Rebellion: The History of England from James I to the Glorious Revolution (50 page)

Yet the new parliament was by no means a compliant body. For some days its members had debated, without reaching any conclusion, whether they should give the protectorate their support. On 12 September they found the doors of their chamber closed against them, and they were asked once more to assemble in the Painted Chamber where the Protector wished to address them. He chided them for neglecting the interest of the state, ‘so little valued and so much slighted’, and he would not allow them to proceed any further unless and until they had signed an oath to agree to ‘the form of government now settled’. All members had to accept the condition that ‘the persons elected shall not have power to alter the government as it is hereby settled in one single person and a Parliament’. ‘I am sorry,’ he said, ‘I am sorry, and I could be sorry to the death that there is cause for this. But there is cause…’

Some members protested and refused to sign, but the majority of them either agreed or at least submitted. Cromwell still did not attempt to guide the debates, but he became increasingly alarmed at their nature. He is reported to have said in this period that he ‘would rather keep sheep under a hedge than have to do with the government of men’. Sheep were at least obedient. The members voted to restrict the power of the Protector to veto legislation; they also decided that their decisions were more authoritative than those of the council of state. They believed, in other words, that parliament should still be paramount in the nation. That was not necessarily Cromwell’s view. From day to day they debated every clause of the ‘Instrument of Government’, with the evident wish to replace it with a constitution of their own. On 3 January 1655 they voted to reaffirm the limits to religious toleration; two days later they decided to reduce army pay, thus striking at Cromwell’s natural constituency. On 20 January they began to discuss the formation of a militia under parliamentary control.

Two days later, Cromwell called a halt. He lambasted them for wasting time in frivolous and unnecessary discourse when they should have been considering practical measures for the general reformation of the nation. He told them that ‘I do not know what you have been doing. I do not know whether you have been alive or dead.’ He considered that it was not fit for the common welfare and the public good to allow them to continue; and so, farewell. The first protectorate parliament was dissolved. The larger problem, however, was not addressed. Could a representative parliament ever co-exist with what was essentially a military dictatorship?

Cromwell and the council once more reigned without challenge, but the price of power was eternal vigilance. In his speech of dissolution Cromwell had warned that ‘the cavalier party have been designing and preparing to put this nation in blood again’ together with ‘that party of men called levellers’. The royalist supporters of the Sealed Knot had indeed survived, despite deportations and executions, and seem to have entered an unlikely association with the radical republicans who shared an interest in removing Cromwell from power. For those of a levelling tendency Cromwell was infinitely worse than Charles; he had used them, betrayed them and set himself up as a despot. Yet the royalists could not even agree among themselves. They had planned six different regional conspiracies in 1654, but the only rebellion was a short and ill-organized affair in the West Country. The spy-master, Thurloe, had done his work.

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Cromwell had been considering a possible friendship or alliance with Spain, despite the fact that as a Catholic state it was one of the horns of the beast. He had said to a Spanish envoy that an alliance was possible on the conditions that the English were granted liberty of conscience within the Spanish dominions and that free trade be allowed between England and the West Indies. The envoy replied that this was ‘to ask my master’s two eyes’.

Without any agreement, therefore, Cromwell felt emboldened to test Spanish power in the sensitive area of the West Indies. He convinced himself that the action was part of a religious crusade against popery, and he trusted that the warfare would not spread to Europe; he was mistaken, or misguided, in both aspirations. At the end of 1654 Admiral William Penn and General Robert Venables set sail for Barbados with the order ‘to gain an interest in that part of the West Indies in possession of the Spaniards’. They arrived safely enough, in the spring of the following year, but their expedition thereafter was not a success.

The English forces sailed to the island of Hispaniola with the purpose of subduing the city of Santo Domingo and taking its treasure. The men marched for four days through rough country in the burning sun with little fresh water; they were apparently untested soldiers who had no idea of the conditions they would confront. Exhausted and demoralized, they were an easy prey for a group of horsemen and cattle-herders who surprised them in ambush. The remaining members of the expedition, still under the command of Venables, managed to sail on to Jamaica where they were able to take and occupy the island. But at the time it seemed like a poor reward, with the additional risk that Spain might now declare a general war against the old enemy.

The news of the failure to rout Santo Domingo reached Cromwell towards the end of July. He locked himself in his room for an entire day. He had hoped to control the trade and treasure routes of the Spaniards, but he had been thwarted. The new republic had never suffered a military defeat before. He had seen himself as the protector and champion of Protestant interests, but the hand of God seems to have been against him. Cromwell had said, in reply to those who had originally questioned the wisdom of the expedition, that ‘God had not brought us hither where we are but to consider the work that we may do in the world as well as at home’. Yet the Lord had not blessed this work in the world. This caused Cromwell the most painful reflections of his rule, and presaged the fears and doubts that would attend the last years of his protectorate. Wherein had he offended? Or was it the nation itself that had provoked God’s anger?

It may not be coincidental, therefore, that soon after the disaster in the Indies a network of godly rule was established in England. The country was divided into eleven districts, or groups of counties; at the head of each was imposed a major-general of decidedly puritan inclinations. These army commanders were instructed to raise taxes and revive the local militia, to enquire into the conduct of clergy and teachers, to arrest any suspect persons and to prevent further royalist uprisings. Their costs were met by charges imposed on royalists alone. This became known as the ‘decimation tax’, taking one tenth of the ‘malignants’’ profits from the land, an injustice to which they were forced to submit without complaint. The newspapers and periodicals were suppressed, and no item of news could be printed without the permission of John Thurloe.

Cromwell was attempting that reformation of manners which the last parliament had signally failed to achieve. The major-generals were instructed ‘to encourage and promote godliness and virtue’ and, as a result, the pastimes of the people were largely suppressed. Colonel Pride, who had led the purge of parliament seven years before, raided the bear-garden at Bankside; he himself killed the bears, and then ordered his troops to wring the necks of the game-cocks in other parts of London. Alehouses were shut all over the country; stage plays as well as ‘mirths and jollities’ were forbidden.

One major-general, William Boteler, informed Thurloe that he had imprisoned ‘drunken fellows’ and others ‘suspected to live only on the highway’; those accused of illegal brewing or of keeping a ‘lewd house’ were also arrested. Those who travelled on the Lord’s day could be set in the stocks or placed in a cage; unmarried men and women who had ‘carnal knowledge’ of each other could be sent to a house of correction; those who swore or uttered profanities were heavily fined.

Public morals may have been improved by these measures, but public sympathy for Cromwell’s regime was lost. The people did not wish to be governed, or corrected, by military officials with an attendant crew of spies and informers. Some of the major-generals were considered by the gentry to be low-born interlopers, and the natural leaders of the counties did not relish their loss of authority. A nation cannot be made virtuous by diktat or by government inspectors. The experience of the major-generals, with their troops of horse behind them, also helped to augment the national hatred for standing armies.

The experiment did not last for very long; the major-generals were sent to their counties in the autumn of 1655 and were summoned back to Westminster in the spring of the following year for consultation. With a great war against Spain growing ever more likely, fresh revenues were urgently needed; the major-generals seem to have persuaded a reluctant Cromwell to call another parliament rather than impose further taxation by decree. Thus they contrived their own fall. It was not likely that the representatives of the nation, however they were chosen, would tolerate a continuation of godly rule.

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After the attack by Penn and Venables on the Spanish colonies in the Caribbean, Spain declared war on England as a natural and almost inevitable consequence. The West Indian adventure had become a European imbroglio with infinitely more dangerous possibilities. Spain and France were old enemies, however, and Cromwell now inclined towards the court of the young Louis XIV. A commercial treaty was signed in the autumn of 1655, containing certain secret clauses about the expulsion of Charles II from French territory; the English king had in fact already left for Spa and Aachen. Charles then promptly fashioned an agreement with Spain that would allow him to live in the Spanish Netherlands (what is now Belgium and part of northern France); he promised that, on his accession, he would return Jamaica to the Spanish. He was disheartened, always in need of money; he was surrounded by squabbling courtiers. With no realistic prospect of regaining his throne, nothing could ease his distress of mind.

Cromwell was himself in no easy condition. The failure of the expedition to the West Indies, and the onset of war with Spain, had precipitated a sickness described by the French ambassador as ‘a bilious colic, which occasionally flies to the brain’. He added that ‘grief often persecutes him more than either of these, as his mind is not yet accustomed to endure disgrace’. Cromwell survived, but became even more aware of the extent to which the commonwealth relied upon his presence. Who else could preserve the unity and constancy of the state? He was showing signs of his age and of his cares; his hand trembled when he held his hat. ‘Study still to be innocent,’ he told his son, Henry. ‘Cry to the Lord to give you a plain single heart.’

With the plans for a new parliament, and with the preparations for war, Cromwell and his councillors were hard pressed. The Venetian envoy observed that ‘they are so fully occupied that they do not know which way to turn, and the Protector has not a moment to call his own’. Cromwell had no very sanguine expectations about parliament. He may have realized that, far from ‘healing and settling’, the rule of the major-generals had provoked fresh dissension; he must have feared in any case that the combined opposition of republicans and silent royalist supporters might produce a majority against him. He explained later, ‘that it was against my judgement but I could have no quietness till it was done.’

The course of the election campaign was strenuous, and Thurloe wrote to Henry Cromwell that ‘here is the greatest striving to get into Parliament that ever was known’. The call went out against the representatives of the military regime. ‘No swordsmen! No decimators!’ It was a further sign that the country was restless and discomposed. The council of state took measures of its own, however, and excluded approximately one hundred of the elected members for ‘immorality’ or ‘delinquency’; it was another example of brute military power, and provoked much outrage in the country. How could this be called a free parliament?

Cromwell opened its proceedings on 17 September 1656, with a warning of the forces ranged against the country. England was at war with Spain, and the Spanish king was even then preparing to assist Charles Stuart in an invasion launched from Flanders. ‘Why, truly,’ he said employing his usual nervous syntax, ‘your great enemy is the Spaniard. He is. He is a natural enemy, he is naturally so.’ As for the enemy within, the levellers and the cavaliers were plotting to seize a seaport to welcome the king’s forces.

In the course of a long and rambling speech Cromwell defended the major-generals for suppressing vice and for espousing the cause of true religion. And what of the forced taxation to pay for them? ‘If nothing should be done but what is according to law, the throat of the nation may be cut while we send for some to make a law.’ The tenor of this comment is similar to one he had made before, that government should be judged by what is good for the people and not by what pleases them. He was by instinct an authoritarian.

On the day of his speech, three conspirators met to take his life as he entered parliament; they hired a house that stood beside the east door of Westminster Abbey, and planned to shoot him as he left there on his way to the Painted Chamber. They were levellers who wished to return to the old form of a puritan republic. Yet, in the face of a crowd, they lost their nerve and dispersed; it was only the first attempt that the leader of the group, Miles Sindercombe, would undertake. Cromwell, meanwhile, dismissed all such threats as ‘little fiddling things’. News soon came that might yet please the parliament and the nation. At the beginning of October Thurloe announced to parliament that Admiral Blake had seized several Spanish treasure ships on their way back to Cadiz; it was perhaps a sign that God was still with them. Parliament set aside a day for national thanksgiving.

A new Venetian ambassador, Giovanni Sagredo, came to England at this time and wrote that he found ‘not elegant cavaliers but cavalry and infantry; instead of music and ballets they have trumpets and drums; they do not speak of love but of Mars … no patches on their faces but muskets on their shoulders; they do not neglect sleep for the sake of amusements, but severe ministers keep their adversaries in incessant wakefulness. In a word, everything here is full of disdain, suspicion and rough menacing faces…’