Beyond doubt, Oliver must have read this remarkable work. Not only was Dr Beard his master, but his personality also made a strong impact on the whole Cromwell family. Robert Cromwell chose Beard as one of the witnesses of his will. In 1616 Dr Beard had dedicated to Sir Oliver Cromwell another work entitled A retractive from the Romish religion in which he equated the Pope with Anti-Christ: he listed as reasons for the dedication not only the knight’s sincere love of the true religion and equally sincere detestation of “the Romish synagogue” but also “for that yourself, with your religious lady, worthy children and brethren and great familie, have been for a long time the principall auditors of my unworthy ministry … wherewith”, continued Dr Beard, “I am bound unto you for many extraordinary favours and kindnesses received”.25 It was however the philosophy of Dr Beard which finally marked the young Oliver so strongly that it can be seen in his thoughts, speeches and very battle reports – the idea that God was no aloof figure of justice wrapped in the clouds of heaven, waiting for man’s death before meting out the due rewards for good and evil. The God of Thomas Beard kept on the contrary a watchful eye on earthly progress, intervened in this life with battles lost (by the evil) and thrones sacrificed (by unworthy rulers). This too was to be the God of Oliver Cromwell. It was at the feet of his master, then, either in the little classroom at Huntingdon or perhaps listening to his doctrines expounded at his father’s house and his uncle’s, that Oliver first encountered the deity in the exacting, interfering, ever-present judging and rewarding form which was to haunt him for the rest of his days.
The incomparable influence exerted by such a man must be weighed against traditions that Oliver was no scholar, preferred stealing apples to studying his books (James Heath referred to him as the Apple Dragon, so notorious were his raids on local orchards) and was generally of “no settled constancy” in his application to knowledge, showing fits of enthusiasm for a week or two, then playing truant for months. Dr Beard, said Heath, tried to correct Oliver’s faults but “prevailed nothing against his obstinate and perverse inclination”.26 The truth was that at all periods of his life Oliver Cromwell showed stronger evidence of thinking, ruminating and meditating than reading voraciously. Nor was this lack of a literary tendency disastrous, since there was so much of the natural temperament of the philosopher about him. Therefore the picture of a physically energetic boy, breaking down hedges, robbing dove-houses in order to devour tender young pigeons, beaten unavailingly by his parents to cure these regrettable tendencies, is not necessarily irreconcilable with the idea of a soul awakened within to a dialogue with God, and the notion of searching out by signs his will on earth. Oliver’s later career was to show the same strange but certainly fascinating combination of extreme physical preoccupation (in the sense that a successful cavalry officer is one who has mastered the physical conditions which confront him) with spiritual interlocution. Bishop Burnet, writing in the following age, gave the opinion that Oliver had been severely handicapped by “the roughness of his education and temper” which he was never able to shake off and which left him with no foreign language save “a little Latin … spoken very viciously and scantily”. Samuel Carrington on the other hand, in an extollatory biography of 1659,* (* In his Bibliography of Oliver Cromwell W. C. Abbott cites this as the first biography proper of Cromwell printed after his death. It was dedicated to Richard Cromwell.) defended his use of Latin “which all men knew, he made use of to treat with strangers”. That there was a roughness of temper in him – be it expressed in hearty exercise, boisterous horseplay or even displays of rage – cannot be doubted in view of Oliver’s later history which was also marked by such incidents, ranging from the engaging to the frightening. Clearly his boyhood too was the stage for such pieces of ebullience. But roughness of education there was not: on the contrary, there was a more than adequate education in the early stages under a man of note and learning, against a family background where such things were evidently taken seriously. Furthermore, if as Carrington declared, Oliver’s “greatest delight” was “reading men rather than books”, he was presented with a man of outstanding quality to “read” in Dr Thomas Beard, and at a most impressionable age.27
In 1616 when Oliver Cromwell proceeded to the near-by University of Cambridge, these early Puritan influences were in no way diminished. He was then seventeen and the college chosen, Sidney Sussex, was an expressly Protestant foundation created on the site of a former Grey Friars monastery by the executors of Lady Frances Sidney, Countess of Sussex, in 1596. Thomas Fuller, who also went into residence there a decade after Cromwell, wrote in his Worthies that Lady Frances died childless “unless such learned Persons who received their breeding in her Foundation may be termed her issue”. These intellectual descendants of Lady Frances found themselves in a new college of red-brick with pale stone quoins and mullions, the combination of colours which inspired a seventeenth-century poet to describe its appearance romantically “rose-red and snow-white”. There was a large hall with an open hammer-beam roof, and windows on both sides; the remains of the Grey Friars refectory, thatched over, was used as a chapel, later buttressed to form chapel, ante-chapel and chapel chamber and library. But there were some traces to be found of the former monastic buildings – for example the area of the previous church was to be discerned in the new bowling-green, and Fuller noted ghoulishly “I have oft found dead men’s bones thereabouts.”28
These geographical traces of an earlier religious observance were definitely not paralleled by the radical doctrinal influences of Sidney Sussex. The Statutes of the College specified that students should here be trained for ministry in the English Church or, as it was picturesquely expressed, the college should be a spacious meadow where young men like bees would gather honey from all kinds of flowers before swarming from the hive and flying to the Church to unload their treasure. Anyone who did not choose to conform to this religio-pastoral ideal was however to be harried with bites and stings, and finally driven forth as a drone. It was also declared that the Masters and Fellows must be amongst those who abhorred Popery whilst among the rules for students, drawn up in 1595, was the prohibition of “long or curled locks, great Ruffes, velvet pantables etc.”. There was to be no bull-baiting, no bear-baiting and no frequenting bowling-places (the college’s own green did not come under the ban, the company rather than the activity being suspect). Nor was there to be frequenting of taverns, or the use of dice and cards. In short Sidney Sussex was Puritan-oriented, for whose traditions under its Master, Dr Samuel Ward, Oliver had been amply prepared by his former education under Dr Beard. Ward had become Master in 1610 and was to continue so until 1643. Fuller considered him “a true Protestant at all times” despite early rumours that he was a Puritan and later stories that he was a Papist. In fact his diary does reveal his strong tendencies to Puritanism and in particular a strong belief in predestination which may have influenced his pupil.
Oliver entered the college on 23 April 1616, and was duly registered with Richard Howlet as his tutor: “Oliverus Cromwell Huntingdoniensis admissus ad commentum sodorum Aprilis vicesime tertio tutore Magistro Richardo Howlet.” It was customary for Fellow Commoners to present a. piece of plate on admission: Oliver gave a silver stoup, but unfortunately when in 1618 the College had to raise money in order to buy back some Sussex Street property which they had parted with illegally, “Mr Cromwell’s Pott” was among the victims of the forced sale.29
Otherwise there is a surviving tradition that Oliver jumped onto a horse from the bay window of his rooms, on the first floor of the north side of Hall Court, looking onto Sidney Street. James Heath indeed believed that he had been more famous at football, cudgels or any other “boisterous sport or game” than at his books. Another favourite story, sometimes related of his school-days, but seeming more logically to belong to those of his University, concerns Cromwell playing the King in student theatricals. His admirers later saw the incident as evidence of natural greatness, his critics believed it pointed to
inborn ambition, in a manner typical of the polarization between good and evil in the early accounts of Cromwell’s life.30 However Oliver’s sojourn at Cambridge, whether dissipated in pleasure or not, was not destined to last long; his stay was cut short before he took his degree not as it happened out of lack of scholarly enthusiasm, but by reason of the death of his father on 24 June 1617.
Only a few days previously Oliver’s sixteen-year-old sister Margaret had been married by Thomas Beard to Valentine Walton, a Huntingdonshire neighbour, and a man who was to supply Oliver with much friendship and loyalty in the future and indeed throughout their long and eventful lives. But the quiver of Cromwell girls at Huntingdon was still far from empty: of Oliver’s six sisters at least four and perhaps five were still living at home with their newly widowed mother. As a boy of eighteen, Oliver found himself the only male in a now totally feminine household. It was his first opportunity to show his mother the adult support and devotion he was to display with such singular attention in her direction for the rest of her long life. This particular tenderness between them, which struck contemporary observers, was explained on her side easily enough in his position as her only son, but perhaps on his it originated in the traumatic period of her widowhood and the responsibility with which he was now faced. It was certainly a situation to encourage the patriarchal streak in any man.
It was true that the financial situation of the Cromwells was neither especially good nor especially bad. Robert Cromwell’s will made Elizabeth his sole executrix, and of course in any case Oliver was still three years under age. But there was a worrying moment when it seemed that Oliver might be considered a royal ward, since part of the Cromwell property had been held in capite or direct from the King by knighdy tenure. There was a case to be made for regarding Oliver as a ward during the lifetime of his mother who by the terms of Robert’s will was made “tenant for life of all the Capite lands”. Oliver might as a result have had to make certain payments, and also “sue for his livery”, an expensive process by which an heir had to institute a suit to obtain possession of lands. Fortunately, the case being carried before the Court of Wards and Liveries, it was decided that his mother’s interest in the estate, as specified in the will, was made in the time of Sir Henry Cromwell, her father-in-law, and that Robert had already “sued his livery” after Sir Henry’s death.31 There was thus no need for Oliver to repeat the process. This peril once averted by the decision of the Chief Justice, Oliver’s mother was free to resume the unexceptional standard of life in a small town, farming their lands and supplementing their income perhaps by a brew-house.
It was only youth which was over for Oliver Cromwell, not opportunity. Those outwardly placid years of childhood, invested by modern theorists with such colossal importance in the formation of a character, had now closed on what might seem to the same theorists the most appropriate ending to any masculine adolescence – the death of the father, and the need to support the mother. In a funeral ode after Oliver’s death one writer reflected:
Thou didst begin with lesser cares
And private thoughts took up thy private years …
The soul which would later sway sceptres learnt first to rule in a domestic way …
So government itself began
From family and single man.
The intensely private nature of Oliver’s youth is something against which not only later historians have knocked their heads in vain, but also upon which his own contemporaries commented. Nor did the obscurity end abruptly with his nineteenth year. Nevertheless even in the sparse facts available, supplemented by later legends, it is possible at least to distinguish certain tendencies. A physically intensely active young man, rough even, happy in a moderate but secure place in society, had been brought into contact early with a restless, insecure but extremely passionate and honest form of religion. At the same time an affectionate nature, surrounded by many family ties, found itself thrust early into the centre of these threads henceforth Oliver himself would constitute the knot. On these foundations, still just discernible if only faintly so, as the outline of the old GreyFriars chapel could still be seen among the new Sidney Sussex buildings, Oliver Cromwell’s adult life was built.
2 His own fields
For neither didst thou from the first apply
Thy sober Spirit unto things too High
But in thine own Fields exercisedst long
A healthful Mind within a Body strong
ANDREW MARVELL ON OLIVER CROMWELL
At the age of eighteen, for all his friendship with Dr Thomas Beard, Oliver Cromwell did not present himself upon the stage of the world as a fully fledged Puritan, at least in the sense we understand the word today. To the years following his father’s death belong the widespread tales of Oliver’s early debaucheries. The report is too general to be ignored. Henry Fletcher in The Perfect Politician, an honest attempt at biography rather than hagiography first printed in 1660, gave the measured opinion that this period of Cromwell’s life was certainly “not altogether free from the wildnesses and follies incident to youthful age”. Richard Baxter, although several years younger than Oliver, had heard the story that he was “Prodigal in youth” and repeated it in his autobiography.The Royalist Sir Philip Warwick related that “the first years of his manhood were spent in a dissolute course of life in good fellowship and gaming which afterwards he seemed sensible of and sorrowful for”. Fletcher confirms the idea of Oliver as a gamester – there was one Mr Calton to whom he later insisted on repaying £30 he had won in the old days, since he now considered he had obtained it by unlawful means and “it would be a sin in him to detain it any longer”.1
Predictably James Heath gives the most colourful account of the youthful carnival of this latterday St Augustine: to him Oliver behaved as “a young Tarquin” who delighted in accosting decent women in the streets in order to “perforce ravish a kiss, or some lewder satisfaction upon them”. He also set about decent men with his quarter staff and when neither opportunity was available, took refuge in generally “tippling”, as a result of which he became the terror of the local alehouses, whose proprietresses would call out when they saw him approaching: “Here conies young Cromwell, shut up your doors!”2 At all events little was omitted from this category of the typical vices of a rake at his progress, including drink, women, gambling and personal violence. But about the same time Oliver was granted his first sight of a wider world than that of Huntingdon, whether its High Street or its alehouses. Whether or not it was part of his mother’s plan to cure him of his dissipation as Heath suggested – and perhaps there was some connexion between the young man’s reputation and his removal – between 1617 and 1620 Cromwell went to London and continued his studies at one of the Inns of Court.
The episode is surrounded with irritating obscurity since there is no actual documentary record in the Black Books of Cromwell’s attendance at the Inn of Court generally associated with his name by his early biographers – Lincoln’s Inn. These authorities included not only Henry Fletcher cited above, but the author of an earlier work (possibly Henry Daubeny) The Portraiture of His Royal Highness Oliver, late Lord Protector published just after Cromwell’s death, and also James Heath who added, with unintentional irony in view of the problems of later historians: “It is some kind of good luck for that honourable Society that he hath left us small and so innocent a memorial of his Membership therein.” It is true that Carrington for example does not actually name Lincoln’s Inn (while noting nevertheless that “his Parents designed him to the study of the Civill Law”). But not only Oliver’s father, grandfather and two of his uncles had attended Lincoln’s Inn, he also sent his own son Richard there in 1647: there seems therefore no real reason to doubt the authenticity of an incident referred to so frequently in the earliest personal memorials of Oliver’s life.*3 (* W. C. Abbott in his Letters & Speeches of Oliver Cromwell I, p. 33 makes a case for Oliver’s attendance at Gray’s Inn, on the grounds that so many of his future associates were t
here at the time when Oliver also would have attended. But this seems an unnecessary complication in view of Oliver’s family connexions with Lincoln’s Inn, and the fact that Gray’s Inn is not mentioned by any of the early biographers.)
The Inns of Court were not then as now a specialized series of institutions destined to equip a body of young men for the law and nothing but the law. They were, on the contrary, regarded as an honourable supplement to a young gentleman’s upbringing: to repair to London to study the law was, whatever the views of Oliver’s mother, as conventional a development in the life of a young man of his station as all the other steps his education had so far taken. Of the members of Parliament between 1640 and 1642 over three hundred had been to one of the Inns of Court, including names to become famous in the turbulent years to follow, such as Denzil Holies, John Lambert, John Bradshaw and Sir Thomas Fairfax. Once more here tradition in the shape of Thomas Le Wright in 1658 (another early eulogist who mentions Lincoln’s Inn) speaks of Cromwell “more reading of men than on the book, as being naturally more inclined and affecting the pratick part, than the theorick”.4 London in 1618 or so was a pleasant place to exercise the burgeoning curiosity of youth, and the Inns of Court themselves were then situated in a positively sylvan area between the City of London and the rising city of Westminster, surrounded by green fields as yet untouched by building speculators. It was the great Thames, a more effective highway than any rutted thoroughfare, which linked the two centres, “those twin-sister cities as joined by one street so watered by one stream” as Thomas Hey wood romantically called them in Porta Pietas, “the first, a breeder of grave magistrates, the second, the burial place of great monarchs”. And it was among “the grave magistrates” of the City of London as well as among his own cousinage, that Cromwell found his associates. For on 22 August 1620, a few months after he came of age, Oliver Cromwell married Elizabeth Bourchier, daughter of a City magnate, Sir James Bourchier.