UK Edition
Providence Lost by Paul Lay, review: a warts-and-all portrait of Cromwell's troubled rule
Minoo Dinshaw applauds this enlightening study of the often overlooked rule of Oliver Cromwell
In the summer of 1641, several future leaders of the Parliamentarian cause in England received bad news from the other side of the globe. Providence Island, an experiment in righteous Puritan government 110 miles off the coast of Nicaragua, had fallen ingloriously to the Spaniards. One of the island’s governors had precious little good to say of his fellow colonists: “I never lived amongst men of more spleen nor of less wit to conceal it.”
The colony had been born in the earliest years of King Charles I’s controversial Personal Rule, and funded by the Puritan grandees who opposed the royal government in church as well as state.
It was a microcosm and cynosure of their dreams for their own kingdom’s domestic future. Providence Island perished just as the factions that would fight the British civil wars for a decade (leaving aside the precociously belligerent Scots) were coming into being.
Yet to some in England, Providence’s uninspiring-sounding story retained a mysterious power. From 1653-1659 England, Scotland and Ireland were to be forcibly yoked together under the rule of Oliver Cromwell (followed, briefly, by his eldest son Richard) as Lord Protector: monarchical in all but title, extracting higher taxes and issuing more peremptory commands than Charles I had ever managed.
For Cromwell, Providence Island was a portent, while its namesake, the overarching, baleful, metaphysical structure of divine providence itself, the omniscience and omnipresence of God’s foreknowledge, was the Protector’s supreme guiding principle. “History,” Cromwell once instructed his sadly inattentive son, “is the working out of the first cause, God’s will, divine providence.” In pondering both the intentions of his deity and the history of his country, Cromwell ineluctably turned west. “Providence seemed to lead us hither”, he wrote in 1650 to the Speaker of the Commons, alluding to the far-flung American conquests of the Spanish crown; the already long-lost island and the Calvinist dictum seem by then to have all but fused in his mind.
In selecting the story of the doomed Puritan colony to serve as the overture to his new book on Cromwell’s Protectorate, Paul Lay – editor of History Today, the country’s most readably rigorous historical periodical – displays an enviable instinct for proportion.
An experienced authority and essayist, both popularising and edifying, but a debut author at book length, Lay makes ruthless structural decisions. He leaps over the civil wars to the execution of the king, then skims over the early years of republican government before Cromwell emerged as the government’s head in name as well as practice. Once within the strictly delineated bounds of the Protectorate itself, Lay allows himself ample time and space to linger on those few confusing years, following a thread that contrives to carry both thematic variety and tragic, narrative force.
On December 16 1653, Cromwell first assumed the old title, but new office, of Lord Protector. The ad hoc ceremony was so drab that most of London failed to notice. As Protector, Cromwell was perhaps the most powerful ruler up to that point in English history (Lay sensibly points out that comparisons to modern, totalitarian leaders falter largely on inadequate early modern state infrastructure). But Cromwell’s (and his standing army’s) inclination towards religious toleration still put him at odds with his Parliaments, and he was always chronically short of money.
If the whole period of the 17th century is shockingly unfamiliar to too many general readers, the Protectorate is most of all so. Partly this is a question of the imaginative distance involved in relating to an era of such apparently alien zealotry – a time for both fanatics and pragmatists, presided over by a fanatical pragmatist.
Cromwell was, for instance, instrumental in arranging discreet encouragement for Jews to return to England for the first time since Edward I’s ban in 1290. Other biographers of the Protector have assumed that in this context he kept commercial considerations chiefly at heart.
Lay, by contrast, insists that Cromwell’s true primary motive was radically millenarian, religious belief: “Christ’s kingdom on earth, it was prophesied, could only come once the Jews had been converted. Here was an opportunity to accelerate history.”
Lay conducts an enlightening tour of very peculiar territory, first in his treatment of the disastrous regional tyranny of the Cromwell-appointed Major-Generals, ordered to regulate English morals under martial law, and then of the frankly bizarre case of James Nayler, a charismatic, breakaway Quaker who impersonated Jesus and inadvertently revolutionised the Cromwellian constitution.
One episode that all but steals the show returns to Cromwell’s providence-inspired westward gaze: the story of the “Western Design”, a project Lay traces to a most unlikely Cromwellian. Thomas Gage was an English Catholic turned Spanish Dominican turned Puritan author; the man who introduced both chocolate and the burrito to the anglophone mind.
With a nice sense of drama, Lay pinpoints Gage and Cromwell’s “fatal coming together… It would result in the death of one and bring doubt, uncertainty and, ultimately, failure to the other”. Gage spun the Protector an exotic tale, the chance to emulate Oliver’s boyhood idol Sir Walter Raleigh with a great, predestined seaborne victory against Catholic Spain and its “lazy sinful people”.
But the expedition Cromwell dispatched in May 1655 for an amphibious assault on Hispaniola was pilloried by its commander’s own, new-married bride as “a wicked army… sent out without arms or provisions”. Roundly batted off from Hispaniola by the Spanish, the Protectorate’s privateers made do with the then far less promising prize of Jamaica, where the enthusiastic Gage was soon to succumb to dysentery. The beginnings of Cromwell’s intensifying fear that providence had turned against him are identified by Lay with this anticlimactic adventure.
The subtlest minds at the Lord Protector’s disposal: the spymaster John Thurloe; the moderate lawyer Bulstrode Whitelocke; the conservative Scots-Irish magnate Lord Broghill, and Cromwell’s own, able, younger son, Henry, all came to realise that the Protectorate could endure only by being properly defined under law. The safest way of accomplishing this would be for Oliver to become what he had displaced, and formally accept the British Crowns. But the still powerful, fiscally thirsty army refused to reconcile itself to the royal title, and also justly suspected most of the lawyers and civilian politicians of opposing religious liberty.
On both these grounds Cromwell inclined nearer to his troops than his monarchically leaning ministers, and refused to “build up Jericho again”. Nothing could have convinced him more fatally of his own inner unworthiness than surrender to such a compromise.
When Cromwell died in September 1658 his succession by his featherweight elder son Richard was based on a deathbed nomination, quite possibly fudged by Thurloe et al, achieving little prestige, political heft, or legal standing. The return of the traditional Stuart monarchy, on its own terms, was to follow, through what, in hindsight, resembled force of nature.
The Protectorate years (as well as the more strictly if notionally republican Commonwealth that dovetailed the regime’s beginning and end) used to be described as a void amid the traditional lists of kings, “the Interregnum”. Paul Lay depicts in bold strokes a miniature portrait of what transpired in between the Charleses, and even what, given certain different outcomes, might just about have persisted.
Providence Lost: The Rise and Fall of Cromwell's Protectorate is published by Head of Zeus at £30. To order your copy for £25 call 0844 871 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop