Swordsmen and Decimators — Cromwell’s Major-Generals

Abstract

‘The most intolerable experience England had ever had’¹ — this is the common opinion of the régime of the major-generals who, during 1655 and 1656, ‘lorded it’ over an England and Wales split into a dozen ‘cantons’. Mercifully — some feel inevitably — brief, it is an episode that has still not been thoroughly explored.² Yet it is clearly of significance. Obviously it throws light on the many unique problems of the Protectorate. Oliver Cromwell had to clear away the lumber of civil wars and revolts and to thwart a would-be king who expected a welcome at home and gambled on backing from abroad. All this stirred questions, plots³ and polemics, checking the drift towards healing and settling and calling for harsh exemplary treatment. This was something the major-generals might provide. But they could do more than this. They could help my Lord Protector with the day-to-day tasks that faced any seventeenth-century government, even the most legitimate. These amounted to getting something positive done at the centre and in the provinces, in spite of endemic shortfalls in funds, patchy information, cumbersome administrative institutions, unreliable personnel, tepid public-spiritedness and articulate, sometimes even fervent, centrifugalism.⁴ Cromwell, of course, had one telling political argument his predecessors had lacked — a large, professional army — but this was not an unmixed blessing. Reaction to the major-generals showed that.