Historical Summary

STERN, dogmatic, honest Oliver Cromwell, leader of the revolutionary forces which overthrew the monarchy, was a reluctant but efficient despot, a first-rate disciplinarian, with a breadth of view and keenness of vision denied to Charles I. Ironically, he who had crushed the Stuart king was forced to do the very things for which the king was put to death. While his ideals were lofty, his execution of them was realistic. "I would have been glad to have lived under any woodside, to have kept a flock of sheep, rather than undertaken such a government as this," he once confessed. Convinced that his whole course was directed by God and that his deeds were crowning mercies of the Most High, Cromwell substituted "divine might" for the "divine right" of the Stuarts.

By the spring of 1653 the Long Parliament had been reduced to a "Rump" of about one hundred members. Cromwell charged them with accepting bribes, with nepotism, and with self-interest, drunkenness, and impiety. When the Rump began to discuss a bill providing that vacancies in Parliament should be filled only with the consent of the existing members, Cromwell lost patience. He entered the House with a company of troopers, berated the members, including some of his closest supporters in the past, and drove them out by force.

It was an extraordinary scene. The man who had fought for law and order, who deeply believed in government by the people, was forced to close the door to legality and fall back on military dictatorship. The move was not popular. Nor was England during the Commonwealth (1649–1660) a happy land. Cromwell, who gave England her first written constitution, sought to introduce the moral standards of Calvinist Geneva. Theaters were closed as "dens of iniquity," freedom of speech, press, and assembly prohibited, and creative writing accordingly declined from the high Elizabethan level to mediocrity. It was said that none hut the dogs cried when Cromwell died. The nation, as Cromwell himself admitted, longed for the fleshpots of Egypt. With the restoration of the Stuarts, there set in a reaction against Cromwell’s somber and stern Puritanism. In its place came an era of lighthearted licentiousness and corruption, forever amber in hue.

The historic scene in which the champion of constitutional liberties resorted to the measures of dictatorship was witnessed by a spectator named Second Earl of Leicester Robert Sydney, whose son, Algernon Sydney, was one of the most distinguished members of the Rump Parliament. His account from the Sydney Papers is given below. Cromwell felt impelled to justify his course, as he had sought to excuse himself after the slaughter in Ireland a few years earlier when 2,000 royalists were put to the sword at Drogheda. On that occasion he had stated: "I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches, who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood; and that it will prevent the effusion of blood for the future." On the occasion of the dissolution of Parliament an eyewitness reported Cromwell to have declared:

"It’s you that have forced me to do this, for I have sought the Lord night and day that he would rather slay me than put upon me the doing of this work."

Key Quote

A spectator, Robert Sydney, the second Earl of Leicester, sees a revolutionary leader break up Parliament and inaugurate a military dictatorship: "Take away these baubles!"