June 23, 2022 55although Cromwell became an MP for
Huntingdon in the Parliament of 1628–
1629, there is no evidence that he took
any interest in national politics during
Charles I’s personal rule in the 1630s.
He was elected to the Short Parliament
in 1640 as MP for Cambridge, but it was
not until the opening days of the Long
Parliament, later that year, that he
came to prominence. Clarendon, who
was a fellow MP at the time, wrongly
asserted that as late as November 1641,
Cromwell was “little taken notice of.”
In fact, he had been an active parlia-
mentarian from the start, working to
secure the release of the Leveller John
Lilburne, moving the second reading
of the Bill for Annual Parliaments, and
helping Sir Henry Vane to draft what
proved to be an unsuccessful bill for
the abolition of bishops.
The future royalist Sir Philip War-
wick remembered coming into the
House of Commons one morning in
November 1640 “well clad” (“for we
courtiers valued our selves much upon
our good clothes”) and perceiving a
gentleman speaking who was unknown
to him and “very ordinarily apparelled”
in “a plain cloth suit, which seemed to
have been made by an ill country tailor.
His linen was plain, and not very clean;
and I remember a speck or two of blood
upon his little [throat] band.” Yet,
though his countenance was “swollen
and reddish” and his voice “sharp and
untunable,” his eloquence was “full of
fervour.” This unprepossessing figure
was “very much hearkened unto.”
Warwick also recalled how in later
years Cromwell, “having had a better
tailor, and more converse among good
company,” acquired “a great and majes-
tic deportment and comely presence.”
“From a very mean figure of a man in
the beginning of this Parliament,” he
rose to “prodigious greatness before
the end.” “No one climbs so high as
he who knows not whither he is going”
was the contemporary adage. But there
were many who in retrospect would
have agreed with Philip Warwick that
the kingship had been Cromwell’s ob-
jective throughout.
Sometime in the late 1620s or, as
Hutton suggests, in the early 1630s
Cromwell had undergone a dramatic re-
ligious conversion; it is not clear exactly
when. But thereafter his fervent, born-
again religiosity was extreme, even by
the standards of the age. On his death-
bed he recalled that his trust in Christ
had saved his life in May 1639, when his
seventeen- year- old son Robert died of
smallpox, an event that, in his words,
“went as a dagger to my heart.” In No-
vember 1641 he supported the Grand
Remonstrance, a long indictment of
King Charles I’s misdeeds, culminating
in a demand that the king’s counselors
be approved by Parliament. Cromwell
felt so strongly about it that, as he con-
fessed to Lord Falkland, if the Remon-
strance had been rejected, he would
have sold all he had the next morning
and never seen England again. Presum-
ably he would have gone either to the
Netherlands or, more probably, to one
of the American colonies.
As it was, the Grand Remonstrance
was passed on November 23, 1641, by a
vote of 159–148. But relations between
Crown and Parliament continued to
deteriorate, and armed conflict broke
out in the autumn of 1642. Cromwell
raised a company of sixty cavalry and,
for no obvious reason, was promoted
from captain to colonel. He becamethe leading horse commander in the
Eastern Association, the parliamentary
army raised in August and September
1643 that drew its personnel from the
six East Anglian counties, and in Jan-
uary 1644 he was promoted to the rank
of lieutenant- general and recognized as
second- in- command of the entire army.Since the beginning of the civil war,
Cromwell had never been in doubt that
God was on the side of Parliament. Re-
porting the defeat of the royalists in the
Battle of Marston Moor, he wrote that
“it had all the evidences of an absolute
victory obtained by the Lord’s blessing
upon the godly party principally.” The
even more decisive parliamentary vic-
tor y at Naseby the fol low i ng yea r he saw
as “none other but the hand of God; and
to him alone belongs the glory, wherein
none are to share with him.”
At the same time Cromwell was
less clear as to how, and in what sort
of church, God should be worshiped.
He certainly wished to get rid of the
Anglican hierarchy of bishops, deans,
and chapters, but he was less certain
about what alternative system of ec-
clesiastical government should replace
it. Parliamentary opinion was divided
between support for the Presbyterians,
who wanted a hierarchy of congrega-
tions, classes, provinces, and national
assemblies, and the Independents, who
preferred greater autonomy for individ-
ual congregations. Cromwell was said to
have remained undecided, remarking to
two fellow MPs that, in matters of reli-
gion, “I can tell you, sirs, what I would
not have, though I cannot what I would.”
His ecclesiastical policy in the mid-
1650s, when he was the head of state
as the Protector, suggests that he fa-
vored a national church, but with a
good deal of freedom for individual
congregations and with toleration for
Protestants of other denominations.
But Hutton rightly notes that there is
a distinct lack of evidence during the
1640s for Cromwell’s own theological
opinions, other than his consistent sup-
port for independency and liberty of
conscience.
Because Hutton’s biography doesn’t
go beyond 1646, many of Cromwell’s
most controversial actions, including
the execution of Charles I in 1649 and
the brutal subjugation of Ireland in the
early 1650s, remain to be discussed. In
a second volume, which he does not
promise but which his readers will ea-
gerly demand, he will have to deal with
the massacres in September and Octo-
ber 1649 of the garrisons of Drogheda
and Wexford in Ireland. Cromwell de-
fended the slaughter at Drogheda as
“a righteous judgment of God upon
these barbarous wretches who have im-
brued their hands in so much innocent
blood.” This was, of course, an outra-
geous interpretation, for the atrocities
that Cromwell had in mind were the
Ulster massacres in 1641, of which the
defenders of Drogheda were wholly
innocent.
The truth is that Cromwell had be-
come what Hutton calls a “Puritan
jihadi.” With a “violent temper and
aggressive manners,” he seems to have
taken a distinctly Manichaean view
of other people, polarizing the world
between the imagined agents of good
and the alleged doers of evil. For the
latter there was to be no mercy and
they were to be treated with savagery.
Unlike his fellow parliamentary gen-eral Sir William Waller, who spoke of
“this war without an enemy,” Cromwell
demonized the royalists. At Belton in
May 1643, he took joy in “doing execu-
tion” upon them as they fled from the
battlefield, and he recounted with rel-
ish the killing of Lord Charles Caven-
dish, a dashing cavalry commander, as
he lay wounded on the ground. As for
the defeated royalists at Marston Moor,
they were, for him, “God’s enemies,”
and “God made them as stubble to our
swords.”
Hutton is right to say that Cromwell
“had a savage streak in his nature”
and that he “enjoyed inflicting death,
injury or humiliation on those against
whom he had taken.” At Naseby he
allowed the foot soldiers of the New
Model Army to commit hideous atroc-
ities against the enemy’s female camp-
followers, killing over a hundred and
disfiguring others by cutting noses and
slicing cheeks.
Cromwell also had a strong tendency
to be economical with the truth. As
Hutton shows, he regularly gave all the
credit for a victory in battle to his own
troops (and by implication himself),
while airbrushing out the contributions
of his colleagues and their troops. He
represented the parliamentary triumph
at Marston Moor, for example, as the
work of his cavalry alone, dismissing
General Alexander Leslie’s three regi-
ments as “a few Scots in the rear.”Unexpectedly, Hutton often turns
away from the insoluble problems
presented by Cromwell’s career to a
different subject altogether. In his in-
troductory note, he explains that one of
the objectives of the book is to express
his sense of “the beauty and variety of
the English landscape and its seasons.”
Accordingly, he frequently turns to de-
scriptions of the landscape when the
evidence for human action is lacking.
Though admirable, it is not clear what
this has to do with Cromwell, about
whose aesthetic sensibilities little if
anything is known. But we can con-
fidently guess that he was much more
likely to have scanned a new landscape
with a farmer’s interest in the state of
the crops or a soldier’s tactical eye for
the best place from which to attack
than to have been a Capability Brown
avant la lettre. Hutton, by contrast, is
an aesthete and a close observer of the
natural world. Vivid and precise, his
sensitive pieces of landscape apprecia-
tion are remarkably eloquent.
They start early in the book, where
the sparsity of records for the first two
thirds of Cromwell’s life forces Hut-
ton to shift his attention to the physi-
cal environment in which the future
Protector grew up. He describes the
Great Ouse, a river with numerous is-
lands, bends, and channels: “In high
summer its waters would have been a
mass of quivering reflections.” (There
are rather a lot of “would haves” in
this book.)Its edges would be crowded with
coarse clumps of comfrey and fig-
wort, giant dock leaves and fra-
grant foamy meadowsweet, and
with moorhens, bumblebees, drag-
onflies, orange- billed swans with
cygnets, bright beetles and lizards.Later Hutton tells us that in July 1643,
when Cromwell set out to relieve Lord
Willoughby of Parham, who was sur-rounded in Gainsborough by royalist
forces, his route lay throughsprawling fields of ripe wheat
and barley, rough green pastures,
copses of trees carpeted with
ferns and fungi, swift brown and
white butterflies, and great gen-
tle hillsides unrolling to disclose
more vistas of field and wood. If
the weather was warm, those vis-
tas would have been bluish with
haze; if showery, towards evening
the shadowed valleys and copse-
patched hillsides would have been
landscapes of jade and violet.He suggests that when Cromwell rode
out of London on his spring campaign
in 1645,there would have been yellow cat-
kins on the hazels, grey buds on
the willows and black buds on the
ashes, but the trees in general would
still have been leafless and the grass
withered and bleached on the sheep
runs. Now as he returned, spring
was almost gone, with fresh grass in
the fields and emerald leaves show-
ing in sprays against the grey trunks
of the woods, while flowers of half a
dozen kinds had opened on the field
banks and the floors of copses.In July 1645 Thomas Fairfax’s parlia-
mentary army marched over Salisbury
Plain toward Dorset. “It was,” writes
Hutton,the season in this land of blue and
yellow flowers and small blue but-
terflies. The toiling soldiers would
also probably have seen droves of
the most notable inhabitants of
the plain at the time: the largest
flightless birds to have survived
in Britain into modern times, the
yellowish- brown and whiskered
bustards, big and tasty as turkeys
(which was why they did not sur-
vive much longer).Hutton is particularly sensitive to
skyscapes. The parliamentary attack
on the Devonshire town of Bovey
Tracey took place on January 8, 1646.
It was, writes Hutton,another freezing winter night, and
the constellations of the season—
Orion with his jewelled belt and
sword, and red upraised hand and
blue- white foot, the great spar-
kling green eye of his dog Sirius,
red- eyed Taurus the bull, the clus-
tered shimmer of the Pleiades, and
the ice- white heavenly twins, Cas-
tor and Pollux— would have shone
above the parliamentary troopers
as they carried out the action.These astral evocations have their
charm, but they take us away from the
story. So in the last paragraph of the
b o o k , H u t t o n s u m s u p h i s v i e w o f C r o m -
well: “He was courageous, devout, res-
olute, principled, intelligent, eloquent,
able, adaptable and dedicated, but also
self- seeking, unscrupulous, dishonest,
manipulative, vindictive and blood-
thirsty.” These qualities, he continues,
“were all woven together, in a single
seamless whole, at the centre of which
lay an acquired sense of a special rela-
tionship with God, which informed and
justified all.” It is hard to improve upon
this assessment. QThomas 54 55 .indd 55 5 / 26 / 22 1 : 13 PM