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The Interregnum — the eleven years between the execution of Charles I and the Restoration of his son — was the only period in English history without a monarch, and the only sustained experiment with republican government. It was an age of paradox. A regime born of revolution spent most of its energy in search of stability; a movement that had fought for parliamentary liberty repeatedly dissolved its Parliaments by force; and a man who genuinely believed in government by consent found himself ruling as Lord Protector, offered a crown and agonising over whether to refuse it. And in the end the experiment failed: within two years of Oliver Cromwell's death the monarchy was back, restored not by foreign conquest but by the broad longing of the political nation for the settled order the republic had never managed to provide. Explaining why the republic could not achieve lasting stability — and how far the answer lies in Cromwell himself — is the central problem of this lesson.
The previous lesson closed with the abolition of monarchy and the declaration of the Commonwealth in 1649. This lesson follows the republican experiments that succeeded one another over the next eleven years: the Rump-governed Commonwealth and the brutal reconquest of Ireland; the failed "Barebone's" assembly of nominated godly men; the Instrument of Government and the Protectorate that made Cromwell head of state under England's only written constitution; the deeply resented rule of the Major-Generals; Cromwell's remarkable religious settlement, with its broad toleration and its "reformation of manners"; and finally the collapse of the regime after Cromwell's death and the near-unanimous turn of the nation back to monarchy. Throughout, the figure of Oliver Cromwell dominates and divides — regicide and usurper to Royalists, Puritan hero to the Victorians, "reluctant revolutionary" to some modern historians and calculating politician to others.
The organising question is twofold and interlocking: why did the republican experiment fail to achieve lasting stability, and how far is the answer to be found in Cromwell himself — in his indispensability, his reliance on the army, and the gap between his consensual ideals and his authoritarian practice? Keep both in view, because they bear on one of the deepest problems in the whole unit: the impossibility, on the terms then available, of reconciling authority (effective government) with consent (a basis the political nation would acknowledge as rightful). The republic could command force or seek legitimacy, but it could never securely command both.
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This lesson belongs to OCR H505 Unit Y108 (British period study and enquiry): England 1603–1660 — The Early Stuarts and the Origins of the English Civil War. Within our own teaching sequence it is the concluding narrative lesson of the unit: the republican interlude between regicide and Restoration, in which the claim that England could be governed without a king is tested to destruction. We treat the whole Interregnum — Commonwealth, Protectorate, and collapse — as a single lesson, distinct from the regicide that opens it and the exam-technique material that follows, because the failure of the republican experiment is a unified analytical problem best addressed as a whole rather than fragmented across the several short-lived regimes. This is our pedagogical arrangement, not a transcription of the specification's ordering. (Refer to the official OCR specification for exact wording.)
Keep asking, throughout, why each republican settlement failed to reconcile authority with consent, and how far Cromwell's own indispensability was the regime's greatest strength and its fatal weakness. Those questions are the analytical spine of the lesson.
The new republic was governed by the Rump — the purged remnant of the Long Parliament — from 1649 to 1653. Born of Pride's Purge, it was a narrow body without popular mandate, surviving on the army's sufferance even as it resented the army's demands. Its record is genuinely mixed, and a balanced answer must weigh its real achievements against its equally real failures.
| Achievement | Failure |
|---|---|
| Established and defended a functioning republic against formidable threats at home and abroad | Lacked any democratic legitimacy — it represented only a faction of one purged House, secured by force |
| Passed significant measures, including the Navigation Act of 1651, and made some moves towards law reform | Failed to deliver the thorough religious and legal reform the army and the godly demanded |
| Maintained domestic order through years of acute danger | Clung to power, repeatedly delaying the fresh elections it had promised to hold |
| Won the wars: Ireland subdued (1649–50), Scotland defeated at Dunbar (1650) and Worcester (1651), the Dutch challenged at sea | The reconquest of Ireland was carried out with notorious brutality whose memory poisoned Anglo-Irish relations for centuries |
The Rump's fatal flaw was its refusal to renew itself. Having justified the regicide in the name of the people, it would not face the people at the polls — and its self-perpetuation gave Cromwell, increasingly impatient at its failure to reform, the pretext for the coup that ended it in April 1653. Here the central dilemma of the whole Interregnum already appears in miniature: the republic could not reconcile effective authority (which the Rump did provide) with a consent it dared not test at an election.
The republic's most notorious military undertaking was Cromwell's reconquest of Ireland, launched to crush the Royalist–Catholic alliance that had proclaimed Charles II and to avenge the Protestant deaths of the 1641 rebellion.
| Event | Detail |
|---|---|
| Drogheda (September 1649) | After the storming of the town, perhaps 3,500 were killed, including the garrison and many others. Cromwell justified the slaughter by the contemporary laws of war — a stormed garrison that had refused quarter forfeited mercy — and as a "righteous judgement" on those he blamed for the 1641 massacres |
| Wexford (October 1649) | Around 2,000 died when Cromwell's troops broke into the town during negotiations, the storming apparently occurring before terms had been concluded |
| The land settlement | The subsequent Act for the Settlement of Ireland (1652) confiscated vast tracts of Catholic-owned land, driving proprietors "to Hell or to Connaught" and permanently transforming Irish landholding in favour of Protestant settlers |
Cromwell's Irish campaign is among the most contested topics in the field, and the disagreement turns partly on evidence and partly on the moral framework applied. Tom Reilly has controversially argued that the killing at Drogheda has been exaggerated and that Cromwell observed the laws of war of his day, targeting soldiers rather than civilians. Micheál Ó Siochrú, in God's Executioner (2008), offers a far more critical reading, situating the campaign within a pattern of English colonial violence and emphasising civilian suffering. John Morrill stresses that Cromwell's motivation was primarily religious — an anti-Catholic providentialism and vengeance for 1641 — rather than proto-nationalist or ethnic. What matters for the exam is to recognise that the Irish conquest is not a footnote but a defining act of the republic, and that its interpretation is genuinely open: the evidence of how many died, and who, is disputed, and the moral judgement depends on the framework within which the violence is set.
By April 1653 Cromwell had lost patience with the Rump's self-perpetuation and, in particular, with its handling of a bill for fresh elections that seemed designed to entrench the sitting members. He entered the Commons with musketeers and forcibly dissolved it, reportedly telling the members that they had sat too long for any good they had been doing, and ordering the mace — "this bauble" — to be taken away. The moment is heavy with irony: the army had now dispersed the very Parliament in whose name the king had been killed. The search for a legitimate constitutional form had to begin again from scratch, and the succession of experiments that followed is the clearest possible demonstration of the republic's inability to reconcile authority with consent.
Cromwell's first experiment was an assembly of "godly men" — around 140 members nominated by the army and the Independent congregations rather than elected — in the hope that a Parliament of the saints might achieve the godly reformation that election never would. It was quickly nicknamed "Barebone's Parliament" after one of its members, Praise-God Barebone. The experiment failed rapidly: its radical wing pressed to abolish tithes (the compulsory maintenance of the clergy) and the Court of Chancery, alarming the propertied and the moderate. Fearful of where the radicals were heading, the moderate members engineered the assembly's surrender of its power back to Cromwell in December 1653. Barebone's is analytically important because it tested, and refuted, the hope that godliness could substitute for consent: an unelected assembly of the pious proved no more able to command national acceptance than the Rump had been, and its radicalism frightened the very propertied classes whose acquiescence the regime needed.
With the failure of Barebone's, the army fell back on a written constitution. The Instrument of Government, drafted by Major-General John Lambert, was England's first and only codified written constitution, and 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 representatives), to sit for at least five months in every three years, elected on 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 repeatedly founder |
The Protectorate embodied Cromwell's genuine dilemma. He believed sincerely in rule by consent through Parliament, yet no Parliament he summoned would accept the constitutional settlement — and above all the army's privileged place within it — that he regarded as non-negotiable. The First Protectorate Parliament (1654–55) promptly began to challenge the Instrument itself, questioning the single-person executive and the army's role, instead of getting on with the business of government; Cromwell dissolved it at the earliest moment the Instrument allowed. The pattern would repeat: every attempt to "heal and settle" foundered on the contradiction between the Protector's commitment to consent and his insistence on terms that no freely elected Parliament would grant.
The episode that did more than any other to fix the regime's authoritarian and militaristic image in the popular mind was the rule of the Major-Generals. Following Penruddock's Rising — a small Royalist revolt in the West Country in 1655 — Cromwell divided England into (eventually) eleven or twelve districts, each under a major-general charged with security and the "godly reformation of manners," and funded by the Decimation Tax, a special levy on Royalists' estates.
| Aspect | Detail |
|---|---|
| Purpose | To secure the regime against Royalist conspiracy and to advance the moral and religious reformation the godly sought |
| Powers | The major-generals policed their districts, suppressed suspected Royalists, and enforced measures against alehouses, "ungodly" recreations, and Sabbath-breaking |
| Funding | The Decimation Tax — a ten per cent levy on the income of former Royalists — which was widely resented as arbitrary and vindictive taxation without proper consent |
| Reaction | Bitterly unpopular across the political spectrum; the fusion of military rule with Puritan moral policing became a byword for everything the nation feared about the republic |
The Major-Generals matter analytically because they crystallise the regime's central failure, and a strong answer should press the point. The experiment was an attempt to make a nation godly by compulsion, backed by soldiers — and it proved, decisively, that the broad mass of the population would not accept Puritan moral discipline imposed from above. When the Second Protectorate Parliament met, the Decimation Tax was refused and the whole system had to be wound up. The failure of the Major-Generals was thus not merely administrative but a verdict on the entire project of the godly commonwealth: it demonstrated the unbridgeable 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. It also, fatally, made "military rule" and "arbitrary taxation" the images that clung to the republic ever afterwards and helped make the restoration of a law-bound monarchy seem, to many, the only escape.
The failure of the Major-Generals pushed the political nation towards a search for a more traditional, law-bound settlement. When the Second Protectorate Parliament (1656–58) met, a group of moderates sought to anchor the regime in the familiar, legally intelligible form of kingship by offering Cromwell the crown itself, in a revised constitution known as the Humble Petition and Advice (1657).
| Aspect | Detail |
|---|---|
| The offer | Parliament invited Cromwell to take the title of King, reasoning that a known, law-bound office would stabilise the succession and rein in the arbitrary power the Major-Generals had embodied |
| Cromwell's refusal | After agonised hesitation, Cromwell refused the crown — the senior officers of the army, who had fought to abolish monarchy, would not stomach a "King Oliver" |
| What he accepted | A revised constitution that gave him a second parliamentary chamber (an "Other House") and the right to name his own successor — monarchy in substance, if not in name |
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