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| Cromwell's House in Ely, Cambridgeshire |
After the end of the English Civil War and the execution of
King Charles I, England
became a republic, known as the Commonwealth
of England, Scotland
and Ireland.
Originally it was governed by what was known as the Rump Parliament, but in
1653 Cromwell forcefully dismissed the Rump Parliament, and a Protectorate was
established, with Cromwell given lifelong leadership as The Lord Protector,
with a ceremony held in Westminster Hall. King Edward’s Chair, the throne
created in 1296 for King Edward I, in which nearly all monarchs have sat for
their coronations since 1308, was taken from Westminster Abbey to Westminster
Hall for Cromwell’s ceremony (one of only three times the throne has been
removed from Westminster abbey).
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| King Edward's Chair (the Stone of Scone has been returned to Scotland until the next Coronation) |
Before this, in 1649, the Parliamentarians were worried by
the potential threat posed by an alliance signed between the Royalists and
Irish Confederate Catholics. Cromwell was sent to Ireland to crush this alliance.
Cromwell was deeply opposed to the Catholic Church, citing the persecution of
Protestants in Europe, and the Irish Uprising of 1641, where an originally
peaceful protest led to bloodshed and massacre of many English and Scottish
Protestant settlers in Ireland,
who had set up homes on land originally taken from the Irish.
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| Oliver Cromwell |
If Cromwell was really opposed to religious persecution of
Protestants, he certainly didn’t spare the Irish Catholics. After laying siege
to the towns of Drogheda and Wexford, his
soldiers attacked the towns and massacred thousands of people, not just
Royalist and Irish troops, but also civilians and priests. Cromwell declared
the killings as justified and not one of his soldiers faced disciplinary
action.
Cromwell withdrew to England
in 1650, after hearing that Prince Charles (Charles I’s son) had landed in Scotland, but the Parliamentary conquest
continued in Ireland
for a further 3 years. After the conquest practising the Catholic faith in
public was banned across Ireland,
many Catholic priests were arrested and killed and Catholic-owned land was
confiscated, leading to mass evictions and deportations.
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| The cleansing of 'popish' items in a church |
An anti-Catholic agenda was one of the driving forces of
Puritanism. The Puritans had been around in one form or another since the reign
of Elizabeth I (it was a cargo of Puritans that
set of for America in 1620
on board the Mayflower), but it was
during the Civil War and the Commonwealth that they really got to grips in England. They
were named Puritans because they believed that the Church of England still tolerated
‘popish’ practises and wished to cleanse the church of all things associated
with the Catholic Church. English churches, already transformed by Henry VIII,
were vandalised, to remove any traces of Catholicism, statues of Mary or saints
lost their heads, screens were torn down and windows smashed.
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| Puritan Punishment |
Life in England,
under the Puritan thumb, must have been very dull. Women were required to cover
their heads and wear modest clothes and were banned from wearing any kind of
makeup. Dancing, feasts and gambling were all outlawed. Theatres were closed
down, sports events such as horse racing, bowling and cock-fighting banned.
Alehouses just about survived, but were regularly inspected to make sure that
no one was doing anything they shouldn’t! An act was passed called the Swearing
and Cursing Act, where people could be fined if heard uttering a profanity.
And, perhaps most famously of all, the celebration of Christmas was made
illegal! It seems that many people either flouted these laws or ignored them
altogether, the wealthy just paying the fines incurred. With insufficient
manpower, the rules were difficult to enforce, but the theatres and sports
grounds remained closed until the Restoration.
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| A Parliamentary Proclamation banning Christmas |
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| Not sure how genuine this one is!! |
Few new public buildings were erected during the
Commonwealth in England.
There were a couple of churches built, I know of one in Yorkshire and the tower
of All Hallows by the Tower in London had its tower rebuilt after it was badly
damaged when gun powder stored in the churchyard exploded. Repairs were made to
some other buildings damaged by the Civil War, or by fire such as Wilton House,
where Inigo Jones worked with John Webb, to create his Single and Double Cube
Rooms, mentioned in my earlier post. In 1654 John Webb added a portico to The
Vyne, originally a Tudor house in Hampshire. This was the very first temple
portico to be added to a private house in England, the first of many!! Webb
also built the classical Lamport Hall in Northamptonshire in 1665.
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| Lamport Hall |
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| The famous Lamport Gnome, from Lamport Hall, the first garden gnome ever sen in Britain!! |
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| The Vyne with the first Temple Portico to feature on an English house |
Another
house built during the Commonwealth in 1650 was Coleshill House in Berkshire by Sir Roger Pratt a gentleman architect, for
his cousin George.
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| Coleshill House, a lost gem! |
Coleshill House would prove to be very influential in house
designs later in the seventeenth century. It was one of the first houses in England to be
built with a double-pile layout of rooms; where the house is two rooms deep,
separated by a corridor running the full width of the house. It is said that it
was Sir Roger Pratt himself who came up with the term double-pile to describe
this type of floor plan.
It is also, perhaps, one of the first houses to feature
Baroque elements. Pratt had spent time in France,
Italy and the Low Countries during the civil war, and bought back this
newly emerging style with him. He built an Italian style staircase in the Grand
Hall, an unusual feature in itself and for its position, at this time in England, the
stair case swept around both sides of the hall, meeting a gallery at the top. The
banisters, door cases and fireplaces were all beautifully decorated and the
ceilings were similar to those introduced by Inigo Jones at the Banqueting
House at Whitehall.
On the roof there were large dormer windows with alternating arched and pointed
pediments above them, and the roof was capped by a baroque style cupola.
Shots of Coleshill taken from an artical in Country Life
Sadly, in 1952, during some renovation work, Coleshill House
caught fire, and was very badly damaged. If the fire had happend today the
house would undoubtedly have been saved and restored, much the same as happened
at Uppark in Sussex and Windsor Castle, but back in the 1950’s the decision was
taken to demolish what was left of the house, and now the grounds are owned by
the National Trust. It was, I think, a very tragic loss!
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| Coleshill on fire |
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| The story in the paper next day |
Oliver Cromwell died on 3 September 1658. His body was to
lie-in-state at Somerset House for a couple of months (he was actually
displayed standing up, wearing purple robes, a crown, orb and sceptre as if a
king!) and was given a state funeral in November that same year. His body was
sealed into a tomb at Westminster Abbey.
After Cromwell’s death, his son Richard took over the
leadership of the country. The population had grown tired of the more or less
constant battles and the strict rules and fines. There had been several
outbreaks of plague and other diseases. The winter of 1657-58 had been
extremely harsh; and just days before Cromwell’s death a heavy storm had passed
over England
uprooting trees and ripping off roofs and church steeples. For a population
still largely superstitious these were viewed as ill omens. Whether this had
any impact on Richard Cromwell’s abilities to lead his country is not clear,
but he was certainly not considered up to the job. In April 1659 a petition of
20,000 signatures was presented to Richard Cromwell, calling for a return of
the Rump Parliament. Cromwell was made to understand that if he refused then
military action would be taken against him. He abdicated, and was ordered to
depart from Whitehall.
For the rest of that year the Commonwealth was left sailing in the wind, no one
had any real control of the country, and eventually in 1660 Charles was asked
to return to England,
to become its new King, where he became Charles II in what became known as The
Restoration.
This isn’t quite the end of the story for Old Cromwell. On
the Orders of Charles II, his body was exhumed from Westminster Abbey and put
on trail for treason and regicide, naturally he was found guilty and his
remains were symbolically hanged at the Tyburn gallows. Afterwards his head was
stuck on a 20 foot pole above Westminster Hall, where it remained until it was
lost in a storm in 1685.
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| A study of Cromwell's head upon its spike above Westminster Hall |
