Oliver Cromwell was a liberal pioneer ahead of his time

Was Oliver Cromwell a religious fanatic who loved banning stuff, or a pioneer of liberal values? Sunday’s Observer reported that a group of historians have dredged up some documents that suggest that he was seriously committed to religious freedom. 

Despite his reputation for brutally suppressing Irish Catholics, it emerges that Cromwell was open to them practicing their faith, so long as they no longer posed a political threat by supporting royalists. Another document confirms his enthusiasm for readmitting Jews to England and his willingness to offer them religious freedom. The article quotes one of these historians, John Morrill, emeritus professor of British and Irish history at Cambridge University: ‘Cromwell’s commitment to religious freedom and religious equality is much more radical than a lot of historians have thought.’

The curious thing is that this view of Cromwell should seem surprising. There has always been plenty of evidence for Cromwell’s pioneering commitment to toleration – but historians have tended to downplay it, to endorse the conservative caricature. To the average middlebrow Tory, this Puritan strongman is the embodiment of narrow reformist zeal, the precursor of Robespierre and Lenin.

I suppose it is unsurprising that this man should make us flustered. He puts our whole political tradition in doubt. For it is based on the idea that true liberal values are compatible with the high conservatism of monarchy and an established Church. And this narrative is not helped by the fact that the key pioneer of the liberal state was opposed to bishops and kings.

Before Cromwell, it was assumed that a nation needed a high degree of religious unity, and that toleration should be kept to a minimum. This was also taken for granted by the vast majority of the Puritans during the civil war. Calvinism was not big on toleration. But Cromwell and his fellow Independents did not want to replace one form of theocracy with another. They had a new idea of the state: that it should protect religious liberty as far as possible. Rather miraculously, this new idea won the day – for a while. Of course there could not be toleration for Catholics and conservative Anglicans, as they posed a direct political threat to the new regime, but the ideal of religious freedom was nevertheless central. According to the historian Alec Ryrie, he ‘became the first Protestant ruler anywhere to support religious toleration as a matter of principle’.

This republican experiment was the first draft of the liberal state. A few decades later, England embarked on a different liberal journey, a far more gradualist one, and it became convenient to dismiss Cromwell as a marginal zealot. The truth is more interesting: he was a liberal pioneer, a key architect of the liberal state – and clear proof of its Christian roots.