Oliver Cromwell and the Rule of the Puritans in England

CHAPTER I

EARLY LIFE

1599–1629

“I was by birth a gentleman living neither in any considerable height nor yet in obscurity,” said the Protector to one of his Parliaments. Cromwell’s family was one of the many English families which rose to wealth and importance at the time of the Reformation. It owed its name and its fortune to Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex, the minister of Henry VIII., and the destroyer of the monasteries. In 1494, Thomas Cromwell’s sister Katherine had married Morgan Williams, a wealthy brewer of Putney, whose family sprang from Glamorganshire. Her eldest son Richard took the surname of Cromwell, entered the service of Henry VIII., and assisted his uncle in his dealings with refractory Churchmen. Grants of land flowed in upon the 


lucky kinsman of the King’s vicegerent. In 1538, he was given the Benedictine priory of Hinchinbrook near Huntingdon. In 1540, the site of the rich Benedictine abbey of Ramsey and some of its most valuable manors were added to his possessions. Honour as well as wealth fell to his lot. At the tournament held at Westminster on May Day, 1540, to celebrate the espousals of Henry VIII. and Anne of Cleves,—a marriage which was to unite English and German Protestantism,—Richard Cromwell was one of the six champions who maintained the honour of England against all comers. Pleased by his prowess with sword and lance, the King gave him a diamond ring and made him a knight.

Six weeks later fortune turned against the all-powerful Earl of Essex. He had pushed forward the Reformation faster than the King desired and bound the King to a woman he detested. “Say what they will, she is nothing fair,” groaned Henry, and suddenly repudiated wife, policy, and minister. On June 10th, Thomas Cromwell was arrested in the Council Chamber itself and committed to the Tower on the charge of high treason. “He had left,” it was said, “the mean, indifferent, virtuous, and true way” of reforming religion which his master trod. In his zeal to advance doctrinal changes, he had dared to say that if the King and all his realm would turn and vary from his opinions, he would fight in the field in his own person with his sword in his hand against the King and all others; adding that if he lived a year or two he trusted “to bring things to that frame that it should not lie in the King’s power to resist or let 


it.” On July 28th, Cromwell passed from the Tower to the scaffold.

Few pitied him and only one mourned him. Sir Richard Cromwell, said tradition, dared to appear at the Court in the mourning raiment which the King hated, and Henry, respecting his fidelity, pardoned his boldness. He retained the King’s favour the rest of his life, was made a gentleman of the Privy Chamber and constable of Berkeley Castle, got more grants of lands, and died in 1546.

Sir Richard’s son Henry built Hinchinbrook House, was knighted by Queen Elizabeth, whom he entertained during one of her progresses, and was four times sheriff of Huntingdonshire. As marshal of the county he organised its forces at the time of the Spanish Armada, raised, besides the four soldiers he was bound to furnish, twenty-six horsemen at his own cost, and called on the trained bands to practise “the right and perfect use of their weapons,” and fight for “the sincere religion of Christ” against “the devilish superstition of the Pope.” In their mixture of military and religious ardour his harangues recall the speeches of his grandson. People called him “the golden knight” because of his wealth and his liberality, and he matched his children with the best blood of the eastern counties. One daughter was the mother of Major-General Edward Whalley, one of the Regicides; another married William Hampden, and her son was John Hampden.

Of Sir Henry’s sons, Oliver, his heir, was a man who from love of ostentation pushed his father’s liberality to extravagance. When James I. came to 


England he was received at Hinchinbrook, “with such entertainment as had not been seen in any place before, since his first setting forward out of Scotland.” James made him a Knight of the Bath at the coronation, and paid him three other visits during his reign.

Robert, Sir Henry’s second son, inherited from his father an estate at Huntingdon, worth in those days about £300 a year, equal to three or four times as much now. He sat for Huntingdon in the Parliament of 1593, filled the office of bailiff for the borough, and was one of the justices of the peace for the county. Robert Cromwell married Elizabeth, widow of William Lynn, and daughter of William Steward of Ely. Her family were well off, and she brought with her a jointure of £60 a year. The Stewards were relatives of the last prior and first Protestant dean of Ely, who had obtained good leases of Church lands, and were farmers of the tithes of the see. Tradition, which loves curious coincidences, has connected them with the royal House of Stuart that their descendant overthrew, but history traces their origin to a Norfolk family originally named Styward. Oliver, the future Lord Protector, was the fifth child of Robert Cromwell, and the only one of his sons who survived infancy. He was born at Huntingdon, on April 25, 1599, baptised at St. John’s Church in that town on April 29th, and christened Oliver after his uncle, the knight of Hinchinbrook. Little is known of his boyhood. A royalist biographer says that he was of “a cross and peevish disposition” from his infancy, while a contemporary panegyrist 


credits him even then with “a quick and lively apprehension, a piercing and sagacious wit, and a solid judgment.”

Stories are told of his marvellous deliverances from danger, and of strange prognostications of his future greatness. It was revealed to him in a dream or by an apparition “that he should be the greatest man in England, and should be near the King.” Another story was that he had acted the part of a king in a play in his school days, placing the crown himself upon his head, and adding “majestical mighty words” of his own to the poet’s verses. These are the usual fictions which cluster round the early life of great men. All that is certain is that Cromwell was educated at the free school of Huntingdon under Dr. Thomas Beard—a Puritan schoolmaster who wrote pedantic Latin plays, proved that the Pope was Antichrist, and showed in his Theatre of God’s Judgments that human crimes never go unpunished by God even in this world. Beard was an austere man who believed in the rod, and a biographer describes him as correcting the manners of young Oliver “with a diligent hand and careful eye,” which may be accepted as truth. But these disciplinings did not prevent pupil and master from being friends in later life.

At the age of seventeen, Cromwell was sent to Cambridge, where on April 23, 1616, he was admitted a fellow commoner of Sidney Sussex College. The College, founded in 1598, was one of those two which Laud subsequently complained of as nurseries of Puritanism. Its master, Samuel Ward, was a learned 


and morbidly conscientious divine; a severe disciplinarian, who exacted from his scholars elaborate accounts of the sermons they heard, and had them whipped in hall when they offended. Cromwell did not distinguish himself, but he by no means wasted his time at Cambridge. He had no aptitude for languages. Burnet says he “had no foreign language but the little Latin that stuck to him from his education, which he spoke very viciously and scantily.” When he was Protector he remembered enough Latin to carry on a conversation in that tongue with a Dutch ambassador.

Another biographer tells us that Cromwell “excelled chiefly in the mathematics,” and his kinsman, the poet Waller, was wont to say that the Protector was “very well read in the Greek and Roman story.” His advice to his son Richard bears out this account of his preferences. “Read a little history,” he wrote to him; “study the Mathematics and cosmography. These are good with subordination to the things of God. These fit for public services for which a man is born.” With Cromwell, as with Montrose, Sir Walter Raleigh’s History of the World was a favourite book, and he urged his son to read it. “’Tis a body of history, and will add much more to your understanding than fragments of story.”

Cromwell’s tutor is said to have observed with great discrimination that his pupil was not so much addicted to speculation as to action, and royalist biographers make his early taste for athletics and sport a great reproach to him. One says: “He was easily satiated with study, taking more delight in horse and field exercise.” Another describes him as “more famous for his exercises in the fields than in the schools, being one of the chief matchmakers and players of football, cudgels, or any other boisterous sport or game.”


How long Cromwell remained at the university is not known, but it is certain that he left it without taking a degree. Probably he quitted Cambridge prematurely on account of the death of his father, who was buried at All Saints’ Church, Huntingdon, on June 24, 1617. For a time Cromwell stayed at Huntingdon, no doubt helping his mother in the management of the estate and in the settlement of his father’s affairs. Then he went to London to acquire the smattering of law which every country gentleman needed, and which one whose position marked him out as a future justice of the peace and member of parliament could not do without. “He betook himself,” says a contemporary biographer, “to the study of law in Lincoln’s Inn; that nothing might be wanting to make him a complete gentleman and a good commonwealthsman.” Though his name does not appear in the books of that society, the fact is probable enough, and sufficiently well attested to be accepted.

Three years after his father’s death, Cromwell married, on August 22, 1620, at St. Giles’s Church, Cripplegate, Elizabeth Bourchier. She was the daughter of Sir James Bourchier, a city merchant living on Tower Hill and owning property at Felstead in Essex. It is probable that Cromwell’s wife brought him a considerable dowry, for the day after 


marriage he contracted, under penalty of £4000, to settle upon her, as her jointure, the parsonage house of Hartford in Huntingdonshire with its glebe land and tithes. Elizabeth Cromwell was a year older than her husband, and is traditionally said to have been a notable housewife. In spite of royalist lampooners she was, if her portraits may be trusted, neither uncomely nor undignified in person. Her affection for her husband was sincere and lasting. “My life is but half a life in your absence,” she writes to him in 1650. “I could chide thee,” says Cromwell in answer to a complaint about not writing, “that in many of thy letters thou writest to me, that I should not be unmindful of thee and thy little ones. Truly, if I love you not too well, I think I err not on the other hand much. Thou art dearer to me than any creature; let that suffice.”

After his marriage, Cromwell settled down at Huntingdon and occupied himself in farming the lands he had inherited from his father. Two-thirds of the income of the estate had been left by Robert Cromwell to his widow for the term of twenty-one years, in order to provide for the maintenance of the daughters, so that Oliver’s means during the early years of his married life must have been rather narrow. It was understood, however, that he was destined to be the heir of his mother’s brother, Sir Thomas Steward, and in 1628 another uncle, Richard Cromwell, left him a small property at Huntingdon. Ere long there was a proof that Cromwell had earned the good opinion of his neighbours, for, in February, 1628, he was elected to represent his native town in the third Parliament called by Charles I. The choice was partly due to the position of his family and its long connection with the borough, but more must have been due also to Cromwell’s personal character and reputation, since the local influence of the Cromwell family, thanks to the reckless extravagance of its head, was already on the wane. In 1627, Sir Oliver to pay his debts had been obliged to sell Hinchinbrook to Sir Sidney Montague, and had retired to Ramsey. He had represented the county in eight Parliaments, but he sat for it no more, and the Montagues were henceforth the leading family in Huntingdonshire.