God's Fury, England's Fire_ A New History of the English Civil Wars - Michael J. Braddick [211]
While some parliamentarians sought to get Charles to accept terms he surely would not accept, others at Westminster turned towards overcoming the strategic weaknesses of the previous campaign. In the complex recriminations that ensued it is possible to distinguish two problems. The southern army had been hampered by the reluctance of the Trained Bands to move, which contributed to Waller’s immobility, and by the destruction of Essex’s army at Lostwithiel, which was perhaps a reflection of problems in the direction of the war. The problems in the Eastern Association were more narrowly political – an escalating conflict between Independents and Presbyterians, which affected war aims. Reforms tackling the logistical problems in the southern army were made against the background of the political problems manifest in the Eastern Association army.
In late November, as what became the Uxbridge negotiations were being launched, Waller and Cromwell reported to the House of Commons on the recent campaigns, in response to an invitation from the Committee of the Army. Waller complained of Manchester’s failure to come to his support at Shaftesbury, and Cromwell joined in the criticism. Cromwell in particular exceeded the bounds of politeness in his public criticism of Manchester. Despite the fact that he was a commoner speaking of an earl, and a second-in-command speaking of his superior, he did not hesitate to blame the failures of the campaigns on Manchester, and in particular on his reluctance to fight. The earl’s response, made a week later in the other House, was withering. It was a reasonably effective defence of his military record and a clear attack on Cromwell’s politics and religion, quoting Cromwell to the effect that he would rather fight the Scots than the King and that he wanted only Independents in his own army, and reporting comments from Cromwell that implied the levelling of social distinctions between aristocracy and commoners.64
These tensions should not be underestimated. The Covenanters were hopeful that they could charge Cromwell with being an incendiary between the two kingdoms – something in breach of the Solemn League and Covenant – and Essex and Holles were apparently willing to go along with it. One night in early December some of Cromwell’s leading political opponents were invited to the Earl of Essex’s house to discuss a plan to impeach him on these grounds.65 Cromwell, it should be remembered, had only signed the Covenant when it was imposed nationally, and these events can only have confirmed the suspicions that he and others felt about that particular deal. On 4 December, Holles reported Manchester’s accusations against Cromwell to the House, to which Cromwell issued a long and forceful denial.66
It was from this debate that the proposal for Self-Denial arose. On 9 December the Committee of the Army endorsed the criticisms of Manchester. During the ensuing debate, in what was no doubt a co-ordinated move, Cromwell made a speech which included an important assertion. Parliament’s enemies, and even some of those who had initially been its friends, had become hostile to the vested interests created by the war: ‘that the members of both Houses have got great places and commands’ and ‘will perpetually continue themselves in grandeur and not permit the war to speedily end, lest their own power should determine with it’. He called for the army to be put into another method, and the war more ‘vigorously prosecuted’. The alternative, he suggested, was that ‘the people can bear the war no longer, and will enforce you to a dishonourable peace’.67
Careers and fortunes were indeed being made on the back of the war, and Cromwell was prescient too: in the spring and summer of the following year locally organized