Oliver Cromwell’s Popular Image in Nineteenth-Century England

  • J. P. D. Dunbabin
Chapter

Abstract

I suppose that, for a historian, the most powerful myths are those that survive continuously and still influence political conduct centuries later. One example is the tradition of vidov dan and the battle of Kossovo among the Serbs, first under Turkish rule and then more recently in their own state. Nearer home, in Northern Ireland, we have King Billy, the siege of Londonderry and battle of the Boyne — immeasurably more important than the romantic Scots memories of Bonnie Prince Charlie and Culloden, precisely because they still reflect contemporary realities and influence everyday conduct. There is, too, a second category of great myths — those which, after long lying dormant, are deliberately adopted in modern times to serve as the symbol, perhaps even the motive principle, of a new state. Thus Kwame Nkrumah had the Gold Coast, the first black African colony to achieve independence, re-named after the old empire of Ghana; and this soon became the standard African pattern. An even more striking manifestation of this phenomenon was the re-creation in Palestine of the state of Israel, whose citizens speak an artificially revived language (Hebrew), and whose soldiers are taken to a 1,900-year-old fortress to swear that ‘Masada shall not fall again’.

Keywords

Seventeenth Century Popular Image English History Friendly Society Bodleian Library 
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Notes

  1. 1.
    Men were conscious of both Cromwell’s and Napoleon’s military dictatorships as unpleasant sequels to revolution. But the Cromwellian example was (in Russia as elsewhere) largely subsumed in the far greater figure of Napoleon. So it was of Bonapartist leanings that Trotsky was accused (especially in 1923), and a’ soviet Thermidor’ that he feared in 1928: Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky 1921–1929 (London, 1959), pp. 11-12, 94-5, 220, 458-64.Google Scholar
  2. 2.
    D. Mack Smith, Cavour and Garibaldi 1860 (Cambridge, 1954), pp. 55, 324, 374; Christopher Hill, God’s Englishman (London, 1970), pp. 269, 272-3; Deutscher, op. cit., p. 220.Google Scholar
  3. 3.
    The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April, 1922-August, 1939, ed. N. H. Baynes (2 vols., London, 1942), I, 429. As far as I know, Hitler did not himself return to this theme, though he did observe that it would need a Cromwell rather than a Cripps to bring the Labour party to power: Hitler’s Table Talk 1941–1944, ed. H. R. Trevor-Roper (London, 1953), p. 368. But this view of Cromwell was quite widely held in Hitler’s Germany. It is carefully scrutinized in Engeland en Cromwell, an Inaugural Lecture delivered by Professor P. J. van Winter at Groningen in November 1939, and reprinted in his Verkenning en Onderzoek (Groningen, 1965), pp. 11-32. A little earlier the ‘comparison between the German Führer and our English Protector’ (which he had encountered also in England) moved the late Sir Ernest Barker to add to his Berlin lectures an epilogue on The English Puritan Revolution and the German National Socialist Revolution’, politely but firmly distinguishing the two and stressing Cromwell’s legacy of toleration (Oliver Cromwell and the English People, Cambridge, 1937). And the same parallel probably underlies Mirko Jelusich’s powerful novel, Oliver Cromwell (Berlin, 1939; ET. 1939).Google Scholar
  4. 4.
    ‘The Political Uses of History in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England’, Past and Present, 36 (1967), 87–105.Google Scholar
  5. 5.
    A set of this material is being deposited in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. The project will be described in Past and Present.Google Scholar
  6. 6.
    Katharine M. Briggs, A Dictonary of British Folk-Tales in the English Language, Part B, II (London, 1971), 21; cf. 3, 20, 25-7, 52-3, 68-70.Google Scholar
  7. 7.
    M. W. Beresford, The Lost Villages of England (London, 1963 impression), p. 98; Alan Smith, ‘The Image of Cromwell in Folklore and Tradition’, Folklore, LXXIX (1968), 17-39.Google Scholar
  8. 8.
    E. C. Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Bronte (Edinburgh, 1924 edn.), pp. 11–12; Bradford Observer, 27_Dec. 1849; Leeds Mercury, 13_Dec. 1834; B. T. Copley, The Events of 1600. A Warning to Electors (Bradford, 1868).Google Scholar
  9. 9.
    Things Past Redress (London, 1937), pp. 40–2.Google Scholar
  10. 10.
    The Life and Poetical Works of George Crabbe, By his Son, (1901 edn.), pp. 301-2; Autobiographical Recollections of Sir John Bowring (1877), pp. 31-2; January Searle, Life of Ebenezer Elliott (1850), pp. 70-75. Ebenezer Elliott (The Corn Law Rhymer’) was to churn out great quantities of verse in Cromwell’s praise.Google Scholar
  11. 11.
    For an examination of the first century of this process, see B. S. Stewart, ‘The Cult of the Royal Martyr’, Church History, XXXVIII (1969). At a more popular level it is well expressed by the following lines from an early nineteenth-century Oxfordshire mumming play: I am King Cole, and I carry my stump, Hurrah for King Charles! down with old Noll’s Rump! I am King William of blessed memory, Who came and pulled down the high gallows-tree, And brought us all peace and pros-pe-ri-ty. (M. Sturge Gretton, A Corner of the Cotswolds through the Nineteenth Century, 1914, pp. 24n., 217–21.)Google Scholar
  12. 12.
    This service provoked counter-demonstrations. From 1693–1735 a club met annually to dine on calf s head and toast ‘the patriots who killed the tyrant’, cf. M. D. George, English Political Caricature to 1792 (Oxford, 1959), p. 70n;’ some rowdy young aristocrats were mobbed for such a feast in 1735. Sylas Neville records his own tavern dinners on calves’ heads with regicide toasts, in the seventies and later’. See also Alan Smith, loc. cit., p. 19 (though the subsequent quotation from Fielding seems to me to be allegorical rather than literal).Google Scholar
  13. 13.
    I am told that it was still being celebrated in one Hampshire village in the 1930s: boys not wearing oak sprigs were called ‘dirty-socks’.Google Scholar
  14. 14.
    Smith, loc. cit., pp. 32–6; George Sturt, A Small Boy in the Sixties (Cambridge, 1927), pp. 92-3; E. Burt, Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland (5th edn., ed. R. Jamieson, 1818), I, 225. It must, however, be conceded that Napoleon (‘Boney’) soon overtook Cromwell as an ogre.Google Scholar
  15. 15.
    An exception is the attribution in 1776 to the American rebels of ‘Old Oliver’s Cause/No Monarch or Laws’ (M. D. George, op. cit., p. 152).Google Scholar
  16. 16.
    M. D. George, op. cit., passim; Hill, God’s Englishman, p. 272.Google Scholar
  17. 17.
    John Cannon, The Fox-North Coalition (Cambridge, 1969), pp. xi, 186, 231–2.Google Scholar
  18. 18.
    M. D. George, op. cit., pp. 207–8, 213, 221-2.Google Scholar
  19. 19.
    Smith, loc. cit., p. 35.Google Scholar
  20. 20.
    R ecollections of Whitefield and its Neighbourhood (Manchester, 1897), pp. 10–11.Google Scholar
  21. 21.
    The White Hat … (reprinted and sold by J. Marshall, Newcastle, 1819).Google Scholar
  22. 22.
    Public Record Office, H.O. 42/123 and 124; J. A. Froude, Thomas Carlyle: A History of his Life in London 1834–81 (London, 1911 edn.), I, 336; Samuel Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical (London, 1967 edn.), pp. 26-7; The Poor Man’s Guardian, 15_April 1831.Google Scholar
  23. 23.
    Morning Advertiser, 31_July 1866. The allusion is to Cromwell’s words on dissolving the Rump: ‘O Sir Henry Vane! Sir Henry Vane! The Lord deliver me from Sir Henry Vane!’Google Scholar
  24. 24.
    Moreover Major Cartwright, the ‘Father of Reform’, who did so much to establish the Hampden Clubs, idolized not the seventeenth century but the Anglo-Saxon Constitution (to the extent of recommending a Witenagemot to the insurgents of the Greek War of Independence): H. J. W. Osborne, John Cartwright (Cambridge, 1970), esp. pp. 92, 140, 147 et seq.Google Scholar
  25. 25.
    Legacy to Labourers (London, 1834), Letter II, pp. 52–7.Google Scholar
  26. 26.
    An exception is The Political Penny Magazine (Bodleian Library, Oxford, and Seligman Collection, Columbia University, New York). In 1836 this set out to instruct the working people on radical lines as a counter to the propaganda of ‘the Education and Improvement-of-Society-mongers’; it dwelt lovingly on the execution of Charles I as an illustration of the proper fate of tyrants and of the principle that, in matters of state, might is right. Since the Magazine admitted that the labouring people were still the weaker party, its practical relevance was slight and its influence probably inconsiderable.Google Scholar
  27. 27.
    Speaking to a protest meeting against the conviction of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, Robert Lowery invoked the memory of Algernon Sidney, Emmet and Peterloo, and concluded that ‘The spirit which brought the first Charles to the block was not yet extinct’: Newcastle Chronicle, 19 April 1834.Google Scholar
  28. 28.
    Northern Star, 13 July 1839 and 11 July 1840.Google Scholar
  29. 29.
    By Charles Westerton, in The Operative (ed. Bronterre O’Brien), 16 Dec. 1838.Google Scholar
  30. 30.
    The Commonwealthsman, 12_April 1842 (P.R.O., H.0.45); Journal (1850), p. 150; The Bridge of History over the Gulf of Time (1871), pp. 9-10.Google Scholar
  31. 31.
    Carlyle’s principal works on this subject were On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1841), ch. vi, and Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches (2 vols., 1845).Google Scholar
  32. 32.
    When General Wavell was asked in 1942 to become a second Oliver, he replied: ‘Isn’t Lincoln an even better example of what we want today — wise, simple, with far-reaching vision, great faith and enduring courage? … But is there really anything very wrong with our leadership today, can you find a man to lead us with greater courage, greater faith in England, more power of inspiration than the P.M.?’ (Sir George Mallaby, From My Level, London, 1965, pp. 91-6).Google Scholar
  33. 33.
    For Miall, see The Nonconformist, 15_Oct. 1845, p. 709; Cowen included Cromwellian and Commonwealth allusions in a number of his speeches, and also owned and guided the highly Cromwellian Newcastle Chronicle; for Spurgeon, see his Autobiography, IV (London, 1900), 279-80; for Guinness Rogers, see his tribute in Stuart Reid, Sir Richard Tangye (London, 1908), p. 261.Google Scholar
  34. 34.
    Michael Hurst, ‘Liberal versus Liberal: The General Election of 1874 in Bradford and Sheffield’, Historical Journal, XV (1972), 713.Google Scholar
  35. 35.
    The Congregationalist, 1873, pp. 50-1.Google Scholar
  36. 36.
    Stuart Reid, op. cit., pp. 201–3. Tangye’s other heroes (Ibid., p. 72) were: Lord John Russell (Parliamentary Reform, Repeal of Test and Corporation Acts), Gladstone (‘the hero of a hundred rights for liberty and progress’), Cobden (Free Trade), Bright (‘peace and goodwill among the nations’), Forster (Quaker, Education Act), Abraham Lincoln, who represented ‘more than the triumph of self-help, since, at the height of his power, braving all opposition, he let the oppressed go free’.Google Scholar
  37. 37.
    Banbury Advertiser, 2_April 1857.Google Scholar
  38. 38.
    Congregational Year Book, 1877, p. 122. In this as in so many other matters Gladstone differed from his followers, being no great devotee of Cromwell.Google Scholar
  39. 39.
    As Carlyle remarked, it was difficult to build such figures as Pym and Vane into really convincing heroes. If one is determined on hero-worship, only Charles I and just possible Hampden seem at all plausible as alternatives to Cromwell.Google Scholar
  40. 40.
    Past and Present (Centenary edn., 1897), pp. 222–5.Google Scholar
  41. 41.
    On Heroes (1897 edn.), p. 228. ‘Orson’: a rough, valiant person.Google Scholar
  42. 42.
    Alexander Ireland, Recollections of George Dawson and his Lectures in Manchester in 1846–7 (Manchester, 1882), pp. 5–8; George Dawson, Biographical Lectures (London, 1886), passim.Google Scholar
  43. 43.
    York Herald, 9_Dec. 1848; handbill printed by Cheney and Sons of Banbury; Bristol Examiner, 9_March 1850; P.R.O., H.O. 45, 3136 (reports on Oldham lectures); Leeds Mercury, 18 Oct. 1851.Google Scholar
  44. 44.
    Oxford Chronicle, 14 Feb. 1852.Google Scholar
  45. 45.
    J. L. Garvin, The Life of Joseph Chamberlain, I (London, 1932), 57–8.Google Scholar
  46. 46.
    ‘The Liberal Revival in Northamptonshire, 1880–1895’, Historical Journal, XII (1969), 99–100. Of the half-dozen books named at the head of this article, one only maintains the attitude common enough amongst conservative writers in the pre-Carlyle period. Sir Reginald Palgrave … claims to put before us, as a true portraitGoogle Scholar
  47. 47.
    Pamela Horn, ‘Nineteenth-Century Naseby Farm Workers’. Northamptonshire Past and Present, IV (1968), 167–71.Google Scholar
  48. 48.
    Of the 12,800 societies returned in 1876, eight or possibly ten were named after Cromwell rather fewer after any other seventeenth-century ruler: Parliamentary Papers, 1877, LXXVII.Google Scholar
  49. 49.
    Another possible guide to the attitudes of the inarticulate is the sale of Staffordshire pottery portraits. These are not easy to interpret: there are apparently no portraits of (e.g.) Lord Palmerston; Queen Victoria was a frequent subject until about 1875, but not in the later part of her reign, when she is usually thought to have reached the height of her popularity; and more figures were made of Napoleon than of anyone else. Ceramic representations of Cromwell are rare — there are none in the Stoke Museum. But they do exist: one in the Willett Collection at Brighton dates from c. 1780; and P. D. G. Pugh illustrates three pairs of Charles I and Cromwell, together with a solo portrait of Charles, in Staffordshire Portrait Figures and Allied Subjects of the Victorian Era (London, 1970), pp. 9, 95, 124, and A 170-1,175. (Information from Mr. A. R. Mountford, Director of the Stoke City Museum).Google Scholar
  50. 50.
    J. A. Bridges records the disappearance in the 1890s of the toast, ‘Church and State’, from Conservative dinners: ‘Its removal in favour of “Ministers of all Denominations” if a bitter morsel for old Tories to swallow was due to the increasing importance of the Dissenting element. …’ (Reminiscences of a Country Politician, London 1906, p. 86).Google Scholar
  51. 51.
    There were, of course, sectarian historical novels. But G. A. Henty (perhaps the archetypal author of Victorian boys’ adventure stories), while observing that ‘men are still almost as much divided as they were then as to the merits of the quarrel’, chose the theme of Friends, though divided: a Tale of the Civil War (London, 1883). Similarly, though his Orange and Green: a Tale of the Boyne and Limerick (London, 1888) was written from the Irish point of view to illuminate the current Irish question, it ends in reconciliation, inter-marriage, the voluntary restitution of estates and service in the British army. And the heroes of Bonnie Prince Charlie (London, 1888) and In The Irish Brigade (London, 1901) both finally return to live happily at home.Google Scholar
  52. 52.
    The Collect for 29_May (in the 1849_Prayer Book) mentions ‘the wicked designs of those traiterous, heady and high-minded men, who, under pretence of Religion and thy most holy Name, had contrived and well-nigh effected the utter destruction of this Church and Kingdom’, and prays for the strengthening of the queen ‘and all that are put in authority under her, with judgement and justice to cut off all such workers of iniquity as turn Religion into Rebellion, and Faith into Faction…’Google Scholar
  53. 53.
    The chief objections voiced were to the services’ anti-Roman Catholic language, to the remoteness of the events recorded, and to the impropriety of committing the Church to so warm an endorsement of Charles I. The services were finally discontinued in 1859. See Parl. Deb., 3rd ser., CLI and CLIII, and Liturgy and Worship, ed. W. K. Lowther Clarke with Charles Harris (1933 edn.), pp. 216-20.Google Scholar
  54. 54.
    Randolph Churchill, Winston S. Churchill II (London, 1967), 646–9. And as late as the 1950s Durham University abandoned its intention of naming a college after Cromwell in view of the opposition this aroused (Hill, God’s Englishman, p. 274).Google Scholar
  55. 55.
    This debate is analysed in an as yet unpublished article by Dr. H. C. G. Matthew, Christ Church, Oxford.Google Scholar
  56. 56.
    Parl. Deb., 4th series, XXXIV (June 1895), 1343. In this Morley was singularly imperceptive. Augustine Birrell had been shocked, when he imprudently mentioned Cromwell and Pitt to his Lancashire Irish constituents in 1886, at their living historical hatred, transmitted from generation to generation’ (Things Past Redress, p. 107). And the Rev. Silvester Home was soon to declare that, since criticism of Cromwell’s dealings with the King and Parliament had receded, ‘the last hope of Cromwell’s enemies’ lay in his dealings with Ireland (London Quarterly Review, July 1899). It may also be worth recalling, in this context, an Oxford anti-IRA graffiti of early 1972: ‘Cromwell come back. All is forgiven.’Google Scholar
  57. 57.
    Apart from the Irish, Cromwell’s only open critics at this time were protosocialists like Cunninghame Graham and J. Morrison Davidson, who rediscovered his treatment of the Levellers (which nineteenth-century radicals had largely ignored). But apparently 274 petitions were presented to Parliament against the erection of his statue (Parl. Deb., 4th series, LXXXIV, 589, June 1900).Google Scholar
  58. 58.
    Daily News, 26 April and 16 Sept. 1899.Google Scholar
  59. 59.
    Arena, Aug. 1900.Google Scholar
  60. 60.
    Cromwell’s readmission of the Jews was naturally much praised by Jewish intellectuals, and often linked with the subsequent prosperity of the British Empire.Google Scholar
  61. 61.
    The Times and The Scotsman, both of 15 Nov. 1899. Rosebery’s speech was also attacked from the ‘pro-Boer’ point of view by leading articles of the Daily Chronicle, 14 and 15 Nov. 1899.Google Scholar
  62. 62.
    The curse of Cromwell on you’ seems to have been a normal military oath (Robert Blatchford, Tales for the Marines, London, 1901, p. 7).Google Scholar
  63. 63.
    A. J. Marder, Fear God and Dread Nought (3 vols., London, 1952–9), II, passim, esp. 24, 434, 436, 449; National Review, Feb. 1903.Google Scholar
  64. 64.
    The Times, 14 and 15 Nov. 1899. The Daily Chronicle, 14 Nov. 1899, gently chided him for this’ secret longing for a good tyrant’.Google Scholar
  65. 65.
    While moving the rejection of the 1909_Budget, Lord Lansdowne cited Cromwell’s creation of an Upper House to protect ‘the people of England against “an omnipotent House of Commons — the horridest arbitrariness that ever existed in the world” ’(Parl. Deb., 4 H.L. Deb., 5th ser., 735). But for that great Cromwell enthusiast, the Congregationalist pastor and politician, C. S. Home, ‘the claim of the Peers to determine the financial policy of the country carried us back to the days when John Hampden broke the power of absolutism on this very question of the hereditary right to tax England apart from the consent of her representatives’ (W. B. Selbie, The Life of Charles Silvester Home, London, 1920, p. 207).Google Scholar
  66. 66.
    A. M. Gollin, Proconsul in Politics (London, 1964), p. 198.Google Scholar
  67. 67.
    At the first Cairo Conference: ‘Cromwell was a great man but he had one failing. He had been brought up in the tradition of the Armada to believe that Spain was still a great power. He made the mistake of supporting France against Spain and thereby establishing France as a great power. Do you think that that will be said of me? Germany is finished, though it may take some time to clean up the mess. The real problem now is Russia. I can’t get the Americans to see it.’ Sir John Wheeler-Bennett and Anthony Nicholls, The Semblance of Peace, London 1972, p. 290. See also Harold Macmillan, Winds of Change 1914–39 (London, 1966), p. 14.Google Scholar
  68. 68.
    L. S. Amery, My Political Life, III (London, 1955), 364–5; Parl. Deb., 5th ser., CCCLX (May 1940), 1150-1. Amery’s invocation of Cromwell was of course a private venture, but an official one was soon to be made with the choice of CROMWELL as the signal for ‘invasion imminent’: A. J. P. Taylor, English History 1914–1945 (Oxford, 1965), p. 499.Google Scholar

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© Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands 1975

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  • J. P. D. Dunbabin

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