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Oliver Cromwell, (born April 25, 1599, Huntingdon, Huntingdonshire, England—died September 3, 1658, London), English soldier and statesman, who led parliamentary forces in the English Civil Wars and was lord protector of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1653–58) during the republican Commonwealth.

As one of the generals on the parliamentary side in the English Civil War against King Charles I, Cromwell helped to bring about the overthrow of the Stuart monarchy, and, as lord protector, he raised his country’s status once more to that of a leading European power from the decline it had gone through since the death of Queen Elizabeth I. A man of outstanding gifts and forceful character, he was one of the most remarkable rulers in modern European history. Although a convinced Calvinist, he believed deeply in the value of religious toleration. At the same time, Cromwell’s victories at home and abroad helped to enlarge and sustain a Puritan attitude of mind, both in Great Britain and in North America, that continued to influence political and social life until recent times.

Youth and early public career

Cromwell was born at Huntingdon in eastern England in 1599, the only son of Robert Cromwell and Elizabeth Steward. His father had been a member of one of Queen Elizabeth’s parliaments and, as a landlord and justice of the peace, was active in local affairs. Robert Cromwell died when his son was 18, but his widow lived to the age of 89. Oliver went to the local grammar school and then for a year attended Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. After his father’s death, he left Cambridge to look after his widowed mother and sisters but is believed to have studied for a time at Lincoln’s Inn in London, where country gentlemen were accustomed to acquire a smattering of law. In August 1620 he married Elizabeth, daughter of Sir James Bourchier, a merchant in the City of London. By her he was to have five sons and four daughters

Formative influences

Cromwell was descended indirectly on his father’s side from Henry VIII’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, who had assisted Oliver’s great-grandfather and grandfather in acquiring significant amounts of former monastic land in Huntingdon and in the Fens. Oliver was the eldest surviving son of the younger son of a knight; he inherited a modest amount of property but was brought up in the vicinity of his grandfather, who regularly entertained the king’s hunting party. His education would have presented him with a strong evangelical Protestantism and a powerful sense of God’s providential presence in human affairs.

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During his early married life, Cromwell, like his father, was profoundly conscious of his responsibilities to his fellow men and concerned himself with affairs in his native Fenland, but he was also the victim of a spiritual and psychological struggle that perplexed his mind and damaged his health. He does not appear to have experienced conversion until he was nearly 30; later he described to a cousin how he had emerged from darkness into light. Yet he had been unable to receive the grace of God without feeling a sense of “self, vanity and badness.” He was convinced that he had been “the chief of sinners” before he learned that he was one of God’s Chosen.

In his 30s Cromwell sold his freehold land and became a tenant on the estate of Henry Lawrence at St. Ives in Cambridgeshire. Lawrence was planning at that time to emigrate to New England, and Cromwell was almost certainly planning to accompany him, but the plan failed.

There is no evidence that Cromwell was active in the opposition to Charles I’s financial and social policies, but he was certainly prominent in schemes in East Anglia to protect local preachers from the religious policies of the king and Archbishop William Laud. He had strong links with Puritan groups in London and Essex, and there is some evidence that he attended, and perhaps preached at, an underground conventicle.

Cromwell had already become known in the Parliament of 1628–29 as a fiery and somewhat uncouth Puritan, who had launched an attack on Charles I’s bishops. He believed that the individual Christian could establish direct contact with God through prayer and that the principal duty of the clergy was to inspire the laity by preaching. Thus he had contributed out of his own pocket to the support of itinerant Protestant preachers or “lecturers” and openly showed his dislike of his local bishop at Ely, a leader of the High Church party, which stood for the importance of ritual and episcopal authority. He criticized the bishop in the House of Commons and was appointed a member of a committee to investigate other complaints against him. Cromwell, in fact, distrusted the whole hierarchy of the Church of England, though he was never opposed to a state church. He therefore advocated abolishing the institution of the episcopate and the banning of a set ritual as prescribed in The Book of Common Prayer. He believed that Christian congregations ought to be allowed to choose their own ministers, who should serve them by preaching and extemporaneous prayer.

Cromwell’s election to the Parliaments of 1640 (see Short Parliament; Long Parliament) for the borough of Cambridge was certainly the result of close links between himself and radical Puritans in the city council. In Parliament he bolstered his reputation as a religious hothead by promoting radical reform. In fact, he was too outspoken for the leaders of the opposition, who ceased to use him as their mouthpiece after the early months of the Long Parliament.

Indeed, though Cromwell shared the grievances of his fellow members over taxes, monopolies, and other burdens imposed on the people, it was his religion that first brought him into opposition to the king’s government. When in November 1641 John Pym and his friends presented to King Charles I a “Grand Remonstrance,” consisting of over 200 clauses, among which was one censuring the bishops “and the corrupt part of the clergy, who cherish formality and superstition” in support of their own “ecclesiastical tyranny and usurpation,” Cromwell declared that had it not been passed by the House of Commons he would have sold all he had “the next morning, and never have seen England more.”

The Remonstrance was not accepted by the king, and the gulf between him and his leading critics in the House of Commons widened. A month later Charles vainly attempted to arrest five of them for treason: Cromwell was not yet sufficiently prominent to be among these. But when in 1642 the king left London to raise an army, and events drifted toward civil war, Cromwell began to distinguish himself not merely as an outspoken Puritan but also as a practical man capable of organization and leadership. In July he obtained permission from the House of Commons to allow his constituency of Cambridge to form and arm companies for its defense, in August he himself rode to Cambridge to prevent the colleges from sending their plate to be melted down for the benefit of the king, and as soon as the war began he enlisted a troop of cavalry in his birthplace of Huntingdon. As a captain he made his first appearance with his troop in the closing stages of the Battle of Edgehill (October 23, 1642) where Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, was commander in chief for Parliament in the first major contest of the war.

Military and political leader of Oliver Cromwell

During 1643 Cromwell acquired a reputation both as a military organizer and a fighting man. From the very beginning he had insisted that the men who served on the parliamentarian side should be carefully chosen and properly trained, and he made it a point to find loyal and well-behaved men regardless of their religious beliefs or social status. Appointed a colonel in February, he began to recruit a first-class cavalry regiment. While he demanded good treatment and regular payment for his troopers, he exercised strict discipline. If they swore, they were fined; if drunk, put in the stocks; if they called each other Roundheads—thus endorsing the contemptuous epithet the Royalists applied to them because of their closecropped hair—they were cashiered; and if they deserted, they were whipped. So successfully did he train his own cavalrymen that he was able to check and re-form them after they charged in battle. That was one of Cromwell’s outstanding gifts as a fighting commander.

Throughout 1643 he served in the eastern counties that he knew so well. These formed a recognized centre of parliamentary strength, but, unwilling to stay on the defensive, Cromwell was determined to prevent the penetration of Yorkshire Royalists into the eastern counties and decided to counterattack. By re-forming his men in a moment of crisis in the face of an unbeaten enemy, he won the Battle of Gainsborough in Lincolnshire on July 28. On the same day he was appointed governor of the Isle of Ely, a large plateau-like hill rising above the surrounding fens, that was thought of as a possible bastion against advancing Royalists. In fact, however, Cromwell, fighting alongside the parliamentary general Sir Thomas Fairfax, succeeded in stemming the Royalist attacks at Winceby in Lincolnshire and then successfully besieged Newark in Nottinghamshire. He was now able to persuade the House of Commons, well pleased with these victories, to create a new army, that would not merely defend eastern England but would march out and attack the enemy.

This new army was formed under the command of Edward Montagu, 2nd earl of Manchester, early in 1644. Appearing in the House of Commons, Cromwell, besides commending Manchester for the command, accused some of his fellow officers as incompetents or as being “profane” and “loose” in their conduct. Although not all members of the House of Commons approved of Cromwell’s using his political position to defame other officers, his friends rallied round him, and in 1644 he was appointed Manchester’s second in command, with the rank of lieutenant general, and paid five pounds a day. After an alliance had been concluded with the Scots, he was also appointed a member of the Committee of Both Kingdoms, which became responsible for the overall strategy of the Civil War. But since he was engaged at the front during the campaigning season, Cromwell took little part in its deliberations.

After Manchester’s army had stormed Lincoln in May 1644, it marched north to join the Scots and the Yorkshire parliamentarians at the siege of York. But Charles I’s commander in chief, Prince Rupert, raised the siege. He was, however, defeated in the Battle of Marston Moor, July 2, 1644, that in effect gave the north of England to Parliament. Cromwell had again distinguished himself in the battle, and when Manchester’s army returned to eastern England to rest on its laurels, Cromwell criticized his superior officer for his slowness and lethargy. He did not believe that Manchester really wanted to win the war, and in mid-September he laid his complaints before the Committee of Both Kingdoms. The quarrel between the two commanders was patched up, but after the defeat at Newbury, caused largely by the earl of Manchester’s refusal to support Cromwell’s cavalry with his infantry, it broke into the open once more.

Cromwell now expounded his detailed complaint about Manchester’s military conduct in the House of Commons. Manchester retorted by attacking Cromwell in the House of Lords. It was even planned to impeach Cromwell as “an incendiary.” Once again, however, these quarrels were patched up. In December 1644, Cromwell proposed that in the future no members of either house of Parliament should be allowed to hold commands or offices in the armed forces; his proposal was accepted, and it was also agreed that a new army should be constituted under Sir Thomas Fairfax. Cromwell, an admirer of Fairfax, put forward his name and then busied himself with planning the new army, from which, as a member of Parliament, he himself was excluded. But, significantly, the post of second in command was left open, and, when the Civil War reached its climax in the summer of 1645, Fairfax insisted that Cromwell should be appointed to it. He then fought at the battles of Naseby and Langport, where Charles I’s last two field armies were destroyed. In January 1646 the House of Commons awarded Cromwell £2,500 a year in confiscated Royalist land for his services and renewed his commission for a further six months. Thus he was able to join Fairfax in the siege of Oxford, from which Charles I escaped before it surrendered.

Cromwell was delighted with the way in which the war had gone since Fairfax had taken command of the new army and the lethargic earls of Essex and Manchester had been removed from their commands. He attributed these victories to the mercy of God and demanded that the men who had served the country so faithfully should have their due reward. After Naseby he wrote to the Speaker of the House of Commons urging that such “honest men” should not meet with discouragement: “He that ventures his life for the liberty of his country, I wish he trust God for the liberty of his conscience, and you for the liberty he fights for.”

But once the war was over the House of Commons wanted to disband the army as cheaply and quickly as possible. Disappointed, Cromwell told Fairfax in March 1647 that “never were the spirits of men more embittered than now.” He devoted himself to trying to reconcile the Parliament with the army and was appointed a parliamentary commissioner to offer terms on which the army could be disbanded except for those willing to take part in a campaign in Ireland. As late as May he thought that the soldiers might agree to disband but that they would refuse to serve in Ireland and that they were “under a deep sense of some sufferings.” When the civilian leaders in the House of Commons decided that they could not trust the army and ordered it disbanded, while they hired a Scottish army to protect them, Cromwell, who never liked the Scots and thought that the English soldiers were being disgracefully treated, left London and on June 4, 1647, threw in his lot with his fellow soldiers.

Mediation and the second Civil War of Oliver Cromwell

For the remainder of this critical year he attempted to find a peaceful settlement of the kingdom’s problems, but his task seemed insoluble, and soon his good faith was freely called into question. The army was growing more and more restive, and, on the day Cromwell left London, a party of soldiers seized Charles I. Cromwell and his son-in-law, Henry Ireton, interviewed the king twice, trying to persuade him to agree to a constitutional settlement that they then intended to submit to Parliament. At that time Cromwell, no enemy of the king, was touched by his devotion to his children. His main task, however, was to overcome the general feeling in the army that neither the king nor Parliament could be trusted. When, under pressure from the rank and file, General Fairfax led the army toward the houses of Parliament in London, Cromwell still insisted that the authority of Parliament must be upheld, and in September he also resisted a proposal in the House of Commons that no further addresses should be made to the king. Just over a month later he took the chair at meetings of the General Council of the Army (which included representatives of the private soldiers known as Agitators [Adjutators]) and assured them that he was not committed to any particular form of government and had not had any underhand dealings with the king. On the other hand, fearing anarchy, he opposed extremist measures such as the abolition of the monarchy and the House of Lords and the introduction of a more democratic constitution.

But all Cromwell’s efforts to act as a mediator between army, Parliament, and king came to nothing when Charles I escaped from Hampton Court Palace, where he had been kept in honourable captivity, and fled to the Isle of Wight to open negotiations with Scottish commissioners offering to restore him to the throne on their terms. On January 3, 1648, Cromwell abandoned his previous position and, telling the House of Commons that the king was “an obstinate man, whose heart God had hardened,” agreed to a vote of no addresses, which was carried. The Royalists, encouraged by the king’s agreement with the Scots and the failure of Cromwell to unite Parliament and the army, took up arms again and the second Civil War began.

General Fairfax first ordered Cromwell into Wales to crush a rising there and then sent him north to fight the Scottish army that invaded England in June. Though his army was inferior in numbers to that of the Scots and northern Royalists, he defeated them both in a campaign in Lancashire; then he entered Scotland and restored order there; finally he returned to Yorkshire and took charge of the siege of Pontefract. The correspondence he conducted during the siege with the governor of the Isle of Wight, whose duty it was to keep watch on the king, reveals that he was increasingly turning against Charles. Parliamentary commissioners had been sent to the island in order to make one final effort to reach an agreement with the king. But Cromwell told the governor that the king was not to be trusted, that concessions over religion must not be granted, and that the army might be considered a lawful power capable of ensuring the safety of the people and the liberty of all Christians.

Witness the trial records and the death warrant of King Charles I with Oliver Cromwell's signature and seal, in the United Kingdom Parliamentary Archives

Witness the trial records and the death warrant of King Charles I with Oliver Cromwell's signature and seal, in the United Kingdom Parliamentary ArchivesSee all videos for this article

While Cromwell, still not entirely decided on his course, lingered in the north, his son-in-law Ireton and other officers in the southern army took decisive action. They drew up a remonstrance to Parliament complaining about the negotiations in the Isle of Wight and demanding the trial of the king as a Man of Blood. While Cromwell still felt uncertain about his own views, he admitted that his army agreed with the army in the south. Fairfax now ordered him to return to London, but he did not arrive until after Ireton and his colleagues had removed from the House of Commons all members who favoured continuing negotiations with the king. Cromwell asserted that he had not been acquainted with the plan to purge the House, “yet since it was done, he was glad of it, and would endeavour to maintain it.” Hesitating up to the last moment, Cromwell, pushed on by Ireton, by Christmas Day finally accepted Charles’s trial as an act of justice. He was one of the 135 commissioners in the High Court of Justice and, when the king refused to plead, he signed the death warrant.

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First chairman of the Council

After the British Isles were declared a republic and named the Commonwealth, Oliver Cromwell served as the first chairman of the Council of State, the executive body of a one-chamber Parliament. During the first three years following Charles I’s execution, however, he was chiefly absorbed in campaigns against the Royalists in Ireland and Scotland. He also had to suppress a mutiny, inspired by a group known as Levelers, an extremist Puritan party said to be aiming at a “levelling” between rich and poor, in the Commonwealth army. Detesting the Irish as primitive, savage, and superstitious, he believed they had carried out a huge massacre of English settlers in 1641. As commander in chief and lord lieutenant, he waged a ruthless campaign against them, though when he refused quarter to most of the garrison at Drogheda near Dublin in September 1649, he wrote that it would “tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future,…which otherwise cannot but work remorse and regret.” On his return to London in May 1650 Cromwell was ordered to lead an army into Scotland, where Charles II had been acknowledged as its new king. Fairfax had refused the command, so on June 25 Cromwell was appointed captain general in his place. He felt more tender toward the Scots, most of whom were fellow Puritans, than toward the Catholic Irish. The campaign proved difficult, and during the winter of 1650 Cromwell was taken ill. But he defeated the Scots with an army inferior in numbers at the Battle of Dunbar on September 3, 1650, and a year later, when Charles II and the Scots advanced into England, Cromwell destroyed that army at Worcester.

This battle ended the Civil Wars. Cromwell now hoped for pacification, a political settlement, and social reform. He pressed through an “act of oblivion” (amnesty), but the army became more and more discontented with Parliament. It believed that the members were corrupt and that a new Parliament should be called. Once again Cromwell tried to mediate between the two antagonists, but his sympathies were with his soldiers. When he finally came to the conclusion that Parliament must be dissolved and replaced, he called in his musketeers and on April 20, 1653, expelled the members from the House. He asserted that they were “corrupt and unjust men and scandalous to the profession of the Gospel”; two months later he set up a nominated assembly to take their place. In a speech on July 4 he told the new members that they must be just, and, “ruling in the fear of God,” resolve the affairs of the nation.

Cromwell seems to have regarded this “Little Parliament” as a constituent body capable of establishing a Puritan republic. But just as he had considered the previous Parliament to be slow and self-seeking, he came to think that the Assembly of Saints, as it was called, was too hasty and too radical. He also resented the fact that it did not consult him. Later he described this experiment of choosing Saints to govern as an example of his own “weakness and folly.” He sought moderate courses and also wanted to end the naval war begun against the Dutch in 1652. When in December 1653, after a coup d’etat planned by Major General John Lambert and other officers, the majority of the Assembly of Saints surrendered power into Cromwell’s hands, he decided reluctantly that Providence had chosen him to rule. As commander in chief appointed by Parliament, he believed that he was the only legally constituted authority left. He therefore accepted an “Instrument of Government” drawn up by Lambert and his fellow officers by which he became lord protector, ruling the three nations of England, Scotland, and Ireland with the advice and help of a council of state and a Parliament, which had to be called every three years.

Administration as lord protector of Oliver Cromwell

Before Cromwell summoned his first Protectorate Parliament on September 3, 1654, he and his Council of State passed more than 80 ordinances embodying a constructive domestic policy. His aim was to reform the law, to set up a Puritan Church, to permit toleration outside it, to promote education, and to decentralize administration. The resistance of the lawyers somewhat dampened his enthusiasm for law reform, but he was able to appoint good judges both in England and Ireland. He was strongly opposed to severe punishments for minor crimes, saying: “to see men lose their lives for petty matters…is a thing that God will reckon for.” For him murder, treason, and rebellion alone were subject to capital punishment. During his Protectorate, committees known as Triers and Ejectors were set up to ensure that a high standard of conduct was maintained by clergy and schoolmasters. In spite of resistance from some members of his council Cromwell readmitted Jews into the country. He concerned himself with education, was an excellent chancellor of Oxford University, founded a college at Durham, and saw to it that grammar schools flourished as they had never done before.

Foreign and economic policies

In 1654 Cromwell brought about a satisfactory conclusion to the Anglo-Dutch War, which, as a contest between fellow Protestants, he had always disliked. The question then arose of how best to employ his army and navy. His Council of State was divided, but eventually he resolved to conclude an alliance with France against Spain. He sent an amphibious expedition to the Spanish West Indies, and in May 1655 Jamaica was conquered. As the price for sending an expeditionary force to Spanish Flanders to fight alongside the French he obtained possession of the port of Dunkirk. He also interested himself in Scandinavian affairs; although he admired King Charles X of Sweden, his first consideration in attempting to mediate in the Baltic was the advantages that would result for his own country. In spite of the emphasis Cromwell laid on the Protestant interest in some of his speeches, the guiding motive in his foreign policy was national and not religious benefit.

His economic and industrial policy followed mainly traditional lines. But he opposed monopolies, which were disliked by the country and had only benefited the court gentry under Queen Elizabeth and the first two Stuarts. For this reason the East Indian trade was thrown open for three years, but in the end Cromwell granted the company a new charter (October 1657) in return for financial aid. Satisfactory methods of borrowing had not yet been discovered; hence—like those of practically all European governments of his time—Cromwell’s public finances were by no means free from difficulties.

Relations with Parliament

When Cromwell’s first Parliament met, he justified the establishment of the Protectorate as providing for “healing and settling” the nation after the Civil Wars. Arguing that his government had prevented anarchy and social revolution, he was particularly critical of the Levelers who, he said, wished to destroy well-tested institutions “whereby England hath been known for hundreds of years.” He believed that they wanted to undermine “the ‘natural’ magistracy of the nation” as well as “make the tenant as liberal a fortune as the landlord.” He also thought that the spiritual anarchy that followed the destruction of the Anglican church had gone too far, for now ordained preachers were frequently interrupted or shouted down in their pulpits. A radical in some directions, such as in seeking the reform of the laws, Cromwell now adopted a conservative attitude because he feared that the overthrow of the monarchy might lead to political collapse.

But vociferous republicans, who became leaders of this newly elected Parliament, were unwilling to concentrate on legislation, questioning instead the whole basis of Cromwell’s government. Cromwell insisted that they must accept the “four fundamentals” of the new constitution that, he argued, had been approved both by “God and the people of these nations.” The four fundamentals were government by a single person and Parliament; the regular summoning of parliaments, which must not be allowed to perpetuate themselves; the maintenance of “liberty of conscience”; and the division of the control of the armed forces between the protector and Parliament. Cromwell said that he would sooner be “rolled into my grave and buried with infamy, than I can give my consent” to the “wilful throwing away of this Government,…so owned by God, so approved by men.” He therefore required all members of Parliament, if they wished to keep their seats, to sign an engagement to be faithful to a protector and Parliament and to promise not to alter its basic character. Except for 100 convinced republicans, the members agreed to do so but were still more concerned with rewriting the constitution than reforming the laws as desired by the protector. As soon as he could legitimately do so (January 22, 1655), Cromwell dissolved Parliament.

In the aftermath of that Parliament, Cromwell faced a Royalist insurrection. The rising fizzled out—too many of those who had secretly pledged support to the king waited to see what others were doing—but Cromwell was aware that local magistrates and militia commissioners had closely monitored the situation. He could rely on the acquiescence of the gentry but not on any commitment from them. He therefore determined to increase security by sending senior army officers (the major generals) to recruit veterans of the Civil Wars into an efficient militia, the costs of which would be defrayed by collections from all those convicted of royalism in the1640s. The major generals also were encouraged to promote “a reformation of manners”—a program of moral rearmament. They ran into serious trouble when the next Parliament met a year early (in 1656, to vote on taxes to pay for a war by land and sea against the Spanish). In that Parliament Cromwell’s broad policy of religious toleration also came under fire, especially in relation to the Quakers. In the spring of 1657 Parliament voted to invite Cromwell to become king, since kingship was an office “interwoven with the fundamental laws” of the nation, as Cromwell himself stated, and there would be an end to constant innovation. Torn between his desire for “settlement” and his continued yearning for a godly reformation, he hesitated for many weeks and then declined the title. Cromwell did agree, however, to a new constitutional arrangement that restored many of the trappings of monarchy, including the restoration of a House of Lords. That decision provoked a republican backlash, and Cromwell’s final parliamentary session (January–February 1658) ended in bitter recrimination and in accusations of a new “Egyptian bondage.”

Ever since the campaign in Ireland, Cromwell’s health had been poor. In August 1658, after his favourite daughter, Elizabeth, died of cancer, he contracted malaria and was taken to London with the intention of living in St. James’s Palace. But he died in Whitehall at three o’clock on September 3, the anniversary of two of his greatest victories. The embalmers bungled their work, and his putrefying body was secretly interred several weeks before his state funeral and the interment of a probably empty coffin in Westminster Abbey on November 23, 1658. In 1661, after the Restoration of Charles II and on the anniversary of the regicide, a corpse that may or may not have been Cromwell’s was exhumed and hung up at Tyburn, where criminals were executed. That body was then buried beneath the gallows. But the head was stuck on a pole on top of Westminster Hall, where it is known to have remained until the end of Charles II’s reign.

Courtesy--Maurice Ashley

John S. Morrill
- Cromwell Oliver

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