PROTECTOR OF THE COMMONWEALTH

Cromwell’s unusualness is not in the fact that some have seen him as an evil tyrant, while others, as a great hero. This always happens to men like him, particularly, as he is such a supremely controversial figure: a regicide in a nation which is still keeping its monarchy today and proud of it. Yet even this capital offence to royalty has not prevented him from snatching a spot among the top ten greatest Britons of all time, according to the 2002 national poll, conducted by the BBC.

His unusualness, though, lies mostly in the fact that he is somewhat hard to accept as a genius, and the story of the first forty-plus years of his life is rather gray and uneventful. Until the ripe age of forty-one, he was a mere small time country squire, married, with nine children. To make matters worse, during this period he did get a fair chance to distinguish himself, and blew it. From 1628 to 1629, he was a Member of Parliament, where his one-year stint went largely unnoticed, and the only speech which he made at the time, left a poor impression. This hardly fits the portrait of a political genius, who is supposed to seize such an opportunity, to reveal himself in full glory. However, it is as if history conspired to turn Cromwell into a genius virtually ex nihilo and in spite of himself, and gave him a second chance in 1640, when he joined the Parliament again, and now this time he was distinguished by the circumstances, although his genius would be revealed by fits and starts, almost reluctantly. As he would humbly call himself at the height of his power, a mere constable, or watchman, that’s what he was; and he was not describing himself this way in jest, or vaingloriously. The explanation of such strange humility was his intense and sincere religiosity that managed to transform a potentially debilitating weakness into Cromwell’s greatest strength.

Perhaps the most important occurrence in Cromwell’s life prior to 1642, the defining moment of his genius, was his ardent embrace of Puritanism. As a result, he may have become known, and even accepted as one of their own, by some very important people who then gave him much more authority in the Long Parliament than he could ever have been given otherwise, on his own merit. But still, this was not a sufficient reason for him to be given command (first as a small troop commander, then as a Colonel, and then as a General!) of the best cavalry troops in the English Civil War on either side, the famed Ironsides. The secret to his fast promotion was in Cromwell’s religious passion. After witnessing the defeat of the Parliamentarian cavalry at the Battle of Edgehill in 1642, he derisively wrote to a fellow Parliamentarian leader, actually his cousin Sir John Hampden: “…Your troopers are most of them old decayed servingmen and tapsters; and Royalist troopers are gentlemen’s sons, young sons, persons of quality; do you think that the spirits of such base and mean fellows as ours will ever be able to encounter gentlemen that have honor and courage and resolution in them?” A rather cruel and unpleasant indictment of his own, and yet not only did he get away with it, but it just proved the winning attitude for him.

Cromwell’s answer to such Parliamentarian deficiency was the religious zeal of his fellow Puritans. He was committed to base the strength of his army not so much on military skill as on the sheer force of its passion. Having shown to everybody what his Ironsides could do, he became unstoppable as the army commander, and at the end of the Civil War, the most powerful force in the nation was eating out of his hand. In return, he treated his soldiers not as his subordinates, but as a mighty weapon of God, divinely entrusted to his care. No other military commander in the history of warfare has ever looked at his troops this way, and it paid off in a spectacular way.

Thus, it can be said that Cromwell’s latent genius was activated and fed by his religious passion, and that, in fact, zealously religiosity was its very essence.

At the end of the war, and following the King’s execution, Oliver Cromwell’s authority reached a virtually superhuman standing. His Protectorate officially lasted from 1653 until his death in 1658. In 1657 he was offered the British Crown by a fawning Parliament, which earlier he personally had managed to install, as the former Parliament had not been good enough to do God’s work for his country. All the trappings of an authoritarian dictator in the making? Surely Napoleon after him could not resist assuming Imperial power! But Cromwell did not fall for this temptation. In a historic speech on April 13^th, 1657, he resolutely refused the flattering offer: “I would not seek to set up that, which Providence hath destroyed and laid in the dust, and I would not build Jericho again.”

When he died the next year, His son Richard’s rule as Lord Protector was perfunctory, extremely reluctant, and quickly ended in his resignation in 1659, after which the Restoration of the monarchy was just a matter of speed.

After the Restoration, Cromwell’s corpse was exhumed from Westminster Abbey, and gruesomely “executed.” But despite the natural vilification of a regicide under the restored monarchy, his historical legacy was never tainted for all time. Even the British Monarchy would come to peace with him. In 1840, sub Victoria Regina, Thomas Carlyle thus spoke of him in a London lecture on Heroes and Hero-Worship:

“He stood bare, not cased in euphemistic coat-of-mail; he grappled like a giant, face to face, heart to heart with the naked truth of things. I plead guilty to valuing such a man beyond all other sorts of men.”
In 2002, as I already said before, he was voted the tenth greatest Briton in history in a BBC national poll…

…An extremely interesting subject regarding Oliver Cromwell is the 1656 Readmission of Jews to England, whence they had been expelled in 1290 by King Edward I. In my childhood reading of a History of England published in the nineteenth century, I learned that Jews were in fact living in England in his time, but incognito, under the guise of foreign (Spanish, in particular) merchants. It was further alleged that the Jews had offered Cromwell money to wage the war against King Charles I at the time when the parliamentarian army had run out of money. The money was received, facilitating the Parliament’s victory, and the promise after several years of waiting and negotiations between Cromwell and the Jewish emissaries, was honored in 1656, but only after a pledge of more Jewish money to the coffers of the Commonwealth was made, and started being fulfilled.

Even more curious, after the Restoration, the Jews were never persecuted in England as Cromwell’s collaborators, but were actually embraced as a welcome community, as long as they had enough money to spare for the British Crown to further its domestic and Imperial interests around the world. It goes without saying that the Jewish growing power in England was the major contributor to the democratization of the British society and the subsequent collapse of the old caste system which put the nobility on top of the social pyramid. It wasn’t for nothing that Lord Byron semi-jokingly complained in early nineteenth century:

“Who hold the balance of the world? Who reign

O’er conquerors, whether royalist or liberal?

Who rouse the shirtless patriots of Spain?

(That make old Europe’s journals squeak and gibber all.)

Who keep the world, both Old and New, in pain

Or pleasure? Who make politics run glibber all?

The shade of Buonaparte’s noble darling?

Jew Rothschild, and his fellow Christian Baring.”

One thing is certain here that at least in so far as Merrie Olde England is concerned we can definitely trace Lord Byron’s “Jew Rothschild, holding the balance of the world,” to none other than our ultimate Christian zealot, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland, the tenth Greatest Briton of all time, and genius malgré lui, Oliver Cromwell.