Oliver Cromwell

Oliver Cromwell was born on 25 April 1599 in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, into a Puritan gentry family that traced its descent to Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's great administrative reformer, through a collateral line. His upbringing was provincial and modest: he studied at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, but was forced to leave on his father's death in 1617. In his late twenties he underwent what he later described as a powerful conversion experience, which fixed him for life as a militant Protestant of independent (Congregationalist) leanings. He served briefly as MP for Huntingdon in 1628, then withdrew to local affairs after Charles I dissolved Parliament in 1629. In 1631 he sold his Huntingdon land and moved to St Ives to manage tenanted pasture, leading the life of a small farmer-magistrate. He was almost certainly destined for provincial obscurity.

The summons of the Long Parliament in 1640 returned him to Westminster, now as MP for Cambridge, aged 41 and with no military experience whatsoever. When civil war broke out in 1642 he spent £1,100 of his own money to raise a troop of horse, recruiting on a single criterion that any Christian believer would be accepted regardless of denomination. This troop, which became famous as the Ironsides, was psalm-singing, disciplined and ferocious. After the Parliamentarian defeat at Edgehill, Cromwell told his cousin John Hampden: "You must get men of a spirit; if you choose godly, honest men to be captains of horse, honest men will follow them." His military rise was meteoric: lieutenant-general of horse in the Eastern Association by 1644, decisive cavalry commander at Marston Moor (July 1644), and architect of the victory at Naseby (14 June 1645) that broke the Royalist cause. He was second only to Thomas Fairfax in the New Model Army.

When the army purged the Long Parliament of moderates in December 1648 (Pride's Purge), Cromwell returned to London too late to prevent it, but endorsed the action. The Rump Parliament that remained tried and executed Charles I on 30 January 1649. Cromwell was the third signature of the fifty-nine on the death warrant. With monarchy abolished, he became chair of the Council of State of the new Commonwealth and accepted command of the Irish expedition. The Siege of Drogheda (September 1649) and the Sack of Wexford (October 1649) saw his army kill some 3,500 and 2,000 people respectively, including soldiers, clergy and civilians. Cromwell wrote of Drogheda: "I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches." In Ireland his name became a curse that survives in folk speech to this day. The 1650 Scottish campaign saw his crushing victory at Dunbar (3 September 1650) and a year later at Worcester, ending the Third English Civil War. The Navigation Act of 1651, although he did not draft it personally, triggered the First Anglo-Dutch War and laid the foundations of British maritime commerce.

In April 1653, frustrated by the Rump's delay in calling fresh elections, he marched a company of soldiers into the chamber, seized the ceremonial mace as "that bauble," and dissolved Parliament by force, denouncing the members: "In the name of God, go!" In December he was made Lord Protector for life under the written constitution Instrument of Government. He governed under a divided regime, alternately summoning and dissolving parliaments, partitioning England into eleven military districts under Major-Generals (1655-57), and refusing the crown twice when it was offered in 1657. He also presided over genuine liberal reforms: he readmitted the Jews to England in 1656, ending a 366-year expulsion, and welcomed Continental Protestant refugees. At the same time, the regime banned Christmas festivities (a 1647 measure he enforced), closed theatres, and enforced strict Sabbath observance.

Cromwell died on 3 September 1658, the anniversary of his Dunbar and Worcester victories, of an influenza-like illness aggravated by malaria contracted during the Irish campaign. He was buried in Westminster Abbey with quasi-royal honours. His son Richard inherited the protectorship but resigned within eight months, unable to manage the New Model Army's politics. Monarchy was restored in 1660 under Charles II, and Cromwell's body was exhumed in 1661, posthumously hanged at Tyburn and decapitated; his head was displayed on a pike outside Westminster Hall for nearly twenty-five years, finally falling in a storm in the late 1680s. After passing through several private collectors over three centuries, the skull was finally buried at his Cambridge college, Sidney Sussex, in 1960. Thomas Carlyle's nineteenth-century rehabilitation in his Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell (1845) began the slow rebalancing of the historical reputation. Cromwell remains the most divisive figure in English political history: regicide and parliamentary champion, religious tolerator and Puritan disciplinarian, military genius and Irish butcher. His complex legacy sits at the dead centre of the British constitutional story, the only commoner ever to have ruled England as something close to a king and refused the title.