One detail of religious custom which acquired great significance in such an atmosphere of agitation was the weekly sermon in the local church, which everyone in England was compelled to attend by law. The Puritans felt and continued to feel extremely strongly on the subject of preaching. The enthusiasm which was one marked characteristic of their cause found its natural expression in the sermon, both as it animated their leaders and reached out to the common people. The style varied. There was the East Anglian Dr Bedell, for example, whose “voice was low, his action little; but the gravity of his aspect very great and the reverence of his behaviour such as was more affecting to the hearers than the greater eloquence and more pompous pronunciation of others”. The preacher John Rogers on the other hand had a habit of taking hold of the canopy of his pulpit and “roaring hideously to represent the torments of the damned”, a performance which one can well believe, in the words of a Dedham clothier who witnessed it, had “an awakening force”. Cromwell himself certainly had a strong streak of the predicant in him expressed in lay sermons, for as his kinsman Bishop Williams of Lincoln told Charles I later, Oliver had acted as a “common spokesman for the sectaries, and had maintained their part with great stubbornness”. Heath alleged that as the decade wore on Cromwell “more frequently and publickly owned himself a Teacher, and did preach in other mens as well as his own house, according as the brotherhood agreed and appointed.”3
Clearly such men would hardly be inclined to the passive acceptance of sermons whose doctrines were inimical to them. But the congregations were not completely powerless in their choice of preacher, particularly since ministerial stipends were often so meagre. This provided the opportunity for members of the congregation to club together either to increase the stipend of a minister of whose theology they approved, or employ “a lecturer” from outside. The financial arrangements for such lectureships varied considerably: it became a recognized good work for groups of London merchants to subscribe to the payment of a lecturer in some outlying district, and in other areas, the lecturer was chosen – and paid by the Corporation, although the assent of the bishop was still needed. The significance of these lectureships as a method of spreading unorthodox teachings was of course appreciated quite as much by Laud and the King as by those groups who hopefully employed them. Even if not all lectureships were necessarily subversive, the question of the future of a particular lectureship was often bitterly fought out between King and local authorities. The Corporation of Huntingdon had selected Dr Beard as their lecturer; in 1633 when he died, his lectureship was declared suppressed, and when the Mercers’ Company of London indignantly set up a new lecturer in the town, reserving to themselves the right to get rid of him if they so desired, without reference to the bishop, this preacher too was dismissed after Laud had appealed to the King.
It was obvious where Cromwell’s sympathies would lie in such a debate, but in fact his correspondence shows that he went further than mere sympathy, and addressed a personal exhortation to those in a position to support these lectureships. In a letter of January 1635 to his “very loving friend” Mr Storie, perhaps to get this same Huntingdon lecturer reinstated, he demonstrated the importance he already attached to the nourishment of the soul. He urged Storie to remember that the “Building of hospitals provides for men’s bodies; to build material temples is judged a work of piety; but they that procure spiritual food, they that build up spiritual temples, they are the men truly charitable, truly pious. Such a work as this was your erecting the lecture in our country [i.e. county].” Cromwell went on encouragingly: “It only remains now that He who first moved you to this, put you forward to the continuance thereof: it was the Lord and therefore to Him lift we up our hearts that He would perfect it.” He also drew attention to the vital importance of such endowments at precisely the present time when they were being attacked from on high: “And surely, Mr Storie, it were a piteous thing to see a lecture fall… in these times, wherein we see they are suppressed, with too much haste and violence by the enemies of God his truth.” The conclusion was practical: “You know, Mr Storie, to withdraw the pay is to let fall the lecture: for who goeth to warfare at his own cost? I beseech you therefore in the bowels of Christ Jesus put it forward, and let the good man have his pay. The souls of God his children will bless you for it; and so shall I.”4
Despite the fervour of such proselytizers as Cromwell and the finances of Mr Storie and his ilk (it is to be hoped he listened to this earnest appeal and gave “the good man” his pay), the unhappiness of the Puritan situation was not alleviated as the decade wore on. Cromwell touched on one aspect of it with his reference to the suppressions carried out all too often by the enemies of God his truth – the bishops. The mood of the whole country was quiescent but bitter: in 1630 and 1631 harvests were bad, poverty rife. The political opposition, so vociferous while Parliament was in session, was now during its long official silence not so much in abeyance as temporarily unheard. It is not surprising that the eyes of the Elect were turned increasingly towards a New World across the seas where conscience might flourish, prosperity would follow, and the frustrations of royal or episcopal control could be forgotten in the establishment of a godly kingdom. Cromwell himself seems to have seriously considered emigrating with his family to North America in the early 1630s.
Emigration to the New World was connected during this period more closely with the political opposition to King Charles i than was indicated by the mere fact that both were symptoms of sad dissatisfaction with the state of England. The organization of the companies formed to colonize certain areas on the other side of the Atlantic served as one method by which the political opponents of the King were able to keep loosely affiliated during the prolonged absence of Parliament. The men responsible for the foundation of the New Providence Company, in particular, including the Earl of Warwick, Lord Saye and Sele, Sir Nathaniel Rich and the Earl of Holland, were prominent Puritans who had also earlier formed part of the opposition party to the Court. Later their numbers were swelled by men such as John Pym, Oliver St John and Sir Thomas Barrington. It was his deprivation of office in 1629 which had in fact incited John Winthrop to secure the charter for the Massachusetts Bay Company, and there on the east coast of America, build up his own godly kingdom; and although the destinies of the two companies – New Providence and Massachusetts Bay-were very different, one to turn into a privateering company interested in purloining the wealth of the Spaniards, the other into the basis of a theocratic state, their origins were similar.5
In the case of Oliver Cromwell’s projected emigration, it will not have escaped notice that some of the names associated with the New Providence Company were connected to him by blood. According to a story repeated by one of Cromwell’s early Royalist biographers, and adopted by eighteenthcentury historians on both sides of the Atlantic, it was in 1638 that Cromwell embarked on a ship lying in the Thames all ready to sail, together with two other future Parliamentary leaders, Arthur Haselrig and John Hampden. At the last minute the Council refused to grant permission for departure. Although in the end the order was rescinded, somehow during the delay the “Three Famous Persons, whom I suppose their adversaries would not have so studiously detained at Home, if they had foreseen events” as Cotton Mather wrote in 1702, had filed down the gangplank again.6 Thus, according to the point of view of the writer, America was either spared much trouble or some unrealized greatness: the dramatic possibilities of Oliver Cromwell’s career in the New World rather than the Old certainly make an interesting subject of speculation.
But in spite of the persistence of the story, a projected departure in 1638 is too late to fit with what else we know of Cromwell’s mood and movements at this period. The true story of the emigration belongs earlier and has a more profound genesis. There is no reason to doubt it because the Royalists tried inaccurately to link it to a quite separate later incident, suggesting that Cromwell wanted to flee because he had wasted his patrimony (a disparagement effectively contradi
cted by the fact that Sir Thomas Steward, Oliver’s maternal uncle, died in 1636, leaving him his main heir).7 We know that the idea of the Puritan New World attracted Cromwell throughout his life: his correspondence shows a continued warm interest in those adventurers who had sailed forth on the great quest for conscience’ sake. His speeches as Lord Protector, and many aspects of his foreign policy, exhibit a positively romantic conception of the colonial ideal – to find or found the godly life. The idea of making the leap himself lingered in his mind after the 16305: according to Clarendon, in 1641, when the Grand Remonstrance was presented to the King, Cromwell whispered in the ear of Falkland that if it had not gone forward, he had made up his mind to emigrate. Emigration, although in certain senses a gesture of despair with England, was not considered an exceptional nor a particularly reckless gesture in the circles in which Cromwell moved, where the return of John Winthrop the younger from Massachusetts about this rime must have enabled many Puritans to hear firsthand accounts of life in the colony. Lord Warwick and Lord Brooke both considered the step at the blackest period for the Puritans; a man such as Sir Mathew Boynton, later instead an MP in the Long Parliament, wrote to Winthrop in Massachusetts about arrangements for a house “against my coming over”.8
But Cromwell himself by 1638 was a man of property, and a man whose life had taken another turn, with other engagements, other responsibilities. He may even have regarded the death of Sir Thomas and the legacy as a special providence, the sign from God he had been seeking as to whether he should emigrate or not. Such a view would be very much in keeping with his reverence for similar dispensations in the 1640s and later. Sir Thomas’s will was drawn up shortly after his wife’s death in January 1636, thus giving the lie to another Royalist scandal that Cromwell had tried to take his uncle’s property in advance by proving him insane. By it Oliver inherited an estate which Heath thought must have been worth four or five hundred a year, as well as considerable local status at Ely. It was an indication that Cromwell at least was intending to stay in England, for the time being. So Cromwell’s dalliance with the notion of emigration, far from having any connexion with dissipation or ruin, was in fact a highly serious attempt to find some solution to the spiritual and moral crisis facing so many Puritans. There was certainly no shame in the project, as later writers tried to make out; it merely placed Cromwell among the concourse of honourable but unhappy men who at the same period were trying to decide exactly where their proper future lay, in terms of the work of God to be done in the world.
The Cromwell family now moved to Ely, to the house in which Oliver’s mother, Sir Thomas’s sister, had been born. Sir Thomas had been childless and the will, a generous one, made Oliver his main legatee with the exception of an income for Oliver’s mother and a few trifling legacies such as Ł5 to Oliver’s eldest son. The estate consisted of varied properties around Ely and in the town itself, mainly held on lease from the deans and chapter of Ely. It included ninety acres of glebe land in the common fields of Ely, eight acres of pasture on the Isle of Ely, and Bartin in Ely with its houses, barns and lands. There was also the tithe and glebe land of the Rectory of Holy Trinity (the Cathedral), the church of St Mary in Ely, the chapel of Chettisham, the Sextry Barn – the second greatest barn in England according to the inhabitants of Ely – excepting all tithes of the chapelry of Stuntney, the churchyards of the cathedral and St Mary’s, and all profits from marriages, churchings and burials in both places.* (*When the rectory of St Mary and Holy Trinity was surveyed under the Commonwealth in 1650 with similar properties belonging to deans and chapters with a view to selling them, there was mention of a “lease” of the oblations and offerings of the parish from “Oliver Cromwell, Esq., late farmer and by him of the said rectory, and by Daniel Wymore, late archdeacon of Elye, unto Richard Pursaby of Elye, tanner”.9) The rents payable quarterly to the Deans and Chapter as rectors were .Ł48 plus .Ł20 with five quarters of the “best wheat well sufficiently dressed, half at Christmas and half at Lady Day”, although the exact amount of the “relief” which Cromwell would have also paid for actually taking over the lease, is not known.10
The new home of Oliver Cromwell and his family was in the town of Ely itself, which lay on a slight.eminence on the west bank of the river Ouse and was, according to Bede, named for the eels in the river. Around stretched that flat area of Cambridgeshire known as the Isle of Ely; in more primitive but equally political days, it had been associated with the last struggles of the Saxon hero Hereward the Wake against the Norman invaders. The Cromwells’ house lay on the edge of a pleasing green, dominated by the sight of great Ely Cathedral. Although Carlyle later chose to describe it as “two gunshots away from the cathedral”, such a measurement was in fact singularly unsuitable to the essentially tranquil nature of the cathedral town.* (* The house, apparently a tavern in Carlyle’s time,11 is now the vicarage of the near-by church of St Mary’s.)The only flaw might be that the cathedral itself would seem altogether too dominating to Cromwell in his modest black and white half-timbered house. For all that its tower with its exquisite central octagon and Gothic dome had fallen down generations back and had not been replaced, it represented the architecture of four centuries. Certainly no one living so close could be indifferent to the significance of such a lofty symbol of the established Church and Cromwell’s subsequent interruption (after due warning) of an Anglican service there, may have originated in long-held resentment as well as spontaneous disgust.
If the cathedral could induce a feeling of claustrophobia, the surrounding country – the vast level isolated land of the Fens – could only expand the mind to reflection and self-reliance. Ely lay on the watery frontiers of the Fens, an area extending for thirteen hundred square miles in Eastern England inwards from the sea, north to the Wash and King’s Lynn.west to Cambridge and Peterborough, with other detached Fen districts towards Lincoln. This land, lying only a little above sea-level, flooded regularly in winter; when the waters receded in summer, rich if ephemeral pastures appeared on which the inhabitants grazed their cattle and made their hay on land held in common, by long-established right, from the lord of the Manor. Here, from olden times, there were no hedges to mark the map, nor were there any really great houses such as Hinchingbrooke to overlay the spirit of the Fen-dwellers. As Isaac Casaubon wrote poetically in 1611 the “solitary bittern and the imitative dotterel” (a small heron and a plover respectively) gave their booming call and their sharp plaintive cries undisturbed.12
Grappling with the hard, but not impossible, geographical conditions outlined above, facing winds in addition which in winter came virtually unchecked from Russia, the people of the Fens concentrated their remaining energies on leading a life which was in many ways more similar to that of their ancient British ancestors, fishing and fowling for survival, than the life pattern now led in the rising English cities. The rest of England was not disposed to look kindly upon these rough diamonds and their problems, regarding them scornfully as Camden wrote in Britannia, as “a kind of people according to the nature of the place where they dwell, rude uncivill, and envious to all others whom they called ‘Upland-men’”. Yet as it happened, by the 1630$ the people of the Fens were facing a crisis, involving a huge alteration in their way of life, for which this inarticulate community had much need of general sympathy, the indulgence of the central authority, or at worst an articulate spokesman of their own.
It was a question of the drainage of the Fens by means of ambitious engineering works and dikes, to provide from the former marshes some land actually dry enough for tillage (nothing had hitherto been arable in the Fens) and to secure the rest sufficiently from flooding to make usable all the year round as pasture. The trouble was that such a movement towards the more intensive use of land, part of the general attack on fens and marshes throughout Western Europe, clearly presupposed a large unit of enterprise to make it workable at all.13 The land could neither be drained piecemeal, nor could an individual support the expense of draining the essentia
l larger unit. The solution was a series of companies, whose participants were known as “Adventurers” and which were granted charters from the Crown (at royal profit) for various Fen districts known as Levels. Cromwell’s area for example was known as the Great Level, and the particular company formed to drain and develop it was under the leadership of the Earl of Bedford. In return for their investment, the Adventurers received a portion of the newly drained land for the company at the completion of the work, the amount varying, but averaging about one-third of the total.
However the lands with which the companies were concerned were themselves held variously, perhaps by a community as common grazing around, perhaps by a lord of the Manor, and granted to his tenants under the ancient Statute of Merton, for their common pasture. Therefore special measures were needed to weld together profitably what had once been so greatly segmented. The ancient Court of Sewers was invoked, which had the right to fine any community which it thought “hurtfully surrounded” (by uncleared marsh) and so compel a particular community to sell by first taxing it and then declaring the tax in arrears and the land forfeit if the community could not pay. Not every jury was amenable to the principle involved. When one jury of a Court of Sewers in Lincolnshire tried to find that a particular area had not in fact been “hurtfully surrounded”, the King, who felt both financially and personally involved in the draining, wrote angrily to the local commissioners of the Court, telling them to proceed with the sale none the less, and threatening to use his royal prerogative in case of further opposition.