Parliament - Splits and Divisions

The hesitancy illustrated by the second battle of Newbury highlighted the tension between the war-weary and nervous old commanders and the zealous certainty of the Cromwell party.

The great victory at Marston Moor had proved not to be the end of their troubles - but the beginning. The question which haunted them now was what on earth to do with a defeated king. As the military balance of power tipped in their favour and the option of a negotiated settlement diminished, they stared deeply into a constitutional abyss. All of which frightened the Parliamentary old guard.

At Westminster, the House of Commons held a public inquest into the Donnington fiasco. Cromwell blamed Manchester's 'unwillingness...to have this war prosecuted unto full victory.' During the debate, a strong divide developed between a war and a peace party. This split was along religious lines. Presbyterian MPs were generally more conservative and looked for a negotiated settlement. Their leader was the Earl of Essex. But there was another more radical group now. They were known as 'Independents' - they disliked any rigid form of church organization and demanded total liberty of conscience. They were far more militant in their demands and regarded negotiation as a betrayal of all they had fought for. This grouping was led by Oliver Cromwell and his ambitious Puritan son-in-law Henry Ireton.

Political and social disagreements underpinned these religious differences. Manchester and Essex wanted to limit the powers of monarchy and regain their traditional place as leading counsellors. They were deeply fearful of the social and religious reforms they believed Cromwell and Ireton were demanding. The very things they had gone to war to protect - the Church of England and Parliament - now seemed in danger.

Essex, worried by the mobs which now threatened the Commons, saw a social uprising as a horrible possibility. What had begun as an attempt to rein in the power of the King and defend the Church of England was, by the mid 1640s, looking like class warfare. Manchester accused Cromwell of hoping to 'live to see never a nobleman in England.' 'Is this the liberty which we claim to vindicate by shedding our blood?', he asked. 'Posterity will say that to deliver them from the yoke of the King we have subjugated them to that of the common people.'

Cromwell, Ireton, and the zealous soldiers of the Parliamentary Army had become increasingly suspicious of the religious conservatives who remained at Westminster. They were contemptuous of the Presbyterian religion which the early civil war combatants such as Essex and the late John Pym held to. They disliked its rigorous discipline. In particular they resented the demand of the Scottish Covenanters that all soldiers should adhere to the Presbyterian creed. The discipline and dogma smacked too much of the old Church of England. 'New Presbyter is but old Priest writ large' was their slogan.

Cromwell believed strongly in liberty of conscience. 'I had rather that Mahometanism were permitted amongst us than that one of God's children should be persecuted.' In an age of religious conformity, this concept of religious liberty was truly revolutionary. And it was a belief that Cromwell was determined to fight for- against any opponent.

After his staggering victory at Naseby, Cromwell wrote a telling letter to Parliament. 'Honest men served you faithfully in this action. Sir, they are trusty. I beseech you in the name of God not to discourage them...He that ventures his life for the liberty of his country, I wish he trust God for the liberty of his conscience, and you for the liberty he fights for.'

That didn't, of course, include Catholics. The message was clear: he was not going to let his soldiers be betrayed by Presbyterians back at Westminster.

The power and influence of the radical Independents started to increase in the middle of the decade. The civil war of Pym and Manchester was giving way to something altogether more radical and dangerous, a new militancy signalled by the execution of Archbishop Laud in January 1645. Detained since 1641, Parliament had tried to forget about the decaying cleric, but the Independents now in charge wouldn't forget his religious crimes. They were afraid to put him on trial and so, as with Strafford, he was executed under an Act of Attainder. His famous red face turned ghostly white as his severed head was displayed to the blood-thirsty Londoners.

Laud was buried according to the rites of the Prayer Book - the very thing which initiated the violence of the 1640s. With Parliament demanding forced loans, publicly mutilating Catholic priests, and seizing land from Royalists, it was becoming unclear who was fighting against tyranny. The early ideals of the Parliamentary leaders were being sacrificed to the demands of war.