Oliver Cromwell: Commander in Chief

by Ronald Hutton

Yale University Press 2024

The long-awaited second volume of Oliver Cromwell’s life by the British historian Ronald Hutton takes us from the end of the First English Civil War in 1646 (during which the civil war general has risen to occupy a place in the centre of power) to Cromwell’s coup against the Rump Parliament of 1653. At the beginning of the book he is still second-in-command of Parliament’s army, the earnest patron of the religious radicals and a parliamentarian increasingly out of step with his own Parliament. By the end, he is the undisputed master of the British Isles, who, through his cantankerous soldiers, holds more sway over the state and all three nations than any English king, least of all Charles I, could have dreamed of. Hutton established in the first volume of his acclaimed biography that the Cromwell handed down to us from Victorian liberal mythologists such as Samuel Rawlinson Gardiner was in fact a devious political operative, with a streak of cruelty and calculation running through him that cannot be easily reconciled with godliness. Hutton scorns old myths: ‘Cromwell’s militarism, evangelism, piety and republicanism can make him look more akin to the current American radical Christian right than to a Victorian British liberal.’

The Cromwell in this volume would seem to follow events as much as he leads them. In the rising tensions between Parliament and the army over the post-war settlement and the unfruitful negotiations with the king in 1647-8, those between the political radicals in his camp and the general staff (most dramatically represented at the Putney Debates), those between opponents and advocates of the king’s trial and execution and those between the army and the Rump in 1652-3, Hutton gives us a Cromwell who (possibly in good faith, and possibly out of calculation) tries to mediate between both camps, only to throw in his lot with the men who formed the bedrock of his power and prestige. ‘When tension developed…’ we are told, ‘…he always began by trying to reconcile the two. When that proved impossible, however, loyalty and expedience both ensured that he would always side with the soldiers.’ Hutton’s juxtaposition of Cromwell the man of action, and the Cromwell who slyly puts up a wet finger to see which way the political wind (or in his own language, divine will) is blowing before throwing himself into action, gets us to the core of what made him such a brutally effective politician.

Hutton’s astonishing command of the source material is once again in evidence, as he plunges us into the confusing events of 1647, during which the hapless King Charles I was passed around like a hot potato from one camp to another. He makes a compelling case that Oliver Cromwell was likely the individual who encouraged Cornet Joyce to seize Charles I from Holdenby House in June 1647, for fear he would fall into the hands of their Presbyterian rivals within the army and Parliament, who wanted to push upon Charles their own post-war settlement, which would have been much less favourable to Cromwell and his fellow-travellers in the variegated Protestant sects.

The military campaigns that Cromwell fought in this period are recounted in superb narrative fashion just as he did in his first volume, with a literary aplomb that makes for thrilling reading as he recaptures the physical landscapes that Cromwell would have passed with his men. Consider this evocative description of the south-eastern coast of Ireland during Cromwell’s 1649 campaign: ‘To the right hand, initially, rose the Wicklow Mountains, now in their rusty red and tawny yellow autumn colours.’ His masterful generalship is more apparent in this second volume, as by 1650 he is undisputed commander-in-chief with the withdrawal of Thomas Fairfax from public life. One of Hutton’s finest achievements is to synthesise the conflicting narratives about what happened at Drogheda in 1649, which, thanks to Irish nationalist grievance and royalist propaganda, is regarded as an especially black mark on Cromwell’s record. What is clear is that, whilst the details are exaggerated (most of the civilian population of Drogheda actually survived the taking of the town), Cromwell undoubtedly bears moral responsibility for the slaughter, which was staggering even by the standards of the time.

Fresh from his crushing victories at Dunbar and Worcester in 1650-51, Hutton shows how on his return to the capital, his rise to supreme power was abetted by his own deft public relations, as he allowed himself to be seen as a champion of reforms that he could not in fact guarantee, setting the stage for his coup in April 1653. In this definitive study of the English Puritan, Hutton brings out all his qualities – his cleverness, his dishonesty, his charm – to present the most three-dimensional portrait of Cromwell ever achieved.

Aaron Kyereh-Mireku is a writer and reviewer living in London.