‘One that Would Sit Well at the Mark’: The Early Parliamentary Career of Oliver Cromwell, 1640–1642

Abstract

Informal parliamentary activity in the mid-seventeenth century is a huge, ill-defined and badly documented subject. Much went on outside the personal gaze of the Speaker, and its importance is obvious because key indicators of it survive, such as the crowds in Westminster Hall, the invention of printing for parliament from 1641 and the scale of petitioning in 1641–1642, which must have been accompanied by massive personal lobbying. The daily experience of any rank-and-file parliament-man in the early phase of the Long Parliament is often hard to re-create, that of a rank-and-file member who during the life of that same parliament achieved fame and notoriety in equal measure, and whose later reputation has been fashioned by centuries of contestation, harder still. Although Oliver Cromwell had played a part in two previous parliaments, the assembly that gathered in November 1640 was the first in which he was visibly active in a number of roles. Inevitably, students of this period in Cromwell’s life have pored over his conduct in search of signs of future greatness, or hallmarks of his character and career, good or ill. Among these might be listed his commitment to godly Protestantism, his impatience with the hesitant or uncommitted, his predilection for ‘networking’ and his social marginalisation. The first two of these attributes can be measured by Cromwell’s own pronouncements and by the official record, but a judgement on the latter two must hang upon an assessment of parliamentary behaviour as a whole.