Oliver Cromwell

‘On the winning side, yet subject to all the former tyrannies,’ the radical Winstanley in 1649 protested against Cromwell’s rule. By A.A. Mitchell.

Oliver Cromwell was at heart no republican; but he believed that God manifested His will through the triumphs or misfortunes that He awarded to those engaged in “great businesses”. Charles Ogilvie writes how Charles's continued misjudgments revealed that, if the world were to be made safe for the “Godly,” the King must be executed.

Critics of Cromwell, both British and foreign, have long continued to “find what they were looking for” in the records of his career and character. Some have denounced him as a hypocritical tyrant; others have described him as the finest type of middle-class Englishman. Once at least, writes D.H. Pennington, he has been acclaimed as “the greatest Englishman of all time”.

With his “great and majestic deportment and comely presence Cromwell himself was fully equal to his new dignities as Lord Protector. Not so, writes C.V. Wedgwood, all the members of his household; his wife was accused of squalid parsimony, and his younger daughters of undue frivolity.

Edmund Baker describes how Cromwell's principal assistant in foreign affairs and his most devoted friend, Thurloe, saw in the Protectoral system “a mean between two intolerable extremes of unrestrained anarchy and reaction.”

Christopher Lloyd marks the tercentenary of Robert Black, Cromwell’s “General at Sea,” whose name ranks with those of Drake and Nelson in English naval annals.

R.T. Godfrey reflects on the nuances of Faithorne’s large range of prints, which were based both on his own drawings as well as the work of other artists.

Keith Feiling suggests that the Battle of Worcester holds central importance, not only in the unique character of the Lord Protector, but for the history of Britain itself.

D.H. Pennington uses the diary notes of a contemporary MP to give readers a real sense of the dramatic atmosphere in the pre-Civil War House of Commons.

A leading actor in the civil war, Clarendon in his History offered an interpretation of the causes of the conflict which has been much debated by later historians, as Christopher Hill discusses here.