Subscribe now and receive weekly newsletters with educational materials, new courses, interesting posts, popular books, and much more!
Articles
English-Speaking Peoples (6): A Nuanced View of Oliver Cromwell
History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Volume 2, Book 6
For 12 successive Fridays starting September 30th, Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn and radio host Hugh Hewitt are discussing Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples in the Hillsdale Dialogues segment of the Hugh Hewitt Show.
Following each discussion, the Churchill Project will offer companion pieces highlighting important episodes and themes in the book covered. Readers will note that our writers focus on aspects of the books which our discussants may not. Such is the depth of Churchill’s History. Every reader may take what they prize most from this vast mine of political wisdom and understanding.
Page references (parentheses) are to Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, vol. 2, The New World (New York: Dodd Mead, 1956).
Cromwell: A necessary tyranny?
The English Civil War sought to reconcile the conflict between the despotic, personal rule of King Charles I and Parliament. Alas the war’s aftermath produced a similarly dictatorial government. Oliver Cromwell, and the few members of the House of Commons who remained in 1649, “resolved that ‘the people are, under God, the original of all just power…that the Commons of England in Parliament assembled, being chosen by and representing the people, have the supreme power in this nation’” (285). Representative sovereignty of the people constituted the highest aspiration of Cromwell’s government and the new English Republic. But it remained only that—an aspiration.
Cromwell, the “Lord Protector,” became what Churchill describes as “a representative of dictatorship and military rule” (316). In Book 6 of The New World, Churchill assesses the entire personage of Cromwell: his vices, virtues, and errors. He arrives at a sobering and typical Churchill conclusion. He recognizes the tyranny and despotism of Cromwell as a stain on the history of English government. However, he also notes its necessity.
Churchill unravels the apparent juxtaposition of this claim, showing that Cromwell created a corrupt and despotic political machine to reunite England after civil war and disunion. Yet, in this very system, Cromwell rejected the core principles which he sought to instantiate throughout English politics: he turned his back on free, republican government.
Cromwell and modern autocrats
Churchill convincingly argues that without Cromwell, there may not have been a force powerful enough to quell military and civil disquietude after the war. In this, Cromwell represents one of the necessary evils in the history of the English-speaking Peoples. His rapid devolution from political savior to oppressor provided the necessary grounds for England to heal and grow. Still, Churchill condemns Cromwell’s “lasting bane” on the history of the English race (292).
Across Churchill’s tale falls the shadow of events three centuries hence. There is a footnote in Book 6 that shows Churchill wrote his Cromwell history in 1938-39—the heyday of 20th century dictators. Even in this context, Churchill places Cromwell among the radical characters of Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco. The weight of this association unearths certain political lessons Churchill learned from Cromwell. To understand the gravity of Cromwell’s rule, the accompanying social and military unrest requires examination.
The Levellers
The Leveller movement posed a great threat to the war-torn English government. The Levellers emerged from among the radical supporters of Parliament. Their populist aim was what Churchill called “sovereignty of the people” (286). They demanded manhood suffrage, annual Parliaments and “equal rights in property as well as in citizenship” (286). Essentially, the Levellers demanded that true political power be delegated primarily to the House of Commons.
Cromwell thought it imperative to eliminate this political faction before it amassed popular support. Considering that the Levellers constituted a military-political interest, he devised a scheme to accomplish this and another of his political objectives. Cromwell planned to mobilize the Levellers in “a war of retribution in the name of the Lord Jehovah against the idolatrous and bloodstained Papists of Ireland” (286). He drew lots to decide which troops to mobilize. Churchill notes that he cast them “again and again until only the regiments in which the Levellers were strongest were cast” (286). Word quickly spread of Cromwell’s deceptiveness, and “mutinies broke out” (286).
The Diggers
Although veteran soldiers disliked Cromwell’s chicanery, the Levellers’ radicalism was not exclusively military. There also existed a civilian faction, known as the Diggers. They saw themselves as a reform of the Levellers, the true champions of popular sovereignty. Their distinctive feature manifested a new model of societal organization: they were in essence communists.
Churchill explains how the Diggers assembled upon the common lands in Surrey “to cultivate them on a communal basis” (287). For Cromwell, this alternative political and economic structure represented “dangerous and subversive nonsense” (287). Churchill recounts that Cromwell “cared almost as much for private property as for religious liberty.” Accordingly, he was “shocked” at the Diggers’ communitarian political ambitions (287).
Cromwell employed his regime’s swift hand to squash the Digger threat. Through the Council of State, he “chased the would-be cultivators off the common land, and hunted the mutinous officers and soldiers to death without mercy” (287). He ordered the execution of Trooper William Thompson—himself a Leveller—“in an Oxfordshire churchyard” (287). There was great symbolism in a political murder unfolding at a church. As Cromwell’s despotic cruelty increased, so too did his religious zeal.
Next, Cromwell “discharged from the Army, without their arrears of pay, all men who would not volunteer for the Irish war” (287). Churchill depicts the “priestly aspect” that led Cromwell to “preach a holy war upon the Irish” (287). When the Council nominated him Commander of the Army, he secured his right to prosecute the war. With this appeasement, by what remained of the Council of State, Cromwell’s martial and political power expanded.
Echoes of Churchill’s own time
The theme of appeasement came to define Winston Churchill’s “wilderness years,” when he was out of power. When Adolf Hitler rose in Germany, expressing clear intentions for Germanic expansion, Churchill saw part of Cromwell in the Nazi Chancellor. He noticed the ambition of Hitler and his National Socialist Labor Party, as expressed in Otto von Bismarck’s account of a meeting with Churchill in 1930:
Hitler had admittedly declared that he had no intention of waging a war of aggression; he, Churchill, however, was convinced that Hitler or his followers would seize the first available opportunity to resort to armed force.[1]
Operating on this framework, Churchill advocated for a harder line toward Nazi Germany. Addressing the Commons on 5 October 1938, he denounced Chamberlain’s Munich Pact as a “total and unmitigated defeat.”[2] He understood handing over the Sudetenland as an irrevocable faux pas, making Britain responsible in part for Hitler’s regional hegemony.
Therefore, when Churchill equates Cromwell’s rise to power and cruelty of governance with similar examples in his own time, he highlights the importance of deterrence. The Council of State did not exercise adequate authority to halt Cromwell’s accruing power. Churchill compares Hitler’s “technique of frightfulness” with “Cromwelllian brutality upon a far larger scale” (290).
Irish depredations
Churchill effectively compares the historical example of Cromwell to his own epoch. But the political forces of 1649 followed a different route—that of Cromwell’s Council of State. With his newly-won authority, Cromwell engaged in a “cold-blooded” campaign in Ireland (288).
Armed with what Churchill describes as “those Old Testament sentiments which dominated the minds of the Puritans,” Cromwell descended upon the Irish towns of Drogheda and Wexford with 10,000 soldiers (288). Drogheda ended with “a massacre so all-effacing as to startle even the opinions of those times” (288-89). Churchill vividly depicts how “all were put to the sword. None escaped; every priest and friar was butchered” (289). To Churchill, this embodied the very definition of cruelty. But Cromwell gloried in the righteousness of his cause. He believed that
…it hath pleased God to bless our endeavours at [Drogheda]. After battery, we stormed it. The Enemy were about 3000 strong in the Town. They made a stout resistance; and near 1000 of our men being entered, the Enemy forced them out again. But God giving a new courage to our men, they attempted again, and entered: beating the Enemy from their defences….
[W]e put to the sword the whole number of the defendants. I do not think Thirty of the whole number escaped with their lives…. I do not believe, neither do I hear, that any officer escaped with his life, save only one…. The Enemy upon this were filled with much terror. And truly I believe this bitterness will save much effusion of blood, through the goodness of God (289).
The root of Anglo-Irish enmity
Cromwell evinces zealous justification in disregarding principled warfare. Churchill understood this, and Cromwell’s actions, as an affront to humanity. Not even “the hard pleas of necessity or the safety of the State can be invoked,” he writes (291). “Cromwell in Ireland, disposing of overwhelming strength and using it with merciless wickedness, debased the standards of human conduct and sensibly darkened the journey of mankind” (291). Here Churchill focuses on the evil of Cromwell:
He shielded himself behind “the heat of action” when his troops had not suffered a hundred casualties…. Above all, the conscience of man must recoil from the monster of a faction-god projected from the mind of an ambitious, interested politician on whose lips the words “righteousness” and “mercy” were mockery (291).
Cromwell in Ireland degraded humanity and exacerbated the religious divide between Irish Catholics and English Protestants. The “curse of Cromwell” upon the religious relations in Britain,” Churchill concludes, lies “upon all of [England] still” (292). It “distressed and at times distracted English politics down even to the present day…a potent obstacle to the harmony of the English-speaking peoples throughout the world” (292).
Charles II and Scotland
Nonetheless, Churchill maintains that Cromwell’s reign was necessary to the security of Britain. With Cromwell laying waste to Ireland, the future Charles II was attempting to reestablish his rule. In a Covenant with the Scots, he accepted the Presbyterian faith in exchange for sovereignty over Scotland. Together they planned to march to England and reinstate the monarchy.
Cromwell quickly became aware of Charles’s Scottish plot and set out at once to meet his challengers. The two factions collided at Dunbar on 3 September 1650—exactly one year after the Drogheda massacre. Both sides “confidently appealed to Jehovah” (296). In this conflicting claim to divine authority, Cromwell’s forces won the day.
The Scots regrouped and attempted to invade England in 1651. Despite the support of the English Royalists, they again failed to defeat Cromwell and his Ironsides. Charles was exiled and the political situation in England deteriorated. On 20 April 1653, Cromwell forcibly dismissed the “Rump Parliament.” He was now in reality the dictator of Britain.
The Monarchy returns
Yet Cromwell, Churchill continues, still sought the external veneer of republican government. He chose a hand-picked assembly, known as the “Barebone’s Parliament.” Through this weak and complacent assembly he worked to pass serious reform. He now had a choice: either suborn his political ambition to his selected Parliament or opt for military leadership. In December 1653, Cromwell accepted the military’s “Instrument of Government.” He cemented the only written constitution in English history, turning his back on “the original of all just power”: the people (285). This solidified Cromwell as the military autocrat Churchill considers him.
This centralization of power, Churchill notes, nevertheless held the seeds of hope. After all, Cromwell’s quasi-monarchy reinvigorated England’s desire for their legitimate king. Upon Cromwell’s death, his son Richard assumed his role as Lord Protector. However, the dictatorial spirit followed no law of primogeniture: Richard was weak and inept, enabling the rise of the soldier-politician George Monck (spelled “Monk” in the text). By skilled maneuvering, Monck reestablished a freely elected Parliament and in 1660 aided in the reinstatement of King Charles II.
Charles II and Cromwell’s legacy
Charles II disbanded the standing army—finally vanquishing the Ironside threat—and reinstituted the rule of Common Law. Churchill relishes in the return of “the law for which Magna Carta was felt to stand—traditional law, the kind of law which made Englishmen free…had been [once again] declared in the courts of Common Law” (329). On the basis of this law, Charles vowed to leave all “thorny problems” to be settled by future Parliaments (326).
In this resolution, Churchill reconciles the duality of Oliver Cromwell. Although he certainly devolved from a promise of freedom to the politics of tyranny, his was a “reluctant and apologetic” dictatorship (316). Churchill defends Cromwell on these very grounds:
Yet if we look beneath the surface to the rock he is revealed as its defence not only against the ambitions of generals, but from the wild and unimaginable forms of oppression in which the Ironside veterans might have used their power. With all his faults and failures he was indeed the Lord Protector of the enduring rights of the Old England he loved against the terrible weapon which he and Parliament had forged to assert them. Without Cromwell there might have been no advance, without him no collapse, without him no recovery. Amid the ruins of every institution, social and political, which had hitherto guided the Island life he towered up, gigantic, glowing, indispensable, the sole agency by which time could be gained for healing and regrowth. (316).
* * * * *
Nevertheless, Churchill does not mince words when dealing with Cromwell’s faults:
If in a tremendous crisis Cromwell’s sword had saved the cause of Parliament, he must stand before history as a representative of dictatorship and military rule who, with all his qualities as a soldier and a statesman, is in lasting discord with the genius of the English race (316).
From Cromwell’s example, Churchill learned the inefficacy of appeasement when dealing with despotism. Cromwell also reified the beauty and fragility of free government: should one adopt a wrong policy or allow civil war and division to rule the day, a Cromwellian demagogue may be the necessary—and simultaneously evil—solution.
In the face of 20th century autocracy, Churchill strove to uphold the power of free government, acting as Lord Protector in his own sphere. But Churchill struck the balance between executive power and principled governance. Nonetheless, the necessary tyranny of Cromwell presents a stunning and sobering reminder of the danger of despotism and the perennial virtue of Churchill—a man who defied authoritarian rule and advocated for freedom.
Endnotes
[1] Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: The Prophet of Truth, 1922-39 (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2009), 407.
[2] Winston S. Churchill, “A Total and Unmitigated Defeat,” in Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897-1963, 8 vols. (New York: Bowker, 1974), VI: 6004.
The author
Mr. Foley is a Winston Churchill Fellow at Hillsdale College and a member of the Class of 2024. He is pursuing a B.A. in Politics and French, and is Vice President of the Pi Delta Phi French honor society. He was recently a Fellow of the Hudson Institute Political Studies Summer Program in Washington, D.C.