Cromwell / Hero or villain?
“He became more recognisable
to more people than all but a
handful of English monarchs”
O
liver Cromwell has
never enjoyed a better
press than in the past
30 years. Almost all the
biographies currently
available in bookshops
treat him as a man of
towering personal integrity. True, he was
capable of self-delusion, and indeed was
dangerously assured that he was God’s
chosen instrument, but here was a man
who, according to many modern
commentators, believed in broad terms
in social justice, equality before the law
and the accountability of governors to
the people. Here was a leader with a more
advanced belief in religious liberty (at
the very least to “all species of protestant”,
as he put it) – a liberty that not only
meant freedom of worship but equal
access to education, the professions and
public service.
Cromwell was a military leader who was
never defeated, a political leader who took
the tough decisions, the man who
orchestrated the Regicide in the winter of
1648–9 and, for the last five years of his life,
a reluctant head of state serving as lord
protector under two different paper
constitutions. To many, his greatness is
undoubted, notwithstanding the fierceness
of his religious faith. Only the Irish,
remembering the Drogheda and Wexford
massacres, revile him.
Cromwell was also, of course, hailed as a
hero and a champion of liberty during his
lifetime – not least by the poet and
polemicist John Milton, who wrote:
“ Cromwell, our chief of men, who through
a cloud
Not of war only, but detractions rude,
Guided by faith and matchless fortitude,
To peace and truth thy glorious way hast
ploughed,
And on the neck of crowned Fortune proud
Hast reared God’s trophies, and his work
pursued”
But he was also reviled. Embittered
royalists and a significant number of
parliamentarians regarded the brutal
military putsch that removed most MPs
from parliament [‘Pride’s Purge’] – and
which led to the staged trial and execution
of Charles I – as a betrayal of all they had
fought for. Many Commonwealthsmen
shared their enmity, believing that
Cromwell’s use of military force to dissolve
the Rump parliament in April 1653 and his
decision to become lord protector within a
paper constitution written by his army
colleagues, had betrayed the cause he had
fought to establish. They were to take their
revenge in their memoirs.Even old army
friends changed their
minds about him.
“I believe firmly that
the root and tree of
piety are alive in your
Lordship, though the
leaves thereof, through abundance of
temptations and flatteries seem to me to
be withered much of late,” wrote Colonel
Duckenfield, a regional commander and
governor of the Isle of Man, to Cromwell
in 1655.
If one event symbolises Cromwell’s fall
from grace, it occurred on 30 January 1661,
eight months after Charles II’s restoration
to the throne, when his corpse was
removed from Westminster Abbey,
dangled from a gibbet at Tyburn and his
head prominently displayed on a spike for
everyone to see.
However Royalist invective soon gave
way to a damning silence. The Whigs did
not seek to rehabilitate him and Tories
preferred not to dwell on what could
happen to kings.Short-lived anonymity
As personal memory faded, and death
carried away those who could testify from
experience (and as the tracts of the 1640s
and 1650s, locked away in private libraries,
were lost to several generations of writers),
Cromwell became less known than at any
later period. Yet his anonymity was
short-lived. When Britain was once more
sucked into major wars in the 1690s,
memories of the previous military
dictatorship were revived by the systematic
publication of the memoirs of many of the
men at the heart of that period: Bulstrode
Whitelocke (a leading law yer), Richard
Baxter (a ‘godly’ minister), Denzil Holles (a
veteran Presbyterian politician), Edmund
Ludlow (a republican army commander),
the Earl of Clarendon (who was Charles II’s
principal adviser in exile and at the
Restoration). They were all, with the
exception of Ludlow, men who both
admired and deplored Cromwell.
Their memoirs set the tone for 18th-
century discussions. Gentlemen of letters
were unanimous in regarding him as
dangerous and fanatical, although the
Tories were far more contemptuous of his
legacy than the regretful Whigs. While
John Hampden and John Pym, leaders of
the Long Parliament at the beginning of
the Civil War, were the respectable voices
against royal and episcopal tyranny,
Cromwell was a vicious extremist. As
David Hume put it, he was the “most
frantic enthusiast... most dangerous ofhypocrites... who was enabled after
multiplied deceits to cover, under a tempest
of passion, all his crooked schemes and
profound artifices”.
So how did Oliver Cromwell make the
long journey from hate figure to the
celebrated character in British public
memory that he is today? His rehabilitation
can be closely linked to the publication of
Thomas Carlyle’s Letters and Speeches of
Oliver Cromwell in October 1845, a text
that was to remain continuously in print
for exactly 100 years. At a conservative
estimate more than 100,000 copies were
sold and many of them were handed down
from generation to generation.
Carlyle’s work is a passionate defence of
Cromwell’s sincerity, of his faith in God, in
his living out his vocation and his mission.
And while deficiencies of scholarship and
Carlyle’s own obtrusive interpolations
disfigure his text, it did not dull its impact.
Suddenly faced with a Cromwell who had
an unreflective belief in spiritual
aristocracy and a rough-tongued, cloudily
articulated integrity, many Whigs
abandoned their conventional distaste.
Thousands more thought about Cromwell
for the first time. Carlyle’s book
emboldened the views of Congregationalist
historians like John Forster who had earlier
taken a more cautious line. Now – in the
best available summation of Carlyle’s
champion – he hailed the new Cromwell as
“no hypocrite or actor of plays... no victim
of ambition, no seeker after sovereignty or
temporal power. That he was a man whose
every thought was with the Eternal – a man
of a great, robust, massive, mind and an
honest, stout, English heart”.
Thomas Carlyle’s Letters and Speeches of
Oliver Cromwell also marked the beginning
of a period when Cromwell made an
unparalleled transformation into popular
culture. He was memorialised not only in
print but on canvas, in woodcut and
engraving, and in marble and bronze.
Visually, he became one of the most
familiar of Englishmen, more recognisable
to more people than all but a handful of
English monarchs or British public figures.
The statue by Hamo Thornycroft, bible in
one hand, sword in the other, which has
stood on Cromwell Green in Westminster
since the tercentenary of his birth in 1899,
is among the most iconic in the country.