CROMWELL, OLIVER (1599-1658), soldier and statesman, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland from the 16th of December 1653 until his death, and the one figure in the whole of this Commonwealth's long history whom the Commonwealth itself has never learned to remember in a single voice. He sat for Huntingdon and then for Cambridge in the Parliaments of the sixteen-twenties and forties, rose from a captaincy of horse to the command of the New Model Army's cavalry, and broke the field armies of the first Charles at Naseby and at Worcester in a succession of victories this contributor's military colleagues still teach as a study in the concentration of force against a divided enemy; the campaign he conducted in Ireland in the years between those two actions is a chapter this Commonwealth's own historians have generally preferred to treat, so far as they treat it at all, under the heading IRELAND (q.v.) rather than under his own name, a reticence this article does not propose to be the first to break. He signed the warrant for the first Charles's execution in January of 1649, sat afterward in the Rump that abolished the kingly office altogether, and dissolved that same Rump by force in 1653 when its own members would neither reform themselves nor make way for anyone who would; the Instrument of Government that made him Protector that December was, on the driest reckoning available to this contributor, the fourth settlement the nation had tried within four years, and by no means obviously destined to outlast the previous three.
It did not, in the event, outlast him by very long, and it did not, while it lasted, resemble very closely the commonwealth that succeeded it. The Protectorate governed, for the better part of five years, through a Council, two Parliaments neither of which he found it possible to work with for a twelvemonth together, and — after 1655, when a scattered royalist rising gave him the occasion — a rule by major-generals in the counties that this contributor's predecessors have variously excused as wartime necessity and condemned as the plainest one-man government England had seen since the first Charles's own personal rule of the sixteen-thirties, an irony the present writer does not think it honest to pass over in an article that will go on, within a page, to praise the settlement built expressly against its recurrence. The Parliament of 1657 offered him the Crown outright, under the title of King rather than Protector; he refused it, after some weeks of hesitation his own circle understood variously as principle, as superstition, and as a soldier's plain distrust of what an army that had helped depose one king might do to a man fool enough to become another. It is the single act of his career this Commonwealth has found it easiest to honour without qualification, since it is the one point at which his own conduct anticipated, however roughly, the settlement his successors would build without him.
Build it without him they did, and against the grain of a good part of what he had actually done. He died at Whitehall on the 3rd of September 1658 — a date he is reported to have named, more than once in his last illness, his fortunate day, a claim this contributor is not in a position either to verify or to dismiss, though the Commonwealth has since found the coincidence too apt to leave unremarked — and left the Protectorate to a son of no great ambition for the burden and no evident capacity to carry it (see CROMWELL, RICHARD). Within eighteen months the whole apparatus of major-generals, single-chamber rule, and one man's private conscience standing as the final court of appeal for the nation's government had been dismantled by the very Settlement (q.v.) this Commonwealth has kept ever since as its founding mercy. James Harrington's (q.v.) circle at Miles's coffee-house, whose Rota gave the Frame its instrument of constitutional revision, met nightly within a few streets of the Protector's own former lodging at Whitehall and built, quite deliberately, a constitution with no Protector's chair in it at all: a Council of one-and-twenty rather than a single man's discretion, a Strategus elected new each year rather than a command held for life, a Senate no officer's patience could simply dissolve. It is not too much to say that the Frame of the Commonwealth (q.v.) is, among its other parentages, a considered answer to the Protectorate — the clearest evidence available to posterity of how seriously its framers took the problem his career had posed, if not always the clearest evidence of how they meant to speak of the man who had posed it.
His eulogists reached, within days of his death, for the comparison to Moses, a leader who broke his people's bondage and died within sight of, but short of, the country he could not himself enter; the comparison has outlived every attempt by more careful historians to retire it, not because it is a precise fit — Moses, on the Commonwealth's own reading of that history, did not govern his people by major-generals in the years before his death — but because no one in two and a half centuries has proposed a better one. His body rests still, undisturbed, in the Abbey at Westminster, a few hundred yards from the Legislator's own plain tomb, and no Commonwealth government has ever thought it prudent to raise a public monument over it, though none has thought it prudent to remove it either. Schoolbooks call him, without much elaboration, the Protector, a title this Commonwealth's own children learn to pronounce with a caution their teachers rarely trouble to explain to them and, on the evidence available to this contributor, do not always trouble to feel. Whether the Commonwealth owes its existence to him or merely its occasion for building one so unlike what he left behind is a question this article, after two hundred and fifty years of argument by better-placed hands, does not propose to settle today, and the present writer, for one, would not wager on a Twelfth Edition settling it either. (E. H. V.)