s chastisement against the 'ungodly Irish'. In his report to Speaker Lenthall on 17 September he wrote,
In retrospect he was probably uncomfortable about what had happened and felt he had to justify it.
‘I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgement of God upon these barbarous wretches, who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood, and that it will tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future, which are the satisfactory grounds for such actions, which otherwise cannot but work remorse and regret’.
In late May 1650 Cromwell returned to England where he was hailed as a conquering general, most notably in Andrew Marvell's poem, and received a formal vote of thanks from the Commons.
With the suppression of the revolt the government was committed to wholesale confiscation of Irish land and ‘ethnic cleansing’. About 30,000 soldiers were able to claim land in lieu of pay. The plan was to confiscate the lands of the Catholics in Ireland and forcibly transport them to Connaught. Although this plan could not be implemented in full, the proportion of land held by Catholics is estimated to have fallen from seventy per cent to twenty per cent.
Scotland
Almost immediately Cromwell was involved in a campaign in Scotland. Soon after the regicide the Scots had proclaimed Charles II not simply King of Scots but of Great Britain, France and Ireland. This was a declaration of war on the Commonwealth.On 23 June 1650 Charles Stuart arrived in Scotland and took the Covenant, which authorised Presbyterian church government across Britain. It was clear that the Kirk party were determined to mound him into a Presbyterian monarch.
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| A satirical English caricature depicting Charles' troubles at the hands of the Scots |
For the English, the question was whether to wait for the Scots to act or to engage in a pre-emptive strike. Fairfax, a Presbyterian, could not reconcile himself to a war of aggression against England’s Protestant neighbours and on 25 June 1650 he resigned as Lord General of the New Model Army and retreated into private life. Cromwell was appointed his replacement. On 28 June he began the march north.
He was opposed by the wily and seasoned soldier, David Leslie, who retreated to the well-defended line of Leith-Edinburgh, stripping the territory north of Berwick of supplies and forcing Cromwell to rely on provisioning by sea through the port of Dunbar. But Leslie was let down by his political masters, who were in the grip of a fanatical religious ideology. They continually purged his army in order to produce a more godly force and urged him to adopt more aggressive tactics in order to show God’s providence.
On 3 September Cromwell defeated the Scots at Dunbar. You can see two good accounts here and here. But he then fell ill and this enabled the Scots to regain the initiative. On 1 January 1651 Charles Stuart was crowned King of Scots at Scone.
In August the Scots under Charles Stuart advanced into England. Cromwell split his forces into two, setting off in pursuit with one half, while George Monck used the other half to secure central Scotland. From Leith Thomas Harrison set off south shadowing the Scots army as it advanced down the west of England. On 3 September, the anniversary of Dunbar, his army was defeated at Worcester. While Charles escaped into exile, barely a dozen Scots reached their homeland.
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| Boscobel House, Shropshire where Charles hid from parliamentary troops |
The Scots now found themselves faced with conquest and union on English terms. Cromwell had succeeded where James VI and I had failed – he had united the two kingdoms. In many respects this was beneficial. The power of the landlords was undermined by the removal of feudal tenures, commerce with England was encouraged and prosperity began to return to the Lowlands. Religious toleration was enforced (irony alert!).
The historian Mark Kishlansky has written:
‘The scope of the Commonwealth’s military achievements was breathtaking … In Ireland, the Rump accomplished in three years what English monarchs had failed to do in a hundred, In Scotland Cromwell’s victories erased the humiliating memories of the Bishops’ Wars. The Commonwealth set afoot plans for a comprehensive union of what was once Charles’s composite monarchy.’To add to the achievement, in 1652 Admiral Robert Blake defeated the mighty Dutch navy in the First Dutch War. After a range of military fiascos under the Stuarts, England was now a formidable naval power.
A godly Commonwealth?
Progress towards a godly Commonwealth was erratic. In 1650 the Rump abolished compulsory attendance in the established Church. This created the situation that allowed new religious groups like the Baptists and Quakers to to flourish, as well as more extreme movements like the Ranters and Fifth Monarchists to flourish. |
| A Fifth Monarchist pamphlet Public domain |
Parliament created a commission to propagate true religion in the ‘dark corners’ of the land - the North and Wales and it used the income from confiscated estates to support poor ministers.
In 1650 it passed the Adultery Act, which made adultery a capital offence. Four women (no men!) were executed under the Act. In the same year the Blasphemy Act attempted (unsuccessfully) to suppress the preaching of the extreme sects.
The dissolution of the Rump
For all its successes, the Rump was a victim of the republican dilemma: too conservative for the army and the millenarian sects, but not conservative enough to heal the breach that the king’s execution had created. It therefore had few friends. Its failure to achieve positive reform – either political, religious, or legal - strengthened the case for a fresh look at the constitution.On 20 April Cromwell 1653 gathered troops and dissolved the Rump. One contemporary said,
‘There was not so much as the barking of a dog in protest.’A few days after the dissolution a wag pinned a notice on the door of the Commons chamber:
‘This House is to be let, now unfurnished.’The reasons for Cromwell’s action remain a mystery - previously his policy had been the careful cultivation of moderate opinion. Many reacted with dismay. In January 1654 a Captain John Williams preached in Radnorshire:
‘in these dayes our sunn was gone down at noone day, and our light turned to darkness.’
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| Andrew Carrick Gow (1907), Cromwell Dissolving the Long Parliament Mackelvie Trust Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki Frame sponsored by John Gow family |
Conclusion
- Whatever its cause the dissolution of the Rump severed the last connection with the ancient constitution and the Long Parliament.
- Constitutional experiments would have to be tried and they would have to deal with the hostility of various groups: royalists, parliamentary moderates, and religious and political radicals.
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