ing speech which was superb in the optimism of its sentiments, even if his mode of delivery was not noticeably cheerful (“in a grave and Christianlike manner”, said one observer, “frequently weeping”). Langley summed it all up to his employer afterwards as an exhortation “to follow the great Work of Providence” in which Cromwell added for their encouragement “that he had an army which attended but their commands to march to the gates of Constantinople”.13
But the speech itself was a great deal longer. First Oliver gave the assembled company a long resume of all their troubles with the Rump, the general dissatisfaction of the people therewith, and the final inevitable act of violence to protect the nation lest the cause be lost, on which he commented:14 “and I may fairly say as before the Lord – the thinking of an act of violence was to us worse than any engagement that ever we were in, or could be …” But now there was a new gathering, which had deliberately come about with the intention of divesting “the sword of the power and authority in the civil administration”. Of course this intention left them with the right to offer some advice for the future, and this advice Oliver proceeded to give at some length, employing a series of semiquotations from the Scriptures, which resulted in some rapt references to wisdom “pure, peaceable, gentle, easy to be entreated, full of good fruits, without partiality, without hypocrisy”, and furthermore tolerance: “... if the poorest Christian, the most mistaken Christian shall desire to live peaceably and quietly under you – I say, if any desire but to lead a life of godliness and honesty, let him be protected.”
It was however in his salutations to the assembly itself that Oliver reached his full heights of ecstatic acclamation. Surely this was a great occasion indeed! In the words of the Psalm, “God doth manifest it to be a day of the power of Christ.” Above all they were a chosen body: “You are as like the forming of God as ever people were.” They must therefore own their call, since never before had there been so many people actually called together by God. It was true that God’s purpose in the past had often been hidden from them: was it not all the more wonderful that this remarkable solution should have been reached? “You are at the edge of promises and prophecies,” he cried.
Cromwell’s speech also made it abundantly clear that these high-minded commendations of their great role were not mere pieces of propitiation towards a body which was ultimately intended to be powerless. On the contrary he took the trouble to assure them that the present Council of Officers (which had been slightly enlarged by three members in May) was purely for temporary convenience, and would stop sitting as soon as it was desired: “they having no authority, no longer to sit, than until you shall take order”. And finally in conclusion he read aloud an Instrument of Government which in effect devolved his own power on the assembly; this in turn would sit not later than November 1654, and three months before the dissolution would choose those who would succeed them for the next twelve months. Of course, this Instrument, by granting the assembly power at Cromwell’s hands, necessarily implied that it was his to devolve. This implication, not pursued at the time, was less important to Cromwell personally than the clear intention also implied therein, that the new governing body were to be as far as possible genuinely independent as well as Saints.
* * *
During the choosing of the Saints, and thereafter throughout their brief reign, there were other external cares on Cromwell’s shoulders. It has been seen that from the start Cromwell had ambivalent feelings about the propriety of the Anglo-Dutch War, the attempted cutting of fellow-Protestant throats: moves towards peace were to be expected once his power was increased. In any case the Dutch themselves were currently in a more moderate mood, and when at the beginning of June they suffered a considerable defeat off the Gabbard Sands, the Grand Pensionary de Witt took the opportunity to send over some envoys. It was a delicate moment for the English, and in particular Cromwell. There was the prospect of a new assembly with whatever that might imply in change of direction, in a matter of weeks (in fact one of Cromwell’s gestures after the establishment of the Barebones Parliament was to order that Dutch missives should in future be addressed to the Council, not His Excellency and the Council). But the war was not popular except with certain merchants, and there were many Englishmen who were heartily fed up with hearing the cannon and great guns booming off their own coast “loud and busy”, or at any rate with paying for them.15
At first there was a certain English aggression in wishing to assert that it was the Dutch who had actually started the war: Cromwell felt it incumbent on him to point out, as formerly to the Scots, how the Dutch should properly interpret their defeats: “You have appealed to the judgement of Heaven. The Lord has declared against you.” In the course of negotiations with the Dutch, on 13 July he made them an interminable and highly moralizing speech on the subject of the English conscience over the war.16 Since the English Government had been careful to keep their consciences clear, they had been rewarded with victories. God’s work, he took the opportunity to say, happened to be much better understood in England than in the Netherlands, and had theEnglish intentions towards the Netheri lands been in any way dishonourable, then God would have indicated their failing by punishing them. Cromwell, in a mood of rising inspiration, also hectored the Dutch deputies on the subject of deception: if they deceived the English Government, they should remember the fate of King Charles i who had attempted to deceive it in 1648.
But these fulminations, while psychologically interesting as showing quite how far Cromwell was able to carry himself away in the contemplation of victories and the identification of them with providences, were less immediately important than the amazing plan which he now proceeded to put forward for a total Anglo-Dutch union. The mixture of obstinacy and vagueness with which Cromwell now clung to this notion throughout the summer and autumn of 1653 suggests that he had long harboured it, albeit wistfully, within the recesses of his imagination. On 21 July a sweeping proposal for the joining of the two countries, which would thus be transformed at one swoop from enemies to the most intimate allies, was put forward. But as none of the practicalities had been worked out, the Dutch understandably continued to look askance at the whole project.
During all this the course of the war was not halted. Blake suffered a serious wound, but his command was reinforced by that of Deane and Monk as co-Admirals. And although Monk was proverbially said to betray his landlubberly origins by calling out “Wheel to the right” in place of some more nautical piece of terminology, a considerable advantage was secured over the Dutch by the end of July under his active auspices. The Dutch Admiral, Van Tromp, was killed at the height of the action. The home problems of the Dutch between those who wanted simply to protect their own shipping, and those who like Van Tromp had wanted to take the offensive, seemed on the verge of being resolved in favour of the former. Then in the actual conduct of the war, although the Dutch benefited in theory from the prevailing westerly winds which made it easy for them to blockade the English coast, the English on the other hand were so geographically placed that they could surround the smaller Dutch coastline altogether. A Plymouth sea captain described the English hold as “an eagle’s wings extended” over the Dutch body. The English were about to attack a mountain of gold, and the Dutch a mountain of iron, Grand Pensionary Pauw had put it at the beginning of the war. It seemed as if the mountain of iron was in the ascendant. In a walk with the Dutch emissary Beverning in his favourite St James’s Park on 6 August, Cromwell felt qualified to speak once again, if in even vaguer terms, of the benefits of a union between England and the Netherlands. It was a union, he believed, which would greatly please both nations. Beverning cited some down-to-earth objections, including the fact that the Dutch had some existing treaty obligations to the Danes, but these Cromwell waved aside.17 As both sides retired temporarily to lick their wounds, financial and otherwise, Cromwell continued to meditate till the autumn on the delights of such a union of Protestant peoples.
It was ge
nerally felt at the time that the idea of this Anglo-Dutch union owed something to the Anglo-Scottish union which had been propounded the year before, and carried through in effect (although not yet ratified by law). After Cromwell left for Worcester, resistance in that country was virtually put to an end when Monk bloodily stormed Dundee in September 1651. By December the same year the forces of Parliament were “masters of Inverness” which, it was boasted, was “farther than Julius Caesar or any invader before ever went in Scotland”.* ( * The words “from the south” should perhaps have been added: it was true that the Romans got no further than the Grampian mountains south of Inverness, but of course there had been other invaders from the north.) Dumbarton fell the following January and Dunnottar (where the regalia of Scotland were preserved by being buried in the floor of a church) in May. Richard Deane was left with what proved to be the more difficult task of pacifying the inaccessible Highlands for which mastery of the town of Inverness proved unfortunately to be the first rather than the last step. In the spring of 1652 a formal Act of Union was proposed, replacing the first outraged reaction of Parliament to the business of Scotland which seems to have been simply to annex the whole country. Shires and burghs were told to send representatives to Edinburgh to elect twenty-one deputies for London, and although a third of those invited did not partake, in October the newly elected deputies did arrive in the English capital. Here they lodged a series of protests against their lowly status, including a demand for more deputies, and after the dissolution suffered the further humiliation of not being able to return to Scotland immediately since their allowances of 2s. a day had not been paid.18
These kinds of local difficulties apart, there was no doubt that such a forced marriage was a painful blow to Scottish national pride, and it is easy to appreciate the bitterness in the prediction of Robert Blair: “it will be as when the poor bird is embodied into the hawk that hath eaten it up”. This left the English in turn reflecting crossly on their ingratitude. No public delight at the proclamation of the Union! “So senseless are this generation of their own good,” wrote an Englishman, “that scarce a man of them showed any sign of rejoicing. Though the most flourishing of their Kings would have given the best jewel in their crowns to have procured a vote in Parliament for their equal shares or staking in the laws of England.” But the removal of the Covenant as the national religion did give a fillip to those who had always opposed it, for as Sir Thomas Urquart of Cromarty, that original Highland philosopher, pointed out, Independents and Royalists had always been able to get along better with each other than either side with Presbyterians. The English took care to emphasize that they were also freeing the Scots from religious bondage as well as other chains. One request asked for additional Independent chaplains to be sent speedily up from England to aid the garrisons. Some Independent churches were founded in the Lowlands, and Deane reported with approval that in the Highlands, the inhabitants were listening to the Independent arguments “with great attention and groanings”.19
It was one of Cromwell’s correspondents who put his finger on the heart of the English problem in Scotland. “For our best security and doing good to that poor and crafty people,” he wrote, “their bait must be freedom and profit.” Profit of a sort was there and would increase markedly when customs were abolished between the two countries, but on the other hand the cost of the English troops was both high and much resented. Freedom was certainly absent. What was more, the Presbyterian clergy retained their hold on their people to a degree that the English Independents in their optimism were reluctant to admit. Sir Thomas Urquart wrote of the Union that it should not be bound simply “by the frost of the conquering sword” as timber and stone are sometimes welded unnaturally together by ice. A proper Union had not only to be homogeneated by naturalization and mutual enjoyment of the same privileges and immunities, but the hearts of the Scottish people needed also to be won (a process not much advanced by the English authorities when they forbade any of their soldiers to marry “a woman of the Scottish nation”). Even if during 1652 there was “a strange kind of hush” across the country, there was in all the Scots, as Robert Lilburne, the English commander, reported with depression the next year “a secret antipathy to us, do what we can to oblige them’ ‘.20
The outbreak of the Anglo-Dutch War provided the incentive for the first proper Royalist attempt to make use of this antipathy, and as so often, it was in the Highlands, so easy of hidden access from the Continent, so difficult of internal penetration by the Government, that the rising was designated to take place. Unfortunately the Royalist expedition suffered from some familiar disadvantages of a divided and frustrated command. Middleton, the experienced Royalist General, who was then abroad, had initial difficulty raising troops, and subsequently clashed with the leader on the spot, the Earl of Glencairn. As a result Lilburne, a phlegmatic man as well as an honest soldier and administrator, did not at first take these “designs of the wicked”, as he termed them in a letter to Cromwell, too seriously. Supported by his sincere belief in the wisdom of English rule for Scotland, he referred to the rising comfortably as being merely “something from Inverness”, the rest of the country being in a very peaceful posture, for all the wild attitudes of the Highlanders. Later, he decided it was some of the Presbyterian ministers blowing their trumpets which raised the Lowlands in turn, and he followed through this view by dissolving the Presbyterian General Assembly forcibly in July; an action in which he had not been instructed from London, although it was subsequently approved.21
But lack of reinforcements from England, for which Lilburne began to write to Cromwell in tones of increasing desperation as autumn drew on, coupled with the very real problem of guerilla warfare in the Highlands, gradually gave to the Glencairn rising a more serious character than its divided command might otherwise have warranted. In November Lilburne told Cromwell feelingly of the beams of rebellion “darting, I may say almost in each corner”, and the enemy growing strong upon the edge of the impenetrable hills. Even so, and hampered as he was by the political changes at home which meant that he never quite received the supplies he needed, Lilburne’s instincts for settling the country were tolerant and perspicacious. For one thing, he had realized that some of the disaffection of the nobility was due to sheer financial need. Insolvency had been brought on by lengthy wars and exacerbated, oddly enough, by the new forms of justice introduced by the English, anxious to break down the hereditary jurisdiction; the lairds’ creditors could now dun them, although in other ways English justice had brought a new stability to the country. Lilburne suggested that less stringent measures should be used to pursue them, and that the Council of Officers should instruct the judges to allow them considerable time to pay the sums owing. Lilburne’s plans for peace after the Glencairn rising were far from punitive, including the taking off of all sequestrations save for five or six major offenders. By December Lilburne was making a more hopeful report to Cromwell.22
Nevertheless the Highlands continued to present a disturbing appearance well into the next year, and continued to do so after a combined operation by Lilburne and Monk induced the Lowlands into a sort of peace. Middleton himself took over the command in early 1654, but once more the Anglo-Dutch War interacted on the Scottish situation, by its conclusion bringing to an end hopes of Continental aid for the Royalists. Finally, in July Middleton was defeated by Monk, who had superseded Lilburne, in a surprise attack at Dalnaspidal near Lochgarry. Although Middleton himself escaped abroad, his followers were irremediably dispersed and the Scottish hopes of King Charles were once more over.
At home the Barebones Parliament had not justified the high expectations generally entertained as to its prowess, despite the fact that the man chosen as Speaker, the aged and pious Francis Rous, was one in whom Cromwell had much personal trust. A veteran of many Puritan struggles, he was at present Provost of Eton; he had turned from the Presbyterian cause to that of the Independents in 1649 and had recently served on the committee for settin
g up a national Church. It might be supposed that Rous was just the sort of man to present Cromwell with the godly wellorganized gathering on which he had set his heart. Unfortunately Harrison’s Fifth Monarchists or their sympathizers, in their own opinion equally godly and on this occasion undeniably better organized, were also present in disturbingly large numbers.23 There had been a popular rumour that Harrison was actually to be Speaker – but under their own managers, Squibb and Moyer, these radicals were soon to attain quite enough coherence to give the name of the so-called “nominated” Parliament a hollow ring in Cromwell’s ears. It was true that the assembly had a genuine religious tinge to it: even if it was not quite so exaggeratedly prone to prayer and outpourings as later mockers liked to pretend, Alexander Jaffray, one of the five Scottish members, noted in his Diary: “I had there occasion to meet and be acquainted with many godly men; though I can say little of any good we did at that Parliament; yet it was in the hearts of some there to have done good for promoting the kingdom of Christ.. ,”24 It was the method of promotion which was at stake.
The Fifth Monarchists, last heard of in 1649 as a-small but growing sect, had in the intervening years increased not only in strength but in noise. For one thing they regarded wars – in this case the Dutch War – with approval, not only because they were helping towards the spreading of the kingdom of Christ, but because Continental war, like the return of the Jews, had its place in their elaborate calculations. These in turn pointed to the restoration of the monarchy of Christ in either 1660 or 1666. By the end of 1652 the Fifth Monarchists were impelled to interfere in matters of State, their language being always noticeably violent. “I heard one prayer and two sermons,” wrote a visitor to one of their churches at Blackfriars in 1653, “but good god! what cruel, and abominable, and most horrid trumpets of fire, murther and flame.”25 Henceforward their fiery prophesyings, larded with Scriptural interpretations either lauding (the Dutch War) or denigrating furiously (peace negotiations) would accompany Cromwell’s actions whatsoever he might do. The dissolution happened to secure their approval, as being one step nearer the throne of the Ancient of the Days in England. But the combination of vocal members within the assembly and positively vociferous preachers without, might well prove alarming on those subjects where they did not agree with the more moderate ecclesiastical policies of Cromwell.