Why were people starting to dislike Oliver Cromwell as Grand Leader in the protectorate period?

I would like to offer a provisional answer that I think would add to the groundwork /u/UnPleasantStuff has put down. That poster is right to point out that Cromwell was perhaps less of a dominant figure than his present reputation (at least relative to other Civil War figures) would suggest. That is not to discount the fact that he is remarkable. He can and often is commended for being a pragmatic recruiter; an able commander in differing scenarios and locations; and a moving orator who was able to fill his men with zeal. Nor did his accomplishments cease when he put on his grand titles in 1653. He was, notably, able to advance England’s colonial position in the Indies and the Baltic not much more than a century after their discovery and thus take on international opponents such as the Dutch and the Spanish. But because such a magisterial reputation and position was furnished through these successes, it was felt that he was taking away from others. The important point that I would like to make with this answer is that there were a lot of factions who felt slighted by Oliver Cromwell at the outset of the Protectorate, let alone the end of it. The success of the Parliamentarians over the Royalists was not a one-man job and the post-war environment was not Cromwell’s to steer alone. I thus think it is to those disaffected characters that one must turn if we are to pinpoint a 'start' to the disliking of Oliver Cromwell.

Take Denzil Holles, for example. Holles is a compelling figure in the drama of the civil war as a whole because he held, on the one hand, that the Parliament did have outstanding and insauspicious grievances with King Charles that needed to be addressed, but, on the other hand, that the olive branch should remain extended. Holles had clear ideas about where the breach between the King and Parliament was and though these were enough to fill out the long document that is the Grand Remonstrance, that did not mean that there should be war. But this puts him at odds with the various brands of anti-monarchist that capitalised on Parliamentarian success on the war, and his notion of a limited breach between Parliament and Crown soon made him quite old-hat. When, much later in 1648, the Parliament was purged in Pride’s Purge, Holles had to escape to France, where he seems to have waited until the Restoration in 1660 of Charles II.

In his Memoirs, Holles has few good words for Cromwell, characterising him and his allies as “[m]en, who thirsted after nothing but blood, mischief and confusion”. Throughout the Memoirs, Holles develops a profile of Cromwell that emphasises his treacherous qualities, planting the seeds of revolution in the people and watching them grow, waiting to benefit from their blind fury. Holles compares the end of the war to a chaotic drama, claiming that the radicals in the army were conspiring for the “Catastrophe of their Tragedy, which was the destruction of the King” whilst Cromwell and others hid “behind the Curtain, laught in their sleeves, and pleas’d themselves to see the game they had packt, play so well”. For Holles, Cromwell was a populist who hypnotised the people with “mellifluous enamouring promises” and let them carry out the dirty work that paved their route to power.

Certain aristocratic elements were already upset with Cromwell when he took power, then, because they saw him as a usurper who had used dishonourable means to achieve his ends. His care was not for the commonwealth, but himself. This is a biased account, of course, and it does not appreciate how moderate Cromwell could be – a moderation that was manifest at least enough that historians do still struggle to make out the nature of his rule.

But Cromwell’s rise to power was problematic to another group of people: those who wanted more sweeping and serious republican reforms. For these people, Cromwell’s assumption of supreme political power was anathema to all that they had hoped to gain out of the overthrow of King Charles. Even confidants of Cromwell, such as Bulstrode Whitelocke, were aware of how atavistic a return to personal rule, albeit under a different leader, would appear. It would seem a paltry prize for the immense depredations of war. For Edmund Ludlow, a thorough diarist of the Protectorate, the ascension of Cromwell was against “the expectations of the people”, and he had only been able to effect it because he took up the mantle before the populace could “become so sensible of their interest as to be enabled thereby to recover the efficacy and substance of it”.

Ludlow believes that the populace at large only realised that they had lost liberties under Cromwell when they saw the immense funding and impropriations given over to a preferred general, John Lambert, and other prominent military officials. Cromwell did a lot to support his armies in this time: his convention of the Second Protectorate Parliament for the approval of funds to the army is one action that has an ironic resemblance to Charles' actions in the lead-up to the war. Whether one believes Ludlow that only these onerous deeds could awaken the people to their continued subjection (and there are a lot of reasons to question it: this kind of rhetoric was common across the political spectrum), Ludlow corroborates one of Holles' main criticisms of Cromwell: that he was prioritising the demands of the Army over those of the Commonwealth and its people. But though it would seem take corruption and financial burdens until the people took issue with something that was mimicking the traditional sovereign powers of prelapsarian Caroline England, Holles and Ludlow make it clear that their opposition to Cromwell begins - on principle - as soon as he took power as Lord Protector.

An interesting third branch of opposition to Cromwell came from Royalists, many of whom had remained in communication with each other despite the tumults since Charles’ execution. These took much the same theoretical issue with Cromwell’s argument as Holles and Ludlow, seeing it as the government as a usurper. The poet Abraham Cowley, for example, published in 1656 his collection of Cavalier poetry, in which the surviving allies of the Crown were imagined as living in an unaffected splendour whilst the rest of the world became mired in conspiracies. “Crown’d with Roses we contemn / Gyges’ wealthy Diadem”, he writes, comparing Cromwell to Gyges, the man who, according to Plato, used a ring of invisibility to assassinate the Lydian King Candaules and take his position.

Another committed royalist, the Earl of Clarendon, gives Cromwell the sordid epithet "Man of blood". Clarendon states that this name is also used for Machiavelli (who had entered the English popular consciousness as a scheming murderer), showing us that Clarendon wanted to draw a line between the great theoriser of selfish political scheming and Oliver Cromwell. But perhaps the more powerful association with these words is owed to their appearance in the the accusations levelled against Charles I at his trial. There the epithet had been essential to establishing the prosecution case against the King on grounds of treason: he had aimed to secure his crown, but had done so by entering his Kingdoms into horrific wars. Clarendon thus echoes the accusation but aims it at Cromwell, rendering him a man who used the Civil Wars as a vain tool to bring about his own gain and prestige.

Almost all the sources I have relied upon are biased sources - ones that have no shame in showing contempt for Cromwell. As sources for a veracious narrative of the political landscape of the 1650s, they are obviously insufficient; but they do show what reasons there were to dislike Cromwell and the regal cult that he had made for himself at the outset of the Protectorate rather than towards its end. These accounts show that men of all stripes saw Cromwell's Protectorate as objectionable because it was too similar to what came before it: the Personal Rule of Charles I. This suspicion about a renewed monarchy is the obvious theme of the preceding accounts, though the different groups colour it differently. For writers like Holles, Cromwell had transformed justified protest to the King into anarchy from which he could take up power. For Royalists, the case was much the same, except Cromwell had capitalised on treason, not on a justified protest to the King. Finally, for another group, radicals who wanted real and dramatic constitutional reform from the English Civil Wars, Cromwell's rise was not just a moral outrage, but a political one too, which seemed to have put back the clocks on constitutional progress and betrayed the expenses of war to an autocratic arrangement, well-known to be vulnerable to corruption and vice.