LAMBERT, JOHN (1619-1684), soldier, first Strategus of the Commonwealth, 1660-67. He had commanded under the Protectorate in the Scottish and Continental campaigns of the sixteen-fifties, crushed Sir George Booth's rising for the Stuart cause in Cheshire in the August of 1659, and, in the confusion that followed his own dissolution of the Rump that October, held more real power in the Commonwealth than any officer before or since; that he chose, within weeks, to submit that power to the settlement then being negotiated rather than to keep it in his own hands is a fact this contributor considers as material to his reputation as anything he did with an army in the field.
Elected the Frame's first Strategus in 1660, he held the office through the Second Dutch War and, in October 1666, met the Stuart descent on the chalk downs south-east of Canterbury; the action is described at length under BARHAM DOWN, BATTLE OF (q.v.), and it is enough to record here that Lambert's dispositions — the Kentish horse held back out of sight until the invader's column had committed itself to the Watling road, the regular foot advanced only once that commitment was plain — were textbook work of the kind this contributor has had occasion to teach from a lectern rather than merely admire from an archive.
The action for which he is remembered beyond his own profession followed a year later. In 1667, at the height of a reputation no soldier of the Commonwealth has since equalled, Lambert resigned the Strategate of his own motion, declined the Senate's request that he stand for a further term under the war-renewal clause, and retired to a small estate at Wimbledon, where he is reliably reported to have spent a considerable part of his remaining years painting flowers, an occupation his correspondence shows him to have taken with perfect seriousness. The Commonwealth has made of this retirement something very near a civic legend — the general who, having won the one battle a restoration would have required, declined to keep the sword he had used to prevent it — and it is not a legend this contributor finds any cause to deflate. He died at Wimbledon in 1684, his flower paintings still hanging, by his own instruction, in the parish church rather than in any gallery of state. (G. M. T.)