This one is super long, but it is one of my favorite periods of history.
It was on this day in 1658 that Oliver Cromwell, an English general and statesman who led the Parliament of England's armies against King Charles I during the English Civil War and ruled the British Isles as Lord Protector from 1653 until his death in 1658, died, probably by a bout of malaria that coincided with kidney stones.
I love the English Civil Wars and the Interregnum. The names of things are so baroque and events so truly bizarre. For instance, three years after his death, on 30 January 1661, Cromwell’s remains were dug up and executed.
Cromwell became the Member of Parliament for Huntingdon in the Parliament of 1628–1629, as a client of the Montagu family of Hinchingbrooke House. He made little impression: records for the Parliament show only one speech (against the Arminian Bishop Richard Neile), which was poorly received. After dissolving this Parliament, Charles I ruled without a Parliament for the next 11 years. When Charles faced the Scottish rebellion known as the Bishops' Wars, shortage of funds forced him to call a Parliament again in 1640. Cromwell was returned to this Parliament as member for Cambridge, but it lasted for only three weeks, becoming known as the Short Parliament.
Charles always wanted to rule as an autocratic monarch in the European fashion, and viewed Parliament with distaste. It was there to give him money and little else. The 1628-9 Parliament had been disbanded due to a debate on royal abuses. The Short Parliament took up the same debate again and, after arresting nine members and becoming unnerved about an upcoming debate on the deteriorating situation in Scotland, disbanded it as well.
Charles still needed money, though. The rise of an industrial economy meant that wealth based on land was falling further and further behind. Charles recalled Parliament in November of the same year. This became the Long Parliament for guess why? It sat through two civil wars and an execution before being replaced by a new autocracy.
Cromwell was again returned as member for Cambridge. He fell in with a group of Lords and Commons with a reform agenda, a moderate extension of liberty of conscience (except for Catholics) and a king checked by regular Parliaments. He also drafted the Root and Branch Bill to abolish episcopacy (the hierarchical organization of the Church of England via a series of Bishops). In short, it took up royal abuses again, as well as the Church.
Failure to resolve the issues before the Long Parliament led to armed conflict between Parliament and Charles I in late 1642, the beginning of the English Civil War. Partisans of the king were known as Cavaliers, with fancy dress and long flowing hair, and those of Parliament were the Roundheads, simply dressed with close cropped hair. Cromwell joined the Parliamentary army, leading a troop of cavalry. The forces of Parliament were joined by the Scots, who in 1643 had formed an alliance bound by the Solemn League and Covenant, in which the English Parliament agreed to reform the English church along similar lines to the Presbyterian Scottish Kirk in return for the Scots' military assistance.
Cromwell and his troop then rode to, but arrived too late to take part in, the indecisive Battle of Edgehill on 23 October 1642. The troop was recruited to be a full regiment in the winter of 1642 and 1643, making up part of the Eastern Association under the Earl of Manchester. Cromwell gained experience in a number of successful actions in East Anglia in 1643, notably at the Battle of Gainsborough on 28 July, and rose rapidly through the ranks, becoming known as Old Ironsides.
By July 1644, Cromwell had risen to the rank of lieutenant general of horse in Manchester's army. The success of his cavalry in breaking the ranks of the Royalist cavalry and then attacking their infantry from the rear at the Battle of Marston Moor was a major factor in the Parliamentarian victory. After Marston Moor, the royalists effectively abandoned the north, the remnants of the force were involved in another Royalist disaster at the Relief of Montgomery Castle in Wales in September. The Royalist cavalry from the northern counties, the "Northern Horse", continued to fight for the King under Sir Marmaduke Langdale, but their undisciplined and licentious conduct turned many former sympathizers away from the Royalist cause.
The indecisive outcome of the Second Battle of Newbury in October meant that by the end of 1644 the war still showed no signs of ending. Cromwell's experience at Newbury, where the Earl of Manchester had let the King's army slip out of an encircling maneuver, led to a serious dispute with Manchester, whom he believed to be less than enthusiastic in his conduct of the war. Manchester later accused Cromwell of recruiting men of "low birth" as officers in the army, to which he replied: "If you choose godly honest men to be captains of horse, honest men will follow them ... I would rather have a plain russet-coated captain who knows what he fights for and loves what he knows than that which you call a gentleman and is nothing else". At this time, Cromwell also fell into dispute with Major-General Lawrence Crawford, a Scottish Covenanter attached to Manchester's army, who objected to Cromwell's encouragement of unorthodox Independents and Anabaptists. He was also charged with familism (a mystical religious sect).
Partly in response to the failure to capitalize on their victory at Marston Moor, Parliament passed the Self-Denying Ordinance in early 1645. This forced members of the House of Commons and the Lords, such as Manchester, to choose between civil office and military command. All of them—except Cromwell, whose commission was given continued extensions and was allowed to remain in Parliament—chose to renounce their military positions. The Ordinance also decreed that the army be "remodelled" on a national basis, replacing the old county associations; Cromwell contributed significantly to these military reforms. In April 1645 the New Model Army finally took to the field, with Sir Thomas Fairfax in command and Cromwell as Lieutenant-General of cavalry and second-in-command.
In contrast to armies of the past, the New Model Army was not a collection of militia led by gentry, but rather a professional standing army. It was not garrisoned in a particular place but had a remit to roam across all of England and Scotland.
At the critical Battle of Naseby in June 1645, the New Model Army smashed the King's major army. Cromwell led his wing with great success at Naseby, again routing the Royalist cavalry. At the Battle of Langport on 10 July, Cromwell participated in the defeat of the last sizeable Royalist field army. Naseby and Langport effectively ended the King's hopes of victory, and the subsequent Parliamentarian campaigns involved taking the remaining fortified Royalist positions in the west of England. Charles I surrendered to the Scots on 5 May 1646, effectively ending the First English Civil War. Cromwell and Fairfax took the formal surrender of the Royalists at Oxford in June 1646.
In February 1647 Cromwell suffered from an illness that kept him out of political life for over a month. By the time he had recovered, the Parliamentarians were split over the issue of the King. A majority in both Houses pushed for a settlement that would pay off the Scottish army, disband much of the New Model Army, and restore Charles I in return for a Presbyterian settlement of the Church. Cromwell rejected the Scottish model of Presbyterianism, which threatened to replace one authoritarian hierarchy with another. The New Model Army, radicalized by the failure of the Parliament to pay the wages it was owed, petitioned against these changes, but the Commons declared the petition unlawful. In May 1647 Cromwell was sent to the army's headquarters in Saffron Walden to negotiate with them, but failed to reach an agreement.
Charles, still playing both ends against the middle, then engaged in separate negotiations with different factions. Presbyterian English Parliamentarians and the Scots wanted him to accept a modified version of the Covenant, but in June, a low level officer in the New Model Army, Cornet George Joyce, seized Charles, and the army council pressed him to accept the Heads of Proposals, a less demanding set of terms drawn up by Cromwell which, crucially, did not require a Presbyterian reformation of the church, and required regularly elected Parliaments to serve as a check on the king. He rejected these as well, and instead signed an offer known as the Engagement, which had been thrashed out with the Scottish delegation, on 26 December. Charles agreed to confirm the Solemn League and Covenant by Act of parliament in both kingdoms, and to accept Presbyterianism in England, but only for a trial period of three years, in return for the Scots' assistance in regaining his throne in England. When the delegation returned to Edinburgh with the Engagement, the Scots were bitterly divided on whether or not to accept its terms. The Engagers eventually won the argument but events in England were still moving apace.
This is about the point where a remarkable but temporary window opens into the thoughts of the lower classes in England who, freed of royal restrictions, can publish their ideas on that newfangled printing press without hindrance. A powerful group in the Army, known as the Levellers, opposed the Heads of Proposals. The Levellers were committed to popular sovereignty, extended suffrage, equality before the law and religious tolerance.
The failure to conclude a political agreement with the King led eventually to the outbreak of the Second English Civil War in 1648, when the King tried to regain power by force of arms. Cromwell first put down a Royalist uprising in south Wales led by Rowland Laugharne, winning back Chepstow Castle on 25 May and six days later forcing the surrender of Tenby. The castle at Carmarthen was destroyed by burning. The much stronger castle at Pembroke, however, fell only after a siege of eight weeks. Cromwell dealt leniently with the ex-Royalist soldiers, but less so with those who had previously been members of the parliamentary army.
Cromwell then marched north to deal with a pro-Royalist Scottish army, the Engagers, who had finally gotten around to invading England when the action was nearly over. At the Battle of Preston, Cromwell, in sole command for the first time and with an army of 9,000, won a decisive victory against an army twice as large.
During 1648, Cromwell's letters and speeches started to become heavily based on biblical imagery, many of them meditations on the meaning of particular passages. These letters suggest that it was Cromwell's faith, rather than a commitment to radical politics, coupled with Parliament's decision to engage in negotiations with the King at the Treaty of Newport, that convinced him that God had spoken against both the King and Parliament as lawful authorities. For Cromwell, the army was now God's chosen instrument, and he had been provided by God to lead it.
The Long Parliament was getting pretty long at this point. In December 1648, in an episode that became known as Pride's Purge, a troop of soldiers, exasperated by the prolonged bloodshed, headed by Colonel Thomas Pride forcibly removed from the Long Parliament all those who were not supporters of the Grandees (the landed gentry in the Army who opposed the Levellers) in the New Model Army and the Independents, executing 9 of them. What was left became known as the Rump of the Long Parliament, the first time “rump” was used to describe the remnants of something and the reason why I sometimes refer to Trump’s base as the rump of the Jim Crow generation.
On the day after Pride's Purge, Cromwell became a determined supporter of those pushing for the King's trial and execution, believing that killing Charles was the only way to end the civil wars.[26] Cromwell approved Thomas Brook's address to the House of Commons, which justified the trial and execution of the King on the basis of the Book of Numbers, chapter 35 and particularly verse 33 ("The land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it."). Charles I was executed on 30 January 1649.
Charles was also separately king of Scotland and the Scots, not having been consulted on the matter, declared Charles’ son Charles king of Britain. Before they would permit him to return from exile in the Dutch Republic to take up his crown, they demanded that he first sign both Covenants: recognizing the authority of the Kirk in religious matters, and that of parliament in civil affairs. This began a century long tradition of Jacobite uprisings in Scotland, led by a never ending succession of Bonny Prince Charlies.
After the execution of the King, a republic was declared, known as the "Commonwealth of England". The Rump Parliament exercised both executive and legislative powers, with a smaller Council of State also having some executive functions. Cromwell remained a member of the "Rump" and was appointed a member of the council. The Royalists, meanwhile, had regrouped in Ireland, having signed a treaty with the Irish known as "Confederate Catholics". In March, Cromwell was chosen by the Rump to command a campaign against them.
Cromwell came across political dissidence in the New Model Army, The Leveller and Agitator movements. Cromwell and the rest of the Grandees disagreed in that they gave too much freedom to the people; they believed that the vote should only extend to the landowners. In the "Putney Debates" of 1647, the two groups debated these topics in hopes of forming a new constitution for England. There were rebellions and mutinies following the debates, and in 1649, the Bishopsgate mutiny resulted in the execution of Leveller Robert Lockyer by firing squad. The next month, the Banbury mutiny occurred with similar results. Cromwell led the charge in quelling these rebellions. After quelling Leveller mutinies within the English army at Andover and Burford in May, Cromwell departed for Ireland from Bristol at the end of July.
Cromwell's hostility to the Irish was religious as well as political. He was passionately opposed to the Catholic Church, which he saw as denying the primacy of the Bible in favor of papal and clerical authority, and which he blamed for suspected tyranny and persecution of Protestants in continental Europe. His nine-month military campaign was brief and effective, though it did not end the war in Ireland. Before his invasion, Parliamentarian forces held only outposts in Dublin and Derry. When he departed Ireland, they occupied most of the eastern and northern parts of the country. His victory was accompanied by massacres of Catholics id Drogheda and Wexford. In the wake of the Commonwealth's conquest of the island of Ireland, the public practice of Roman Catholicism was banned and Catholic priests were killed when captured. All Catholic-owned land was confiscated under the Act for the Settlement of Ireland of 1652 and given to Scottish and English settlers, Parliament's financial creditors and Parliamentary soldiers.
Meanwhile the Scots had proclaimed Charles II as king, and Cromwell made a famous appeal to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, urging them to see the error of the royal alliance—"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken." The Scots' reply was robust: "would you have us to be sceptics in our religion?"
His appeal rejected, Cromwell's veteran troops went on to invade Scotland, starting the Third English Civil War. At first, the campaign went badly, as Cromwell's men were short of supplies and held up at fortifications manned by Scottish troops under David Leslie. Sickness began to spread in the ranks. Cromwell was on the brink of evacuating his army by sea from Dunbar. However, on 3 September 1650, unexpectedly, Cromwell smashed the main Scottish army at the Battle of Dunbar, killing 4,000 Scottish soldiers, taking another 10,000 prisoner, and then capturing the Scottish capital of Edinburgh. The victory was of such a magnitude that Cromwell called it "A high act of the Lord's Providence to us [and] one of the most signal mercies God hath done for England and His people.”
The following year, Charles II and his Scottish allies made an attempt to invade England and capture London while Cromwell was engaged in Scotland. Cromwell followed them south and caught them at Worcester on 3 September 1651, and his forces destroyed the last major Scottish Royalist army at the Battle of Worcester. It was a remarkable battle of maneuver, in which Cromwell organized an envelopment followed by a multi-pronged coordinated attack on Worcester, his forces attacking from three directions with two rivers partitioning them. He switched his reserves from one side of the river Severn to the other and then back again.. Charles II barely escaped capture and fled to exile in France and the Netherlands, where he remained until 1660. Scotland was ruled from England during the Commonwealth and was kept under military occupation.
With Cromwell away and the king no longer present as a common enemy, the Rump of the Long Parliament dissolved in chaos. Cromwell tried to galvanize the Rump into setting dates for new elections, uniting the three kingdoms under one polity, and to put in place a broad-brush, tolerant national church. However, the Rump vacillated in setting election dates, although it put in place a basic liberty of conscience.
In frustration, Cromwell demanded that the Rump establish a caretaker government and then abdicate; but the Rump returned to debating its own bill for a new government. Cromwell was so angered by this that he cleared the chamber by force, just as Charles had done 11 years earlier, and dissolved the Parliament on 20 April 1653, supported by about 40 musketeers. Several accounts exist of this incident; in one, Cromwell is supposed to have said "you are no Parliament, I say you are no Parliament; I will put an end to your sitting". At least two accounts agree that he snatched up the ceremonial mace, symbol of Parliament's power, and demanded that the "bauble" be taken away.
After the dissolution of the Rump, power passed temporarily to a council that debated what form the constitution should take. They took up the suggestion of Major-General Thomas Harrison for a "sanhedrin" of saints. Although Cromwell did not subscribe to Harrison's apocalyptic, Fifth Monarchist (an extreme Puritan sect that took its name from a prophecy in the Book of Daniel that four ancient monarchies would precede the kingdom of Christ; well, sort of Christ since Daniel was Old Testament). beliefs—which saw a sanhedrin as the starting point for Christ's rule on earth—he was attracted by the idea of an assembly made up of men chosen for their religious credentials. In his speech at the opening of the assembly on 4 July 1653, Cromwell thanked God's providence that he believed had brought England to this point and set out their divine mission: "truly God hath called you to this work by, I think, as wonderful providences as ever passed upon the sons of men in so short a time." The Nominated Assembly, sometimes known as the Parliament of Saints, or more commonly and denigratingly called Barebone's Parliament after one of its members, Praise-God Barebone. The assembly was tasked with finding a permanent constitutional and religious settlement. However, the revelation that a considerably larger segment of the membership than had been believed were the radical Fifth Monarchists led to its members voting to dissolve it on 12 December 1653.
After the dissolution of the Barebones Parliament, John Lambert put forward a new constitution known as the Instrument of Government, closely modelled on the Heads of Proposals. It made Cromwell Lord Protector for life to undertake "the chief magistracy and the administration of government". Cromwell was sworn in as Lord Protector on 16 December 1653, slamming the door on any semblance of a democratic society and becoming king in all but name.
This has become pretty long so I’ll spare the politics of the Protectorate and just summarize some of the lower class social and political ideas that bubbled up into history for the first time only to be submerged again after the Restoration.
1. Anabaptist (literally, "baptized again") was a term given to those Reformation Christians who rejected the notion of infant baptism in favor of believer's baptism. It is generally assumed that during the Interregnum, the Baptists and other dissenting groups absorbed the British Anabaptists. Despite this, evidence suggests that the early relations between Baptists and Anabaptists were quite strained. In 1624, the then five existing Baptist churches of London issued an anathema against the Anabaptists. Even today there is still very little dialogue between Anabaptist organizations (such as the Mennonite World Conference) and the Baptist bodies.
2. The Diggers were an English group of Protestant agrarian communists, begun by Gerrard Winstanley as True Levellers in 1649, who became known as Diggers due to their activities. You have to wonder how much of Karl Marx’s ideas came from the time he spent in English pubs talking to the working class. Their original name came from their belief in economic equality based upon a specific passage in the Book of Acts ("The group of believers was one in mind and heart. No one said that any of his belongings was his own, but they all shared with one another everything they had." Acts 4:32).The Diggers tried (by "levelling" real property) to reform the existing social order with an agrarian lifestyle based on their ideas for the creation of small egalitarian rural communities.
3. The Familia Caritatis ("Family of Love", or the "Familists"), were a religious sect that began in continental Europe in the 16th century. Members of this religious group were devout followers of a Dutch mystic named Hendrik Niclaes. The Familists believed that Niclaes was the only person who truly knew how to achieve a state of perfection, and his texts attracted followers in Germany, France, and England.
The Familists were extremely secretive and wary of outsiders. For example, they wished death upon those outside of the Family of Love. The group were considered heretics in 16th-century England. Among their beliefs were that there existed a time before Adam and Eve, Heaven and Hell were both present on Earth, and that all things were ruled by nature and not directed by God.
The Familists continued to exist until the middle of the 17th century, when they were absorbed into the Quaker movement.
4. The Grindletonians were a Puritan sect with antinomian tendencies. Antinomianism is any view which rejects laws or legalism and argues against moral, religious or social norms. They arose in the town of Grindleton around 1660. The Grindletonians were close to the Familists in their beliefs. They thought the Spirit is privileged over the Letter (meaning the Bible), that anyone who has the inner light is qualified to preach, whether ordained or not, and that a person could live without sin and attain Heaven on Earth. The last known Grindletonian died in the 1680’s.
5. The Muggletonians, named after Lodowicke Muggleton, was a small Protestant Christian movement which began in 1651 when two London tailors announced they were the last prophets foretold in the biblical Book of Revelation. The group grew out of the Ranters and in opposition to the Quakers. Muggletonian beliefs include a hostility to philosophical reason, a scriptural understanding of how the universe works and a belief that God appeared directly on this earth as Christ Jesus. A consequential belief is that God takes no notice of everyday events on earth and will not generally intervene until it is meet to bring the world to an end.
Muggletonians avoided all forms of worship or preaching and, in the past, met only for discussion and socializing amongst members. The movement was egalitarian, apolitical, and pacifist, and resolutely avoided evangelism.
6. The Seekers were not a distinct religion or sect, but instead formed a religious society. Like other Protestant dissenting groups, they believed the Roman Catholic Church to be corrupt, which subsequently applied to the Church of England as well through its common heritage.
Seekers considered all churches and denominations to be in error, and believed that only a new church established by Christ upon his return could possess his grace. Their anticipation of this event was found in their practices. For example, Seekers held meetings as opposed to religious services, and as such had no clergy or hierarchy. During these gatherings they would wait in silence and speak only when felt that God had inspired them to do so. Out of them grew
7. The Quakers
8. The Ranters were a sect in the time of the Commonwealth who were regarded as heretical by the established Church of that period. Their central idea was pantheistic, that God is essentially in every creature; this led them to deny the authority of the Church, of scripture, of the current ministry and of services, instead calling on men to hearken to Jesus within them. Many Ranters seem to have rejected a belief in immortality and in a personal God, and in many ways they resemble the Brethren of the Free Spirit in the 14th century. The Ranters revived the Brethren of the Free Spirit's beliefs of amoralism and followed the Brethren's ideals which "stressed the desire to surpass the human condition and become godlike". Further drawing from the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the Ranters embraced antinomianism and believed that Christians are freed by grace from the necessity of obeying Mosaic Law. Because they believed that God was present in all living creatures, the Ranters' adherence to antinomianism allowed them to reject the very notion of obedience, thus making them a great threat to the stability of the government.
9. The followers of Socinianism were Nontrinitarian in theology and influenced by the Polish Brethren. The Socinians of 17th century England influenced the development of the English Presbyterians, the English Unitarians and the Non-subscribing Presbyterian Church of Ireland.
It was a remarkable time. Then Cromwell died and was subsequently executed. His head was cut off and displayed on a pole outside Westminster Hall until 1685. Afterwards, it was owned by various people, including a documented sale in 1814 to Josiah Henry Wilkinson, and it was publicly exhibited several times before being buried beneath the floor of the antechapel at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, in 1960 in an undisclosed position. Charles II returned from the continent in 1660 but all legal documents dated the start of his reign from the execution of his father in 1649.
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