and after the dissolution of Cromwell’s second parliament in February 1658 he showed his anxiety that the protector should act in a moderate and constitutional manner. After Oliver’s death Henry hailed with delight the succession of his brother Richard to the office of protector, but although he was now appointed lieutenant and governor general of Ireland, it was only with great reluctance that he remained in that country. Having rejected proposals to assist in the restoration of Charles II., Henry was recalled to England in June 1659 just after his brother’s fall; quietly obeying this order he resigned his office at once. Although he lost some property at the Restoration, he was allowed after some solicitation to keep the estate he had bought in Ireland. His concluding years were passed at Spinney Abbey in Cambridgeshire; he was unmolested by the government, and he died on the 23rd of March 1674. In 1653 Henry married Elizabeth (d. 1687), daughter of Sir Francis Russell, and he left five sons and two daughters.
CROMWELL, OLIVER (1599–1658), lord protector of England, was the 5th and only surviving son of Robert Cromwell of
Huntingdon and of Elizabeth Steward, widow of William Lynn.
His paternal grandfather was Sir Henry Cromwell of Hinchinbrook,
a leading personage in Huntingdonshire, and grandson
of Richard Williams, knighted by Henry VIII., nephew of
Thomas Cromwell, earl of Essex, Henry VIII.’s minister, whose
name he adopted. His mother was descended from a family
named Styward in Norfolk, which was not, however, connected
in any way, as has been often asserted, with the royal house of
Stuart. Oliver was born on the 25th of April 1599, was educated
under Dr Thomas Beard, a fervent puritan, at the free school
at Huntingdon, and on the 23rd of April 1616 matriculated as
a fellow-commoner at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge,
then a hotbed of puritanism, subsequently studying law in
London. The royalist anecdotes relating to his youth, including
charges of ill-conduct, do not deserve credit, the entries in the
register of St John’s, Huntingdon, noting Oliver’s submission
on two occasions to church censure being forgeries; but it is
not improbable that his youth was wild and possibly dissolute.[1]
According to Edmund Waller he was “very well read in the
Greek and Roman story.” Burnet declares he had little Latin,
but he was able to converse with the Dutch ambassador in that
language. According to James Heath in his Flagellum, “he
was more famous for his exercises in the fields than in the schools,
being one of the chief match-makers and players at football,
cudgels, or any other boisterous game or sport.” On the 22nd
of August 1620 he married Elizabeth, daughter of Sir James
Bourchier, a city merchant of Tower Hill, and of Felstead in
Essex; and his father having died in 1617 he settled at Huntingdon
and occupied himself in the management of his small estate.
In 1628 he was returned to parliament as member for the
borough, and on the 11th of February 1629 he spoke in
support of puritan doctrine, complaining of the attempt by the
king to silence Dr Beard, who had raised his voice against the
“flat popery” inculcated by Dr Alabaster at Paul’s Cross. He was
also one of the members who refused to adjourn at the king’s
command till Sir John Eliot’s resolutions had been passed.
During the eleven years of government without parliament very little is recorded of Cromwell. His name is not connected with the resistance to the levy of ship-money or to the action of the ecclesiastical courts, but in 1630 he was one of those fined for refusing to take up knighthood. The same year he was named one of the justices of the peace for his borough; and on the grant of a new charter showed great zeal in defending the rights of the commoners, and succeeded in procuring an alteration in the charter in their favour, exhibiting much warmth of temper during the dispute and being committed to custody by the privy council for angry words spoken against the mayor, for which he afterwards apologized. He also defended the rights of the commoners of Ely threatened by the “adventurers” who had drained the Great Level, and he was nicknamed afterwards by a royalist newspaper “Lord of the Fens.” He was again later the champion of the commoners of St Ives in the Long Parliament against enclosures by the earl of Manchester, obtaining a commission of the House of Commons to inquire into the case, and drawing upon himself the severe censure of the chairman, the future Lord Clarendon, by his “impetuous carriage” and “insolent behaviour,” and by the passionate vehemence he imparted into the business. Bishop Williams, a kinsman of Cromwell’s, relates at this time that he was “a common spokesman for sectaries, and maintained their part with great stubbornness”; and his earliest extant letter (in 1635) is an appeal for subscriptions for a puritan lecturer. There appears to be no foundation for the statement that he was stopped by an order of council when on the point of abandoning England for America, though there can be little doubt that the thoughts of emigration suggested themselves to his mind at this period. He viewed the “innovations in religion” with abhorrence. According to Clarendon he told the latter in 1641 that if the Grand Remonstrance had not passed “he would have sold all he had the next morning and never have seen England more.” In 1631 he converted his landed property into money, and John Hampden, his cousin, a patentee of Connecticut in 1632, was on the point of emigrating. Cromwell was perhaps arrested in his project by his succession in 1636 to the estate of his uncle Sir Thomas Steward, and to his office of farmer of the cathedral tithes at Ely, whither he now removed. Meanwhile, like Bunyan and many other puritans, Cromwell had been passing through a trying period of mental and religious change and struggle, beginning with deep melancholy and religious doubt and depression, and ending with “seeing light” and with enthusiastic and convinced faith, which remained henceforth the chief characteristic and impulse in his career.
He represented Cambridge in the Short and Long Parliaments of 1640, and at once showed extraordinary zeal and audacity in his opposition to the government, taking a large share in business and serving on numerous and important committees. As the cousin of Hampden and St. John he was intimately associated with the leaders Cromwell’s first parliamentary efforts. of the parliamentary party. His sphere of action, however, was not in parliament. He was not an orator, and though he could express himself forcibly on occasion, his speech was incoherent and devoid of any of the arts of rhetoric. Clarendon notes on his first appearance in parliament that “he seemed to have a person in no degree gracious, no ornament of discourse, none of those talents which use to reconcile the affections of the standers by; yet as he grew into place and authority his parts seemed to be renewed.” He supported stoutly the extreme party of opposition to the king, but did not take the lead except on a few less important occasions, and was apparently silent in the debates on the Petition of Right, the Grand Remonstrance and the Militia. His first recorded intervention in debate in the Long Parliament was on the 9th of November 1640, a few days after the meeting of the House, when he delivered a petition from the imprisoned John Lilburne. He was described by Sir Philip Warwick on this occasion:—“I came into the House one morning well clad and perceived a gentleman speaking whom I knew not, very ordinarily apparelled; for it was a plain cloth suit which seemed to have been made by an ill country tailor; his linen was plain and not very clean; . . . his stature was of a good size; his sword stuck close to
his side; his countenance swollen and reddish; his voice sharp and untunable and his eloquence full of fervour . . . I sincerely profess it much lessened my reverence as to that great council for he was very much hearkened unto.” On the 30th of December he moved to the second reading of Strode’s bill for annual parliaments. His chief interest from the first, however, lay in the religious question. He belonged to the Root and Branch party, and spoke in favour of the petition of the London citizens for the abolition of episcopacy on the 9th of February 1641, and pressed upon the House the Root and Branch Bill in May. On the 6th of November he carried a motion entrusting the train-bands south of the Trent to the command of the earl of Essex. On the 14th of January 1642, after the king’s attempt to seize the five members, he moved for a committee to put the kingdom in a
- ↑ Life of Sir H. Vane, by W. W. Ireland, 222.
