Oliver Cromwell

Oliver Cromwell is the novel’s defining political figure of the English Republic: a ruler whose military and maritime power briefly unsettles the monarchies of Europe, and whose defeat is recast by the Restoration as a return to order. His significance extends beyond his own rule. The narrative makes Cromwell a test of political loyalty for Lord Clancharlie, a landmark in the history of the peerage, and a symbol in Gwynplaine’s denunciation of oppression.

The Protector and the Republic

The account places Cromwell at the height of the English Republic’s authority. In its retrospective survey, England’s victories and influence abroad are gathered around his rule: the Republic had overcome European rivals, strengthened its maritime power, and made its presence felt from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean. The narrative describes Cromwell as having tamed Mazarin and as signing treaties above the King of France. It presents his government not as an isolated domestic regime but as a power able to dictate peace, declare war, and make the British flag a presence across the world.

The military strength of the regime is embodied in Cromwell’s Ironsides. Their reputation, the narrator says, weighed in Europe’s fears like an army. The Republic’s reach at sea is described in equally sweeping terms: England had cleared rival fleets from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Mediterranean, and its naval preponderance joined commercial ambition to military victory. These claims make Cromwell’s government appear as a formidable alternative to the old European order, rather than simply a brief interruption in England’s monarchy.

The political picture includes freedoms as well as force. Under the Republic, the narrator says, speech and the press were free, without control or censorship. The old balance of thrones had been overturned, and the Stuart place within Europe’s monarchical order was unsettled. Cromwell is thus associated with both concentrated state power and a temporary opening in public expression. The tension matters to the novel’s account: the Republic is not reduced to a single achievement, and its passing will be remembered differently by those who benefited from the Restoration and those who remained attached to its political principles.

Restoration and the meaning of defeat

The narrative presents 1660 as a moment when the country’s prevailing judgment turned decisively against the Republic. After the revolution ended and parliamentary government fell, England welcomed Charles II and celebrated the Restoration. The return of monarchy was described as reconciliation and national happiness; republican politics, by contrast, became an object of ridicule. The narrator renders this reversal through the language of common sense: people who had once spoken of rights, liberty, and progress were now said to regard those ideas as political folly. Cromwell’s former authority was folded into a story of national error from which the restored king supposedly delivered England.

That account of consensus explains why Lord Clancharlie’s refusal to return to royal allegiance appeared incomprehensible to his contemporaries. A peer who had accepted the Republic might, in the eyes of the restored order, have been expected to rejoin the monarchy once it prevailed. Instead, Clancharlie remained faithful to the Republic after its defeat and chose voluntary exile rather than readmission to the upper house. The 1650 parliamentary declaration of fidelity to a republic without king, sovereign, or lord supplied the stated ground for his continued separation from the kingdom. Cromwell’s political legacy therefore appears not only in the institutions that fell, but in the private and public consequences of remaining loyal to them.

The narrator’s treatment of this loyalty is deliberately divided. The Restoration’s supporters regard Clancharlie’s attachment to the defeated cause as stubbornness or senility, and even suppose that he must be an idiot to persist in it. Yet their contempt also exposes how thoroughly the new political settlement has defined reasonable conduct as submission to the victorious order. Cromwell’s defeat has become more than a change of government: it has altered the terms in which fidelity, prudence, and political memory can be judged.

The peerage and Cromwell’s place in political history

Cromwell also figures in the novel’s account of the peerage’s complicated power. The narrator describes the Lords as having helped limit royal authority and as having joined with the Commons in the struggles that produced a constitutional settlement. In this interpretation, their historical role was contradictory: aristocratic and self-interested, yet at certain moments an obstacle to royal despotism. The peerage’s past actions included deposing kings, and the narrator places Cromwell among the conditions that made such a challenge to monarchy possible.

The account makes a striking claim about Cromwell’s own relation to aristocratic status. It says that he aspired to the peerage and married Elizabeth Bouchier, presented as the descendant and heiress of two extinct peerage lines. According to the narrator, the suppression of a king became a shorter path to power than the recovery of a title. The detail complicates any simple opposition between republican rule and inherited rank: Cromwell is represented as a revolutionary force who nevertheless sought access to the social order whose privileges the revolution had disrupted. This is the narrator’s interpretation of his ambition, not a separate account of Cromwell’s private thoughts.

The political history is compressed into a further contrast between the sword of kings and Cromwell’s axe. In Gwynplaine’s speech to the Lords, Cromwell stands as the figure who broke the line of kings and made the Republic an event that could be invoked against present oppression. The speech warns that the Republic was destroyed but insists that it will return. Its reference to Cromwell gives that warning a historical precedent: a supposedly solid order can be overturned, and the people who appear silent or subdued may become a force capable of answering power.

Narrative significance

Cromwell is not developed through private scenes in these passages; he is made legible through competing public accounts of his rule. The Restoration narrative casts his era as a dream or error, while the later appeal to the Lords recovers the Republic as a moment when royal power was broken. This contrast allows the novel to show political memory at work: the same past can be celebrated as liberation, condemned as disorder, or used as a warning that the present hierarchy is not permanent.

His importance is therefore both historical and structural. Cromwell connects the earlier conflict over monarchy and republican allegiance to the novel’s later confrontation between inherited privilege and the suffering of ordinary people. In the speech, he is not offered as a complete political program; his name marks the possibility of rupture. The lasting force of the reference lies in the contrast between a restored order that declares its own stability and a defeated Republic that remains available as a language of resistance.