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REVIEW BY GRAHAM GOODLAD
It is now three years since Bristol University historian Ronald Hutton’s The Making of Oliver Cromwell appeared. That earlier volume took Britain’s first commoner head of state from his origins as a minor East Anglian landowner to the end of the first Civil War in 1646. Commander in Chief is the keenly awaited sequel, tracing his transformation from victorious Parliamentarian general to supreme national leader. We take our leave of him in April 1653, after his dissolution of the Rump Parliament, a few months before his elevation to the position of Lord Protector.
With several heavyweight Cromwell biographies already in print – and a further one, by John Morrill of Cambridge University, expected next spring – readers may ask whether another one is necessary. What makes Hutton’s work stand out is his departure from what he regards as earlier writers’ over-reliance on Cromwell’s voluminous reported speeches and writings. He made a conscious decision to test his subject’s words against other sources wherever possible. The result is a vivid portrait, more sharply focused on the manipulative, brutal side of Cromwell’s personality than most previous studies.
This is not to say that earlier biographers naively took the Puritan warlord at his own valuation. Back in 1958, the late Christopher Hill wrote that, to his contemporaries, Cromwell’s claim to be ‘waiting on the Lord’ could seem like ‘waiting to see which way the cat would jump’. But Hutton’s assessment is harsher. He is critical of the view of Cromwell, derived from the writings of Victorian liberal historians, which sees him as foreshadowing 19th-century political and religious liberty. Instead, he suggests that with his combination of militarism, religious fervour, and republicanism, he had more in common with the radical Christian right of modern America.
The calculating politician
The complex political situation that developed after Charles I’s capture by the Scottish army in May 1646 has rarely been more clearly explained. Hutton delineates the tensions between the Presbyterian-dominated parliament, which favoured some kind of national church structure, and the religious radicals, heavily represented in the New Model Army, who wanted more freedom for independent congregations. He also charts the growing conflict over political and social ideas within the Army, which pitted egalitarian rank-and-file soldiers and junior officers against the conservative grandees. A third strand is the emerging dispute within the Parliamentarian camp over relations with the defeated king, which led in the winter of 1648-1649 to Charles’ trial and execution.
What was Cromwell’s role in this tangle of ideas and loyalties? In Hutton’s account, he is almost always at the centre of events, but careful to cover his tracks. A good example is the mysterious incident in June 1647, when a relatively junior officer, Cornet Joyce, took the King from Holdenby House in Northamptonshire to bring him under the control of the Army. Hutton weighs the evidence before concluding that it is most likely – though impossible to prove categorically – that it was Cromwell who authorised the abduction.
The thread that runs through the narrative is Cromwell’s attachment to the Army – the instrument that he and his immediate superior, Sir Thomas Fairfax, had forged to win the war, and which now had the power to make or break governments. Although Cromwell’s instinct was to seek compromise between the squabbling civilian politicians and the military, when it came to the crunch he invariably sided with the latter.
Cromwell could never abandon his soldiers. He shared their overriding objective of securing freedom of worship for ‘godly’ Puritans outside the framework of the established Church. To achieve this, he was prepared to experiment endlessly with different constitutional forms – as he once said, he was not ‘wedded and glued to forms of government’. And, of course, his own interests critically depended on alignment with the Army.
Where the evidence is not conclusive, Hutton is honest about its limitations. This comes across in Cromwell’s attitude towards the execution of the King. Hutton argues that, once the trial was under way, he pursued the outcome with complete ruthlessness. But he acknowledges that, despite Cromwell’s centrality to the process, we cannot know his true feelings – did he feel genuine hatred for the King? Was he driven by political pragmatism, or did he feel any remorse? On this, the sources are silent.
Hutton’s portrait focuses on the manipulative, brutal side of Cromwell’s personality.
Man of action
To readers of MHM, the most interesting chapters of Commander in Chief are likely to be those that deal with the military campaigns of 1648 and 1650-1651, in which Cromwell smashed the Scottish-Royalist resurgence, and his violent intervention in Ireland between the two. Hutton is as familiar with the warfare of the era as he is with its politics. Unusually for an academic historian, he is an active member of the Sealed Knot re-enactment society, so he knows what it would have been like to experience 17th-century cannon firing.
The Battle of Preston of August 1648, where Cromwell defeated a Scottish army that had invaded northern England in support of the imprisoned king, was the turning point of the Second Civil War. The battle showcased Cromwell’s qualities as a general. In rough terrain, amid persistent rainfall, he used the element of surprise to gain the upper hand over a numerically superior but fatally dispersed and poorly led opposing army. His aim was to move as rapidly as possible to cut his enemies off from reinforcement. The crisis of the battle, when the Royalists broke and fled, pursued by Parliamentarian cavalry, is vividly described. So too are the Scottish forces’ last disorganised attempts to regroup, only to be crushed by the relentless Cromwellians.
Cromwell’s 1649 Irish campaign remains one of the most controversial episodes in his career. In recent decades, the hostile nationalist view of him as a cold-blooded, murderous conqueror has been challenged. Some historians have attempted to show that his actions were in line with the prevailing laws of war, or even that he showed relative restraint by contemporary standards.
Hutton is typically judicious in assessing these rival interpretations. This is especially so when he considers Cromwell’s conduct after the capture of Drogheda. Hutton argues that he authorised the killing of almost all the Royalist garrison, but did not, as was later claimed, order an indiscriminate massacre of the civilian population. A month later, it was Cromwell’s troops who took the initiative, without a direct order being issued, in the slaughter and looting that attended the taking of Wexford.
Nevertheless, Hutton is clear about Cromwell’s hardness. The Irish campaign was undoubtedly more savage than those waged in England. An ideological anti-Catholicism reinforced his determination to end the strategic threat posed by Ireland to the fledgling republican regime. In a startling phrase, Hutton states that Cromwell had ‘always been a killer’ who exulted in the extermination of his opponents.
Cromwell in three dimensions
Hutton’s emphasis on the darker side of his subject’s character may jar with Cromwell’s admirers. This was, after all, a historical figure who not so long ago made the top ten in a BBC poll of the ‘100 Greatest Britons’. Hutton reminds us that, at national level, Cromwell and his Puritan shock troops never represented anything approaching a majority viewpoint. Charles I, often depicted as culpably slippery in his conduct of the doomed post-war negotiations, comes across as a still-flawed but in some ways sympathetic character – certainly no match for Cromwell in duplicity and ruthlessness.
Hutton’s strict adherence to the sources means that some well-known anecdotes do not appear. There is no mention of the traditional story that Arthur Aston, the one-legged governor of Drogheda, was beaten to death with his own wooden leg. In describing the dispersal of the Rump Parliament, Hutton omits the phrase often attributed to Cromwell in addressing the startled MPs: ‘In the name of God, go!’ Although the instruction has echoed down the centuries – being famously used by Leo Amery to Neville Chamberlain in May 1940, for example – it does not feature in contemporary accounts and has never been properly verified.
One area where Hutton allows himself some licence is in his evocation of the physical environment of mid-17th-century Britain. This is a distinctive feature of the book. The author has a talent for memorable scene-setting. The Essex town of Saffron Walden is a ‘cluster of rose-coloured brick and magpie timber’, while the Banqueting House in London’s Whitehall, outside which Charles was beheaded, is described as a ‘pale grey stone hulk’. Sometimes the almost lyrical descriptions border on the fanciful: discussing Cromwell’s advance into Wales in the spring of 1648, Hutton mentions the trees and flowers that he would have seen, and even pictures golden eagles circling overhead.
In his introduction, Hutton writes that, when he produced The Making of Oliver Cromwell, he had not yet definitely decided to make it the first volume of a full-scale biography. His readers will surely be glad that it has not turned out to be a free-standing study of Cromwell’s first 47 years. We now have the man in three dimensions. A final instalment, covering the five tumultuous years of the Protectorate, will be eagerly anticipated.
Oliver Cromwell: Commander in Chief
Ronald Hutton
Yale University Press, hbk, 480pp (£25)
ISBN 978-0300278941
