Blair Worden - A Book of Friendship

BLAIR WORDEN - A BOOK OF FRIENDSHIP

In general, eighteenth-century commonwealthmen did not speak highly of Oliver Cromwell. At the beginning of the century, John Toland referred to the ‘Tyrannical Usurpation of OLIVER CROMWELL’. 2 Towards its end, James Burgh quoted Robert Huntingdon’s claim that ‘ Cromwell’s design was to set himself and the army above both [king and parliament]’. Burgh also noted Huntingdon’s suggestion that Cromwell had openly acknowledged ‘that the interest of ... [his own party] was the interest of the kingdom’ and that it was, therefore, ‘lawful to purge the parliament, or put a period to it, and support his own party by force’. 3 Catharine Macaulay’s view of the Lord Protector was in the same vein. In her account of the Leveller mutiny at Burford in May 1649, Macaulay suggested that Cromwell was responsible for what occurred, claiming that the Levellers were ‘deceived by a promise from Cromwell of a delay of hostilities’ and were then ‘unexpectedly attacked by a number of superior troops ... and entirely defeated’. 4 Elsewhere she accused him of cajoling the Presbyterians ‘for the purposes of his ambition’. 5 This reflected her broader argument (shared by Burgh) that Cromwell acted in his own interests, rather than in those of the nation – and that he conflated the two. For Macaulay, this was a consequence not simply of Cromwell’s personality but of single-person rule: It has been fully related in the preceding pages of this History, how Cromwell, assisted by a few wrong-headed fanatics, by the corrupt part of the army, by the lawyers, who were enraged at the Parliament for an intention to reform the law, and by the clergy ... seized the government out of the hands of the Parliament, re-subjected the nation to the yoke of an individual, and again involved it in discord, faction, and their attendant evils, tumults, conspiracies, and general discontent. ... The people again sustained the mortification of paying their money to support the parade of a court, and to gratify the dependants and flatterers of an individual. 6

2 John Toland, Vindicius Liberius (London, 1702), p. 146. 3 James Burgh, Political Disquisitions (London, 1774-5) Volume II, p. 379. 4 Catharine Macaulay, Political Writings , ed. Max Skjönsberg (Cambridge, 2023), p. 40. The quotation is from her History of England (1763).

5 Macaulay, Political Writings , p. 45. 6 Macaulay, Political Writings , p. 45.

62