The keynote to the remedy then was self-denial: Cromwell’s speech, the first in which he showed himself as a politician rather than a revolutionary or a prophet, pointed the way to the Self-Denying Ordinance by which no member of either House of Parliament could hold office in the Army from forty days after its passing. The Ordinance was proposed by Tate on the same day and seconded by Vane. In the words of Baillie, the House of Commons had in one hour ended all the quarrels which had existed between Manchester and Cromwell. This being done so suddenly in one session, with great unanimity, there was still some general doubt as to whether it was a wise, necessary and heroic action, or the most hazardous and unjust course ever pursued by Parliament. In Baillie’s own opinion, there was much to be said for both points of view: “as yet it seems a dream and the bottom of it is not understood”.
Perhaps the bottom of the Self-Denying Ordinance will never be quite understood since its precise authorship remains in doubt, although it has been suggested that it was Vane, the skilled political negotiator, who was responsible.36 For one thing the idea itself was not new since in November there had already been considerable discontent about offices of profit held by MPs, for which a committee of a different complexion had been set up, which included Holies but not Vane or Cromwell. Then some Kentish petitioners had come forward complaining that the war was being dragged out because of the financial benefits to be derived from it. From the point of view of the political Independents, epitomized by Vane, the Ordinance was a skilful move to make the earlier committee unnecessary, shut the mouths of the Kentish petitioners and get rid of the unsuccessful generals – all with the concurrence of the Presbyterians.
But Cromwell himself, fresh from the field and still very much the soldier, had a further vested interest in securing the reform of the Army itself as a quid pro quo for the self-denial of the commanders. This was a subject on which after all he had felt strongly since he first began to form his “lovely company”. In the second of his speeches, on 9 December, in which he declared quite roundly his own willingness to lay down his commission, he concluded with an enlargement on the vices and corruptions which had got into the Army, “the profaneness and the impiety and absence of all religion, the drinking and gaming, and all manner of licence and laziness”. He then said plainly that “till the whole army were new modelled and governed under a stricter discipline, they must not expect any notable success in anything they were about”. This surely was the heart of Cromwell’s matter, and a new modelled Army for which he had been hoping and no doubt praying for so long was what he personally expected to get out of the Self-Denying Ordinance. Whitelocke, one of those who spoke against the Ordinance in Parliament, argued that on the contrary those would serve the cause best whose interests most coincided with it; and he quoted the example of the Greeks and Romans who gave the greatest offices to the same senators in both peace and war for this very reason. Cromwell however had come to see that the noblest Roman of them all at the head of an army was no sure recipe for victory so long as that army itself was ragged, insubordinate, ill-fed, ill-equipped, ill-paid and last of all (perhaps post hoc propter hoc) ill-conducted in private life.37
As 1644 drew to a close there were now three separate but complicatedly interwoven strands in the political texture of events. First there were the prolonged negotiations to secure the consent of the House of Lords to the passing of the Self-Denying Ordinance, presented to them by the Commons on 19 December. This consent was essential if the Ordinance was to be enacted, but the Lords, still smarting under the attack on their member Manchester, were hardly in a mood to grant it and several weary months of political manoeuvre were to pass before the bill finally became law. Secondly there were the continuing moves of the peace party to negotiate in some sense with the King. Despite the failure of one round of propositions in November, the Scots were the principal instigators of a further set of discussions at the end of January 1645. The Treaty of Uxbridge, as this abortive attempt to avoid a settlement by war came to be known, finally ended in failure also at the end of February. It left the Presbyterian Scots with the unpleasant discovery that the eel-like King Charles was perhaps best dealt with at the end of a gaff after all, a view which the Independents had been urging on them for some time. Thirdly Cromwell was among those foremost in framing the regulations by which the great New Model Army, the hope of Parliament, was to be brought into being. Amongst all this Byzantine activity, the execution at the end of a protracted trial of that lingering ghost from quite another world, Archbishop Laud, in January 1645 seemed almost irrelevant, although the fact that in this the Commons finally managed to get their way against the protests of the Lords, was not.
By the end of the year Cromwell had been placed on two important committees. One was constituted in order to draw up a letter to the Scots, suggesting friendly relations between the two Parliaments. The other, close to Cromwell’s heart, was to be a subsidiary of the Committee of Both Kingdoms which would make decisions with regard to the reorganization of the Army. In the early months of 1645 his energies were evidently concentrated on this vital point. The New Model was to consist of ten regiments of horse of six hundred men, twelve foot regiments of twelve hundred men and a regiment of one thousand dragoons; later another regiment of horse was added, a total approaching 22,000 men, to be paid for by a levy of 6,000 a month on all the districts under the control of Parliament. It was on 21 January that the officers for the New Model Army were chosen. In the election of Sir Thomas Fairfax as the new Commander-in-Chief – an obvious choice since not only was he, as Cromwell said in recommending him, “very equal to the task” but he was also one of the few Generals who was not also a member of Parliament – Cromwell and Vane told for the Yeas. The post went to Fairfax by 101 votes to 69. Philip Skippon, a devout man of engaging personality and also a professional soldier who had served abroad before the Civil War, was named as Major-General. He now gave his men an “excellent, pious and pithy hortatory speech” which ended with a vow “to live and die with them, with God’s help as he had done before”.38
Only one appointment was left significantly empty in this brave new army – that of Lieutenant-General of the cavalry. But the man who had established a reputation as the great Parliamentary cavalry leader, and undoubtedly had every right to the post on grounds of military skill, Oliver Cromwell, was now busying himself in organizational matters. He was exceptionally assiduous at this period on the committee which provided the measures for the new Army, missing only two meetings before he was drafted to leave London. As the arguments with the House of Lords over the Self-Denying Ordinance dragged on – it was not finally passed by them until 3 April and then in a much less tough form Cromwell still gave no outward indication that he would regret the inevitable passing of his active military career in the field.
Instead, he concerned himself with the fight to make the new Army militarily efficient, as opposed to Parliament-controlled. He felt strongly on a proposed measure by which all officers above the rank of Lieutenant were to be nominated by both Houses: Cromwell argued for the right of a Commander-in-Chief to make his own appointments. In the end a compromise was reached by which appointments were to be made by Fairfax, but approved afterwards by Parliament. Cromw,ell also opposed steadfastly, as he had always done, the notion that the officers should take any form of religious covenant as a sine qua non of their service. In the course of the discussion on the subject, Whitelocke saw fit to observe that if Cromwell’s officers were to be taken as typical of those who did not subscribe to such a rigid form of Church government, it must also be noted that “no men appeared so full and well armed and civil as Colonel Cromwell’s horse”.39 In fact when the House of Lords tried to strike out two Colonels and more than forty Captains from Fairfax’s list of appointments on the grounds of their religious opinions, the House of Commons obliged them to give way.
The brave new Army thus brought into being was created out of what remained of the armies of Manchester, Essex an
d Waller (although numbers were by now so reduced that impressment had to be used to make them up with an additional eight thousand men drawn from London and the southern and eastern counties). Cromwell’s own regiment of Ironsides, which had risen to fourteen troops, was now divided up, since each regiment of horse in the New Model was only to consist of six troops. Six went to form Fairfax’s own regiment – the General’s regiment as it was usually called; six were put under Colonel Whalley and two more dispersed. The officers in the General’s regiment included some of those Puritan stalwarts of the early days of the Eastern Association and Cromwell’s first efforts at recruitment, his brother-in-law John Desborough, James Berry who had been his own Captain-Lieutenant, and that William Packer, now a Captain, on behalf of whose religious convictions he had tangled with Crawford a year previously.40
The New Model was ready by the beginning of April and entering the field officially by May. Of course at its inception it was still only one of the several armies supposed to be fighting on the side of Parliament, including that of the Scots and those formed by local levies. Equally the idea of a reformed Army was not new; as early as March 1644 unsuccessful attempts had been made to refurbish Essex’s army, and in June Waller had spoken in Parliament concerning the uselessness of the home-based levies: “Till you have an army merely your own, that you may command, it is impossible to do anything of importance.” But now dreams, such as Cromwell had long had, were becoming realities, and Parliament was at last armed with a well-paid and well-disciplined force. Above all it was free from those local irritations which had previously bedevilled its strategy, as when Essex’s men refused to fight under Waller, the Eastern Association constantly requested the return of their own forces to protect their own area, or Manchester displayed his famous reluctance to leave that area in the first place. It was symbolic of the new feeling for uniformity and discipline that all the Parliamentarian soldiers were now to be dressed in red. “Redcoats all” a newspaper called the New Model Army in May, with only the facings, such as the blue of his family colours for Fairfax’s own, to distinguish the various regiments.41
If war was fought on paper, perhaps Cromwell would have lived to lay down his command for ever within forty days of the passing of the SelfDenying Ordinance as did Manchester, Waller, Essex and the many other notabilities who were also members of Parliament, such as Sir Samuel Luke. But long before this came to pass, the ugly facts of a military situation in which a political theory of command at Westminster would not necessarily win a single battle in some more remote part of the country, had forced themselves back on the attention of the House of Commons. The truth was that in the spring of 1645 the spirits of the King’s party were by no means so low as might be supposed with hindsight and our own knowledge that the creation of the New Model was to prove the turningpoint of the war in favour of Parliament. The astonishing victories of Montrose in Scotland contributed in some measure to their elation; so did hopes of Irish Catholic support. The spectacle of Parliament resolutely divesting itself of the majority of its tried commanders, including its one unbeaten cavalry leader, Cromwell, cannot have been altogether dissatisfying. As for Parliament’s own supporters, the mood of the Scots was notably sour, since they had seen in what terms their beloved Covenant was discussed by some of those in the Commons. The inclination of their army to sally forth once more from their northern vantage point to the aid of these irreverent allies, was correspondingly decreased. Against this was to be balanced only the hopes of a force still very much in the making, and absolutely untested as an experiment. Looking back on this period in April 1646, in a sermon to both Houses of Parliament, Hugh Peter beseeched them to remember their own depression and forebodings, extending even to plans of exile: was it only a year since “we had thought to have hung om harps upon willow trees in some strange countries under some strange Princes, and there might have been called unto for our English songs; Alas, how would they have been mingled with tears, sighs and groans!”42
At this point the persistent threat of Goring in the west, backed up by the Royalist-held fortress of Bristol, an ever-open door to the dreaded possibility of Irish or even Continental assistance for the King, called for Parliamentary action in the field. It was decided that Waller must hold off Goring, and as some of Waller’s men were in a state of mutinous discontent, while others of Essex’s troops refused to serve under Waller, it seemed important as a temporary measure to back up Waller with Cromwell and his horse. Together Waller and Cromwell might relieve Taunton and if possible capture Bristol. The expedient was a purely interim one and did not affect the workings of the Self-Denying Ordinance, which was in any case not yet in action owing to the delaying tactics of the Lords. Cromwell was put under Waller’s command, and at the end of the campaign was designated to go back to Windsor and there deliver up his commission to Fairfax, engaged in fitting out the New Model. Throughout this campaign in the west, Waller testified to the fact that Cromwell bore himself as an obedient officer, who never disputed his superior’s orders nor displayed any form of arrogance.
In fact this spring campaign, the last under the old dispensation, revealed how lethal were the problems of this style of army, with Waller’s men in a perpetual state of ferment over their absence of pay. In spite of these problems, the campaign was not without its humorous moments of relief: on 9 March at Andover some Royalists were captured under Lord Percy, whom Cromwell was deputed by Waller to entertain. One of the prisoners was a particularly charming and fair-complexioned young man, whose military credentials aroused Cromwell’s suspicions. With his rather earthy sense of humour, which at any rate endeared him to his soldiers who enjoyed his easy manner of “rustic joking” with them, Cromwell decided the matter must be put to the test. He requested the so-called soldier to sing to him. The result was a piping treble. Cromwell told Lord Percy with amusement that as a warrior he did well to be accompanied by Amazons, and Lord Percy in confusion admitted that “she was a damsel”. Percy, his men and presumably also his Amazon were given passes to go to France, subject to Parliament’s approval.43
On 17 April the date had been reached by which Waller, and Cromwell likewise, were to return from Salisbury and hand over their commissions at Windsor according to the Self-Denying Ordinance, now at last in force. It was at this critical juncture that the news came that the King, not content to remain placidly at Oxford while his enemies marshalled themselves in better order against him, was planning to join up with Prince Rupert and together march up via the two important Royalist garrisons of Chester and Pontefract, to challenge the Scots. Ordinance or no ordinance, it was now absolutely imperative that this union of the Royalists should be prevented, and from Windsor Cromwell was accordingly ordered to take the field yet again. With his former regiment, now Fairfax’s, and Colonel Fiennes, he must at all costs hold off the King.
In this next campaign, a series of skirmishes and assaults near Oxford and its environs, Cromwell showed himself at his brilliant best. He hastened to throw himself between the King at Oxford, and the Royalists at Hereford and Worcester. Then he beat up the Earl of Northampton’s cavalry at Islip, just north of Oxford itself, in a surprise attack by which he captured over a hundred of the King’s horse and put an end to the King’s intention of quitting the city. Next he took Bletchingdon House, about fifteen miles away, without any difficulty, due either to the prudence or cowardice of its commander who did not give battle; from Bletchingdon he inherited a substantial quantity of ammunition, horses and muskets. He then proceeded to blast the Royalists in surrounding Oxfordshire, and throughout his predatory raids, still firmly prevent the King from communicating with his supporters at Worcester. Once more by swift decisive action at a critical moment, Cromwell had reversed the immediate prospects for Parliament.
His own battle report to the Committee of Both Kingdoms, issued after Islip and Bletchingdon on 25 April, shows the enormous significance that Cromwell attached to this, his first military command after the formation of the
New Model, so that he was able to describe himself to its commander Fairfax as leading “your honour’s regiment (lately mine own)” to victory. It was also his first military command since the Self-Denying Ordinance had come officially into force, and in this context the ending of his report was peculiarly interesting :44
This was the mercy of God, and nothing more due than a real acknowledgment; and though I have had greater mercies, yet none clearer; because in the first God brought them to your hands when we looked not for them;... His mercy appears in this also, that I did much doubt the storming of the house it being strong and well manned, and I having few dragoons, and this being not my business; and yet we got it.
He ended: “I hope you will pardon me, if I say, God is not enough owned. We look too much to men and visible helps…”
In a further report to the Committee three days later, he praised the new dispensation which was producing these manifestations of the Almighty’s approval:
God does terrify them … and surely God delights that you have endeavoured to reform your armies; and I beg it may be done more and more. Bad men and discontented say its faction. I wish to be of the faction that desires to avoid the oppression of the poor people of this miserable nation upon whom one can(not) look without a bleeding heart.
Cromwell concluded with some criticisms of the system by which the Army lived off free quarter, thus annoying the local country people, before sounding once more the note of personal inspiration and divine guidance: “My Lords, pardon this boldness; it is because I find in these things wherein I serve you that He does all. I profess His very hand has led me. I preconsulted none of these things.”
Cromwell’s enemies – to say nothing of the Royalist writers – later accused him of having engineered deliberately this whole “Juggle of the Self-Ordinance” as Denzil Holies called it in his Memoirs, in order to promote the fortunes of the Independents. Thus all the old commanders must retire, “cast by, as old Almanacks” in Holles’s vivid and indignant phrase, “except for Cromwell – for him they soon find a starting-hole”. To counteract these charges, historians have rightly pointed out what an enormous gamble Cromwell was taking in offering to lay down his command, if indeed he intended to wriggle out of retirement at the last moment.45 There were many factors that weighted the scales against him, and as will be seen, his official role in the New Model Army was not in fact confirmed until 10 June, and then a time limit was still given to his command. But if one delves into the reactions of Cromwell himself, one must take into account his peculiar providentialist temperament. Since to Cromwell the successful outcome of any venture could be interpreted as a sign that God had approved of his involvement in the first place, the events of this first command after the Self-Denying Ordinance was passed become extremely important. The charge of double-dyed hypocrisy from the first, can hardly be made to stick in view of the immense difficulties and the total lack of certainty of success which would have faced him in such an intrigue in December 1644. But the notion of the gamble is more plausible.