Warts and All

Books read this week: God's Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (Christopher Hill) 7/10

And with Oliver Cromwell, there were a lot of warts to paint. Cromwell is a hard man to like, and God's Englishman doesn't try to hide his faults. The book is more a collection of essays about Cromwell's contribution to the revolution of the 1640s - and what happened in England between 1640 and 1660 was the first of the world's great revolutions, not matter how many historians want to refer to it as the "great rebellion" (handy tip: it's not a rebellion if it wins) - than a true biography.

The comparison between Napoleon and Cromwell towards the end of the book I found very interesting - it is not one that had occurred to me before, but once suggested it was obvious - two gifted generals who both saved and destroyed the revolutions they were supposed to protect. The only thing one can say about Napoleon is that he had Cromwell's example to learn from. Indeed this is one of the most fascinating things about the 1640s and 1650s in general. Weak and incompetent kings had been deposed, even killed before (Edward II, I'm looking at you). But to put the king on trial - to establish that the monarch was personally subject to the law of their own country - that was something entirely new. One can see here that Cromwell made every effort to reach a modus vivendi with Charles I, just like the revolutionaries of 1789 and 1917, but ultimately his efforts foundered because Charles I was mindnumbingly stupid. Stupid enough to believe that he was indispensible (boy was he wrong). Some men you just can't reach. Throughout the book, you can see Cromwell struggling with the problems of legitimacy and reform, of how much to destroy the old order and how much to keep, which confronted the revolutionaries of 1789 and 1917. It is a testament to the value of experience that every time our answers to those questions have got a little better; eventually, maybe we'll get it right.

The picture of Cromwell's character that emerges differs considerably from the humorless puritan of popular imagination; he remarks are blunt, simple and plain, but there is often a rough humour to them, and a certain self-deprecating charm ("paint me warts and all", "trust God and keep your powder dry") as well as a good eye for the pertinent details - his verdict on Charles II is particularly memorable: "Give him a shoulder of mutton and a whore, that's all he cares for." His defence of religious toleration is also worth noting: "One might as well ban wine from the Kingdom for fear that men would get drunk."

Of course one can't discuss Cromwell without remembering that he did terrible, unforgivable things in Ireland. The massacres at Drogheda and Wexford cannot be justified, and today they would be considered war crimes. That said, there are relatively few English rulers between Henry II and George V who didn't do terrible things in Ireland, and the careers of Robert Peel and Lord John Russell get discussed without continuous reference to their responsibility for the Irish Potato Famine. This is not in any way to excuse Cromwell - rather I think that we should pay more critical attention to the crimes of other historical figures (Lord John "The free market can solve all our problems" Russell, in particular*).

As I said at the beginning, Cromwell is a hard man to like. But without Cromwell, there would be no parliamentary democracy in the UK (quite possibly no democracy at all), no United States of America, no French revolution. That's quite an epitaph.

* It seems to be a common political blindness, to forget that we tried laissez faire capitalism in the 19th Century. It was shit.