It is important to emphasize, returning closer home to the great sprawling palace of Westminster, when Oliver Cromwell first reached it in March 1628, that whatever the traditional loyalties of many of King Charles’s subjects, Cromwell himself stepped immediately and naturally into an already formed – if still shapeless – group of those critical of the monarchy, by reason of his family connexions. In the previous year certain members of Parliament had suffered imprisonment rather than subscribe to one of the King’s financial expedients – a forced loan – and these prisoners had included six of Cromwell’s relations. Two of them, Oliver St John and John Hampden, were to be closely associated with him in future fame. Oliver Cromwell had therefore every opportunity to hear from his natural intimates both the causes of the opposition to the King, and the desperate need for it: indeed his first public impressions of Charles i can hardly have been reassuring.
Later many of the Court poets and writers were to paint a falsely rosy picture of this period, in contrast to the later holocaust. Ben Jonson, for example, in an Anniversary Ode of 1629, dismissed such discontents as there might be as being the distasteful products of idleness:
O Times! O Manners! Surfet bred of ease
That truly epidemicall disease …
Lucy Hutchinson was closer to the truth when she looked back with more cynical nostalgia to that vanished time when the land had been at peace: ‘If that quietness may be call’d peace, which was rather like the calm and smoothe surface of the sea, whose dark womb is already impregnated of a horrid tempest.”15 It would never have been possible for Cromwell, coming into politics as he did at such a critical moment, by birth falling straightaway into the heart of the protesting caucus, to hold the view that England’s troubles could be attributed to “surfet bred of ease”. For him there were already in practice two divergent points of view – one basically Royal and one critical of it – which may for convenience’ sake be termed Parliamentary, and are sometimes alternatively described as those of Court and Country.* (*Obviously any group critical of the monarchy found itself from time to time in a literal sense in opposition to its aims. But there was of course no official opposition, in the modern sense, since any opposition to the King, as such, constituted treason. Since the composition and aims of such a group also fluctuated between 1628 and 1643, there was also no political “party” in the modern sense.) These two points of view were effectively expressed only three months after he first sat in Parliament, in June 1628, by the Petition of Right.
This famous document demanded the redress of certain notable grievances, principally the arbitrary arrest of subjects without trial, and arbitrary taxation; unlike earlier bills, which Charles had rejected, it did at least take the form of a petition, or request, although attempts were made within it to define the rights of subjects under the law. It was significant that John Pym, the great Parliamentary leader, looked back to the past and ancient rights, as he discoursed of the laws suggested in the Petition: “There are plain footsteps of those Laws in the Government of the Saxons. They were of that vigour and force as to overlive the Conquest; nay, to give bounds and limits to the Conqueror.”16 And the past lay not in the sixteenth century, nor even in the age of Magna Carta, but in the far-distant days before the Norman Conquest, it being a popular maxim of certain Parliamentarians and political theorists at this date that “a Norman yoke” had been placed over free Saxon heads in 1066. Charles I was by this argument merely the latest descendant of a line of “Norman conquerors” conspiring to deprive good erstwhile Saxons of their liberties. Such liberties had never been forgotten and were now being revived in the Petition of Right.
In accepting the Petition – because his desperate financial situation left him no choice – the King was careful to accept the appeal to the past although on his own terms. He refused to accept the accompanying Remonstrance, and prorogued (or temporarily suspended) Parliament a few days later. Although he did agree to redress the named grievances, in doing so, he declared, he was merely confirming “the ancient liberties” of his subjects. There was no “entrenchment” upon his prerogative. Even more firmly he asserted that he owed an account of his actions to God alone, nor had the Houses of Parliament any right to make a law without his consent. The battle was certainly joined, politically speaking, before Cromwell’s eyes, long before the first fascinating novelty of the House of Commons can have worn off sufficiently to have blunted the very keen impression he must have received from the whole dramatic episode.
Politics and money were not the only topics on which there was opposition to the King. Religion was another burr under the saddle of many of Charles’s subjects. It was on the matter of those dangerous innovations, verging on “popery”, which many considered were staining the white garment of the Church of England, and the general tolerance of laxity leading even to the tolerance of “popery” itself, that Cromwell made his first recorded pronouncement in the House of Commons in February 1629. In November the King had issued a Declaration on the subject of religion which was prefixed to the Book of Common Prayer, in which it was generally felt by the Puritan element that the “papistical” views of his rising favourite, the Archbishop Laud, were to be discerned. To Laud however it was Puritanism not “popery” which was the slow powerful menace threatening the state Church. Puritan tendencies were to be checked. Above all individual conscience was not to be regarded as the guide towards the definition of doctrine, which was the duty of the Church. Thus all were bidden to continue in “the uniform professfon” of the articles of the Church of England, “prohibiting the least difference”.
The answer of the House of Commons to this challenge was to set up a Committee of the House on Religion. These committees were by their very nature anti-monarchical devices, developed since the beginning of the century. A committee of the whole, for example – a deliberate ruse to. declare the entire House of Commons members of one committee – evaded the authority of the Speaker, in those days acting as a Royal nominee, because it meant that the House could elect its own chairman for the committee. It could thus sit as long as it liked, and members could speak more than once. Other lesser committees followed, and the King himself acknowledged angrily how the practice was spreading when he observed a few months later in 1629: “We are not ignorant, how much the House hath of late years endeavoured to extend their Privileges, by setting up general Committees for Religion, for Courts of Justice, for Trade, and the like…” 17 Of this particular Committee on Religion Oliver Cromwell was made a member. If we are to believe Milton, the spring of 1629 was exceptionally fine, when “the wanton earth” offered herself up to the sun’s caress. The hot spring weather was spent by Cromwell in vehement and indignant outpourings against the tolerance of “popery” in high places, in which cause he declared himself personally informed and inspired by Dr Thomas Beard.
There was a certain Manwaring, he announced, who continued to enjoy status as a preacher, despite the fact that he had been censored for his “papist” sermons by Parliament. Roger Manwaring had in fact previously acted as one of King Charles’s chaplains in which capacity he had preached in 1627 a notable sermon on the Divine Right of the King, whose powers he discovered to lie not in consent, not in grace, not in law or even custom, but simply and immediately in their investment from God. Now he had been preferred to a rich living. All this accorded well with the story told to Cromwell by Beard of a certain Dr Alablaster, preaching “flat popery” in a sermon at Paul’s Cross. At the end of it all he was defended from attack by Beard (who intended to contradict his thesis) by the Bishop of Winchester, who charged Beard to desist, all this despite the manifest encouragement given to Beard by the Bishop of Ely. This tale of religious chicanery and the smell of incense – if not brimstone – in high places, was evidently delivered with an impressive passion, since at least three people present, including Bulstrode Whitelocke, made a note of the speech.*18 ( One of the difficulties of this period is the fact that the complete proceedings of Parliament w
ere not, as now, officially disseminated. Members of the House of Commons sometimes kept private journals or diaries of proceedings or made notes; Sir Simonds D’Ewes in his important Journals drew on some of these sources. About 1640 certain speeches began to be printed by order of the House. Both these were inevitably selective procedures. It was not until 1681 that a general resolution was adopted for printing the votes and proceedings of the House. The Commons’ Journals however, recording bills passed and the various stages of passing, were first begun in the reign of Edward VI.19) In fact the Committee ended by condemning Manwaring, compelled Charles to withdraw his sermon, and protested strongly against the “extraordinary growth of Popery” even in England, to say nothing of Scotland and Ireland. Once more Oliver had found himself in opposition to the King, and on this occasion there is evidence of his practical involvement.
The protesting nature of this, the period of his first entry into public life, is only confirmed by the final turbulent scenes of Parliament in the spring of 1629. On 2 March Cromwell was among those who refused to adjourn at the King’s command until the resolution of Sir John Eliot condemning popery and illegal subsidies not granted by Parliament was passed. The Speaker of the House, Sir John Finch, was actually held down in his place by Denzil Holies and Benjamin Valentine while the resolution was read. “God’s wounds!” bellowed Holies. “You shall sit till we please to rise.” By the time King Charles succeeded in dissolving Parliament, thus drawing to an end Parliamentary government in England for the next eleven years, the damage was done and the resolutions had been read. Perhaps it was Oliver’s first sight of a short sharp physical action in a righteous cause. Whatever the significant impressions left by the incident relevant to his future career, by the time Cromwell returned to his own fields at Huntingdon, he had certainly witnessed excitement enough, at Westminster. Edmund Ludlow wrote in his memoirs of the scene in the House with the Speaker that King Charles “might have observed the pulse of the nation beating high towards liberty”.20 Oliver Cromwell too formed part of that pulse.
* * *
As in his childhood, Cromwell’s roughness was melded with spiritual resource. The story of his early years in London and the short violent affray into Parliament displays the same contrast between outward straightforward action and some inner whirlpool of deeper more melancholy waters. It is known from the records of Sir Theodore Mayerne, a distinguished doctor then practising in London, that Oliver Cromwell visited him on 19 September 1628 – six months after his first election to Parliament. Mayerne, now a man in his fifties and enormously rich and successful, the son of a famous French Protestant, had in the past doctored King Henry iv of France and would in the future number King Charles and Queen Henrietta Maria among his regular patients. Owing to his huge girth he seldom went out, preferring to record at home his patients’ histories in a case-book, awaiting their next visit. Cromwell had apparently been drinking the medicinal waters of Wellingborough (in Northamptonshire) which were sufficiently esteemed at the time for the King and Queen to have spent a season there, two years previously, in order to quaff them. But this had only aggravated Cromwell’s condition. Otherwise, Cromwell’s flesh was very dry and withered, he had a recurrent pain in his stomach three hours after meals which had not so far yielded to any remedy, and a persistent pain in his left side. Above all, the great doctor wrote ominously of “Monsr. Cromwell” that he found him “valde melancholicus” – extremely melancholy.21
This was not the only indication that the energetic protester who witnessed the manhandling of the Speaker of the House had another less outgoing side to his nature. Oliver’s own family physician was that Dr Simcott, who later recorded in his case-book how Cromwell had taken “Mithridate” [a poison antidote] to ward off the plague, and, in doing so “cured his pimpled face”. Here he less succinctly but more evocatively described to Sir Philip Warwick certain incidents that occurred about the same date, and certainly before the death of Oliver’s uncle, Sir Thomas Steward, in 1636. Cromwell, said Simcott, would sometimes lie in his bed “all melancholy”; at other times he would send for Simcott at midnight and “such unseasonable hours” because he felt himself to be dying; on other occasions still he had strange “fancies” about the large cross standing in the centre of the town of Huntingdon. A further “fancy” which seized Oliver was that he should be “the greatest man in this kingdom” (the word King was not mentioned). 22 Simcott’s revelations, picturesque but also pathetic, bear all the marks of what would in modern language be termed a nervous breakdown. It does not matter whether he was “splenetic” as Simcott suggested (then meaning gloomy or moody) or “melancholicus” as Mayerne observed – he may well, as many people undoubtedly are, in such a state, have been both by turns. While an exact medical diagnosis is obviously impossible across three hundred years, nevertheless the evidence for some severe crisis both at Huntingdon and in London, sufficiently serious to lead Cromwell to consult the leading doctor of the day, clearly exists.
It is Simcott’s testimony which suggests how much Oliver’s sufferings at this time lay on the mental, rather than the physical plane. There is no mention here of the low fevers, probably malarial, which were to trouble him later. Even the vision of future leadership (which of course took on a sinister connotation to a Royalist writing much later with hindsight) falls into a believable pattern of a man in the throes of some sort of personal agony, who feels at times that he has not long to live, at times that great things lie in store for him, at times simply that he is too depressed and apathetic even to leave his bed. Such an experience, it has been suggested above, might be referred to in our own terminology loosely as a nervous breakdown; it might also, in the language of the mystic, be described as the “dark night of the soul” when the aspirant after God is suddenly, fearfully, deprived of all knowledge and contact with God’s wishes. Thirdly, in the Puritan language of the time, such an attack might be related to the essential conversion, the choice by God, which every soul must go through before it can find grace. It is to Oliver’s self-acknowledged – but not precisely dated – conversion that it is suggested that these torments must be linked.
Considerably later, in 1638, Oliver Cromwell wrote a fascinating letter of mixed ecstasy and self-abasement on the subject of his conversion, to his “beloved cousin” Mrs St John, the daughter of his uncle Henry Cromwell. While modestly rebutting her compliments to his own talents, Cromwell was nevertheless very willing to
“honour my God by declaring what He hath done for my soul … Truly no poor creature hath more cause to put forth himself in the cause of his God than I … The Lord accept me in His son, and give me to walk in the light, and give us to walk in the light, as He is the light. He it is that enlighteneth our blackness, our darkness. I dare not say, He hideth His face from me. He giveth me to see light in His light. One beam in a dark place hath exceeding much refreshment in it. Blessed be His Name for shining upon so dark a heart as mine! You know what my manner of life hath been. Oh, I have lived in and loved darkness and hated the light. I was a chief, the chief of sinners. This is true; I hated godliness, yet God had mercy on me. O the riches of His mercy! Praise Him for me, that He hath begun a good work should perfect it to the day of Christ.. .”23
Here indeed is the authentic language of the convert, of one touched by grace and feeling the workings of Christ within himself. It is also incidentally the first true revelation in Oliver’s surviving letters of that high religious, almost manic strain of language, densely interwoven with Biblical and semi-Biblical phrases to be displayed later so prominently in his communications, ranging from battle reports to harangues inside Parliament. The Biblical influence was of course through his life intensely strong. The King James’s Bible as it was known, the great Authorized Version, had been first published in 1611 when he was a boy of twelve, and may be said to be by far the most dominating literary presence in all his letters and speeches, although it has been pointed out that there are also traces of knowledge of the Gen
evan Version, which would have been used during his schooldays by Beard, for example in this particular letter. No doubt Cromwell remembered such phrases from his childhood.24 It is important to stress the nature of the language because it is not suggested that Oliver is here regretting such offences as he may have committed before his marriage, then nearly twenty years away, although this conclusion has sometimes been drawn from the last few lines of the letter quoted in order to back up the Royalist stories of debauchery prolonged long after youth. A strict distinction must be drawn between these youthful vices and the “darkness” to which Cromwell is here referring.
This type of darkness, the darkness which envelopes the spirit before its conversion, was an important concept in Puritan thought of the time. To the Puritan – or one might say to the Calvinist, since this was a doctrine originating from the precepts of Calvin a century earlier – the conversion, the calling by God, was all-important. As Calvin put it in his Institutes, “the covenant of life” was not “preached equally to all men”, and again “he [God] gives to some what he refuses to others”. Yet without grace, no one could be saved. The Elect, as these fortunate possessors of grace were known to themselves, or “the Saints”, were not born with this grace. And unlike the Roman Catholics, for example, they did not believe that they could obtain grace by means of an outward sacrament such as baptism (which redeemed Catholics from the stain of original sin). The Calvinists and their descendants believed on the contrary that the vital grace came only through God’s choice of the individual, who now felt Christ working in him. For God donated his Son to the Elect to support them: as John Preston put it in a sermon roughly contemporary with Oliver’s conversion: “When God calleth you to come unto Christ, he promiseth that the virtue of Christ’s death shall kill sin in you, and that the virtue of Christ’s Resurrection shall raise you up to the newness of life.” And once granted, this grace would never be withdrawn. Burnet wrote of Oliver himself: “His beloved notion was, once a child of God, always a child of God.”25 The Saints could not fall from grace. For these two reasons, conversion or acknowledgement of the workings of grace was liable to appear an epoch-making spiritual event in the life of any member of the Elect.