Review : Providence Lost - The Rise and Fall of Cromwell's Protectorate

In the last few years I've become fascinated by the English Civil War. It's a period I don't know much about, but I'm trying to make amends.

I very much enjoy reading ancient and medieval military history*, but in this case I have only the most rudimentary grasp of the conflict itself. No doubt that will eventually be remedied. But the colossal scale of the Civil War seems emblematic of the massive social changes that were raging throughout the country. The bloody but brief witchfinder epidemic points to a flux in thinking from the mystical to the material, a period still rife in superstition but gradually giving way to empiricism and objective reasoning**. The war unleased creativity by reducing censorship, formulating prototypes of socialism and modern-day democracy; an initially religious conflict giving way to a choice over system of government - and of course with some powerful lessons about how that government should be run. Here was a time when few of the modern conventions existed, a key period in history when the British Constitution (such as it is) began to be formulated. There were no rules and a golden opportunity to design a truly republican (small r), democratic government. So how did they fare ?

* It's a good thing I proof-read these, because initially I'd written historical military history. I mean, historical history, for goodness' sake...

** Lucy Worsely has a new documentary about this which presents a different view of the witch hunts than the book review I've linked. Gaskill concentrates on the most famous examples of Hopkins and Sterne, whose reign of terror was brief, and aimed at the most vulnerable in society (not always women) accused of committing often rather petty crimes. Worsely presents a very different view of the background-level witch hunts, which, she says, were sometimes about prominent public figures accused of committing major crimes and with a strong sexist element at work. Furthermore they were enabled by the whole way of thinking of society, whereas Gaskill and Sterne only flourished because of the temporary lawlessness of the War, though they inflicted a much higher rate of victims compared to the more typical witch hunts.

Terribly. That's the short answer according to Paul Lay's Providence Lost, which covers the brief period when Britain was a republic. And there are many reasons for this, from the conflicting philosophies pervading society to the complex characters who found themselves in charge of the whole omnishambles. Naturally I'll cover some of those shortly.

Firstly, it must be said that the book is somewhat bipolar. The first six chapters are, to be frank, no good. Lay presumes an enormous amount of background knowledge for a popular audience which I for one just do not have. He gives no overview of the Civil War whatsoever - a truly bizarre omission ! - and rambles on and on about an expedition to some Caribbean island for no (initially) apparent reason, then gets bogged down in microbiographies of insignificant characters bereft of context. Immensely complex forces and events are glossed over, characters are named ambiguously (Charles Stuart confusingly referring both to Charles I and II), and bizarre phrases ("the mystery that is the Isle of Man") are chucked in without any apparent reason. I was well on the verge of giving up.

Well, I'm glad I didn't. The first chapters are poor indeed, but chapter 7 really turns a corner. From thereon it's excellent. It's insightful, concise, and lucid, unafraid to draw interpretations of what happened and why, whilst giving ample detail as to the events themselves. The complexities of Cromwell's character emerge, set marvellously in context. Why in the world his editor didn't tell him to chuck out the awful chapters 1-6 and write them again I'll never know, but I give nothing but praise for the rest of the book. Overall, I'll give it a solid 7/10. This could easily have been an 8 or even a 9 if the first chapters had been better or the rest had been longer. So much for the sunk cost fallacy.

So, what does this mostly-wonderful book say ? Rather than try and summarise the history, I'll try and extract some interesting themes instead.

Cromwell wasn't a dictator

Lay's view of Cromwell is conflicted : socially liberal but politically authoritarian. In the previous book review, Parliament and the Army were seen to diverge as independent actors. Here, as Protector, Cromwell himself becomes independent from both, sometimes advancing the causes of his key backers but often acting purely in his own interests.

Lay maintains that Cromwell wasn't a dictator in the modern sense, in part simply because of technological constraints of the era : "The early modern state, with its lack of infrastructure and limited communications, was incapable of administering totalitarian government, whatever an individual's ambitions." This is not to say he didn't have some strong authoritarian tendencies - he absolutely did. But there simply did not exist the modern technological capacity for rapid, large-scale monitoring and response. Nor, as we shall see, was there anything like sufficient national unity to ensure Cromwell could get his own way through dialogue, or military power sufficient to force the issue.

In fact Britain in this period was briefly but only technically under military rule - the rule of the major generals. But their inefficacy only reinforces the limits of what was possible. In essence these were regional governors with the power to raise local militias. This was paid for by a tax on the royalists, thus using the state's enemies to fund their own oppression - a clever maneuver possible thanks to its relatively mild nature, imposed on a vanquished enemy who saw no real alternative to Cromwell. 

Ultimately the scheme was a complete failure. Royalists were incapable of providing enough cash to fund the scheme, and while a few governors were (predictably) zealous, others were far more lenient with their opponents. Cromwell himself appears especially gracious in this regard, frequently letting off opponents even from paying fines. And centralised government was simply ill-equipped to deal with many of the problems : governors tried to tackle vagrancy through transportation to colonies, but the government couldn't organise the necessary ships. In the end, most were simply released. This is part of a distinct pattern of largely lacklustre attempts at enforced Puritanical virtue, "generally more heavy-handed than brutal" (though with some important exceptions).

Furthermore the population at large were simply not devout enough for the more busybody "nanny-state" aspects of the plan to ever have much impact :

Examples of inequity are rare, though not because of the mercy of the Puritan commissioners. In truth, the procedures of investigation were often long-drawn-out and there was little support for them among local populations that, on the whole, remained quietly Anglican...There is little evidence that, on their watch, sexual offences were reduced, nor that rural sports were successfully proscribed.

Lay describes the situation overall as a "preference for a blanket of mild tyranny over the chaotic discomforts of anarchy". While Cromwell did broadly support the moral policing efforts of the major generals, albeit with some considerably leniency, socially he personally was much more liberal. His authoritarianism was very real, but in the main it was limited to his dealings with Parliament. It speaks volumes about the man that he saw no irony in trying to impose religious liberty on the British people, expending considerable effort to enshrine such freedoms in the Instrument of Government (an attempt at a written constitution) - if necessary backed by military force :

Parliament's commitment to liberty of conscience was never as sincere or expansive as Cromwell's... Parliament's persistent undermining of the Instrument of Government, which led to the dissolution of the First Protectorate Parliament in January 1655, had convinced Cromwell of a simple undeniable truth : that it was the army more than any Parliament he might call the bulwark of his regime.

And while he frequently called for "healing and settling", he was hardly adverse to stoking the fires of nationalism and conflict if he felt he needed to. He was not a nice man, but - in Britain at least* - he was not much of a despot.

* Lay does not cover his actions in Ireland, because this falls out of the Protectorate period. This is definitely a major weakness of the book, because such a context could change interpretations considerably.

The Protectorate wasn't a theocracy

In my day, schoolchildren were taught that the Civil War was all about Parliament versus the King, i.e. who has ultimate authority. The religious dimension of the conflict was almost absent, except, supposedly, that Cromwell was a staunch Puritan who cancelled Christmas because he was an absolute misery-guts. This is nowhere evident in Lay's account. Attempts at moral policing were implemented, but they were largely a half-hearted failure. 

Cromwell himself emerges as a complete hypocrite. While his lavish public offices of state can perhaps be excused as they were designed to impress visiting European dignitaries, even in private his atheistic tastes were solidly Catholic :

The tapestries at Hampton Court, a particularly expensive form of decoration, depicted the sinful, adulterous figure of Venus. Those in the aptly titled Paradise Room went even further in their dabbling with sinful narratives, celebrating the Triumphs of the Seven Deadly Sins. Cromwell's collection of paintings was no less decadent in its themes... Prominent courtiers also built up substantial art collections, perhaps feeling that Cromwell's own collection gave them the latitude to do so...The Puritan Mary Netheway was appalled by "those monstres".

As for music, while "lascivious anything was out (beyond the confines of Cromwell's private chambers), dancing, at least of the courtly, decorous kind, was a matter 'indifferent' ". At court, games of dice and and cards were "common pastimes". 

The moral vision of the Puritan revolution remained unfulfilled, unachievable in this word, though the polity remained stable and its institutions largely efficient.

Lay's description has the Puritans as a powerful minority, disproportionately represented in government, but with nowhere near enough of a wider base to really alter the social norms. It's not that they didn't try, or even that they wouldn't have welcomed a theocratic form of government : many of them were far more anti-Catholic than Cromwell ever was. It was simply that were unable to accomplish anything.

The quintessential feature of the rule of the major generals was not that it was army rule, nor that it was London rule, but rather that it was godly rule, and it was as such that it was decisively rejected by the great majority of the English and Welsh people.

As Cromwell could be argued to be a would-be dictator, so could Parliament and the army be seen to be would-be theocratic rulers. Neither were at all effective : "the rule of the major generals was never that; they never did rule... their impact [was] 'very slight indeed' - though there is an important caveat to this which I'll return later :

But that was not how it was perceived at the time, and perception in politics is the greater portion of the game.

Religion was however very important, and far more mixed with politics than today. Not only did the Civil War era see the rise of the Levellers and the Diggers, both movements striving for social equality, but it also saw the birth of new religious movements like the Quakers. Like Cromwell, they were a mass of contradictions. Fiercely individualistic, they embraced feelings above expertise, abstained from politics to the point of opposing democracy - yet preached equality for all. Their confusing, anti-Calvinist views did not sit well with the godly rulers, enticing them to harsher laws. While Britain's brief flirtation with republicanism didn't entail a fundamentalist government, that's not to say there weren't strong religious overtones about it, nor should the the general failure of Puritanism be mistaken for a total failure :

It may be that the Republic was harsher on sexual practises than any British government before or since. The 1650 Act laid down the death penalty for adultery by a married woman and her partner, though few were indicted. Death was also the price paid by those judged to have committed incest and prostitutes in the habit of reoffending. This brought English law into line with that of the Old Testament.

Just as Cromwell's lack of outright despotism didn't mean he didn't have a strong authoritarian streak, so should the lack of Puritan dominance not be mistaken for a complete lack of religious-based bigotry in politics.

While I'm trying to divide things into neat little categories for the sake of readability, it would be a mistake to draw too clear a line between Church and State. They were undeniably intertwined. As well as tax-collecting, we've seen that the militias also acted as moral police. But, says Lay, this was at least partly practical, as social gatherings were places where Royalist plots were hatched. Such plots did in fact occur, so this cannot be put down as an excuse or paranoia - yet the simultaneous attempt at enforcing Puritan values, however haphazard, inhomogeneous and ineffectual, should not be forgotten.

There's one section of Lay's text where I think he fails rather badly. He describes at length the prosecution of James Nayler, a prominent Quaker who walked into Bristol one rainy October morning accompanied by a small group of followers singing a nice song about God. For this he was lucky to escape with his life. Only with the greatest of efforts was the death penalty avoided, and his eventual punishment was scarcely less brutal : he was whipped 300 times. Lay does not at all convey what in the world Nayler had done that had people so enraged against him; an analogy to a modern-day equivalent would have been helpful here.

What was Parliament for ?

In Cromwell's attempts to protect religious liberty, however limited in success, we may perhaps glimpse the formation of liberalism proper. The Blasphemy Act of 1650 was progressive for its time : it limited first offenders to six months in prison at most, and no more than banishment for repeat offenders. The Instrument of Government, for which Cromwell pushed hard, contained a considerably more liberal article :

That such as profess faith in God by Jesus Christ (though differing in judgement from the doctrine, worship or discipline publicly held forth) shall not be restrained from, but shall be protected in, the profession of the faith and exercise of their religion.

Excluding Catholics, mind you. Well, it was 1650, you can't have everything.

Even so, such an extreme prospect caused outrage at Nayler's trial. "God deliver me from such liberty" ranted one MP. One of the major generals said that if the Instrument did indeed contain such religious protections he would "have it burnt in the fire".

Because the Civil War was initially a religious conflict, there was no overarching movement deciding what sort of government the people wanted*. This was not a revolution in the modern sense of overthrowing a dictator to return power to the people - because the very idea that the people should have power had barely taken root. Consequently the situation was much more complicated. Some didn't really want constitutional change, they just wanted a better ruler. Others were radically socialist, while still others held religion dear above all else. There was no one single cause that unified the nation.

* This also goes some way to explaining such harsh responses to proposed religious freedom. The war had been fought over religious matters, and to pretend the various religious orders could now become friends just wouldn't have made any sense. It would be a bit like if the Crusades had ended with everyone just deciding that actually, worshipping anything from Zeus to a giant duck god would be fine after all.

It's testament to Cromwell's skill and gravitas that he managed the chaotic situation as well as he did - even if "as well as he did" actually means "pretty badly". For "pretty badly" is not the "utter catastrophe" it easily could have been. Perhaps we can even excuse some of his more authoritarian tendencies - there being no democratic ideal to strive for and no clear idea as to what the roles of Parliament and Protector were supposed to be, no guiding principle for anyone to follow as to who should rule, let alone how.

If Boris Johnson would liken himself to Winston Churchill*, he has some definite resemblances to the nastier bits of Cromwell too. Given to long, rambling speeches, he repeatedly purged Parliament of his opponents, stoked fear and nationalism, and quite blatantly didn't understand how to work with a democratic Parliament - let along make that dysfunctional institution (for dysfunctional it certainly was) into something capable of running the country. It was Cromwell, and the respect in which he was held by the different groups, which managed that. Not respect for the office of Protector, but the man himself. Still, he was awful :

* Without realising the irony that Churchill was quite the racist and not widely regarded as being a democratic parliamentarian.

Cromwell's speech... was full of fear and warning, conjuring up once again images of 'Papists and Cavaliers' in league with the levelling sort. Much of the speech was devoted to 'security'... he claimed that those who opposed these men [the major generals] of 'known integrity and fidelity' were 'against the interest of England'.

'Being denied just things, we thought it our duty to get that by the sword which we could not otherwise do. And this hath been the spirit of Englishmen.'

It is, as so often with Cromwell, difficult to distinguish between the sincere and the manipulative, the hyperbolic and the realistic. One wonders whether the Protector found it any easier.

As with Johnson, it would be a mistake to present him as a full-throated despot. He did sometimes act purely in Parliament's interest, extending the duration which it sat when he was perfectly entitled to dissolve it by normal procedure. One of his odder moves was to in effect re-instate the House of Lords (though calling it simply the "Other Chamber"). The irony here was not that it was intended to curtail his own power, but that of the Commons - thus giving him, he hoped, more control of proceedings :

It was then that a new distraction had come upon the scene in the form of the Nayler trial, which, although it interrupted the advance of the succession debate, was to profoundly shape the Protector's attitude towards the creation of a second chamber, a successor to the House of Lords, to hold the Commons in check.

'By the proceedings of the Parliament, you see they stand in need of a check or balancing power, for the case of James Nayler might happen to be your case.' 

This, predictably, did not work :

The introduction of the Other House, so eagerly sought by Cromwell, had resulted in fewer regime loyalists in the Commons, which made managing the Hose that little bit harder. Problems were exacerbated when former allies of Cromwell... refused to take their seats in the new chamber, which looked a little too much like the old, and despised, House of Lords, and offered further fuel for the narrative of 'Betrayal'.

The need for a second chamber was real and continues to be so. But Cromwell had woefully misunderstood the nature and purpose of checks and balances. Adding more politicians, unless you really pack them with diehard, fawning loyalists, is liable to just add more disagreements - in the best case leading to more considered decisions, but in the worst case simply to an impasse. Without the second chamber Parliament also acted as a court (in the case of Nayler), and having politicians act as both judge and jury is pretty obviously one hell of a stupid idea.

Not that Cromwell never considered political theory and principle. It's just that he was very much a man of his time and the highly specific circumstances in which he found himself, with short-term considerations necessarily taking precedence over more grandiose ideas. He stipulated four principles of government which were to be strictly enforced : 1) Parliament could not sit permanently and must be elected frequently; 2) Government was to be comprised of Parliament and a "single person"; 3) Liberty on conscience was integral to government; 4) Control of the army was to be shared by Parliament and the Protector.

Here the concept of separation of powers is not more than the germ of an idea. It was a world wrestling with the idea of what the very purpose of government should be, and could not seem to escape the notion that Parliament was literally a process of parley with a ruler (formally this is still the case). That Parliament itself could be the entire system of government doesn't seem to have been on the agenda. It could be a check on the ruler's power at most, but not power itself - and perhaps in part rightly so at the time, since it was hardly a model of efficiency, let alone a bastion of representative democracy.

Strange alliances

No conflict is ever totally black and white. As in the Crusades did the Christians often side with the Muslims in support of specific goals, so during the Protectorate were there occasional alliances between Royalists and Levellers. On the face of it a group striving for social equality is by nature diametrically opposed to one insisting that certain bloodlines are divinely ordained to rule - the unifying factor was their opposition to Cromwell.

While these groups did occasionally join forces to become curious but genuinely dangerous bedfellows, Cromwell tended to exaggerate the threats. There was never any credible threat of foreign invasion during the Protectorate. For all its political failings, the basic institutes of State continued to function - political disturbance never translated into any significant unrest. In particular, Britain had a formidable and battle-tested military.

Referencing once again the unholy alliance of Royalists and Levellers, the declaration referred to a 'new and standing militia of horse'... The new tax was imposed on 'the whole of the royalist party, because the insurrection evidently involved the whole party by implications'. And yet this was despite the fact that many, perhaps most, Royalists passively accepted Cromwellian rule, if only because of the lack of any realistic hope of an alternative.

The truth is, Cromwell's rule was nowhere near as insecure as he imagined, or perhaps rather pretended it to be. A first-class intelligence network and strong army and navy made any threat from overseas implausible, while opposition within tended to be resentful and passive rather than optimistic and proactive.

Why exaggerate the threat ? Was Cromwell feeling genuinely paranoid and insecure ? Possibly. There are two reasons why this might be the case. First, Calvinist Protestantism lends itself very easily to monumental levels of insecurity :

Every event, major or minor, was to be interpreted within the overall plan of God's providence. An Essex minister sympathetic to the Protectorate recoreded his belief that the death of one of his children was due to his 'unreasonable playing at chess'... It was a surveillance society of the soul and it is no wonder it cultivated anxieties and paranoia.

The concept of a tireless interventionist and inescapable God might be compared to modern social meda.... Facebook, Twitter, Instagram are realms of round-the-clock surveillance, where one's thoughts and actions... are subjected to constant comparison and judgement. But one can opt out of social media, however addictive. There was no such option in the world God had created, nor in the next.

A heck of an analogy ! Second, and related, the failure of the 'Western Design' - a special military operation to annoy the Spanish in the Caribbean, which was poorly conceived and defined - would easily feed into this ever-watchful mindset. Even without the Calvinist philosophy, the failure of a major military project would give any ruler pause for thought. 

So it's at least possible that Cromwell really did misjudge the threats. But another explanation is that, just like in modern times, it behoves the ruling side to portray themselves as under attack. Charitably, this can be because of their own insecurities, aware their foundations are thinner than they'd like. Alternatively, but not mutually exclusively, having an external enemy to rally against is a great way to enforce group solidarity, preventing - or at least reducing - the prospect of the group fragmenting. My suspicion is that Cromwell, despite his religious hypocrisy*, was more than canny enough a political operator that this latter explanation is more likely. Perception is, after all, the name of the game in politics.

* "Puritanism and hypocrisy are natural partners", says Lay. And given this surveillance mindset, one can understand why : this level of repression is unnatural and self-destructive.

Trapped

I've likened Cromwell to Johnson, but this analogy should not be pressed very far. Cromwell, unlike Johnson, was brilliant. But the British republic was a fleeting, momentary thing. On this death, his son made a surprisingly good go of things considering he was "the worst prepared head of state in British history" (and incidentally, Richard Cromwell is the second-longest-lived head of state after Elizabeth II - it's just that unlike virtually every other ruler, he was able to abdicate and live a quiet life afterwards). Still, only a few short months afterwards, the experiment was over.

The impression from Lay is that everyone was trapped in the system. While individual Puritans made a determined - and occasionally brutal - attempt to enforce their ideology on the masses, they were nowhere near successful enough to overturn social conventions. Likewise the Protectorate system was too haphazard to ever work, too much dependent on the character of Cromwell and barely at all founded in philosophical or political principle. Once again, remembering the initially religious nature of the conflict makes this much easier to understand. Since few had actually set out to overturn the monarchy, there was little or no desire for a republic as the driving force in the country at large.

It does not seem too much of an oversimplification to state that the Protectorate was a monarchy by another name. The whole basis of government was the system of parlaying with the ruler. Without a movement to change the nature of the constitution, the easiest solution by far was simply to replace the king with someone else.

Or rather, the King, with a capital K. For monarchy had managed to cultivate an air of mystique that the title of Protector was unable to usurp. Everyone could see the Protector got to his position by merit - and there's nothing much divine about that (Calvinism notwithstanding). Whereas the King... he got there because God himself appointed him. Even in those who didn't buy into the Divine Right, kingship contained an almost mythological power that stretched back centuries. The title of Protector had no such associations.

More prosaically, the need for an individual head of state was deeply ingrained. More than that, the role of the king, and the limits of his divine power, were well-known, even if those limits were expansive. The Protector need not have such limits at all, a prospect many found distinctly uncomfortable :

Men... attended meetings in Whitehall in which the Protector would listen to their arguments as they sought to tie him down to the ancient office of monarch and restrict his personal rule to explicit English law, refined over centuries. Were the title placed on Cromwell's head, they urged, the people would 'know your duty to them, and they their duty to you... the people do love what they know.'

Cromwell was offered but refused the crown, apparently out of a sincere - on this occasion - religious belief, that God would have made it known if he should accept. He went further, endlessly procrastinating over the issue of succession until a hereditary solution was essentially forced on the system because nobody had any better ideas. But in every other respect he was King Oliver in all but title. The political circle of kingship simply could not be squared with the chaotic mass of conflicting revolutionary demands, and monarchy returned by default.

Conclusions

To me it feels like the Civil War was more the consequence than the cause of the massive social changes occurring in 17th-century Britain. Social norms were changing, but unevenly and incoherently. The country was pulling itself in different directions and nobody managed to lead a movement strong or persuasive enough to entirely subsume all the others. Reading Lay, all the major protagonists, Cromwell included, feel trapped by systemic forces they were unable to break.

Was a more democratic system even possible ? I'm not at all sure. Direct democracy would have been simply impossible, and certainly totalitarian despotism wouldn't have had any easy time of it. A representative democracy might, and I stress might, have been more feasible. But there was little or no underlying social movement to instigate it - it was simply never going to happen. And whatever Parliament's democratic elements that it did have were not nearly enough to render it a capable system of government. Too often still the notion persists that democracy of any kind is magically and literally inexplicably better than all of systems, something I think has been refuted over and over again. Democracy, it goes without saying, is essential in certain contexts, just as other methods of judgement are equally essential in other contexts.

Cromwell's Protectorate made the best of an extraordinarily complicated situation. The Instrument of Government wasn't the only attempt at a constitution, but it wasn't at all clear any sort of replacement would have helped. Years back an American associate told me that Britain should have a constitution to protect itself from dictators... well, we got rid of Johnson, however belatedly, without resort to anything except convention, whereas America had to endure Trump until he was finally beaten electorally (January 6th notwithstanding).

Don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying the British system is perfect - it isn't, it's shite. It's probably quite a bit better variety of shite than the American model (arguably, an irrational system of government is better able to handle man's irrational nature; the American model presumes too highly of people), but that's not saying much. My point is, the law is not the ultimate defence against tyranny. In the case of the Civil War, republicanism transmuted to de facto monarchy and then actual monarchy all too easily. As for Cromwell himself, arguably a would-be tyrant, the only thing that stopped him was his demise.