Cromwell, Lord Protector

Here is an article, made available online for the first time,
from the February 1954 edition of the Socialist Standard.

JUST over three hundred years ago, on December
16th, 1653, Oliver Cromwell took the oath as Lord
Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland. The
occasion of the ter-centenary of this event summoned
forth a number of articles in the Press. Maurice
Ashley, in The Times (15-12-53) was shocked to find
how far the materialist conception of history (though,
of course, seldom acknowledged as such) has spread
among the younger school of historians. He quotes an
Oxford historian as having tried to show "that
Cromwell represented 'the men of the new wealth' who
purposed to overthrow the established ruling classes,"
and goes on,

"An older generation of university historians would
rub their eyes at so fanciful an economic interpretation of
history. Could any reader of Cromwell's letters and
speeches, they might ask, genuinely picture him as an
upstart moved by jealousy and greed, or any student of
contemporary tracts suppose that religion had not been
a central fact in the puritan revolution?"

This article does not propose to discuss the place
of Puritanism in the Great Rebellion; this has been
done with consummate skill by Professor R. H. Tawney
in "Religion and the Rise of Capitalism.?" But it is
proposed to enquire how far the picture of Cromwell
as the representative of the men of new wealth is a
true one.

Marching with the Band in Front

It is of course possible for a leader or figurehead
to be motivated (so far as he himself understands his
motives) entirely by religious considerations, while his
"followers" are acting to protect or advance their
economic interests. "Followers" is put in quotation
marks because in such a case the great mass of men
making up the movement would not be followers at
all; the leader only "marches with the band in front"
like children do. The movement only follows such a
person because it is in the interest of those making up
the movement to do so. As soon as the" leader " gets
out of step, he finds that the movement has pursued
its own course, and he has been left a general without
an army. For example, Mohammed, a religious fanatic
got his big chance when the inhabitants of Medina
invited him to come and rule over them. This they
did not because of religious conviction, but because
they wanted to share in the profits of religious
pilgrimages, which were then going entirely to the great
rival of Medina, Mecca. Five hundred years later, the call
of successive Popes to the faithful to go on Crusade
against the Saracens was successful not because of
religious enthusiasm, but because there was a surplus
of younger sons in the great landed houses who in this
way carved out for themselves estates in the Middle
East. In such cases, is the root cause of the movement
in what inspires the lender, or in what inspires the
"followers"? For as Sir Ernest Barker put it, "what
makes national history most is the action not of lonely
leaders, but of big battalions; and by big battalions I
mean social groups." (Introduction to L D. Jones'
"The English Revolution 1603-1714.")

Righteous judgment

Even it it is allowed, then, that the Great Rebellion
was caused by the emergence of a new class of
men made rich by large-scale trading, allied to the class
of yeomen or small landowners who were found chiefly
in the south-eastern counties, we must still consider if
Cromwell himself was inspired mainly by puritanism.
There is some evidence for this view, but more against
it. First, the evidence for this view.

Certainly Cromwell, like the Kaiser, was always
sure that God was on his side, When he was faced
with the task of subjugating a rebellious Ireland, in
1649, he stormed Drogheda; of the 3,000 troops which
had defended it, he himself wrote "I believe we put
to the sword the whole number of the defendants, I do
not think thirty of the whole number escaped with their
lives. Those that did, are in safe custody for
Barbadoes "-that is, were sold into slavery. This
bloody work he described as " a righteous judment of
God," and he wrote back to the Speaker of the House
of Commons more fully:

"Sir, what can be said of these things? Is it the arm
of the flesh that hath done these things? Is it the wisdom
and counsel, or strength of man? It is the Lord only.
God will curse that man and his house that dares to
think otherwise. Sir, you see the work is done by a
Divine leading."

Cromwell then stormed Wexford, slaughtered the
garrison there too, and wrote again to the Speaker that
"God hath blessed you with a great tract of land in
longitude alongst the shore." It is curious that a full
knowledge of this butchery does not prevent our
modern Nonconformists claiming Cromwell as a blood
brother, inspired by the Holy Scriptures.

Stubble to our swords

After some months of this, Cromwell left to his
lieutenants the work of murdering and enslaving the
Irish, and himself went north to deal with Scotland.
Though at first the English army seemed in a perilous
situation, Cromwell wrote "We have much hope in the
Lord, of whose mercy we have had large experience."
On this occasion the Lord's mercies took tangible shape
in the battle of Dunbar, where 3,000 Scots were killed
or injured, and 10,000 captured. After the battle
Cromwll boasted that "the Lord made them as
stubble to our swords." Further evidence may be
found in the well-known fact that before the battle
Cromwell gave the command to sing a Psalm; surely
this means that he was motivated by religion? But on
further consideration, one observes that Cromwell chose
none of the bloodthirsty Psalms, of which usually he
was inordinately fond; for example, Psalm 110 (the
Lord "shall fill the places with the dead bodies; he
shall wound the heads over many countries") or Psalm
69 ("Let them be blotted out of the book of the
living") - or many more. Psalm 117, which Cromwell
chose, is a very mild one, with nothing to recommend
it - except its brevity; of all the 150 Psalms, this is the
shortest, having only two verses. The moral perhaps
is that if Cromwell hadn't been attentive at Sunday
School, he might well have chosen Psalm 119, which
has one hundred and seventy six verses; and the Scots
would have been able to withdraw to the trackless
moors in their rear before the English army had
finished Psalming at them.

Providence seemed to lead us

These examples of the pious-sounding words used
by Cromwell could be multiplied many times. "The
Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell" by Thomas
Carlyle, is full of instances. But to find the true
character of a man, and the true reasons for his
policies, it is always necessary to examine not only his
words but also his deeds. And we find that both
Cromwell's home and his foreign policy were shaped
by the desires of the commercial class, not by any
religious abstractions.

In 1651 England went to war with Holland, in spite
of the fact that the brand of religion professed by the
Dutch was very similar to that of the Puritans them-
selves. It is true that at that time Cromwell had not
yet become Protector, but he was already so out-
standing a figure in the Government, as well as being
Commander-in-chief of the army, that the Rump would
not have dared to take any action of which he disapproved.
The cause of this war was unashamedly commercial - the
Rump had passed the Navigation Act, which was an attempt
to win back the carrying trade of England and the colonies
from the Dutch. Cromwell brought this war to a successful
conclusion in 1654, and then tumed his attention to the
Spanish Empire. England had a large navy at the end of the
Dutch War, the Spanish West Indies were inadequately
defended, and altogether, as Cromwell himself said,
"Providence seemed to lead us" to an unprovoked
aggression against Spain. This war gained Jamaica and
Dunkirk (also previously a Spanish possession) for the
English Empire. As it happened, Spain was a Catholic
power, which suggests the view that the war was really
a war of religion; but since England was at the same
time allied with another Catholic Power, France, this
view is untenable.

First to his Englishmen

Even Cromwell's speeches themselves show us
that he was by no means blind to economic considerations.
In a speech to the first Parliament elected under
the Instrument of Government, in 1654, he bemoaned
the fact that the trade of the nation was ruined and
the manufacture of cloth at a standstill for want of a
market. (This market Cromwell attempted to provide
by attacking the Spanish Empire.) In another speech
to the same Parliament he pointed with pride to the
fact that the Sound, leading into the Baltic, was now
open, and said "that which was and is the strength
of this nation, the shipping, will now be supplied
thence "-with rope, masts, pitch and tar. Cromwell
even carried his patriotism into his religion. G. M.
Trevelyan tells us in "England under the Stuarts"
that Cromwell held, along with his secretary Milton,
that God revealed himself "as His manner is, first to
His Englishmen."

A study of Cromwell's home policy reveals plainly
the same lesson. Same of the reforms carried
out under the Commonwealth, although they were all
held to be nullities at the Restoration, were immediately
re-enacted by the extreme anti-Puritan Anglicans who
held power after 1660 - for example, the Navigation
Act, the provision in the Instrument of Government
for triennial Parliaments, and the abolition of the
system of holding land by military tenure. Many more
of Cromwell's reforms and policies were abolished in
1660, only to be resuscitated later. Among these were
the abolition of the monarchy (since the last century
this country has been, in effect, "a crowned Republic");
the reform of the franchise; the unification of
Ireland and Scotland with England in one united
Commonwealth, and free trade within that Common-
wealth; the reform of the court of Chancery, and an
attempt to codify the common law; the abolition of
patronage in the Church of England, and the establish-
ment of civil marriage; the maintenance of a fleet
permanently in the Mediterranean; and the setting-up
of an efficient system of local government and police
(which is called in the history books "the rule of the
Major-Generals "). These reforms and policies were
not brought back all at the same time. Some were
re-enacted by the High Church Anglicans of Queen
Anne's reign; some by the Low Church, freethinking
Whigs of the eighteenth century; and some by men of
all shades of religious belief, and of none, in the
nineteenth century. All these men were very different,
in point of religion, from the sternly Puritan and
evangelic Cromwell. What they had in common with
him was not any particular set of religious principles,
but the desire to preserve and extend the interests of
the commercial class, and to carry out the reforms in
the structure of society desired by that class.
Cromwell genuinely thought of himself as a chosen
instrument of God, carrying out God's will. But no newly-
emerging ruling class has ever been accurate about its
motives. Every man likes to credit himself with higher
motives than the pursuit of self- or class-interests. But
it is what a man does, not what he says, that shows
what he is: and Cromwell's policies reveal him to have
been, just as much as his comrades-in-arms, a man of
the middle class.

JENKIN.