I

Twenty months after Oliver Cromwell's death Charles II sat once more on his father's throne. The intervening period had shown that no settlement was possible until the Army was disbanded. Richard Cromwell lacked the prestige with the soldiers necessary if he was to prolong his father's balancing trick; but after his fall no Army leader proved capable of restoring the old radical alliance, and nothing but social revolution could have thwarted the "natural rulers" determination to get rid of military rule. Taxes could be collected only by force: the men of property refused to advance money to any government they did not control. The foreign situation helped to make Charles's restoration technically unconditional: there was a general fear that the peace of November 1659 which ended 24 years of war between France and Spain would be followed by an alliance of the two countries to restore the Stuarts.¹ Once it seemed likely that Charles would return, most of those who had fought against his father hastened to show their loyalty to the son. Not only the King came back but the House of Lords and ultimately the bishops too. Sectaries and Presbyterians were excluded from the church and persecuted at the instance of the House of Commons. Regicides were hanged, drawn and quartered. Milton barely escaped with his life. Oliver's corpse was dug up and hanged at Tyburn. Godliness was at a discount at the court of the merry monarch, but the cult of King Charles the Martyr prospered. Defeat for everything that Cromwell stood for could hardly have been more complete.

But the appearances were deceptive, the cheering which greeted Charles II factitious. Within a few years not only Bristol Baptists were looking back nostalgically to 'those halcyon days of prosperity, liberty and peace, … those Oliverian days of liberty'.² An unsentimental civil servant like Samuel Pepys, soon to be accused of papist leanings, recorded in July 1667 that: 'Everybody do now-a-days reflect upon Oliver and commend him, what brave things he did and made all the neighbour princes fear him.'³ Cromwell's former ambassador to France, Lockhart, whom Charles II also employed, 'found he had nothing of that regard that was paid him in Cromwell's time'. George Downing made a similar remark about the attitude of the Dutch to him, and the Ambassador of the Netherlands in 1672 told Charles II to his face that of course his country treated him differently from the Protector, for 'Cromwell was a great man, who made himself feared by land and by sea'.⁴ The common people were muttering similar things. 'Was not Oliver's name dreadful to neighbour nations?' Lodowick Muggleton asked in 1665. Four years later an apothecary of Wolverhampton was in trouble for contrasting Cromwell's successful Dutch policy with Charles II's bungling.⁵ Nor was it only in foreign affairs that such contrasts could be made. Roger Boyle's biographer points out that the inefficiency of Charles II's government was such that 'despite the king's frequent efforts to reward him, Orrery was a richer man in the service of Cromwell than in the service of Charles II'.⁶ It is the sort of thing men notice. The odious comparisons had become so frequent that French and Italian visitors commented on them.

And if we look on another 20 years, it becomes clear that the reigns of Charles II and James II were only an interlude. In 1660 the old order had not been restored neither prerogative courts nor the Court of Wards nor feudal tenures. Royal interference in economic affairs did not return, nor (despite James II's attempts) royal interference with control of their localities by the 'natural rulers'. After 1688 the policies of the 1650s were picked up again. The revolution of 1688 itself was so easily successful because James II remembered all too clearly that he had a joint in his neck. The lesson of January 1649 for the kings of Europe did not need repeating for another 144 years. The follies of James, and William III's own semi-legitimate claim to royalist loyalty, meant that the Liberator did not need to retain the large army which brought him to power: a settlement very like that which Oliver sought in vain was arrived at, with a strong executive but ultimate control by Parliament and the taxpayers. Parliament became again a permanent part of the constitution. Taxes could not be levied without the approval of the representatives of the men of property in the House of Commons; they could not be anticipated without the goodwill of bankers and the moneyed interest. All attempts to build up an independent central executive, with its own judicial system or subservient judges, strong enough to coerce the 'natural rulers' had failed—Laud's and James II's no less than the Major-Generals'. In 1649 and again in 1653 London juries acquitted John Lilburne against all the authority of the central government: in 1656 the republican Bradshaw demanded trial by a jury of 'men of value', and Cromwell, 'seeming to slight that', spoke against juries.⁷ By the end of the century juries were no longer accountable to the government for their verdicts; judges had become independent of the crown, dependent on Parliament. There was to be no administrative law in England, no more torture. The gentry and town oligarchies henceforth dominated local government, Parliamentary elections and juries.

For James I customs had been one of many sources of revenue; by the end of the century customs dues were raised or lowered in the interests of the national economic policy which the commercial classes now dictated. At the restoration the Navigation Act had been re-enacted, and the power of the East India Company confirmed: imperial trade, and especially re-exports, were expanding rapidly. Sprat in 1667 could assume as a truism learnt in the preceding twenty years that 'the English greatness will never be supported or increased … by any other wars but those at sea'.⁸ But it was only after 1688 that governments came to assume that 'trade must be the principal interest of England'—as the old Rumper Slingsby Bethel had vainly tried to convince Charles II in 1680.⁹

Parliament now determined foreign policy, and used the newly-mobilized financial resources of the country, through an aggressive use of sea power, to protect and expand the trade of a unified empire. England itself had by then been united under the dominance of the London market; separate courts no longer governed Wales and the North, 'cantonization' was no longer a danger. William III's political and economic subjugation of Ireland was thoroughly Cromwellian: the Union with Scotland in 1707 was on the same lines as that of 1652-60. By the end of the century industrial freedom had been won, monopolies had been overthrown, government interference with the market, including the labour market, had ended. The anti-Dutch policy was sponsored by the republicans of the City and the Rump, and later by the Stuart Kings, who had their own reasons for disliking the Dutch republic. The policy of colonial expansion into the western hemisphere, first against Spain, then against France, enjoyed more support among the gentry, and gradually won over a majority in the House of Commons as Dutch and Spanish power declined and French increased. After 1688 there was no opposition between the two policies, for the Netherlands had been effectively subordinated to England, and all the power of the English state could be concentrated on the battle with France for the Spanish empire and the trade of the world. The two foreign policies fused as the landed and moneyed interests fused. England emerged from the seventeenth-century crisis geared to the new world of capitalism and colonial empire.¹⁰

The control which the Parliamentary class won extended to the church too. The destruction of the Laudian bureaucracy in the church, as of Charles I's bureaucracy in the state, made inevitable the domination of the gentry over church and state alike. Cuius regio eius religio: Cromwell had used the phrase to justify him in following his own conscience and permitting toleration. But in the long run the region belonged to the gentry rather than to the Lord Protector, whose title, as he himself declared, implied that the office was held on behalf of others. The failure in 1660 to restore the High Commission meant that the bishops could not prevent the squire's domination of the parson, just as the failure to restore Star Chamber deprived the central government of any effective control over the squire in his capacity as Justice of the Peace. The hierarchy could no longer control the religious views of clergy and laity, as before 1640 in alliance with the crown it had been able to do. Church courts, which were still handing men over to be burned when Cromwell was born, had virtually ceased to function by the end of the century. JPs had succeeded to many of their functions. Apart from a brief interlude in James II's reign, no one after Cromwell's Triers ever again attempted to interfere with the patronage rights of the gentry. The monopoly of the national church had been broken. The House of Commons remained hostile to the idea of religious toleration; but nonconformity in the reigns of Charles II and James II both showed under persecution that it had come to stay, and shook off its revolutionary political associations. The Toleration Act of 1689 recognized these facts. Presbyterians and Congregationalists were not comprehended in the national church, but the Church of England was subordinated to Parliament, the parson to the squire. The high-flying clergy, the Non-jurors, were excluded as the Laudians had been under Cromwell. The Puritan Revolution was defeated in 1660; but Great Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was unique among the great powers of Europe for the strength of its evangelical tradition. It was also more tolerant than most European countries.

During the seventeenth century an intellectual revolution had taken place. The second wife of Oliver's grandfather, Sir Henry Cromwell, was alleged to have been killed by witchcraft, and in 1593 a woman was hanged for the crime. Sir Henry endowed a sermon against witchcraft, to be preached at Huntingdon annually for all time. Oliver must have heard many such sermons. Yet the occupation of Scotland by English troops under Cromwell's command led to a virtual cessation of witch persecution there. In England the burning of witches was coming to an end, and educated men were ceasing to believe in their existence. It may be a tribute to Sir Henry's lectureship that Huntingdon was one of the last places in England to see a witch executed, early in the eighteenth century. By that time the Royal Society had made science respectable.

Science had entered Oxford behind the Parliamentary armies, and in 1669 the turncoat Robert South used an official Oxford occasion to attack, in one breath, 'Cromwell, fanatics, the Royal Society and the new philosophy'.¹¹ But science and the new philosophy survived Oliver. The nucleus of the Royal Society was the group which had been installed in Oxford by the Parliamentary Commissioners, including John Wallis, the Long Parliament's cryptographer, Jonathan Goddard, physician to Cromwell's armies in Ireland and Scotland, Thomas Sydenham, former Cromwellian officer, Sir William Petty, a surveyor of Ireland for the Protector; its leading figure was John Wilkins, Oliver's brother-in-law, first secretary of the Royal Society. The Society's second secretary was Henry Oldenburg, also associated with the Oxford group, who in 1654 had described Cromwell as 'the greatest hero of the century'.¹² It would be absurd to link Cromwell too closely with the scientific movement. But as we have seen he was interested in mathematics, and many scientists emerged under his patronage. It is said to have been 'through the favour and power of Cromwell' that Goddard became Professor of Physic at Gresham College in 1655.¹³ In the following year the Protector in terested himself in the chair of geometry at the same college, to which Laurence Rooke was elected in 1657. Both were excellent appointments. The history of science in England would be very different but for the Revolution which Oliver led. In consequence of the intellectual ferment of the Revolution, divine right in all spheres was in decline by the end of the century. Political discussion was no longer conducted by swapping Biblical texts or Anglo-Saxon precedents, but in rational and utilitarian terms. The concept of scientific law had evolved: God, like the King, was bound by law. By 1712, when Richard Cromwell died, the world into which Oliver was born in 1599 had been modernized out of all recognition.¹⁴

The 'natural rulers' had also successfully resisted all attempts from below to circumscribe their authority, whether by an extension of the Parliamentary franchise or by a written constitution. Here too Cromwell played a prominent part, in outmanoeuvring and then suppressing the Levellers, in defeating the religious radicals who at one time, however wrongly, had thought of him as their leader. The abolition of tithes, extension and redistribution of the suffrage, and serious reform of the law, all had to wait until the nineteenth century. Ireton told the Agitators at Putney, 'Liberty cannot be provided for in a general sense if property be preserved.' 'Liberty and property', the royalist Sir Robert Filmer confirmed, 'are as contrary as fire to water'.¹⁵

In the great seventeenth-century struggle to decide who was to benefit from the extension of cultivation which was necessary to feed the growing cities,¹⁶ the common people were defeated no less decisively than was the crown. The abolition of the Court of Wards and of feudal tenures was a great relief for the gentry, but only for them; the acts of 1656 and 1660 specifically retained copyhold unchanged. The radical movements to win security of tenure for copyholders were defeated. Squatters and cottagers who had no written title to their holdings could be evicted. The Barebones Parliament was the last to contemplate legislation against depopulating enclosures. In 1654, for the first time, Parliament authorized the export of corn when prices were low; by 1700 England had solved its own food problems and was regularly exporting corn. Fen drainage alone extended the country's arable area by 10%. Expensive clover and root crops enabled cattle to be kept alive through the winter, thus not only increasing the meat supply but also at last breaking the manure barrier which for so long had held back agricultural expansion. But smaller cultivators did not benefit by this agricultural revolution. Commons, wastes and fens, like royal forests, were enclosed and cultivated by the private enterprise of capitalist farmers and improving landlords. 'I know several that did remember the going of a cow for 4d. per annum. The pigs did cost nothing', wrote John Aubrey in the 1680s, looking back to the disafforestation of earlier decades. 'Now the highways are encumbered with cottages, and travellers with the beggars that dwell in them.'¹⁷ The yeomen, who had formed the backbone of Cromwell's army, lost their hold on the land. Enclosure and eviction helped first to create and then to feed a proletariat for the eighteenth-century industrial revolution, and to create a market for its products. The French Revolution guaranteed the survival of the peasantry in France: the English Revolution ensured its disappearance in England.

In the 1630s Oliver Cromwell had defended the rights of the inhabitants of Huntingdon in their common lands: as Lord of the Fens he had protected commoners against the court-supported great capitalist fen-drainers; in 1641 he got a clause put into the Grand Remonstrance on their behalf. But in May 1649, less than a fortnight after the suppression of the Leveller regiments at Burford, Cromwell was named as one of fifty-odd commissioners joined with the Earl of Bedford, and the adventurers' authority to drain the Fens—formerly challenged by Oliver Cromwell—was renewed. Three days after Oliver had dissolved the Rump, he sent a major of his own regiment to suppress commoners who were opposing the adventurers. In 1654 he issued an ordinance to protect Bedford and his works, and to lay the cost of the upkeep of the work upon the inhabitants of the area. Oliver himself received 200 acres of the drained lands. In this symbolic reversal—and in his alleged somersault over tithes¹⁸—we see the reason for the hatred which the religious and political radicals felt for the leader who had betrayed their cause.

So, for good and for evil, Oliver Cromwell presided over the great decisions which determined the future course of English and world history. Marston Moor, Naseby, Preston, Worcester—and regicide¹⁹—ensured that England was to be ruled by Parliaments and not by absolute kings: and this remains true despite the Protector's personal failure to get on with his Parliaments. Cromwell foreshadows the great commoners who were to rise by merit to rule England in the eighteenth century. The man who in the 1630s fought the Huntingdon oligarchy and the government of Charles which backed it up ultimately made England safe for its 'natural rulers', despite his own unsuccessful attempt to coerce them through the Major-Generals. The man whose first Parliamentary speech was against the 'popery' of the Arminian bishops and their protégés, who collaborated with Londoners to get evangelical preaching in his locality (and who besought Scottish Presbyterians 'in the bowels of Christ' to think it possible they might be mistaken) ensured that England should never again be ruled by high-flying bishops or persecuting presbyteries, that it should be a relatively tolerant country, and that the 'natural rulers' should control the church both centrally and locally. The man who almost emigrated to New England in despair of old England lived to set his country on the path of empire, of economic aggression, of naval war. He ruthlessly broke the resistance not only of the backward-looking royalists but also of those radicals whose programme for extending the franchise would have ended the exclusive political sway of Cromwell's class, whose agrarian programme would have undermined that class's economic power, and whose religious programme would have left no national church to control—even though half at least of Oliver sympathized with the last demand. The dreams of a Milton, a Winstanley, a George Fox, a Bunyan, were not realized; nor indeed were those of Oliver himself: 'Would that we were all saints'. The sons of Zeruiah proved too strong for the ideals which had animated the New Model Army. If Cromwell had not shot down the Levellers, someone else would no doubt have done it. But in fact it was Oliver who did: it is part of his historical achievement.

The British Empire, the colonial wars which built it up, the slave trade based on Oliver's conquest of Jamaica, the plunder of India resulting from his restitution and backing of the East India Company, the exploitation of Ireland; a free market, free from government interference and from government protection of the poor; Parliamentary government, the local supremacy of JPs, the Union of England and Scotland; religious toleration, the non-conformist conscience, relative freedom of the press, an attitude favourable to science; a country of landlords, capitalist farmers and agricultural labourers, the only country in Europe with no peasantry: none of these would have come about in quite the same way without the English Revolution, without Oliver Cromwell.

If we see this revolution as a turning point in English history comparable with the French and Russian Revolutions in the history of their countries, then we can agree with those historians who see Cromwell in his Revolution combining the roles of Robespierre and Napoleon, of Lenin and Stalin, in theirs. Oliver was no conscious revolutionary like Robespierre or Lenin: the achievements of the English Revolution were not the result of his deliberate design. But it would not have astonished Oliver or his contemporaries to be told that the consequences of men's actions were not always those which the protagonists intended. 'This kind of government of the church', wrote one of the New Model Army's chaplains in 1651, 'God doth not manage according to the wisdom and thoughts, no not of his very people, but wholly according to the counsel of his own will and the thoughts of his own heart: doing things that they must not know yet but must know afterwards; yea, such things as for the present seem absurd and absolutely destructive.'²⁰ Another of Oliver's close associates, in the same year, declared that 'the actings of God's providence in carrying on the interest of Christ are and shall be exceedingly unsuited to the reasonings and expectations of the most of men', who 'expect that nothing must be done but what suits unto … their principles; and if anything contrary be wrought, even of God himself, how deceived and how disappointed are they!'²¹ On one occasion, perhaps in 1636, Cromwell took a heavy dose of mithridate as a precaution against plague infection: he was surprised to find it had the effect of curing his pimples.²² He would have been no less surprised if he could have known that his heroic struggles to build God's kingdom in England had as their lasting consequence the removal of obstacles to the development of English capitalism. 'From plague to pimples' would be an unfair summary of the great Protector's career: but it contains a thought.

Remembering Pepys, we may perhaps think Oliver's most important contribution was to the formation of a popular national consciousness. His assertion, more effectively than ever since the fifteenth century, of England's power in Europe, was strongly emphasized by contemporary poetical eulogists. Oliver 'showed/The ancient way of conquering abroad', said Waller; he 'once more joined us to the continent', Marvell agreed. 'He made us freemen of the continent', Dryden echoed, and taught the English lion to roar. Thomas Sprat thought Oliver restored the 'subdued courage' of this lion, and sharpened its claws. It may be observed that none of these four poets had been supporters of the Parliamentary cause during the civil war. But some republicans shared the enthusiasm too: the anonymous editor of Milton's Republican Letters (1682—probably printed in Holland) contrasted Cromwell's attitude to Louis XIV's France with that of Charles II. This emphasis survived into the eighteenth century. 'He supported his state and terrified all Europe, as well as the three nations, by the grandeur of his courage and the spirit of his army:' the praise, rather unexpectedly, comes from Jonathan Swift. Cromwell, said Henry Fielding, 'carried the reputation of England higher than it ever was at any time,' in addition to promoting men by merit. Chatham eulogized Cromwell's 'sagacious mind'. It has been argued that it was during the revolutionary decades that a consciousness of nationality embraced the whole English people.²³ This is not an easy proposition to prove, or to disprove. A cursory reading of Shakespeare and other Elizabethans shows that strong patriotic, not to say jingoistic, feelings already existed in England. Foxe and Milton had identified Englishmen with the chosen people.²⁴ What Oliver Cromwell did was to popularize in action this identification, and to link it to an aggressive foreign policy. But just because more people were drawn into political action during the revolutionary forties and fifties, and brought under the more direct dominance of London, it may well be that national consciousness was extended to new geographical areas and lower social levels.

The transition from divine right of monarchy to the divine right of the nation had lasting consequences. The new English patriotism was closely associated with religion, with liberty and with the rise of the middle class. Its symbol in the eighteenth century was to be the unattractive figure of John Bull—Oliver Cromwell minus ideology.

II

Historians have given us many Cromwells, created if not after their own image at least as a vehicle for their own prejudices. Immediate post-restoration descriptions were naturally almost wholly hostile, though men like Bate and Carrington did emphasize the Protector's interest in England's trade and the navy. Clarendon saw Cromwell as Machiavelli's Prince in action, regarding him with a mixture of repulsion and admiration. 'Cromwell, though the greatest dissembler living, always made his hypocrisy of singular use and benefit to him, and never did anything, how ungracious or imprudent soever it seemed to be, but what was necessary to the design.'²⁵ Ludlow's Memoirs, written from a republican standpoint, laid equal stress on ambition and hypocrisy. Algernon Sidney in his Discourses concerning Government (not published until 1698, though Sidney was executed in 1683) pilloried Cromwell as the betrayer of the republic. A first attempt to redress the balance, brought out shortly after the revolution of 1688, was Nathaniel Crouch's History of Oliver Cromwell, A Brief Character of the Protector Oliver Cromwell, published in 1692, noted the changed atmosphere: 'Many in our times … have a great reverence for the memory of Oliver Cromwell, Protector; as being a man of piety and a great champion for the liberties of the nation'. Thirty years later Isaac Kimber, a Baptist minister, wrote a life which was on the whole favourable; as was that of John Banks in 1739. Laurence Echard in 1718 had depicted Cromwell as an honest patriot, and Rapin in 1723-7, though critical, thought him 'one of the greatest men of his age'. Gilbert Burnet saw him as both enthusiast and dissembler, but 'when his own designs did not lead him out of the way', a lover of justice, virtue and learning.²⁶

But for most respectable historians Cromwell fell between two stools. Tories denounced the revolutionary and regicide, Whigs the wrecker of the Good Old Cause. The Tory David Hume saw Oliver as a 'frantic enthusiast', and the radical Mrs Catherine Macaulay thought him 'the most corrupt and selfish being that ever disgraced a human form'. John Millar agreed that Oliver was 'one of the most notorious tyrants and usurpers that the world ever beheld'. Goldsmith claimed that he was himself named after and indeed related to Cromwell. Burke once said that Goldsmith should have been called Oliver Cromwell, not Oliver Goldsmith. Goldsmith in his History of England was fact not too severe on the Protector.²⁷ The radical William Godwin thought that Cromwell 'became the chief magistrate solely through his apostacy and by basely deceiving and deserting the illustrious band of patriots with whom he had till that time been associated in the cause of liberty'. Nevertheless, Godwin admitted, 'the government of England had never been so completely freed from the fear of all enemies, both from without and within, as at the period of the death of Cromwell.' Hallam repeated the charge of fanaticism, which led Macaulay to retort with a Cromwell who revealed most of the qualities of the nineteenth-century English middle class. 'No sovereign ever carried to the throne so large a portion of the best qualities of the middling orders, so strong a sympathy with the feelings and interests of his people…. He had a high, stout, honest English heart.'

It was Carlyle's Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, published in 1845, which finally allowed Cromwell to speak for himself—though not without irritating Carlylean asides and interjections. Carlyle's edition established for all time and beyond dispute that Cromwell was not the ambitious hypocrite of the traditional legend. Carlyle praised Cromwell for some of the reasons which led eighteenth-century radicals to reject him. Cromwell the God-sent Hero reflected Carlyle's own view of what was needed in mid-nineteenth-century England, trembling on the brink of Chartism, democracy and other evils. Even more conservative was the French statesman, François Guizot. Exiled himself by the revolution of 1848, he knew better than nineteenth-century Englishmen what revolutions were like. His Histoire de la République d'Angleterre et de Cromwell, published in the 1850s, laid a stress on the social and class forces at work in the English Revolution which had not been heard since the seventeenth century. But Guizot rather naturally disapproved of popular revolutions, and was horrified at the 'excesses' to which 'religious fanaticism' gave rise in England. He gave Cromwell qualified praise as a despot who restored order at the expense of liberty, but his moral was stern: 'God does not grant to those great men who have laid the foundations of their greatness amidst disorder and revolution the power of regulating at their pleasure, and for succeeding ages, the government of nations.' (God, it seems to be implied, should by these standards have been kinder to Guizot.)

After Carlyle, the main formative influence in the nineteenth century was Samuel Rawson Gardiner, whose History of England from 1603 to 1656 was published between 1863 and 1901, and Cromwell's Place in History in 1902. Masterly in detail, irreplaceable in learning, perfect in literary sense and knack of apt quotation, the work of Gardiner (himself a descendant of Cromwell) was also responsible for inventing the idea that the seventeenth century had seen a 'Puritan Revolution'. Gardiner's Cromwell was a sophisticated and liberalized version of Carlyle's Puritan Hero, a man whose ideal was constitutional monarchy; who wished for bit-by-bit reform, and opposed 'the exaggerations of Puritanism': something like a nineteenth-century liberal in advance of his time. That was why he had become, in Gardiner's phrase, 'the national hero of the nineteenth century', 'the greatest because the most typical Englishman of all time'. There is of course far more to Gardiner than that: his was the first serious professional history of the English Revolution, and we all stand on his shoulders. Nevertheless, 'the Puritan Revolution' was an unfortunate concept. It suffered both from exaggeration by Gardiner's epigones and from an equally exaggerated reaction away from it by some twentieth-century historians.

Gardiner's liberal prepossessions were attacked by implication in Sir John Seeley's The Growth of British Policy, published in 1895. In keeping with the spirit of his age, Seeley stressed Cromwell the imperialist. Hilaire Belloc among others recalled Cromwell's hostility to democracy, which seemed more reprehensible in the twentieth century than it had done in the nineteenth. The weaknesses of the English liberal attitude were revealed in a conversation held in Moscow in 1934 between H. G. Wells and Stalin. 'Take the history of England in the seventeenth century', Stalin suggested. 'Did not many people say that the old social order was rotten? Yet nevertheless, was not a Cromwell needed to overthrow it by force?' Wells replied, conventionally enough, 'Cromwell acted in accordance with the constitution and in the name of constitutional order.' 'In the name of the constitution,' retorted Stalin, 'he took up arms, executed the king, dissolved Parliament, imprisoned some and beheaded others.' Stalin had his own axe to grind; but it is difficult not to think that he had the last word.

Nevertheless, Gardiner's liberal prepossessions were less distorting than the late W. C. Abbott's laboured comparisons between Cromwell and Hitler in his indispensable Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, published from 1937 to 1947. Some historians have even extended to the 1650s the word 'totalitarian', already overworked and almost meaningless in its twentieth-century applications. Oliver has never failed to appeal to eccentrics. Mr Trevor Davies accused him of fighting the civil war in order to be able to persecute witches.²⁸ On the other hand a writer in the Occult Review of 1936—apparently in all seriousness—repeated contemporary charges that Oliver owed his success to black magic, witchcraft and compacts with the devil. Professor Trevor-Roper has fitted Cromwell into his own patterns by describing him as a 'country-house radical' and 'natural backbencher', who could lead a revolution of destruction but had no positive ideals or abilities. The professor's view that only 'a little parliamentary management by the executive' was needed to solve the political problems of the 1650s would have surprised the men of the seventeenth century no less than his dismissal of the Protector's foreign policy as 'futile', 'thirty years out of date', prepared 'to surrender all English interests in Asia to the Dutch.'

The best biography of Cromwell still remains that by Sir Charles Firth, first published in 1900. It is completely in the Gardiner tradition, with little attempt to relate Cromwell to the social and economic problems of his time; but within its limits it is first-class. Mr Maurice Ashley wrote three studies of Cromwell which seem to illustrate their author's preoccupations. That of the 1930s is sub-titled The Conservative Dictator; those of the 1950s depict Oliver as a constitutional liberal manqué. The influence of contemporary problems can also be seen in Dr R. S. Paul's The Lord Protector (1955), with its stress on Oliver the oecumenicist; but his is the best life in English since Firth's.²⁹ Readers will no doubt have decided for themselves by this time how far this book has been written to air my own prejudices and distortions of history….

Notes

¹Clarke Papers, IV, pp. 143-6; G. Davies, The Restoration of Charles II, 1658-60 (San Marino, 1955), p. 174.

² Ed. E. B. Underhill, The Records of the Church of Christ meeting in Broadmead, Bristol, 1640-87 (Hanserd Knollys Soc., 1847), pp. 39, 45. Cf. L. F. Brown, Baptists and Fifth Monarchy Men, p. 76.

³ Ed. H. B. Wheatley, The Diary of Samuel Pepys (1946), VII, p. 17, cf. II, p. 191, IV, pp. 43-4, 222, 287, 366, VI, pp. 157-8, VII, p. 97.

⁴History of My Own Time, I, pp. 139, 145; Pepys, Diary, II, p. 191.

⁵Reliquiae Baxterianae, II, p. 48; L. Muggleton, A True Interpretation….of the whole Book of the Revelation of St. John (1665), p. 106.

⁶ K. M. Lynch, Roger Boyle, First Earl of Orrery (Tennessee University Press, 1965), p. 127. Orrery is our old friend Lord Broghill.

⁷ P. J. Pinckney, 'Bradshaw and Cromwell in 1656', p. 236.

⁸ Sprat, The History of the Royal Society of London, p. 404.

⁹ S. Bethel, The Interest of Princes and States (1680), p. 2, and chapter I passim.

¹⁰ See pp. 13-14, 55-7, 130-2, 155-68 above.

¹¹ South had published a panegyric on the Lord Protector in April 1654.

¹²The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, I, pp. xxxiv-vi, 37.

¹³ Ed. Sir H. Hartley, The Royal Society: Its Origins and Founders (Notes and Records of the Royal Society, XV, 1960), p. 72.

¹⁴ See my Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution, Chapter II and passim.

¹⁵ Sir R. Filmer, Observations Upon Aristotles Politics (1652), in Patriarcha and other Political Works (ed. P. Laslett, Oxford, 1949), p. 225.

¹⁶ See pp. 17-18, 48-9 above.

¹⁷ J. Aubrey, Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme (ed. J. Britten, 1881), pp. 247-8.

¹⁸ See pp. 125-6, 145, 187 above.

¹⁹ 'The question had been judged in the field at Naseby before it was tried in Westminster Hall' said Gibbon, in the year of the execution of Louis XVI (Miscellaneous Works, Dublin, 1796, II, p. 232).

²⁰ W. Dell, Several Sermons and Discourses (1709), pp. 225-6. It was a familiar protestant point; Dell went on to quote Luther to illustrate it.

²¹ J. Owen, Works VIII, pp. 327-9.

²² Ed. F. N. L. Poynter and W. J. Bishop, A Seventeenth-century Doctor and his Patients: John Symcotts, 1592?-1662 (Bedfordshire Historic Record Soc, XXXI, 1961), p. 76.

²³ H. Kohn, 'The Genesis and Character of English Nationalism', Journal of the History of Ideas, I, pp. 79-93.

²⁴ See quotations from Milton and Cromwell on my title-page.

²⁵ Quoted by F. Raab, The English Face of Machiavelli (1964), p. 152. The whole section of this stimulating book devoted to Cromwell is well worth reading (pp. 130-54).

²⁶ Burnet, History of My Own Time, I, p. 142.

²⁷ James Prior, The Life of Oliver Goldsmith (1837), I, p. 6.

²⁸ R. Trevor Davies, Four Centuries of Witch Beliefs (1947), Chapter IX.

²⁹ There is an excellent study in Russian by M. A. Barg, Cromwell and His Time (Moscow, 1952), though the author lacks Dr Paul's sensitivity to Cromwell's religious beliefs. Unfortunately I cannot read the biographies in Hungarian and Czech, by L. Makkai and M. Hroch respectively….