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 From the Civil War to the Restoration, 1645-1660
  1645-1660; Continue

1645-1660; Continue

Born at Huntingdon in 1599, of a good family, Cromwell became a member of Parliament at the age of twenty-nine. In 1642, at the age of forty-three, his military career began, and it was not to close till he was fifty-two. He had made his reputation in the cavalry during the Civil War, and to him was due the chief credit for organizing and training horsemen that could rival Prince Rupert's. In his cavalry tactics he, like Rupert, did not make the mistake of firing before charging, but, unlike Rupert, he did not rely, it has been said, so much upon the pace as upon the weight and solidarity of his charge (His cavalry did not gallop, but charged in close order, to use Cromwell's own words, at a "pretty round trot"). In his campaigns, both during the Civil War and later, he showed that, though not perhaps a great strategist, he possessed real genius in seeing the critical points of a battle, and untiring energy in following up a victory.

In politics, so far, he had not made much mark. As a member of the Long Parliament, however, he had shown himself greatly interested in religious questions, and a keen partisan; "if the Grand Remonstrance had not passed," he said, "I would have sold all I had the next morning, and never seen England more." In the years after the Civil War was over, his most striking characteristic, especially in his negotiations with king or Parliament, is the long hesitation and indecision he shows in making up his mind; and then, when a decision has at last been arrived at, the "swift, daring hammer-stroke", as it has been called, that follows.

The time has long gone by when Cromwell was regarded as a hypocrite, half knave, half fanatic. A man of intense religious feeling, who looked upon all he did as due to God's providence, he possessed at the same time strong practical common sense. " Trust in God and keep your powder dry " is said to have been the advice he gave to his soldiers-and the saying illustrates this double aspect of his character. His speeches are somewhat intricate and sometimes unintelligible, but they reveal a man of masterful energy who never lost sight of his ideals. Though a hater of the Roman Catholic religion and not very lenient to supporters of the Anglican bishops, he was large-hearted; and his ideas of toleration, inadequate as they seem to us to-day, were far more liberal than those generally prevalent during his own lifetime. If, when he came to supreme power, he showed himself anxious to put down undesirable amusements and to make life in England more serious, it must not be supposed that he was averse to all pleasure. On the contrary, he was fond of music and of writing verses; he loved good horses, and was a bold jumper and a skilful driver (A team of six horses did run away with him, however, in Hyde Park, while he was Protector, to the great joy of his enemies, who wrote numberless lampoons on the subject). Cromwell, above all, was an Englishman. He was, in the words of the great historian of this epoch, "with all his physical and moral audacity, with all his tenderness and spiritual yearnings, in the world of action what Shakespeare was in the world of thought, the greatest because the most typical Englishman of all time".

The history of the fourteen years that follow the Civil War ran be briefly put. The New Model Army begins to interfere in politics, and finally becomes supreme, with Cromwell as its leader. It then tries to base its authority upon the consent of the English people as expressed in Parliament- and in this it fails. But we must follow the stages in a little more detail.

Chronology
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