Oliver Cromwell

• 1. Introduction

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  Oliver Cromwell died on the 3rd of September 1658, the same date on which he had won his greatest victories at Dunbar and Worcester. Whether that coincidence was providence or mere chance was exactly the kind of question Cromwell spent his life wrestling with. Born in Huntingdon on the 25th of April 1599, he rose from a modest gentry family farming chickens and sheep to become the ruler of England, Scotland, and Ireland, signing a king's death warrant along the way. His head would eventually be cut off and stuck on a pole above Westminster Hall, where it remained on public display until at least 1684. His body was exhumed from Westminster Abbey and hanged at Tyburn. Yet a statue of him still stands outside the Houses of Parliament. Winston Churchill called him a military dictator. Others have called him a hero of liberty. What kind of man could attract both verdicts? And what did it take to tear apart an entire kingdom, execute its anointed king, rule as something very like a monarch while refusing the crown, and still leave the country in chaos the moment he was gone?

• 2. A Gentleman in Obscurity

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  Robert Cromwell left his son Oliver a house in Huntingdon and a small parcel of land generating no more than £300 a year, near the bottom of the range for landed gentry. Oliver was the fifth child but the only boy to survive infancy. He was baptised at St John's Church on the 29th of April 1599, attended Huntingdon Grammar School, and went on to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, then a recently founded college with a strong Puritan ethos. He left in June 1617 without taking a degree, immediately after his father died.

  The years that followed were difficult. In 1628 he was elected to Parliament for Huntingdon, but he made little impression; records show only one speech, poorly received. That same year, he sought treatment from the Swiss-born London physician Theodore de Mayerne for a range of ailments that included what was recorded as valde melancholicus, meaning depression. A dispute among the Huntingdon gentry in 1629, followed by his being called before the Privy Council in 1630, led him to sell most of his Huntingdon properties in 1631 and move to a farmstead in nearby St Ives. He and his brother Henry kept chickens and sheep, selling eggs and wool.

  The spiritual crisis that accompanied this social fall left the clearest trace in a letter Cromwell wrote in 1638 to his cousin, the wife of Oliver St John. He described himself as having been the 'chief of sinners' and his calling as among 'the congregation of the firstborn.' The letter is dense with biblical quotation and reveals a man who now believed the Reformation had not gone nearly far enough and that England remained mired in sin. In 1636 an inheritance of properties and a tithe-collecting job in Ely from his uncle pushed his income to roughly £300-400 a year and returned him to the acknowledged ranks of the gentry. By the time the Long Parliament assembled in 1640, he was a committed Puritan with strong family links to influential Puritan networks in London and Essex.

• 3. The Making of a Cavalry Commander

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  Cromwell's only military experience before the Civil War was in the county militia, the trained bands. When armed conflict between Parliament and Charles I began in late 1642, he recruited a cavalry troop in Cambridgeshire after intercepting a valuable shipment of silver plate from Cambridge colleges that had been destined for the King. He arrived too late to fight at the Battle of Edgehill on the 23rd of October 1642, but the experience of watching that indecisive engagement appears to have sharpened his sense of what was wrong with Parliament's forces.

  The troop became a regiment over the winter of 1642-1643, folded into the Eastern Association under Edward Montagu, 2nd Earl of Manchester. Cromwell gained experience in East Anglia in 1643, including at the Battle of Gainsborough on the 28th of July, and was appointed governor of the Isle of Ely. His innovations were tactical as much as temperamental. He introduced close-order cavalry formations with troopers riding knee to knee, then an unusual practice in England. Crucially, he kept his men together after they had broken enemy ranks rather than letting them scatter in pursuit. This discipline allowed immediate re-engagement and was decisive at both Marston Moor and Naseby.

  At Marston Moor in July 1644, where Cromwell had risen to lieutenant general of horse, his cavalry broke the Royalist cavalry and then struck the Royalist infantry from the rear, a major factor in the Parliamentarian victory. He was slightly wounded in the neck during the battle and stepped away briefly for treatment before returning. After Marston Moor, a dispute with Manchester deepened. Manchester had let the King's army slip out of an encirclement at the Second Battle of Newbury in October 1644, and Cromwell was furious. Manchester accused him of recruiting officers of 'low birth.' Cromwell replied that he would rather have 'a plain russet-coated captain who knows what he fights for and loves what he knows than that which you call a gentleman and is nothing else.' At Naseby in June 1645, leading the cavalry of the new, nationally organised New Model Army, he routed the King's main force. By the 10th of July and the Battle of Langport, the last sizeable Royalist field army was broken. Cromwell then besieged the formidable Catholic fortress of Basing House in October 1645, where he was later accused of killing 100 of its 300-man garrison after its surrender.

• 4. Killing the King

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  Charles I surrendered to the Scots on the 5th of May 1646, which formally ended the First Civil War. What followed was three years of political negotiation that Cromwell initially pursued in good faith. He sent his son-in-law Henry Ireton to draw up constitutional proposals, eventually refined into the 'Heads of Proposals,' which sought to limit royal power, establish regularly elected parliaments, and restore a non-compulsory church settlement.

  The failure of those talks pushed Cromwell toward the conviction that God had passed judgment on the King. His letters and speeches during 1648 grew saturated with biblical imagery. After his victory at Preston on the 3rd of September 1648, where with 9,000 men he defeated a Scottish Royalist army twice that size, he wrote to Parliament that those who were 'implacable and will not leave troubling the land may be speedily destroyed out of the land.' In December 1648, Colonel Thomas Pride's troops physically removed from the Long Parliament all members who were not supporters of the army's Grandees, leaving the rump of the house to agree that Charles should be tried for treason.

  Cromwell was still in the north when Pride's Purge happened, but on the day after, he declared himself a firm advocate of the King's trial. He was the third of the 59 signatories to sign the death warrant. When officers refused to sign the actual order for the beheading, Cromwell seized a pen, scrawled out the order himself, and handed the pen to Colonel Hacker, who also signed. Charles I was executed on the 30th of January 1649. A republic known as the Commonwealth of England was declared.

• 5. Ireland and Its Aftermath

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  At the Siege of Drogheda in September 1649, Cromwell's troops killed nearly 3,500 people after the town's capture: around 2,700 Royalist soldiers plus all men found carrying arms, including some civilians, prisoners, and Catholic priests. Cromwell wrote that he was persuaded this was 'a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches.' The garrison had refused surrender even after the walls were breached; the military protocol of the day held that a town refusing the chance to surrender was not entitled to quarter. His orders to his men, as he described them, were 'in the heat of the action, I forbade them to spare any that were in arms in the town.'

  At Wexford in October, while Cromwell was apparently still negotiating surrender terms, some of his soldiers broke into the town and killed an estimated 2,000 Irish troops and up to 1,500 civilians. Cromwell failed to take Waterford, and at Clonmel in May 1650 he lost up to 2,000 men in failed assaults before the town surrendered. He returned to England from Youghal on the 26th of May 1650.

  The conquest continued under Henry Ireton and Edmund Ludlow for almost three more years. The last Catholic-held town, Galway, surrendered in April 1652. Under the Act for the Settlement of Ireland 1652, all Catholic-owned lands were confiscated and given to English and Scottish settlers, Parliament's financial creditors, and Parliamentary soldiers. Catholic landowners were confined to the province of Connacht, facing execution if they refused to relocate, which gave rise to the phrase 'To hell or to Connacht.' The 17th-century economist William Petty estimated total excess deaths across the Wars of the Three Kingdoms in Ireland at 600,000 out of a pre-war Irish population of 1,400,000.

  James Joyce invoked Drogheda in Ulysses, and Winston Churchill wrote that Cromwell's Irish record was 'a lasting bane,' noting that three hundred years later, the 'curse of Cromwell' remained an expression of concentrated hatred. In 1997 the Irish Taoiseach Bertie Ahern said he voiced forthright views to the British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook when his delegation encountered a portrait of Cromwell in the Foreign Office.

• 6. The Lord Protector

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  After dissolving the Rump Parliament on the 20th of April 1653 with about 40 musketeers at his back, Cromwell reportedly grabbed the ceremonial mace, called it a 'bauble,' and had it removed. He handed it to his trusted commander Charles Worsley. The brief experiment of Barebone's Parliament, assembled on the suggestion of Major-General Thomas Harrison, collapsed when members voted to dissolve it on the 12th of December 1653, fearing what the radical Fifth Monarchist faction among them might do.

  On the 16th of December 1653, Cromwell was sworn as Lord Protector in plain black clothing rather than any royal regalia. He changed his signature to 'Oliver P,' with the P standing for Protector, and was soon addressed as 'Your Highness.' The annual salary of the post was £100,000. He ended the First Anglo-Dutch War, slightly reduced taxes, and launched the Western Design armada against the Spanish West Indies, capturing Jamaica in May 1655.

  After a Royalist uprising in March 1655 led by John Penruddock, Cromwell divided England into military districts each governed by an army major general. These 15 major generals, called 'godly governors,' were tasked not only with security but with enforcing moral and religious reform. The experiment ended in failure after the second Protectorate Parliament voted down a tax proposal by Major General John Desborough that would have funded them. In 1657, over 360 years after their expulsion by Edward I, Cromwell encouraged Jews to return to England, motivated partly by economic rivalry with the Netherlands and partly by the hope, drawn from Matthew 23:37-39 and Romans 11, that Jewish conversion to Christianity would hasten the Second Coming.

  In 1657 Parliament offered him the Crown. He agonised for six weeks before refusing, saying in a speech on the 13th of April 1657 that he would not 'build Jericho again.' Instead, he was re-installed as Lord Protector on the 26th of June 1657 in Westminster Hall, sitting on King Edward's Chair, wearing a purple robe, a sword of justice, and a sceptre. A new constitutional instrument, the Humble Petition and Advice, established a house of life peers, referred to in the document as the Other House because the Commons could not agree on a name for it.

• 7. Death and the Long Argument

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  Cromwell is thought to have suffered from malaria and kidney stone disease. In 1658 a bout of malarial fever was followed by illness symptomatic of a urinary or kidney complaint. His daughter Elizabeth Claypole died in August, and his own decline may have accelerated with her death. He died at age 59 at Whitehall on the 3rd of September 1658. The most probable cause was sepsis following his urinary infection. He was buried at Westminster Abbey in a ceremony modelled on the funeral of James I.

  His son Richard succeeded him but resigned as Lord Protector in May 1659, having no power base in either Parliament or the Army. George Monck marched on London and restored the Long Parliament, enabling Charles II to return from exile in 1660. On the 30th of January 1661, the 12th anniversary of Charles I's execution, Cromwell's body was exhumed. It was hanged in chains at Tyburn, then thrown into a pit. His head was cut off and mounted on the roof of Westminster Hall, where it remained until at least 1684. It passed through various hands, including a documented sale in 1814 to Josiah Henry Wilkinson, and was publicly exhibited several times before being buried beneath the floor of the antechapel at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, in 1960. A plaque marks the approximate location; the exact position was never disclosed.

  Assessment of Cromwell has shifted with each generation. Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon, writing in 1667, declared him 'a brave bad man.' Thomas Carlyle, publishing an annotated edition of his letters and speeches in the 1840s, called English Puritanism 'the last of all our Heroisms.' The historian Wilbur Cortez Abbott, whose multi-volume compilation of Cromwell's letters and speeches appeared between 1937 and 1947, argued he was a proto-fascist. Austin Woolrych saw him pulled between conflicting obligations to the Army and to achieving a lasting civil settlement. John Morrill and others have argued that his radical actions were driven above all by zeal for godly reformation. The statue outside the Houses of Parliament, first proposed in 1856 and not erected until 1895, was funded mostly by private contributions organised by Prime Minister Archibald Primrose.