Skilful satyr
Geoffrey Elton
The Rump Parliament 1648-1653 Blair Worden (Cambridge University Press £8.40)
The wave of precise historical scholarship, devoted to an exhaustive use of the sources and Unfettered by preliminary interpretative theories, which some twenty-five years ago burst out of the medieval reservoir to flood the sixteenth century, is now engulfing the seventeenth. This is good news. Too many historians of the "century of revolution" had been content to fight the ideological battles of that age or indeed of their own day, getting us no further in understanding. With the arrival of scholars like Gerald Aylmer, Valerie Pearl and David Underdown, new light began to dawn. Dr Worden's first book proves him to be a worthy member of that company.
He has shown some courage in choosing his subject. After the heroic days of resistance to tyranny, civil war, the execution of the king, the years during which a truncated remnant of the Long Parliament ruled England have always seemed at least an anticlimax, perhaps even the satyr-play needed to relieve the tragedy. Concentration was apt to be diverted to Dunbar and Drogheda, pursuing Cromwell around the Islands, while what went on at Westminster was written off as a pointless display of inefficient selfishness rightly in the end terminated by the returning warrior. Little or nothing of this survives Dr Worden's vigorous examination. The book comprises three sections: an analysis of the Rump's membership, an analytical discussion of attempts at reform, and a narrative account of the Parliament's history especially in its conflict with the victorious Army. Dr Worden completes the process begun by J. H. Hexter thirty years ago when he puts to sleep all talk of 'presbyterian' and 'independent' parties, or indeed of anything resembling party, and shows how diverse and in manner unpredictable so many Rumpers were. Not all can even be categorised as republicans by conviction, especially as so many of those excluded in 'Pride's Purge' returned after a while, and most of them were willing to accept whatever settlement could be arrived at. Despite its origins, the Rump was conservative rather than revolutionary, those favouring change being generally unable to specify the changes they wanted. However,. though it achieved little, this Parliament did make some stabs at reform and was not unserious about it. Evidently the bad reputation of the Rump has for too long reflected only the bitterness of its enemies, especially of Levellers and the Army. The Rump had to govern three kingdoms shattered by war and for about half its life further disturbed by the struggle to suppress royalism in Scotland and Ireland. At least these troubles held the members together; after Worcester, facing the insoluble problem of an Army determined upon idealistic reform and eager for its backpay, they fell apart. The quarrel with the Army destroyed the Rump, but not until Cromwell decided that he could no longer work with this civil government and had indeed been cheated by it. In the most striking piece of revision in the book, Dr Worden demonstrates that the outburst of fury with which the Lord General sent the House packing was not, as he was afterwards to claim, justified by its alleged conspiracy to perpetuate itself. The bill that so enraged Cromwell was one for a dissolution followed by new elections, not for an enlargement of the existing body by 'recruiting.' Cromwell may have been genuinely in error until it was too late, after which (probably realising his mistake) he allowed the fateful bill to vanish and false stories to be put about; or he may have been seeking for an excuse to substitute the rule of the saints which did follow the expulsion of the Rump. At any rate, the man who had effectively created the system of 1649 was also the man who four years later threw it out. The Rump was only the first of the suits of clothes tried on in an endeavour to cover the nakedness of the sword, but it set the pattern of failure. Cromwell tired of it because it would not undertake the reforms in law and religion for which the Army was pressing, but since (as Dr Worden says) he meant it to provide a conservative bastion against social revolution it shows a significant lack of sense on his part that he should have expected it to prove conveniently reformist on such matters as he wished to see reformed.
The main concern of this book is with the parliamentary and national history of the period, and notwithstanding the serious deficiencies of the evidence Dr Worden succeeds in telling a full and satisfying tale. But his outstanding contribution lies perhaps in what he has to say about Oliver Cromwell. No more than anyone else can he make 'sense' of the man, but that is because sense in that simple form was absent from' Cromwell's character and actions. Those constant inner cross-purposes, those best intentions shattered by political incompetence and frequent impatience, that entirely idiosyncratic mixture of idealism and practical ruthlessness, all this comes through convincingly; and so, rendered three-dimensional, comes the truth of the man's greatness. Dr Worden, who knows that history is about real people, supplies many memorable portraits, but though none is really attempted of Oliver the whole book stands in the shadow of a personality here better realised than in most biographies.
This, then, is political history at its best — anchored in reality, fascinated by men's motives and doings in affairs, marching steadilY through the events to bring out the issues and confusions, without surrender to either antiquarianism or pattern-making. To his other virtues as an historian Dr Worden adds high skill as a writer. He can even jest without destroying the atmosphere of the scene, a rare gift. If the book owes its enduring virtues to the author's determination to tell it as it was and to his willingness to abide by the limitations of the evidence, it should also be recognised that without the deployment of a powerful and disciplined historical imagina" tion Dr Worden would, on such a subject, have written the kind of worthy dull book with which readers of history are only too familiar. As it is, he has written one to fascinate and captivate.
Geoffrey Elton is Professor of English Constitutional History at Cambridge University.
Previous page
