Cromwell-still elusive

G.R. Elton

Cromwell, Our Chief of Men Antonia Fraser (Weiderifeld and Nicolson.£4.95) S. R. Gardiner called Cromwell the greatest of e..nglishmen, but when he came to write his little book on Oliver's place in English history the phrase acquired no substance. More recent studies also never achieve anything Much better than adequacy; in many ways the best of them remains Sir Charles Firth's sober volume first published in 1907. R. S. Paul has laboured to do justice to the man's religion; Maurice Ashley has seen him varinnsly as the prototype of a fascist dictator and the spiritual ancestor of Sir Winston Churchill; Christopher Hill, calling him God's Englishman, seems really to think of him as the Englishman's dubious god. Oliver, in the end, defeated them all. He has now defeated Lady Antonia Fraser who, drowning in the Morass, drags the reader after her. This is certainly the biggest book-on Cromwell over 700 pages of it. It rests on 1.10nest and hard work; it embodies solid reading in printed materials and some acquaintance with unpublished manuscripts; its prose, never meretricious, varies from the cornrietent to the unexciting. Reading this interrinable book is made no easier by occasional apses in grammatical structure and a cavalier attitude to commas. The author is not al , ways certain of her words: ' unexceptional ' ' unexceptionable' contrasts with ' in"nleable ' for ' inimical.' We find Cromwell inF.Orring the focus of public attention and setcalled upon to upstake themselves: both snlind obscurely painful experiences.

The book's chief faults are two — poor or ganisation and a lack of psychological penet

!'ation. The first accounts'for its inordinate

,ngth. This is not really a biography of Oliver `-romwell but a relentless history of his times Written around him. Of course, we cannot un

derstand Cromwell without understanding What happened in his lifetime, and a person 80 Much the Cause of action in himself and n, thers calls for the inclusion of much general nistory. But in obeying these demands Lady Antonia keeps losing the thread: where she should summarise, allude or adumbrate, she recites, expounds and comments, Her book acks intellectual discipline, and even its virt„ties of sense, modesty and care cannot in cues

make it readable.

The problem of psychological insight is "ever easy in historical biography, but in Oliver's case it is crucial because he has a way of 1pPearing to each searching student as a re1,e,,ction of his own bundle of predilections. ,ne extraordinary difficulty of depicting a :."an so manifestly demonic is assuredly an ;:)(eUse for ultimate failure in explaining him, nt this biographer does worse than she need 2,ave done. She is much too honest to play :tsnout with dubious psychologising, though „"nW and again she uses terms which she does at seem to grasp with any precision. An ithor who can say that a person suffered er(3rn what " in modern language" would be balled a nervous breakdown, cannot at least se accused of modishness, but when a tiredcilitle journey in Russia is called traumatic at taint begins to appear. ' Paranoiac' and ,e l/sYFhosomatic ' are flashed about a bit too dlachlY. Lady Antonia is, of course, aware s,_at Cromwell's personality was very unf_Lable and she rightly draws attention to his [,e,cluent terrifying rages; but, despite talk of 'Ile dark night of the soul," she never per

suades me that, being evidently nice, sensible and a bit downright, she comprehends the violence and frustration at the heart of the man which, failing too frequently, he strove to control. As for his religion, the conscious core of him, we get a valiant attempt to expound it, but the understanding of puritanism here displayed is from the outside — and is that of an earnest and not very perceptive student. Where is the sense of God battering the soul of Oliver Cromwell as well as pouring occasional balm? Lady Antonia makes no attempt to exculpate the man and especially permits a combination of sympathy for the Irish and a critical attitude to the sources unusual in her to dominate the most repulsive phase of the great man's public life; but with all her piling of detail and painting of shadows she still fails to lay bare his inner reality.

Why should Oliver have proved so universally elusive? Well, in the first place.he is in fact an exceptionally difficult person to do justice to: the stage he occupied gets in the way. Very few historians can free themselves from firm convictions about the English Revolution and the Civil Wars, and Cromwell is therefore always liable to lose his humanity and appear as superhuman — a hero or a villain larger than life. Yet he Cannot be accepted as superhuman until he is treated and understood as a public man, a politician and labourer in affairs, proceedings by methods and upon grounds which apply also to others. Secondly, he is very well — at any rate, very plentifully — recorded; we know a lot about his words and moods as well as his actions, and the sum total often bewilders quite rightly because this highly emotional man bewildered not only contemporaries but himself too. Some'consistency in thought, some regular pattern of behaviour and reaction, such things help to bring understanding of a historical figure: Oliver, stuttering and thrashing about, resists such aids to portraiture. Then there is the extraordinary achievement to account for, against a background formed of manifestly often very modest abilities and excruciatingly conventional attitudes (and just as it is clear that we have here that figure beloved by English historians, the typical backwoods squire, the confusing fellow gives birth to thunderous and radical particularity). Cromwell's one unquestioned greatness as a military organiser and commander in battle appeared only in middle age, urgently asking to be explained in terms of his personality but too late in manifesting itself to assist in understanding his formation. Doubts have been expressed about this, but though he achieved his victories in the face of general ineptitude among those he knocked down, I am persuaded (by Lady Antonia, among others) that he had genius in war.

Was Oliver sane — or at any rate capable of sanity and balance? Lady Antonia rightly draws attention to the boisterous good spirits he showed in battle. He loved fighting and seems to have relished killing: never did he feel so much at ease as among the flashing swords. Nor would it be wise to ascribe this kind of reaction solely to convictions about fighting the battles of the Lord: the physical exhilaration of combat seems to have helped by itself to banish the brooding doubts and stammering hesitancies which so often beset him. The only other times that he displayed a like freedom from care were apparently those moments of tedious horseplay and crude jesting_that he could indulge in at the expense of others. A simple soldier-man and rather nasty with it? Certainly not, as the frequent flashes of reflective insight, the thoughts cherished for others, the sense of personal destiny subordinated to the spiritual regeneration of a nation show well enough. Above all there was his ability to tolerate bloodyminded troublemakers (the age abounded with them, all claiming mandates from God and the people), an ability quite astounding in a man of his

power who at other times so readily destroyed opposition with brutal efficiency. His religion itself was not typical but peculiar: it was by the standards of his own time, not those of ours, that he manifested a strange mixture of faith and doubt, simplicity and deviousness, wild spiritual exhilaration and institutionalised decorum.

Wherever one touches Cromwell simplicities in fact writhe into marvellously opaque complexities. The often incomprehensible muddle of his speeches, shot through with those famous, drastically clear, sentences that strike like lightning, may owe something to poor reporting; but it is too much at one with the confused, confusing, primitive, subtle, furious, considerate man and mind to be ignored as an accident of the evidence. Certainly, a man who believed that all his doings were the work of God and who received his instructions direct from on high was bound to hesitate and dither so long as the orders failed to come through, even as he was bound to act without a moment's doubt once the message had been delivered — commonly in prayer. The behaviour which disconcerted so many at the time and gave him the reputation of a cynic and hypocrite did assuredly arise from these more respectable difficulties.

But there remain too many fundamental and irreconcilable contradictions. And we confront a man whose God invariably advised him in the manner most conducive to his worldly advance. Who really created both hesitations and actions? Who in fact was the creator — God of Oliver, or Oliver of his God?

And does that make this energetic, Usually competent politician, this highly successful general, this solid ruler in an exceptionally difficult situation — the only leader of a revo lution who did not have to escape personal disaster by pursuing ever more radical ends — once again into a superhuman being? The one thing Oliver never became was a statesman: the compassing of lasting achievements in the body politic was beyond him.

In the end it remains uncertain whether Cromwell possessed greatness, intellectual power, insight and foresight, the ability to de fine tasks precisely — or whether he really rose so high because he did not know where he was going and never matched inner force to the situation into which events and the animal drive of his being catapulted him. This biography brings us no nearer to solving the puzzle.