Oliver Cromwell

Oliver Cromwell (25 April 1599 – 3 September 1658) ("Old Ironsides")was an English military and political leader best known for his involvement in making England into a republican Commonwealth and for his later role as Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland. He was one of the commanders of the New Model Army, which defeated the royalists in the English Civil War. After the execution of King Charles I in 1649, Cromwell dominated the short-lived Commonwealth of England, conquered Ireland and Scotland, and ruled as Lord Protector from 1653 until his death in 1658.

Early years: 1599–1640

Few sources survive about the first forty years of Cromwell's life. He was born in Huntingdon on 25 April 1599, to Elizabeth and Robert Cromwell (c.1560-1617). He was descended from Catherine Cromwell (born circa 1482), an older sister of Tudor statesman Thomas Cromwell. He married Elizabeth Bourchier (1598–1665), and they had nine children
The social status of Cromwell's family at his birth was relatively low within the gentry class. His father was a younger son, and one of ten siblings who survived into adulthood. As a result, Robert's inheritance was limited to a house in Huntingdon and a small amount of land. This land would have generated an income of up to £300 a year, near the bottom of the range of gentry incomes.
In 1631 Cromwell sold most of his properties in Huntingdon and moved to a farmstead in St Ives. This was a major step down in society compared to his previous position, and seems to have had a major emotional and spiritual impact. A 1638 letter survives from Cromwell to the wife of Oliver St John, and gives an account of his spiritual awakening. The language of this letter, which is saturated with biblical quotations and which represents Cromwell as having been saved from sin by God's mercy, places his faith firmly within the Independent beliefs that the Reformation had not gone far enough, that much of England was still living in sin and unsaved, and that Catholic beliefs and ceremonies needed to be fully removed from the church. Cromwell's conversion to these beliefs may have been prompted by the step down from his previous position in Huntingdon.
Cromwell's house in Ely
In 1636, Cromwell inherited control of various properties in Ely from his uncle on his mother's side, as well as his uncle's job as tithe collector for Ely Cathedral. As a result, his income is likely to have risen to around £300-400 per year, and by the end of the 1630s Cromwell had returned to the ranks of the gentry. He had become a committed puritan and had also established important family links to leading Puritan families in Essex and London. In his own eyes, he had come through a period of crisis by virtue of God’s providence.

Member of Parliament

Cromwell became the Member of Parliament for Huntingdon in the Parliament of 1628–1629, as a client of the Montagus. After dissolving this Parliament, Charles I ruled without a Parliament for the next eleven years. When Charles faced the Scottish rebellion known as the Bishops' Wars, shortage of funds forced him to call a Parliament again in 1640. Cromwell was returned to this Parliament as member for Cambridge, but it lasted for only three weeks and became known as the Short Parliament.
A second Parliament was called later the same year. This was to become known as the Long Parliament. Cromwell was again returned to this Parliament as member for Cambridge. For the first two years of the Long Parliament, Cromwell was linked to the Puritan group of aristocrats in the House of Lords and MPs in the Commons with which he had already established familial and religious links in the 1630s, such as the earls of Essex, Warwick and Bedford, Oliver St John, and Viscount Saye and Sele. At this stage, the group had an agenda of reformation: the executive checked by regular parliaments, and the moderate extension of liberty of conscience. Cromwell appears to have taken a role in some of this group's political manoeuvres.

Military commander: 1642–1646

Failure to resolve the issues before the Long Parliament led to armed conflict between Parliament and Charles I in the autumn of 1642. Before joining Parliament's forces, Cromwell's only military experience was in the trained bands, the local county militia. Now 43 years old, he recruited a cavalry troop in Cambridgeshire after blocking a shipment of silver from Cambridge colleges that was meant for the king. Cromwell and his troop then fought at the indecisive Battle of Edgehill in October 1642. The troop was recruited to be a full regiment in the winter of 1642/3, making up part of the Eastern Association under the Earl of Manchester. Cromwell gained experience and victories in a number of successful actions in East Anglia in 1643, notably at the battle of Gainsborough on July 28. After this he was made governor of Ely and made a colonel in the Eastern Association.
By the time of the Battle of Marston Moor in July, 1644, Cromwell had risen to the rank of Lieutenant General of horse in Manchester's army. The success of his cavalry in breaking the ranks of the Royalist horse and then attacking their infantry from the rear at Marston Moor was a major factor in the Parliamentarian victory in the battle. Cromwell fought at the head of his troops in the battle and was wounded in the head. Marston Moor secured the north of England for the Parliamentarians, but failed to end Royalist resistance.
The indecisive outcome of the second Battle of Newbury in October meant that by the end of 1644, the war still showed no signs of ending. Cromwell's experience at Newbury, where Manchester had let the King's army slip out of an encircling manoeuvre, led to a serious dispute with Manchester, whom he believed to be less than enthusiastic in his conduct of the war. Manchester later accused Cromwell of recruiting men of "low birth" as officers in the army, to which he replied: "If you choose godly honest men to be captains of horse, honest men will follow them... I would rather have a plain russet-coated captain who knows what he fights for and loves what he knows than that which you call a gentleman and is nothing else"
Soldier's catechism for the New Model Army
Partly in response to the failure to capitalise on their victory at Marston Moor, Parliament passed the Self-Denying Ordinance in early 1645. This forced members of the Commons and the Lords such as Manchester to choose between civil office and military command. All of them — with the exception of Cromwell, whose commission was given continued extensions — chose to renounce their military positions. The Ordinance also decreed that the army be "remodeled" on a national basis, replacing the old county associations.
Sir Thomas Fairfax, commander of the New Model Army
In April 1645 the New Model Army finally took to the field, with Sir Thomas Fairfax in command and Cromwell as Lieutenant-General of cavalry, and second-in-command. By this time, the Parliamentarian's field army outnumbered the King's by roughly two to one. At the Battle of Naseby in June 1645, the New Model smashed the King's major army. Cromwell led his wing with great success at Naseby, again routing the Royalist cavalry. At the Battle of Langport on July 10, Cromwell participated in the defeat of the last sizable Royalist field army.
Naseby and Langport effectively ended the King's hopes of victory and the subsequent Parliamentarian campaigns involved taking the remaining fortified Royalist positions in the west of England. In October 1645, Cromwell besieged and took Basing House, where he was accused of killing 100 of the 300 man Royalist garrison there after they had surrendered. Cromwell also took part in sieges at Bridgwater, Sherborne, Bristol, Devizes, and Winchester, then spending the first half of 1646 mopping up resistance in Devon and Cornwall. Charles I surrendered to the Scots on 5 May 1646, effectively ending the First English Civil War. Cromwell and Fairfax took the formal surrender of the Royalists at Oxford in June.

Politics: 1647–1649

In February 1647 Cromwell suffered from an illness that kept him out of political life for over a month. By the time of his recovery, the Parliamentarians were split over the issue of the king. A majority in both Houses pushed for a settlement that would pay off the Scottish army, disband much of the New Model Army, and restore Charles I in return for a Presbyterian settlement of the Church. Cromwell rejected the Scottish model of Presbyterianism, which threatened to replace one authoritarian hierarchy with another. The New Model Army, radicalised by the failure of the Parliament to pay the wages it was owed, petitioned against these changes, but the Commons declared the petition unlawful. During May 1647, Cromwell was sent to the army's headquarters in Saffron Walden to negotiate with them, but failed to reach agreement. Cromwell met with Cornet George Joyce on 31 May, 1647, and in June a troop of cavalry under Cornet Joyce seized the king from Parliament's imprisonment.
Cromwell and Henry Ireton then drafted a manifesto — the "Heads of Proposals" — designed to check the powers of the executive, set up regularly elected parliaments, and restore a non-compulsory episcopalian settlement. Many in the army, such as the Levellers led by John Lilburne, thought this was insufficient demanding full political equality for all men, leading to tense debates in Putney during the autumn of 1647 between Cromwell, Ireton and the army. The Putney Debates ultimately broke up without reaching a resolution. The debates, and the escape of Charles I from Hampton Court on 12 November, are likely to have hardened Cromwell's resolve against the king.
Cromwell & the King
The failure to conclude a political agreement with the king eventually led to the outbreak of the Second English Civil War in 1648, when the King tried to regain power by force of arms. Cromwell first put down a Royalist uprising in south Wales and then marched north to deal with a pro-Royalist Scottish army (the Engagers) who had invaded England. At Preston, Cromwell, in sole command for the first time with an army of 9,000, won a brilliant victory against an army twice that size.
During 1648, Cromwell's letters and speeches started to become heavily based on biblical imagery, many of them meditations on the meaning of particular passages. A letter to Oliver St John in September 1648 urged him to read Isaiah 8, in which the kingdom falls and only the godly survive. This letter suggests that it was Cromwell's faith, rather than a commitment to radical politics, coupled with Parliament's decision to engage in negotiations with the king at the Treaty of Newport, that convinced him that God had spoken against both the king and Parliament as lawful authorities. For Cromwell, the army was now God's chosen instrument. The episode shows Cromwell’s firm belief in "Providentialism"—that God was actively directing the affairs of the world, through the actions of "chosen people" (whom God had "provided" for such purposes). Cromwell believed, during the Civil Wars, that he was one of these people, and he interpreted victories as indications of God's approval of his actions, and defeats as signs that God was directing him in another direction.
In December 1648, those MPs who wished to continue negotiations with the king were prevented from sitting by a troop of soldiers headed by Colonel Thomas Pride, an episode soon to be known as Pride's Purge. Those remaining, known as the Rump Parliament, agreed that Charles should be tried on a charge of treason. Cromwell was still in the north of England, dealing with Royalist resistance when these events took place. However, after he returned to London, on the day after Pride's Purge, he became a determined supporter of those pushing for the king's trial and execution. He believed that killing Charles was the only way to bring the civil wars to an end. The death warrant for Charles was eventually signed by 59 of the trying court's members, including Cromwell (who was the third to sign it). Charles was executed on 30 January 1649.
Execution of Charles I

Establishment of the Commonwealth: 1649

After the execution of the King, a republic was declared, known as the Commonwealth of England. The Rump Parliament exercised both executive and legislative powers, with a smaller Council of State also having some executive functions. Cromwell remained a member of the Rump and was appointed a member of the Council. In the early months after the execution of Charles I, Cromwell tried but failed to unite the original group of 'Royal Independents' which had fractured during 1648. The Royalists, meanwhile, had regrouped in Ireland, having signed a treaty with the Irish Confederate Catholics. In March, Cromwell was chosen by the Rump to command a campaign against them. Preparations for an invasion of Ireland occupied Cromwell in the subsequent months. Cromwell departed for Ireland from Bristol at the end of July.

Irish Campaign: 1649–50

Cromwell's hostility to the Irish was religious as well as political. He was passionately opposed to the Roman Catholic Church, which he blamed for tyranny and persecution of Protestants in Europe. Cromwell's association of Catholicism with persecution was deepened with the Irish Rebellion of 1641. This rebellion was marked by massacres of English and Scottish Protestant settlers by native Irish Catholics in Ireland.
Cromwell’s nine month military campaign was brief and effective, though it did not end the war in Ireland. Before his invasion, Parliamentarian forces held only outposts in Dublin and Derry. When he departed Ireland, they occupied most of the eastern and northern parts of the country. After his landing at Dublin on 15 August 1649 Cromwell took the fortified port towns of Drogheda and Wexford to secure logistical supply from England. At the siege of Drogheda in September 1649, Cromwell's troops massacred nearly 3,500 people after the town's capture—comprising around 2,700 Royalist soldiers and all the men in the town carrying arms, including some civilians, prisoners, and Roman Catholic priests. At the Siege of Wexford in October, another massacre took place under confused circumstances. While Cromwell himself was trying to negotiate surrender terms, some of his soldiers broke into the town, killed 2,000 Irish troops and up to 1,500 civilians, and burned much of the town.
One of his major victories in Ireland was diplomatic rather than military. With the help of Roger Boyle, 1st Earl of Orrery, Cromwell persuaded the Protestant Royalist troops in Cork to change sides and fight with the Parliament At this point, word reached Cromwell that Charles II had landed in Scotland and been proclaimed king by the Covenanter regime. Cromwell therefore returned to England from Youghal on May 26 1650 to counter this threat.
The Parliamentarian conquest of Ireland dragged on for almost three years after Cromwell's departure. The last Catholic held town, Galway, surrendered in April 1652 and the last Irish troops capitulated in April of the following year.

Scottish Campaign: 1650–1651

Cromwell's veteran troops went on to invade Scotland. At first, the campaign went badly, as Cromwell's men were short of supplies and held up at fortifications manned by Scottish troops under David Leslie. Cromwell was on the brink of evacuating his army by sea from Dunbar. However, on September 3, 1650, in an unexpected battle, Cromwell smashed the main Covenanter army at the Battle of Dunbar, killing 4,000 Scottish soldiers, taking another 10,000 prisoner and then capturing the Scottish capital of Edinburgh. The victory was of such a magnitude that Cromwell called it, "A high act of the Lord's Providence to us [and] one of the most signal mercies God hath done for England and His people".
The following year, Charles II and his Scottish allies made a desperate attempt to invade England and capture London while Cromwell was engaged in Scotland. Cromwell followed them south and caught them at Worcester on 3 September 1651. At the subsequent Battle of Worcester, Cromwell's forces destroyed the last major Scottish Royalist army. Many of the Scottish prisoners of war taken in the campaigns died of disease, and others were sent to penal colonies in Barbados. In the final stages of the Scottish campaign, Cromwell's men, under George Monck sacked the town of Dundee, killing up to 2,000 of its 12,000 population and destroying the 60 ships in the city's harbour.

Dissolution of the Rump Parliament

From the middle of 1649 until 1651, Cromwell was away on campaign. In the meantime, with the king gone (and with him their common cause), the various factions in Parliament began to engage in infighting. On his return, Cromwell tried to galvanize the Rump into setting dates for new elections, uniting the three kingdoms under one polity, and to put in place a broad-brush, tolerant national church. However, the Rump vacillated in setting election dates, and although it put in place a basic liberty of conscience, it failed to produce an alternative for tithes or dismantle other aspects of the existing religious settlement. In frustration, in April 1653 Cromwell demanded that the Rump establish a caretaker government of 40 members (drawn both from the Rump and the army) and then abdicate. However, the Rump returned to debating its own bill for a new government. Cromwell was so angered by this that on April 20, 1653, supported by about forty musketeers, he cleared the chamber and dissolved the Parliament by force. Several accounts exist of this incident: in one, Cromwell is supposed to have said "you are no Parliament, I say you are no Parliament; I will put an end to your sitting". At least two accounts agree that Cromwell snatched up the mace, symbol of Parliament's power, and demanded that the "bauble" be taken away. Cromwell's troops were commanded by Charles Worsley, later one of his Major Generals and one of his most trusted advisors, to whom he entrusted the mace.
Cromwell dissolves Parliament
After the dissolution of the Rump, power passed temporarily to a council that debated what form the constitution should take. They took up the suggestion of Major-General Thomas Harrison for a "sanhedrin" of saints. Cromwell was attracted by the idea of an assembly made up of a cross-section of sects. Sometimes known as the Parliament of Saints, the assembly was also called the Barebone's Parliament after one of its members, Praise-God Barebone. The assembly was tasked with finding a permanent constitutional and religious settlement. However, the assembly’s failure to do so led to its members voting to dissolve it on 12 December 1653.

The Protectorate: 1653-1658

After the dissolution of the Barebone's Parliament, John Lambert put forward a new constitution known as the Instrument of Government. It made Cromwell Lord Protector for life.. Cromwell was sworn in as Lord Protector on 16 December 1653, with a ceremony in which he wore plain black clothing, rather than any monarchical regalia. However, from this point on Cromwell signed his name 'Oliver P', standing for Oliver Protector - in a similar style to that used by English monarchs - and it soon became the norm for others to address him as "Your highness". As Protector, he had the power to call and dissolve parliaments but was obliged under the Instrument to seek the majority vote of a Council of State. Nevertheless, Cromwell's power was buttressed by his continuing popularity among the army.
Cromwell had two key objectives as Lord Protector. The first was "healing and settling" the nation after the chaos of the civil wars and the regicide. To Cromwell, the form this healing took was unimportant. Forms of government were to him "but... dross and dung in comparison of Christ". More important was preservation of the traditional social order. Direct taxation was reduced slightly and peace was made with the Dutch, ending the First Anglo-Dutch War.
Cromwell's second objective was spiritual and moral reform. He aimed to restore liberty of conscience and promote both outward and inward godliness throughout England. Cromwell divided England into military districts ruled by Army Major Generals who answered only to him. The fifteen major generals and deputy major generals—called "godly governors"—were central not only to national security, but Cromwell's crusade to reform the nation's morals. The generals not only supervised militia forces and security commissions, but collected taxes and ensured support for the government in the English and Welsh provinces. Commissioners for securing the peace of the commonwealth were appointed to work with them in every county. Most were zealous puritans who welcomed the major-generals with open arms and embraced their work with enthusiasm. The major-generals lasted less than a year. Many feared they threatened their reform efforts and authority. Cromwell's failure to support his men, sacrificing them to his opponents, caused their demise. Their activities between November 1655 and September 1656 had, however, reopened the wounds of the 1640s and deepened antipathies to the regime.
In 1657, Cromwell was offered the crown by Parliament as part of a revised constitutional settlement, presenting him with a dilemma, since he had been "instrumental" in abolishing the monarchy. Cromwell agonized for six weeks over the offer. He was attracted by the prospect of stability it held out, but in a speech on 13 April 1657 he made clear that God's providence had spoken against the office of king: “I would not seek to set up that which Providence hath destroyed and laid in the dust, and I would not build Jericho again”. Instead, Cromwell was ceremonially re-installed as Lord Protector on 26 June 1657 (with greater powers than had previously been granted him under this title) at Westminster Hall, sitting upon King Edward's Chair which was specially moved from Westminster Abbey for the occasion. The event in part echoed a coronation, utilising many of its symbols and regalia, such as a purple ermine-lined robe, a sword of justice and a sceptre (but not a crown or an orb). But, most notably, the office of Lord Protector was still not to become hereditary, though Cromwell was now able to nominate his own successor. Cromwell's new rights and powers were laid out in the Humble Petition and Advice, a legislative instrument which replaced the Instrument of Government. Cromwell increasingly took on more of the trappings of monarchy.

Death and posthumous execution

Cromwell is thought to have suffered from malaria (probably first contracted while on campaign in Ireland) and from "stone", a common term for urinary/kidney infections. In 1658 he was struck by a sudden bout of malarial fever, followed directly by an attack of urinary/kidney symptoms. A Venetian physician tracked Cromwell's final illness, saying Cromwell's personal physicians were mismanaging his health, leading to a rapid decline and death, which was also hastened by the death of his favourite daughter Elizabeth Cromwell in August at age 29. He died at Whitehall on 3 September 1658, the anniversary of his great victories at Dunbar and Worcester.
He was succeeded as Lord Protector by his son Richard. Although Richard was not entirely without ability, he had no power base in either Parliament or the Army, and was forced to resign in May 1659, bringing the Protectorate to an end. In the period immediately following his abdication the head of the army, George Monck, took power for less than a year, at which point Parliament restored Charles II as king.
In 1661, Oliver Cromwell's body was exhumed from Westminster Abbey, and was subjected to the ritual of a posthumous execution, as were the remains of John Bradshaw and Henry Ireton. Symbolically, this took place on January 30; the same date that Charles I had been executed. His body was hanged in chains at Tyburn. Finally, his disinterred body was thrown into a pit, while his severed head was displayed on a pole outside Westminster Abbey until 1685.
Cromwell's head
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