- FIVE CROMWELLIANS
Press. I5S.)
Cromwell's Captains. By C. E. Lucas Phillips. (Heinemann. 16s.) CROMWELL'S officers are slowly emerging from under the shadow of his mighty and eccentric personality, and we are becoming more and more aware of the solid and uninspired effort that went on behind the scenes where -Oliver made his passionate and largely irrelevant speeches. Every detail helps to hammer home the argument that Cromwell was no personal dictator. Sir James- Berry and Mr. Lee point out and illustrate the independence and initiative of one of the most important major-generals. It is not their fault if lack of evidence makes it difficult to give a clear impression of Berry until under Charles II he refused to purchase his liberty by condemning his principles. Berry seems to have been a business man interested in iron before. the war, though during the course of it he inevitably speculated in real estate, and bought a bishop's palace. (The authors give interesting evidence to show that when the whole regiment used its debentures jointly to buy a crown manor, Berry and five other officers bought all the rest out some 2J, years later. Apparently they gave ki,000 less than cost price for it, though it is not quite clear whether this secured them the whole manor. But the conditions of the market enormously favoured those. who had ready capital—i.e., the officers.) Berry's letters (here fully collected) show him to have been a very competent and conscientious administrator, and dispel the legend that the main occupation of the major-generals was the preservation of standards of moral behaviour. There was simply a dose connexion in their minds between godliness and political orthodoxy. The major-generals seem to have combined the functions of the abolished bishops (supervision of church government and the clergy; arbitration in disputes) with the police functions necessary after any revolution. The authors suggest a further interesting parallel with the old hierarchy when they say "a regiment seems to have been regarded by this time as a form of endowment for useful public servants." The rivals and successors of the major-generals • were Thurloe and the new civil service. The military dictatorship had difficulty in Wales in finding either local government officer, on whom it could rely or cavaliers whose wealth was of a type that made them liable to decimation.
Mr. Phillips's more " popular " studies are of Hampden, Skippon, Blake and Lambert. He was unlucky in being antici- pated by Mr. Dawson's full-length work on Lambert ; of Hampden there are already satisfactory biographies. Mr. Phillips is most interesting on Skippon, a pleasing and hitherto neglected figure. Son of a yeoman family which had been acquiring land before the civil war, Skippon amplified the estate by a well-planned carder, and hit SolfW'as knighted by Charles II. Yet Skippon was also the author of devotional books and poems, a fighter for his principles on the Continent who returned to find his Madrid at London and to organise the courageous citizens' army which saved the parliamentary cause at-Turnham Green and Gloucester. Mr. Phillips is on intimate terms with his subjects : Lambert is " Jack " or " Johnnie " to him. And his attempts to give a modern flavour are not always successful, " the proletarian levellers " being a particularly ujohappy example. Sir James Berry and Mr. Lee more illumin- atingly compare the active intervention of the troops in politics with the soldiers' councils of the Russian revolution. Biography as a method of presenting narrative has its disadvantages. Unless great care is exercised it inevitably tends to make history the work of great men, and to obscure the processes by which the great men themselves are impelled. It was not, after all, a mere whim of Lambert's that made Cromwell protector. Mr. Phillips is less successful in avoiding this pitfall than Berry's conscientious biographers.
.CHRISTOPHER HILL.
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