Book review: “God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution” by Christopher Hill

In May, 1650, after Oliver Cromwell’s successful invasion of Ireland, he returned to London to face a new threat. Within a few months, he took his Parliamentarian army north to invade Scotland where Charles, the son of the executed Charles I, had been proclaimed king.

It was a key moment in the rebellion of Parliament against the monarchy’s assertion of absolute power, an armed conflict that extended from 1642 to 1651, then continued during an uneasy peace with Cromwell as Lord Protector from 1653 until his death in 1658, and then ended with the Restoration of Charles II in 1660.

And it was the moment, writes Christopher Hill, an expert on the 17^th century rebellion, that Andrew Marvell composed his Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland “in which he saw Oliver as the personification of the English Revolution, a historical force rather than an individual.”  It is a poem, which refers to Cromwell as “the war’s and fortune’s son,” reads in part:

 

And, if we would speak true,

Much to the man is due,

Who from his private gardens where

He liv’d reserved and austere,

As if his highest plot

To plant the bergamot,

Could by industrious valour climb

To ruin the great work of time,

And cast the kingdom old

Into another mould.

 

“A historical force”

Like Marvell, Hill is more interested in Cromwell as “a historical force” than as an individual.

In his 1970 book God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution, Hill is at pains to examine in the context of his times the man whose skill at war and politics made him near-royalty for rebels who had cut off the head of the only royalty they had ever known.

There is a sense from Hill’s book that someone had to be at the center of things and Cromwell happened to be the guy.

 

A dispensable man?

As for the who of Cromwell, the breathing body and thinking mind, Hill is less interested. He recounts Cromwell reacting to events around him and acting to steer them as well, but his depiction of the man who became the Protector is of a dispensable man.

I may be overstating that, but it seems to me a fair analysis of Hill’s attitude.

If Cromwell had not been born, Hill seems to be implying throughout his book, the rebellion would still have occurred, and someone would have emerged as leader, or maybe several someones.

In fact, it was Cromwell. And he and his character and his way of thinking and his decisions all had an impact.  Nonetheless, he was a cog — an important cog, of course, but only a cog — in the machinery of history. He didn’t make the machine.

 

“Innocent of political theory”

While not without ambition nor without a personal charisma, Cromwell was no Napoleon, no Lenin.  Hill writes:

Few politicians can have been so innocent of political theory as Oliver Cromwell. “I can tell you, sirs,” he said to two MPs in 1641, “what I would not have, though I cannot what I would.” He truthfully claimed not to be wedded and glued to forms of government. They were “but a moral thing,” “dross and dung in comparison of Christ.”….

Political practice was always more important for him than constitutional theory. He subsequently justified the abolition of King and Lords not on any ground of political principle but “because they did not perform their trust.”

Cromwell was not caught up in intellectual pursuits: “the cast of his mind was practical, pragmatic, never doctrinaire.”

In an era of strongly held religious beliefs, he was unusual in his willingness to tolerate other faiths, at least as far as his followers let him. In addition, Hill notes “his preference for listening to others rather than arguing with them.”

 

A manic depressive?

As for the Protector’s psychic makeup, Hill suggests that, when one tries “to grasp Oliver Cromwell’s elusive personality, it seems that he had some of the qualities of a manic depressive.”  And he goes on:

Cromwell was always likely to be ill in a crisis, as in the spring of 1647, or on receipt of bad news, as in 1655 when he heard of the failure to capture Hispaniola.

On the other hand there is much evidence for his manic phases…At Dunbar “he did laugh so excessively as if he had been drunk, and his eyes sparkled with spirits…The same fit of laughter seized him just before the battle of Naseby.”

Both Dunbar and Naseby were decisive victories for his New Model Army.

 

“Natural rulers”

Hill deals with Cromwell’s Christian beliefs only in passing, taking them for granted but not using them in any way to frame his examination of this embodiment of the Revolution.

It was such newly evolved faith that motivated many of the Parliamentary rebels, but, more important to those radicals, Hill insists, was the protection of their property rights.

Many ideas were floated for sharing the wealth, but the only wealth that got shared was that of the church and the royalists and the royals. And those who benefited weren’t the poor. As Hill writes:

The man whose first Parliamentary speech was against the “popery” of the Arminian bishops and their proteges, who collaborated with Londoners to get evangelical preaching in his locality (and who besought Scottish Presbyterians “in the bowels of Christ” to think it possible they might be mistaken) ensured that England should never again be ruled by high-flying bishops or persecuting presbyteries, that it should be a relatively tolerant country, and that the “natural rulers” should control the church both centrally and locally.

Indeed, Hill is at pains to point out that the victors of the rebellion, even after the Restoration occurred twenty months after Cromwell’s death, were those “natural rulers,” the rich oligarchy and others who owned property.

 

Undefeated

At the time of the Restoration, Hill writes, “Defeat for everything that Cromwell stood for could hardly have been more complete.”  Yet, he goes on to argue that such appearances were deceptive.

The actions of Cromwell and his governments have reverberated down the centuries, as Hill summarizes in one long, deeply echoing sentence near the end of his book:

The British Empire, the colonial wars which built it up, the slave trade based on Oliver’s conquest of Jamaica, the plunder of India, resulting from his restitution and backing of the East India Company, the exploitation of Ireland; a free market, free from government interference and from government protection of the poor; Parliamentary government, the local supremacy of JPs, the Union of England and Scotland; religious toleration, the non-conformist conscience, relative freedom of the press, an attitude favorable to science; a country of landlords, capitalist farmers and agricultural laborers, the only country in Europe with no peasantry; none of these things would have come about in quite the same way without the English Revolution, without Oliver Cromwell.

Yes, not “in quite the same way” without Cromwell. But also — Hill insists — more importantly, without the Revolution itself.

The Revolution was the historical force.  Cromwell was its personification.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

6.18.26