to the royalists both here and at Exeter, ‘base, scurvy propositions’ as Baillie describes them, is attributed by him to the influence of Cromwell, and to a design to set the army free to oppose the Scots if it should be necessary (Baillie, ii. 376). It is certain that Cromwell’s influence was constantly used to ‘procure the fair and moderate treatment of the conquered party, and he more than once urged on the parliament the necessity of punctually carrying out the Oxford articles and preserving ‘the faith of the army.’ With the fall of Oxford the war was practically over, and Cromwell returned to his parliamentary duties. His family removed from Ely and followed him to London, with the exception of his eldest daughter Bridget, who had married Ireton a few days before the surrender of Oxford (15 June 1646). During the last eighteen months parliament had voted all the essentials for a presbyterian church, and the question of the amount of toleration to be legally granted to dissentients was more urgent than ever. Cromwell had not ceased to remind parliament of the necessity of establishing the toleration promised in the vote of September 1614. ‘Honest men served you faithfully in this action,’ he wrote after Naseby; ‘I beseech you not to discourage them. He that ventures his life for the liberty of his country, I wish he trust God for the liberty of his conscience and you for the liberty he fights for’ (Letter xxix.) Again, after the capture of Bristol, writing by the special commission of Fairfax and the council of war, he warned the house: ‘For being united in forms commonly called uniformity, every christian will for peace sake study and do as far as conscience will permit. . . . In things of the mind we look for no compulsion but that of light and reason.’ The presbyterian party in the commons turned a deaf ear to these reminders, and suppressed these passages in the letters published by its order. When Cromwell returned to his seat in the House of Commons, the question of toleration was still undecided; the recruiting of the parliament by fresh elections inclined the balance against the presbyterians, but the flight of the king to the Scots gave them again the ascendency. Of Cromwell’s views and actions during the latter half of 1646 and the spring of 1647 we have extremely little information.
Two letters to Fairfax show the anxiety with which he regarded the king’s negotiations with the Scots and the satisfaction with which he hailed the conclusion of the arrangement by which he was handed over to the commissioners of parliament. With even greater anxiety he watched the increasing dissensions within the parliament, and the growing hostility of the city to the army. ‘We are full of faction and worse,’ he writes in August 1646; and in March 1647, ‘There want not in all places those who have so much malice against the army as besots them. Never were the spirits of men more embittered than now (Letters xxxviii, xliii.) Cromwell’s attitude at the commencement of the quarrel between the army and the parliament has been distorted by fable and misrepresentation. Thoroughly convinced of the justice of the army’s claims, he restrained the soldiers as long as possible, because he saw more clearly than they did the danger of a breach with the only constitutional authority the war had left standing. He risked his influence with them by his perseverance in this course of action. ‘I have looked upon you,’ wrote Lilburn to Cromwell on 25 March 1647, ‘as the most absolute singlehearted great man in England, untainted and unbiassed with ends of your own. . . . Your actions and carriages for many months together have struck me into an amaze. I am informed this day by an officer, and was informed by another knowing man yesterday, that you will not suffer the army to petition till they have laid down their arms, because you have engaged to the house that they shall lay them down whenever the house shall command.’ This conduct Lilburn proceeds to attribute to the influence of Cromwell’s parliamentary associates, ‘the politic men,’ ‘the sons of Miachiavel,’ ‘Vane and St. John’ (Lilburn, Jonah’s Cry, p. 3; a similar account of Cromwell’s behaviour at this juncture is given by John Wildman in a tract called Putney Projects published in November 1647). Angered by the reserve of their superiors, the agitators of eight regiments addressed a letter to Fairfax, Cromwell, and Skippon, adjuring them in the strongest language to plead the cause of the soldiers in parliament (Declarations, &c. of the Army, 4to, 1647, p. 5). Skippon laid his copy of the letter before the House of Commons, and the house, now thoroughly alarmed, sent down Cromwell, Skippon, and other officers to examine into the grievances of the army (Rushworth, vi. 474). But the concessions which parliament offered were too small and too late, and the failure of Cromwell’s mission gave colour to the theory of his double dealing, which his opponents were only too ready to accept. There seems to be no reason to doubt the truth of the common story that they were on the point of arresting him, when he suddenly left London and joined the army (3 June 1647).
