Parliaments and Politics during the Cromwellian Protectorate (review)

No other decade in England’s long parliamentary history was ever like the 1650s. It began with the rule of the Rump Parliament, the purged remnant of the Long Parliament that had defeated the monarchy and governed the country at the sufferance of the revolutionary army. Uniquely, the Rump combined the legislative and executive functions, while remaining the supreme national court as well. This breadth did not protect it from a forced dismissal by Oliver Cromwell, who ruled temporarily by the sword but soon called a new, appointed legislature, variously known as the Nominated Saints or the Barebone Parliament. This extraordinary body was sent home in its turn, and Cromwell, consolidating his authority under the traditional title of Lord Protector, returned to elected Parliaments in 1654 and 1656, each chosen under a different form. A third body, the Protectoral Parliament, convened by Richard Cromwell, Oliver’s son and successor, was dismissed in another army coup in 1659, at which point the Rump Parliament was recalled, to be dismissed and revived once more until it finally dissolved itself on the eve of the Stuart restoration.

These various parliamentary experiments deserve examination in their political context, the predominant circumstance of which was the presence of a revolutionary army led, until 1658, by Cromwell. His personality looms so large over the period that a mere institution seems pallid and diffuse beside it. But it must be remembered that the English Revolution itself was the product of parliamentary enterprise and that Cromwell never conceived his rule apart from it. If there was to be an England, there would have to be a Parliament. Charles I lost his head because he ignored that principle.

The Cromwellian period has come under renewed scrutiny in recent years, and the work under review, which synthesizes earlier studies by both authors, fills an evident gap. The protectoral parliaments have generally been viewed as a failure, preoccupied as they were by questions of institutional integrity and authority. These questions were natural. The first protectoral parliament, that of 1654, was called under the aegis of the Instrument of Government, a document produced by the army. Its reflexive response was to validate its autonomy by modifying the role prescribed for it, as well as the powers exercised by the lord protector. The second Parliament proposed to reconstitute itself as a bicameral body and to offer Cromwell a crown, the purpose of which, as Little and Smith show, was not to augment but to restrain Cromwell’s powers. People knew what a king was or ought to be; the Cromwellian protectorate had few apparent limits save those that Cromwell voluntarily chose to observe. A case in point was his exclusion of more than a hundred members of parliament (mps) in 1656. Because parliaments had long struggled to assert the right to confirm and police their own membership, the Cromwellian exclusions were more shocking than anything done by the most authoritarian of monarchs.

Little and Smith contend both that Cromwell was a less detached (and capricious) parliamentary manager than has been assumed and that his parliaments were less obstructionist than they might superficially appear. There is truth to both these assertions. Cromwell’s contradictions as a statesman were of epic proportions; he idealized his parliaments as the instrument of an elect nation but showed little patience with the pace of legislative procedure. The situation was complicated by the fact that this procedure was rendered highly problematical by unresolved disputes about the relation of protectoral ordinances to parliamentary statutes, the imposition of taxes, the control of the militia, and the status of the protectoral veto. Some of these disputes echoed those of Stuart and Caroline parliaments, but in none of those cases was the constitutional framework so unstable, and the relations of power so volatile.

A further complication was the presence in these parliaments of republican and royalist elements, both of which were ideologically hostile to the protectorate. Even the centrist Presbyterian base that was...