William Tyler
Cromwell and the English Republic

William Tyler - Cromwell and the English Republic

- So, okay, I’m going to hand over to you. Looking forward to your presentation. Thanks so much, once again, and thanks to Judy.

• Thank you, Wendy, and welcome to everybody. My topic today is Cromwell and the Republic, the Republic of England, and then the Republic of Britain. I’m going to start by saying something, I suppose it’s quite trite. Cromwell is a complex figure with a complex afterlife. I don’t believe, which was a question raised by someone last week, I don’t believe there’s much evidence of him being popular amongst ordinary people during his lifetime. And since his death in 1658, the restoration of the monarchy two years later, and the Constitutional Settlement of 1688, Cromwell has been mostly either ignored or vilified, the majority of English people being quite happy to remain loosely monarchists. To true monarchists, of course, there was never a rule of Cromwell. Charles II reign they date from the moment that his father was executed in 1649 and not the date of his return to England in 1660. But of course, that’s just playing with things. Because between 1649 and 1660, England, and later Britain, was a republic. They used the word or famously used the word a Commonwealth.

We talk about the Commonwealth today, which is a very different concept, but Commonwealth, the common wheel, was the sort of popular word that was used. The concept of a republic emerges later in the 18th century, really, through the French and the influence of the French. At school, in the 1950s, the period of the Commonwealth, 1649 to 1660, was referred to as the Interregnum, that is between reigns. And that’s how many British children, school children, were taught about it. It was between reigns, it led nowhere, was the common view at the time in the 1950s. Over the last 70 years, there’s been a recalculation of Cromwell and Cromwell’s rule. And I think I mentioned the book last time, written by Professor Ronald Hutton of the University of Bristol on Cromwell’s, first half of Cromwell’s life, which is an outstanding book with outstanding research. I only hope that he will lead on to a second volume dealing with the period that we are dealing with today, the post-Civil War period. The aftermath of Cromwell is interesting. In 1661, on the anniversary of his father’s execution, Charles II had Cromwell’s corpse brought to Tyburn, where it was first hanged and then executed. It must have been a terribly gruesome sight. The man had been dead two and a half years. The severed head was then displayed on Westminster Hall on a spike. We don’t know when it was taken down, but sometime in the 1680s, it had rotted so much it just fell down. Today, we know where it is and we’ve been able to trace its provenance from that moment that it fell down right through to the fact that now, it resides in Cromwell’s own college of Sydney Sussex College at the University of Cambridge.

Even today, in 2021, Cromwell’s name has the ability to stir passions, mainly on the right rather than on the left. On the right, Cromwell’s name became a byword for Puritanism, for people against fun and games, if you like. And only in last week’s Times newspaper, I saw this. “The historian Dan Snow’s network of historical podcasts has done so well that he threw a Christmas party on Tuesday before the modern Cromwells banned them. Before the modern Cromwells banned them.” And that actually, I think probably in truth, goes further than the political right. It’s deep in English DNA. We don’t like governments banning fun. The worst thing any British government could do was to ban football matches or, in American language, soccer matches on a Saturday afternoon. It would lead to revolution here almost. We don’t like that. And it dates from Cromwell’s time. For the left, Cromwell is not a good figure. He certainly lacked the standard picture of a freedom fighter. He isn’t glamorous. He lacked glamour, but he is also not on the left. True, he led what we call a revolution, but he was on the right.

He’s very traditionalist, he’s very middle class, he’s English gentry. And the last thing the English gentry want is real revolution. And when there were signs of real revolution after the execution of the king in 1649, Cromwell crushed it. The so-called levellers that wanted everyone to be equal, the diggers who wanted everyone to have pieces of land, all of that was anathema to the gentry, as of course was any rise in taxes. And Cromwell managed to alienate many of his own kind by raising taxes. And, of course, he had to raise taxes. Paid for the war that he had fought against the king and to pay for wars against Spain and the Dutch that he entered into. Some historians believe he entered into those wars to keep the army busy so that the army wouldn’t turn on him in the 1650s. And there may be some truth in that. All efforts to portray Cromwell as a hero of a radical left simply failed in the face of facts. So let me be quite clear from the beginning. Cromwell’s aim during the course of the Civil War was not to defeat and certainly not to bring the king to court and last of all execute him, but rather to bring the king to his senses so that he would rule not as an autocrat, but along with Parliament. It was a traditional view of how England was ruled, by king and Parliament.

And that’s what Cromwell wanted out of Charles. But Charles, what it did for him was his belief that he was appointed by God and could do no wrong and that if he didn’t want to go with Parliament, he was quite entitled to say so. And he was stubborn, stubborn as a mule. And even when he was losing the Civil War, even lost the Civil War after the battle of Naseby in ‘45, he would not negotiate openly and genuinely with the English Parliament. In fact, he negotiated instead with the Scots behind the English Parliament’s back and persuaded the Scots to go to war again on his behalf in 1648. And Cromwell had to don his armour once more and head north for battle. On the 17th of March 1648, he defeated the Scots at the Battle of Preston in Lancashire and then on the 3rd of September, 1650, he annihilated the Scots in Scotland at the Battle of Dunbar. But the consequence of Charles unleashing of what historians called the Second Civil War, the consequence was that Oliver Cromwell had lost entire patience with this man whom he could not deal with, who could not be trusted to do a deal.

And the only solution was to get rid of him, not with a dagger in the dark, a poisoned cup of cocoa, or whatever at night as the Italians might have done in this period, but instead to bring him to an open trial, a public trial, in the House of Commons, whilst ensuring that no royalist MPs were allowed anywhere near the chamber. Cromwell was found guilty. It was a show trial, in modern terminology, and the warrant of execution was signed, it is said, by Cromwell stamping around the room, shouting at them, “Sign, sign, sign!” And the king was executed, two o'clock, on the 30th of January, 1649. Bulstrode Whitelocke, an MP for Marlow in England, recorded contemporary events. And he recorded this following the execution of the king, that is Cromwell’s response. And Cromwell’s response was this, according to Whitelock. “Cromwell proposed to him, sorry, Cromwell proposed to them that the old king being dead and his son being defeated, it was necessary to come to a settlement of the nation. A settlement of the nation.” In other words, a new form of constitutional rule. But no one had given any thought to that. This is not like the American Revolution, where a great deal of thought had been on what would happen after the British were defeated.

But here there was no idea of what they should do. But Cromwell had an idea. Cromwell placed his faith in Parliament, or specifically in the elected House of Commons and the members of Parliament that constituted it. John Milton, who served Cromwell’s government as so-called Latin Secretary, that is writing diplomatic letters in Latin and replying to diplomatic letters in Latin, John Milton wrote a sonnet called “Cromwell, Our Chief of Men.” And he wrote it after Cromwell’s final victory over Charles II at the Battle of Worcester in September, 1651. And this is what Milton said. “Yet much remains to conquer still. Peace hath her victories no less renowned than war. Peace has its victories, no less than war.” The war had turned out in the end to be easily won. After Worcester of 1651, there was no serious royalist threat left. And when Charles II did return in 1660, it was not by invasion, not by coup d'etat, but by the invitation of the Cromwellian army. It was a war finally won. But it was the peace that proved the undoing of this English experiment in Republicanism, a failure to reach what Whitelocke had called the settlement of the nation. They didn’t find a way to govern themselves, frankly. This is so different than 120 years later, The American Revolution.

The American Revolution had a lot of examples to look at, not only in places like Massachusetts and Connecticut, but in all the writings of the Enlightenment. There was a background to the American Revolution, an intellectual background, which there wasn’t, with Cromwell. Cromwell wanted rule by Parliament to create a holy and godly nation under God. So it was an uneasy England that faced the future in February, 1649 with no king on the throne. This is Toby Barnard’s book, I’ll put a book list up tomorrow morning, on the English Republic. And Toby Barnard has written this, “The revolution which had killed the king, abolished the monarchy, and substituted a commonwealth, but it had been made by a small group of members of Parliament and some officers from a politicised army. The survival of the unpopular new regime was, from the start, endangered by its feeble support.” It was not a grassroots revolution. I keep saying this is not America in the 1770s, where the bulk of the British living in America wanted independence. And those that didn’t left, mainly for Canada, as we know.

But here in England, there was no support for this government. “The army had to shield the Commonwealth against its enemies. Between 1649 and 1653, the size of the army increased from 47,000 to 70,000 and the tax burden grew proportionately.” Wow, the tax burden increased. Cromwell has not reached into the English middle class, the English gentry, for support. One, they don’t like the increase in the army, two, they don’t like increased taxation, and thirdly, they don’t like the attacks on the Church of England, which saw the episcopacy, the bishops, removed from office and in many parishes, the priest, the parish Vicar, the rector, removed and a rector Vicar of the more left wing views of Christianity to take over, more independent was the phrase used at the capital eye, more independent views. In other words, very much like the America of the 17th century of this period. Barnard goes on to say this, “The Commonwealth was weak because few had actively wanted it. And because even those who had created it, the Parliament or some of the MPs and the officers, expected different results on it. The soldiers thought they’d acquired a Parliament which would draught new constitution and transfer powers to a fresh Parliament. The Parliament, while finalising the details of the new system, was expected to start the long delayed reform of society and the church.” But it didn’t come. The reforms didn’t go far enough and the Parliament proved ineffective and the army grumbled and Cromwell had not created a situation in which this godly land could be created. By the spring of 1658, the Parliament had wracked up a deficit of over 700,000 pounds, which at the time was equal to half its annual revenue.

Dissatisfaction with Parliament grew and not least in the army. And the Army is important. Cromwell did not have the support of Parliament, Cromwell did not have the support of the people. Cromwell’s support rested on the military. Cromwell’s support rested on the military and they are getting jumpy. So Cromwell intervened in case, in his view, the army would move in and get rid of Parliament. So Cromwell himself closed the Parliament down in the spring of 1653. And now comes a critical moment in Cromwell’s political career, the decade of the 1650s. Cromwell sided with the army, he really had no choice, and decided to do away with Parliament all together once he had dissolved it. And as Toby Barnard has written, “The Parliament’s failure to enact useful measures of legal and religious reform and its eagerness to lavish use and its eagerness to lavish scarce resources on a naval war with the Dutch reluctantly made Cromwell believe the complaints current among his men in the army and act as they wanted. For all his love of Parliamentary rule, Cromwell overthrew it.” I wouldn’t agree with the word love the Parliamentary rule. It was Cromwell’s belief, which is not the same as love, it was Cromwell’s belief that Parliament was where power should lie, with elected members of Parliament elected from across England, okay? Not a wide electorate as we have today. No women had the vote and the men that had the vote had property qualifications and so on, no different than America became. But it has a degree of democracy in it, in a 17th century sense.

And he steady gets away with it. So this is my view, which you all know, you never have to agree with me. The guiding lights for Cromwell, in my view, are these. He wanted a peace in England, a settlement, that would last. He wanted a settlement and he did not suffer fools gladly and he thought the MPs in Parliament were fools. And anyway, how could his, that is Oliver’s judgement , ever be wrong? For God was working through him for England’s good. Oh gosh. We’re back to Charles I, aren’t we? Charles I believed in the divine right of kings, Cromwell believed that he had this evangelical conversion moment earlier in his life and that God directed all his actions for the good of the country. So he believes that he is doing God’s will. Now, many of you know, if you talk to people with those, what we will describe as fundamentalist views, there’s no way you can argue with them because they come back to the basic thing. “Well, I’m sorry William, I can’t be wrong because God has told me that this is the right course of action.” You can’t argue against that. And that’s Cromwell. So he looked distinctly like Charles in that respect.

And that doesn’t look like radicalism. It isn’t. It’s Traditionalism, really. In 1653, Cromwell took a high moral attitude to politics. He came to believe that moral reformation was more important than political to all usher in this new Jerusalem that he dreamed of, a wholly ungodly nation. This is not much different than the immigrants that arrived in Boston, Massachusetts. He wants to create a new Jerusalem. As they said in Boston, a city built upon a hill. It’s the same Puritan political view. And the politics follows the morality. So what’s he going to do? He dare call another Parliament. Because if he does so, there have to be elections. He was going to do away with elections. But if there are elections, people might well vote for royalist MPs. He doesn’t control the country. He doesn’t control the middle class gentry. They might vote for royalist MPs and then everything will come to a grinding halt. And so he had an idea, a dreadful idea, that instead of a Parliament, he would set up an assembly of good men, an assembly of Godly men that would meet in the House of Commons. But they would be appointed, not elected, so there’s no chance of them being not the right people, or as Margaret Thatcher would’ve said, “Not our sort of people”.

And this is an extraordinary, this is an extraordinary moment, really. He’s desperately, desperately wanting to create a body that will create this moral reforming society that will lead to this new and completely reformed England. But it simply doesn’t work like that. It simply doesn’t work like that. And one of the reasons it doesn’t work like that is because, it’s because people didn’t like it. In fact, they called it the Bare Bones Parliament after one of the members who had the name Bare Bones. Don’t ask, they all have funny names in this period. They had Fi-Fornication was another Christian name they carried. Bare Bones Parliament was disastrous. It was desperately unpopular. You had no elected MP. They had no right to be there. They would just do whatever Cromwell wanted to do. And it was viewed across the world in that way, not just in England. Let me just read you this bit. “A Dutch pamphlet derided the humble social origins of the members of the assembly, its author incensed, quote, 'By the ambitions of these aversions, all-devouring English devils, these shoemakers, cheap tailors, kettle meddlers, rag peddlers, rat catchers, dog butchers, manure sweepers, cut purses, privy cleaners, and animal castrators.’”

And that was what the Dutch, the nearest country to England that existed in the 1650s, thought. And ordinary people in England, well the gentry thought that. “Oh my God, do you know who’s representing us now? My God, he’s the mouse catcher! I mean really!” And of course the working class in England took much the same view. Why should Fred be representing us? He’s no better than me. Well, yes, but he’s a deeply committed Puritan and that’s why he’s been asked. It was an extraordinary thing. Was it bound to fail? Well, of course it was bound to fail. It failed within three months. It was dead and buried by Christmas, 1653. So what does Cromwell do now? What does Cromwell do now? What does the country do? The issue incidentally on which it fell was the proposal to unite England, Scotland, and Ireland into one country, Britain. How would this ever be replaced is the question. And this is what Claire Jackson writes in her book, Devil-Land, which I mentioned last week.

“The Council of State,” there was always a Council of State. The Council, which acted like a pretty council, in a way. “The Council of State proclamation of a protectorate,” new word, “Of a protectorate on the 16th of December, 1653 to be the core, the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland.” In other words, a united Britain. Why is this important? Well, for Americans, for example, who think that Britain has never had a written constitution, wrong. This protectorate had the first, and indeed last, written constitution for the country in the form of what was called Instruments of Governs. Instruments of Governs. They appointed, it’s called a protectorate. They had a protector and Cromwell was appointed law protector and was initiated into his role in a ceremony in Westminster Hall, which, in some ways, parroted a coronation service. And then they went into overdrive with the publicity. The PR machine went into overdrive. A printed account, we read, of the inauguration ceremony insisted by the protectorate’s creation, quote, “This Commonwealth is become the wonder and emulation of Europe, nay, of the whole world.” Really? This sounds like Boris Johnson. It certainly wasn’t the wonder emulation of Europe or of the whole world. This is just putting it on, I mean with, gosh, I dunno what this is. This is over the top and over the top again. It went on to say, it went on to say, “and it attacked the bird-witted opinion natures of this age who already begin to bring forth a disowning and dislike of this great and unparalleled change.” You can see by that, that for all its hype, it had a practical realisation that it was not popular. A protector?

We’d had nothing like that before. Nothing like it before. A Londoner, an anonymous Londoner, wrote this in a letter. He described Cromwell as, quote, “The craziest man in all of Christiandom who has made himself the greatest prince of the world, but remained a man without dessert and of no quality.” There speaks the voice of middle class England. Louis XIV’s minister said, “Cromwell is one of the cleverest men of the century. He set up two defective Parliaments in order to discredit him and exalt himself in their dismissal.” Now that’s a popular view. Cromwell was so egotistical, so egotistical, that he was determined to rule. I don’t think that’s true. I think the truth is that Cromwell was so committed to what he believed was God’s plan for England, of a holy and godly society. That would’ve made Cromwell an excellent governor of Massachusetts. But he didn’t have a population that would’ve supported him, as Massachusetts might have done. Instead, he had an England that wasn’t so much divided but actually very antagonistic to this lurch, by 1653, four years after the execution of the king. By this lurch towards, well, in today’s jargon we would call neo-fascism and which they saw as neither doing anything for them and being untraditional. If there’s one thing the English like, its continuity, its precedent, and its tradition.

You might say, well what about Scotland and Ireland? They didn’t care about Scotland and Ireland. They simply didn’t care. The settlement they’ve reached is now the sort of settlement that they’d hoped to reach in 1648 with the king, but instead of the king, there’s a protector, Cromwell. The structure was the king, the protector, the privy council, they call the Council of State, the House of Commons, they abolished the House of Lords, The House of Commons, which was, for the first time, a British House of Commons. Well, sort of. There were 340 English MPs, 30 Scottish MPs, and 30 Irish MPs. That tells you everything you want to know about how they looked at this union. In fact, there was an army of occupation not only in Ireland, there was an army of occupation in Edinburgh as well. This is an English revolution, not a Scottish, not an Irish. The English turned it into a British, but it was an English-led revolution through and through. To be honest, Cromwell had no time for either the Scots or the Irish. Toby Barnard writes this, which I find very interesting. “Cromwell’s ideal remained a freely-elected Parliament, elected for the moment on a much restrictive franchise, which would voluntarily cooperate with him as protector. Accordingly, he did little to direct either the elections or the Parliament, funny though. Most voters and MPs dislike the protectorate, both as a constitutional innovation,” against tradition, again, “Which barely disguised military and godly dictatorship.

The effects of a Cromwellian protectorate were similar, too, though, usually worse than those of a Stuart monarchy.” We’ve come so far, but actually, on balance, says Toby Barnard, “It was worse than it had been.” Maybe that’s an exaggeration, but it certainly wasn’t any better, that’s for sure, and it lacked legitimacy. It lacked legitimacy. And the English like legitimacy. Once elected, the MPs wanted to change the instrument of government to control Cromwell. Cromwell therefore dismissed it and said, “No, no, no, no, no good. You aren’t reforming enough. You haven’t pushed us further down the road of a godly and holy nation.” And in 1655, Commonwealth was fearful, unnecessarily, we know in hindsight, of a royalist counter revolution. There had been a small uprising in Cornwall, which was crushed, bluntly, in two days, the so-called Penruddock Rising. There wasn’t really. People didn’t want war. They might not have wanted Cromwell, but they didn’t want war again. They simply, there was no, there was absolutely no support for risings in favour of Charles II.

Of course there were royalists who dreamt a bit, there were royalist spies, all of that. But the ordinary people had had enough of war, enough of civil war, and better stick with Cromwell than to go back to war again, even though we would prefer the king, Charles II, to return, we’ll stick with what we’ve got. Because I think the overwhelming knew. And now Cromwell made the biggest mistake of his political career. And England has something else added to its DNA. He instituted the rule of Major-Generals, military rule. England and Wales, he didn’t bother about Scotland and Island. They’ve got armies of occupation. Here in England and Wales, he divided it into 11 regions and in each region, he appointed a Major-General. Some were overzealous over questions of morality.

And here is a contemporary record from Baxter, a man called the Reverend Baxter, who was a Puritan minister from Kidderminster in Worcestershire. And Baxter wrote in his autobiography, “About this time, Cromwell set up his Major-Generals and the decimation on the estates of a royalist, called delinquents, to maintain them, and James Berry was made Major-General of Worcester, Shropshire, Herefordshire, and North Wales, the countries in which he formerly lived as a servant, a clark of iron works. Oh, they were lowly-born. So my wife comes in and says, "Oh William, I think you should invite this Major-General they’ve appointed. We might gain something politically, we might save some of our land. We should invite him to dinner and we’ll invite our friends and we can all meet him.” To which your reply was, “No, my dear, we can’t possibly, we can’t possibly. He was a clark in an iron works. He’s not one of us, you know.” A further alienation. Class always raises its head in England.

So class and then this awful business about morality. This is a further explanation. A lawyer, an anonymous lawyer wrote this. “Grievance that there is no law against insidious gestures once and a filthy dalliance and familiarity, whorish attire, strange fashions such as our naked breasts, bare shoulders, powdering, spotting, painting the face, curling and shearing of the hair. An excess of apparel in servants and mean people.” And some of the Major-Generals took all of that on board and sorted out. “I’m sorry, Wendy, you are arrested. You are showing bare shoulders. Disgraceful.” “Judy, you seem to have a painted face. Disgraceful.” “William, you’ve been shearing your hair. Disgraceful.” “Strange fashions and whorish attire.” It’s wonderful really, isn’t it? They’re against fun even in what you wear, how you dress. And people were arrested there. Not all over the country. It depended on the whim, if you like, of the individual, one of the 11 Major-Generals. They were overzealous, they were lowly, and some of them were actually publishing, not in the streets of goff, they were lazy. They were lazy. In an article in March, 2020, the British historian, Antony Beevor, a historian of considerable standing, wrote this. It was an article about the COVID pandemic, but he wrote, “Unlike those countries with the ethos of a thoroughly centralist state, we have long had a gut instinct in the United Kingdom against excessive governmental controls.

Most historians believe that this stretches back all the way to the 17th century and the rule of the Major-Generals under Cromwell and the protectorate. We don’t like central government telling us what to do.” Every American understands that. It’s the pressure, the tension, between the federal government and the individual states. And it’s interesting to hear a man of Beevor’s academic brilliance making the same analysis about England. And we’re always talking about England. He says United Kingdom, it’s England, really. We don’t, it’s no different. This is one of the things we share in common with Americans. We don’t like people telling us what to do. And it comes from the same root, it comes from this Puritan root. And it comes here in England with a reaction against Major-Generals. And we’ve always had that feeling about the army. Now next week I’m talking about the Constitution as developed in England in 1688 and in America in 1776 and one of the things that differs is our approach to the army. Our constitutional approach to the army is quite different and it’s related to our different experiences in revolution. In the American Revolutionary War, the army led by Washington delivers victory. In England, they don’t think of the Parliamentary Army delivering victory, they think of the Parliamentary Army ruling the country through Major-Generals.

And I’ll talk more about that next week. The rule of the army ended as quickly as it begun in January, 1657. And Cromwell tried a further attempt to set up a House of Commons, this time with an Upper House to replace the House of Lords. So he’s still playing with the idea of a Parliament, but this Parliament proved no better than its predecessors. And in February, 1657, a petition was presented to Parliament to ask Cromwell to become king. To become king. A hereditary ruler, the House of Cromwell to replace the House of Stuart. So did Cromwell, for those of you on the left, who would like to believe he’s the radical that some people like to portray, he rejected it out, no he did not. He seriously thought about accepting the crown. And that point is taken up by Antonia Fraser when she writes this. I’ve lost my marker for a moment, I shall find it. Here we are. And she writes this. “On Wednesday, the 6th of May, 1657, Cromwell’s mind was made up. Oliver took a walk in St. James’ Park, which was habitual to him, in this case vital to the course of British and English history. There Cromwell encountered what Thurloe,” Thurloe was his Secretary of State, “Thurloe termed the Three Great Men. So who were the three men he met? Lambert, Fleetwood, and Desborough, all military. It matters little that their presence there could hardly have been coincidental and that like the three kings of the gospels, they must surely have followed deliberately the star of the protector into the park.”

Well they knew he was going to be there. In plain language, they knew that he took this walk every day, so the three of them decided they would intercept him, which is what they did. And Antonia Fraser goes on, “They must surely have followed deliberately the star of the protector in the park on hearing the news that he intended to accept the crown formally the next day. It was the import of their message, which was momentous, for here was no idle joking on the subject of monarchy, but a definite announcement from all three that they would not tolerate its acceptance. They would not go into opposition against Cromwell, but they will all resign their employment.” In other words, they’d all resigned from the army. And she finishes by saying, “Into the mysterious, shadowy realms of the mind of Oliver Cromwell, this straightforward decision came like bright clear, if searing, light. The projected meeting with the committee for the morrow,” when he was going to accept the crown, “Was put off. Thursday the 7th of May, which might have been his accession day, was spent by the protector in deliberate relaxation. He did not accept the crown. Finally, it was on Friday the 8th of May, at 11 o'clock in the morning, that Cromwell met with the committee.

Here, after a delay of nearly two and a half months since the first official proposal that Cromwell be given the crown, Parliament at last got its answer. He cannot undertake this government with the title of King.” But he only didn’t take it because he couldn’t risk the army turning against him because the army was his sole support within the political structure of Protectorate England. He was tempted, he would have taken it. Had he had the support of the middle class, or most importantly, if he’d had the support of the army, he would’ve become King Oliver. And so we wouldn’t be really talking about a revolution today, we’d be talking about a change of dynasty between Stuart and Cromwell. He took the title, His Highness, the Law Protector as a hereditary protectorship and he was given a royal ceremony in which the Sword of State and the orb and sceptre were placed in his hands, but not the crown on his head. But the crown was there on a chair. He was, to all intents and practical purposes, King, but with a different title, a title that the army could go along with, and a title that he was forced to go along with. He’d been born in 1598. So he’s what? He’s 10, he’s 60, he’s 60, near his damning. Had he lived until 70, another 10 years, what might have happened? Might we have remained a semi-republic until we had a revolution like France? Or would the king have returned and another civil war ensued?

It didn’t work out like that. In fact, no one could imagine that it would end as it did. It ended rather unspectacularly, in a way. It ended rather like Eastern Europe ended, as Marxism ended. It imploded. Oliver himself died on the 3rd of September, 1658. He died of chronic renal infection caused by a bladder stone plus plague, not plague, plus malaria, which he’d caught in the vents, which the English called vents are called ague, A-G-U-E. All of these things led to his death. His family thought it was the death of his favourite daughter a few months before that really brought him down, brought him low. But he’s dead. And his son Richard becomes protector. Well, Richard is known as Tumbledown Dick. He’s hopeless. He doesn’t want the job, he has no idea how to do the job, he’s weak with no ideas. He wants out, basically. And James Hawes, in his short history of England, writes this of Richard and the end of Cromwell, as it were. And he writes, “When Cromwell died on the 3rd of September, 1658, few mourned.” There we are again, few mourned. “His son Richard inherited the post of Law Protector, but not his father’s prestige amongst the army. Without it, he was unable to control them and in May 1659, he threw in the towel and so did the army. In 1647, they had tried to impose heaven by force. Now it just wanted its back pay.” And Hawes says, “Almost all the English by 1659 wanted a king again, but they wanted a freely elected Parliament to approve him.

In 1660, Restoration meant not only restoring the monarchy, but also the true power of Parliament,” why Parliament went to war in 1642 in the first place. “The one man with a viable force still at his command, General Monk, the military ruler of Scotland, marched on London to make this happen.” On the 2nd of May, he recalled all MPs from the Parliament of 1642 and they voted to restore the monarchy. Monk is the hero of the hour. There’s no military dictatorship, there’s no civil war, Monk simply reads what people want. They want the king, but the king with reduced powers or, if you like, traditional powers to rule with Parliament. And the bonus to Monk, the bonus to Monk, is that the King Charles II is young, handsome, and immensely popular. And when he returns to London in 1660, in May of 1660, he’s greeted rapturously, so much so that he jokes about it, “If I’ve known I was so popular, I wouldn’t have stayed away so long.” People like those sorts of jokes. Or at least, we do in England. And so everything begins to settle, doesn’t settle immediately. Now it isn’t going to settle until 1688, my story of next Monday. But it begins to settle. We’ve had enough. We’ve had enough of civil war, we’ve had enough of religious division, frankly. We want a good time. Think about the theatre of Charles II’s reign. I mean, baudy doesn’t come into it. Blue, I mean deep, dark blue is the theatre of Charles II’s reign. People loved him. There’s Nell Gwyn, women onstage playing women. Nell Gwyn with it all hanging, oh no, no.

So let me come back to Cromwell and try to summarise. I was asked last week, “Was Cromwell religious?” Yes, he was absolutely religious. He’s Fundamentalist. In his book on The Making of Oliver Cromwell, Ronald Hutton simply writes this. He says that he had this conversion in the 1630s. “It has been clear to most of Cromwell’s biographers that the informing and defining experience of Cromwell’s life was his conversion to a passionate Puritan religiosity, which took place in the early 1630s.” He’s a born-again Christian is how Evangelicals would describe it. Was he a killjoy? Not really. He loved dancing and music, for example. He danced at his daughter’s wedding through the whole proceedings. But Christmas disappeared under the Commonwealth because the Puritans disliked linking Christ’s birth with fun and games. Christmas disappeared and Christmas didn’t recover until the 19th century and Charles Dickens and the Americans gave us back Christmas and Santa Claus and Coca Cola and all the rest of it. The Christmas of today is very different from the mediaeval Christmas. It’s a family Christmas, not a community Christmas, and between 1650 and sort of 1820, Christmas disappeared. You might have had a decent meal, you might have given money to the poor, but there was none of the celebrations that we have today.

The question is if Cromwell was religious, why the horror of the Irish massacres, giving rise to the Irish curse, the curse of Cromwell beyond you? Well bluntly, because Cromwell’s religion taught him that Roman Catholics were next in line to the devil, following, in their view, a perverted form of Christianity, not reliant on the Bible, but reliant on priests and the boat. And their view was that Catholics should be converted to Protestantism or, bluntly, killed. You didn’t worry about that. Indeed, Cromwell regarded the military expedition to Ireland as a Protestant crusade. As a Protestant crusade. So think about the Crusades in the Middle Ages, the Christian crusades against Muslims. That’s how Cromwell saw the military operation in Ireland, a Protestant Christian crusade against Catholics. Then we come to the final questions. Did Cromwell fail? In the short term, yes. He failed to create this godly nation. He failed to create a Parliament that would reform the morals of the nation. Did he fail in the long term? In one way, yes. For Republicans, it failed. We became a monarchy and we’ve remained a monarchy. And indeed throughout the period from 1616 to 2021, the support for a Republican state remains quite small. Remains quite small. How long that will persist after the death of the present queen, who knows? But at least it’s held. Since 1660, we’ve liked the idea of a Parliamentary monarchy. More about that next week. And we haven’t wanted Republican. In fact, the French Revolution turned us against Republican in a major way. So then the final thing is, did Cromwell succeed? In terms of creating a moral and godly nation, no.

Just imagine Cromwell going to see Nell Gwyn in Drury Lane in the 16th. Aw, you can’t begin. I was educated, as many of you know, at an evangelical Christian public school in Britain and we had a new a new theatre and dance hall and everything. And we asked if we could organise a dance with a local girls’ public school, which we’d often done, with Westmere. Well not dances, we often had various activities. No, not those sort of activities, academic activities with Westmere. And we asked if we could have a dance. And I remember the answer we were given ‘cause I was on the committee and went and saw the Head. And the answer was, “Did Jesus Christ dance?” And I wanted to say “Yes, probably,” but I kept my mouth firmly shut and we never did get the dance. So I understand this Puritan religiosity. But he didn’t really succeed. He didn’t succeed. Did he succeed embracing the power of the monarchy and giving power to Parliament? Yes, and that’s the important thing. From this moment on, our foot is firmly on a Democratic path to which we have never left, a different Democratic path to that in America, but from the same, same root of Puritanism. Massachusetts and Connecticut to the Federal Constitution, Cromwell to the settlement of 1688. Both of us came from that same Puritan route. And I’ll say more about that next week.

And I always like to have something to end on. And there wasn’t anything that sort of struck me to end on. And then I thought, “Well, hang on a moment, why don’t I finish tonight, it’s tonight here in Britain, why don’t I finish tonight where I began?” Cromwell is a complex figure with a complex afterlife.

Thank very much for listening and we’ve probably got some questions, Judy, I think. Yes we have, questions or comments.

Q&A and Comments:

Yes, Cromwell’s Thomas and Oliver were related, but distantly.

Q: When did elections for a Parliament start?

A: They started with Simon De Montfort in the 13th century. It’s not elections that’s important, it’s the fact that it was a narrow electorate. That, of course, follows the world, if you like. It certainly follows the American electoral system in terms of who the electorate, in terms of who has the vote.

“I’m American,” this is Arlene. “I always learned even in university that only one-third of those in the colonies wanted separation from England, one-third was indifferent, and one-third wanted to remain subject to Britain. Please comment.” I’ve not heard that breakdown. There were a number of people who did not want rule by the Puritans, who they then call Yankees. They don’t want to be ruled by damned Yankees. They’re the ones who are the empire Loyalists who leave what becomes the United States and go to Canada. And a number of them came from the South and they were French and they went to Canada. And you’d think, “Hang on, what are French people doing going to Canada?” Well, they went to Quebec, of course. And the French church, the Catholic church, said, “Better King George than those damn Yankees in New York.” That’s what they were told. So there were people who objected, but– Of course in the America of the 17th century, it’s geographically spread and difficult. So some of the people on the frontier, as it were, didn’t really care much who governed them. It’s the intellectuals and it’s the middle classes in the east that lead this revolution. The figures, I don’t know.

Q: Did Cromwell have allies in England once he was in power?

A: No, he had the army basically and some MPs. No, he didn’t really have allies.

Q: How does one distinguish between Traditionalism and Fundamentalism? Could not every Fundamentalist argue their case in the name of traditional aspirations?

A: No, no, I don’t think so, Marcel. I don’t think that’s so. Traditional means what we’ve always done. Fundamentalists means cutting everything and going right back to the beginning. So the Puritans don’t want anything to do with tradition, Christian tradition. They want the Bible, they want to read the Bible, and they’re going to interpret it. Whether they’re English Puritans or American Puritans, they’re led by the Bible. The only problem with that is, for those who us who are not Puritan, is that you have to accept their interpretation of the Bible because they can’t be wrong, because God has told them that they are right. So I think there’s a difference between fundamental and traditional.

Yes, you see, that’s the problem. You’re quite right, Karen. I think Trump would’ve loved to create or instal a Bare Bones Congress who would do his bidding. That is the problem we face in the Western world. It’s to hold onto our democracy. There are problems about that in both America and Britain. At moment, they can’t do that. But one political party could, Republicans in the states, Conservatives here, that we should call Neo-Conservatives here, could have a system of selecting candidates for Congress or for Parliament who are signed up to the view of somebody like Trump. Now we saw that in Britain an attempt to do that by labour with Corbyn. So there’s always a danger of that.

Karen, yes, and Trump also attempt to create a group within the military that would support him no matter what. And that is a problem. It’s a different problem than we face here in Britain. And that goes back to this time. Something I will look at next week, but basically the army is independent, is independent of Parliament, whereas in America, the head of government, that is to say the President, as well as the head of state in one person, the head of state and head of government being won, controls the army. And that was a problem that the generals were facing under Trump. Whereas he could give them orders they couldn’t follow. Here, we’ve divided it. The Queen is the head of the army, not the Prime Minister. And although you might say that’s a splitting hairs, it isn’t. In the last analysis, the army here would not obey Parliament, would obey the crown if there was a serious problem. And in America, well, it would lead to the same action, of course. It would be civil strife in America and in Britain if we ever reached that point because we know that the generals, or a large proportion of them, would not have followed Trump to war, for example. Barnard’s book, yes. I put it on my list tomorrow. It’s simply called The English Republic. It’s in a very small series called Seminar. It’s not a book to read, it’s really an account to keep you informed of the timeline. And at the end it has some, at the end, it’s got some contemporary accounts, but I’ll put everything about what I think would be useful and interesting to read online tomorrow morning.

Oh, Sharon, how wonderful. “I remember going to dinner at Sydney Sussex College and by the portrait of Oliver Cromwell, there’s a curtain. Apparently they pull it across when they make the royal toast.” Wonderful!

Q: Did Cromwell accept the King James version? Did he have his own?

A: No, they accepted the King James version.

Q: Why was the army so opposed to Cromwell becoming king?

A: Well, they didn’t like the idea of him becoming king because they thought it was a betrayal of what they had accomplished. Within two years, the army takes a different view.

Well, that’s not entirely true. Monk was a man, as I’ve tried to say, of stature and he commanded in Edinburgh and said to the army there, who are English, that what they would do. The rest of the army then did not go. What was the option? They had no leader.

Monk was the outstanding general, Richard Cromwell had washed his hands of everything, Oliver was dead, there was no one to lead a civil war. And there was no taste for that. So if Monk has decided that was the answer, that was going to be the answer, and he legitimated it by going through the 1642 Parliament, which was the last Parliament called legitimately, if you like.

Q: Did you ID with the treatment of the Irish?

A: No, I didn’t. I said what I wanted to say later. It’s a very big subject to go into in an hour. And I said, really the answer to that, that that it was his religion that made him regard the Irish as expendable. There are lots of arguments, incidentally, about the massacres at Drogheda and Wexford. He gave them the opportunity to surrender and they didn’t surrender and then it was thought right and proper that you could loot and kill. And that’s exactly the way that happened in the European 30 Years War at the same time.

Q: Yes, can Cromwell readmit the Jews?

A: Well, Trudy is going to speak about that. The simple answer is he needed their money. We are desperately short of cash. And he argued that, he made the argument, that he’d found out by reading the Bible, goodness knows how, that if there wasn’t a Jew in every country of the world, Christ could not return for the second coming. So he said, I found out we have no Jews, so we better get them quick. But that’s not what’s really happening. What’s really happening is he wants them here with their financial contact in Amsterdam. He needs cash. That’s why the Jews come back.

Q: What was the relation between the Puritan church and the Church of England?

A: Well, really, the Church of England, in most cases, simply disappeared. It’s very interesting if you go into parish churches and you can see the names of Vicars and there’s a change of Vicar in, say 1649, and then there’s a change of Vicar in 1660. And the Vicar in 1649 comes back in 1660. So in other words, a Puritan who’d taken over as minister is replaced. There was lots of confusion, to be honest. They hadn’t reached a settlement. Charles II had promised before he came back that there will be toleration and openness and within a year, he’d reimpose the Church of England. And if you want proof of that, many parish churches in England have the royal arms in the church. And the earliest royal arms you will find, which is indicative of this, is the arms of Charles II and that tells you what happened. The king is going to control the church. And actually, to be perfectly honest, we enter a period of history in which we don’t ask too many questions about how people worship. We didn’t ask questions of the Jews that came back, we didn’t ask questions of Catholics who did it privately, we didn’t ask questions of Puritans. We began to be, if not by law, we began to be, in practise, relatively tolerant. And later that tolerance is placed in the law. Thanks.

Q: Yes, “Why didn’t they use the Dutch Republican model,” says Erica.

A: There was a precedent. That’s actually a very good and difficult question to answer, partly because we hated the Dutch. The English hate everybody, but we hated the Dutch at this period because they were rivals in terms of trade. But the Dutch Republic was a funny republic because the House of Orange, now of course kings and queens of the Netherlands, the House of Orange had some, it wasn’t a true republic. The House of Orange carried military power in the Netherlands, even if they didn’t carry the kingship. So it isn’t an exact Republican model. You can’t think of it like France or America. Separately, The Red Letter. Oh, on my blog, TalkHistorian.com, you can find my last book list, but The Red Letter is by Nathaniel Hawthorne, an American author of the 19th century, Nathaniel Hawthorne. But it’s on my blog. I’m looking at my computer, I don’t know why. Www.talkhistorian.com. And there’s a home page and a blog and you can scroll down and get everything and bore yourself to tears.

James has asked, “Conservatives here in the UK are currently led by a classical liberal. I honestly don’t see any threat to our democracy in here in the UK.”

Well, I’m sorry, I have to disagree. Even today, the government has announced it’s looking at ways to give ministers the right to overturn judicial decisions. That breaks the fundamental principles of the separation of powers. There is real, real challenge to the judiciary through the Home Secretary, through the Lord Chancellor, and now through the Prime Minister. So I have to, sorry, I have, I don’t really often do that, I have to disagree, fundamentally, with you. I’m really concerned about this government’s attack on democracy. The governor of Florida’s a plan to form a personal paramilitary army lawyer to him.

Yes, I read that in the English papers, Myrna, and that is worrying. That should be extremely worrying to all Americans.

Q: “Had he actually decided to have the crown,” says Hindi, “Who or what authority would’ve placed the crown on his head?”

A: Oh, a very good question. There’s no Archbishop put it on his head. Oh, that is a, I never thought of that question. I think he’d probably have put it on his own head, like Napoleon.

What does Sue say? “Those residents in the USA, as it is today, who supported the Crown, are the ones who fled to Canada. Upstate New York was filled with those who came to fight with the crown. They’re proudly called United Empire Loyalists in Canada. Those who remained are daughters of the American Revolution. It is a task of genealogists to join either. I qualify for both though,” oh, lucky you.

“There are whole communities outside Quebec, non-French members, so many non-French Loyalists crossed the border to Canada.”

Absolutely true. Oh, yes, Mrs. Thatcher may have disagreed with who is the head of the army after . She might have done, but she would’ve been wrong. I’m very outspoken tonight. I don’t, I must have had something from my tea. What questions are raised when the head of the military alerts the enemy they will not attack, as Millie did when there was no overt threat of attack. Oh, that said, I can’t answer that. Yeah, that’s, there are some very difficult questions in the modern age about the military. Now I’m following a lot on Twitter about military thinking today. It’s all changing. I think I’ve said, Allan and Carol, ask about treatment to the Jews. I think I’ve said what I wanted to say. Trudy will elaborate on that.

They were welcomed here because we needed them and they were soon integrated into British society because they wished to be integrated and, in terms of immigrants, they looked, they were Europeans, so they looked like us, they did not overtly, they didn’t dress differently than us, and they were highly educated. And when Bevis Marks Synagogue, the big and great synagogue in the city of London, was built, Queen Anne paid money for it out of her own pocket. Not government money, her own money. She was a very strong Anglican was Queen Anne, but she saw, she was very broad-minded, and she gave personal cash, a large amount, to the founding of Bevis Marks. There was no antisemitism in that sense. The the antisemitism really begins in the 19th century with the arrival of Ashkenazi Jews, not helped by the fact that some of the Sephardic Jews actually asked them not to come because they thought it would make it worse for them. And every Jew in England knows that story, but if you are not British, you might not know that story, but it’s a very interesting one.

• William, I’m going to jump in and save you now. You’ve been on for a long time.

• Right, okay, thank you.

• I’m sure that you’ve had enough. It’s been almost an hour and a half. And I just want to really thank you very, very much. I think a lot of the, you know, you’ve answered most of the questions. And just to say that in 40 minutes, we have Judge Dennis Davis on, he’s going to be speaking about the origins of international law. So I do want to give my team a rest as well. I just want to thank you very much for an outstanding presentation, as always. We had 1300 devices tuned in tonight and we look forward to hearing from you next week.

• Thank you! I look forward to being here next week!

• I went to, I also went to a very conservative school. I went to a Church of England boarding school where the boys were referred to as undesirables. No, certainly no dance.

• [William] That’s wonderful, oh Wendy, that’s fantastic!

• Yeah, my parents sent me to boarding school, I went to Kingsmead and, believe me, it was so conservative. Taught me to be rebellious!

• Yes, that’s what he does.

• That’s where I found my feisty spirit. But anyway, on that happy note of rebellion, I’ll say good night to everybody and thanks for joining us. Lots of love, take care!

• Bye-bye to you.

• Bye-bye!

• Bye-bye good fellows, bye-bye!

• Thank you everybody.