54 The New York ReviewA ‘Puritan Jihadi’
Keith ThomasThe Making of Oliver Cromwell
by Ronald Hutton.
Yale University Press,
400 pp., $35.00; $22.00 (paper; to be
published in August)When in 2002 the BBC held a national
poll to identify the greatest Briton in
history, the tenth place, well below
notables like Winston Churchill and
William Shakespeare, was taken by
Oliver Cromwell. It is not obvious why
he should have got even as far as that.
Admittedly, Cromwell had a spectacu-
lar career. A country gentleman from
Huntingdonshire and a keen Puritan,
he was a member of Parliament in
1628 – 1629 and again from 1640 on-
ward. A strong critic of King Charles I
for his anti- Calvinist policies, his at-
tempt to rule without Parliament for
eleven years (1629–1640), and his sun-
dry illegalities, Cromwell became a
prominent figure when the civil war be-
tween the monarch and his opponents
broke out in 1642.
He rose to be a highly success-
ful general who played an import-
ant part in defeating Charles I and
(once it became clear that the king
had no intention of abdicating) secur-
ing his prosecution and execution in
January 1649. As the new republic’s
commander- in- chief, Cromwell sub-
dued Ireland in 1649–1650 and conclu-
sively defeated the Scots at Worcester
in September 1651. In December 1653
he was appointed to the highest office
in the land, Lord Protector of England,
Scotland, and Ireland. He and his son
Richard, who succeeded him after his
death in 1658, were the first and only
nonroyals to have been England’s head
of state. The Anglican Church, with its
bishops, deans, and chapters, was abol-
ished, and although the Presbyterian
system, which replaced it, was also a
national church, there was in practice
a great deal of tolerance. The Baptists,
Congregationalists, and Quakers were
among the sects that achieved perma-
nence during this period.
All this made Cromwell a hero in the
eyes of later Protestant Nonconform-
ists, who admired him for his hostil-
ity to an episcopal church and for his
championing of religious toleration.
He also won much posthumous respect
among future democrats for his famous
assertion that “I had rather have a plain
russet- coated captain that knows what
he fights for, and loves what he knows,
than that which you call a gentleman
and is nothing else.” Nevertheless,
despite all the upheavals and the new
loyalties briefly created during those
years, the monarchy and a wealthy, es-
tablished Church of England returned
for good in 1660.
For all Charles I’s faults, his execu-
tion was widely seen as a lamentable
murder. In 1660 the Restoration Par-
liament declared him a martyr. He
was added to the calendar of Anglican
saints, and prayers were ordered to be
said annually in his memory. There
was a determined search to find, arrest,
and condemn to a hideous death the
“regicides”— the men who had signed
the warrant for the king’s execution.
Cromwell’s body or, more accurately,
the one that was believed to be his (for it
was widely rumored that another bodyhad been substituted for his and that he
lay in his daughter Mary’s family vault
in Newburgh Park, in the North Rid-
ing of Yorkshire) was exhumed from its
grave in Westminster Abbey and taken
to Tyburn, the usual place of execution,
where it was hanged for several hours
and then decapitated. The headless
body was buried in a lime pit, and the
head was impaled on a spike and ex-
posed for more than two decades at the
south end of Westminster Hall.
For two centuries after his death, the
name of Cromwell was vilified by roy-
alist and Anglican propagandists. His
brand of godliness, which had involved
much public self- denunciation as “the
chief of sinners,” became increasingly
unfashionable in the Age of Reason,
and his rise from minor gentleman to
king in all but name, with unaccount-
able power much greater than Charles I
ever enjoyed, inevitably provoked accu-
sations of self- seeking hypocrisy. For
Edward Hyde, later Earl of Clarendon,
the author of the influential History
of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in En-
gland (completed in 1672 but published
posthumously in 1702–1704), Cromwell
was “the greatest dissembler living.” In
his posthumously published Memoires
(1701), another royalist MP, Sir Philip
Warwick, described Cromwell as “the
great Hypocrite,” and the eighteenth-
century philosopher David Hume in his
much- read History of England (1754 –1761) unambiguously labeled him “the
usurper.”Oliver Cromwell is therefore a chal-
lenging subject. The first serious histo-
rian to examine his career, the Scottish
writer Thomas Carlyle, came to the
conclusion that “this Cromwell was
one of the greatest souls ever born of
English kin,” but that a book about him
was “impossible! Literally so.” Carlyle
had included him in his essay On He-
roes, Hero- Worship, and the Heroic in
History (1841), but in mid- December
1843 he gathered together everything he
had written about Cromwell and hurled
it into the fire. Renouncing the idea of
writing a biography, Carlyle turned in-
stead to an edition of Cromwell’s let-
ters and speeches. His Life and Letters
of Oliver Cromwell appeared two years
later. It was an immediate success. As
a contemporary journalist observed,
it “burst on the world as a kind of his-
toric revelation.” “At a single stroke,”
claimed another writer, it “completely
reversed” the verdict of history.
The prevailing image of Cromwell as
a ruthless hypocrite was destroyed by
Carlyle’s publication of his often inco-
herent speeches, in which, rather than
delivering a prepared text, he was ob-
viously thinking aloud and trying to
convince himself of the truth of what
he was saying as he went along. “Crom-well, emblem of the dumb English,”
wrote Carlyle, “is interesting to me by
the very inadequacy of his speech.” His
utterances, moreover, did not exculpate
him from the charge of occasional de-
viousness. But they also revealed him
to have been intensely religious, with a
strong sense of being directed by God,
though he was frequently tortured by
doubts and uncertainties.
In his impressive new study, The Mak-
ing of Oliver Cromwell, Ronald Hut-
ton reminds us that throughout his life
Cromwell was “impulsive, and given to
fits of savage temper, brooding with-
drawal and boisterous good humour.”
With his family and friends he en-
joyed unsophisticated pleasures like
throwing cushions and carpets at one
another. He was emphatically not an
intellectual. But Hutton is unduly dis-
missive when he says that as an adult,
Cromwell never showed any personal
interest in scholarship. This overlooks
the letter to his son Richard in which
he recommends Sir Walter Raleigh’s
History of the World: “It’s a Body of
History; and will add much more to
your understanding than fragments of
Story.”
Hutton is a professor at the Uni-
versity of Bristol and a distinguished
historian of paganism and folklore, as
well as of seventeenth- century British
politics. Over the past thirty years he
has also been a member of the Sealed
Knot, a club whose members dress up
on weekends and reenact civil war bat-
tles. It is, one suspects, his experience
with them that leads him to emphasize
the smell that must have arisen from
nearly 30,000 unwashed soldiers at the
Battle of Marston Moor who, like their
horses, had to relieve themselves where
best they could.
Hutton’s book is intelligent, well doc-
umented, and stylish. It covers the first
forty- eight years of Cromwell’s life, in-
cluding his military career in the first
civil war (1642–1646), when he served
in the parliamentary forces under the
Earl of Manchester and contributed
decisively to their victories at Mar-
ston Moor in July 1644 and Naseby in
June 1645. By stopping in 1646, how-
ever, Hutton leaves out the story of
how Cromwell went on to become not
just a highly successful general but the
most powerful man in the country. To
pave the way for the king’s execution,
in December 1648 he purged the Long
Parliament (which had been in session
since 1640), and in April 1653 he forci-
bly dissolved it altogether. In December
1653 he was sworn in as head of state for
life, with the title of Lord Protector. In
1657 Parliament formally offered him
the kingship, which had been vacant
since Charles I’s death, but after some
hesitation, and for reasons about which
we can only speculate, he declined.Cromwell’s meteoric ascent must have
come as a great surprise to those who
had known him in his earlier life. He
had a grammar school education and
spent fourteen months at Sidney Sussex
College, Cambridge, which he left im-
mediately on his father’s death. (There
was nothing unusual in those days
about gentlemen leaving university
too soon to qualify for a degree.) ButOliver Cromwell; illustration by Hugo GuinnessThomas 54 55 .indd 54 5 / 26 / 22 1 : 13 PM