Cromwell
Reviewed by Blair Worden, professor of history at the School of English and American Studies at the University of Sussex and author of Roundhead Reputations: The English Civil Wars and the passions of posterity (Allen Lane, 2001)
RATING: 4
British, 1970
Screenwriter/director Ken Hughes
Cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth
Music Frank Cordell
Cast Richard Harris (Cromwell), Alec Guinness (Charles I), Robert Morley (Earl of Manchester), Dorothy Tutin (Henrietta Maria), Frank Finlay (John Carter), Timothy Dalton (Prince Rupert), Patrick Wymark (Earl of Strafford), Patrick Magee (Hugh Peters), Nigel Stock (Sir Edward Hyde), Charles Gray (Earl of Essex), Michael Jayston (Henry Ireton), Geoffrey Keen (John Pym)
How much obligation lies on makers of historical films to keep to the historical record? How much fiction is permissible within the representation of fact? No cinematic description of the past, and certainly not one designed for a mass audience, could be expected to stay within the boundary of the known. The pace of fiction cannot be the pace of life. Complexities of chronology will need reduction. Buildings and landscapes that contained historical events have disappeared. Dialogue must be invented. Characterisation may need to be simplified.
But elaboration and modification are one thing: perversion of fact is another. Claims for artistic licence could not warrant the wilful and almost unrelenting misrepresentations of Cromwell, which, whatever else it is, is not art, and which invites us to suppose, through a voice-over, that its account is historically authentic.
Cromwell in Cromwell
We begin in 1640, in Cambridge, where Cromwell (of Huntingdonshire and Ely) is supposed to live – perhaps because American viewers will have heard of it. The Irish rebellion of 1641 has already taken place; the Scottish war of 1639 has yet to start. Cromwell, instead of having grown poorer in recent years, has become a prosperous squire.
The backbench MP of the early stages of the Long Parliament becomes one of its leading figures. He is made responsible for the execution of Strafford and is placed among the five members of the Commons whom Charles I seeks to arrest.
By this stage, the chronology is hopelessly jumbled, and the real-life drama of Puritan politics has yielded to pasteboard invention. We are shown two battles of the First Civil War: Edgehill, which is converted from an inconclusive confrontation into a Royalist triumph; and Naseby, where the Roundhead forces, instead of having a numerical advantage, are outnumbered by three to one. The accounts of Cromwell's role in both battles and of his military status in the Civil Wars are grotesquely misleading.
After the execution of the king, rather than sitting in Parliament and then leading campaigns in Ireland and Scotland, he retires to Cambridge in search of inner peace, until – after six (instead of four) years – he is moved to dissolve the Long Parliament by force. The film mercifully ends before his installation as Lord Protector.
Misrepresentation
The careers and characters of Cromwell's associates are transformed. Essex, Pym, Hampden, Ireton and the unjustly traduced Fairfax appear when they shouldn't and not when they should. The king's faithful adviser Sir Edward Hyde is made to desert him and testify against him at Charles's trial.
However, the misrepresentation into which most energy has gone is the portrayal of Cromwell's rival – the parliamentarian general, the earl of Manchester – caricatured in Robert Morley's performance as a corrupt and arrogant buffoon. His peerage somehow does not disqualify him from becoming a dominant member of the House of Commons.
Travesties and a show stealer
Cromwell rises above his contemporaries to peer into the egalitarian future. He is the friend of 'the people' and wants 'schools and universities for all'. 'I am persuaded,' he tells the king, 'that England must move forward to a more enlightened form of government, based on a true representation of a free people. Such an institution is known as democracy.' 'Under his hand,' the voice-over tells us, 'were laid the foundations of a truly democratic nation.' Such travesties, wholly at odds with the thinking of the man and his time, are more profoundly misleading than the whimsical reversals of chronology and character.
In the central part, Richard Harris does what he can, playing Cromwell with mournful intensity and a nicely judged catch in the throat. Alec Guinness steals the show as Charles I, in its portrayal of whom the film sometimes deviates into accuracy. Perhaps it should have been about him.
'Am I to believe my ears?' Cromwell is made to ask at one moment of especially severe distortion. Viewers shouldn't believe theirs.
