Peter Gaunt. Oliver Cromwell. New York: New York University Press, 2004. 144 pp. $22.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8147-3164-2.
Reviewed by Stephen Roberts (History of Parliament Trust, London)
Published on H-Albion (November, 2006)
As Peter Gaunt, the author of this very useful summary of the lord protector's life and career, points out, biographies of Oliver Cromwell have been far more numerous than those of any English monarch. And still they keep coming. Successful fresh contributions to the stock can be divided into two sub-species. There are works that embody new findings on Cromwell's career. There are many episodes in the man's life that remain stubbornly obscure to us, most notably among them his early days, his attitude to the regicide, and his conduct in April 1653, when he expelled the Rump Parliament. Genuinely fresh perspectives on the problems of the Cromwell biography are as welcome as they are rare. The other kind of biography is one which fills a particular need in the market, and this book is emphatically in the latter category. It is described as providing "a concise and accessible introduction," and that is exactly what it does. It is beautifully and copiously illustrated, with many photographs in full color. The book is laid out in an eye-catching style reminiscent of literary magazines, with particularly pithy quotations from Gaunt's text selected to head pages and point up the chapters. There is a handy chronology, useful further reading suggestions, and a good index. As one of the British Library's series on "historic lives," this is a very solid and wholly dependable contribution, written by a leading authority on Cromwell's life and times.
Gaunt is a distinguished and long-serving chairman of the Cromwell Association; like another stalwart of that society, the late Maurice Ashley, he has now written two monograph biographies of Oliver Cromwell. The one under review here is for the general interested reader; his earlier achievement in the field, with exactly the same unadorned title, was a Historical Association study (1997) steered more towards the needs of students. Unlike Maurice Ashley, who presented Cromwell as a whiggish figure in one of his biographies and as a "conservative dictator" (from Ashley's subtitle) in the other, Peter Gaunt paints a picture which is consistent between the two books. His Cromwell Association credentials are a useful clue as to his approach. He is sympathetic to his subject, seeing the lord general and the lord protector as one who achieved much of value and who "always retained a radical edge and never became a self-satisfied, conservative figure" (p. 9). Always inclined to give Cromwell the benefit of the doubt--his defense of Cromwell in Ireland in 1649 is the benchmark of Gaunt's liberalism as it is in similar vindications by liberals before him--Gaunt concludes by emphasizing the "inherent decency of the man and his regime" (p. 121). But like Ben Jonson on William Shakespeare, Peter Gaunt stops "this side of idolatry," and deals candidly with Cromwell's policy errors, such as in the Caribbean in 1655 and the management (or lack of it) of the summoning of the second Protectorate Parliament.
Inevitably, in a short account such as this, the author has to convey complex and difficult issues to readers with a brevity that sometimes leaves questions hanging. Cromwell's attitude to the Scots is skated over somewhat; they take the stage in the narrative only in 1644. The presbyterianism of the Scots is mentioned but not convincingly described, and the appearance of the "so-called Presbyterians" (p. 59) of the House of Lords and the House of Commons will doubtless convey something meaningful to those conversant with the main themes of the period. But with no exploration of why "so-called," or of how they relate to the other lot of Presbyterians north of the border, much may well remain perplexing to the readers to whom this book is addressed. The statement that Cromwell was "tolerant of Protestant beliefs" but "hated Roman Catholicism" obscures as much as it reveals. In Gaunt's account, it was Cromwell and the army who dismissed the conservative MPs of the Rump at the time of the dissolution of that parliament in 1653, but no mention is made of the pressure Cromwell was under from the millenarians led by Thomas Harrison and the threat these radicals represented to Oliver's position.
In any biography of a figure as powerful as Cromwell, let alone in a brief survey volume such as this, there is a natural tendency for the subject to be credited personally with policies and initiatives which may have origins elsewhere. Thus Gaunt notes that Cromwell personally took pride in the 1654 ordinance for establishing the "triers and ejectors" of the protectoral church, but the ordinance was a revival of legislation that had been adumbrated in the Rump Parliament (though admittedly not implemented with any drive or rigor) and those early 1650s ecclesiastical arrangements themselves owed much to the preceding committee structures of parliament during the 1640s. As Gaunt candidly remarks, as Cromwell assumed supreme authority in the state from 1653, the real man becomes harder to glimpse behind the official correspondence. His speeches, with their oft-remarked-upon contorted, not to say delphic, qualities may be more personally revealing of Oliver during the 1650s. Yet grateful as we are for their survival, we can hardly rely on speeches on state occasions as unambiguous expressions of Cromwell's innermost thoughts. It may, in the end, not be possible to separate out Cromwell the person from Cromwell the head of state: as lord protector he persisted with a self-deprecating line about his role as constable or as victim, but no one was taken in then, nor should modern biographers or readers be.
Gaunt is quite clear that from the early 1640s until his death in 1658 Cromwell "consistently made the pursuit of liberty his main goal" (p. 133). This is a refreshingly bold and simple conclusion to a case that the author argues effectively through the book. Some readers will balk at another of his conclusions, namely that Cromwell was essentially a humble man, and will consider that (as in some other dimensions) Gaunt has taken the lord protector too much at his own estimation of himself. The Leveller view of Cromwell the hypocrite, the millenarians' view of Cromwell the apostate, and the republicans' view of Cromwell the self-server find little or no confirmation in this book. This book is the liberal case for Cromwell truly stated, and it deserves to become a first port of call for those seeking a sure guide to the man and his times.
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Citation:
Stephen Roberts. Review of Gaunt, Peter, Oliver Cromwell.
H-Albion, H-Net Reviews.
November, 2006.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=12496
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