Rebellion: The History of England from James I to the Glorious Revolution (52 page)

A royalist agent in London, Allan Broderick, reported to Edward Hyde that the army ‘is infected with sedition’ and that the treasury was exhausted; he added that the countries of Europe were ‘cold friends or close enemies’ and that the people of England were labouring under ‘an unwearied restless spirit of innovation’. Yet Broderick said of Cromwell himself that ‘the man is seemingly desperate, any other in his condition would be deemed irrecoverable, but as the dice of the gods never throw out, so is there something in the fortune of this villain that often renders ten to one no odds’.

This message was designed to encourage Charles Stuart. It was reported that the exiled king was waiting in Flanders with an army of 8,000 men, ready to strike at the first favourable opportunity. Another royalist insurrection was planned for the spring, but once more the plotters were betrayed and taken; four of them were found by Colonel Barkstead, the lieutenant of the Tower, in what he called ‘a desperate malignant alehouse’. Other royalists were beheaded or hanged, drawn and quartered, but the majority were consigned to gaol.

Another fortunate throw of the dice also favoured Cromwell. In the early summer of the year the forces of the French and English scattered the Spanish just outside Dunkirk in the ‘battle of the dunes’; Dunkirk, hitherto held by Spain, was then surrendered to England. It was the first piece of continental territory to fall into English hands since the time of Calais. Since there was a royalist contingent in the Spanish army, victory for Cromwell was all the sweeter. The French king now hailed him as ‘the most invincible of sovereigns’. Yet this praise concealed the truth that the Protector’s expenditure far outran his income; the exchequer was often bare and the pay of his soldiers was in arrears. It was said that his ministers had to go ‘a-begging’ to the merchants of the City.

Sickness was also in the air. A malignant fever, called ‘the new disease’, had arisen. In the spring of 1658 the new epidemic spread, in the words of a contemporary, Dr Willis, ‘as if sent by some blast of the stars’. Cromwell himself laboured under the burden of personal rule to the extent that, as one of his servants, John Maidstone, said, ‘it drank up his spirits’. His private suffering was then increased by the death of his most loved daughter, Elizabeth Claypole, at the beginning of August from an obscure or undiagnosed disease; the event, though long expected, had a violent effect upon him. Thurloe reported that ‘he lay very ill of the gout and other distempers, contracted by the long sickness of my lady Elizabeth, which made great impressions on him’; he became dangerously ill, but then recovered sufficiently to ride in Hampton Court Park.

When one of the leaders of the Quakers, George Fox, visited Cromwell, however, he reported that ‘I saw and felt a waft of death go forth against him, and when I came to him he looked like a dying man’. In the last week of August Cromwell fell sick again with a condition then known as ‘tertian ague’, a form of malaria with fits every three days. It began with chills and sensations of coldness which were followed by a stage of dry heat that ended in a drenching sweat.

He was taken back to Whitehall where, as Thurloe put it, ‘our fears are more than our hopes’. Prayer meetings assembled throughout the capital. His condition varied from rally to relapse, as all the time he grew weaker, but he was said to have prayed for ‘God’s cause’ and ‘God’s people’. He asked one of his doctors why he looked so sad.

‘How can I look otherwise, when I have the responsibility of your life upon me?’

‘You doctors think I shall die.’ His wife was sitting by his bedside and he took her hand. ‘I tell thee I shall not die of this bout; I am sure I shall not. Do not think I am mad. I tell you the truth.’ He then told the astonished doctor that this was the answer God had given to his prayers. He also questioned one of his chaplains.

‘Tell me. Is it possible to fall from grace?’

‘It is not possible.’

‘Then I am safe; for I know that I was once in grace.’

He had always been sustained by the notion that he was one of the elect; his pride and his piety were thereby combined, giving him that irresistible power to remove all obstacles in his path. Yet there were many times when he did not know what to do, when he waited for a sign. He once said that no man rises so high as one that does not know where he is going. He had reached the height of his command through a mixture of guile, zeal and adventitious circumstance; no one could have predicted the series of measures and counter-measures that had led to his ascendancy. It did not matter that he was inconsistent, in turns pragmatic and authoritarian, as long as the force of righteousness was with him. That is why he believed above all else in ‘providence’ as both the cause and justification of his actions.

On Thursday 2 September it became clear that he was dying. One of his physicians offered him a sleeping draught but he replied that ‘it is not my design to drink or to sleep, but my design is to make what haste I can to be gone’. Five officers, called to the deathbed, testified that he had declared that his son, Richard Cromwell, should succeed him. He died on the afternoon of 3 September which had been called by him his ‘fortunate day’ as the anniversary of his victories at Dunbar and at Worcester. His battles were all now over.

*   *   *

When in 1650 Oliver Cromwell came back to England, after his successful campaign in Ireland, he was greeted by ‘
An
Horatian
Ode upon
Cromwel’s
Return from
Ireland’. It has been described as the greatest political poem in the English language, but it is not the most transparent. Andrew Marvell was at this time a poet of no great account. He had been educated well, and had made the obligatory tour of Europe. He might have become a clergyman or secretary to some great man; instead he lived off the sale of some lands in the north, and revolved in the circles of London literature.

He seems to have first been attached to some royalist poets or poetasters but the crucial victories of Cromwell, and the execution of the king, gave him pause. It might be time to find patronage among the new rulers of the land, and it may be that he composed his ‘Ode’ with some such purpose in sight. Yet his words, distilled as if in an alembic, testify to his creative ambiguity and equivocation. His mind is so finely tempered that he can become both royalist and republican at the same time; he is open to all possible opinions, and thus finds it impossible to choose between them. He is in the position of one who, on coming to a judgement, realizes at the same time that the opposite is also true. We may therefore discuss Marvell here as representative of the confusion that must have been experienced by many others in this period of change and conflict. The poem itself was composed in the interval between Cromwell’s return from Ireland and his subsequent campaign in Scotland.

In the opening lines of the ‘Ode’ Cromwell is one who finds fulfilment not in ‘the inglorious Arts of Peace’ but in ‘advent’rous War’ through which he takes his ‘fiery way’. This might not necessarily be construed as a compliment but Marvell is withholding judgement as well as praise. He goes on to declare that:

’Tis Madness to resist or blame

The force of angry Heavens flame:

And, if we would speak true,

Much to the Man is due.

This is as much as to say that Cromwell cannot be resisted and should not in any case be censored or condemned. He may have emerged into the light as part of the inexorable movement of time, or of historical necessity, but in that respect his personal failings are of no consequence. It was his destiny (providential or otherwise) to

… cast the Kingdom old

Into another Mold.

Though Justice against Fate complain,

And plead the antient Rights in vain:

But those do hold or break

As Men are strong or weak.

Cromwell is in other words a strong man whose strength is its own reward. If justice has been sacrificed in the process, it is a necessary and inevitable consequence of change. Cromwell is in any case a creature of ‘Fate’ rather than of ‘Justice’, decisive and undeflectable. A leader may be both redeemer and despot. It had often happened in the history of the world, and Marvell’s contemporaries were thoroughly acquainted with the career of Julius Caesar.

So this is a poetry of doubt and ambiguity rather than of praise and affirmation, which may thus reflect a more general distrust and uncertainty concerning Cromwell’s motives in these crucial years. It can only be confirmed that he has:

Nor yet grown stiffer with Command,

But still in the
Republick’s
hand:

How fit he is to sway

That can so well obey.

It can at least be said that Cromwell has not become a tyrant. Marvell does not take sides because there are no sides to take, and we may recall T. S. Eliot’s remark upon Henry James that ‘he had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it’. Marvell’s almost impenetrable reserve and self-effacement are also evident. He utters no real opinion of his own, and seems ready to retreat at almost any moment into silence. This, too, may have been the stance of many contemporaries in the face of Cromwell’s supremacy.

Four years later Marvell applied himself once more to the phenomenon of Oliver Cromwell with ‘T
HE
F
IRST
A
NNIVERSARY
of the Government under O.C.’. This is a much more positive account of Cromwell’s rule, but it would be fair to say that it is a panegyric on the nature of protectorate government rather than on the Protector himself. Cromwell is compared to Amphion who with his brother raised the city of Thebes by means of music. So:

No Note he struck, but a new Story lay’d

And the great Work ascended while he play’d.

Cromwell is here praised for creating a structure of government that will, like Thebes, endure. He has also been able to create a unique form of leadership that was an appropriate substitute for royal government:

For to be
Cromwell
was a greater thing,

Then ought below, or yet above a King:

Therefore thou rather didst thy Self depress,

Yielding to Rule, because it made thee Less.

This polity has created a system of government that avoids the extremes of liberty or oppression:

’Tis not a Freedome, that where All command;

Nor Tyranny, where One does them withstand:

But who of both the Bounders knows to lay

Him as their Father must the State obey.

As a result England was respected and feared by all of its neighbouring nations:

He seems a King by long Succession born,

And yet the same to be a King does scorn.

Abroad a King he seems, and something more,

At Home a Subject on the equal Floor.

This might be described as the ‘party line’ for Cromwell’s adherents, and may or may not reflect Marvell’s private thoughts on the matter. The difficulties of Cromwell’s position as Protector, and the emergence of many agents of opposition to his rule, are not mentioned. Marvell is giving expression to the opinions of many people, however, who seem to have believed that the government of a Protector was more effective than the government of parliament. The poetry here is of great fluency and sophistication; it is precise but not pointed, hard but not wooden, eloquent but not facile.

The last poem by Marvell on Cromwell is also the most intimate. He had become by this time well known to the Protector’s household; he had been asked to compose songs for the marriage of Mary Cromwell to Lord Fauconberg, and had been commissioned by Cromwell to write poems for Christina of Sweden. In 1657 he had been given employment as assistant to John Milton in Milton’s position as Secretary of Foreign and Latin Tongues. So ‘A Poem upon the Death of O.C.’, written in 1658, was his last gift to an employer whom he may have come to love as well as admire. It seems more than likely that he was allowed to enter the death chamber and to view Cromwell’s corpse:

I saw him dead, a leaden slumber lyes,

And mortal sleep over those wakefull eyes:

Those gentle Rays under the lids were fled,

Which through his looks that piercing sweetnesse shed;

That port which so Majestique was and strong,

Loose and depriv’d of vigour, stretch’d along:

All wither’d, all discolour’d, pale and wan,

How much another thing, no more that man?

35

The young gentleman

It was believed by some that after the death of Oliver Cromwell the fabric of the commonwealth would be torn apart; the centre would not hold. Yet the succession of his oldest son, Richard Cromwell, passed off without any commotion. No great public mourning was aroused by his father’s death, and very little debate was instituted about his role or his legacy. John Evelyn witnessed the Protector’s funeral where ‘there were none that cried but dogs, which the soldiers hooted away with a barbarous noise, drinking and taking tobacco in the streets as they went’.

Richard Cromwell was a modest and self-effacing man with none of the natural authority or commanding presence of his father. He was, according to an appendix to James Mackintosh’s
Eminent British Statesmen
, ‘a person well skilled in hawking, hunting, horse-racing, with other sports and pastimes’. Allusions were made to ‘Queen Dick’. He admitted soon after his accession that ‘it might have pleased God, and the nation too, to have chosen out a person more fit and able for this work than I am’.