Simon Guerrier investigates the mysterious life of Elizabeth Cromwell \u2013 the ordinary woman who became England’s first lady in the 17th century… <\/p>
On 14 April 1654, the new lord protector, Oliver Cromwell<\/a>, moved into apartments in Whitehall Palace. But his wife, Elizabeth, could never endure whispering or to be left alone in her new home. She was haunted by the ghosts of dead princes.<\/p>\n At least, that\u2019s the story in The Court and Kitchen of Elizabeth Cromwell,<\/em> a satirical cookbook \u2013 yes, really \u2013 first published in 1664. The pamphlet is, obviously, Restoration<\/a> propaganda, accusing the former lady protectress of meanness and greed, and written from \u201ccontemptuous indignation that such a person durst presume to take upon herself such a sovereign estate when she was a hundred times fitter for a barn than a palace\u201d. It recoils at the very idea that, in the 1650s, the most powerful woman in England was not an aristocrat but an ordinary housewife.<\/p>\n Elizabeth\u2019s life and the times she lived through were extraordinary. Yet, unlike almost anyone else who ever married a British head of state, there is no major biography of her. Just a handful of academic papers mention her. That\u2019s largely because so little evidence of her life survives.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n We know she was born some time in 1598, perhaps the oldest of 12 children of the merchant James Bourchier. James was knighted in 1603 and he owned property in Essex and London. Yet the next we know of Elizabeth is her wedding day: 22 August 1620. The 14th-century church where she was married, St Giles Cripplegate, is still standing, dwarfed by the brutalist architecture of the Barbican Centre around it.<\/p>\n Between 1621 and 1638, Elizabeth and Oliver had nine children and lived in Huntingdon, St Ives and then Ely. Their home in Ely is now a museum, the satirical cookbook a key source in the re-creation of Elizabeth\u2019s kitchen. We can follow Oliver\u2019s path from relative obscurity as MP for Huntingdon to general of the New Model Army during the Civil War<\/a>, but all we really know of Elizabeth\u2019s life at the time is that he sent her some of his pay.<\/p>\n What did she think of the war with King Charles I<\/a> and her husband\u2019s part in defeating him? A 19th\u2011century painting by William Fisk shows Elizabeth and her children pleading with Oliver to spare Charles\u2019s life \u2013 but there\u2019s no contemporary evidence of such an intercession. Did she really believe that ghosts of dead princes haunted her? We simply don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n We do have a sense of Elizabeth\u2019s relationship with Oliver. Three letters from him to her survive from the year after the king\u2019s execution. While at war in Scotland in 1650\u201351, Oliver wrote to Elizabeth: \u201cThou\u00a0art dearer to me than any creature.\u201d In another, he says: \u201cAlthough I have not much to write, yet indeed I love to write to my dear, who is very much in my heart.\u201d<\/p>\n A letter from Elizabeth to Oliver dated 27\u00a0December 1650 is a rare surviving record of her voice. She complains that she has written three letters for every one received from him. \u201cTruly, my life is but half a life in your absence,\u201d she says, \u201cdid not the Lord make it up in himself.\u201d<\/p>\n The letter reveals more than her love\u00a0for Oliver (and God, reminding us of the Cromwells\u2019 puritanical faith). She also tells Oliver to write to the lord chief justice, the president of the Council of State and the speaker of the House of Commons. \u201cYou cannot think the wrong you do yourself,\u201d she concludes, \u201cin the want of a letter, though it were but seldom.\u201d It\u2019s tempting to read a lot into this one surviving letter. Is it evidence that Elizabeth guided, even masterminded, her husband\u2019s political career? How much did she help him reach the highest office in the land? Again, we just don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n But what we do know about Elizabeth can shed light on how the Puritan regime might have differed to that of the late king \u2013 or not. We tend to think of the Puritans as dour and earnest, opposing all comfort and pleasure. However, a portrait of Elizabeth from about 1653, painted by Robert Walker and now on display in the Cromwell Museum in Huntingdon, shows something very different. Elizabeth gazes confidently down at us, resplendent in a dress of black velvet and bright orange lining. She wears pearl earrings and necklace, her hair is in glossy ringlets and she seems to be wearing make-up.<\/p>\n In short, Elizabeth \u2013 this first housewife among equals \u2013 looks rather like a queen.\u00a0In style and composition, the painting could almost be one of a pair with the portrait of Henrietta Maria<\/a>, widow of King Charles,\u00a0on display in the National Portrait Gallery.<\/p>\n But many portraits of Henrietta Maria exist, while there are very few of Elizabeth \u2013 which might be evidence of a major difference between the two women. We know the Cromwells adopted the royal palaces of Whitehall and Hampton Court as their homes. Elizabeth helped to entertain the wives of foreign dignitaries there. But, unlike her husband, her role was not defined in the written constitution. The part she played at state occasions seems to have been strictly limited. That could have been a conscious choice: to be different from the Stuart monarchy and not use Oliver\u2019s family as a symbol of state power. If so, our lack of knowledge about Elizabeth is not down to sources having been lost \u2013 or erased. Instead, her life was not recorded, as a kind of political statement by her husband\u2019s regime.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n We don\u2019t know how the death of Oliver in 1658 affected Elizabeth.\u00a0We know the Protectorate offered her \u00a320,000 and the use of St\u00a0James\u2019s House. We don\u2019t know if she attended Oliver\u2019s state\u00a0funeral on 23\u00a0November, or how involved she was in her son Richard\u2019s reign as lord protector. The army would not follow Richard, but it proposed to parliament that Elizabeth receive a generous pension.<\/p>\n We can only imagine Elizabeth\u2019s feelings when, soon after this, parliament restored the monarchy. Her late husband\u2019s corpse was exhumed from Westminster Abbey to be \u2018executed\u2019 for treason. By the time Oliver\u2019s head was displayed on a pole at Westminster Hall, Elizabeth had been evicted.<\/p>\n Her son Richard fled the country in fear of his life but was Elizabeth ever in danger? The satirical cookbook shows how cruelly she was mocked by those keen to show loyalty to the new regime. A telling source is her petition to Charles II<\/a> in 1660, denying the rumours that she\u2019d stolen jewels and other items belonging to the royal family. She speaks of \u201cmany violences and losses under pretence of searching for such goods\u201d, insists that she played no part in her late husband\u2019s regime and assures the new king of her obedience.<\/p>\n Charles must have believed her \u2013 perhaps her low profile in the Protectorate even saved her life. She was allowed to retire to live with her son-in-law John Claypole in Northborough Manor, a few miles from Peterborough. But Elizabeth\u2019s health was failing; her daughter Mary described her mother\u2019s sickness as \u201cso affecting a spectacle as I scarce know how to write\u201d. She died in 1665 and is buried in the nearby St Andrew\u2019s Church. Today, a plaque put up by the Cromwell Association marks the site but the stone is bare. We don\u2019t know if the inscription was defaced or merely faded over time.<\/p>\n A commoner becoming queen is a fairy tale, yet Elizabeth\u2019s life was anything but. It\u2019s frustrating that we don\u2019t know more about such a key figure in this extraordinary period. But perhaps that\u2019s why the rare glimpses we do have of her remain so haunting.<\/p>\n In producing a documentary about Elizabeth, the challenge has been to use what glimpses we do have of her to bring her to life. We know how many children she had and that she attended particular court events in the 1650s but we needed something more vivid.<\/p>\n As well as retracing Elizabeth\u2019s steps \u2013 the church where she was married, the house where she died \u2013 we looked for anything that would give us a feel for Elizabeth the person. That\u2019s why the satirical cookbook produced by her post-Restoration tormenters is so important: for all it mocks Elizabeth, it also lists what she ate, including her \u201calmost constant dish\u201d of Scotch collops of veal. Suddenly, there\u2019s a tantalising sense of a real person.<\/p>\n At the Cromwell Museum in Huntingdon, curator John Goldsmith showed us a lavish box of soaps owned by the Cromwells but never used \u2013 suggesting, we believed, that the puritan Elizabeth had never dared to indulge herself (our experts thought that this assumption was too fanciful).<\/p>\n Most powerful was historian Patrick Little pointing us to sources describing the music that might have played in Cromwell\u2019s court. He helped us track down modern recordings of works by John Hingeston and Giacomo Carissimi, which we\u2019ve included in the documentary. That\u2019s the benefit of radio: what you hear conjures pictures in your head. And when that music plays, Elizabeth and her world feel suddenly within reach.<\/p>\n <\/p><\/div> <\/section> Simon Guerrier is a freelance writer and producer, who co-produced The Fundamentalist Queen<\/a>, a documentary about Elizabeth Cromwell for BBC Radio 3<\/strong><\/p>\nWho was Elizabeth Cromwell?<\/h2>\n
What was her relationship with Oliver Cromwell like?<\/h2>\n
What happened to Elizabeth Cromwell?<\/h2>\n
Scented soaps and collops of veal: Elizabeth Cromwell left us just a few glimpses of her life, as Simon Guerrier found<\/h4>\n