Providence Lost

The Instrument of Government, which Parliament had sought constantly to dilute, was too closely aligned with the army’s declarations of 1647 and, indeed, the Agreement of the People of 1648. In November 1654 army officers had met with Cromwell in defence of the Instrument, worried by the constant efforts by MPs to amend the constitution. The government’s interest was also, by and large, that of the army. The discontent that had arisen in October among Cromwell’s powerful navy had been addressed by that most traditional of means – a pay rise – and it, too, was loyal. The regime had near total control of the country, whose population, weary of war, proffered stability to insurrection.

The concept of a tirelessly interventionist and inescapable God might be compared to modern social media, resulting in comparable levels of anxiety and paranoia. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram are realms of round-the-clock surveillance, where one’s thoughts and actions, beliefs and appearance are posted and preserved for all to see and subjected to constant comparison and judgment. On occasion, the shame, vindictiveness and piety that social media generates would not have felt out of place among seventeenth-century Puritans. But one can opt out of social media, however addictive. There was no such option in the world God had created, nor in the next.

[Near the end of the Protectorate.] The army was owed almost £900,000 in arrears, the state had debts of £2.5 million and the annual shortfall in revenue was approaching £350,000. It was unsustainable, but the MPs’ response was to question the accounts rather than seek long-term solutions to a deteriorating financial situation.