CHAPTER XXI

THE DEATH OF CROMWELL 1658–1660

To contemporaries, the Protectorate had never seemed stronger than it did in the summer of 1658. “From the dissolution of Cromwell’s last Parliament,” writes Clarendon, “all things at home and abroad seemed to succeed to his wish, and his power and greatness to be better established than ever it had been.” Military mutiny, royalist insurrection, projected invasion—the three dangers which threatened his rule in the spring—had all been successfully overcome. The conspiracies were frustrated by the timely arrest of their leaders. Some disaffected officers lost their commissions, a few of the Fifth Monarchy men were imprisoned, while about a dozen Royalists were tried by a High Court of Justice, of whom five suffered on the scaffold or the gallows. Abroad, the victory of the Dunes and the capture of Dunkirk shed new lustre on English arms, and raised Cromwell’s fame still higher in Europe, while the splendid reception of Lord Fauconberg at the French Court, and the complimentary mission sent by Louis XIV. to the Protector, attested the value which the most powerful sovereign in Europe set on Cromwell’s friendship.

Modern historians have taken a less favourable view of the situation than contemporaries did. Some have assumed that Cromwell’s power was tottering to its fall, and that he must have succumbed to the difficulties which surrounded him. He was faced, it has been said, by the certainty of bankruptcy without a supply from Parliament, and the certainty of overthrow if he summoned Parliament. Both statements are exaggerated, for neither difficulty was insuperable. Cromwell had been faced by both ever since he began to rule, and his Government had contrived to live through them.

In 1658, the financial difficulty was more serious than the parliamentary difficulty. When the Long Parliament was expelled, the national finances were in a state of chaos. The monthly property tax had risen to £120,000 per mensem, there was a debt of about £700,000, and the Crown lands, Church lands, and confiscated estates—which were the great resource of the treasury in emergencies—had almost all been sold. During the Protectorate the financial administration was improved, public money thriftily husbanded, and taxation reduced. The monthly assessment was lowered first to £90,000, then to £60,000, and finally to £50,000. But as the reduction of the expenditure of the state did not proceed at the same pace, the receipts did not balance the outgoings. The income of Cromwell’s Government for 1657–1658 may be estimated at about £1,900,000, while its expenses were about £400,000 more. The army cost about £1,100,000, the navy about £900,000, and the civil government about £300,000. The causes of this large deficit were two. One was the cost of holding down Ireland and Scotland, the revenues of which were insufficient to defray the cost of their garrisons, so that the English treasury had to supply about a quarter of a million a year for that purpose. The second cause was the Protector’s foreign policy. It was calculated by financiers that less than half a million was enough to maintain a fleet sufficient for defensive purposes. But a navy strong enough to fight Spain for the mastery of the Western seas, blockade the Spanish coasts, and interfere in the disputes of the Baltic powers, cost twice that sum. The consequence of this was that the Protector’s Government was always embarrassed for money, and that a considerable debt accumulated. By the spring of 1659, that debt amounted to about a million and three quarters. Had the financiers of the Protectorate, like the financiers of the time of William III., adopted the device of funding the debt, and raising loans to cover the deficits caused by war, the difficulty would have been temporarily solved. But as the conditions of the time and the want of skill amongst Cromwell’s financial advisers prevented the adoption of that plan, the only course was to reduce expenditure, or to obtain larger supplies from Parliament, neither of which things was easy, but neither impossible. After the successful campaign of 1658, it became evident that Spain would be forced to make peace, and a reduction both in naval and military expenditure became feasible. In the opinion of the French Ambassador (a shrewd observer, and deeply concerned in forming a right estimate of the question), there was nothing in the financial embarrassments of the Government to endanger its stability. As little danger, according to his view, was there of its overthrow by Parliament. The temporary success of the Republicans in the second session of the last Parliament was due to a cause which would not recur, that is, the weakening of the Government majority by the withdrawal of forty of its supporters to form the new Second Chamber. The Protectorate had gained, rather than lost, parliamentary strength. While the result of the Parliament of 1654 had been to weaken the authority of the Protector, the result of that of 1656 had greatly increased it. In the summer of 1658, therefore, the Protector resolved to summon another Parliament towards the close of the year, and but for his death the intention would have been fulfilled. It was confidently expected on all hands that the offer of the Crown would have been renewed by that body, and, as the elections of December 1658 proved, the Government would have had a majority of at least three to two. The support which Richard Cromwell obtained from Parliament negatives the theory that the opposition would have succeeded in the attempt to overthrow his father.

Events proved clearly that the maintenance of the Protectorate depended on the fidelity of the army. At the commencement of the Protectorate, it numbered not less than sixty thousand men. In December, 1654, there were still fifty-three thousand men in arms in the three nations, in spite of recent reductions. By the end of the Protectorate it numbered, including the troops employed in Flanders and Jamaica, about forty-eight thousand men. During this period a considerable change had taken place in its character and composition. Officers opposed to the Government had been, one after another, deprived of their commands: Harrison in December, 1653, Overton and four other colonels in 1654, Lambert in 1657, Packer and five captains of Cromwell’s own regiment in the spring of 1658. By 1658 the superior officers were generally either personal adherents of the Protector or professional soldiers who took little interest in political questions. Men of the type of Monk had taken the place of men of the type of Harrison. Amongst the subordinate officers and non-commissioned officers there were many Republicans, but they were without sufficient influence to be dangerous. All Anabaptists and Fifth Monarchy men had been purged out of the ranks; private soldiers in general looked to military service as a livelihood, and might become mutinous if their pay was too much in arrears, but hardly for the sake of maintaining political principles.

The history of the Protectorate is the history of the gradual emancipation of the Protector from the political control of the army. Twice he had successfully frustrated attempted alliances between the parliamentary opposition and the malcontents in the army, and each attempt had strengthened his authority over the army.

It was this sense of the hopelessness of insurrectionary movements, so long as Cromwell lived, which caused the repeated conspiracies of Royalists and Levellers for Cromwell’s assassination. In 1654, some of the people round Charles II. issued a proclamation in the King’s name offering five hundred pounds, knighthood, and a colonel’s commission, to any one who succeeded in killing “a certain mechanic fellow” called Oliver Cromwell, “by pistol, sword, or poison.” Charles was cognisant of these plots, and stipulated only that the Protector’s assassination should be connected with a general royalist rising, not an isolated act. There were many subsequent designs of the same nature, especially after the alliance between the Levellers and the Royalists. Lieutenant-Colonel Sexby, once a soldier in Cromwell’s own regiment, undertook to arrange the assassination of the Protector, and was supplied with money by the Spanish Government for that purpose. Sindercombe, whose plot was detected in January, 1657, was his agent. In the following May, Sexby published a tract entitled _Killing No Murder_, the object of which was to prove that it would be both a lawful and a glorious act to kill the Protector. “Let every man,” said he, “to whom God hath given the spirit of wisdom and courage be persuaded by his honour, his safety, his own good, and his country’s, to endeavour by all rational means to free the world from this pest. Either I or Cromwell must perish,” announced Sexby. But, visiting England in disguise to make further arrangements for this purpose, Sexby was arrested, and died a prisoner in the Tower.

Cromwell was kept well informed of these designs by his police, and spoke of them with great contempt. “Little fiddling things” he termed them in one of his speeches. “It was intended first for the assassination of my person,” he told Parliament of the plot of 1654, “which I would not remember as anything at all considerable to myself or to you, for they would have had to cut throats beyond human calculation before they could have been able to effect their design.”

As a precaution against such designs, the Protector’s life-guard, which had originally consisted simply of the forty-five gentlemen forming the life-guard of the Commander-in-chief, was raised in 1656 to 160 men. Royalist accounts say that during the last months of his life Cromwell was “much more apprehensive of danger to his person than he had used to be,” and that in consequence he surrounded himself with guards, never returned from Hampton Court by the road by which he went thither, and rarely slept twice in the same bed. These are legends for which there is no solid foundation. The Protector took reasonable, but not exaggerated precautions. He was not a man whose nerves could be shaken by threats, but he knew as well as his enemies did how much depended on his life, and how little the permanence of his work was assured.

The real danger to the Protectorate was that Cromwell was growing old. He was now in his fifty-ninth year. The fatigues of campaigning had injured his health before he began to rule. He had one dangerous illness in the spring of 1648, and another in the spring of 1651. “I thought I should have died of this sickness,” he said of the latter. Under the fatigues of government, his health was still more impaired. The despatches of foreign ambassadors have frequent references to the ill health of the Protector as one of the causes which retarded their negotiations. The difference between his signatures in 1651 and in 1657 is very remarkable. The bold firm hand of the first date becomes shaky and feeble six years later. His speeches prove that he felt the weight which rested upon his shoulders. “It has been heretofore,” he said in 1657, “a matter of, I think, but philosophical discourse, that a great place, a great authority, is a great burden. I know it is.” Danton, disillusioned by failure, cried that it was better to be a poor fisherman than a ruler of men. Cromwell sometimes regretted the quiet country life he had exchanged for the cares and vicissitudes of supreme power. “I can say in the presence of God, in comparison of whom we are but like poor creeping ants upon the earth, I would have lived under my woodside, to have kept a flock of sheep, rather than undertook such a government as this is.”

He met each new difficulty with his old resourcefulness and courage, but when one was overcome another rose before him, and the incessant struggle made increasing demands upon his vital forces. In the opinion of his steward, Maidston, “being compelled to wrestle with the difficulties of his place as well as he could without parliamentary assistance,” after the dissolution of his second Parliament, was a fatal addition to his burdens. “I doubt not to say it drank up his spirits, of which his natural constitution afforded a vast stock, and brought him to his grave.”

Private griefs also contributed their share to his load. In February, 1658, Robert Rich died, the husband of Cromwell’s youngest daughter Frances, married only four months earlier. On the 6th of August following, died Elizabeth Claypole, his favourite daughter, after a long and painful illness. The Protector was much with her in her last days, and his “sense of her outward misery in the pains she endured took deep impression upon him.”

A little time after his daughter’s funeral, Cromwell fell ill of an ague, or intermittent fever, but in a few days he seemed to shake it off and to regain strength. On August 20th, George Fox, going to Hampton Court to plead with the Protector “about the sufferings of Friends,” met him riding in the Park at the head of his guards. “Before I came to him,” says Fox, “I saw and felt a waft of death go forth against him, and when I came to him he looked like a dead man.” The next day Cromwell fell sick again, but he felt certain that the prayers put up for him would be answered, and was assured that he would recover. “Banish all sadness from your looks, and deal with me as you would with a serving man,” he said to a doubting physician. “You may have skill in the nature of things, yet nature can do more than all physicians put together; and God is far above nature.” When the fit was past, his physicians ordered him to remove to Whitehall, thinking that he would be benefited by the change of air.

At Whitehall, his condition became worse instead of better: he was racked by alternate heats and chills; all recognised that the danger was great; “our fears are more than our hopes,” wrote Thurloe to Henry Cromwell. On Tuesday, the last day of August, the French Ambassador told his Government that the Protector was at death’s door, but the same evening he rallied, and hope gained the upper hand again. That night, one who watched in Cromwell’s bedchamber heard him praying, and remarked that “a public spirit to God’s cause did breathe in him to the very last.” For he prayed, not for himself or for his family, but for Puritanism and for all Puritans—for “God’s cause” and “God’s people.” “Thou hast made me,” he said, “though very unworthy, a mean instrument to do them some good, and Thee service. And many of them have set too high a value upon me, though others wish and would be glad of my death. But, Lord, however Thou dost dispose of me, continue and go on to do good for them. Give them consistency of judgment, one heart, and mutual love, and go on to deliver them.... Teach those who look too much upon Thy instruments to depend more upon Thyself. Pardon such as desire to trample upon the dust of a poor worm, for they are Thy people too. And pardon the folly of this short prayer, even for Jesus Christ’s sake, and give us a good night, if it be Thy pleasure.”

Cromwell hourly grew weaker. Through the night of Thursday, the 2nd of September, he was very restless, speaking often to himself in broken sentences difficult to hear. “I would be willing,” he said once, “to live to be further serviceable to God and His people, but my work is done.” “God will be with His people.” He resigned himself to die.

A physician offered him something to drink, bidding him to take it, and to endeavour to sleep, but he answered: “It is not my design to drink or to sleep, but my design is to make what haste I can to be gone.” Towards morning he spoke again “using divers holy expressions, implying much inward consolation and peace,” and with them he mingled “some exceeding self-debasing words, annihilating and judging himself.” After that he was silent, and at four o’clock on the afternoon of Friday he died.

It was the 3rd of September, his fortunate day, the anniversary of Dunbar and Worcester.

As Marvell sang:

“No part of time but bare his mark away Of honour—all the year was Cromwell’s day, But this, of all the most auspicious found, Thrice had in open field him victor crowned, When up the armèd mountains of Dunbar He marched, and through deep Severn, ending war: What day should him eternise, but the same, That had before immortalised his name?”

Sometime during his illness Cromwell had verbally nominated his eldest son as his successor, so, about three hours after Oliver’s death, Richard was proclaimed Protector. Addresses from counties, cities, and regiments poured in to the new ruler, and foreign powers hastened to congratulate and to recognise him. There was no more opposition than if he had been the descendant of a long line of hereditary sovereigns. “There is not a dog that wags his tongue, so great a calm are we in,” wrote Thurloe to Henry Cromwell.

Richard’s first care was his father’s funeral. The body of the late Protector was embalmed and removed from Whitehall to Somerset House, there to lie in state, as that of James I. had done. His waxen effigy, clad in royal robes of purple and ermine, with a golden sceptre in the hand and a crown on the head, was for many weeks exhibited. The corpse was privately buried in the chapel of Henry VII., in Westminster Abbey, on September 26th, but the public funeral took place with extraordinary pomp on November 23rd. All the great officers of state and public officials, with officers from every regiment in the army, walked in solemn procession from Somerset House to the Abbey, through streets lined with soldiers in new red coats with black buttons.

The funeral ceremonies cost sixty thousand pounds, and this profusion, which the Government could ill afford, excited angry criticism amongst the Republicans. Their dissatisfaction would have mattered little, but there were already signs of coming trouble in a more dangerous quarter. A quarrel began between the civil and the military faction in the Protector’s council. Oliver had been Commander-in-chief, as well as Protector, but now the superior officers demanded a commander-in-chief of their own choosing, and put forward Fleetwood as their candidate. Their aim was to shake off the control of Richard’s civilian advisers, and make the army independent of the civil power. Richard firmly refused their demand, and the storm seemed to blow over, but the officers only waited for a more convenient opportunity.

In January, 1659, the necessity of providing money for the public service obliged Richard to call a Parliament. All the Republican leaders obtained seats, but more than two-thirds of the members elected were supporters of the Government. There was a long struggle over the recognition of Richard as Protector, followed by excited debates about the right of the members for Scotland and Ireland to sit in Parliament, and over the old question of the House of Lords. On all these points, the Government carried the day, but in the meantime the agitation in the army had begun again, and a council of officers repeated the demands made in the previous autumn. The Protector, backed by his Parliament, which was indignant at military dictation, ordered the council to cease meeting. The military leaders, allying themselves with the Republican minority in the House, refused obedience. A few colonels adhered to the Protector, and obeyed his orders, but they were deserted by their men, and all the regiments in London gathered round Fleetwood at St. James’s. On behalf of the council of officers, Fleetwood and Desborough demanded the immediate dissolution of Parliament. “If he would dissolve Parliament,” said Desborough, “the officers would take care of him; if he refused, they would do it without him and leave him to shift for himself.” Richard might have resisted with some chance of success, for Monk and the army in Scotland remained faithful, and Henry Cromwell, with the Irish army, would have supported him. But he trusted the promises of his uncles, and, whatever the result to himself, he shrank from beginning a civil war. “I will not have one drop of blood spilt for the preservation of my greatness,” he is reported to have said. Yielding to the pressure put upon him, he dissolved Parliament (April 21, 1659), and a fortnight later he had ceased to reign.

Thus the Protectorate fell before that alliance between the Republicans and the malcontents in the army which Cromwell had always been strong enough to prevent. Fleetwood had no wish to overthrow his brother-in-law, Desborough no animosity to his nephew; they meant to make him their tool, and to govern under his name. But the inferior officers declared for the restoration of the Republic, and threw over the House of Cromwell. On May 7th, the Long Parliament was restored to power by the men who had expelled it in April, 1653, and the Revolution was completed.

There was no real union between these temporary allies. The fifty or sixty members of the Long Parliament who governed England in the name of the Republic had learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. The soldiers, conscious that the Government could not live for a day without their support, grew restive and indignant when their claims were ignored and their requests slighted. After the suppression by Major-General Lambert of a royalist insurrection in August, 1659, Parliament and army came to an open breach. Parliament cashiered Lambert and eight other officers for promoting a petition which it had declared seditious, and Lambert retaliated (October 13, 1659), by putting a stop to its sittings.

Lambert—the real leader of the army, though Fleetwood was its nominal head—stood now in the position which Cromwell had occupied in April, 1653; but this time the army was divided. In Scotland, Monk declared for the restitution of the Parliament, and by dilatory negotiations kept Lambert and Fleetwood from acting until the desertion of their soldiers, the defection of the fleet, and the opposition of London obliged them to give way. At the end of December, 1659, the Long Parliament was a second time restored, and Monk, with six thousand men, entered England unopposed. It was not zeal for that assembly which caused its restoration, but hostility to military government. Under the opprobrious nickname of “The Rump,” Parliament was the laughing stock of every ballad-maker, but for the moment it represented all that was left of the constitution. Weary of experiments, and most weary of the rule of the sword, the English people wished to return to the known laws and the old government. As Monk marched to London, petitions poured in urging him to declare for a free Parliament, and every petitioner knew that a really representative Parliament meant the restoration of Charles II. Monk answered by protesting unalterable fidelity to the Republic, but made up his mind to use his power to let the nation determine freely its own future. When he reached London he availed himself of the disaffection of the City to oblige Parliament to readmit the Presbyterian members whom Pride had expelled in 1648 (Feb. 21, 1660). Having thus secured a majority ready to do his bidding, he obliged the House to vote its own dissolution, and issue writs for the calling of a free Parliament (March 16, 1660). As commander-in-chief, he maintained the freedom of the elections, kept the army under control, and watched over the peace of the nation.

Monk’s greatest service to England was not the restoration of Charles II. After the breach between army and Parliament that was inevitable. “The current,” said Cowley, “was so irresistible, that the strongest strove against it in vain, and the weakest could sail with it to success.” Monk’s merit was that he brought about the Restoration without a civil war. His dexterous and unscrupulous policy blinded the Republicans to his intentions till it was too late for them to resist, and made the army instrumental in effecting what the bulk of it would have fought to prevent. But for him, England would have been, in Cromwell’s phrase, “one Cain.” Thanks to him, the transition from the government of an armed minority to the government which an overwhelming majority of the nation desired was a peaceable and constitutional revolution. So the rule of Puritanism, founded with blood and iron, fell without a blow. The alliance between the Presbyterians and the Royalists, begun thirteen years ago, was now at last completed. The once triumphant Independents were divided and powerless. Maidston, the steward of Cromwell’s household, in a letter to John Winthrop, wrote the epitaph of militant Independency.

“The interest of religion lies dreadfully in the dust, for the eminent professors of it, having achieved formerly great victories in the war, and thereby great power in the army, made use of it to make variety of changes in the government, and every one of those changes hazardous and pernicious.... They were all charged upon the principles of the authors, who, being Congregational men, have not only made men of that persuasion cheap, but rendered them odious to the generality of the nation.”

At the end of April, 1660, a free Parliament met, the first for twenty years. On May 29th, Charles II. re-entered London “with a triumph of above twenty thousand horse and foot, brandishing their swords and shouting with inexpressible joy; the ways strewed with flowers, the bells ringing, the streets hung with tapestry, the fountains running with wine.”

“I stood in the Strand and beheld it, and blessed God,” wrote John Evelyn. “And all this was done without one drop of blood shed, and by that very army which rebelled against him; but it was the Lord’s doing, for such a restoration was never mentioned in any history, ancient or modern, since the return of the Jews from the Babylonish captivity; nor so joyful a day, and so bright, ever seen in this nation, this happening when to expect or to effect it was past all human policy.”

In the constitutional settlement which followed the King’s return, England reverted to the state of things which had existed before the Civil War began. Cromwell’s legislation and all the laws made by the Long Parliament were regarded as null and void. There was a general amnesty for all political offenders excepting the Regicides and a few persons regarded as specially dangerous. Twelve Regicides suffered the penalties of high treason, and Hugh Peters and Sir Henry Vane shared their fate. About twenty escaped into foreign parts, and about five and twenty were imprisoned for life. After the punishment of the living, came vengeance against the dead. In November, 1660, a bill for the attainder of Cromwell and other dead Regicides was introduced into the House of Commons. During its progress, Captain Titus stood up and observed,

“that execution did not leave traitors at their graves, but followed them beyond it, and that since the heads of some were already put upon the gates, he hoped that the House would order that the carcases of those devils who were buried at Westminster—Cromwell, Bradshaw, and Ireton—might be torn out of their graves, dragged to Tyburn, there to hang some time, and afterwards be buried under the gallows.”

It was voted without any opposition, though many present must have agreed with Pepys, whom it “troubled, that a man of so great courage as Cromwell should have that dishonour done him, though otherwise he might deserve it well enough.”

Accordingly, on Saturday, January 26, 1661, the bodies of Cromwell and Ireton were disinterred from their graves in Westminster Abbey, and on the Monday conveyed from Westminster to the Red Lion Inn, in Holborn. Finally, on the morning of January 30th, the twelfth anniversary of the execution of Charles I., their bodies, and that of Bradshaw, were drawn upon sledges from Holborn to Tyburn. “All the way, as before from Westminster, the universal outcry and curses of the people went along with them.” “When these three carcases were at Tyburn,” continues the newspaper, “they were pulled out of their coffins, and hanged at the several angles of that triple tree, where they hung till the sun was set; after which they were taken down, their heads cut off, and their loathsome trunks thrown into a deep pit under the gallows.” The common hangman took the heads, placed them on poles, and set them on the top of Westminster Hall, Bradshaw’s head in the centre, Ireton’s and Cromwell’s on either side.

Yet, though all this was done in the face of day, as many places claim to be Cromwell’s sepulchre as once contended for the honour of being Homer’s birthplace. Strange rumours spread abroad that the body subjected to all these indignities was not Cromwell’s. Two years later, a French traveller in England was told that Cromwell had caused the royal tombs in Westminster Abbey to be opened and the bodies transposed, so that none might know where his own body was laid. Pepys repeated the story to one of the late Protector’s chaplains, who answered, “That he believed Cromwell never had so poor a low thought in him as to trouble himself about it.” Another rumour was that Cromwell’s body was secretly conveyed away, and buried at dead of night on Naseby Field. According to a third, Cromwell’s daughter, Lady Fauconberg, foreseeing changed times, had ere this removed her father’s body from Westminster, and reinterred it in a vault at Newburgh Abbey, in Yorkshire. All these stories found, and find, believers, but there is no reasonable ground for doubting that it was Cromwell’s body which hung on the gallows at Tyburn, or that it was duly buried in the pit beneath them. Where Connaught Square now stands, a yard or two beneath the street, trodden under foot and beaten by horsehoofs, lies the dust of the great Protector.