In any case, the tendency of historians to treat Puritans as if they were interested in religion in only the narrowest sense—altar or table, Communion in one kind or in two—overlooks other scruples, also religious. For example, the Body of Liberties not only forbids horrible punishments, which often involved dismemberment, but also specifies that the body of the executed should be buried within twelve hours. Under Elizabeth severed heads and limbs were hung on walls and in trees in various places and left there, to widen the impact of royal justice, presumably. The heads of Cromwell and two men close to him were displayed for decades on pikes over the Palace of Westminster. Cromwell died a natural death and so was exhumed and executed posthumously. Only a strong wind finally brought his head down from the pike. It might seem a minor courtesy that the head of Charles I had been surgically reattached to his body and that he had been allowed to remain in his grave. Still.
A great deal is made of the repressiveness of the Puritan reformation of morals under Cromwell, his attempt to suppress swearing and drunkenness. It is true that he had led a terrifyingly efficient army over the length and breadth of England, and into Scotland and Ireland. Certainly he had blood on his hands. But if the Puritan departure from the penal horrors enshrined in law were thought of as a part of the reformation of morals—to me this seems appropriate, since they would spare society as a whole much terror and degradation—the ban on swearing would be comparatively minor, even pardonable. Again, it should be noted emphatically that under Cromwell no one was executed for his religious beliefs. In his letters Cromwell advocates consistently for freedom of conscience. These would have been important enhancements of the quality of life. It should be noted that the Massachusetts code does not list heresy among capital crimes—or mention it at all, for that matter. We know the colonists did expel people from their settlements on these grounds. Total reformation never comes at one stroke. Still, on balance, what is often called Puritan intolerance might as fairly be seen as Puritan tolerance. Winthrop says this about the expulsion of Anne Hutchinson: “So the Court proceeded and banished her; but, because it was winter, they committed her to a private house, where she was well provided, and her own friends and the elders permitted to go to her, but none else.”
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So American culture sprang from English dissenters. What has this meant? The Carolinas were colonized after the fall of Cromwell and the Restoration, and named for Charles II, then king. The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina was drawn up, commissioned by the king and written, it is said, by John Locke. No doubt the tendency of colonies to legislate for themselves was to be forestalled by this constitution, which would have established an authoritarian class system based on landownership. It created carefully delineated ranks and degrees and provided invented names for them. Somehow the colonial governor, William Sayle, who was a Puritan, never found the right time to put this constitution into effect. It would have created a kind of idealized England from the monarchical point of view, where landholding and authority were fixed and simultaneous. It would have precluded long-standing issues.
From the early Middle Ages the dream of the English poor was secure access to land, which they claimed as a right based in tradition. This access was threatened and progressively ended by enclosures, the seizing and hedging in, the appropriation for private use, of land that by custom had been available for the use of the community. Enormous flocks of sheep displaced villages, their inhabitants turned out to wander the roads and in the worst cases to starve or to be hanged for vagrancy. This endless, irresistible disaster was written about in the early sixteenth century by More and is the context for his Utopia. The First Fisherman in Shakespeare’s late play Pericles speaks of “rich misers” like whales who “never leave gaping till they’ve swallowed the whole parish, church, steeple, bells, and all.” Oliver Goldsmith, writing in the eighteenth century, describes a ruined village where “one only master grasps the whole domain,” and a landscape where once “scattered hamlets rose,” but now “unwieldy wealth and cumbrous pomp repose.” Enclosure was a revolution from above that created abject dependency in the huge class of the poor by seizing commons and excluding the community from the use of this traditional resource. The visionary literature of England idealized the echoing green, the world as it was before this systematic creation of poverty and destruction of the poor—a world modest, joyful, familial, and as if unfallen. This vision remained powerful even as the society urbanized and the loss of the commons became more a symbol of profound discontent than a present grievance for those who involved themselves in protests and uprisings.
Englishmen in the New World found a harsh life, one that did not lend itself readily to the Arcadian aspects of this vision. But Puritan New England did have a particular ethos of community of the kind Winthrop urges and celebrates in his Arabella address, which is as indebted to English social history as to Scripture, insofar as the two can be distinguished. Its early exponents were Lollards, after all, in fact or by association.
The Earl of Somerset, Lord Protector of Edward VI, was one of a number of wealthy and powerful men who would take the side of those who resisted enclosure. Cromwell seems to have been another. His history before the age of forty is very little documented, but during that time he was a modestly substantial landowner, educated in Cambridge, who served in Parliament. His aristocratic connections by blood and marriage, though not direct, were not insignificant, either. It was in this earlier period that he was called “Lord of the Fens.” This was an irony. It seems Cromwell tried to prevent the drainage, therefore the making suitable to conventional farming and enclosure, of land that had sustained a population of the very poor. Before Cromwell, the Protector Somerset had attempted to intervene on behalf of a rising against enclosures called Kett’s rebellion, an attempt that began his fall from power. John Kett himself was a landowner who sympathized with, then led, and finally died in this insurrection. In other words, neither Somerset nor Cromwell was involved in class war as that phrase is normally understood. There were then two contending visions active, both of them believed by their adherents to be based on Scripture, one claiming a basis in antiquity, the other a basis in an ideal primitivity—when Adam delved and Eve span, when Christianity was still pure of accretions. This latter was Puritanism, the tradition of Cromwell’s rearing and education, the tradition he helped to establish in Connecticut.
The emergence of Cromwell and the relative effectiveness of his government until his death would be difficult to account for if it were the novelty and departure history often suggests. But, first, it was a Calvinist revolution of a kind for which there were earlier precedents in Switzerland and the Low Countries. Second, its ethos and policies had precedents in the reign of Edward VI. While Catholic Mary ruled, many leading Protestants went as refugees to Geneva, including some who had been figures close to Edward. There they produced the Geneva Bible with its Reformist notes, the Bible of Shakespeare and of the American colonists, and there they felt very directly the influence of Calvin, whose contempt for monarchy in general seems to have eluded scholarly attention. Many Englishmen went to the Low Countries to fight on the Protestant side, including Sir Philip Sidney, who famously and graciously died there. In other words, there were important models of stable Protestant regimes that had overthrown their traditional rulers, and English people of great influence had the opportunity to study them at length and at close range. The severing of English from European history in this period is as unaccountable as its severing from American colonial history.
And, of course, the neglect of English history by those who write English history is equally arbitrary. Later writers give the reign of Edward VI short shrift. But during the Renaissance and Reformation Foxe’s Actes and Monuments was the most popular history among contemporaries. Foxe says this:
These meke and gentle times of king Edward, have thys one commendation proper unto them for that among the whole nomber of the popyshe sort, of whom some prively did steale out of
the realme, many were crafty desemblers, some were open and manifest adversaries, yet of all that multitude, there was not one man that lost hys lyfe. In summe, during the whole time of the vi yeres of this king, much tranquility, and as it were a breathing time, was graunted to the whole churcuhe of England: So that the rage of persecution, seasing, & the sword taken out of the adversaries hande, there was now no danger to the godly … Briefly during al this time, neither in Smithfield, nor any other quarter of thiss realme, any was hard to suffer for anye matter of religion, either Papist or protestant, eyther for one opinion or other …
Since Foxe was a Protestant, as most of his readers were also, presumably, his celebration of an interval in which neither Protestants nor Catholics were violently persecuted, as both had been at various times under Henry VIII, suggests a developing consensus in favor of this degree of toleration, at least. Jeanne d’Albret, who became the queen of Navarre shortly after Edward’s death, executed no one on religious grounds during her seventeen-year reign. She was an ally of Calvin’s and corresponded with him as Edward and Somerset had done. So in this regard Cromwell might be thought of as part of an emerging movement, and also as engaged in the restoration of welcome reforms that Mary had swept away.
There was an intellectual underground in England, a long tradition of radical thought that went back to John Wycliffe and William Langland and emerged in the speeches of the common soldiers in Cromwell’s army when they held their remarkable debates about the nature of the society that should emerge from the ruins of the old order. This tradition would have given the moment the tentative familiarity of an expectation fulfilled. Cromwell would certainly have been influenced by it, through long familiarity with the “godly men,” the “plain russet-coated fellows” who made up the solid core of his army. The English historian Christopher Hill argues that Milton was influenced by the thinkers of this underground. It is entirely probable that he was, not only because of its importance to the revolution but also because it was a deeply rooted literary tradition.
Early in her reign Queen Mary declared “an inhibition by proclamation” meant to deter dangers to her realm “through diversity of opinions in questions of religion.” It forbade unauthorized preaching and interpreting of Scripture, and also “playing of interludes, and printing of false-found books, ballads, rhymes, and other lewd treatises in the English tongue, concerning doctrine, in matters now in question and controversy, touching the high points and mysteries of Christian religion; which books, ballads, rhymes, and treatises, are chiefly by the printers and stationers set out to sale to her Grace’s subjects, of an evil zeal, for lucre and covetousness of vile gain.” This is quoted by Foxe, to whom these strictures would clearly apply, as they would also to John Day, the printer and publisher of many dissenting works, including the Actes and Monuments. Foxe had remarkable access to documents far older and rarer than this one would have been, and his reports of them are highly consistent with their use by later and modern historians. So either his faithfulness to them is confirmed by others or he is simply considered reliable, despite his being an apologist and polemicist for the faction whose zeal the queen would like to inhibit.
The kind of censorship called for by Mary was not unusual, though it was intermittent. Clearly nothing of comparable severity had been imposed by Cromwell, though we know from Milton’s Areopagitica that Parliament did begin to require a licensing of books. Roger L’Estrange, proposing a regime of censorship to be imposed by the newly restored Charles II, after the fall of the Commonwealth, called for a reduction by two-thirds of the number of active printers; raids to seize prohibited books, whether new, republished, or concealed; rewards for informants who knew of the existence of forbidden books; and punishments for those informed upon, anyone involved in their making or distribution, including stitchers and carters. The “ordinary penalties” are proposed: “Death, Mutilation, Imprisonment, Banishment, Corporal Peyns, Disgrace, Pecuniary Mulcts.” He says, “For the Authors, nothing can be too Severe, that stands with Humanity and Conscience. First, ’tis the way to cut off the Fountain of our Troubles. 2dly. There are not many of them in an Age, and so the less work to do.” He quotes treasonous views that are in print, for example, this: “Princes Derive their Power and Prerogative from the People, and have their Investitures merely for the People’s Benefit.” And this: “Kings are Accountable to the People, I do not mean to the Diffused humours and fancyes of particular men in their single and natural Capacities; but to the People in their Politique Constitution, lawfully Assembled by their Representative.” Certainly there are better grounds for finding the basis of our laws in this suppressed and defeated Commonwealth movement, which contributed so largely to our early population, than to an elusive “common law.”
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In his introduction to the first volume of The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, published in 1937, the Harvard historian W. C. Abbott says, “If Calvin’s Institutes provided a logical system of theology to set against that of Rome and his government of Geneva became a model state, his doctrines and practices combined to inspire an almost fanatical (that word again) devotion among his followers. It is one of the greatest mysteries of the human spirit that a faith founded on the assumption that man’s fate depends not on his own free will and acts but was predestined from the beginning, should have moved its devotees not to supine inaction but to deeds of heroism and self-sacrifice as vain as they were exalted unless they were ‘of peculiar grace elect among the rest.’” It is always fair to wonder if anyone, even a scholar as generally scrupulous as Abbott, has actually read the Institutes, and if he has, how he would define the words logical and system, very commonly invoked, or how, they being granted, they limn out a “mystery” that seems to him to make no sense at all. But this observation is nearly inevitable wherever any reference to Calvin and his influence is made. Perhaps by 1937 it was already mere reflex. It does not respond usefully to the fact, which he notes, that Calvin’s influence is strongly, even uniquely, associated with potent activism. Here I will mention Lewis Tappan again, who was in fact fairly representative of his culture and his times. I could mention John Brown.
Some light is shed on Abbott’s mystery by the life of Cromwell himself. A man who, without training or experience, discovered at the age of forty that he had a genius for the use of cavalry in battle, and beyond that for warfare, including the organization and control of a highly effective army, might really wonder how these things befell him. He might think in terms of fate even if he were not theologically predisposed to. People in at all comparable circumstances often do. There are surprises in life that refuse to be understood in the simple terms of act and consequence. It seems reasonable to assume they come most frequently to those who throw themselves into the arms of fate, or Providence, rather than to those who proceed by calculation. Human estimates of the possible tend to be conservative. And our estimates of the effects of our actions and intentions are very far from reliable. It seems odd to me to think an act of heroism is “vain” if it does not count toward one’s own everlasting benefit. Any reader of classical literature would know that heroism occurs among people who never think in terms like eternal salvation, and who really are fatalists. Again, however, this is just the little storm of perplexity that is always stirred up by the mention of Calvin, a figure of great importance in early modern history as his mention here should remind us, who ought to be looked at seriously on these grounds alone.
In any case, Abbott does quote, from the dedicatory letter that prefaces the Institutes, a passage that both justifies revolution and describes the form it should take. “‘Let us not think,’ wrote Calvin, ‘there is given no other commandment but to obey and suffer … I affirm that if they wink at kings willfully raging over and treading down the poor community, their dissembling is not without wicked breach of faith, because they dreadfully betray the people’s liberty.’” It is odd in this context that Abbott does not say who “they” are who are to defend the p
eople’s liberty. “They” are parliaments, magistrates of the people. Cromwell took part in a war already begun between king and Parliament, was obedient to Parliament in his role as military commander, and attempted for years to establish what might be called parliamentary government, ironically at last dismissing Parliament and ruling alone, just as Charles I had done. In Geneva there were governing councils in place long before the Savoyards were driven out and before Calvin’s arrival. They continued to govern. This kind of continuity must have seemed possible for some time in England as well. The worthies who signed the American Declaration of Independence and negotiated the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution were acting as representatives of the people and were generally accepted as such. After its revolution, France attempted parliamentary government and ended up with the emperor Napoleon. Though this model has not been consistently successful, its successes have been sufficient to make it important to the emergence of the modern West. In this context, the Cromwell period is again no anomaly, and the Calvinist basis of its activism is not far to seek. The idea that there is liberty that inheres in the people and that kings have no right to abuse is consistent with interpretations of the Magna Carta that emerged under Edward VI and Somerset. It is important to remember that both the Magna Carta and Calvin’s Institutes were translated under their patronage. The second of these might well have influenced the reading of the first, since in the charter there is no comparably explicit assertion of what might be called the unalienable rights of the “poor community” over against the king. The claims of the Magna Carta are entirely of, by, and for the barons, whose appeal to custom had no positive implications for the people custom allowed them to despoil.