IN THE CLOSING YEAR OF the sixteenth century, in the quiet little town of Huntingdon, Oliver Cromwell first saw the light. He was born on April 25, 1599, and baptized at St John’s Church on the 9th of the same month and entered in the parish register as “son of Robert Cromwell, gentleman, and of Elizabeth Cromwell, his wife.’”
Who were Robert and Elizabeth Cromwell? Many years afterward this son, speaking to one of his Parliaments, described his social position in the words,. “I was by birth a gentleman, living neither in any considerable height nor yet in obscurity.”
Oliver had no reason to be ashamed of his ancestry on either side. His great-grandfather—Richard Williams by name—was a Welshman, and here we have the Celtic strain that fired Cromwell’s more sluggish English blood. Richard Williams was nephew of Thomas Cromwell, Wolsey’s friend and Henry VIII’s minister, known as ‘the Hammer of the Monks.’ Uncle Thomas liked and advanced his kinsman, and Richard Williams partly—in gratitude, no doubt, partly to insist on the relationship—changed his surname to Cromwell. Thomas Cromwell was, as we know, like Wolsey to sound “all the depths and shoals of honour,” like Wolsey to learn the wretchedness of the man who hangs on princes’ favors. He it was who, for political purposes, negotiated Henry VIII’s marriage with Anne of Cleves. But the lady had been flattered in her picture, and the King, who had expected a Venus, ungallantly dubbed her a “Flemish mare.” He had a short way with wives and a short way with ministers: Anne, his fourth wife, was divorced and Thomas Cromwell paid “a long farewell to all his greatness” on the scaffold.
Richard Cromwell, who was knighted at the tournament held in honour of the ill-starred wedding, where his prowess attracted the attention of the royal bridegroom, did not share in his kinsman’s disgrace. He appeared at Court clad in black, though the monarch’s dislike of mourning was notorious. His boldness was forgiven and he enjoyed the sunshine of princely favor to the end of his days. He had had his share of the spoil of the monasteries, for the Benedictine convent of Hinchinbrook and the rich Benedictine abbey of Ramsey, with their revenues and manors, had fallen to his lot.
It was a goodly heritage for his eldest son, Henry, who carried the fortunes of the Cromwell family a step farther, building himself a fine house at Hinchinbrook, where he might entertain with lavish splendor. Great were the preparations for Queen Elizabeth’s visit when she was his guest on one of her royal progresses. The Queen dubbed him her knight, and such was his generosity and public spirit that he was known as ‘the Golden Knight’ to his friends and neighbors. When the Spanish Armada threatened England he trained twenty-six horsemen at his own expense for the defense of the land against “the devilish superstition of the Pope,” as he put it.
In the course of time, when Henry was gathered to his fathers, his eldest son, Oliver, inherited Hinchinbrook, and his second son, Robert, an estate in Huntingdon. His daughters married well—one by her union with William Hampden became the mother of the patriot, John Hampden. Robert found his mate in Elizabeth Lynn, a young widow, the daughter of William Steward of Ely. The Stewards were people of good social standing, though there is no foundation for the legend that they could trace their descent from the Stuart kings of Scotland. They belonged to the landed gentry and farmed the cathedral tithes of Ely. Their ancestor, the last Prior of Ely, changed his views in the nick of time when the dissolution of the monasteries was making Roman Catholic prelates quake in their shoes, and he remained in office as the first Protestant dean of Ely.
Robert and Elizabeth Cromwell lived in Huntingdon. They were comfortably off, for their joint income of £360 a year would be worth something like £1200 nowadays. Four children had been born to them before their second son, Oliver, came on the scene.
In later years many legends clustered round the childhood and boyhood of Oliver. They must not be taken too seriously, since the earliest biographers saw his character through the veil of their own prejudices. Until our own century justice has not been done to him. A Royalist writer records that “he was of a cross and peevish disposition,” but this opinion was balanced by a more favorable observer, who declared that he had “a quick and lively apprehension, a piercing and sagacious wit, and a solid judgment.” The truth lies between the two extremes. Throughout his life he was quick-tempered; as a boy he was certainty high-spirited, and probably he was occasionally troublesome also. His parents had their hands too full with the cares of their nine children to pay undue attention to this son, who was followed by three sisters and a brother. Gaps soon came in the family. Oliver was but a baby when his eldest sister, a little girl of eight, died; he was old enough to realize the shadow of death when his eldest brother died, and when his youngest brother survived his birth by only a few months.
It is related of Oliver that, in his infancy, he was taken to his uncle’s house and laid in a cradle, whereupon a monkey seized him and carried him up to the roof. The agonized household held mattresses below him lest he should be dropped by his captor. Fortunately when the monkey had had enough of his infant charge he brought him down in safety.
Another legend records that at the same house of Hinchinbrook he first encountered the prince with whom he was to come to a death-grapple in later years. Prince Charles, journeying from Scotland to England, was the guest of Sir Oliver Cromwell, and little Oliver, who was invited to meet him, so forgot what was due to Royalty that he fell to fighting him. Prince Charles, who was a fragile child, had much the worst of it, and retired from the struggle with a bleeding nose.
Other stories of Oliver’s boyhood are not so hard to believe. He was, no doubt, like many another lad, an ‘apple dragon,’ and may have been given to pigeon-stealing. The discipline of schooldays would have quelled his childish spirits. He was sent to the free school at Huntingdon, where Dr Thomas Beard, a stern Puritan, believed that sinners are not only punished in the world to come, but that retribution dogs their footsteps in this world also. He had written a book entitled The Theatre of God’s Judgments Displayed, to convince humanity at large of this fact, and he proved it to his scholars by a liberal use of the rod.
It was said that once the schoolboys acted a play called The Five Senses. Oliver, wreathed with laurel, was making for the stage when he stumbled against a property crown. He straightway discarded his own headgear, crowned himself, and made a fine speech to his schoolfellows.
At seventeen he left school, and was entered at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, on April 23, 1616. On the same day a great career was closed at Stratford-on-Avon, for Shakespeare’s worldly course was run.
Oliver once more came under a strongly Puritan influence, for the head of the college was Dr Samuel Ward, a fine type of man, who had been one of the translators of the authorized version of the Bible. He was a convinced Puritan, and his college was called by Archbishop Laud a ‘nursery’ of Puritanism.
Oliver was essentially a man of action. In his college days he loved an outdoor life, horse and field exercise, football, cudgels, and boisterous games, rather than severe study. Nevertheless he profited by his academic course, becoming well read in ‘Greek and Latin story,’ and proficient in mathematics and cosmography—studies he greatly valued. Sir Walter Raleigh’s History of the World was ever a favourite work with him, but he was never bookish.
His college career was brought to an abrupt close when, in June 1617, his father died, and as he was the only surviving son and his father’s heir, he returned home. Ultimately, no doubt, he was to take his sire’s place as head of the family, but in the meantime his mother did not consider him fully equipped for his part in life. Little could she foresee what that part was to be! Her highest ambitions for her boy were that he should be an upright country gentleman carrying on the good old traditions of the Cromwell family, becoming eventually a Justice of the Peace and possibly a member of Parliament. With these ideals in view she sent him to London to study law. Whether or not he entered one of the Inns of Court is not definitely known, and though tradition says that he was a student of Lincoln’s Inn, there is no record of his name on the books.
He was now free from parents and school-masters, and it was said that he made use of his liberty to sow his wild oats. A letter written many years afterward, when he was thirty-nine, to his cousin, Mrs. St John, is quoted as evidence: “You know what my manner of life hath been. Oh, I have lived in and loved darkness, and hated light; I was a chief, the chief of sinners. This is true: I hated godliness, yet God had mercy on me.” There is this to be said on the other side. Cromwell became such a deeply religious man that he judged his easy-going youth very harshly, and in all probability his tares grew but a scanty crop.
In London Oliver made .the acquaintance of the Bourchiers: Sir James, .a wealthy merchant, his wife, and their daughter Elizabeth, a comely girl but a year older than he was. They had a fine town house on Tower Hill and a country home at Felstead in Essex. Oliver fell in love with Elizabeth, and her parents did not look unfavorably on his suit. He was betrothed to her, and when he was twenty-one they were married in the beautiful old church of St Giles, Cripplegate, where we can still read in the parish register the entry which records their union.
BEFORE WE FOLLOW THE FORTUNES of the young bride and bridegroom, let us take a brief survey of a few of the important events that were making English history during Oliver Cromwell’s childhood and youth. He was born when Queen Elizabeth, that last and most typical representative of the Tudor monarchs, was on the throne. He must have heard many a description of her in his nursery days, of the splendor of her garments sewn with jewels, of her haughty bearing, of her vanity—in short, all the tittle-tattle about Royalty that is ever welcome gossip. He would have been told how jealous she had been of Mary Queen of Scots, and how, after keeping her for many years in captivity, she had condemned her to death. This had happened a dozen years before his birth, but it was still fresh in people’s minds, especially as Elizabeth was now growing old and the heir to the throne was Mary’s son, James VI of Scotland. When little Oliver was just beginning to prattle and to try the strength of his sturdy limbs the country was shocked by the news that the Queen, unforgiving to the last, had allowed her favourite Essex to be beheaded. But though the Cromwell household, together with many another, would discuss the Earl’s fate, the knowledge of it would not cause such a shock of horror as it would to-day. Indeed, such a punishment would be impossible in the twentieth century, but in those days the axe was a swift way of solving difficulties and paying off old scores.
Probably the first public event which really gripped the child’s mind was the passing of the great Queen when he was four years old. Her death ended an epoch, and in the new one which dawned when. James I succeeded her on the throne the little boy plucking the early primroses in the fields around his home was destined to play a leading part.
He was not only to hear of the customary rejoicings at the coronation, but he was actually to see the new monarch on his journey from Scotland to England. Sir Oliver, true to the splendid traditions of his house, received his royal guest at Hinchinbrook, and entertained him with such lavish hospitality that it exceeded that of any other of the King’s hosts. Sir Oliver was made a Knight of the Bath, and dames honored his house by three subsequent visits.
What did little Oliver think of the King? Children are not over-critical as to the personal appearance of grown-up people, but no doubt he had his dreams of what a sovereign should be and thought his childish thoughts when his blue eyes rested on James, “clad in green as the grass he trod on, with a feather in his cap, and a horn in4tead of a sword by his side.” The King was not an imposing figure, of middle height, and rather stout, with “a rolling eye, a thin beard, tongue too large for his mouth, and weak, tottering legs.”
Grave political and religious difficulties—too grave for the child to understand—were to mark the new reign. We shall deal with them in another chapter. But one result of these troubles thrilled the boy of six, when the news spread like wildfire through England that the Roman Catholics had plotted to blow up the Houses of Parliament on November 5, 1605, when the King was to be present to open the session. At the eleventh hour a Catholic noble had been warned by one of the accomplices, and the game was up! Guy Fawkes was caught in the cellar, waiting to fire the powder; the other conspiratory fled, and one by one they were tracked to their hiding-places, to forfeit their lives on the scaffold.
Other public events seemed tame after this crisis, especially the tittle-tattle of Court gossip. James I was infatuated by George Villiers, the handsome Duke of Buckingham. He called him ‘Steenie’ and entirely forgot his dignity as a king in the familiarity of their intercourse. Various scandals of Court life were the gossip of the ale-house and the servants. The court ladies got drunk, the unseemly behavior of the courtiers made men of the older generation shake their heads and hark back to “the stately times of great Elizabeth.” With all her faults, James’s predecessor never forgot that she was a queen; he, however, considered that the ‘divine right’ covered a multitude of indiscretions.
School and college days were over and Oliver was beginning to take a personal interest in the affairs of the big world, reading law in London, when Sir Walter Raleigh, having failed to find the rives of gold or to keep the peace with the Spaniards, perished on the scaffold. In all probability the young man was among the immense crowd of sightseers who on that chill October morning watched the passing of the great Elizabethan to his doom.
EACH AGE HAS ITS OWN problem to face, its own inheritance of the mistakes of the previous one. The seventeenth century was to see the birth of new ideals which threatened the very existence of monarchy. The country had acquiesced in the rule of the Tudors partly because they were dominant personalities, partly because it required time to recover after the weary conflict of the Wars of the Roses. Then, too, nothing succeeds like success. In Elizabethan days England rose in glory and stood high in the estimation of Europe. National pride was quickened by the defeat of the Spanish Armada and by the voyages of the great seamen, Grenville, Raleigh, and Drake.
The Tudors had the power to force their will on the people. At best such a rule was bad alike for governor and governed; at its worst it was tyranny.
It was the misfortune of the Stuarts that they could not realize that the death of Elizabeth meant the end of absolute sovereignty, and for this lack of understanding the house was doomed.
James I had no sooner ascended the throne of England (thus uniting the Crowns of England and Scotland) than he was made to feel that his new kingdom was in a state of transition and that the era of subservience was at an end. The points of view of King and Parliament were radically different. James, in The True Law of Free Monarchy, asserted his belief in the ‘divine right of kings’—the sovereign was above all human law and when he obeyed it he did so merely to set an example to his subjects. “As it is atheism and blasphemy to dispute what God can do, so it is presumption and high contempt in a subject to dispute what a king can do, or to say that a king cannot do this or that.”
The newly elected members of Parliament were no less emphatic as to their position, and in the ‘Apology’ which they presented to him the year after his accession they made it perfectly clear. “Our privileges and liberties are our right and due inheritance, no lest than our very lands and goods…. They cannot be withheld from us, denied or impaired, but with apparent wrong to the whole state of the realm.”
In brief the contest was to be this: Had the King sovereign power independently of Parliament or only through Parliament? Was the monarch, in common with his people, subject to the law, or was the law subject to the King?
James was not the man to hold the reins of government at such a time. Though not without intelligence—he has been called “the wisest fool in Christendom"—he was a dull pedant, and had none of that tact which would have helped him to steer a safe course.
But England had not to face the political problem only; there was the religious difficulty as well.
The Reformation had not produced a nation of one mind as to religious observance, though people of that age, lacking the wider vision of our own, still believed that uniformity was possible. There were four main divisions: the Arminians or Anglicans, the Puritans, the Presbyterians, and the Roman Catholics. The first two in some way corresponded to the High and Low Church of to-day, for both were within the pale of the Church of England. Like the Roman Catholics, the Arminians believed in the authority and traditions of the Church. For them the Reformation did not introduce any new form of worship, but simply swept away abuses that had gathered round the old. They retained most of the beautiful liturgy and the symbols of the faith, though they staunchly denied the supremacy of the Pope.
The Puritans, on the other hand, though for the most part they still remained within the Church of England, thought that the Reformation had not gone far enough. The old traditions were hateful to them. They desired a purer form of worship founded solely on the Bible. The Book should be diligently studied, not only in order to “justify the ways of God to man,” but in order that the creature might understand the will of the Creator. The cross in baptism, the ring in marriage, the cap and surplice and official robes, the very Prayer Book itself, were but superstitions. They wanted the pure Word of God. Unfortunately for such guidance through the mazes of this troublesome world, the Bible is capable of many interpretations in accordance with the point of view of the reader, and the Puritans themselves were to split into many different sects. But, for good and ill, they were fated to play an enormous part in shaping the destinies not only of England but of that “new world called America.” Fanatics there were among them, without doubt, but the majority were. people of sincere conviction, to whom life was a serious business, not alone here and now, but as the preparation for a world to come.
The Presbyterians desired an entirely remodeled Church with another form of government. Bishops and priests were abhorrent to them, and presbyters and elders were to take their place. The discipline was strict, and offending members could be called before a Presbytery for any offence in life or doctrine, to listen meekly to grave rebuke or the sentence of expulsion from the Church. The Presbytery, too, claimed the power of declaring the mind of God “in all questions of religion.”
The Roman Catholics were the adherents of the faith that had grown up from earliest times through the Middle Ages, which they held unchanged and unchangeable. Their supreme earthly head was the Pope, who was infallible in his judgments. They revered and worshipped the Virgin as they did her Son, and they held that the bread and wine used in the service of the Mass were in some mystical way changed into the body and blood of Christ.
All parties looked to James I to do something for them. The hopes of the Presbyterians ran high, for he had been bred among them. This, however, was little recommendation to him, for he had grown heartily tired of their long dissertations and admonitions. The Roman Catholics looked to the son of Mary Stuart to allow them a larger measure of toleration; ultimately they hoped that Roman Catholicism would once more become the State religion—but the time was not yet ripe for it. James had promised them a certain amount of freedom, but no sooner had he ascended the throne than the laws against them were so rigorously enforced that the extremists formed the Gunpowder Plot. Its discovery led to far harsher laws against the Roman Catholics, and thenceforth they were obliged to receive the Mass in secret as though they were committing a crime.
The Puritans also hoped for many things from the new reign, as did the Arminian. The latter came off the better. ‘No Bishop, no King,’ came to be the motto of the House of Stuart. It was a case of mutual service: if the bishops preached the ‘divine right,’ the kings could not but support them.
The political and religious troubles were to lead to civil war, to the death of Charles I, to the Commonwealth, and to the Restoration.
TO THE OLD HOUSE