"To reconcile all things unto himself": thoughts on the burial of Elizabeth Cromwell

I was rather moved when last Thursday I saw a Tweet from the Cromwell Museum marking the day as the anniversary of the death of Elizabeth Cromwell, wife of Oliver and mother to her husband's short-lived successor as Lord Protector, Richard.  Initially I could not quite grasp why reading about her burial in Northborough parish church (pictured) moved me. This post is an attempt to gather my thoughts and emotions.

At the Restoration, Elizabeth had expressed to Charles II "humble and faithful obedience to your Majesty in your government", requesting that Charles would "out of your princely goodness vouchsafe her a protection, without which she cannot expect, now in her old age, a safe retirement". The Cavalier reaction at the Restoration explains the need for the petition.  The bodies of deceased Regicides - including Oliver Cromwell - had been disinterred and hung from the gallows.  Deceased members of Cromwell's family were also disinterred: the bodies of his mother Elizabeth and sister Jane were removed from their resting places in Westminster Abbey and dumped in a common pit.

Such actions reflected both the trauma of the martyrdom of Charles I and what the 1662 Preface termed "the late unhappy confusions" inflicted by those who exercised "the late usurped powers".  The "confusions" also, of course, engulfed the Churches of England and Ireland, to the extent that Clarendon at the Restoration would declare that the deliverance of these Churches was miraculous:

God ... miraculously ... snatched this Church as a brand out of the fire ... raised it from the grave, after he had suffered it to be buried so many years, by the boisterous hands of profane and sacrilegious persons.

Which brings me back to Elizabeth Cromwell.  She lived out her remaining years with her widowed son-in-law John Claypole in Northborough, Cambridgeshire.  She was buried in the parish church, the parish register recording:

Elizabeth, the relict of Oliver Cromwell, sometime protector of England, was buried November, 19, 1665.

The 1662 Act of Uniformity ensured that the burial would have been according to the rites and ceremonies of the Book of Common Prayer.  As per the Canons of 1604 (restored in 1660) the parish bell would have pealed before and after the burial.  Prayer Book, parson in surplice, the ringing of the bell at a funeral: all this had been controversial in the 1630s, despised by the Puritans, and prohibited during the Protectorate of Elizabeth's husband and son.  Now they dignified her burial.

It was there, in Northborough parish church on that day in November 1665, that the true meaning of the restoration of Church of England was to be seen.  Not in the vindictive violence against the corpses of Regicides.  Nor in the repressive legislation of the Cavalier Parliament. Nor in the triumphalism which shaped much Anglican public discourse in these years.  But there, in that quiet funeral for a woman publicly despised, whose husband had been a cause of "the unhappy confusions".

The 1604 Canons stated:

No Minister shall refuse or delay ... to bury any Corpse that is brought to the Church or Church-yard (convenient warning being given him thereof before) in such manner and form as is prescribed in the said Book of Common Prayer. 

This was and is a concrete expression of God's purposes in Christ: "by him to reconcile all things unto himself; by him, I say, whether they be things in earth, or things in heaven" (Colossians 1:20).  Whatever the sins and failures of a life, whatever the broken domestic and strained communal relationships, whatever the personal animosities and political divisions, the deceased was and is received in the parish church, and the words were and are read over her or him:

Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed: we therefore commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life ...

Almighty God, with whom do live the  spirits of them that depart hence in the Lord, and with whom the souls of the faithful, after they are delivered from the burden of the flesh, are in joy and felicity: We give thee hearty thanks, for that it hath pleased thee to deliver this our brother/sister out of the miseries of this sinful world ...

Elizabeth Cromwell's husband had sought the destruction of the episcopal and liturgical order of the Churches of England and Ireland.  He had a leading role in the bloody conflict which swept over these Islands.  Her son had been the figurehead for those attempting to perpetuate the constitutional and ecclesiastical settlement imposed by her husband and his army.  As wife of one Lord Protector and mother to another, Elizabeth was clearly associated in the public mind with these events, with what the preacher at Jeremy Taylor's funeral described as "a fearful Tempest ... and a barbarous and unnatural War". 

Her burial in the parish church, according to the rites and ceremonies of the Book of Common Prayer, was a sign of how a basic, ordinary Anglican practice - burying all in the parish, using the words of the Prayer Book - gave expression to the cosmic reconciliation set forth by the Apostle, a reconciliation which reached into the divisions of "the late unhappy confusions", into bitter memories of civil war and a king's martyrdom, into the injustices perpetrated by both Parliamentarian and Cavalier.  

And so Elizabeth Cromwell was, with the decent rites of the Prayer Book, laid to rest in a parish church - as, indeed, would be her son Richard, the last Lord Protector, when he died in 1712.  A memorial in the old Hursley parish church commemorated Richard and his descendants.  When Keble built a new parish for Hursley in 1857 he refused to permit the memorial to be placed in the new church.  Following Keble's death in 1866, however, the memorial was restored to the parish church.  This was fitting, a sign - like Elizabeth being laid to rest in Northborough parish church - of the parish church reflecting the reconciliation "of all things", by embodying the call to be "in love and charity with your neighbours" and ministering to "all sorts and conditions".

And this, I think, brings me to why I was moved by reading of the burial of Elizabeth Cromwell.  It brought to mind the significance of the ordinary routine of the parish church, enshrined in the Canons of the Church of Ireland:

no member of the clergy shall, where reasonable notice has been given to that member of the clergy, refuse to read the burial service in the prescribed form at ... the burial within the cure in which that member of the clergy officiates of any person who may have died within that cure.

It brought to mind reading the Burial Office at a graveside on a cold November day.  Passing the remembrance garden in the grounds of the parish church, which holds the mortal remains of some I have known and many I have not known.  Reading memorial plaques and the dedications on stained glass windows in the parish church, to those who died over a century ago: in war, in old age, of illness.  Gathering up all of this when I pray the commemoration of the faithful departed in the Communion Office: "And we also bless thy holy name for all thy servants departed this life in thy faith and fear".  

Reading of the burial of Elizabeth Cromwell in Northborough parish church brought to mind the meaning of this routine, these practices which proclaim "the means of grace, and ... the hope of glory", for amidst the ordinary, amidst the complexities of lives and legacies, amidst failures and pains, amidst uncertainty and death itself, God has in Christ "reconcile[d] all things unto himself; by him, I say, whether they be things in earth, or things in heaven".