OLIVER CROMWELL AND THE SECOND EARL OF MANCHESTER.* THE quarrel
between Oliver Cromwell and the once popular Lord Kimbolton, who had succeeded his father in the earldom of Manchester, has long been one of the dark places in the history of the great Civil War, and every one who is interested in the study of English history must regard with satisfaction the appear- ance of any work which professes to throw light on the subject from unused sources of information. The volume before us does not altogether disappoint 118 in the hopes which its title raises, though it does not realise them to the full extent. It appears under rather melancholy circumstances, death having removed from its superintendence the accomplished student to whose hands the task had been originally entrusted. Mr. John Bruce, whose death was a sensible injury to the interests of accurate historical investigation, was peculiarly qualified by his extensive knowledge of this portion of our annals, and by his calm and impartial judgment, to arrive, if this were possible, at the real truth on this disputed and obscure point, and we very much doubt whether he would have committed himself to print in this matter, without having previously collected a more complete array of facts and documents than those contained in the present pub- lication. The Camden Society, however, appear to have thought it desirable to lay before the public such materials as Mr. Bruce had already before him, and they selected Professor Masson as the student best qualified to carry out what might be gathered from Mr. Bruce's fragmentary manuscripts to have been his plan in editing these documents. The volume as it now appears con- sists of an historical preface of considerable length, a portion only of which belongs to Mr. Bruce's share, and which serves as an introduction to some documents hitherto unpublished. These are, first, Correspondence between the Earl of Manchester and the Committee of Both Kingdoms, from July to November, 1644, taken from the letter-book of the Committee, preserved in the Record Office ; and next, Two Documents from the archives of Kimbolton Castle,—one, a Narrative of the Earl of Manchester's campaign, from the pen of Major-General Crawford, Cromwell's well-known opponent ; the other, a Statement by another opponent of Cromwell. Then follows Cromwell's own narrative of the same period, from the Domestic State Papers ; and lastly, come some Notes of evidence given in the case between Cromwell and
The Quarrel between the Earl of Manchester and Oliver Cromwell: an Episode of the English Civil War. Unpublished Documents relating thereto, collected by the late John Bruce, F.S.A., Sc., with Fragments of an Historical Preface by Mr. Bruce. Annotated and completed by David Masson. Printed for the Oamden Society. 1875.
Manchester, and in support of the former's statement. These last are also taken from the Kimbolton archives. Professor Masson has discharged his task with his usual excess, we might almost call it, of industrious illustration, but we cannot help thinking that it would have been wiser in him to have given up any attempt to fill in and supplement his predecessor's unfinished and disjointed introdnetion, and to have taken the editorship of the documents entirely on himself, using Mr. Bruce's manuscript only where portions of it were of special value, and contained remarks not to be found elsewhere. Mr. Bruce had scarcely entered on his real task, when the continuous part of his manu- script comes to an abrupt close, and it is hardly just to his memory to present his intended narrative in so crude and incom- plete a shape as to impose the necessity of frequent transitions from the earlier to the later editor and back again,—transitions which render the reading aloud of the composite introduction a matter of no small difficulty. We have one more fault to find with Professor Masson's editorship,—that he has divided his illustrative matter very unevenly between the former and latter portions of the documents, and while he tells us more than enough of the com- position of the first armies of the Parliament, and of the division which sprang up between the Presbyterians and Independents on the subject of toleration, he leaves the second battle of Newbury and the antagonistic narratives of Cromwell and Major-General Crawford of that battle, and of the subsequent defiant return of the King to Donnington Castle, almost without annotation from contemporary accounts. He ought to have given us, at least, a plan of the battle-field, showing the positions of the several forces, so as to enable the reader to see at a glance the real points at issue between Cromwell and the Earl.
Having spoken thus freely of what appear to us to be the defects in the editorship of this volume, we may say that Professor Masson seems to have arrived at just conclusions on all the points which it was possible to determine from the limited materials before him. We quite agree with him, and we do not see how any careful reader can do otherwise, that one charge of Crom- well's against the Earl is most completely established from Man- chester's own letters, as given here in connection with those of the Committee of Both Kingdoms, during the period between the battles of Marston Moor and Newbury, and immediately after the latter battle. It seems clear beyond dispute that the victory at Marston had the effect of paralysing the action of the Earl, to whatever motive this change of conduct may be attributed. It may have been that he thought the King was now brought low enough, and that be considered it a time for negotiating for a peace while success inclined to the side of the Parliament, but there is such a continuity of wilful inaction after the news had arrived of the surrender of Essex's army to the King in the West, that we cannot help thinking that some other reasons must have predominated with the Earl. If we listened solely to the accounts given by Crawford and others opposed to Cromwell, it would seem as if the conduct of the Earl were determined very much by the internal condition of his army, and the struggle going on within it between the intolerant Presbyterian faction led by Crawford, and the "godly men" who were protected, if not patronised and preferred, by Cromwell. But from the letters of Manchester himself, we should be disposed to attribute his evasions and disregard of the Committee's order to him to march first after Prince Rupert into Cheshire and then westward to the relief of Essex, to an incapacity of grasping the proper manner in which a war affecting the whole country should be conducted. Instead of taking a great General's or a statesman's view of what was necessary in order to secure a speedy and complete success to the cause of the Parliament, regarding the whole country as a single chess-board, he was always thinking of how this or that set of associated counties, and especially his own Eastern Association, would be affected by the movement of his army in such or such a direction. The Earl appears always to be trying to reduce the Civil War to a number of separate district contests, the manage- ment of which was to be left to the Committee of each district, in co-operation with the particular General who there commanded for the Parliament, while the other armies engaged in more general campaigns were to be abandoned to the chances of war. The Committee of Both Kingdoms, sitting at Derby House, in Cannon Street, Westminster, on their side naturally wished to bring the operations of their different armies to a common action, so as to hasten on the struggle to some decisive issue. Such an issue Manchester may, as he was accused of doing, have possibly dreaded, as involving the chance of utter ruin to the cause of the Parliament, and of the destruction of himself and other leaders of the popular party, at the hands of the victorious and revengeful King, and there are one or two traces of such a, feeling in some of his despatches just before the battle of Newbury. But this is not the prevailing tone of his repeated excuses to the Committee. However, whatever the motive, the fact remains that it- took the Committee a whole month of pressing letters to move the main body of the Earl's army from Lincoln in any direction whatever, and when he did at last set his army in motion, it took the Committee another six weeks of similar writing to force for- ward the unwilling Earl to a junction with the other arrvies of the Parliament near Newbury. The excuses, evasions, and in- genious reasons for delay with which the Earl's letters are filled during all this period form one of the most curious collections of reasons for doing nothing that our military annals could supply. Nor was there ever, perhaps, an English officer who, while prac- tically disobeying all the instructions and commands of his superiors, made such strong and repeated professions of his desire and eagerness to do everything that they should direct. In this latter point of view, Manchester may be styled, as he was by Principal Baillie, "a sweet, meek man," but his meekness was of that kind which is not very easily distinguishable from the most self-willed obstinacy.
Such a course of proceeding as that pursued by the Earl would have fretted and angered any man who was earnest in the wish to bring the war to a speedy as well as a successful termination, as it did the Committee of Both Kingdoms, whose Scottish con- tingent cannot be suspected of any previous bias against Man- chester. Their rebukes of the Earl for his virtual disobedience and procrastination are not unfrequent, and at length very severe. Can it be wondered at, then, that a clear-sighted, quick-tempered man, such as Cromwell, should have been unable at times to, repress his impatient indignation within the bounds of social and professional etiquette, and have said, as he is reported to have done on one occasion, that there would be no good in- England till the Earl of Manchester was plain Mr. Montagu, —i.e., a man who had no conventional rank to place him and keep- him in a position which he was plainly so incapable of filling- properly ? Nor does the "sweet, meek man" himself appear, if the counter-reports of his expressions are also to be credited, to have been much behind-hand in hastiness of temper,—at all events if he really threatened to hang Cromwell, should he venture again to- urge a speedy march into the West. Whatever else may have been behind to aggravate the differences between the Earl and his second-in-command, we have in what we have just stated quite. sufficient to explain the alienation of the latter from his superior, even without the malicious insinuations and ill offices of a heated and shallow religionist such as Crawford was.
The second stage, if we may so call it, in the quarrel between the officers of the Eastern Counties Army, though immediately and_ naturally following from the first, cannot be so satisfactorily eluci- dated. Crawford's account of the second battle of Newbury is really nothing but a few rough notes set down for the benefit of the Earl of Manchester, when he was preferring his charges against Cromwell in the House of Lords. On the other hand, Cromwell's narrative of the same transactions is merely an abstract, given in by him to the House of Commons in writing of what he had pre- viously spoken in that House when preferring his charges against the Earl. Neither account is an answer to, or cognisant of the- existence of the other, and such portions of Manchester's own. statement as we possessed before the publication of the present work do not, on any material point, supply what is wanting to enable us to bring the conflicting statements as to fact to a rear issue. One thing is clear, viz., that there was a complete want of understanding between the different officers in command' during the battle, and a disposition, we may well believe, on the part of each to object to and cross the plans and action of some one of the others. With such embittered' feelings already towards one another, what would be more likely than that every order or objection on the part of either the Earl or Cromwell should be construed unfavourably by the other? Whether Cromwell refused to put his cavalry into action without adequate reason for such refusal, and whether the Earl of Man- chester failed to support at the appointed time a successful charge of that part of the army where Cromwell was situated, cannot be determined from the materials here placed before us, and we have only really our deductions from the antecedents of the two men to guide us in our judgment as to what was the actual' case, and as to who was truly in fault. The previous conduct of Manchester, to which we have alluded, does not prepossess us in his favour, though it is very possible that the irritation which that conduct had caused in Cromwell may have had an unfavourable effect on his judgment as to the part taken by the ESA in the battle itself.
We should add, however, that Cromwell's narrative is ably and clearly written, and as it appears to us, as well as to Professor Masson, is the composition of Cromwell himself, and not, as Mr. Bruce was inclined to think, of some one of his friends better versed in the art of writing. Any extracts, however, that we I could give within our space, either from it or from the letters of the Earl and the Committee, would fail to convey by themselves any adequate idea of the general purport and spirit of either, and we must refer our readers to the work itself for such information. Incomplete though it necessarily is, this is a really valuable con- tribution to our stores of historical knowledge, and we heartily thank the Camden Society for adding it to their well-chosen series of volumes, and Professor Masson for the labour and trouble he has bestowed on its publication.
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