Duncan Bowie on the failure of the English republic
The Fall by Henry Reece published by Yale University Press
This study covers the twenty months between the death of Oliver Cromwell in September 1658 and the restoration of Charles II as monarch in May 1660. England had been a commonwealth for a short period between the execution of Charles I and the appointment by parliament of Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector, but it is the period after the death of the older Cromwell that was perhaps the best opportunity for England (with Wales, Scotland and Ireland) to rid itself of the tradition of a single rule – monarch or protector – Cromwell having been sovereign in effect, although having rejected the title of “king”. The appointment of his son Richard as his successor in effect created a new dynasty to rival the exiled Stuarts, even though the dynastic rule was to last only nine months after the first protector’s death.
The older Cromwell was an autocrat, glorifying in all the symbols of sovereignty, twice dissolving parliament by force and then naming his son as successor. He should never be regarded as either a republican or a democrat. It is ironic that his statue is outside parliament, with the main entrance to parliament at Cromwell Green named in his honour. The son, generally perceived by historians as weak, one biography is titled “Tumbledown Dick”; he also dissolved parliament on one occasion at the insistence of the army leaders. One mystery of the period is why parliament so readily endorsed Richard Cromwell’s succession, with no real opposition from even the most hardened republicans, such as Henry Vane the younger. Edmund Ludlow, John Disborough, Henry Neville and Sir Arthur Haselrig (Algernon Sydney being out of the country as ambassador to Sweden and Denmark at the time). The reasoning seems to be that the republicans, while opposed to “rule by a single person”, saw the younger Cromwell as someone whom Parliament could manage, and preferable to being governed by the army, with its generals such as John Lambert, Charles Fleetwood and George Monck.
Reece’s detailed narrative demonstrates the extent to which the period of the younger Cromwell’s protectorate and the year that followed his deposition was a struggle for power between the army and parliament and within parliament between the radical republicans and the presbyterian moderates, less radical in religion and not in principle opposed to the notion of a constitutional sovereign who worked in partnership with a parliament. The relationship was complicated because several of the leading parliamentary republicans were also army generals, having been part of the older Cromwell’s cohort of major-generals, each of whom had governed a region of England or Wales. The nature of parliament has changed – there was a freely elected parliament under Richard Cromwell’s protectorate. But with the recall of the rump parliament, some of the presbyterian leaders returned to influence, and the radical republicans were first marginalised and then outvoted.
When General George Monck marched from Scotland to London, ostensibly to protect parliament from the army, and defeated the republican military leader Lambert, the survivors of the Rump Parliament were recalled. The survivors of the 1640 Long Parliament were then recalled, as a larger and more representative body, to bring back Charles II from exile and to restore him as monarch.
The leading republicans went into exile, some accepting that the monarchy had been restored by a relatively free parliament, others to seek to plot the restored monarch’s downfall. While the republican tradition was to survive, it was to be parliament that in 1688 was to prefer the protestant Dutch William of Orange to the catholic James II. It was to be a moderate republican perspective that was to support the concept of a constitutional monarch that became central to the Whig tradition throughout the 18th and early 19th century. The more radical republican tradition became marginalised, if only to reappear as English and Scottish Jacobinism after the French Revolution of 1789 and the emergence of a French Republic. A political approach that was to be harshly suppressed by the younger Pitt and his successors.
The Commonwealth period tends to be viewed as a brief interruption in the British tradition of sovereign government. It can, however, also be viewed as a missed opportunity. Reece does not seek to reach a judgement or attribute blame – whether to hold the older or younger Cromwell as responsible, or the military leaders or the feuding parliamentarians. After twenty years of endlessly changing governments, political instability and civil unrest, the restoration of sovereign rule seems to have been widely popular as a “safe option”. In my view, the main reason for the failure of republicanism was the role of the army leadership in seeking to dominate parliament rather than support it. Responsibility also lies with the parliamentary leadership, which was highly factional, as much on personal grounds as on political or even religious grounds. Reece’s book provides an excellent narrative of this crisis in British political history. Readers will take their own views on where responsibility lies for the failure of the republican experiment.