Extensive records survive of Cromwell’s speeches during his years as Lord Protector (1653-58), and they tell us much about both the man and the age in which he lived. They reflect his intense religious faith and his grappling with the issues and dilemmas of the English Revolution. We know that he spoke either from notes or extempore, rather than from prepared texts, but it was usual for him to authorise the versions published shortly afterwards. This means that they genuinely capture Cromwell’s ‘voice’.
Many of Cromwell’s longest speeches were to the Parliaments that met periodically during his Protectorate. One of the greatest ironies of his career was that this figure, who had played such a crucial role in Parliament’s armies during the English Civil Wars, then found it extremely difficult to establish a stable working relationship with Parliaments when he was Lord Protector. This was above all because so many members did not share his commitment to liberty of conscience and felt that extending religious toleration ran the risk of unleashing ‘errors, heresies and blasphemies’. They were anxious lest liberty turn to licence.
Cromwell’s speeches to the first Protectorate Parliament provide a good example of the pattern characteristic of all his Parliaments: his initial optimism turned to irritation and disappointment, and ultimately led to an angry dissolution. On 4 September 1654, he welcomed the members, telling them that they were ‘met here on the greatest occasion that, I believe, England ever saw’. He added that they had upon their shoulders ‘the interest of all the Christian people in the world’, and that their great goal was to bring ‘this ship of the Commonwealth…into a safe harbour’. Yet, only five months later, frustrated at the Parliament’s obsession with redrafting the constitution rather than promoting godly reforms, he dissolved it with bitter words: ‘instead of the peace and settlement, instead of mercy and truth being brought together, righteousness and peace kissing each other,…weeds and nettles, briers and thorns, have thriven under your shadow’. He concluded that it was ‘not for the profit of these nations, nor fit for the public good’ for the Parliament to continue any longer.
Such passages reflect the authoritarian side of Cromwell’s character, but there were other speeches that had a more thoughtful, almost meditative quality. The best example of this was the series of speeches he made when faced with the greatest dilemma of his career: Parliament’s offer of the kingship in 1657. It was supremely ironic that someone who had not only defeated Charles I but also been the third person to sign his death warrant should receive such an offer, and Cromwell was deeply conflicted over whether or not to accept it. Most civilian politicians urged him to say yes; by contrast, the senior Army officers were virtually unanimous in their opposition, arguing that it would be a betrayal of all that they and their fellow comrades had fought for.
Cromwell hesitated for over two months, and then decided to decline the offer. The rhetoric he used was typical of him in its fervent religiosity: ‘truly the providence of God has laid aside this title [of king] providentially…God has seemed providentially not only to strike at the family but at the name.’ As a result, he declared, ‘I would not seek to set up that that providence has destroyed and laid in the dust, and I would not build Jericho again.’ To his audience, the Biblical allusion would have been clear. Just as, in the Book of Joshua, the walls of Jericho had fallen at the blast of the trumpets, so the monarchy had fallen, and Cromwell was not going to be the one to rebuild it.
So, even though in some respects he was a king in all but name, Cromwell never took the crown and he remained Lord Protector until his death in September 1658. His final months were marked by increasing weariness and frustration, and his penultimate speech to Parliament, on 25 January 1658, was a savage indictment of what he saw as the English people’s failure to espouse religious toleration and to grant each other liberty of conscience. He lamented that ‘the general spirit of this nation’ was ‘that every sect may be uppermost, that every sort of men may get the power into their hands’. The result was that there was ‘an appetite to variety, to be not only making wounds, but as if we should see one making wounds in a man’s side and would desire nothing more than to be groping and grovelling with his fingers in those wounds’. This extraordinary language shows the depth of Cromwell’s disillusionment by the final months of his life. Ten days later, on 4 February 1658, he dissolved the Parliament, crying ‘Let God judge between you and me’; to which, according to some contemporary reports, the members responded ‘Amen’.
Cromwell’s speeches give us a wonderfully vivid insight into his complex character and his search for a settlement after the turmoil of the English Civil Wars. He struggled to translate his personal faith into tangible reforms that would enable the English to become a godly nation. He constantly sought parallels between the experiences of England during the 1640s and 1650s and those of the people of Israel in the Old Testament. Cromwell regarded both as chosen peoples, and the English had to live up to the often painful responsibilities of that. They were, as Cromwell reminded them, ‘like the people newly under circumcision, but raw’. If necessary, he would rule ‘for the people’s good, not what pleases them’, and he remained convinced that ‘misrule is better than no rule, and an ill government, a bad one, is better than none’. Small wonder, then, that he has remained ever since a highly contentious figure: one who has divided opinion between those who admire him as a hero and those who condemn him as a villainous tyrant. We shall see in a later article that his surviving letters from this period present a similarly complicated picture.
