Rewriting Cromwell: a case of deafening silences.

Morrill, John

I

In December 1999, the BBC ran a competition amongst its listeners for the UK "person of the Millennium." On Millennium Eve 1999 they announced the result. First, by a distance, was William Shakespeare. Second was Winston Churchill and third, close behind, was Oliver Cromwell. This great general, whose revolution died with him, had a higher positive rating than any of the forty monarchs to have occupied the English throne since 1066. It is but one token of his high and positive profile: there are 250 Cromwell Streets in the UK, one in every city and one in almost every county town. There are currently 400 web-sites that seek to commemorate him. These include one devoted to him as an exemplar of good family values, one devoted to exploring his institutionalized violence against the people of Ireland, several devoted to making available key passages from his letters and speeches, and one devoted to commemorating a black slave who had been given the name Oliver Cromwell and had been decorated for his courage in the American Civil War. George V may have vetoed Churchill's intention in 1915 to name a battleship The Cromwell, but George VI made no objection to the naming of a class of tanks that helped to win World War II after him. He is even memorialized musically: a folk song bearing his name was edited by Benjamin Britten in 1938. A nursery rhyme that can be first traced back to the late seventeenth century begins "Oliver Cromwell lay buried and dead, hee-haw, buried and dead." The most extraordinary musical evocation is undoubtedly the rendering of a John Cleese prose poem by the Monty Python Team (in the film The Meaning of Life [1983]) that tells the life of Cromwell set to the music of a polonaise by Chopin. (2)

He has become one of the great, rugged figures of English history. More than twenty biographies by academic historians have been published in the past fifty years. With one qualified exception they have been laudatory, have commended his integrity, his reliance upon his God, his brilliance as a soldier, his restless energy as head of state. There are varying estimates of the long-term effects of his role in the British Revolutions; but no doubting that he was a man to be admired.

Of course, this has never been the Irish view of Cromwell. The Irish remember him as the man responsible for the mass slaughter of civilians at Drogheda and Wexford (3) and as the agent of the greatest episode of ethnic cleansing ever experienced in Western Europe as, within a decade, the percentage of land possessed by Catholics born in Ireland dropped from sixty to twenty. In a decade, the ownership of two-fifths of the land mass was transferred from Irish Catholics to British Protestants. (4) The gap between Irish and the English views of the seventeenth-century conquest remains unbridgeable and is governed by G.K. Chesterton's mirthless epigram of 1917, that "it was a tragic necessity that the Irish should remember it; but it was far more tragic that the English forgot it." (5)

II

Why should I want to add to the stack of biographies? How can I possibly imagine that I can say anything distinctive about Cromwell?

First, I had better explain my interest in historical biography, and then in the biography of Oliver Cromwell. An interest in writing historical biography has grown on me gradually, incrementally. I have always been interested in how men and women in the past made sense of their world. I do believe it is possible to enter into the minds of people in the past, in just the same way as it is possible to enter into the minds of people in the present; and that we can do that not only with those we know and like but with those whose background and experience is different from our own. We can only do so partially but each one of us bases her or his life on the ability to do exactly that: to be able to predict how most people will behave most of the time.6 1 have come to learn that people in the past become predictable in their behaviour in much the same way as people in the present become predictable. Studying individuals leads one to anticipate what they will do in a situation you know they encountered before you read up the evidence that tells you how they behaved. A very good example of this will be given below when I explore Oliver Cromwell's actions in the eighteen months before the execution of the king. (7) In saying this, of course, I am robustly challenging much of the presumption (I use that word with studied ambiguity) of post-modernism. I do not believe that every account of the past is an act of fiction. I believe that the properly-trained historian's writing is an imperfect recovery of a past that existed and which exists in the forms of the documents and artifacts that testify of its existence. The very partial survival of the records of the past creates special difficulties in this regard, but the advanced skills of the historians--the traditional name for which is source criticism--allow for a sufficient grip on the reality of the past to make some lives recoverable to a sufficient extent to make historical biography possible.

I have always believed what I have just written. But it took me a long time to realize that reconstructing the life through entering into the thought--and decision-making-processes of particular men and women was one of the purest ways of reconstructing the past for the enlightenment of the present. I completed my doctoral dissertation in 1971 and published it in 1974. (8) I wrote my first exercise in historical biography in 1984 when I revisited one of the key players in my doctoral dissertation and tried to make sense of the twists and turns of his career. His name was Sir William Brereton and he was the dominant military and civilian figure in civil-war Cheshire, bestriding this strategically vital county throughout the decade of the 1640s. My essay examined what drove him to become the most active and activist of all the puritan gentry of Cheshire; how he was galvanized by very specific religious rather than legal-constitutionalist vision; and why he lapsed into dismayed quietism after 1648. (9) I gave the paper as a keynote address at an NACBS conference in Toronto, and was subject to a bitter and unpleasant commentator. I was bemused and a little bruised, but the then President of the NACBS said that the commentator had missed what she termed "my gift for political psychology"--the relationship between what one believed and how one acted. This was a revelatory remark for me. I realized that this was what fascinated me about history. My major book to that point--(The Revolt of the Provinces: Conservatives and Radicals in the English Civil War 1630-1650) (10)--had examined how people came to take sides (or more particularly sought to avoid taking sides) in the 1640s. I came to realize that it was much more a book about their political psychology than their political thought. They made their decisions not by intellectual preference based on a reading of pamphlets and tracts and listening to sermons, but in a much more experiential way, based on the circumstances of their lives. It was a kind of collective biography of a bewildered nation.

From then on, I have been increasingly drawn to case studies of individuals. The most exciting to research and write was a study of William Dowsing, "the bureaucratic puritan" as I dubbed him, the man appointed to supervise the removal of the "monuments of idolatry and superstition" from the churches of East Anglia and the chapels of the Cambridge Colleges. I had none of his letters or private papers, but I had the diary he kept of his acts of iconoclasm and I had a large part of his library with the highly revealing marginalia in his own affirmed hand. (11) I had also made my first foray into the life and mind of Oliver Cromwell. I edited a collection of essays on his life, and had intended to contribute an essay on his speeches. But I could not find anyone to write on his early life--the forty-two years of provincial obscurity that preceded the sixteen years of high-profile action. So I allocated it to myself and discovered to my amazement that upon pulling at the loose ends, whole parts of the previously received view unravelled. (12)

Let me give just one example from that essay. In one of the five known letters of Cromwell for the period before 1640, (13) Cromwell reproved someone called Mr. Storie for not keeping up his subscription for a lecturer (town preacher) called Mr. Wells. Cromwell was in scolding mood: at a time when "the enemies of God His truth" (by which he meant the Bishops) were suppressing lectureships, it was vital that men like Storie did not add to the woes of the godly: "building of hospitals provides for men's bodies; to build material temples is judged a work of piety; but they that procure spiritual food, they that build up spiritual temples, they are the men truly charitable, truly pious." Many scholars had commented on the tone of this letter, but they have not tried to find out who Mr. Storie was, and who Mr. Wells was. Tracking them down produced a treasure trove. It opened up a whole new world of understanding. Walter Wells was the preacher at Godmanchester, less than a mile from Huntingdon, but on the other side of the river Ouse, in a different county and a different diocese. (14) Cromwell's support of him indicated a dissatisfaction with the preaching in his own town of Huntingdon. Wells was also a friend and correspondent of Samuel Hartlib, the religious progressive and social reformer, and their correspondence offered new insights into East Anglian puritanism. But the trail to identify Mr. Storie was much more rewarding. He turned out to be a prominent London mercer (cloth merchant). (15) The Mercers Company records revealed a major disagreement in Huntingdon in the late 1620s over the best way to spend a significant bequest left to the town by Richard Fishborne, a man born there but who had made his fortune as a London mercer. Cromwell is to be found as a leading member of the defeated faction who wanted to endow a new lectureship rather than to divide it between a stock for the poor and to underwrite an existing lectureship held by a man Cromwell disapproved of. In the course of this dispute Cromwell was involved in meetings with a group of Mercers sympathetic to their cause, including one George Storie. This recovery transformed our understanding of what caused Cromwell to sell up and to move from Huntingdon to St. Ives. It strengthens our sense of him as a puritan and it established a series of links placing Cromwell within the patronage network of the Earl of Warwick, the greatest of all "establishment puritans" of the pre-civil war period. (16) This gave me the bug for research of this type. It was a thrilling chase and a satisfying kill. It is quite widely held to be the best thing I have written to date. I have to say that when I finished it I thought I had said all there was to say about Cromwell's early career. But I had left two loose ends dangling. (17) Why had George Storie not paid his subscription for the Godmanchester lecture in 1635? And given that we now knew a lot more about why a humiliated Cromwell sold up and moved away from Huntingdon in 1630, why did he move to St Ives to become a tenant of a gentleman called Henry Lawrence, who was to become a lifelong friend and was later to be President of the Council of State when Cromwell became Head of State as Lord Protector? If I had pulled on these loose ends in 1990, I would have told a very different tale. Mr. Storie, it turned out, had yet another story to tell. We will find out what that is later in this essay.

III

I have recently written about fifteen entries myself in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, to be published in 2004. Four of these lives were above 10,000 words in length--including that of Oliver Cromwell. This required me to get the whole of Cromwell's life into 31,000 words, and to give both a strong sense of the main external facts of his life and some insight into what gave his life shape and meaning. It is this exercise--plus similar ones on King Charles I and on Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of Essex--that led me to write this essay. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of my work for Oxford DNB was to write the Cromwell biography, and to come up with a new account of Cromwell's intentions towards Charles I--that from November 1647 to January 1649 he wanted to see Charles I removed from the throne, preferably by abdication, but that he did not want to abolish monarchy--and then to write about Charles I and to see whether this account of Cromwell helped us to understand Charles's behaviour, and to find that it did. It explains why Charles, believing rightly that Cromwell did not want Regicide but abdication, gambled on his unwillingness to resort to the former if he refused to abdicate under the threat of trial and execution. Charles called his bluff and lost. But the two biographies turned out, although researched and written separately, to vindicate each other.

IV

Who, then, was Oliver Cromwell? (18) He was born on 25 April 1599 and died on 3 September 1658, on the anniversary of three of his greatest military victories. For forty years he lived in provincial obscurity. Virtually nothing is known of his first thirty years and then there is a flurry of information that tells us that he underwent a profound personal and spiritual crisis. Following the bitter disputes about the Fishborne bequest, Cromwell was dismissed from the minor offices he held in Huntingdon, a small town sixty miles north of London; when he retaliated by accusing those responsible of malfeasance, he was hauled before the privy council, and made by them to apologise before a braying crowd in Huntingdon market square. He was also heavily in debt. His credit--in every meaning of the word--in ruins, he sold up and took on the tenancy of a farm a few miles away. And at or around that time he experienced a profound sense of God's promise to him of election. As he put it later: "the Lord will I trust bring me to his tabernacle, to His resting place. My soul is with the congregation of the firstborn [=Christ], my body rests in hope." (19) For ten years, he languished in the fenland, the cold and damp leaving him with chronic bronchitis and the mosquitoes that thrived in the summer fenland swamps causing him to contract a form of malaria that was to recur at times of crisis throughout his life and to drain his life away in 1658. For those ten years he knew that he had been called by God not only to salvation but to some great purpose as yet unrevealed. In 1640, he got his chance. He was returned to Parliament as member for Cambridge, the poorest man in the House of Commons by some distance. Sir Philip Warwick memorably recalled him as wearing a coarse suit, and plain linen shirt, its collar spotted with blood. It is an image of a man short of a change of shirt and without a servant to shave him: a man on the margins socially and not entirely at ease with himself. But he was a man with a fearless and tactless tongue who denounced the tyranny of the bishops and the pervasive idolatry of the established Church. He was shunned by those leading the opposition to Charles I's government, but only until it came to war. Then he was packed off to raise troops in his home area and he did so brilliantly. Within twelve months he had risen from captain to colonel to lieutenant general of one of the largest regional armies in England. Thus began a military career spanning a decade in which he fought in more than thirty open engagements and took part in more than forty sieges without ever tasting defeat. The extraordinary self-discipline of his cavalry charges turned several of the greatest battles of the war, and earned first Cromwell himself and then his men the title "Ironsides." Famously he called for command to be given not to the well-born but to the godly: "I had rather have a plain russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than that which you call a gentleman and is nothing else." (20) When the failure of Parliament to profit from its victories caused the two Houses to reorganize their armies in the winter of 1644-45 and to create a new major assault force, the New Model Army, Cromwell was, to the joy of the radicals and the dismay of the more cautious Parliamentarians, given command of the cavalry, effectively the number two position in the Army. Within eighteen months the New Model won the war, but it could not win the peace. For thirty months the king ducked and weaved, playing off his opponents against one another, nodding, winking and turning his back as it suited his purpose.

Cromwell took the lead in making the Army a political force in its own right and a major player in the negotiations for settlement. He was duped by the king and heavily criticized inside and beyond the army for it. Gradually but inexorably he came to recognize that Charles had to be removed by induced abdication or, if necessary, by deposition. After much hesitation, Cromwell came to see that the only safe form of deposition was decapitation and he held his nerve as a rigged trial prepared the way for the regicide of 30 January 1649. After that, he spent three years defending the infant Commonwealth first by a ruthless conquest of Ireland, and then by a slightly less ruthless military occupation of Scotland. As a result of his actions, there was, briefly, the most complete integration of the England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales that there has ever been. The Regicide had only been made possible by a putsch barring most MPs from taking their seats, and the remnant of collaborators, the Rump, had been left to make provision for the future. They not only made little progress: they consistently stalled or stymied every recommendation from the Army. There was no movement on constitutional reform, for greater social justice or for a more equitable legal system, and a mere toleration of divergent protestant practice but no proactive protestant evangelism. In April 1653, Cromwell's patience snapped. He used his troops to clear the Parliament House and to declare the Long Parliament dissolved. He then--and this is surely significant--refused to take power himself, but, in consultation with his army colleagues and well-wishers who wrote in, he appointed 140 men who had, in his phrase, "the root of the matter in them," who were men who "knew the Lord" and represented "the various forms of godliness in this nation" (21) and he appointed them a constituent assembly with a brief to work out a long-term constitutional framework which might make "all fit to be called" to the responsibilities of Christian liberty. (22) Cromwell then retreated from the exercise of power and left them to it. For five months they bickered and schemed against one another, and then accepted the inevitable. Most of the 140 handed power back to him, and--with a great show of (quite possibly sincere) reluctance--he agreed to be head of state, but not king, in a constitution that bore a striking resemblance to the one he had pressed on Charles I in 1647. For the remaining five years of his life he was Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland. He remained Lord General and head of a large army that held down Britain and Ireland and was strikingly successful in assisting the French against the Spaniards on the continent. He survived assassination plots and broke the heart and will of the defeated royalists. He refused to take the title of king, but behaved more and more as a king would be expected to behave. His passionate advocacy of religious liberty came under strain in the face of the licentiousness of the sects and the anti-authoritarianism of the Quakers. When he died, he had gained the acquiescence but not the committed support of a large majority. He dreamed of turning the nation from the things of the flesh to the things of the spirit; and he was determined to win hearts and minds by gospel-reason and not by persecution. But within two years of his death, the revolution he had engineered was over: the king and the old Episcopalian church were back, his closest comrades were tortured to death and his own exhumed corpse exposed on a gibbet and his head, for twenty years, was displayed near the entrance to the Houses of Parliament. (23) His greatness lay in his ability to command events during his own lifetime, no more, no less.

V

This apart, then, there is a fairly consensual view of Cromwell. Almost every modern biography of Cromwell has been written from identical sources: the collection of 224 letters and 18 speeches as gathered together by Thomas Carlyle in 1845. The new edition of Carlyle published in 1904 added another 149 letters and two short speeches, and a reworked canon by W.C. Abbott in the 1930s added a few more personal letters and quite a lot of others signed by him but not written by him. (24) It is a beguiling canon: enough on which to base a biography. And so, for 150 years professional historians have carefully read Carlyle's volumes and correlated what they contain against their own general knowledge of the period, no more no less. And it is a beguiling corpus: Cromwell presents a compelling picture of himself as a man driven by Providence; as a man of sincere Calvinist faith seeking to win a civil war so as to create a world free of tyranny. He claimed that he did not enjoy power. It was thrust upon him. He was not especially intelligent, indeed he was quite unintellectual, lacking a deep understanding of law, of the classics, of theology. He had a deep sense of being propelled by God into leading his people towards a Promised Land. He had an imperfect sense of what the Promised Land would look like, and only a magpie instinct for picking up the latest bright and shiny idea of how to make the next move towards it. Those whose ideas he took up all too briefly felt the warm glow of his approval. He then moved on to the next idea, and abandoned the people as well as the ideas that had not worked. This is why he was so resented and so distrusted by those he affirmed and then abandoned. He could never make the adjustment from war, where the objective was always clear and the victory unambiguous, to the fogginess of peace. The pragmatism and compromise of the political arena constantly dismayed him and ground him down. All this cost him in personal terms. He yearned, as he put it, to "keep a flock of sheep under a woodside," (25) to emulate Gideon who led the armies of Israel and then returned to his farm. But God would not let him go. God would have him serve. And still there was before him the mirage of a perfected humanity. He had seen that corrupted institutions could not deliver a humanity more obedient to the will of God. He had been called to overthrow tyranny and pride and replace it with humility and a common concern to share the fragments of truth that so many men of goodwill had been granted. But instead pride and self-interest kept on taking over. As he climbed another barren hill and peered over the next sun-baked valley, the mirage re-appeared.

What makes Oliver Cromwell endlessly appealing and endlessly alarming was that he was true to his own vision. He never doubted his call to service or to salvation. He knew enough of the Bible to know that all those whom God called, he chastened. The fierceness of his determination to free up all those whose sense of God shared elements of his own experience drove him into uncomfortable action. He was not wedded and glued to forms of government. He was not bound by human law. If God called upon him to be the human instrument of His wrath, he would not flinch. His sense of himself as the unworthy and suffering servant of a stern Lord protected him from the tragic megalomanias of others who have risen to absolute power on the backs of revolutions. Cromwell's achievements as a soldier are great but unfashionable; as a religious libertarian great but easily misstated; as a statesman inevitably stunted. No man who rises from a working farmer to head of state in twenty years is other than great. To achieve that and still to be able to say that "if here I may serve my God either by my doing or by my suffering, I shall be most glad" (26) is a man of towering integrity. He was to himself and to his God most true, if at great cost to himself and others.

VI

The most obvious ways for the biographer to offer new insights into the life of a major historical figure is to find new evidence or to ask new questions. No significant new evidence bearing directly on the life of Oliver Cromwell has been discovered since 1900. Recent biographers like Colin Davis and Peter Gaunt (27) have tried to ask new and searching questions of the canonical texts, but the results have been to nuance rather than to transform what we know. So my approach has been to see what is hidden and concealed within the canonical texts. My oxymoronic title, speaking of deafening silences, was intended when I first committed myself to it, to suggest that there are things in the sources which scream out at us but which we have failed to notice. Now I realize that I am not talking about the silence of the sources as about the deafness of the historian. I want to suggest that it is how we listen that matters. Finally I will look in turn at three aspects of this question: how sometimes voices in the record can be disguised or inaudible because of the white noise that surrounds them. Secondly I will suggest the non-existence or non-survival of records is not necessarily neutral or random, but profoundly meaningful; and thirdly I will suggest that sometimes we do not hear what is being said because what matters is what is implicit, not what is explicit. Here I will have time only for one example of each: and I will be looking at some radical new ways of looking at Cromwell's hidden life before 1640; at what happened at the Putney Debates; and at how he used the Bible to convince himself and others.

VII

History is a collaborative subject. This next section was made possible by the sharp eye and quizzical nature of one of my former PhD students, Andrew Barclay. Dr. Barclay is a distinguished member of the team of researchers and authors who work for the History of Parliament Trust, producing biographies of every MP up to modern times. He is preparing a biography of Cromwell's parliamentary career 1640-58. He noticed in an obscure book published in 1858 and little referred to since, (28) a strange account of Cromwell's election to the Parliaments of 1640. The author dismissed it as fanciful, riddled with error. Since 1858 no one has bothered to check. Dr. Barclay did so, and began to wonder about it. Together we have come up with the following credible account. It illustrates my claim above that "sometimes voices in the record can be disguised or inaudible because of the white noise that surrounds them."

In the early 1660s there appeared a scurrilous, mendacious, malicious life of Cromwell under the title Flagellum. It was written by James Heath, an embittered royalist exile (known as Carrion Heath) and it had about as much value as a guide Cromwell's life as the National Enquirer does to the lives of those it pillories. It has, quite rightly, been discounted as a reliable source. Heath's stories are frequently recognizably based on events for which we have more reliable evidence; but it is recognizable only as a pile of vomit can reveal its previous history. And yet, it is in James Heath's work that we find the key to Cromwell's early life. Or rather it is in the third edition of Flagellum that we find that key. For so successful was this work that it was reprinted "with additions." (29) The new material in the second edition passed through Heath's bile duct on its way to the page; but then he died and for the third edition his printer added new material, as he was sent it, and this new material was as biased as its anonymous author had made it, not as Heath had made it. In the first and second edition of Flagellum, Heath gives a wildly implausible version of Cromwell's return to the 1640 Parliament. Then suddenly, in the third edition, we find a new version. It tells how a group of men, headed by one Richard Tyms, decided to secure Cromwell's election as MP for Cambridge. To be eligible to stand he had to be a freeman of the town, and time was too short for them to get Cromwell made a freeman by the usual route, by a vote at the meeting of the town's common hall. The only alternative was for the Mayor to use his right to create one freeman during his year in office. The group, which included the mayor's brother-in-law, therefore went in search of Mayor French. He heard them out but said that he was not really able to help, since he had promised to use his right to create a referendum in favour of "the king's fisherman." Tyms and others said that if the mayor did as they asked, they would see the king's fisherman was made a freeman at the next common hall. The mayor concurred and Cromwell was made a freeman and subsequently returned to Parliament on the interest of the faction that proposed him. And why were they so fond of him? "It was the hap of Richard Tyms ... to be at a conventicle (as he usually every Sunday rode to the Isle of Ely to that purpose, having a brother who entertained him in his course) where he heard this said Oliver, with such admiration, that he thought that there was not such a precious man in the nation." (30) Cromwell preaching at an illegal, underground conventicle in the 1630s, can it be true? Well, almost everything else checks out. (31) All the men named existed and several were close allies of Cromwell on wartime committees. Mayor French, amongst his many business interests, did rent the medieval fishponds at the back of St. Johns College to breed up fish which he then passed on to a business partner in Southwark, who was the King's fishmonger, and who was made a freeman of Cambridge three weeks after the election of Cromwell to Parliament; and Richard Tyms did have a brother who was a tenant farmer and neighbour of Cromwell in St. Ives. Everything that can be checked, checks out. So we have a discovery of a pearl within the dross: Cromwell was a preacher at a puritan conventicle, an illegal underground church, in the 1630s. And that makes him not only the poorest but also the most extreme member of the Long Parliament. It recontextualizes the fragmentary accounts we have of his verbal assaults on the bishops in 1641, perhaps of how he came to be the man to push for the release of John Lilburne, severely flogged and imprisoned by Charles I's Star Chamber for circulating subversive religious tracts in 1638. It greatly increases the prospect of Cromwell himself instigating and encouraging lay preaching by officers and common soldiers at regimental prayer meetings throughout the 1640s.

But that is not all. If, armed with this information, we go back over the material of the 1630s to examine some of the unsupported and suspected allegations against Cromwell made in post-Restoration memoirs and histories, we can begin to feel substance forming around nebulous assertions. Several royalists, headed by Clarendon and Dugdale, asserted that Cromwell tried to emigrate to New England in 1638. Sir Charles Firth investigated this claim and found it incredible, especially with respect to 1638. He did not consider whether they were right about the event but wrong about the year. Cotton Mather, in Margalia Christi, makes the same assertion, although he does not attach a date. Now if Tyms heard Cromwell preaching at a conventicle near his home in the 1630s who would have been the sponsor and protector of that conventicle? The obvious answer would have been Henry Lawrence, Cromwell's landlord in St. Ives. And suddenly, scales fall from the eyes. Time and again, in discussing Cromwell's move from Huntingdon to St. Ives, historians say: Cromwell moved to be tenant of Henry Lawrence, who became his lifetime friend and whom he made President of his Council of State in 1654. I did so myself in 1992. Indeed: but why did he become the tenant of Henry Lawrence and not the tenant of someone else in 1631? Surely it is not coincidental that shortly after Cromwell joined him, Lawrence became one of the twelve trustees of Connecticut who made a clear commitment to move over to New England with their tenants as soon as maybe. So Cromwell very probably moved to St. Ives in readiness to go to Connecticut. And in early 1635, Lawrence wrote to John Winthrop to say that "we are peremptory for Connecticut, it being the joint resolution of us all that nothing but a plain impossibility could divert us from that place."

In Cotton Mather's narrative, Cromwell was prevented from travelling because of an order of the privy council. And although these events are not dated, they are sequentially placed in the early 1630s. And in 1634 William Laud, the archbishop of Canterbury became secretary of the committee of the council for colonies and for a short time puritans were prevented from sailing. And then policy changed again, and the government decided it was better to drive puritans out than bottle up their resentments at home. So what did Lawrence do? He moved to Holland, joined the puritan church in Arnhem, and--according to a royal spy--was observed preaching. The white noise of gutter journalism in James Heath has prevented us from hearing something very important buried away. We constantly warn one another never to overestimate the value of a source. We must be careful not to underestimate them too. And there is a coda to this story. Once we are alerted to the probability that Cromwell nearly went to New England, it makes us grub around in the New England records for evidence that others linked to Cromwell migrated. And we find that several clergymen who went--including Roger Williams and Robert Hooke--were connected to Cromwell through his father's sister, the dowager Lady Joan Barrington, who acted as a marriage broker for the godly and quite probably brokered Cromwell's own marriage. (32) But even more dramatic is the story told by John Winthrop's diary in which someone we have already met makes a cameo appearance. One Captain Keayne found a stray sow and advertised it extensively. After a year and a day he killed and salted it. Subsequently a Mistress Sherman claimed it and a trial and lawsuit ensued, in which Mistress Sherman--her husband being in London--was urged on to continue her claim after she had lost the first case by "one ... who kept in her house." The case split the magistracy, Saltonstall and Bellingham siding with Mistress Sherman and the majority with Captain Keayne. And the one who advised her to persist in her suit? "George Storie, a young merchant of London"! (33) The London records, which are full enough for us to feel confident in their completeness, yield only one George Storie: the mercer whom Cromwell met in 1629 and corresponded with so frankly with in January 1636. This must have been the man who so irritated Winthrop in Massachusetts in the course of 1636. So that is why he had not paid his subscription to the lectureship for Mr Wells. One Storie; many stories.

VIII

Every historian of the English Revolution knows about the Putney Debates. (34) In and close to the parish church of Putney, sitting high and proud alongside the Thames, four miles upstream from Westminster, there met for fourteen days from 28 October 1647, the General Council of the New Model Army--that is the Generals, representatives of the officers of every regiment and adjutators representing the rank and file. Also in attendance were newly appointed agents for five cavalry regiments who had disowned the original adjutators, and these agents brought with them two men well known as campaigners for democratic freedoms in the city of London and associates of the Leveller leadership. There survives a vivid record of the debates, during which fundamental political issues were exposed, (35) most famously in the passionate cry of Thomas Rainsborough: "The poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he; and therefore truly ... every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government." (36) Cromwell was at Putney, with his back to the wall, defending monarchy, the principle of a negotiated settlement with, rather than an imposed settlement on, Charles I, and defending the principle that those who participated in government must have a stake, a "fixed permanent interest" (37) in the commonwealth, defending the probity of his own actions against allegations of pursuing his own self-interest and betraying those of his men. We know about the Putney Debates because a team of stenographers was present, taking down all the speeches in shorthand; (38) and out of their notes William Clarke collated the tense, intense narrative. But there is a double and crucial silence in the record of the Putney Debates. The first is that Clarke's notes were squirreled away after the event. All knowledge of them was lost until the manuscript was recovered in the 1890s by Sir Charles Firth. (39) The historians who shaped and continue to shape the way we think about the English Revolution and about Cromwell's role in it--Clarendon, Hume, Carlyle, Gardiner--wrote in ignorance of those debates. The recovery of the Putney debates has produced some excellent scholarship on the debates and their ideas, but it has failed to shift our views about what Cromwell brought to and took away from Putney. I will just take one aspect. Gardiner--in ignorance of Putney--had ruled definitively that Cromwell was a late convert to regicide, that he only became convinced of the necessity of king-killing at the end of 1648. (40) Where Gardiner has sifted the evidence so carefully, few have challenged him. Almost all biographers follow his line. But the impeccable Gardiner had no opportunity to consider the evidence of the Putney debates. His less impeccable successors have not considered the need to do so. We will do so in a moment.

But there is a second silence in respect of Putney. The debates lasted from 28 October to 11 November. Clarke's recording of events covers 28 October to 1 November. He was then stopped from taking notes. Why? The obvious reason is that the debates became so acrimonious and bitter, that the Generals ordered him to desist. In weighing the significance of how Putney changed Cromwell, we need to weigh the significance of those nine lost days. There are fragments, shards of evidence in Clarke's papers--11 pages cover those 10 days, compared with 180 covering the previous 3 days. They reveal that the debates became more and more concerned with the destiny of the king. Should he be deposed, should he be put on trial, should monarchy itself be abolished? The signs are that this split the army vertically--not officers versus men, but general against general, major against major, private against private. Henry Ireton, Cromwell's son-in-law and principal defender of the negotiations with the king which preceded Putney, stormed out, not to return on 5 November. (41) And in this crucible of debate, in which men thought unthinkable thoughts and uttered unutterable words, Cromwell had an epiphany, the beginnings of his conversion to the view that God had withdrawn his support for the anointed Charles, and might well be inviting the army to be the instrument of his destruction.

Cromwell's role at Putney was first and foremost as chair and ringmaster. His mission statement for all four recorded days was "let us be doing, but let us be united in our doing." (42) He extracted a retraction of the charge that he and his son-in-law had negotiated in bad faith. The Agreement of the People, tabled on 30 October, proposed that the discredited king and the discredited parliament be ignored and a new constitution introduced which was to be endorsed by all those who wished to enjoy rights of citizenship. Cromwell subsequently persuaded the committee of eighteen, made up of officers and adjutators, to whom the most contentious issues were referred, unanimously to reject that proposition in favour of a proposal that the army lobby the Long Parliament to dissolve itself after making provision for a redistribution of seats "according to some rule of equality of proportion," and for biennial elections on a franchise consisting of all those previously qualified plus all those who had secured a stake by offering their lives in the parliamentarian armies up to and including the date of the battle of Naseby. This compromise, acceptable to all sections of the army, was made possible by Cromwell's careful diplomacy.

So dazzling is the debate on the franchise, such a moving and powerful recovered moment in the history of liberal democracy (and it is those things) that historians have given it undue weight. They have missed the fact that the debates moved on to issues much more profound for that society. And they have missed the fact that in all likelihood the key events took place at the prayer meeting on 29 October at which the officers and adjutators prayed together. At the meeting there were long silences followed by testimony: officer or soldier quoting a passage from scripture and applying it to the current situation. Sometimes, the testimony lay unfertilized on the floor; but sometimes it pollinated and blossomed as others took up the theme. Clarke's record was dominated by an extraordinary meditation by Goffe, based on the Book of Revelation chapter 17, in the course of which he showed how English Kings had overthrown the power of the Antichrist in the person of the Pope, only to assume the trappings of Antichristian power themselves. He then said that "let us inquire whether some of the actions that we have done of late, some of the things we have propounded of late, doe not crosse the worke of God in these particulars; because in our proposing of thinges we doe indeavour to sett uppe that power that God would not sette up again." This is startling talk. But it is followed by a long exegesis of the Book of Numbers, chapter 14, in which God deserts those who anticipate his will, take the law into their own hands to do what they believe God intends: "Let us not now in a kinde of heate run uppe and say, 'wee will goe now;' because itt may bee there is a better opportunity that God will give us." (43) In the short term, this passionate (half-hour?) outburst seemed to leave the assembly cold. I suspect it lit a slow fuse in the heart of Oliver Cromwell.

Up to the evening of 31 October, then, tempers were frayed but things were going reasonably well. Unity had been maintained. But Cromwell had more difficulty controlling things on and after 1 November. Now the subject turned to the right of the king and the lords to veto legislation approved by the Commons. This drifted into the wider and even more contentious issue of whether the king should be a party to the settlement and even whether Charles should be deposed and executed. Clearly by 1 November 1647, Cromwell's patience with Charles was running out. But he also argued that the army should not be "wedded and glued to forms of government" and that "forms of government are (as St. Paul says) dross and dung in comparison of Christ." (44) Using the Old Testament as his sole source, he argued that the Jewish people had done well and badly under all forms of government. A bad king did not discredit monarchy itself. (45) Cromwell's speeches on 1 November 1647 are important evidence of the development of an unsophisticated political thought, which owed nothing to Aristotle and everything to the Old Testament. It is also testimony to his growing impatience with Charles and willingness to wait upon God's pronouncement of a judgement against the king. Cromwell made three major interventions in the debate on 1 November, and in each the weight of Colonel Goffe's meditation on Revelation and the Book of Numbers became evident. Cromwell began by arguing that this was not the time or the place for the Army to decide on a negative voice (in other words, a power of veto) in the king or in the lords. That belonged either to a parliament chastened and made wiser by the army's remonstrations or it belonged to a parliament elected under new and better electoral rules. (46) Following Allen's call for all to keep an open mind on the king's future and following Sexby's meditation on the words of Jeremiah: "we find in the worde of God: 'I would heal Babylon but shee would not be healed.' I thinke that wee have gone about to heale Babylon when shee would not," (47) Cromwell returns to Goffe's words, and went into a dramatic and clearly extempore meditation on the series of testimonies given forth as a result of the day of prayer. (48)

 Truly wee have heard many speaking to us; and I cannott butt thinke
 that in many of those thinges God hath spoken to us ... I cannott
 see butt that wee all speake to the same end, and the mistakes are
 onely in the way. The end is to deliver this nation from oppression
 and slavery, to accomplish that worke that God hath carried on in
 us ... We agree thus farre.

He then makes a crucial admission: "wee all apprehend danger from the person of the kinge." For several minutes he labours that point, reiterating that there is a problem with Charles himself--"I myself do concurre" with those who held that "there can bee no safetie in a consistencie with the person of the Kinge or the Lords or their having the least interest in the publique affaires of the Kingedome." But he argues that does not mean that "God will destroy these persons' [in other words, kings in general] or that power." Furthermore, God has clearly shown that they must not "sette uppe" or "preserve" kings where it threatens the public interest. But God has not yet made plain, he says, whether it would be hazardous to the public interest to "goe about to destroy or take away king and Lords or whether it would be [more] hazardous to retain them." His plea is not to rush to judgement on this issue. The Council must not assume that even if God wills it, they are ipso facto the self-appointed instruments of God's will: "[let] those to whome this is not made cleare, though they do but thinke itt probable that God will destroy them, yett lett them make this rule to themselves, though God have a purpose to destroy them, and though I should finde a desire to destroy them ... Therefore let those that are of that minde waite uppon God for such a way when the thinge maye bee done without sin and without scandall too."

All this appears to be a thinking through of Goffe's words on 30 October, and it gives us the key to Cromwell's politics over the next fifteen months: an ever-greater conviction that God intended Charles I to be struck down, and a continuing uncertainty about when and how that would be done and about the extent of his and the army's agency. This anger against a King who was duplicitous and willing the nation back into blood, the principal author and progenitor of the Second Civil War, can be seen to mount steadily; and Cromwell's public and private letters are a chronicle of his introspective search for the connection between God's actions in the history of His first chosen people, the people of Israel, and of His new chosen people, the people of England. In a sense Goffe's meditation at Putney took fifteen months to reach fruition. And so Cromwell enters the silent days when Clarke stopped the recording of the debates.

Occasionally, through the door that closes the unrecorded past to us, we can hear voices raised, fragments of an anguished argument about the future of monarchy. On 2 November the Committee voted unanimously on a series of measures that increased the power of the Commons, and limited the power of the lords and king. But they also resolved to limit the freedom of future parliaments to place restrictions on the free exercise of religion and conscience, to impress men to serve in the army, and to change the electoral arrangements already agreed. (49) Thereafter there are the merest fragments that suggest that the debate returned to consider the position of Charles I with Cromwell lashing out at Colonel Harrison, who had reiterated the charge that the king was a "man of blood" and that "they were to prosecute him," not by denying the desirability of such a course, but the feasibility of it. He "answered him, by putting several cases in which murder was not to be punished," citing the Old Testament case of David's refusal to put Joab on trial for the murder of Abner because the murderer and his brothers had more troops at their disposal than David had: "the sons of Zeruiah were too hard for him." Charles I, Cromwell implies, no longer deserved to reign; but it was not feasible or prudent at present to get rid of him. (50)

Yet Cromwell had crossed a Rubicon. He had seen that Charles I was not to be restored. The question was only to be when and how he was to replaced. On 12 November, this growing distrust was massively reinforced. Charles, breaking his word, escaped from Hampton Court and fled to the Isle of Wight. There was plenty of contemporary speculation that Cromwell encouraged him in this escapade, but there are compelling reasons for doubting it. Charles, no doubt alarmed at rumours reaching him of the Army's intentions, and conscious that he was on the brink of securing that rainbow coalition of English Episcopalians, Scottish Presbyterians, and Irish Catholics that was allowed for in the Engagement he signed with the Scots a month later, needed neither encouragement nor collusion from Cromwell to formulate escape plans. When, a few days later, Sir John Berkeley, a royalist intermediary who had formed good relations with Cromwell and Ireton over recent months, arrived with a letter from Charles, he found an army Council meeting in progress. He later recalled that "I look'd upon Cromwell and Ireton and the rest of my acquaintance, who saluted me very coldly, and had their countenance very changed towards me ... " Berkeley was then told by an unnamed officer that at the afternoon meeting of the Council, Ireton and Cromwell had called for the king to be transferred as a close prisoner to London "and then br[ought] to a tryal"; and that "none be allowed to speak to him [in other words, negotiate with him] upon pain of death." Within weeks, Cromwell was advocating that no further negotiations be held with the king. (51)

Putney seems to have been a turning point for Cromwell. From then he was clear that Charles I had to be removed from the throne. He was still not convinced that he should be put on trial. He was still not convinced that he had to die. He became committed to Charles's abdication in favour of one of his sons. But we can see the process of change beginning to happen on 1 November and we can see a trajectory of events through the lost days of Putney that completed that process. The silence of the record screams out at us that this was one of the great epiphanies of his life and it ended in Regicide and in the struggle to create a new England, and indeed a new world.

IX

The third kind of silence that we can penetrate in order to advance our understanding of Cromwell is the most familiar, and the most rewarding: the silence of the words not spoken but implied, the words that the immediate audience took for granted but that the modern audience has to strain to hear, has to make the effort of imagination and learning to recover. My example here, big enough for me to be in the process of writing a book on it, is Cromwell's use of the bible. Some biographers have noticed in general his reliance on the bible for exemplifying his arguments, and a few, notably Robert Paul, have drawn out the significance of some passages. (52) But there has been no systematic exploration of the way Cromwell drew the scriptures into the internal forum and made them work there.

In 1652, a German ambassador, Gilbert Mylius from Oldenburg, recorded the following experience:

 In the king's chapel at Whitehall, General Cromwell sat today with
 his family in the same pew which was formerly used by the King and
 his children. Colonel Hugh Peter ... armed in a sword, dressed in
 military regalia preached, and this is common; anyone may step up,
 when he wishes, and deliver a sermon. (53)

Cromwell, the lay preacher of the 1630s, and encourager of soldiers to preach in the 1650s, remained committed to the right of all godly men, and not just a licensed clergy, to break open and explain the word of God. It is unlikely he desisted himself, and I would suggest that many of his speeches are in fact sermons, closely working with biblical texts. It is possible to find literally hundreds of biblical references buried in his letters and speeches--I have completed a study of twenty-seven letters and four speeches in which I have found 264 biblical quotations, 64 per cent from the Old Testament (half of those from the psalms and most of the rest from the prophets [especially Isaiah] and the stories of Moses, David, and Gideon, on each of whom Cromwell sought to model himself) and 36 per cent from the New Testament, overwhelmingly from the Pauline epistles. Only 2 per cent were drawn from the gospels. (54)

On 1 September 1648, in an otherwise inconsequential letter, Cromwell suddenly burst out: "this scripture hath been much stay with me: Isaiah eighth, [verses] 10,11,14--read all the chapter." (55) That chapter and the next are about how most of the people have missed out on righteousness and those who follow the idolatrous leaders of Judah and Israel will be destroyed.

Within days Cromwell was writing in wonder at how a godly minority had seized power in Scotland, expelled the corrupt majority from the Scottish Parliament and set up godly rule: "Think of the example and of the consequences, and let others think of it too." (56) The connection between this wonderment and the subsequent purge of the English Parliament is palpable.

Scholars have long puzzled over Cromwell's letter of 3 August 1650 to the clergy of the Scottish Kirk before the battle of Dunbar. Leading his undefeated New Model Army against the undefeated army of the Protestant Covenanters in Scotland, Cromwell wrote: "I beseech thee in the bowels of Christ, consider whether ye might be mistaken." Did he direct this question, many scholars have speculated, against himself as well as them? Not if we read on, for he says to them: "I pray you, read the twenty-fifth of Isaiah from the fifth to the fifteenth verse." They would have known what a stinging rebuke that was: for the passage describes how Jewish priests, drunk with strong wine, vomited over the altar of the lord. "There is," Cromwell rammed home his allusive message, "a spiritual fullness that the world may call drunkenness ... a carnal confidence upon misunderstood and misapplied precepts, which may be called spiritual drunkenness." (57)

We cannot prove that Cromwell ever read, beyond his years at school and his one year at Cambridge University, a single book other than the Bible. But he knew the Bible by heart, and quoted from memory, a fact we know because he so frequently mingled together phrases from the two translations he knew: the Geneva and the King James Bibles. (58)

The Bible seems to have acted in two principal ways: one to legitimise and root his personal testimonies. This can be illustrated from the letter that he wrote in October 1638 to his cousin, Elizabeth St. John, giving her an account of his conversion experience several years earlier. It is a patchwork of biblical quotations:

 ... In this I am confident. (59) Truly then this I find: that he
 giveth springs in a dry and barren wilderness where no water is.
 (60) I live (you know where) in Mesheck, which they say signifieth
 Prolonging; in Kedar which signifieth blackness. (61) Yet the Lord
 forsaketh me not. Though he do prolong, yet he will bring me to his
 tabernacle, to his resting place. My soul is with the congregation
 of the firstborn (62) my body rests in hope; (63) and if here I may
 honour my God either by doing or by suffering, (64) I shall be most
 glad. (65)

The letter is three times that length and contains three times as many biblical citations: Cromwell draws on eight psalms and five epistles. But the spine of the letter, the text around which it is based and to which the others are decorations is Philippians chapter 4, in which St. Paul gives thanks for the support he has been given during his imprisonment and calls for the unity and perseverence of the faithful under persecution. The imprisoned Paul tells of the all-sufficiency of Christ in all circumstances.

Cromwell in 1638 was a born-again man, but a man who had lost his wealth, his health, and his social standing and who had spent long years as a working farmer in the fen, where we get one glimpse of him in the records when a traveller noted him at church, suffering from chronic bronchitis and with a piece of red flannel across his chest and throat to keep out the fog and the damp. By October, the death of his mother's childless brother had brought him relief; he had inherited his uncle's job as land agent for the dean and chapter of Ely cathedral, but the key sentence in the letter seems to me to be the one from Philippians 4 and it reads: "if here I may honour my God by doing or by suffering I shall be most glad." (66) Cromwell's years in the fen were his years in the desert, released from slavery to sin by God's free will, but not yet able to enjoy the fruits of his call. He was ready for that call and in 1640 he grabbed it with his whole being. Elected against all sense to the House of Commons, its poorest and meanest member, he had no doubt that the time of suffering was over and the time of doing was upon him. And he seized every opportunity to serve God by his reckless speaking against the bishops and popery in all its forms, by his reckless militarism even before Civil War had broken out. No wonder in 1648 he used that same phrase from Philippians in a letter to Fairfax. (67) It was now the people of England who were called by God and who must honour him by their sufferings before they could serve him by their doing. They too must have their desert experience before they could enter the promised land, and this underlay the constant reference to himself throughout the Protectorate as the new Moses.

In the years up to 1641, Cromwell's letters dwell on the psalms and the epistles. And they remain his most constant sources of inspiration; but by the late 1640s he is citing the early Prophets much more, and from 1650 the Pentateuch. Less than two per cent of all his citations are to the Gospels and even less to the apocalyptic books of the Old and New Testament, which you might find significant.

The other use is the more important. It is an internal version of something for which we have evidence relating to the external equivalent. In April 1648, the council of officers met at Windsor to ponder the future. They sat in a silence broken only by an individual officer citing a text and offering an account of how it could be applied to present circumstances. Sometimes the words fell on stony ears: silence. Sometimes the biblical phrase took root and speaker after speaker testified to its resonance in the presence. At Windsor the phrase that took root was from Judges 35:33: "So ye shall not pollute the land in which ye are: for blood it defileth the land and the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein but by the blood of him that shed it." (68) Charles had shed the innocent blood of his people and he must pay with his own life. The Army, in Cromwell's presence, proclaimed that they would put the king on trial as soon as they were in a position to do so. Similarly, Cromwell's speech to the Nominated Assembly in July 1653 contains an extended meditation on what he termed "that famous Psalm, sixty-eighth psalm, which indeed is a glorious prophecy ... of the gospel churches"--"Let God arise, let his enemies be scattered ... Let the righteous be glad, let them rejoice before God, let them rejoice exceedingly ... "(69) It was a meditation on the history of the revolution, of how he had been called, and how God, having overturned the tyrannies of the old English church and state, called him and those who answered his call to build a new, more accountable political system and a new religious order. It culminated in the loveliest of all his pleas for toleration:

 In my pilgrimage and some exercises I had abroad, I did read that
 Scripture often, Forty First of Isaiah, where God gave me
 encouragement ... He said he would plant in the wilderness the
 cedar and the [acacia] tree, the myrtle and the oil tree; and he
 would set in the desert the firtree and the pinetree and the boxtree
 together. For what end will the Lord do all this? That they may see
 and know and consider and understand together that the hand of the
 Lord hath done this ... For what end? To see and to know and
 understand together, that he hath done and wrought all this for the
 good of the whole flock ... Love the sheep, love the lambs, love
 all, tender all, cherish and countenance all ... and if the poorest
 Christian, the most mistaken Christian, shall desire to live
 peaceably and quietly under you, let him be protected. (70)

With ever-greater certainty, Cromwell conducted these debates within himself and then tried to explain the conclusions of the internal forum to others. In 1653, for example, Cromwell wrote to his son-in-law Charles Fleetwood about his problems with religious radicals in the Nominated Assembly. Despite all his efforts to those representing "the various forms of godliness in this nation" to love one another, he found their mutual antipathies obstructing the way forward. He wrote: "yet it much falls out as when the two Hebrews were rebuked; you know upon whom they turned their displeasure. If everyone (instead of contending) would justify his form of judgement by love and meekness, wisdom would be justified of her children." (71) This became a subject of sympathetic debate between them. The reference is to Moses and to the events described in Exodus chapter 2. Moses, brought up in Egypt as an Egyptian, sees an Egyptian overseer flogging a Hebrew slave and strikes dead the oppressor. Shortly afterwards, he intervenes in a fight between two Hebrews and one of them reproves him with the words: "who made you a prince and a judge over us? Do you mean to kill me, as you killed the Egyptian." This is just one of dozens of occasions on which Cromwell reveals how much he had meditated on himself as the new Moses, who had overthrown the oppressor. But how was he to control the warring religious factions? Sometimes his meditations on the Moses story have a more chilling edge to them. Writing to an old but estranged friend from Ireland in 1650, and justifying the brutality of his conquest, he wrote: "be not offended at the manner of God's working. Perhaps no other way was left. What if God accepted their zeal as he did that of Phineas whom reason might have called before a jury." (72) Phineas had found one of the Israelites copulating with a Moabite concubine and had performed summary execution on them, skewering them together with his spear. Moses had accepted this extra-legal action as a divinely-sanctioned execution. In the unresolved debate about the severity of Cromwell's actions in Ireland, this passage merits attention.

Cromwell spent 1648 meditating on the parallels between his own life and the life of Gideon, called from his life as a farmer to lead the armies of Israel. He winnowed the army, selecting only those who were faithful to the cause of YHWH and he led them to a great victory. He then executed the King of Midian and retired to his farm, much honoured. (73) This was clearly a vision that inspired him. But by the mid 1650s, it was the figure of Moses who inspired him: especially the story of the Exodus itself, of how Moses led the people out of slavery in Egypt across the Red Sea (Regicide) into the desert. It took the people of Israel forty years to cross the desert and to reach the promised land. Cromwell believed that the people of England had the same choices. If they failed to learn the responsibilities of freedom, failed to turn from the things of the flesh to the things of the spirit, it might take them that long or longer. They might even choose to trek back to Egypt. But if they learnt obedience to God, they could inherit it much sooner. (74) He did not mind that the Regicide did not lead into an immediate Canaan. But he yearned to lead them from the desert to the Promised Land. It was not to be.

I could go on forever on Cromwell as Moses; or examine the shorter intense episodes in which Cromwell explored the likenesses, the parallels between his life and those of David, of Josiah the iconoclast, of Joshua.

Instead I will close. My conclusion is simple. If we are to get beyond the received interpretations of Cromwell, we need to listen to the silences in the record of him; or at any rate to put in our hearing aids and pay attention. Within the white sound of unsafe sources, there are still small voices to be picked out. We need to recognize that the silence of the record is not neutral. If we try to make sense of a life by assuming that the answers lie in the evidence that has survived without weighing the significance and the probabilities of the lost and silent parts of his life, we will introduce distortions. And if we do not hear and understand his words with the ears and the knowledge that his intended audience would have had, we miss most of all. Perhaps one day someone will find a box with 200 unknown letters of Cromwell in it. Meanwhile, the great general and troubled leader of his people, the man hailed by John Milton as "our chief of men" (75) has many secrets to yield to those with ears to hear.

(1) This paper is a tribute to Paul Christianson, from whom I have learnt so much as a scholar and as someone who shares his learning so generously with students and colleagues. The paper I gave at the colloquium in his honour was on Cromwell and Toleration, but it is unripe for publication. I am making new recoveries that are proving hard to assimilate. In its place I am publishing this paper, which is a significantly developed version of a paper given at the University of Alabama in March 2001.

(2) All this is drawn from my life of Oliver Cromwell in the New Dictionary of National Biography [hereafter cited as New DNBJ (forthcoming, 2004).

(3) The classic account is Dennis Murphy, Cromwell in Ireland (Dublin, 1883), and it has been softened and not abandoned in most Irish accounts ever since. A major attempt at rehabilitation was attempted by Tom Reilly, Cromwell: An Honourable Enemy (London, 1999) but this has been largely rejected by other scholars, and the leading study would now generally be held to be J. Scott Wheeler's Cromwell in Ireland (New York, 1999).

(4) K. Bottigheimer, English Money and Irish Land," the 'Adventurers' in the Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland (Oxford, 1971).

(5) G.K. Chesterton, A Short History of England (Toronto, 1917), p. 134.

(6) I have developed these ideas a bit further in two earlier essays: "The historian and the historical filter," in Peter Geach et al. The Past and the Present: Problems of Understanding (Oxford, 1993), pp. 93-100; and in "Introduction" to S. Caldecott and J. Morrill (eds.), Eternity in Time: Christopher Dawson and the Catholic Idea of History (Edinburgh, 1997), pp. 1-10.

(7) More fully developed in J. Morrill and P. Baker, "Oliver Cromwell and the sons of Zeruiah," in J. Peacey (ed.), The Regicides and the Execution of Charles 1, (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 14-35.

(8) J. Morrill, Cheshire 1630-1660." County Government and Society during the 'English Revolution' (Oxford, 1974).

(9) Published as J. Morrill, "Sir William Brereton and England's Wars of Religion," Journal of British Studies, 24 (1985), 311-32.

(10) (1976). A recast edition with a modified title, Revolt in the Provinces: the English People and the Tragedies of War 1634-1648 (New York, 2000), contains two essays of self-reflection relevant to this discussion.

(11) J. Morrill, "William Dowsing: the bureaucratic puritan" in J. Morrill, E Slack, D. Woolf (eds.), Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1992), 173-203; rewritten and expanded as 'William Dowsing and the administration of iconoclasm in the puritan England', The Journal of William Dowsing (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 1-29.

(12) J. Morrill, Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (London, 1990), pp. 19-48.

(13) All citations to Cromwell's letters come from the edition by Thomas Carlyle (1845), and published in many subsequent editions. All these editions have their own pagination but retain the letters in their original sequence. The edition revised by S.C. Lomas, The Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell (3 vols., London, 1904) has more accurate transcriptions than earlier editions, and it is this edition which is cited, but by item number not page. Cromwell's letter to Mr Storie, dated 11 Jan. 1636 is letter 1 in all editions.

(14) Morrill, Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution, pp. 38-42.

(15) Ibid., pp. 26-32.

(16) Ibid., pp. 40-44.

(17) The loose end 1 consider as potentially exciting as the references to Storie and Wells in letter 1 is the afterthought in letter 2 (11 Nov. 1638) in which Cromwell asks his cousin, Elizabeth St. John, to remind her husband to honour his "promise to write about Mr. Wrath of Epping" about whom he is very anxious to learn. Why?

(18) This section follows closely material in my essay for the Oxford DNB; but it is broadly compatible with the narrative framework of all the leading biographies. I will list here only the three excellent recent ones: B. Coward, Cromwell (London, 1991); P. Gaunt, Oliver Cromwell (Oxford, 1996), J.C. Davis, Cromwell (London, 2001). Each of these has its own excellent bibliography.

(19) Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, letter 2, 13 Oct. 1638.

(20) Letter 16, 11 Sept. 1638.

(21) All phrases from his speech to the Nominated Assembly of 4 July 1653. In all citations to the speeches, I have used the readily available versions edited by Ivan Roots, The Speeches of Oliver Cromwell (London, 1989). This is an inexpensive paperback edition without notes, but the texts are based on those prepared for an Oxford D.Phil. and published as The speeches of Oliver Cromwell edited by C.L. Stainer (1901). The only full discussion of the various editions of Cromwell's words is to be found in J. Morrill, "Textualising and Contextualising Cromwell," Historical Journal 33 (1990), 629-39. The phrases from Cromwell's speech of 4 July 1653 are in Roots, Cromwell, pp. 8-27.

(22) Ibid., p. 24.

(23) P. Gaunt, "To Tyburn and beyond: the mortal remains of Oliver Cromwell," Cromwelliana (1986), 13-24.

(24) W.C. Abbott, The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell (4 vols., Cambridge, Mass., 1938-48). This edition is not recommended for study, containing far too many errors of transcription and judgement (Morrill, "Textualising," 629-39).

(25) Roots, Speeches, p. 189 (speech of 4 Feb. 1658).

(26) Carlyle, letter 2, 13 Oct. 1638.

(27) For details, see note 16.

(28) J.L. Sanford, Studies and Illustrations of the Great Rebellion (London, 1858), at pp. 264-67.

(29) The publishing history can easily be checked through the author or title index of D.G. Wing (ed.), A Short Title Index of Books Printed in England 1641-1700 (3 vols., 1945-51) and later rescensions; or through the search engine of Early English Books Online (wwwlib.umi.com/eebo).

(30) [J.Heath], Flagellum, third edn (London, 1665), pp. 14-18.

(31) Not quite everything. The version in Flagellum clearly conflates the events surrounding Cromwell's return to the Short Parliament (April 1640) and to the Long Parliament (October 1640). This is an error which led Sanford to dismiss it as unreliable in 1858. I consider it to be the sort of error that is very easily a trick of memory. Our ability to verify so much information about the obscure men discussed in the account is far more reassuring than this is disturbing. I am not giving the details of the proofs on this occasion since this reconstruction is a joint effort of Andrew Barclay and myself and he should take most of the credit when his essay appears in The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1640-1660.

(32) F. Bremer, Congregational Communion: Clerical Friendship in the Anglo-American Puritan Community 1610-92 (Boston, 1994).

(33) J.K. Hosmer, Winthrop's Journal: "History of New England" 1630-1649 (2 vols, New York, 1908), II 64-6, 118; Records of the Court of Assistants of Massachusetts (2 vols., Boston, 1904), II, 117-19.

(34) For a recent spectrum of ideas of what took place there, see M. Mendle (ed.), The Putney Debates of 1647: the Army, the Levellers and the English State (Cambridge, 2000).

(35) There are two major editions of the debates. The first, low-key and very literal as a transcription was edited by C.H.Firth, Selections from the Papers' of William Clarke, 4 vols., (1891-1901), I, 226-418. The second, a much more excited version, more freely transcribed is by A.S.P.Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty (third edn, London, 1986), pp. 1-124. I have a strong preference for the earlier version and will cite it here.

(36) Firth, Clarke, I., 300-1.

(37) This is the great and repeated cry of Henry Ireton on 30 October, as at Firth, Clarke, I, 306.

(38) F. Henderson, "Reading and writing, the text of the Putney Debates," in Mendle (ed.), Putney Debates, pp. 36-52.

(39) The story is told by Lesley le Claire in "The survival of the manuscript" in Mendle (ed.), The Putney Debates, pp. 19-35.

(40) S.R. Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War 1642-1649, 4 vols., (1893), IV, 252-96.

(41) Morrill and Baker, "Sons of Zeruiah," pp. 22-23. For more on the mysterious events on 5 and 6 November, see Firth, Clarke I, 440-42.

(42) Firth, Clarke I, 259.

(43) Ibid., 281-85.

(44) Ibid., 277, 369-70.

(45) Ibid., 369-70.

(46) Ibid., 370-71.

(47) Ibid., 376-77.

(48) Ibid., 378-83. This is possibly the longest speech recorded at Putney.

(49) Ibid., 407-409.

(50) Ibid., 417.

(51) Sir John Berkeley, The memoirs of Sir John Berkeley (London, 1699), pp. 70-74.

(52) R.S. Paul, The Lord Protector (London, 1955), passim.

(53) L. Miller (ed.), John Milton and the Oldenburg Safeguard (New York, 1985), pp. 39-49.

(54) Provisional figures in preparation for a book to be called Oliver Cromwell and his bible, forthcoming.

(55) Carlyle, letter 67 (2 Sept. 1648).

(56) Carlyle, letter 136 (3 Aug. 1650).

(57) Ibid.

(58) Paul, Lord Protector, appendix 2.

(59) Psalm 27:3.

(60) Psalm 63:1.

(61) Psalm 130:5ff.

(62) Hebrews 12:23.

(63) Psalm 16:9.

(64) A play on Philippians 4:11.

(65) Carlyle, letter 2 (13 Oct. 1638).

(66) Ibid.

(67) Carlyle, letter 61 (28 June 1648).

(68) W. Allen, A Faithfull Memorial in Somers Tracts (16 vols., 1748-52), VI, 500-501.

(69) Roots, Speeches, pp. 26-27.

(70) Ibid., p. 22.

(71) Carlyle, letter 189 (22 Aug. 1653).

(72) Carlyle, letter 118 (to Lord Wharton: 1 Jan. 1650).

(73) Ibid., letter 61 (28 June 1648).

(74) For an example of the way he explored this theme, see Roots, Speeches pp. 29-31 (from his speech to the 1st Protectorate Parliament on 4 Sept. 1654).

(75) The opening line of John Milton's sonnet "To the Lord General Cromwell" which welcomes him back as the victor from the battle of Worcester in September 1651, but warns him against the hazards of peace. For the text of the poem and a full discussion of it, see A.B. Worden, "Milton and Cromwell," in Ian Gentles, John Morrill, and Blair Worden (eds.), Soldiers, Writers and Statesmen of the English Revolution (Cambridge, 1998).

Selwyn College, Cambridge