“I was by birth a gentleman living neither in any considerable height nor yet in obscurity,” said the Protector to one of his Parliaments. Cromwell’s family was one of the many English families which rose to wealth and importance at the time of the Reformation. It owed its name and its fortune to Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex, the minister of Henry VIII., and the destroyer of the monasteries. In 1494, Thomas Cromwell’s sister Katherine had married Morgan Williams, a wealthy brewer of Putney, whose family sprang from Glamorganshire. Her eldest son Richard took the surname of Cromwell, entered the service of Henry VIII., and assisted his uncle in his dealings with refractory Churchmen. Grants of land flowed in upon the 2lucky kinsman of the King’s vicegerent. In 1538, he was given the Benedictine priory of Hinchinbrook near Huntingdon. In 1540, the site of the rich Benedictine abbey of Ramsey and some of its most valuable manors were added to his possessions. Honour as well as wealth fell to his lot. At the tournament held at Westminster on May Day, 1540, to celebrate the espousals of Henry VIII. and Anne of Cleves,—a marriage which was to unite English and German Protestantism,—Richard Cromwell was one of the six champions who maintained the honour of England against all comers. Pleased by his prowess with sword and lance, the King gave him a diamond ring and made him a knight.
Six weeks later fortune turned against the all-powerful Earl of Essex. He had pushed forward the Reformation faster than the King desired and bound the King to a woman he detested. “Say what they will, she is nothing fair,” groaned Henry, and suddenly repudiated wife, policy, and minister. On June 10th, Thomas Cromwell was arrested in the Council Chamber itself and committed to the Tower on the charge of high treason. “He had left,” it was said, “the mean, indifferent, virtuous, and true way” of reforming religion which his master trod. In his zeal to advance doctrinal changes, he had dared to say that if the King and all his realm would turn and vary from his opinions, he would fight in the field in his own person with his sword in his hand against the King and all others; adding that if he lived a year or two he trusted “to bring things to that frame that it should not lie in the King’s power to resist or let 3it.” On July 28th, Cromwell passed from the Tower to the scaffold.
Few pitied him and only one mourned him. Sir Richard Cromwell, said tradition, dared to appear at the Court in the mourning raiment which the King hated, and Henry, respecting his fidelity, pardoned his boldness. He retained the King’s favour the rest of his life, was made a gentleman of the Privy Chamber and constable of Berkeley Castle, got more grants of lands, and died in 1546.
Sir Richard’s son Henry built Hinchinbrook House, was knighted by Queen Elizabeth, whom he entertained during one of her progresses, and was four times sheriff of Huntingdonshire. As marshal of the county he organised its forces at the time of the Spanish Armada, raised, besides the four soldiers he was bound to furnish, twenty-six horsemen at his own cost, and called on the trained bands to practise “the right and perfect use of their weapons,” and fight for “the sincere religion of Christ” against “the devilish superstition of the Pope.” In their mixture of military and religious ardour his harangues recall the speeches of his grandson. People called him “the golden knight” because of his wealth and his liberality, and he matched his children with the best blood of the eastern counties. One daughter was the mother of Major-General Edward Whalley, one of the Regicides; another married William Hampden, and her son was John Hampden.
Of Sir Henry’s sons, Oliver, his heir, was a man who from love of ostentation pushed his father’s liberality to extravagance. When James I. came to 4England he was received at Hinchinbrook, “with such entertainment as had not been seen in any place before, since his first setting forward out of Scotland.” James made him a Knight of the Bath at the coronation, and paid him three other visits during his reign.
Robert, Sir Henry’s second son, inherited from his father an estate at Huntingdon, worth in those days about ￡300 a year, equal to three or four times as much now. He sat for Huntingdon in the Parliament of 1593, filled the office of bailiff for the borough, and was one of the justices of the peace for the county. Robert Cromwell married Elizabeth, widow of William Lynn, and daughter of William Steward of Ely. Her family were well off, and she brought with her a jointure of ￡60 a year. The Stewards were relatives of the last prior and first Protestant dean of Ely, who had obtained good leases of Church lands, and were farmers of the tithes of the see. Tradition, which loves curious coincidences, has connected them with the royal House of Stuart that their descendant overthrew, but history traces their origin to a Norfolk family originally named Styward. Oliver, the future Lord Protector, was the fifth child of Robert Cromwell, and the only one of his sons who survived infancy. He was born at Huntingdon, on April 25, 1599, baptised at St. John’s Church in that town on April 29th, and christened Oliver after his uncle, the knight of Hinchinbrook. Little is known of his boyhood. A royalist biographer says that he was of “a cross and peevish disposition” from his infancy, while a contemporary panegyrist 5credits him even then with “a quick and lively apprehension, a piercing and sagacious wit, and a solid judgment.”
Stories are told of his marvellous deliverances from danger, and of strange prognostications of his future greatness. It was revealed to him in a dream or by an apparition “that he should be the greatest man in England, and should be near the King.” Another story was that he had acted the part of a king in a play in his school days, placing the crown himself upon his head, and adding “majestical mighty words” of his own to the poet’s verses. These are the usual fictions which cluster round the early life of great men. All that is certain is that Cromwell was educated at the free school of Huntingdon under Dr. Thomas Beard—a Puritan schoolmaster who wrote pedantic Latin plays, proved that the Pope was Antichrist, and showed in his Theatre of God’s Judgments that human crimes never go unpunished by God even in this world. Beard was an austere man who believed in the rod, and a biographer describes him as correcting the manners of young Oliver “with a diligent hand and careful eye,” which may be accepted as truth. But these disciplinings did not prevent pupil and master from being friends in later life.
At the age of seventeen, Cromwell was sent to Cambridge, where on April 23, 1616, he was admitted a fellow commoner of Sidney Sussex College. The College, founded in 1598, was one of those two which Laud subsequently complained of as nurseries of Puritanism. Its master, Samuel Ward, was a learned 6and morbidly conscientious divine; a severe disciplinarian, who exacted from his scholars elaborate accounts of the sermons they heard, and had them whipped in hall when they offended. Cromwell did not distinguish himself, but he by no means wasted his time at Cambridge. He had no aptitude for languages. Burnet says he “had no foreign language but the little Latin that stuck to him from his education, which he spoke very viciously and scantily.” When he was Protector he remembered enough Latin to carry on a conversation in that tongue with a Dutch ambassador.
Another biographer tells us that Cromwell “excelled chiefly in the mathematics,” and his kinsman, the poet Waller, was wont to say that the Protector was “very well read in the Greek and Roman story.” His advice to his son Richard bears out this account of his preferences. “Read a little history,” he wrote to him; “study the Mathematics and cosmography. These are good with subordination to the things of God. These fit for public services for which a man is born.” With Cromwell, as with Montrose, Sir Walter Raleigh’s History of the World was a favourite book, and he urged his son to read it. “’Tis a body of history, and will add much more to your understanding than fragments of story.”
Cromwell’s tutor is said to have observed with great discrimination that his pupil was not so much addicted to speculation as to action, and royalist biographers make his early taste for athletics and sport a great reproach to him. One says: “He was easily satiated with study, taking more delight in horse and field exercise.” Another describes him as “more famous for his exercises in the fields than in the schools, being one of the chief matchmakers and players of football, cudgels, or any other boisterous sport or game.”
7How long Cromwell remained at the university is not known, but it is certain that he left it without taking a degree. Probably he quitted Cambridge prematurely on account of the death of his father, who was buried at All Saints’ Church, Huntingdon, on June 24, 1617. For a time Cromwell stayed at Huntingdon, no doubt helping his mother in the management of the estate and in the settlement of his father’s affairs. Then he went to London to acquire the smattering of law which every country gentleman needed, and which one whose position marked him out as a future justice of the peace and member of parliament could not do without. “He betook himself,” says a contemporary biographer, “to the study of law in Lincoln’s Inn; that nothing might be wanting to make him a complete gentleman and a good commonwealthsman.” Though his name does not appear in the books of that society, the fact is probable enough, and sufficiently well attested to be accepted.
Three years after his father’s death, Cromwell married, on August 22, 1620, at St. Giles’s Church, Cripplegate, Elizabeth Bourchier. She was the daughter of Sir James Bourchier, a city merchant living on Tower Hill and owning property at Felstead in Essex. It is probable that Cromwell’s wife brought him a considerable dowry, for the day after 8marriage he contracted, under penalty of ￡4000, to settle upon her, as her jointure, the parsonage house of Hartford in Huntingdonshire with its glebe land and tithes. Elizabeth Cromwell was a year older than her husband, and is traditionally said to have been a notable housewife. In spite of royalist lampooners she was, if her portraits may be trusted, neither uncomely nor undignified in person. Her affection for her husband was sincere and lasting. “My life is but half a life in your absence,” she writes to him in 1650. “I could chide thee,” says Cromwell in answer to a complaint about not writing, “that in many of thy letters thou writest to me, that I should not be unmindful of thee and thy little ones. Truly, if I love you not too well, I think I err not on the other hand much. Thou art dearer to me than any creature; let that suffice.”
After his marriage, Cromwell settled down at Huntingdon and occupied himself in farming the lands he had inherited from his father. Two-thirds of the income of the estate had been left by Robert Cromwell to his widow for the term of twenty-one years, in order to provide for the maintenance of the daughters, so that Oliver’s means during the early years of his married life must have been rather narrow. It was understood, however, that he was destined to be the heir of his mother’s brother, Sir Thomas Steward, and in 1628 another uncle, Richard Cromwell, left him a small property at Huntingdon. Ere long there was a proof that Cromwell had earned the good opinion of his neighbours, for, in February, 1628, he was elected to represent his native town in the third Parliament called by Charles I. The choice was partly due to the position of his family and its long connection with the borough, but more must have been due also to Cromwell’s personal character and reputation, since the local influence of the Cromwell family, thanks to the reckless extravagance of its head, was already on the wane. In 1627, Sir Oliver to pay his debts had been obliged to sell Hinchinbrook to Sir Sidney Montague, and had retired to Ramsey. He had represented the county in eight Parliaments, but he sat for it no more, and the Montagues were henceforth the leading family in Huntingdonshire.
9Cromwell’s entry upon the stage of English politics took place at the moment when the quarrel between Charles I. and his Parliaments became a complete breach. To Henry VIII. Parliaments had been the servile tools with which he used to work his will in Church and State. To Elizabeth they had been faithful servants, obedient though sometimes venturing to grumble or criticise. During her reign, the House of Commons had grown strong and conscious of its strength. The spoils of the monasteries had enriched the country gentry, and the development of local government had given them political training, while the growth of commerce had brought wealth to merchants and manufacturers. Into upper and middle classes alike the Reformation had put a spirit which began by questioning authority in matters of religion, and went on to question authority in politics.
It was in religious matters, naturally, that this 10spirit of opposition first revealed itself. Henry VIII. had separated the English from the Catholic Church, not in order to alter its doctrine, but in order to make himself its master. The doctrinal change which Thomas Cromwell had prematurely attempted, Somerset and Northumberland carried out in the reign of Henry’s son. The only result of the reaction under Mary was to inspire most Englishmen with a passionate hostility to the faith in whose name the Queen’s bonfires had been kindled. Elizabeth restored Protestantism, and re-established the control of the State over the Church. She called herself “Supreme Governor” instead of “Head of the Church,” but kept all the essentials of the supremacy which her father had established. To conciliate the English Catholics she made the doctrine and ritual of the National Church less offensively Protestant, but to impose her compromise she was obliged to use force. Year after year the penalties inflicted upon Catholics who refused to conform became heavier, and their lot was made harder, but thousands remained invincibly constant, and preferred to suffer rather than deny their faith.
Not only did the enforcement of the Elizabethan compromise fail to suppress Catholicism, but it created Puritanism and Protestant Nonconformity. Puritanism represented from the first “the Protestantism of the Protestant religion.” The aim of those who called themselves Puritans was to restore the Church to what they thought its original purity in doctrine, worship, and government. Some remained within its pale, content to accept the rule of bishops 11and the supremacy of the Crown so long as doctrine and ritual were to their liking. Others, who desired a simpler ceremonial and a more democratic form of government, sought to transform the Anglican Church to the model of that of Scotland or Geneva, and were the predecessors of the Presbyterian party of Charles the First’s time. A small band of extremists separated altogether from the National Church, and founded self-governing congregations, which defined their own creed and chose their own ministers. But though Independency sprang up first in England it made few converts, and never throve till it was transplanted to Holland or New England.
Elizabeth suppressed nascent Presbyterianism, and persecuted with equal vigour Catholic recusant and Protestant separatist. But within the National Church, in spite of repressive measures, the Puritan party grew continually stronger, while Parliament became more aggressively Protestant, and more eager for Church reform. While the Queen lived, no change in the ecclesiastical system was possible. When she died, wise men counselled her successor to adopt a different policy: to try comprehension instead of compulsion, and to make concessions to Puritanism. James refused. “I shall make them conform themselves,” was his answer, “or I shall harry them out of the land.” He began his reign by authorising new canons which enforced more rigid uniformity, and by driving three hundred ministers from their livings. The main cause of his breach with his first Parliament was his refusal to restrict the authority or to reform the abuses of the ecclesiastical courts.
12The Church policy of James aggravated the divisions he should have tried to heal; his foreign policy ran counter to the national traditions of his subjects as well as their religious prejudices. It was an axiom with Englishmen that England’s natural allies were the Protestant states of Europe, and that it was her duty when occasion demanded to come forward as the champion of Protestantism against the Catholic powers. But for more than ten years James made a close alliance with Spain his chief object in European politics, partly with the laudable aim of putting an end to religious wars, partly in the hope of paying his debts with the dowry of the Spanish Infanta. For the sake of this alliance he sent Raleigh to the block, declined to help the German Protestants, offered to suspend the penal laws against the Catholics, and forbade Parliament to discuss foreign affairs. The general joy which hailed the breaking off of the Spanish match revealed the depth of the hostility which the King’s schemes had excited.
During the same years, the King’s attitude towards English institutions called into life a constitutional opposition. His theory of monarchy found expression in persistent attempts to extend the power of the Crown and diminish the rights of Parliament. Backed by a judicial decision that the right to tax imports and exports was a part of the royal prerogative, James imposed new customs duties by his own authority, and dissolved his second Parliament when it voted them illegal. Members were imprisoned for their utterances in the House of Commons, and Parliament was forbidden to debate mysteries of State 13or matters touching the King’s government. When the House asserted its right to freedom of speech James replied that its privileges were derived from the grace and favour of his ancestors, and erased the protest, which claimed that the liberties of Parliament were “the undoubted birthright and inheritance of the subjects of England.”
Such a policy seemed to proceed from a formed design to destroy English freedom. Throughout Europe, absolute monarchies had risen on the ruins of national liberties, and now the same fate threatened England. When Charles I. succeeded his father, he found the nation he had to govern not only discontented, but also full of suspicion. “We are the last monarchy in Christendom that maintains its rights,” said a parliamentary orator in 1625, and the distrust and fear created by the pretensions of James flung their shadows across the path of his son.
Charles I., with his royal bearing and his kingly graces, seemed fitter to win back the hearts of his subjects than James, who lacked both majesty and manners. But he was as devoid of sympathy for the nation he governed as his father had been; as prone to cherish chimerical schemes, and as blind to facts. James had left him a courtier instead of a statesman to be his guide, and Charles gave Buckingham as complete trust as if he had possessed the experience of Burleigh or the wisdom of Bacon.
At the moment when the new reign opened, the rupture with Spain had given both Charles and his minister a factitious popularity. But on both foreign and domestic affairs King and Parliament speedily 14disagreed. Parliament was eager for war with Spain, but not ready either to furnish funds for a European coalition against the House of Hapsburg, or to buy the alliance of France by repealing the penal laws against English Catholics. It granted the King money to fit out a fleet, but its refusal of a more liberal supply, and its open declaration of want of confidence in the King’s minister, brought the session to a sudden close.
Buckingham hoped to justify himself by success, and launched forth on the sea of European politics with all the boldness of an adventurer. He sent an expedition to sack Cadiz and to capture the Spanish plate-fleet. He promised subsidies to the King of Denmark for his campaigns in Germany. He courted popularity with the Puritans by repudiating the engagements made to France in the King’s marriage treaty, and endeavouring to pose as the protector of the Huguenots. But when a second Parliament met there was nothing but a record of failure to lay before it. The expedition to Cadiz had ended in disaster and disgrace. “Our honour is ruined,” cried Sir John Eliot to the Commons, “our ships are sunk, our men perished, not by the sword, not by the enemy, not by chance, but by those we trusted.” All blame fell on the man who had monopolised power, but the King forbade Parliament to call his servant to account, and put a stop to Buckingham’s impeachment by a second dissolution.
During the next two years Charles tried the “new ways” he had threatened to adopt if Parliament declined to supply his necessities. A forced loan of 15￡300,000 was levied, and those who refused payment were, if rich, imprisoned; if poor, impressed. There were schemes for raising an excise to support a standing army, and Ship-money to maintain a fleet. Judges were dismissed for denying the legality of the forced loan, and divines promoted for declaring it sinful to refuse payment. But abroad failure still dogged the King’s foreign policy. In Germany the King of Denmark was crushed because Charles could not pay the promised subsidies. The French alliance ended in quarrels which grew into a war with France. Buckingham’s expedition to the Isle of Rhé ended in a more ruinous failure than the expedition to Cadiz. “Since England was England,” wrote Denzil Holles, “it received not so dishonourable a blow.” Unable to continue the fight with France and Spain without money, Charles was forced once more to appeal to the nation.
Charles the First’s third Parliament met on March 17, 1628. It opened its proceedings with a debate on the grievances of the nation, and almost the first speech Cromwell heard in the House must have been Eliot’s appeal to his brother members to remember the greatness of the issue before them. “Upon this dispute,” said the spokesman of the Commons, “not alone our goods and lands are engaged, but all that we call ours. Those rights, those privileges that made our fathers freemen are in question. If they be not now the more carefully preserved, they will render us to posterity less free, less worthy than our fathers.” The House voted the King supplies, but made their grant dependent 16on the redress of grievances. Then followed the drawing up of the Petition of Right, declaring arbitrary imprisonment and taxation without the consent of Parliament henceforth illegal, and at last the Commons, by the threat of impeaching Buckingham again, wrung the acceptance of their petition from the reluctant King.
In the interval between the first and second session of the third Parliament, Buckingham died by Felton’s hand, but his death did not put an end to the quarrel. Charles became his own prime minister, and made evident to all men that the King’s will, not the favourite’s influence, was the source of the policy against which the Commons protested. The beginning of the second session, in January, 1629, was marked by a new dispute about taxation. The Commons asserted that the levy of tonnage and poundage without its grant, and the continued collection of the new customs duties imposed by James I., were contrary to the Petition of Right. The King declared that these were rights he had never meant to part with, and persisted in exacting them despite the votes of the House. Louder still grew the cry against the High Church clergy and the ecclesiastical policy of the King. It was not only of sermons in favour of absolute monarchy or innovations in ritual that the Puritan leaders complained. The dispute about ceremonies had now developed into a dispute about doctrine too. The milder theories about justification and election—known as Arminianism and favoured by the High Church clergy—seemed to Puritans to be sapping the foundations of Protestantism 17and paving the way for Popery. The King endeavoured to put an end to doctrinal disputes by silencing controversial preaching; the Commons demanded the suppression of Arminianism, and the punishment of all who propagated views deviating from what they regarded as Protestant orthodoxy.
It was during these religious disputes that Cromwell first took part in the debates of the Commons. Inheriting the traditions of a family that owed everything to the Reformation, trained by a Puritan schoolmaster and at a Puritan college, he could take only one side, and he raised his voice to swell the attack upon the friends of Popery in the Church. The House was discussing some charges against Dr. Neile, the Bishop of Winchester, when Cromwell intervened with a story showing that prelate’s leaning to popish tenets. A certain Dr. Alablaster, said Cromwell, had “preached flat Popery” in a sermon before the Lord Mayor, and when Dr. Beard, the next preacher there, came in turn to deliver his sermon, Neile sent for Beard, and “did charge him as his diocesan not to preach any doctrine contrary to that which Dr. Alablaster had delivered.” Beard nevertheless persisted in refuting his predecessor, and was reprimanded by Neile for his disobedience.
Before the charges against Neile and other like-minded prelates were brought to a conclusion, and before the remonstrance of the Commons against the King’s ecclesiastical policy was perfected, Charles put an end to the sitting of Parliament.
Ere it separated, the House of Commons, at Eliot’s bidding, affirmed once more the principles for which 18it was fighting. Cromwell was one of the defiant crowd who refused to obey the King’s orders for adjournment till they had passed by acclamation Eliot’s three resolutions. Whoever, it was declared, should bring in innovations in religion, or seek to introduce Popery, Arminianism, or any opinion disagreeing from the true and orthodox Church, should be reported a capital enemy to this kingdom and commonwealth. Whoever counselled the levying of tonnage and poundage without a parliamentary grant should also be held an enemy to his country and an innovator in the government; and whoever willingly paid those taxes was proclaimed to be a betrayer of the liberties of England. The significance of the resolutions lay not merely in their challenge to the King, but in the union of political and religious discontents which they indicated. Elizabeth’s policy had called into being a religious opposition. James had created a constitutional opposition. Under Charles the two had combined, and from their alliance sprang the Civil War.
To themselves the parliamentary leaders seemed defenders of the existing constitution in Church and State against the revolutionary changes of the King. In reality the greatest innovation of all lay in the claim of the Commons that Church and State should be controlled by the representatives of the people, not by the will of the King. When that claim was once made, the struggle for sovereignty was an inevitable and irrepressible conflict.