CROMWELL’S PROTECTORATE
In 1649 King Charles I was executed, and England proclaimed a republic
nominally ruled by the “Rump Parliament” – that is, the rump of MPs after
Cromwell had purged them in 1648. The problems facing Cromwell after he
had killed the king were ironically very similar to those that had faced King
Charles: rebellion from without (Ireland and Scotland) and within. Thus both
the Irish and the Scots proclaimed Charles II as their king; for his father had
been king, not only of England but also of Ireland and Scotland…
Cromwell dealt with the external threat efficiently if cruelly. Thus his
slaughter of 3000 innocents in Drogheda in Ireland is remembered by Irish
Catholics to this day. “Ireland,” writes Robert Tombs, “was by far the worst
sufferer in the British civil wars, its population falling between 1649 and 1653
by perhaps 20 per cent – many times the loss in England.”1
As for the Scots, “Throughout the 1640s,” writes John Morrill, “the Scots
had been calling for a union [with the English] because they believed that
there could be no future for Scotland except in a defined federal relationship.
The English parliament resisted for two main reasons. It was determined not
to let Scotland impose strict separation of church and state and clerical
supremacy. And it did not wish to allow the Scottish parliament to have any
kind of veto over policies in England.
“In return for Scottish support during the wars, parliament had promised
federal union and a united church. But when parliament abolished the
monarchy in England and Ireland after the execution of Charles I in 1649, it
told the Scots they were an independent nation free to go their own way. The
Scots refused to accept this and voted to fight to install Charles II as king of
England, Scotland and Ireland.” They recalled him from Holland in June,
1650, and then crowned him at Scone in January, 1651. He now led an army of
12,000 Scots into England, which was defeated by Cromwell at Worcester.
The English, continues Morrill, now “had to make a choice: they could
either withdraw or they could occupy Scotland to prevent constant attacks on
England. Eventually, they decided to quell the threat by uniting England and
Scotland. It was a reluctant conquest. There may have been no great
enthusiasm for union; but it was deemed necessary.” 2 Scotland now came
under the ruler of the Englishman General Monck. Ironically in view of the
major role the Scottish covenanters played in starting the Civil War that
deposed Charles I, it was Monck, the governor of Scotland, who, after the
death of Cromwell in 1658-59, played the major role in negotiating the
accession of Charles II to the throne of England…
But it was the English rebels that really troubled him Cromwell…
1
Tombs, The English and their History, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015, p. 244.
2
Morrill, in “The Great Misconceptions of the Civil War”, BBC History Magazine, May, 2015, p.
39.
He had been a libertarian by comparison with the Presbyterian
mainstream. But this “liberty” seemed to be getting out of hand when the
Koran rolled off the printing presses in May, 1649… Moreover, as Peter
Ackroyd writes, “political, as well as religious radicals, were in the ascendant.
John Lilburne, one of the levellers who had helped to promote agitation in the
New Model Army, had turned against the new administration. In ‘England’s
New Chains Discovered’ he lambasted Cromwell and the army grandees for
dishonesty and hypocrisy; he accused them of being ‘mere politicians’ who
wished to aggrandize themselves while they pretended ‘a waiting upon
providence, that under the colour of religion they might deceive the more
securely’. A pamphlet, ‘The Hunting of the Foxes’, complained that ‘you shall
scarce speak to Cromwell but he will lay his hand on his breast, elevate his
eyes, and call God to record. He will weep, howl and repent, even while he
does smite you under the fifth rib.’
“Cromwell was incensed at the pamphlet and was overheard saying at a
meeting of the council of state, ‘I tell you, sir, you have no other way to deal
with these men but to break them in pieces… if you do not break them, they
will break you.’ By the end of March Lilburne and his senior colleagues had
been placed in the Tower on the charge of treason. The levellers, however,
were popular among Londoners for speaking home truths about the
condition of the country. When thousands of women flocked to Westminster
Hall to protest against Lilburne’s imprisonment the soldiers told them to ‘go
home and wash your dishes’; whereupon they replied that ‘we have neither
dishes nor meat left’. When in May a group of soldiers rose in mutiny for the
cause of Lilburne, Cromwell and Fairfax suppressed them; three of their
officers were shot. As Cromwell said on another occasion, ‘Be not offended at
the manner of God’s working; perhaps no other way was left.’
“Assaults also came from the opposite side with royalist pamphlets and
newsletters mourning ‘the bloody murder and heavy loss of our gracious
king’ and proclaiming that ‘the king-choppers are as active in mischief as such
thieves and murderers need to be’. The authorities were now awake to the
mischief of free speech, and in the summer of the year the Rump Parliament
passed a Treason Act that declared it high treason to state that the
‘government is tyrannical, usurped or unlawful, or that the Commons in
parliament assembled are not the supreme authority of this nation’. There
was to be no egalitarian or libertarian revolution. At the same time the council
of state prepared ‘An Act against Unlicensed and Scandalous Books and
Pamphlets’ that was designed to prohibit any pamphlets, papers or books
issued by ‘the malignant party’. A resolution was also passed by the Rump
that any preacher who mentioned Charles Stuart or his son would be deemed
a ‘delinquent’.”3
3
Ackroyd, The History of England, vol. III. Civil War, London: Macmillan, 2014, pp. 314-315.
The problem for Cromwell after returning from his triumphant wars in
Scotland and Ireland in 1651 was not only that not everyone obeyed the
Rump Parliament (whose constitution was largely his work), but also that the
Rump, in spite of its purged condition, was “in no way inclined to obey his
orders with the same promptness as the soldiers of the New Model Army.
Those parliamentarians who were members of the council of state were in
most respects still conscientious and diligent, yet others were not so easily
inspired by Cromwell’s zeal or vision.
“Cromwell had argued for an immediate dissolution of parliament,
making way for a fresh legislature that might deal with the problems
attendant upon victory [over Scotland and Ireland]. Yet the members
prevaricated and debated, finally agreeing to dissolve their assembly at a date
not later than November 1654. They gave themselves another three years of
procrastination. The army was by now thoroughly disillusioned with those
members who seemed intent upon thwarting or delaying necessary
legislation. The most committed soldiers believed them to be time-servers or
worse, uninterested in the cause of ‘the people of God’.
“In truth the Rump was essentially a conservative body, while the army
inherently favoured radical solutions; there was bound to be conflict between
them. Yet Cromwell himself was not so certain of his course; he wished for
godly reformation of the commonwealth but he also felt obliged, at this stage,
to proceed by constitutional methods. He did not want to impose what was
known as a ‘sword government’. Another possibility was also full of peril. In
the current state of opinion it was possible that, unless fresh elections were
carefully managed, a royalist majority might be returned; this could not be
permitted.”4
Cromwell was now faced with the same dilemma that faces all leaders who
come to power on the back of the revolution: that while they seize power by
destroying the previously legitimate power, they eventually need to recreate
some kind of legitimacy in order to retain power. Might had triumphed over
right; but now might wanted to be perceived as not only mighty, but also as
right. But that was impossible; for his government was indeed a “sword
government”, and, as the Lord said (Cromwell must have known this), “all
who take up the sword shall perish by the sword” (Matthew 26.52).
Earlier, just after his victory over the King at Naseby in 1645, he had
declared: “God hath put the sword in the Parliament’s hands, - for the terror
of evil-doers, and the praise of them that do well. If any plead exemption
from that, - he knows not the Gospel”. But when anarchy threatened, and
Parliament failed him, Cromwell found an exemption to the Gospel:
“Necessity hath no law,” he said to the dismissed representatives of the
people…
4
Ackroyd, op. cit., pp. 322-323.
Napoleon adopted a similar rationale when he dismissed the Directory and
the elected deputies in 1799. As the French Prime Minister Guizot wrote,
Cromwell “was successively a Danton and a Buonaparte”. 5 As did Lenin
when he dismissed the Constituent Assembly in 1918. “Necessity” in one age
becomes the “revolutionary morality” of the next – more exactly, the
suspension of all morality.
And so on April 20, 1653 “Cromwell came into the chamber of the House
of Commons, dressed in plain black, and took his seat; he had left a file of
musketeers at the door of the chamber and in the lobby. He took off his hat
and rose to his feet. He first commended the Commons for their early efforts
at reform but then reproached them for their subsequent delays and
obfuscations; he roamed down the middle of the chamber and signalled
various individual members as ‘whoremaster’ and ‘drunkard’ and ‘juggler’.
He declared more than once that ‘it is you that have forced me to do this, for I
have sought the Lord night and day that he would rather slay me than put me
upon the doing of this work’. He spoke, according to one observer, ‘with so
much passion and discomposure of mind as if he had been distracted’; he
shouted, and kicked the floor with his foot.
“In conclusion he called out, ‘You are no parliament. I will put an end to
your sitting.’ He then called for the musketeers and pointed to the
parliamentary mace lying on the table. ‘What shall be done with this bauble?
Here. Take it away.’ He said later that he had not planned or premeditated his
intervention and that ‘the spirit was so upon him, that he was overruled by it;
and he consulted not with flesh and blood at all’. This is perhaps too
convenient an explanation to be altogether true. He had dissolved a
parliament that, in one form or another, had endured for almost thirteen
years. The Long Parliament, of which the Rump was the final appendage, had
witnessed Charles I’s attempt to seize five of its members and then the whole
course of the civil wars; it had seen some of its members purged and driven
away. It was not a ruin, but a ruin of that ruin. It ended in ignominy,
unwanted and unlamented. Cromwell remarked later that, at its dissolution,
not even a dog barked. On the following day a large placard was placed upon
the door of the chamber. ‘This House to be let, unfurnished.’” 6
Such was the inglorious, indeed farcical end of the first parliament that
wielded supreme power in England – only four years after it had executed the
previous supreme ruler, King Charles I.
In spite of speculation about the replacement of Parliament by one-man
rule, Cromwell was not yet ready for such a drastic step, which would have
alienated much of the Army. So a new Parliament, selected by Cromwell and
his Council of Officers, came into being. “It was nicknamed ‘Barebone’s
5
Guizot, The History of Civilization in Europe, p. 221).
6
Ackroyd, op. cit., pp. 325-326.
Parliament’ after Praise-God Barebone (or Barbon), one of its members.
Optimists hoped that it would be the prelude to the Second Coming.
Cromwell expected the Assembly to ‘usher in things God hath promised’. It
could hardly fail to disappoint. In fact, it was not wholly different from earlier
parliaments, being largely made up of gentry, JPs and lawyers.” 7.
Barebones failed. “The members of the new assembly were zealous and
busy, but they were perhaps not worldly enough to judge the consequences of
their decisions. They determined to abolish the court of chancery, for example
and drastically to simplify the law; some in fact demanded the abolition of the
common law, to be substituted by the code of Moses. They voted to abolish
tithes, a proposal that might have eventually led to the disestablishment of
the Church and the violation of all rights of property. The alarm and horror of
the nation soon became manifest, and Cromwell realized that it was time to
end an experiment that had lasted for just five months. He is reported to have
said that he was more troubled now by fools than knaves. A parliament of
saints had gone to excess…”8
“The conservatives in 1653 were upset by the radicals’ reforming
programme. They felt, or claimed to feel, that property was in danger. The
Presbyterians, a royalist correspondent stated, were alienated by Barebones’s
attack on tithes, which could lead to an attack on all property [i.e. not just that
of the Church], ‘especially since elected Parliaments, the bulwark of property,
is taken away’. The French ambassador reported in November moves for a
rapprochement between Presbyterians and Independents against their radical
enemies and to re-assert the old forms of government.
“Cromwell came to think of the Barebones Parliament as ‘a story of my
own weakness and folly’. Though he spoke in favour of law reform in his
initial speech to the assembly, he was not prepared for the abolition of
Chancery or of ecclesiastical patronage and tithes. Since Barebones proposed
at the same time that higher Army officers should serve for a whole year
without pay, most of the latter were easily persuaded that the dangerous
assembly must be got rid of. On 12 December the conservatives got up early,
and after speeches denouncing the Parliament for ‘endeavouring to take away
their properties by taking away the law, to overthrow the ministry by taking
away tithes and settling nothing in their rooms’, they voted an end to their
meeting. Then they marched off to the Lord General, to whom they
surrendered the authority they had received from him five months before.
“As usual, we do not know whether Cromwell planned the coup: he
denied it. But he was certainly prepared to accept and act upon it. Within
three days a new constitution, the Instrument of Government, had been
accepted: it had been under discussion by the officers for a month or so. On
7
Tombs, op. cit., p. 247. “Sixty of the members (nearly half) either had been or were to be
members of elected Parliaments, and most of them were of respectable standing” (Hill, God’s
Englishman, London: Penguin, p. 134).
8
Ackroyd, op. cit., p. 332.
the next day, 16 December, Oliver Cromwell was proclaimed Lord Protector.
In a public ceremony he took an oath to rule ‘upon such a basis and
foundation as by the blessing of God might be lasting, secure property, and
answer those great ends of religion and liberty so long contended for’. In his
speech after taking the oath Oliver reiterated his determination so to govern
that ‘the gospel might flourish in its full splendour and purity, and the people
enjoy their just rights and prosperity’. ‘Ministry and property were like to be
destroyed,’ Oliver reminded his officers in February 1657. ‘Who would have
said anything was their own if they had gone on?’”9
What irony! Barely five years after the king had been executed for his
supposed threat to the rights and the property of Englishmen, one-man-rule
had been restored to protect those same rights and property.
“To the radicals Oliver was now the finally lost leader. Liliburne, Wildman,
Sexby and other Levellers turned to negotiation with the royalists rather than
accept the new regime. Baptists like Henry Jessey and John Rogers, George
Fox and the Quakers, never forgave Cromwell for failing to carry out his
alleged promises to abolish tithes. The Fifth Monarchist Vavasor Powell
greeted the Protectorate by asking his congregation whether the Lord would
have ‘Oliver Cromwell or Jesus Christ to reign over us?’ A few months earlier
the two had not seemed to be rivals…”10
Cromwell “was accused of sacrificing the public good to ambition and was
denounced as a ‘dissembling perjured villain’ Biblical insults were hurled t
him as the ‘Old Dragon’, the ‘Little Horn’, the ‘Man of Sin’, and the ‘Vile
Person’ of Daniel 11.21. As the pulpit set up by Blackfriars one preacher,
Christopher Feake, proclaimed that ‘he has deceived the Lord’s people’, he
added that ‘he will not reign long, he will end worse than the last Protector
did, that crooked tyrant Richard [III]. Tell him I said it.’ Feake was brought
before the council and placed in custody. The governor of Chester Castle,
Robert Duckenfield, put it a little more delicately when he wrote to Cromwell
that ‘I believe the root and tree of piety is alive in your lordship, though the
leaves thereof, through abundance of temptations and flatteries, seem to me
to be withered much of late’.
“In a sense the revolution was now over, with all attempts at radical
reform at an end. Cromwell instituted a reign of quiet in which men of
property might feel safe; he inaugurated a gentry republic…”11
For all his authoritarian tendencies, Cromwell was not yet ready to
dispense with Parliament entirely; and the Instrument of Government
retained a unicameral Parliament. The relationship was uneasy. Thus when
9
Hill, God’s Englishman, pp. 137-138.
10
Hill, God’s Englishman, pp. 139, 140.
11
Ackroyd, op. cit., p. 334.
he convened a new Parliament in September, 1654, as Peter Ackroyd writes,
“Cromwell addressed the new assembly in the Painted Chamber of
Westminster Palace; he sat in the chair of state while the members were
seated on benches ranged against the walls. ‘Gentlemen,’ he told them, ‘you
are met here on the greatest occasion that, I believe, England ever saw.’ He
then proceeded to speak for three hours on the various manifestations of
God’s providence in an oration that veered from messianic enthusiasm to
scriptural exposition. He had called parliament, but ‘my calling be from God’.
He was thus reiterating, in his own fashion, the divine right of kings. He was
above parliament. Yet he came to them not as a master but as a fellow servant.
Now was a time for ‘healing and settling’.
“Yet the new parliament was by no means a compliant body. For some
days its members had debated, without reaching any conclusion, whether
they should give the protectorate their support. On 12 September they found
the doors of their chamber closed against them, and they were asked once
more to assemble in the Painted Chamber where the Protector wished to
address them. He chided them for neglecting the interest of the state, ‘so little
valued and much slighted’, and he would not allow them to proceed any
further unless and until they had signed an oath to agree to ‘the form of
government now settled’. All members had to accept the condition that ‘the
persons elected shall not have power to alter the government as it is hereby
settled in one single person and a Parliament’. ‘I am sorry,’ he said, ‘I am
sorry, and I could be sorry to the death that there is cause for this. But there is
cause…’
“Some member protested and refused to sign, but the majority of them
either agreed or at least submitted. Cromwell still did not attempt to guide
the debates, but he became increasingly alarmed at their nature. He is
reported to have said in this period that he ‘would rather keep sheep under a
hedge than have to do with the government of men’. Sheep were at least
obedient. The members voted to restrict the power of the Protector to veto
legislation; they also decided that their decisions were more authoritative
than those of the council of state. They believed, in other words, that
parliament should still be paramount in the nation. That was not necessarily
Cromwell’s view. From day to day they debated every clause of the
‘Instrument of Government’, with the evident wish to replace it with a
constitution of their own. On 3 January 1655 they voted to reaffirm the limits
to religious toleration; two days later they decided to reduce army pay, thus
striking at Cromwell’s natural constituency. On 20 January they began to
discuss the formation of a militia under parliamentary control.
“Two days later, Cromwell called a halt. He lambasted them for wasting
time in frivolous and unnecessary discourse when they should have been
considering practical measures for the general reformation of the nation. He
told them that ‘I do not know what you have been doing. I do not know
whether you have been alive or dead.’ He considered that it was not fit for the
common welfare and the public good to allow them to continue; and so,
farewell. The first protectorate parliament was dissolved. The larger problem,
however, was not addressed. Could a representative parliament eve co-exist
with what was essentially a military dictatorship.”12
Indeed, that was precisely what it was: a military dictatorship. Cromwell
and his Army had simply taken the place of King Charles and his court; and
his arguments with Parliament were more or less the same as those of the
king with Parliament – except that Cromwell, unlike Charles, usually got his
way. Moreover, his power was much wider and more obtrusive than the
king’s, with Major-Generals ruling the provinces instead of the “natural
leaders” of the country as the parliamentarians saw it.
But the people were unhappy, not least with the Major-Generals. So
Cromwell decided quietly to drop them and proceed to the last act of what
was now becoming a farce, if not a tragedy. Early in 1657 a member of
Parliament put forward a motion that Cromwell should “take upon him the
government according to the ancient constitution” – in other words, become
king. After a long debate, at the end of March the members formally offered
him the crown. Cromwell dithered for a long time. Finally, the opposition of
his army colleagues forced him to give up the idea.
“The only way forward was by means of compromise. Even if Cromwell
would not be king, he could accept the other constitutional measures
recommended by parliament; in particular it seemed just, and necessary, to
re-establish the House of Lords as a check upon the legislature. On 25 May the
‘humble petition’ was presented again with Cromwell named as chief
magistrate and Lord Protector, an appointment which he accepted as ‘one of
the greatest tasks that ever was laid upon the back of a human creature’. On
26 June 1657, Oliver Cromwell was draped in purple and in ermine for the
ceremony of installation in Westminster Hall; upon the table before his throne
rested the sword of state and a sceptre of solid gold. The blast of trumpets
announced his reign. His office was not declared to be hereditary but he had
been given the power to name his successor; it was generally believed that
this would be one of his sons. So began the second protectorate, which was
now a restored monarchy in all but name.”13
The king is dead (Charles)! Long live the king (Oliver)!
And yet Cromwell died very soon, in 1658, and it was a third king, Charles
II, that finally emerged triumphant. “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
12
Ackroyd, op. cit., pp. 336-337.
13
Ackroyd, op. cit., pp. 346-347.
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…”14
Frederic Harrison, a nineteenth-century admirer of Cromwell, exaggerates
only a little when he writes: “Apart from its dictatorial character, the
Protector’s government was efficient, just, moderate, and wise. Opposed as he
was by lawyers, he made some of the best judges England ever had. Justice
and law opened a new era. The services were raised to their highest
efficiency. Trade and commerce revived under his fostering care. Education
was reorganised; the Universities reformed; Durham founded. It is an
opponent who says: ‘All England over, these were Halcyon days.’ Men of
learning of all opinions were encouraged and befriended. ‘If there was a man
in England,’ says Neal, ‘who excelled in any faculty or science, the Protector
would find him out, and reward him according to his merit.’ It was the
Protector’s brother-in-law, Warden of Wadham College, who there gathered
together the group which ultimately founded the Royal Society.
“Noble were the efforts of the Protector to impress his own spirit of
toleration {!] on the intolerance of his age; and stoutly he contended with
Parliaments and Council for Quakers, Jews, Anabaptists, Socinians, and even
crazy blasphemers. He effectively protected the Quakers; he admitted the
Jews after an expulsion of three [nearer four] centuries; and he satisfied [the
French Cardinal] Mazarin that he had given to Catholics all the protection
that he dared. In his bearing towards his personal opponents, he was a model
of magnanimity and self-control. Inexorable where public duty required
punishment, neither desertion, treachery, obloquy, nor ingratitude ever could
stir him to vindictive measures…” 15
And yet, of course, this is only half the story – and not the most important
half. For on the one hand, it is true, his firm but (generally) just rule as
protector restored order to his country, held it back from a truly radical
revolution, and laid the foundations for its future greatness. But on the other,
he gave the revolution, with all its enormously destructive, truly apocalyptic
consequences, its decisive break-through in Europe and the world…
For we must remember that the Antichrist himself, according to tradition,
will come at a time of chaos and bring much-needed peace and prosperity
before introducing the most thoroughly anti-christian government in history.
In this light, Cromwell must be recognized to be a forerunner of the
Antichrist. For the good he did was essentially secular in nature and
14
Hill, God’s Englishman, p. 245.
15
Harrison, Oliver Cromwell, 1892, pp. 216-217.
ultimately constituted a subtle and profound spiritual deception. He
introduced much-needed peace and prosperity (if you ignore the losses of the
Civil War and unless you were a Catholic Irishman). But he also broke the
back of Old England; after the period of his reign there was no going back to
the concepts of true faith, Christian monarchy and faithfulness to tradition
that, however perverted and corrupted, still linked England to its Orthodox
past.
Cromwell is one of the most important and contradictory figures of
history. As Hill writes, “for good and for evil, Oliver Cromwell presided over
the great decisions which determined the future course of English and world
history. [The battles of] Marston Moor, Naseby, Preston, Worcester – and
regicide – 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 nonconformist
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, or 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…”16
Even such a wise and Orthodox writer as Metropolitan Anastasy
(Gribanovsky) of New York admits that he did much to restrain the evil he
had himself unleashed: “[The English revolution] bore within itself as an
embryo all the typically destructive traits of subsequent revolutions; but the
religious sources of this movement, the iron hand of Oliver Cromwell, and the
immemorial good sense of the English people, restrained this stormy element,
preventing it from achieving its full growth. Thenceforth, however, the social
spirit of Europe has been infected with the bacterium of revolution…”17
May 30 / June 12, 2018.
16
Hill, God’s Englishman, pp. 253-254.
17
Metropolitan Anastasy, “The Dark Visage of Revolution”, Living Orthodoxy, vol. XVII, N 5,
September-October, 1996, p. 10.
