The third title in a series of books exploring political and popular culture in the early modern period, Andrew Barclay's Electing Cromwell is based on the assumption that “no MP should be seen in isolation” (vii). Electing Cromwell therefore is only partly about Oliver Cromwell. Barclay says as much about the local contexts from which the future Lord Protector emerged. Making use of sources little utilized by Cromwell's biographers, Barclay's approach is to shed light on Cromwell by reconstructing and analyzing the lives of many of those around him. The result is a book that challenges preconceptions about Cromwell while offering much insight into the period of his life surrounding his election to parliament in 1640.

The main question addressed by Electing Cromwell is of course why was Oliver Cromwell elected MP for Cambridge borough in 1640? This simple question continues to perplex historians because, as Barclay maintains in the opening chapter, “[b]y 1640 there was no obvious reason why any constituency should have chosen him” (12). Cromwell, a resident of the cathedral city of Ely from 1636, was a relative newcomer to Cambridgeshire and, although securely in the ranks of its gentry, he had, on the face of it, nothing to recommend him to the freemen of Cambridge who constituted the borough's electorate. Even so, he was elected not once but twice in 1640, first for the Short Parliament and then again for the Long Parliament. Obviously, Cromwell's success in these elections was contingent on something, and in the scarcity of evidence historians have long speculated on what that contingency might have been. The traditional explanation has been that the townspeople of Cambridge must have sympathized with and admired what Cromwell's early biographers had supposed was a leading role in protests against the draining of the fens around Ely, which was a royal policy from 1638. More recently, John Morrill suggested that Cromwell's possible links to the Earl of Warwick, a figure who John Adamson lately detected at the center of an aristocratic opposition to Charles I, might account for his elections. Neither of these explanations withstands Barclay's scrutiny. His study of the Cambridge elections found no basis for supposing that an aristocratic patron influenced the elections in Cromwell's favor. As for the traditional explanation, Barclay concludes that “[i]f fen drainage was an issue at all in the Cambridge elections, it can only have been a very minor one” (128), and that Cromwell, a justice of the peace for Ely, “far from protesting” the draining of the fens, “may instead have worked as a loyal magistrate in the king's service to prosecute some of those who did protest” (92).

Barclay therefore makes a case for taking seriously an anecdotal account of how Cromwell became an MP for Cambridge, which was added to the second edition of James Heath's Flagellum, a near-contemporary biography that modern historians have deemed too unreliable a source for understanding Cromwell because Heath, a royalist writing after the Restoration, had aimed to blacken Cromwell's reputation. According to that account, one Richard Timbs, impressed with Cromwell's preaching at a gathering of religious nonconformists held somewhere in the fens, conspired with his friends William Welbore, Robert Ibbot, and Bryan Kitchinman to persuade the mayor of Cambridge to make Cromwell a freeman of the borough, and at the celebrations held to mark that event, the four men floated the suggestion among the freeman of Cambridge that Cromwell should become their MP. In the subsequent election, John Lowry was chosen MP for Cambridge, along with Cromwell after his supporters worked hard and successfully maximized his vote over that of a long-serving court bureaucrat. What a post-Restoration readership would have appreciated here are the account's essential claims that Cromwell had been in attendance and had been preaching at an illegal fenland conventicle until some obscure Cambridge residents got him elected because they admired his religious convictions.

While admitting that the account is flawed, most obviously in that it conflates Cromwell's two elections as MP for Cambridge, Barclay judges it “to have been more right than it was wrong,” as if it originated with a source that was very well informed (145). Using sources independent of Flagellum, he confirms many of the details offered in the account, adding credibility to its larger claims. On the weight of other evidence, Barclay finds it not improbable that Cromwell had been an outspoken religious nonconformist prior to his election, perhaps partly because he could not have failed to experience firsthand the committed efforts of the bishop of Ely, Mathew Wren, to set a shining example of the religious innovations favored by Charles I and William Laud. To those who disapproved of such changes, “Ely was a town besieged” (97). Barclay observes the real and ironic possibility here that Cromwell, who derived income from properties held of the cathedral chapter of Ely, may already have begun to be the fierce critic of Laudian episcopacy that he was to be in parliament. But what persuades him that the explanation for Cromwell's election in the Flagellum account is essentially correct is his discovery that Timbs and the other supporters named were all “godly” citizens of Cambridge. The issue that mattered most to these men by 1640 was the pace of religious change being imposed on them from above, most directly by the bishop of Ely. What they wanted going into the parliamentary elections was “someone who could take on Wren and his colleagues with the passion and the fervour they themselves felt” (141). In such terms, Barclay reasons that Cromwell would have had much to recommend him. He concludes, therefore, that “Oliver Cromwell was in all probability elected as MP for Cambridge in 1640 through the efforts of a group of local godly citizens” (145).

In arriving at its not altogether surprising suggestion that Cromwell was elected in 1640 as an opponent of Laudian prelacy, Electing Cromwell nevertheless leaves the reader with some fresh and indelible images of the man who was to leave to Lowry, Cambridge's other MP, the task of maintaining ties to that constituency as he went on to become a political as well as military leader. All this was contingent on those first stirrings of support for Cromwell, which Barclay discerns in the pages of Flagellum. Electing Cromwell serves as an important reminder that hostile sources are not necessarily incapable of inspiring valuable insights and probable explanations.