20 August: Boreham on Oliver Cromwell

The Man Who Can
The twentieth of August was a very great day in the stormy life of Oliver Cromwell, for it was on that day, in the year 1620, that he led his beloved Betty to the altar. Frederic Harrison ranks Cromwell as one of the four really great men in English history, the other three being William the Conqueror, Edward the First, and the elder Pitt. Carlyle's guffaw upon hearing of this pretty piece of patronage would have sounded like a thunderclap. Carlyle would say that, if these four were stood together, the other three would look like a troupe of travelling dwarfs grouped about a colossus. Carlyle can see nothing in our history, nor in any other, more impressive than the spectacle of this young farmer leaving his fields in Huntingdonshire, putting the plough in the shed and setting out for London to hurl the King from his throne, to dismiss the Parliament, and to reconstitute the country.

To Carlyle, Cromwell is a King, the Kingliest of Kings. The very word "King," he argues, is simply a contraction of "kanning"—The-Man-Who-Can. Cromwell is pre-eminently The-Man-Who-Can, The-Man-Who-Knows-That-He-Can, and, therefore, The-Man-Who-Will. In his famous essay on "The Hero as King," Carlyle selects two models of Kingship— Cromwell and Napoleon. But he spends so much of his space on Cromwell that poor little Napoleon only comes in at the fag-end of the chapter as a kind of postscript or afterthought. Yet all the authorities—Professor Gardiner, Sir Charles Firth, and particularly Lord Tweedsmuir—agree that the most notable and memorable quality in Cromwell is his sheer, downright, flesh and blood humanness. "The basic stuff of Oliver's character," says John Buchan, "was the same as that of the ordinary English countryman; of more delicate texture than most, and interwoven with finer strands, but essentially the same tough workaday fabric." He was always the man; never the superman.

At His Best Among His Own Folk
Let it be granted that Cromwell represents one of the sturdiest and most satisfying figures in our history. Like Goldsmith's tall rock:—

. . . . . . he lifts his awful form,
Swells from the vale and midway leaves
the storm,
While round his breast the gathering clouds are spread
Eternal
sunshine settles on his head.

Yet, Homeric as is his personality, he walks the world with a charming humbleness and is never unmindful of his need of others. No man in our annals was more dependent on his womenfolk, or more devoted to them. His lifelong tenderness to his mother stands as a classical idyll of filial devotion. Taking her into his new home on his wedding day, he sheltered her there until she died in her 90th year. Every evening of his dangerous and tumultuous life, he made it a rule, if within riding distance, to gallop home, bid her goodnight, receive her blessing.

His affection for his wife, whom he married as soon as he became of age, deepened with the years. Among the letters in Carlyle's enormous collection, there are none more beautiful than those addressed to her. In most of them he laments his clumsiness. He cannot tell her of his fondness. "But," he says, in an epistle addressed to her in the 33rd year of their wedded life, "I love writing to my dear: she is so very much in my heart." And nobody can read these intimate domestic records without recognising that his daughters—his Biddy, his Betty, and the rest—were always his darlings. Betty died a few weeks before he did, and, full as were his hands, he watched unremittingly at her bedside till her last breath had been drawn. He was, moreover, a good companion. He never put on airs; never talked other people down; never stood upon his dignity; never awed men by his overbearing authority. A tremendous laugher, with a weakness for a rollicking chorus or a popular glee, he loved a good honest jest and revelled in the homely speech of the English chimney-corner. No man in history had tastes more simple or manners more unaffected.

Burning The Candle At Both Ends
So far from being narrow-minded, Cromwell was a man of broad sympathies and of stately vision. He deserves to be regarded as a great Imperialist. He ceaselessly dreamed of a vast colonial empire; a group of British nations bound by indissoluble ties of loyalty and devotion to the Mother Country. "You cannot plant an oak in a flower pot," he used to say; "she must have earth for the roots and heaven for her branches." He was no orator in the sense in which Pitt and Sheridan were orators. "Yet," says Winstanley, "when he delivered his mind in the House, it was with a strong and masculine eloquence. His expressions were hardy; his opinions resolute; his asseverations grave and vehement. He always spoke with restrained passion and insinuating persuasiveness; and with such a commanding and wise deportment that his utterance swayed the House.

Cromwell died, a very old man, at the age of 59. His herculean strength was utterly exhausted: his immense vigour of body and mind was completely spent. His broad shoulders had borne the stupendous burden that a distracted time had imposed upon them; but, at a comparatively early age, he staggered beneath the crushing load. Realising that he could no longer struggle on, he took to his bed. The-Man-Who-Can was The-Man-Who-Can no longer. He asked a trusted friend to read the New Testament to him and particularly requested a passage in the Epistle to the Philippians. On hearing the words: "I can do all things through Christ who strengtheneth me," his face lit up and he repeated the syllables in a kind of ecstasy. "I can do all things," he echoed. The-Man-Who-Can was, after all, The-Man-Who-Can to the very end.

F W Boreham

Image: Oliver Cromwell