John Adamson, Review of The Making of Oliver Cromwell by Ronald Hutton, Sunday Times, Culture Section, 25 July 2021

BOOKS | BIOGRAPHY The Making of Oliver Cromwell by Ronald Hutton review — the master of fake news The lord protector was a ruthless self-promoter, says this sharp study John Adamson Sunday July 25 2021, 12.01am, The Sunday Times Military man: Oliver Cromwell by Robert Walker, c 1649 ROB E RT AL E X AN D E R/ G E T T Y I M AG E S s posthumous reputations go, Oliver Cromwell’s has never stood higher. A BBC poll in 2000 placed him among the three greatest Britons of the millennium, beaten only by Shakespeare and Churchill. Admirers abound. And his vast statue, installed in 1899, stands proudly outside Westminster Hall, unchallenged by any demands that Oliver must fall. A Yet all this is relatively recent. Within two years of his state funeral in 1658, his corpse had been exhumed and publicly dismembered for his part in the execution of Charles I. For the next two centuries he was the nation’s most vilified figure. 1 Only with the rise of democratic movements in the 19th century was he rehabilitated: recast as the heroic soldier who won the civil war, made parliament supreme and reminded haughty monarchs they too had necks. Predictably biographies of him are legion. Over the past 30 years a new one has emerged roughly every five years. Why, then, do we need another? His latest biographer, the distinguished historian Ronald Hutton, has his answer ready. Most recent biographers have shared a basic similarity of approach: striving to represent Cromwell “in his own words” and falling, in consequence, for his own estimation of his motives and significance. Hutton’s solution is to dim the spotlight on Cromwell and illuminate the wider stage: to “recontextualise” Cromwell by locating him within the much larger cast of characters with whom he interacted. He heeds their testimony as attentively as the lines delivered by his drama’s star. This is no easy task. Cromwell’s years of prominence straddle the two most unstable and complex decades in British history, when rules of government and centres of power changed with kaleidoscopic speed. Placing Cromwell securely in any one of these ever-changing “contexts” requires archival research on a scale that deters most scholars. To make the project manageable Hutton opts to ignore Cromwell’s years of real political prominence — the creation of the English republic and his rise as lord protector in the years after 1648. He focuses instead on his formative years as a political and military leader: the period between the collapse of royal government in 1640 and the parliamentary victory in the civil war six years later. Before that we have only what Hutton calls “prehistoric Cromwell”. Frustratingly, for the first two thirds of Cromwell’s life — the 40 years between his birth in 1599 as the son of a minor Huntingdonshire squire and his election to the Commons in 1640 — we have mere fragments of information. On one thing, however, all commentators agree: that at some time in his midthirties he experienced a powerful religious conversion that left him convinced of his membership of a puritan spiritual elite and enjoying a particular intimacy with God. 2 Hutton identifies this intense and dynamic religiosity as the lodestar for Cromwell’s political and soldierly career: impelling him to raise a cavalry force at the outbreak of war, despite lacking military experience; sustaining him in his wrangles with lacklustre superiors; guiding him as an agent of divine judgment in opposing and defeating the king. Nor was godliness all. Cromwell’s success, Hutton argues, owed much to his agile intellect, his capacity for learning on the job, and not least his luck in avoiding injury amid the perils of his military campaigns. Much of the book is necessarily devoted to these campaigns and battles, and Hutton relates them with impressive narrative élan. He is incapable of writing a dull sentence. But Cromwell’s undoubted “godliness”, Hutton insists, coexisted with a series of more slippery and less saintly traits. Ruthless self-promotion was one. An early master of the manipulation of battlefront news, Cromwell skilfully exploited the 1640s’ proliferation of cheap print to extol his own achievements at the expense of his brother officers. He was even more unscrupulous in deploying “blatant untruths” to discredit parliament’s aristocratic military commanders. This depiction of Cromwell as simultaneously a figure of authentic piety and a master of politics’ darker arts is both original and psychologically persuasive. But bringing down the curtain in 1646 creates distortions of its own. At the end of this book we are left with the impression not only that Cromwell is already “an enduring national figure”, but also that his future greatness is foreordained. This is pushing things, to put it mildly. In 1646 Cromwell was one of two dozen or more prominent figures at Westminster: a person of consequence, but still in the political second division. True, he had been second-in-command to Sir Thomas Fairfax at the decisive victory at Naseby. But who today can name Wellington’s second-in-command at Waterloo? His “recontextualisation” is also very limited. Cromwell’s military success owed at least as much to his political allies’ mastery of parliament’s administrative and patronage machine as to his own qualities as a general. Yet this broader political dimension of Cromwell’s “making” is largely ignored here. Moreover, Cromwell was made of material far too volatile for the process of his “making” ever to have reached a stable end point. His ideas and guiding principles 3 were permanently in flux. He discerned in God’s intentions for England first a restored if powerless monarchy in 1647, then a regicidal republic in 1649, and by the later 1650s a Cromwellian quasi-kingship. His religious enthusiasms charted an equally unstable course, including in 1653 a flirtation with those convinced of the imminent second coming of Christ, quickly ended by Cromwell when their policies produced parliamentary chaos. No one can read this book without coming away with their understanding of Cromwell deeply enriched. Yet the man himself remains the English Revolution’s Scarlet Pimpernel. He eludes us still. The Making of Oliver Cromwell by Ronald Hutton Yale UP £25 pp400 4