Either as a soldier or as a statesman Cromwell was far greater than any Englishman of his time, and he was both soldier and statesman in one. We must look to C?sar or Napoleon to find a parallel for this union of high political and military ability in one man. Cromwell was not as great a man as C?sar or Napoleon, and he played his part on a smaller stage, but he “bestrode the narrow world” of Puritan England “like a colossus.”
As a soldier he not only won great victories, but created the instrument with which he won them. Out of the military chaos which existed when the war began he organised the force which made Puritanism victorious. The New Model and the armies of the Republic and the Protectorate were but his regiment of Ironsides on a larger scale. As in that regiment, the officers were carefully chosen. If possible, they were gentlemen; if gentlemen could not be had, plain yeomen or citizens; in any case, “men patient of wants, faithful and conscientious in their employment.” Character as well as military skill was requisite. A colonel once complained that a 468captain whom Cromwell had appointed to his regiment was a better preacher than fighter. “Truly,” answered Cromwell, “I think that he that prays and preaches best will fight best. I know nothing that will give the like courage and confidence as the knowledge of God in Christ will. I assure you he is a good man and a good officer.” Inefficiency, on the other hand, certain heresies which were regarded as particularly blasphemous, and moral backslidings in general, led at once to the cashiering of any officer found guilty of them.
Officers, it has been well said, are the soul of an army; and the efficiency and good conduct which Cromwell required of his, they exacted from the rank and file. Most of the private soldiers were volunteers, though there were many pressed men amongst them, and it cannot be said that all those who fought for Puritanism were saints in any sense of the word. But regular pay and severe discipline made them in peace the best conducted soldiers in Europe, and in war an army “who could go anywhere and do anything.” A common spirit bound men and officers together. It was their pride that they were not a mere mercenary army, but men who fought for principles as well as for pay. Cromwell succeeded in inspiring them not only with implicit confidence in his leadership, but with something of his own high enthusiasm. He had the power of influencing masses of men which Napoleon possessed. So he made an army on which, as Clarendon said, “victory seemed entailed”—“an army whose order and discipline, whose sobriety and manners, 469whose courage and success, made it famous and terrible over the world.”
Cromwell’s victories, however, were due to his own military genius even more than to the quality of his troops. The most remarkable thing in his military career is that it began so late. Most successful generals have been trained to arms from their youth, but Cromwell was forty-three years old before he heard a shot fired or set a squadron in the field. How was it, people often ask, that an untrained country gentleman beat soldiers who had learnt their trade under the most famous captains in Europe? The answer is that Cromwell had a natural aptitude for war, and that circumstances were singularly favourable to its rapid and full development. At the outset of the war he showed an energy, a resolution, and a judgment which proved his possession of those qualities of intellect and character which war demands of leaders. The peculiar nature of the war, the absence of any general direction, and the disorganisation of the parliamentary forces gave him free scope for the exercise of these qualities. In the early part of the war each local leader fought for his own hand, and conducted a little campaign of his own. Subordinate officers possessed a freedom of action which subordinates rarely get, and with independence and responsibility good men ripened fast. At first, Cromwell was matched against opponents as untrained as himself, till by constant fighting he learnt how to fight. In a happy phrase Marvell speaks of Cromwell’s “industrious valour.” If he learnt the lessons of war 470quicker than other men it was because he concentrated all his faculties on the task, let no opportunity slip, and made every experience fruitful.
It was as a leader of cavalry that Cromwell earned his first laurels. In attack he was sudden and irresistibly vigorous. Like Rupert he loved to head his charging troopers himself, but in the heat of battle he controlled them with a firmer hand. When the enemy immediately opposed to him was broken he turned a vigilant eye on the battle, ready to throw his victorious squadrons into the scale, either to redress the balance or to complete the victory. At Marston Moor, as on many another field, he proved that he possessed that faculty of coming to a prompt and sure conclusion in sudden emergencies which Napier terms “the sure mark of a master spirit in war.” When the fate of the battle was once decided he launched forth his swordsmen in swift and unsparing pursuit. “We had the execution of them two or three miles” is the grim phrase in which he describes the conclusion of his fight at Grantham, and after Naseby Cromwell’s cavalry pursued for twelve miles.
When he rose to command an army, Cromwell’s management of it in battle was marked by the same characteristics as his handling of his division of cavalry. In the early battles of the Civil War there was a strong family likeness: there was an absence of any generalship on either side. The general-in-chief exhibited his skill by his method of drawing up his army and his choice of a position; but when the battle began the army seemed to slip from his 471control. Each commander of a division acted independently; there was little co-operation between the different parts of the army; there was no sign of a directing brain. Cromwell, on the other hand, directed the movements of his army with the same purposeful energy with which he controlled his troopers. Its different divisions had each their definite task assigned to them, and their movements were so combined that each played its part in carrying out the general plan. The best example of Cromwell’s tactical skill is the battle of Dunbar. There, though far inferior in numbers, Cromwell held in check half the enemy’s army with his artillery and a fraction of his forces, while he attacked with all his strength the key of the enemy’s position, and decided the fate of the day by bringing a strong reserve into action at the crisis of the battle. Whenever the victory was gained it was utilised to the utmost. At Dunbar the Scots lost thirteen thousand men out of twenty-two thousand; after Preston less than a third of Hamilton’s army succeeded in effecting their return to Scotland: after Worcester, not one troop or one company made good its retreat.
Cromwell’s strategy, compared with that of contemporary generals, was remarkable for boldness and vigour. It reflected the energy of his character, but it was originally dictated by political as well as military considerations. “Without the speedy, vigorous, and effectual prosecution of the war,” he declared in 1644, the nation would force Parliament to make peace on any terms. “Lingering proceedings, 472like those of soldiers beyond seas to spin out a war,” must be abandoned, or the cause of Puritanism would be lost. Therefore, instead of imitating the cautious defensive system popular with professional soldiers, he adopted a system which promised more decisive results. “Cromwell,” says a military critic,. “was the first great exponent of the modern method of war. His was the strategy of Napoleon and Von Moltke, the strategy which, neglecting fortresses and the means of artificial defence as of secondary importance, strikes first at the army in the field.”
In his Preston campaign Cromwell had to deal with an invading army more than twice the strength of his own, which ventured because of that superiority to advance without sufficient scouting and without sufficient concentration. He might have thrown himself across Hamilton’s path and sought to drive him back; he chose instead to fall upon the flank of the Scots, and thrust his compact little force between them and Scotland. Thus he separated the different divisions of Hamilton’s army, drove Hamilton with each blow farther from his supports, and inflicted on him a crushing defeat instead of a mere repulse. In 1650 and 1651, Cromwell had a much harder task given him. He had to invade a country which presented many natural difficulties, and which was defended by an army larger than his own under the command of a man who was a master of defensive strategy. All his efforts to make Leslie fight a pitched battle in the open field completely failed until one mistake gave him the opportunity which he seized with such promptitude at Dunbar. In the 473campaign of 1651, Cromwell found himself brought to a standstill once more by Leslie’s Fabian tactics. As Leslie gave him no opportunity he had to make one, and with wise audacity left the way to England open in order to tempt the Scots into the invasion which proved their destruction.
In his Irish campaigns Cromwell had an entirely different problem to solve. The opposing armies were too weak to face him in the field and too nimble to be brought to bay. The strength of the enemy consisted in the natural and artificial obstacles with which the country abounded: fortified cities commanding points of strategic value; mountains and bogs facilitating guerrilla warfare; an unhealthy climate, a hostile people, a country so wasted that the invader must draw most of his supplies from England. Under these conditions the war was a war of sieges, forays, and laborious marches, but there were no great battles. Cromwell combined the operations of his army and his fleet so as to utilise to the full England’s command of the seas. He attacked the seaports first, and after mastering them secured the strong places which would give him the control of the rivers, thus gradually tightening his grasp on the country till its complete subjugation became only a matter of time.
Opinions may differ as to the comparative merits of these different campaigns. What remains clear is that Cromwell could adapt his strategy with unfailing success to the conditions of the theatre in which he waged war and to the character of the antagonists he had to meet. His military genius was equal to every duty which fate imposed upon him.
474Experts alone can determine Cromwell’s precise place amongst great generals. Cromwell himself would have held it the highest honour to be classed with Gustavus Adolphus either as soldier or statesman. Each was the organiser of the army he led to victory, each an innovator in war—Gustavus in tactics, Cromwell in strategy. Gustavus was the champion of European Protestantism as Oliver wished to be, and each while fighting for his creed contrived to further also the material interests of his country. But whatever similarity existed between their aims the position of an hereditary monarch and an usurper are too different for the parallel to be a complete one. On the other hand, the familiar comparison of Cromwell with Napoleon is justified rather by the resemblance between their careers than by any likeness between their characters. Each was the child of a revolution, brought by military success to the front rank, and raised by his own act to the highest. Each, after domestic convulsions, laboured to rebuild the fabric of civil government, and to found the State on a new basis. But the revolutions which raised them to power were of a different nature and demanded different qualities in the two rulers.
Cromwell’s character has been the subject of controversies which have hardly yet died away. Most contemporaries judged him with great severity. To Royalists he seemed simply, as Clarendon said, “a brave, bad man.” Yet while Clarendon condemned he could not refrain from admiration, for though the usurper “had all the wickedness against which damnation is pronounced, and for which hell fire is prepared, 475so he had some virtues which have caused the memory of some men in all ages to be celebrated.” Though he was a tyrant he was “not a man of blood,” and he possessed not only “a wonderful understanding in the natures and humours of men,” but also “a great spirit, an admirable circumspection and sagacity, and a most magnanimous resolution.”
The Republicans regarded the Protector as a self-seeking apostate. “In all his changes,” said Ludlow, “he designed nothing but to advance himself.” He sacrificed the public cause “to the idol of his own ambition.” All was going well with the State, a political millennium was at hand, “and the nation likely to attain in a short time that measure of happiness which human things are capable of, when by the ambition of one man the hopes and expectations of all good men were disappointed.”
Baxter, a Presbyterian, though as convinced an opponent of the Protector as Ludlow, was a more generous critic. According to him, Cromwell was a good man who fell before a great temptation. He
“meant honestly in the main, and was pious and conscionable in the main course of his life, till prosperity and success corrupted him. Then his general religious zeal gave way to ambition, which increased as successes increased. When his successes had broken down all considerable opposition then was he in face of his strongest temptations, which conquered him as he had conquered others.”
But like Milton’s Satan, even after his fall “all his original virtue was not lost.” As ruler of England 476“it was his design to do good in the main, and to promote the interest of God more than any had done before him.”
Eighteenth-century writers judged Cromwell with the same severity as his contemporaries. “Cromwell, damned to everlasting fame,” served Pope to point a moral against the desire of making a name in the world. Voltaire summed up Cromwell as half knave, half fanatic, and Hume termed him a hypocritical fanatic. Even as late as 1839, John Forster quoted as “indisputably true” Landor’s verdict that Cromwell lived a hypocrite and died a traitor.
Six years later, Carlyle published his collection of Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, which for every unprejudiced reader effectually dispelled the theory of Cromwell’s hypocrisy. “Not a man of falsehoods, but a man of truths,” was Carlyle’s conclusion, and subsequent historians and biographers have accepted it as sound. It is less easy to answer the question whether Cromwell was a fanatic or not. Fanaticism, like orthodoxy, is a word which means one thing to one man and something else to the next, and to many besides Hume enthusiast and fanatic are synonymous terms. It is plain, however, that Cromwell was a statesman of a different order from most. Religious rather than political principles guided his action, and his political ideals were the direct outcome of his creed. Not that purely political considerations exercised no influence on his policy, but that their influence instead of being paramount was in his case of only secondary importance.
In one of his speeches Cromwell states in very 477explicit language the rule which he followed in his public life. “I have been called to several employments in this nation, and I did endeavour to discharge the duty of an honest man to God and His people’s interest, and to this Commonwealth.”
What did these phrases mean? If anyone had asked Cromwell what his duty to God was in public affairs, he would have answered that it was to do God’s will. “We all desire,” he said to his bro............