Blair Worden - A Book of Friendship

JOHN MORRILL

O NE OF THE HAZARDS of editing a dispersed archive is the inevitability that when you publish your diligent labours, someone will say to you: why didn’t you publish that important item in that important archive? And so I was not only surprised but resigned when Dr David Brown said to me in a Dublin pub after the Irish launch of the Letters, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell that he was surprised the editors had not made use of a version of Cromwell’s speech to the Nominated Parliament on 4th July 1653 in the library of the King’s Inn in Dublin. After I picked myself up off the floor, I sort-of hoped it would be a copy of one of very divergent versions we had published. Why is (academic) life never that simple? The speech that Oliver Cromwell made to the members of the Nominated Assembly is unquestionably one of the most important of his life. It explored the withering of the hopes of a brave new world expressed in Thomas Simon’s Great Seal of 1651, with its image of the Rump Parliament in session – as it put it, ‘in the third year of freedom by God’s blessing restored’ – and the speech looked forward to how a new land of milk and honey worthy of God’s blessing might yet be achieved. And none of Oliver’s parliamentary speeches has a more complicated and unstable textual history, so complicated and unstable that the new edition of Cromwell’s recorded words 2 could not decide on a proof text but uniquely printed the three extant versions of what Cromwell, speaking extempore and often in tears, is thought to have said. Two of these are more than 8,000 words in length and the third about 3,000 words. 3 The clearest analysis of the different versions is by Austin Woolrych. 4 There are differences about the precise language Cromwell uses in the more apocalyptic passages and more generally in Cromwell’s vision of how the Assembly could create the conditions for a future free Commonwealth. 5

2 Gen.ed. John Morrill, The Letters, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell (3 vols, Oxford, 2022), henceforth referred to as LWSOC. 3 LWSOC , 2: 664-713. 4 Austin Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate (Oxford, 1982), appendix A, pp. 399-402. 5 Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate , pp.144-151; all the key variants between the versions are given in the footnotes in LWSOC 2,664-713. 1 Blair and I have been friends since we first met in Bruce Wernham’s paleography class for rookie DPhil students in the first week of Michaelmas Term 1967. His career took off faster than mine, and I owe it to him that Owen Chadwick thought of me as Blair’s successor at Selwyn College in the spring of 1974. He is (I will brook no argument) a better historian than I am, especially in respect of finding more in complicated texts than I can. This is the best I can do with a teasing textual discovery, but it relates to a subject at the heart of both our intellectual careers, so here goes…

31