"Begone, You Rogues"

By A.T. Baker

CROMWELL: THE LORD PROTECTOR

by ANTONIA FRASER

754 pages. Knopf. $12.50.

As current biographers go, Lady Antonia Fraser is not necessarily the best, but she is certainly the prettiest. It is a title she would not relish, for she is to scholarship born and bred. Her father, the Earl of Longford, a sometime leader of the House of Lords, is also the author of a number of books on topics that range from banking to philosophy. Her mother Elizabeth is a distinguished biographer of Queen Victoria and the Duke of Wellington. One sister is a novelist; another turns out textbooks. A younger brother is a historian.

Still, for years her British compatriots have known her chiefly as one of the most beautiful of the Beautiful People, wife of the rich M.P. Sir Hugh Fraser and mother of six. Then, to the astonishment of nearly everybody, at age 37, she produced a massive, readable, academically respectable biography of Mary Queen of Scots. Now, nearly five years later, as if intent on proving that her first success was no accident, the lady has delivered a fatter and more scholarly study of Oliver Cromwell, the florid, slovenly country gentleman who became Britain's first Lord Protector.

The choice seems odd. As a beautiful woman, an aristocrat, a romantic and a Roman Catholic, Mary was a congenial subject for the author, who is all those things herself. Cromwell was certainly not beautiful, had no record of romantic interest, and was a scourge of Catholics and a regicide. Why Cromwell? Says Fraser: "I guess I wanted to prove I was more than just a pretty brain." There is no doubt she proves it. Her Cromwell is vast and conscientious. She has read every biography, pored through every broadside of the times, considered every malicious rumor, and records them all before rendering her own considered opinion. The result is sometimes tedious, but Lady Antonia is obviously intent on leaving no flank exposed to attack by scholarly predators.

Perks and Palaces. As between Cavaliers and Roundheads, this is a portrait of Cromwell that no Roundhead sympathizer could fault. When Cromwell puts a thousand innocent men, women, children and priests to the sword at Drogheda, the author tells us he was in a fit of passion. Did he smash and savage churches in England? Well, choirs and pageantry and opulent vestments outraged his Puritan conscience.

There is no real explanation, though, of why, after months of dickering with King Charles I, Cromwell overnight decided the King must die, and then became utterly ruthless in pressing for his execution. Nor of why, only months before his own death, this driven, self-doubting man of God came within a few hours of accepting the crown himself--only to settle for the protectorship, with nearly all the perks and palaces of kingship.

Lady Antonia scants no detail of politics or social trends. The result is a dense scrim of facts that partly obscures the giant size and shape of Cromwell's tortured personality. Every once in a while, his voice rings out memorably--in an outburst at Parliament ("Begone, you rogues, you have sat long enough"), or pleading with a superior not to order tired horses into battle ("They will fall down under their riders if you thus command them; you may have their skins, but you can have no service"). Or, raging at a petition from the Irish Catholic clergy, offered as he was about to reconquer royalist Ireland ("By the grace of God, we fear not, we care not for union. Your covenant was with death and hell ... Is God, will God, be with you? I am confident he will not."

As a study in personality, Cromwell suffers from something like the historical equivalent of television's This Is Your Life. Everyone else is heard from, but the audience is left with the feeling that the hero might have been better off speaking for himself. . A.T. Baker

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