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| Oliver Cromwell |
OLIVER CROMWELL, the leader of the
bourgeois English Revolution, died on 3rd September 1658. Cromwell,
the MP for Huntingdon, was the leading Parliamentary commander during the
English Civil War, which began in 1642 and ended in 1649 with the trial and
execution of Charles Stuart and the abolition of the monarchy. The Republic of
England, or Commonwealth as it was styled in English, was proclaimed soon
after.
In 1653 Oliver
became head of state, the Lord Protector. By then the republic Cromwell led
included England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland as well as colonies in New
England and the Caribbean. During its brief life the Commonwealth became a
force in Europe. Culturally it inspired the great poetry of Milton and Marvell
and other radical and pacifist religious movements like the Quakers who are
still with us today.
Oliver Cromwell
was succeeded by his son, Richard, who was neither a politician nor a soldier.
Unable to reconcile republican generals with the demands of the rich merchants
and landowners to curb the influence of the New Model Army, Richard Cromwell
resigned the following year. The government collapsed. The monarchy was
restored in 1660 and the New Model Army was dissolved.
Monarchists see
Cromwell as an upstart general who made himself dictator through the might of
his New Model Army. For some Protestants Cromwell is still a religious reformer
who fought for freedom of conscience for all faiths apart from Catholicism.
Many in the Jewish community still remember Cromwell as the leader who allowed
Jews to live, worship and work in England for the first time since the pogroms
of 1290. But for the bourgeoisie Oliver is best forgotten, even though their
ascendancy began when their ancestors took up the gun in the 1640s.
The ruling class
abhor revolutionary change today because it threatens their own domination so
they naturally deny that their class ever came to power through it in the first
place. For them the English republic is an aberration, a temporary blip in the
steady advance of bourgeois progress which is the myth they teach us in school.
If they elevate anything at all it is the “glorious revolution” of 1688 when
the last of the Stuarts was deposed and replaced by a king of their own choosing.
Though not as bloodless as they claimed – plenty was shed in Ireland – the
establishment of a monarchy that was the gift of Parliament was achieved
without the involvement of the masses, which was precisely what was intended.
Engels said that
Cromwell was the “Robespierre and Napoleon rolled into one” of the English
bourgeois revolution. This is what the Great
Soviet Encyclopaedia had to say in its day:
Cromwell
was born into a middle gentry family and began his political activity in 1628,
when he was first elected to the House of Commons. Nevertheless, within the
ranks of the Parliamentary opposition to Stuart absolutism Cromwell became well
known only with the convocation in 1640 of the “Long Parliament,” in which he
spoke out as an advocate of the interests of the bourgeoisie and the new
gentry.
With
the beginning of the first civil war against the king (1642 – 46), Cromwell
with the rank of captain became head (in September 1642) of a volunteer cavalry
detachment. Cromwell strongly advocated the democratisation of the
Parliamentary army, and he wanted to attract to it those who would fight
against the king out of conviction rather than as mercenaries. In seeking out
such “soldiers of God,” Cromwell turned to the yeomanry of eastern England, who
were devout Puritans and hostile to outmoded feudal orders.
Cromwell’s
peasant cavalry (he commanded a cavalry regiment from the beginning of 1643)
soon merited its nickname of “Ironsides” because of its tenacity and
discipline. It became the nucleus of the Parliamentary army, which was reorganised
upon Cromwell’s initiative at the beginning of 1645 (the “New Model Army”) and
in which Cromwell was deputy commander in chief with the rank of lieutenant
general. Cromwell’s skill as a general was most clearly manifested in the
decisive battles of the first civil war — at Marston Moor (2nd July
1644) and at Naseby (14th June 1645), where it was Cromwell’s
cavalry that decided the success of these battles.
Although
during the first civil war Cromwell reflected to a considerable degree the mood
of the revolutionary democracy in the Parliamentary camp, after the victory
over the king and the latter’s imprisonment, he retarded and restrained the
movement of the popular masses.
This
led to a fierce struggle between Cromwell and the Levellers (1647). Caught
between three political forces in 1647 — the Presbyterian majority in
Parliament, the army, and the imprisoned king — Cromwell showed himself to be a
resourceful and evasive politician. Using the army as his principal support, he
carried on secret negotiations with the king at the same time, and he dealt
harshly with disturbances among the soldiers.
When
at the beginning of the second civil war (1648) Cromwell again needed the
support of the masses, he made a temporary alliance with the Levellers. In 1648
he captured London, and with the aid of his soldiers he purged the House of
Commons of the openly outspoken royalists (”Pride’s Purge” of 6th December
1648). Under pressure from the lower classes, Cromwell was compelled to agree
to the trial and execution of the king, the abolition of the monarchy and the
House of Lords, and the proclamation of England as a republic. However the
republic that was declared in May 1649 was in fact a dictatorship by the
so-called Meek Independents, headed by Cromwell.
The
smashing of the Levellers’ uprising and the Diggers’ movement in England
itself, the extremely harsh military expedition against rebellious Ireland
(1649–50), Cromwell’s Scottish campaign (1650–51), and the plundering of Irish
lands all testified to Cromwell’s transformation into the Napoleon of the
English Revolution. By his growing conservatism and his hostility to the
democratic aspirations of the masses Cromwell merited the trust of the
bourgeoisie and the new gentry.
Officially
appointed by Parliament in May 1650 as lord general and commander in chief of
all the republic’s armed forces, Cromwell proceeded to establish his own
personal dictatorship. On 20th April 1653 he dissolved “the Rump” of
the Long Parliament; in December 1653 he was proclaimed lord protector of
England, Ireland, and Scotland. This protectorate regime transformed Cromwell
into the de facto sovereign ruler of the country, the military might of which,
forged during the course of the Revolution, was now placed at the service of
the bourgeoisie’s trade and colonial expansion.
Cromwell’s
outward grandeur, which reached its apex during these years, could not,
however, conceal the weakness of the protectorate system. The class allies who
had come to power strove to erect a more tenable barrier against the claims of
the popular masses. Famed for his reputation as a regicide, Cromwell was in
their eyes an insufficient guarantee against the common people. Cromwell’s
right-wing enemies prepared secretly for a restoration of the Stuarts. By his
own open anti-democratism Cromwell himself facilitated and expedited this
restoration, which was carried out in 1660, shortly after Cromwell’s death.
