REVIEW – Oliver Cromwell: Commander in Chief, by Ronald Hutton

Oliver Cromwell: Commander in Chief Ronald Hutton Yale University Press, 480 pages, £25 Do we need another biography of Oliver Cromwell? More than 20 by leading scholars of the English or British revolutions of the 17th century have appeared since 1980 and they are remarkably similar. Cromwell is consistently portrayed as a deeply committed Puritan, a soldier of genius, who believed he was called by God to free the nations of Britain and Ireland from royal and episcopal tyranny to be – like the people of Israel freed from slavery in Egypt – offered the chance to follow a pillar of fire to a Promised Land. Well, Ronald Hutton is offering something new. He is writing a three-volume biography and none of his predecessors have needed more than one (his three volumes will be more than double the length of any previous biography). His is a life-and-times biography that does not move outwards from the three million words contained in his writings and speeches, but is written as a military and political history of the mid-17th century with Cromwell as its compulsive central figure: in the words of the first great historian of that period, Edward Hyde, “a brave bad man”. The first volume appeared in 2021 and took the story up to the end of the English Civil War in 1646. This new volume takes us down to the <em>coup d’etat</em> of April 1653 rather than to the creation of the Protectorate in December 1653 – an interesting decision. Why would any reader of the <em>Catholic Herald</em> want to spend good time and money on such a project? This is a pro-royalist biography, but hardly a pro-Catholic one. For much of the early part of the volume, Hutton is concerned more to rehabilitate Charles I as a man who has been traduced by historians than to condemn Cromwell as a king killer. His reading of Charles’s personality and actions is persuasively presented. Meanwhile, Hutton is far more hesitant about discovering quite what Cromwell was up to. This is partly honesty in the face of the loss of so much necessary evidence, but it is also the result of a distrust of the evidence that there is. One of the attractive features of the book is that Hutton narrates with great authority and relegates all discussion of problems in the sources or in other historians’ disagreements about those problems to very long endnotes – some are 800-plus words long. If you buy this book, also buy a bookmark. Anyone interested in military history will find this book riveting. All the campaigns and all the battles in three kingdoms are narrated and evaluated better than ever before and at great length – the battle of Preston (August 1648) gets more than twice as many words as the Putney Debates on the future of the King, Parliament and the franchise (October-November 1648). Anyone interested in political history will get an admirably clear account of the many failed attempts at settlement between the many stakeholders (King, Parliament, the Army, the Scots) in 1647-9 and of the total failure of the Rump of the Long Parliament to come up with clear solutions to any of the massive challenges created by regicide and the decision to abolish not only Charles I but monarchy itself, a distinction that could have been clearer. Catholics may be especially interested in Cromwell’s brutal reconquest of Ireland, 80 per cent of which was under Catholic control after the rebellion and massacres of many thousands of Protestants in and after the winter of 1641-2. Here, Cromwell’s ruthless brilliance as a soldier is very well demonstrated and Hutton’s account of what did and did not happen when he stormed Drogheda is superior to every previous account. I stand by my view that the sack of Drogheda was his Hiroshima and of Wexford his Nagasaki, <em>in terrorem</em> actions that shortened the war. It worked and had all the same moral problems attached. But Hutton is tempted to see Cromwell’s rage in Ireland as anti-Catholic and anti-Irish when there is a case for seeing it as principally anti-royalist. He is keener to suggest that when Cromwell said he would not “suffer the exercise of the Mass where I can take notice of it”, he was not, as Hutton glosses it, intending to extirpate Catholicism but the clergy whom he believed had organised the 1641 massacres. Cromwell continued by saying, “As for the people, what thoughts they have in matters of religion in their own breasts I cannot reach, but think it my duty, if they walk honestly and peaceably not to cause them to suffer for the same.” Conversion was the aim, but by example not by force. That takes us to Hutton’s important interrogation of the evidence to see how far Cromwell was a dissembler and a double-dealer. But it can be argued that whenever he was talking about the things of God, he was more likely to be self-deceiving than deceitful. The failure of this book to address all the attempts Cromwell made, from 1647, to reach accommodation with Catholic leaders in Britain and Ireland (most clearly in Scotland, in fact) to grant sacramental freedom behind closed doors to those who would give guarantees of political acquiescence, is a weakness. This may make Cromwell not only a pragmatist rather than a fanatic, but also a pragmatist more after the model of Soviet rulers in Catholic Eastern Europe after 1945. But it does offer an alternative to the view that anti-popery was his lodestar and his disgrace. It is a rich, mature and fresh take on that brave bad man. <em>The Revd Professor John Morrill is a Fellow of the British Academy</em> <strong><strong>This article appears in the October 2024 edition of the <em>Catholic Herald</em>. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent, high-calibre, counter-cultural and orthodox Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/subscribe/?swcfpc=1"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">HERE</mark></a></strong></strong>.