You are viewing a free preview of this lesson.
Subscribe to unlock all 10 lessons in this course and every other course on LearningBro.
The Protectorate — the regime under which Oliver Cromwell ruled as Lord Protector from 1653 to 1658, and his son Richard briefly after him — was the republic's most sustained attempt to find a stable, legitimate constitutional form. It was also, ultimately, its last. Within two years of Cromwell's death the monarchy was restored, brought back not by foreign conquest but by the broad longing of the political nation for the settled order the republic had never managed to provide. This lesson examines why the republican experiment, having survived the regicide and the wars, still failed to achieve lasting stability — and it therefore straddles two of the breadth study's organising themes: it is the final act of the revolution, and it explains, by its failure, why the settlement of 1660 took the form it did.
The figure of Oliver Cromwell dominates the period and divides historians as sharply as any individual in English history. Was he a sincere seeker after godly, consensual government, tragically forced into authoritarian expedients by circumstances he could not master — or a military strongman whose piety cloaked the reality of a dictatorship resting on the sword? The question is sharpened by the extraordinary moment in 1657 when Cromwell was offered the crown and, after agonised hesitation, refused it. This lesson works through the successive constitutional experiments of the Protectorate — the Instrument of Government, the two Protectorate Parliaments, the rule of the Major-Generals, the offer of the crown — and the religious vision that underpinned them, before turning to the collapse of the republic after Cromwell's death and the reasons the nation turned back to monarchy in 1660.
Key enquiry: Why did England's republican experiment fail to achieve lasting stability under the Protectorate — and how far is the answer to be found in Oliver Cromwell himself: in his indispensability, his reliance on the army, and the gap between his consensual ideals and his authoritarian practice?
By April 1653 Cromwell had lost patience with the Rump's self-perpetuation and its handling of a bill for new elections. He entered the Commons with musketeers and forcibly dissolved it, reportedly upbraiding the members — "You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately... In the name of God, go!" — and ordering the mace, "this bauble", to be taken away. The army had now dispersed the very Parliament in whose name the king had been killed, and the search for a legitimate constitutional form began again from scratch.
The first experiment was the Barebones (Nominated) Parliament of July to December 1653: an assembly of "godly men" nominated rather than elected. Its radical wing pressed to abolish tithes and the Court of Chancery, alarming the propertied classes, and the moderates engineered its surrender of power back to Cromwell. This failure — an assembly of the godly proving too radical for the nation — is a microcosm of the whole republican dilemma, and it led directly to the establishment of the Protectorate.
The Instrument of Government, drafted by Major-General John Lambert, was England's first and only codified written constitution. It established Cromwell as Lord Protector.
| Feature | Detail |
|---|---|
| Lord Protector | Executive authority vested in Cromwell for life, advised by a Council of State that constrained as well as supported him. |
| Parliament | A single-chamber Parliament of around 400 English members (plus Scottish and Irish), to sit for at least five months every three years, with a reformed franchise. |
| Religious toleration | Liberty of worship for Trinitarian Protestants — a remarkably broad toleration by the standards of the age — though not extended to Catholics or to public Anglican (Prayer Book) worship. |
| The militia | Control of the armed forces shared between Protector and Parliament — the very point on which the constitution would founder. |
Cromwell's tragedy was a genuine paradox: he believed sincerely in rule by consent through Parliament, yet no Parliament he summoned would accept the constitutional settlement — and the army's privileged place within it — that he regarded as non-negotiable. Each attempt to "heal and settle" foundered on this same contradiction.
| Body | Date | Problem |
|---|---|---|
| First Protectorate Parliament | 1654–55 | Promptly challenged the Instrument itself — the single-person executive, the army's role — instead of governing. Cromwell dissolved it at the earliest moment the Instrument allowed. |
| The Rule of the Major-Generals | 1655–57 | After Penruddock's Rising (1655), Cromwell divided England into (eventually) eleven or twelve districts under major-generals charged with security and "godly reformation of manners", funded by the Decimation Tax on Royalists. Bitterly resented, it fused military rule with Puritan moral policing and became a byword for everything the nation feared about the regime. |
| Second Protectorate Parliament | 1656–58 | Offered Cromwell the crown in the Humble Petition and Advice (1657), seeking to anchor the regime in the familiar, law-bound form of kingship. After agonised hesitation Cromwell refused the title, but accepted a revised constitution with a second chamber and the right to name his successor. |
The experiment of the Major-Generals deserves particular attention, because it crystallises the central failure of the whole republic. Charged with enforcing security and a "reformation of manners" — restricting alehouses, suppressing "ungodly" recreations, enforcing the Sabbath — the Major-Generals embodied the attempt to make a nation godly by compulsion. They proved, decisively, that the broad mass of the population would not accept Puritan moral discipline imposed from above by soldiers. Their failure was not merely administrative but a verdict on the whole project of the godly commonwealth. Here lies a recurring theme of the Interregnum: the gulf between the convictions of the godly minority who had made the revolution and the instincts of the conformist majority who had to live under it. The resentment the Major-Generals generated fed directly into the parliamentary pressure that produced the offer of the crown — an attempt to return to familiar, civilian, law-bound forms.
The refusal of the crown is the supreme test-case for interpreting Cromwell. In 1657 the Second Protectorate Parliament, through the Humble Petition and Advice, offered him the title of king. The attraction was obvious: kingship was a known, law-bound office, and a King Oliver founding a dynasty might have anchored the regime in the legitimacy that the Protectorate, an improvised novelty, so conspicuously lacked. Yet after weeks of agonised hesitation Cromwell refused — chiefly because the army's senior officers would not stomach a king, and because his own providential conscience recoiled from restoring a title God, in his reading, had cast down. To some historians this proves his principled republicanism; to others it reveals the regime's fatal weakness, unable to clothe itself in the legitimacy of kingship that might have secured its survival. Either way, the episode illuminates the whole dilemma of the Protectorate: the tension between what would work (kingship, consent, civilian rule) and what the army and Cromwell's conscience would permit.
The two constitutions of the Protectorate repay direct comparison, for the movement between them exposes the regime's search for legitimacy with unusual clarity. The Instrument of Government (1653) was a military document — drafted by Lambert and the officers, imposed without any elected assembly's assent, and resting the Protector's authority on the sword that had dispersed the Rump. The Humble Petition and Advice (1657), by contrast, was a parliamentary one, offered by an elected House and drawing its authority from consent rather than conquest; it not only pressed the crown on Cromwell but restored a second chamber (an "Other House") and gave him the right to name his own successor — the trappings, in all but name, of a hereditary, law-bound, quasi-monarchical settlement. The trajectory from the Instrument to the Humble Petition is therefore the trajectory of the whole experiment: a regime born of military necessity groping, year by year, back towards the familiar, civilian, monarchical forms it had begun by abolishing. That it never completed the journey — that Cromwell took the powers of a king while refusing the name, and left the crucial question of the succession resting on his personal nomination of the untested Richard rather than on any settled principle — is the clearest measure of why the Protectorate could not institutionalise itself. A constitution that depends on the irreplaceable authority of one man is not a constitution at all, but a life-tenancy; and when the tenant died, so did the settlement.
To understand Cromwell at all, one must grasp that religion was the centre of his being, not a veneer over politics. He believed himself an instrument of divine providence, reading the army's victories — Marston Moor, Naseby, Dunbar, Worcester — as God's own verdicts, and he interpreted political choices as attempts to discern God's will. This providentialism explains much that otherwise looks merely contradictory: his willingness to dissolve Parliaments that thwarted what he took to be God's purposes; his anguish when events seemed to signal divine displeasure; and his life's deepest commitment, liberty of conscience for the godly.
| Aspect of the religious settlement | Detail |
|---|---|
| Toleration | Cromwell extended a remarkably broad liberty of worship to Trinitarian Protestants — Independents, Baptists, and even (controversially) the readmission of the Jews to England from 1656, after their expulsion in 1290. This tolerance, by the standards of the age, was extraordinary. |
| A loose national Church | Rather than impose uniformity, Cromwell maintained a broad, decentralised state Church staffed through the Triers and Ejectors (1654), commissions that vetted ministers for godliness and competence rather than for doctrinal precision. |
| Limits of toleration | Liberty did not extend to Catholics or to public Anglican (Prayer Book) worship, nor to those whose beliefs threatened public order. The Quaker James Nayler, who re-enacted Christ's entry into Jerusalem, was savagely punished by Parliament in 1656 — against Cromwell's own inclination. |
| The "reformation of manners" | The godly sought to reform the nation's morals — restricting alehouses, suppressing recreations, enforcing the Sabbath — a programme the Major-Generals embodied and which provoked deep popular resentment. |
Cromwell's toleration is one of the most significant features of the Interregnum for the breadth study, because it is a genuine point of change: no monarch before 1649 had extended such liberty to Protestant Dissenters, and the sects that flourished under it would become the permanent body of Nonconformity whose toleration is contested right down to 1689. Yet the "reformation of manners" reveals the regime's central failure — the attempt to make a nation godly by compulsion, which the population would not accept.
The collapse of censorship and Church discipline in the 1640s had unleashed an astonishing ferment of radical religious and political movements, which reached their height in the 1650s.
| Movement | Key ideas |
|---|---|
| Levellers | Political democracy: a wide franchise, equal constituencies, a written constitution, popular sovereignty. Led by John Lilburne, Richard Overton and William Walwyn; their threat to the army was broken at the Burford mutiny (1649). |
| Diggers (True Levellers) | Agrarian communism: the earth as a "common treasury", common ownership of land. Gerrard Winstanley established a short-lived commune on St George's Hill, Surrey (1649). |
| Ranters | Antinomianism: the saved are above the moral law and cannot sin. Probably far smaller and less organised than alarmed contemporaries claimed — the centre of a key historiographical dispute. |
| Quakers (Society of Friends) | The "inner light": direct, unmediated experience of God; rejection of a professional clergy, tithes, oaths and outward social deference. George Fox was the leading figure; by the late 1650s the movement was large and, to the authorities, alarming. |
| Fifth Monarchists | Millenarianism: the imminent Second Coming and the rule of "King Jesus"; the saints should prepare by establishing godly government, by force if need be. |
The fear these movements inspired among the propertied majority is central to understanding both the Protectorate and the Restoration. The spectacle of the world "turned upside down" — of social and religious hierarchy dissolving — frightened the gentry into valuing order above liberty, and it is one of the strongest currents drawing the nation back towards monarchy by 1660. The radicalism of the 1650s thus helps explain the conservatism of the settlement that followed it.
Cromwell's rule also had a European dimension that a rounded assessment must weigh.
Subscribe to continue reading
Get full access to this lesson and all 10 lessons in this course.