A Cloak for Knavery: Kingship, the Army and the First Protectorate Parliament 1654–55

Abstract

Current interest in the role of kingship during the 1650s is confined largely to concerns about the origins and consequences of the Humble Petition and Advice presented to Oliver Cromwell on 31 March 1657 by the Second Protectorate Parliament.1 That episode highlighted an unresolved tension at the heart of Protectoral authority: though Cromwell regularly utilised the trappings of kingship and already, in effect, exercised a de facto prerogative, he rejected the actual kingly title itself. This is undoubtedly a crucial issue but focusing narrowly on that one event has tended to obscure rather than clarify these issues under the Protectorate, reducing episodes where these matters were raised earlier in the Interregnum simply to staging posts on the road to the Petition and Advice.2C. H. Firth's main conclusions on that event made at the beginning of the twentieth century remain essentially unchallenged, although evidence for a revision of some sort has slowly accumulated over the years.3 The Petition and Advice, of course, deserves close attention but we need also to recognise that the issue of kingship did not just 'happen' in 1657 or even 1656: it was a serious concern among the elite, both military and civilian, throughout the Interregnum. As J. M. Wallace noted in 1968, 'A good deal of evidence concerning the vitality of the kingship issue as early as 1654 can be found in the histories of the period, though never widely aired by historians, and more is available in the pamphlet literature'.4My aim is to examine one episode in the mid-1650s - the first Protectorate Parliament, 3 September 1654 to 22 January 1655 - where concerns about monarchy and the succession did play a prominent role. Most familiar with the period will recall Augustine Garland's attempt to have the Parliament petition Cromwell to take the crown.5 This is generally regarded as an isolated incident with little support among the members. While it certainly lacked support in the House, this should not be taken as evidence it lacked support more generally. At that very moment, a lively debate on monarchy was in fact in progress in the pamphlet literature and, to a lesser extent, the news-books.Moreover, the apparent lack of support in the House itself requires closer examination. Historians have taken the absence of kingship from the Parliamentary records to mean it lacked importance during 1654. The contrast between the lively debate in the pamphlet literatures and the silence of Parliamentary sources is too systematic simply to be dismissed as a difference between reliable and unreliable sources. It is as if kingship had been cut deliberately from the picture leaving only a suspicious silhouette.Such silences are notoriously difficult to deal with. An argument from silence seems to break the golden rule of evidence: silence, at best, supports scepticism. If there was only silence then nothing more could be said but there is also the contrasting debate in the pamphlet literature, indications of censorship or at least 'interference' in the press, and considerable evidence - albeit circumstantial - that powerful interests in the Army, the Government and the Parliament, were desperate to keep a lid on any such debate with the House itself. From this perspective, the critical silence of the 'eyewitnesses' did not simply mark an absence; it also marked the invisible hub of Parliament's anxiety: kingship and the succession. The aim of this article is to situate that silence and the anxiety it concealed within the debate on legitimate authority which dominated early Protectoral politics.The Silence of ParliamentOn 22 January 1655, at the dissolution of Parliament, Cromwell praised the Instrument of Government because it 'put us off the hereditary way' and achieved a balanced, equitable form of government by avoiding 'the extremes of monarchy on the one hand, and democracy on the other'.6 He told Parliament that,if you had upon the old government offered me this one . …