The making of Oliver Cromwell – His early years
[00.00]
The Greek philosopher, Aristotle, said: “Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man”. So how far is this true of the life of Oliver Cromwell? A man who rose from being an obscure yeoman farmer in East Anglia to become one of the most revered, and by some most reviled, figures in British and Irish history.
Finding the answer to this question is difficult as Cromwell’s early years are shrouded in mystery and obscured by myths created by those hagiographers and biographers who wanted to portray him as either a great man or an unprincipled tyrant and dictator.
To sort the fact from the fiction and to build up a clearer picture of the making of the man, we invited a distinguished biographer of Cromwell, John Morrill, Emeritus Professor at Selwyn College, Cambridge, to discuss these early years with our contributing editor, Professor Andrew Hopper of the University of Oxford.
[01.11]
Andy Hopper: Well, it’s a great pleasure to welcome you on to the World Turned Upside Down podcast, John, and I’m very much looking forward to talking about the early years and the making of Oliver Cromwell. What do we know about the family that Oliver was born into in Huntingdon on 25 April 1599?
John Morrill: Thank you, Andy. It’s never a hardship for me to talk about Oliver Cromwell!
Well, his family had had a great rise in the 16th century when an ancestor, a Welsh ancestor, had married into the family of Thomas Cromwell, and had acquired a great wealth as a result of the dissolution of the monasteries. So, the main branch of the family were occupying former monastic sites, had two large houses, one on a big abbey, one on a nunnery. So, Oliver is in that sort of position, but his father was a younger son and only inherited some urban property and some church tithes, possibly about £100-£200 a year, so right on the fringes of gentry. His title, the gentleman, rested more on the fact that he was the son of a knight than on his own wealth, so Oliver is the eldest son of the younger son of a knight, and that makes his status slightly ambiguous, and as he went through his life, it remains both ambiguous and I think important in defining him.
[02.31]
Andy Hopper: Right. So, what are the key primary sources then for looking at Oliver’s early life?
John Morrill: There’s quite a lot, actually, but they’re pretty scratchy. Down to the time when he really becomes prominent in the Long Parliament in 1640, we only have six of his letters, for example, and we have a rather fragmentary account of a speech he made in the Parliament of 1628.
There are a lot of kind of public documents, parish records, urban records, from the town of Huntingdon in which he lived. There’s lots of references to it in other public records, including those of London companies. There are Chancery cases, there are quite a lot of indentures and other legal documents, so we can piece together the shape of his life. What is least accessible is the inner man, down really to the late 1630s when we get two extremely important and revelatory letters.
[03.30]
Andy Hopper: So, do you think there was anything unusual or striking about his own ideas about his ancestry?
John Morrill: Oh, he certainly takes a very close personal interest in the rise of the family in the 16th century, and indeed, his antecedents. The Morgan Williams who married Thomas Cromwell’s sister, is a Welshman, and Cromwell is a very proud Welshman, though he hadn’t been anywhere near Wales until 1648. He does on some legal documents call himself Oliver Williams, alias Cromwell, because the family had changed its name to Cromwell in deference to their great patron, Thomas Cromwell, and some other members of his family do revert to the name of Williams. One of his cousins in the 1650s reverts to the name of Williams, and his uncle, the rich uncle, in the big house just outside Huntingdon has a genealogy drawn up when Cromwell is a boy which has the ancestry back through the time of Thomas Cromwell, right back to the Williamses as being part of the Welsh princely classes.
All this demonstrates that Cromwell is trying to shore up his rather insecure social identity by believing the truths – or not – of his having princely, perhaps Royal blood.
[04.55]
Andy Hopper: Oh, thank you! So, where was the young Oliver educated? Were the arrangements for his education conventional for provincial English gentry at this time?
John Morrill: Pretty much. There is the ruins of an old hospital, that’s a care home if you like, on the High Street in Huntingdon, about 100 yards from the house in which he was born, and he goes to school there from something like the age of six or seven until he’s a teenager, with a rather famous schoolmaster who was actually one of the translators of the Bible for the so-called authorised version or King James’ version, so he’s busy doing that while he’s teaching Oliver. He’s also quite a prolific author, and he may have had quite an influence on Cromwell’s religious formation, obviously particularly on his study of the Bible.
[05.44]
He then, slightly older than the average for his class, goes to university at the age of 16, not 14, and he goes interestingly to Sidney Sussex College, which is a newly founded College. All the members in the senior branch of his family, and indeed his own father, had gone to Queens’ College, a well-established 14th century college, but he goes to Sidney Sussex. Now, the reason for that is not entirely clear. My own feeling is that they wanted him to go with the status of a fellow commoner, that’s to say, someone who could eat with the fellows, and it was a good deal cheaper to be a fellow commoner at the brand new college than it was at the well-established colleges.
[06.32]
So he goes there, but he has to leave after a short time, only a year, because of his father’s premature death, but he does spend a year there and he makes friends there who he continues to be in touch with over the following decades, including some who were political opponents in the Civil War, with whom he still had very civil relationships. And that’s quite important. Friendship for Cromwell, like kinship, transcends political divides. If you’re a friend or a kin of Cromwell, then you can be supported by him, even helped by him, during the Civil War, and that’s the case of some of his contemporaries.
[07.12]
Both at Sidney, and interestingly at Queens’, where he clearly made friends, including the very important figure of Oliver St John, a really significant figure in the Civil War, and a close ally. And they certainly met and became quite close, while they were together in Cambridge.
[07.30]
Andy Hopper: So, the death of Oliver’s father, Robert, you just mentioned, John, that brought about the end of his time at Cambridge. How else do you think it might have affected him?
John Morrill: Well, it gives him a large amount of responsibility very early on. One of the things we might mention here is that it is central to my sense of Cromwell throughout his life that he is surrounded by women. I mean, he has aunts rather than uncles. He has sisters and no brothers. He has four sisters but no brothers, who survive into adulthood, and then he has nine children, but the boys either die young or at any rate, leave home at the age of seven, so he’s surrounded by his daughters, five daughters. He lives with his mother until he’s into his 50s, or he lives with his mother when he’s not on campaign, so his household consists for his formative years, in the 1620s and 1630s, of his wife, his mother and increasingly, as the boys move away, his daughters. My view is that, if we want to understand Cromwell, we need to realise that he opens up much more freely in his letters throughout his life to women than he does to men, and his relations with his daughters are far better than his relations with his sons.
[08.50]
Andy Hopper: That’s fascinating! It also brings us into the question of who he married in 1620 and where the marriage took place?
John Morrill: Well, the marriage took place in central London in one of the big churches there. Cromwell’s relationship with London is one of the really obscure areas. He clearly has links with the Mercers’ Company in the 1620s/1630s, and he certainly took part in a big debate in Huntingdon about how to spend a bequest by a former Huntingdon man who had become a Mercer and left a significant amount of money for charity in Huntingdon. And at some point, Cromwell becomes very involved with them. So it maybe the commercial links may come from other family connections that we haven’t been able to really establish.
[09.37]
I think it’s more likely that the marriage was arranged by his aunt, that’s to say his father’s sister, Joan, who had married Sir Francis Barrington, perhaps the most prominent of all the Puritan gentry of Essex, and she certainly takes part in arranging a lot of marriages in her extended family, and I think this is quite likely one of them.
The person he marries, Elizabeth Boucher, or Bourchier – Boucher, I think, is the pronunciation – Elizabeth Bourchier, her father was a prominent London businessman. He had made a fortune by trading fur and other things with Russia, particularly fur, and he had retired to Essex on quite a large estate, which links in, again, to the Barringtons and to the Earl of Warwick, the greatest Puritan peer of Essex. So, there’s a nexus there, there’s a web of connection into the Essex Puritan elite that is elusive but very tangible.
[10.38]
Andy Hopper: Do you think there’s any evidence of it having been a loving and companionate marriage, despite it having been probably been arranged?
John Morrill: It is fragmentary knowledge, but it is all blowing in the same direction that it was, indeed, a deeply companionate marriage. The letters we have between them come from much later, but they are very deeply affectionate and easy. And you can see also from the very affectionate way in which his easy relationship with his children, particularly his daughters – it’s interesting the daughters all have pet names, for example, which he shares and when he does write to his wife, he’s also making very affectionate references using pet names to his daughters.
[11.19]
Andy Hopper: So how much then do we know about his life in Huntingdon during the 1620s, and perhaps why he was selected as MP for the town in the 1628 Parliament?
John Morrill: Well, this is where we are being very speculative really. Huntingdon is a small, now insignificant, borough. I mean, it’s a county town and it’s on the Great North Road. That gives it some prominence, and certainly a lot of the great and the good move up and down the Great North Road, and because Huntingdon is, unsurprisingly, a very good place for hunting, the King, James I, comes quite regularly and stays with the uncle. So it’s quite likely that Oliver, you know, will have been introduced to King James, because some nephews who at that stage were close to the main branch of the family are likely to be invited in.
[12.09]
In fact, although there are a lot of rather apocryphal stories about his childhood, particularly coming from hostile biographies written not long after his death, particularly one by James Heath with the intimidating title of The Flagellum, or the flogging, although there are a lot of other odd stories, one that I really would like to believe is that when the little Prince Charles, who was born a few months after Oliver, came down from Scotland to join his father in 1604, he stopped off in the uncle’s house at Hinchingbrooke, just outside Huntingdon, that little Oliver, who was one year older, came to visit, and he played with Prince Charles, and they fought over a toy, and Oliver punched Charles on the nose! That’s the last time they actually were in the same room together until 1647. Now that’s a story I’d really like to believe!
[13.05]
Andy Hopper: Yes!
John Morrill: In the 1620s, to go back to our main theme, Huntingdon is a minor town, but it has a democratic or reasonably democratic constitution, with annual election of the Common Council, and Oliver is regularly elected as a common councilman of Huntingdon until he falls out with the authorities at the end of the 1620s.
Now, the main branch of the family, perhaps because they entertained the King too lavishly too often, were actually financially becoming into great difficulties. In the late 1620s, they sell the Huntingdon house, just outside Huntingdon, Hinchingbrooke, they sell it to another great rising family, the Montagues, and they themselves retreat to their other big house which is in the fenland, about 15 miles to the north.
[13.56]
So, the, the patronage of the main branch of the family disappears. Now, soon after this, an election is held for Huntingdon and Oliver is returned, and my guess is that it’s a kind of goodwill gesture by the Montagues to the family they’ve just bought the estate from, to actually give one of the seats because it’s in their patronage effectively, to get one of the Cromwell family to sit in Parliament as a kind of ‘thank you for letting us take over your estate’. That’s my best guess, but fairly soon relations between Oliver’s family and the Montagues break down significantly and he goes through the first great crisis of his life, with possibly a nervous breakdown, certainly with a very serious collapse of his public standing in 1629.
[14.51]
Andy Hopper: Do you have any details or hunches about what might have been troubling him during this crisis moment around that time?
John Morrill: I think there’s a concatenation of things. He may be surrounded by sisters and daughters, but the sisters in particular needed husbands, and that’s expensive, you have to pay a dowry. And it may well be that the amount of debt which is building up from providing appropriate, socially appropriate, husbands for his sisters is actually causing him financial difficulties.
One of the first things that the Montagues do, because they’d be courtiers, when they come in, they say ‘look, this is hopeless. Having annual elections of Common Councils is a hopelessly inefficient way of running a town. What we want is a stable oligarchy, so we’ll get a new town charter and we will nominate the people who will run the town.
[15.51]
When that new charter comes in and the new permanent councillors are appointed, Oliver is not one of them. So, he’s experiencing a very significant slight from the Montagues, and so he then publicly criticises the mayor and the recorder, who is a really key member of the Montague entourage, a man called Robert Barnard. He publicly criticises them for, effectively, corruptly acquiring the New Charter, and this is a sign of his overwroughtness, and he is hauled before the Privy Council in London for libelling the Montague connection and has to make a grovelling apology, was ordered to make a grovelling apology on market day in Huntingdon market square, which of course is a terrific blow to his honour and to his self-esteem.
[16.44]
So, around this time, he is being treated in London by the King’s physician in fact, for what is, for what in his medical notebooks he just writes, nothing more than this, ‘valde melancholicus’, which I think can be easily translated as clinical depression. So I think he’s going through a full scale crisis of identity. I mean, he’s losing his honour, he’s losing his status, he’s becoming financially troubled, and we think it’s quite likely, not all historians agree with this, but probably a majority do, that this is the moment in which he has the most important experience of his life, which is this religious experience, that he has been called by God to be amongst the elect, to be the elect of God, if not, if not, as it were, one of the great ones of the nation. So his conversion, his Puritan conversion, can, in my view, fairly firmly be dated to 1629.
[17.42]
Andy Hopper: Right, and then soon after he moves to St Ives, perhaps signalling a fall in his social status. What do we know about his, his life there?
John Morrill: Well, why does he move to St Ives? Partly to escape from the humiliations in Huntingdon, and partly because he decides to sell up all the properties he’s inherited from his father to take that in order to deal with all the debts, and to move away. He’s also been involved in a major row within Huntingdon, over this charitable bequest, how to spend it, and he was determined that it should be spent to alleviate the poverty of the town, but also to ensure a proper public lecture, that’s to say, a religious exercise every week that shouldn’t be given by the man who wants to give it, and in fact in the end does give it, who’s his old schoolmaster who, by now, he thinks may be a very learned man but is not a very godly man. He’s a pluralist, he has various livings, and Cromwell wants to bring in a new minister to give a fresh, a fresh and more Puritan, I suppose, form of preaching.
[18.53]
So he moves away from Huntingdon, and the choice of St Ives is, I think, important. He becomes effectively a yeoman farmer, and he was a working farmer, that is to say, not someone who lives off rents, but by the sweat of his brow. It’s a comfortable estate to be running, through the fenland isn’t the most productive of land, but he’s making a reasonable living there, but the conditions there cause him to have quite serious medical conditions. There was a chance account of him in the mid-1630s of suffering from severe bronchitis, of wearing a red flannel around his neck, to deal with the hacking cough from the fenland fogs, and he also develops what is characteristic of England at this time, rather surprisingly, which is a form of malaria, which is particular to the swampy areas. And he picks up malaria, which is then to come back at times of stress, throughout the rest of his life. We find throughout the rest of his life, there are periods when he’s fighting, for example, that the war for him has to grind to a halt for a bit while he deals with the very high fevers associated with this returning malaria.
[20.06]
So, it’s a difficult time for him, but he has restabilised the family’s finances, and the person who is his landlord, a really important figure, he’s to remain an important figure for the rest of his life, Henry Lawrence. Henry Lawrence shares his very strong Puritan convictions by now, so much so that, because of all the pressures on the Puritans in the 1630s, Henry Lawrence, as well as being a significant landowner in the area to the north of the Huntingdon/Cambridge road, Henry Lawrence is also one of the trustees for the new company that’s going to settle Connecticut in America, just south of Massachusetts. And he is planning to emigrate there, his plans are well advanced.
[20.54]
Now, it seems to me quite likely that Oliver went to St Ives, partly to farm in St Ives, but partly to join the enterprise that would have taken Lawrence and Oliver to New England. The best evidence for this is from a memoir of part of the clan of Puritan ministers in New England called the Mathers, Cotton Mather wrote a thing called Magnalia Christi in the late Restoration, in which he is categorical that Cromwell was to be on the boat with Lawrence going to New England. And in fact, they were on the boat ready to go when it was stopped by an order from the Privy Council.
[21.34]
Now a lot of historians have rather doubted this because the dating in the three sources that talk about this, the dating is given as 1638, that is to say at the time of the Ship Money judgments when everybody thought the King’s tyrannical regime was getting out of control. But if we redate it for 1634 which is when we know for a fact that Lawrence was planning to go, it makes perfect sense for Cromwell too. Now, they were stopped going in 1634, and then events in England prevented Cromwell going because he gets caught up in an inheritance dispute relating to his mother’s family. And at the same time, Lawrence decides that because of rows that are breaking out within the Puritans in New England, he’d be better off in the Netherlands than in America, so he goes off to the Netherlands and is further radicalised. He becomes a Baptist, whereas Cromwell wins the inheritance dispute back in England and now has a new set of opportunities which take him to Ely, to which we will presumably move on.
[22.41]
This is a long answer, but I think that the evidence that Cromwell, for a period, thought he might resettle in America, is actually, is actually pretty strong. We have to use subjunctives, we have to say ‘might’ and ‘could’, but I think the ‘might’ and ‘could’ are quite strong.
[23.00]
Andy Hopper: Right, okay. So he then moved on to Ely because of the death of his maternal uncle, Sir Thomas Steward, and that led to an improvement in his status there.
John Morrill: Yes. Well, he’s certainly seen an improvement in status in terms of his steady income, because the income now is acting as a secure administrator. The family have acquired the right to administer the tithes of a number of significant churches which are where the tithes are owned by the cathedral, so they pay the cathedral upfront, and then they collect the tithes and make a healthy surplus on them.
[23.35]
He has a very prominent house, which you can still see, a hundred yards from the great entrance to the west door of Ely cathedral, and he very quickly becomes established within Ely civic society, but one of the things we haven’t mentioned is that when he was St Ives, he was a prominent member of a radical underground church that met alongside the parish church, in which Cromwell undoubtedly was a lay preacher, was breaking scripture with his friends and colleagues.
[24.11]
Now, we don’t know precisely how knowledge of that affected his relationship with the authorities in Ely, because it’s a very hardline Laudian bishop in Ely, Matthew Wren. And it’s interesting to know whether Cromwell just kept quiet about that, whether he continued to go back quite a way to St Ives in order to be part of that underground church, or whether he replicated it in Ely. For reasons we’ll come to, it’s clear that his radicalism doesn’t go away in the late 1630s, but it’s difficult to believe the Bishop had no knowledge of what he was like.
[24.52]
In the documents of the Cathedral archive, there’s an intriguing statement where the Bishop has said ‘tell Mr Cromwell I am ready for him’! Now, is that a kind of straightforward ‘tell Mr Cromwell I’m ready for him’, or is he in fact saying ‘tell Mr Cromwell I know what’s going on, and I’m ready for him’! It would be lovely to know the tone of voice in which that was written but it’s an impenetrable matter.
[25.14]
Andy Hopper: Tantalising, you could say!
John Morrill: Tantalising is a better word, absolutely! Tantalising is exactly, exactly right!
[25.20]
Andy Hopper: So how was it then that Cromwell came to be chosen as an MP for the city of Cambridge in 1640?
John Morrill: Well, my friend, Andrew Barclay, has really sorted this out.
I said earlier on that there’s a very hostile account of Cromwell’s early life, his whole life, by James Heath called Flagellum, and in that, there is a lengthy account of the background to Cromwell’s election for the city of Cambridge in 1640. Since Flagellum is such an unreliable source, people have just dismissed it, but there are in fact three separate editions of Flagellum, and what happened is, after it was published, lots of other people sent in stories saying ‘have you heard this one?’, and some of those are well-founded. And this story really checks out. So if you will allow me a little bit of time, I’ll explain what happened.
[26.18]
In Cambridge, there was a fairly open electorate for, let’s say quite a lot of citizens could vote. The tradition in Cambridge was to have somebody from the Court who could pull strings, and then to have somebody who was closely linked with the city, and Cromwell didn’t have either of those. What Cromwell had, of course, was a reputation amongst some people of being an advanced radical who would really speak out on all the religious abuses which the Puritans, at any rate, thought were going on in the church. But he wasn’t a citizen.
[26.52]
Now, amongst the, amongst the prominent members of the Council, and indeed the aldermen, there were, there were people who knew about the Conventicle, the underground church in St Ives. In fact, one of the key figures in that Conventicle had a brother who owned property in St Ives which he left, on his death, to this man in Cambridge who clearly knew all about the St Ives’ situation. So those who were the radicals amongst the Puritans of Cambridge thought that Cromwell would be an ideal man to represent the town because the town had lots of grievances against the University, and it had lots and lots of problems about the suppression of lectureships and the suppression of Puritan practice within the city.
[27.43]
So they go to see the Mayor and they say ‘can you use your right as Mayor to make one person, during your mayoralty, a Freeman of the City? Can you make Mr Oliver Cromwell a Freeman of the City?’. And the Mayor says ‘well, the problem is I promised it to the King’s fisherman’, that is to say, the man who was breeding fish in the fishponds in St John’s College, and then moving them by water down to London to be on the King’s table. So the friends of Cromwell from the Conventicles say to the Mayor, ‘look, if you make Cromwell a citizen immediately, we will support the King’s fisherman at the next meeting of the Common Council’, and the Mayor says ‘fair enough’!
[28.33]
Now, the importance of why I’m telling you all this is all this checks out. We can prove that all those things happened. The King’s fisherman did get ’made’ at the next meeting, and so on. There’s a lot of detail which a, which a fantasist wouldn’t have known about which really checks out. So a radical clique in Cambridge ask the Mayor to facilitate Cromwell becoming a candidate and he’s then duly elected, and goes up to London to speak on behalf of the radical group in Cambridge and indeed, the radical group of anti-Laudians and anti-Catholics in the Short and in the Long Parliament.
That’s a long answer, but I hope it’s an interesting one!
[29.17]
Andy Hopper: Yes, thanks very much, John. And then what happens when he gets there? What about his activities as an MP in the Long Parliament in the build up to Civil War?
John Morrill: He’s pretty visible. In the diaries that are kept by a number of MPs, I mean he is recorded as making about 90 speeches, which we have record of, between the beginning of the Long Parliament and when he goes off to war at the end of June 1642, and then there’s six months’ silence. But he is speaking on a whole range of issues, and I suppose the two things which really stand out are religious debates, so he’s a great supporter of lots of ways of dealing with the problems created by over-mighty bishops and by the oppression of Puritans. So, for example, he’s the first person to speak up on behalf of John Lilburne, who had been imprisoned for his opposition to bishops. He speaks up and he gets him released.
[30.25]
He supports the measures to limit the power of bishops and then to abolish them, and he speaks up on behalf of a lot of particular causes, for example, supporting the appointment of preachers and towns in which preaching had been suppressed in the recent past. So, religion is an important area and he’s always on the most extreme wing of those who speak on those issues.
[30.52]
The other really interesting thing for the future is that he becomes someone who becomes extremely involved in the crisis in Ireland that breaks out at the end of 1641. Why he became so prominent in Irish affairs cannot easily be explained, except that he was totally persuaded by the accounts of Catholic massacres of Protestants, exaggerated accounts, but nonetheless he wasn’t alone in being persuaded but he’s probably more persuaded than most. And he throws himself into radical action to send an army to Ireland to put down the rebellion by the Catholics of Ireland, and he joints a number of committees.
[31.40]
Then that takes me to the other point that I think the managers, the so-called grandees of the Long Parliament, find him probably being embarrassingly over the top and they probably try to restrain his speaking on major debates. They don’t use him to speak on major issues, but he is a very useful person to have on committees because he will turn up and he will take a strong line on committees, but that’s a less visible kind of radicalism.
[32.08]
So, he’s sufficiently prominent to be, as I say, a frequent speaker at one of the more commonly appointed committees. He’s not sufficiently prominent, of course, to be one of the five members who is accused by Charles of being the leaders of the opposition to him. The film, Cromwell, from a generation ago, the film Cromwell actually includes him as one of the five members; that’s just a bit of artistic licence. He was not that prominent, but he is clearly recognised as being a hot-head in matters of religion and over the revenge that should be taken on Irish Catholics for their massacres of the winter of 1641-2.
[32.57]
Andy Hopper: So that marked him out as quite distinctive amongst these fellow gentry who enlisted as Parliamentarian officers?
John Morrill: Yes, yes. What someone who had a clear memory of him at this time interestingly says that he remembers him as having a coarse voice, but as wearing rather shabby black clothes with white lace collars with spots of blood on it. Now that reference to the ‘spots of blood’ on his collar is really quite interesting, because I think it’s a slight, it’s a social slight, to say ‘look, he hasn’t got a spare white collar and he can’t afford a barber’, so he’s cut himself shaving, that’s the implication, and gentlemen don’t shave themselves! That reinforces this notion that he’s socially marginalised. He’s one of the poorest people in the Long Parliament.
[33.52]
So that puts him again in a very interesting position, and one’s thinking then of his passionate advocacy in 1643 of the plain russet-coated captain who knows what he fights for and loves what he knows, than he was a gentleman and is nothing more. You know, this social edginess that comes very clearly in the war years which I think – this is the important point of the ambiguities of his social identity, and I think that feeling, he must have constantly felt as though he was one of God’s elect but he wasn’t one of the elect, in a secular sense, one of those at the top table.
[34.36]
Andy Hopper: So, in this early life, in the range of skills that he has shown us, is there anything that you can see that might have marked him out as a future successful military leader?
John Morrill: We know of no military experience at all. I mean, we don’t have any militia records for Huntingdon so we don’t know whether he plays any part in the local militia. Given his movement, and not least the movement between Huntingdonshire and then Cambridgeshire, and then moving around, I think it’s unlikely that he has any military experience.
[35.11]
I think what really marks him out is this sense, not simply that he’s been called to eternal life in heaven, despite his unworthiness, but also that he’s been called to some great purpose as yet unrevealed in this life.
Let’s explore Cromwell’s religious conversion through a letter he wrote to his cousin, Mrs St John, which he wrote on 13 October 1638, and then we’ll look at the context of the letter.
“You know what my manner of life hath been, how I lived in and loved darkness and hated the light. I was a chief, the chief of sinners, this is true. I hated godliness, yet God had mercy on me. Oh the riches of His mercy! Praise Him for me. Pray for me that He who hath begun a good work would perfect it to the day of Christ, yet to honour my God by declaring what He has done for my soul, in this I am confident and I will be so. Truly then this I find, that He giveth springs in a dry and barren wilderness where no water is. My soul is with the congregation of the first-born. My body rests in hope and if here I may honour my God either by doing or suffering, I shall be most glad”.
[36.44]
There’s a great mystery about this letter, even precisely which of his cousins he wrote it to. Can I just take a minute to elaborate this story?
[36.52]
Andy Hopper: Sure, yes.
John Morrill: Okay. So, Oliver St John, who was his friend from Cambridge, had a first wife who comes straight out of the Puritan group we’ve already mentioned in Essex, and she dies. The registers are not entirely clear which year it is, but it’s probably the very beginning of 1638. Cromwell writes a letter in October 1638 to his cousin who is the wife of Oliver St John. Now is it the first wife who actually dies a year later in 1639, does he write it to a dying woman? Or, is he writing to the second Mrs St John? Whatever happens, the Mrs St John that Cromwell writes to, is deeply depressed and distressed. Cromwell is writing to someone who is having a religious crisis, a crisis of faith, a crisis about whether or not she’s worthy to be saved, and he’s saying ‘look, you know my condition, when I was at my lowest point, when I had made my biggest mistakes, when I recognised that I was worthless as a human being, God told me that he would save me despite, not because, of who I was, and he’ll do the same for you’.
[38.14]
Now, is he saying that to a dying woman or is he saying it to a young woman who has just lost a child? In the recent edition of Cromwell’s letters and speeches that I was the general editor of, Andrew Barclay, who edited that particular letter, came to the conclusion that it almost certainly is the young woman, the young second Mrs St John. We can’t be entirely sure, so it’s an extraordinarily important letter, but Cromwell’s pouring his soul out to Mrs St John saying ‘look, you must just recognise that you’re not saved because you deserve it, but because God just chooses to save you, and you, because you know of your unworthiness, are now worthy to be saved. It is precisely your unworthiness that makes you able to accept the gift of God’s grace’. It’s an extraordinary letter.
[39.05]
Now, in that same letter he says one thing which I think is really important. He says ‘if I can serve my God by my doing or by my suffering, I will be most glad’. What does he mean by ‘by my doing or by my suffering’? Here he is with chronic bronchitis, he’s suffering from bouts of malaria, a man who’s lost most of the advantages in life that he’d had by birth, saying ‘I’m a suffering person’, on the margins, ‘but God may call me to do something’. My own strong sense is – and this is more, this is extrapolating from this perhaps further than perhaps we should go but I’m quite comfortable saying this – that Cromwell is waiting to see whether he is called to do something great, and that when the opportunity comes, as it does by the unexpected elevation of him to a seat for a major city in the Long Parliament, but more particularly when he has to make a decision in the summer of 1642, what to do if Civil War breaks out. When he goes into Huntingdon marketplace and he raises a band of volunteers and they set off and they block the road out of Cambridge heading north, to the Great North Road, in order to detain the silver that the Cambridge colleges are sending to the King to fund a war effort, when he does that, he is making a remarkably bold and dangerous move, which identifies him from the beginning as being a fearless warrior for truth.
[40.47]
I mean, if the Civil War had been abandoned, if war had not broken out despite all the likelihood of it, he could have been hanged as a highwayman for seizing the silver of the Cambridge colleges. Where other people were waiting upon events, most people across England are waiting to see which way war is going to happen, there are these people who, in my view, are overwhelmingly people with strong religious Puritan views, who are seizing the initiative, and Cromwell is absolutely one of those. And what makes him go into Huntingdon marketplace, calling for volunteers to fight against popery, to fight against tyranny, to fight for justice, to fight for liberty, I think that he had this sense he’d been called for a purpose and that purpose had now been revealed to him, and from that moment onwards, he is going to build a military and subsequently a political career because now at long last, he had found the meaning in his life which had been, he’d been seeking for at least a decade.
[41.51]
Andy Hopper: Well, thank you very much indeed, John, for doing so much to vividly illuminate Cromwell’s early years for us, from quite a slim range of sources as well. And I’d just like to round things off by asking you, in the absence of having the luxury of lots of sources about his early life, how has it been mythologised in the literature and film world?
John Morrill: Huh! At the beginning, at the beginning, there are lots and lots of stories about a misspent youth, about stealing apples, and horsing around. There are stories about him being rowdy in Cambridge and so on. There are stories of him nearly drowning. There are lots and lots of stories which can’t be verified and which seem to really be the kind of stories which would attract around someone you wanted to see as being a canting hypocrite, because one of the great charges against him by his enemies, not only by his Royalist enemies, but by his enemies within the Parliamentarian movement, are that this religious energy and drive and conviction, which I described to you, is all false. What he is really driven by is a naked worldly ambition.
[43.01]
And it is an issue for Cromwell biographers that so many of his contemporaries viewed him that way, and that’s for another day, I think, to talk about why, in the end, those charges can’t be sustained. But why they would be made is clear.
In the very early days, and then after his death, the story of his early life is always one in which he is seen as being a man not to be trusted, a man whose whole life is built on lies.
[43.33]
After that, there’s a very long period during which he falls into a sort of bogeyman name, and so, you know, he comes, down through the period from his death into the nineteenth century, in folk songs, in doggerel verse, ‘Oliver Cromwell is buried and dead, the bogeyman will come in the night’. Then in the 19th and 20th centuries there’s quite a lot of fiction about him, but it’s pretty light on his early life. It’s much more a study of his life as a soldier and as a statesman. In modern times, some of the more recent historical fiction has been more sympathetic to him in his early life and particularly as a family man.
[44.21]
I mean, the story of Cromwell is one in which, you know, it seems to me we start by looking at what happened in 1899 when Parliament wants to erect a statue to him, and it splits both parties, because, for the Liberals, Cromwell is a hero of liberty, religious liberty, political liberty, freeing you from the tyranny of kings and bishops, creating conditions of liberty, but at the same time, he’s the man who committed atrocities in Ireland, and the Liberals are particularly sensitive to the legacies of those in Ireland.
[44.56]
On the Tory side, he is despised as a king killer and a defiler of the Church of England, he’s a great iconoclast. On the other hand, he’s an empire builder. So, both parties are split, and in the end, the Liberal Prime Minister said ‘how would it be if we put up the statue by public subscription?’, and the MPs can more or less agree to that. Rosebery, the Prime Minister then, privately says ‘well, let’s raise as much money as we can and I will make up the difference’, but it was heavily oversubscribed. And in that story, you can see that the polarisation about the Cromwell who is a hero of liberty and the Cromwell who is the tyrant, that polarity is seen. Although it is softened in the 20th century, it’s still there.
[45.42]
He did rather well in the public vote on who are the greatest of Britons for the year 2000, and on the Radio 4 Great Men of the Millennium series, he came fourth, I think. On the television version, he did less well, but he was still in the Top 10. So, he’s become a really significant figure in our history, and the sense that here is a man, you know, from very humble origins who seized power by acts of violence, particularly by orchestrating the execution of the King, and who killed thousands of people in Ireland, that side of him competes with the view of someone who had a deep and abiding passion for freeing people from the forms of tyranny which prevailed, certainly political tyranny in the form of Charles I, certainly religious tyranny, possibly social tyrannies too, possibly with a commitment to a much fairer and juster and more equitable judicial system, for example.
[46.50]
He’s simply a figure who polarises, so my aim is to give coherence to a man who is not just a religious dreamer, a man who is deeply pragmatic about means, but not about ends. I mean, the ends seem to me to be as we’ve always seen them, but I see a much steelier and more, I think, effective pragmatist. And I think that probably has a lot to do with the experience of what happened in his early life when he just spoke too bluntly in the wrong way at the wrong times, and he learnt from that, as he did learn by his gradual development as a military commander by the very fortunate, ways in which his career, military career, was allowed to develop.
[47.38]
Andy Hopper: Well, thanks very much, John. That’s done a great job of really illuminating the making of Oliver Cromwell and his early years. It’s been a pleasure speaking to you about this.
John Morrill: It’s been fun for me too! I never cease to be willing to think and think again about this extraordinary man.
[48.01]
During his distinguished career, Professor Morrill has written extensively about Cromwell. He is the general editor of the scholarly analysis of the recorded writings and speeches of Oliver Cromwell in three volumes published by Oxford University Press. His major new biography, Oliver Cromwell: The Brave, Bad Man of British History, will soon be published by Bloomsbury.
Meanwhile, you can learn more about Cromwell in the civil wars at our website. www.worldturnedupsidedown.co.uk, where leading historians answer key questions such as “Was Oliver Cromwell the Defender of Liberty or a Tyrant?” and “Did Cromwell ban Christmas?”
And you can learn more about the man and his life at the website of the Cromwell Association, www.olivercromwell.org, and by visiting the Cromwell Museum in Huntingdon, which is housed in the school building where Oliver was educated. Find them at www.cromwellmuseum.org.
Finally, do look at the further reading and other resources – including the transcript of Professor Morrill’s interview – in the programme notes.