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For the Monty Python song based on the historical figure, see Oliver Cromwell (song) Oliver Cromwell (April 25 1599 – September 3 1658) was an English military and political leader, considered by critics to be a dictator, best known for making England a republic and leading the Commonwealth of England. For the first forty years of his life a middling gentry farmer, he rose from the ranks to command the Army and eventually to impose his rule on England, Scotland, and Ireland as Lord Protector, from December 16 1653 until his death. Cromwell is a very controversial figure in English history — a regicidal dictator to some historians (such as David Hume and Christopher Hill) and a hero of liberty to others (such as Thomas Carlyle and Samuel Rawson Gardiner.) He was a regicide who debated whether to accept the crown himself and decided not – though ironically he had more power than Charles I. He was a parliamentarian who ordered his soldiers to dissolve parliaments. He was devoted to Christian values yet his conquests of Scotland and Ireland were brutal. He advocated religious liberty of conscience but allowed blasphemers to be tortured. He advocated equitable justice but imprisoned those who criticized his raising taxation outside the agreement of Parliament. Admirers hail him as a strong, stabilizing and stately leader who brought international respect, overthrew tyranny and promoted republicanism and liberty. In a BBC poll of Great Britons, he was voted number 10. Cromwell's critics ridiculed him as an overly ambitious hypocrite who betrayed the cause of liberty, imposed puritanical values and showed scant respect for the nation's traditions. After the Restoration of Charles II, his corpse was dug up, hung in chains, and beheaded.
Family Oliver Cromwell was descended from Catherine Cromwell (born circa 1482), an older sister of Tudor statesman Thomas Cromwell. Catherine was married to Morgan ap Williams, son of William ap Yevan of Wales and Joan Tudor. The family line continued through Richard Cromwell (c. 1500–1544), Henry Cromwell (c. 1524–January 6 1603), then to Oliver's father Robert Cromwell (c. 1560–1617), who married Elizabeth Steward or Stewart (1564–1654) on April 25, 1599, the day of Oliver's birth. Early years: 1599-1640 Cromwell was born in Huntingdon on 25 April 1599. Records survive of his baptism and of his attendance at Huntingdon grammar school. He then studied at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, which was then a recently founded college with a strong puritan ethos. He left in June 1617 without taking a degree, immediately after the death of his father. Early biographers claim he then attended Lincoln’s Inn, but there is no record of him in the Inn’s archives. He is likely to have returned home to Huntingdon, given that his mother was widowed, his seven sisters were unmarried, and there was hence a need to take charge of the family. The crucial event of the 1620s was his marriage to Elizabeth Bourchier (1598-1665) on 22 August 1620. They had seven children; his successor Richard Cromwell (1626-1712) was the third son. Her father Sir James Bourchier was a London merchant who owned extensive land in Essex and had strong connections with puritan gentry families there. The marriage brought Cromwell into contact with Oliver St John and also with leading members of the London merchant community, and behind them the influence of the earls of Warwick and Holland. Membership of this godly network would prove crucial to Cromwell’s military and political career. At this stage, however, there is little evidence of Cromwell’s own religion. His letter in 1626 to Henry Downhall – an Arminian minister – suggests that before this point Cromwell had yet to be influenced by radical puritanism. However, there is evidence that Cromwell went through a period of personal crisis during the late 1620s and early 1630s. He sought treatment for valde melancolicus (depression) from London doctor Theodore Mayerne in 1628. He was also caught up in a fight amongst the gentry of Huntingdon over a new charter for the town, as a result of which he was called before the Privy Council in 1630. In 1631 Cromwell sold most of his properties in Huntingdon—probably as a result of the dispute—and moved to a farmstead in St Ives. This was a major step down in society and seems to have had a major emotional and spiritual impact. A 1638 letter is a conversion account of how after having been "the chief of sinners", he had been called to be among "the congregation of the firstborn". By 1638, it is likely that Cromwell was a committed puritan, firmly associated with the Independent vision of religious freedom for all Protestants. He had also established important family links to leading godly families in Essex and London. In his own eyes, he had come through a period of crisis by virtue of God’s providence. Member of Parliament: 1628-1629 and 1640-1642 Cromwell became the Member of Parliament for Huntingdon in the Parliament of 1628–1629, as a client of the Montagus. He made little impression – records for the Parliament are relatively full, and show only one speech (against the Arminian Bishop Richard Neile) that was poorly received. Charles I ruled without a Parliament for the next eleven years (having dissolved Parliament, of which Cromwell was a member, in 1629). When Charles was facing a Scottish rebellion known as the Bishops War, he was forced by shortage of funds to call a Parliament again in 1640. This Parliament only lasted three weeks and was known as the Short Parliament, and succeeded by the Long Parliament. Cromwell was returned as MP for Cambridge for the Long Parliament – as in 1628, it is likely that he owed his position to the patronage of others. This would explain the fact that, in the first week of the Parliament, he was in charge of presenting a petition for the release of John Lilburne. For the first two years of the Long Parliament, Cromwell was linked to the group of aristocrats in the Lords he had already established links with in the 1630s, such as the earls of Essex, Warwick and Bedford, and Viscount Saye and Sele. At this stage, the group had an agenda of godly reformation: the executive checked by regular parliaments, and the moderate extension of liberty of conscience. In May 1641, for example, it was Cromwell who put forward the second reading of the Annual Parliaments Bill, and who later took a role in drafting the Root and Branch Bill for the abolition of episcopacy. Military Commander: 1642-1646
Politics: 1647-1649
Irish Campaign: 1649-50 See also: Cromwellian conquest of Ireland and Irish Confederate Wars Cromwell led a Parliamentary invasion of Ireland from 1649-50, with the twin aims of eliminating the military threat posed by the alliance of the Irish Confederate Catholics and English Royalists (signed in 1649) to the Commonwealth and punishing the Irish for their rebellion of 1641. The English Parliament had long planned to re-conquer Ireland since 1641 and had already sent an invasion force there in 1647. Cromwell's invasion of 1649, however, was much larger and, with the civil war in England over, could be regularly reinforced and re-supplied. By the summer of 1649, the Irish-Royalist alliance was judged to be the biggest single threat facing the Commonwealth. Cromwell wrote, "I had rather be overthrown by a Cavalierish interest than a Scotch interest; I had rather be overthrown by a Scotch interest than an Irish interest and I think of all this is the most dangerous ". Cromwell's nine month military campaign was brief and effective, though it did not end the war in Ireland. Before his invasion, Parliamentarian forces held only outposts in Dublin and Derry. When he departed Ireland, they occupied most of the eastern and northern parts of the country. After his landing at Dublin on August 15, 1649 (itself only recently secured for the Parliament at the battle of Rathmines), Cromwell took the fortified port towns of Drogheda and Wexford to secure logistical supply from England. At the siege of Drogheda in September 1649, Cromwell's troops massacred nearly 3,500 people after the town's capture — comprising around 2,700 Royalist soldiers and all the men in the town carrying arms, including some civilians, prisoners, and Catholic priests. At the Siege of Wexford in October, another massacre took place under confused circumstances. While Cromwell himself was trying to negotiate surrender terms, the New Model Army soldiers broke into the town, killed 2000 Irish troops and up to 1,500 civilians and burned much of the town. These actions still have resonance in Irish nationalist historical memory. The two atrocities, while horrifying in their own right, were not exceptional in the war in Ireland since its start in 1641, but are well-remembered even today. In part this is because of a concerted propaganda campaign by the Royalists, which portrayed Cromwell as a tyrant who indiscriminately slaughtered civilians wherever he went. After the fall of Drogheda, Cromwell sent a column north to Ulster to secure the north of the country and went on to besiege Waterford, Kilkenny and Clonmel in Ireland's south-east. Kilkenny surrendered on terms, as did many other towns like New Ross and Carlow, but Cromwell failed to take Waterford and at the siege of Clonmel in May 1650, he lost up to 2000 men in abortive assaults before the town surrendered. One of his major victories in Ireland was diplomatic rather than military - persuading, with the help of Roger Boyle, 1st Earl of Orrery - the Protestant Royalist troops in Cork to change sides and fight with the Parliament. At this point, word reached Cromwell that Charles II had landed in Scotland and been proclaimed king by the Covenanter regime. Cromwell therefore returned to England to counter this threat. The Parliamentarian conquest of Ireland dragged on for almost three years after Cromwell's departure. The campaigns under Cromwell's successors Henry Ireton and Edmund Ludlow mostly consisted of long sieges of fortified cities and guerrilla warfare in the countryside. Debate over Cromwells actions in Ireland The extent of Cromwell's alleged brutality in Ireland has been strongly debated. It is clear that Cromwell saw the Irish Catholics in general as enemies. During the civil wars, the Parliamentarian side in particular nursed a hatred towards the Catholic Irish, who were long seen as "savages" and inferior by the English. A desire for revenge for the massacres of the 1641 Irish Rebellion against English rule added to the general climate of Protestant hostility. Cromwell's hostility to them was religious as well as political. He was passionately opposed to the Roman Catholic Church, which he saw as denying the primacy of the Bible in favour of papal and clerical authority, and which he blamed for tyranny and persecution of Protestants in Europe. Cromwell's association between Catholicism and persecution were deepened with the Irish Rebellion of 1641. This rebellion was marked by massacres by native Irish Catholics of English and Scottish Protestant settlers in Ireland, which were wildly exaggerated in puritan circles in Britain (from 4,000 killed to 120,000). These factors contributed to Cromwell's harshness in his military campaign in Ireland. In September 1649, he justified his sack of Drogheda as revenge for the massacres of Protestant settlers in Ulster in the Irish Rebellion of 1641, calling the massacre, "The righteous judgement of God on these barbarous wretches, who have imbued their hands with so much innocent blood". Drogheda had in fact never been held by the rebels in 1641 - many of its garrison were in fact English Royalists. Addressing the Irish defenders of New Ross in 1649, who were negotiating the surrender of the town, Cromwell stated, "I meddle not with any man's conscience, but if by liberty of conscience you mean the liberty to exercise the Mass... where the Parliament of England has authority, that will not be allowed of." In a letter to the Irish Catholic Bishops later that year he wrote, "you are part of the Anti-Christ and before long you must have, all of you, blood to drink." Moreover, the records of many churches such as Kilkenny Cathedral accuse Cromwell's army of having defaced and desecrated the churches. On the other hand, on entering Ireland, Cromwell demanded that no supplies were to be seized from the civilian inhabitants, and that everything should be fairly purchased. Several English soldiers were in fact hanged for disobeying these orders. With regard to the massacre at Drogheda, Cromwell's orders followed military protocol of the day, where a town or garrison was first given the option to surrender and receive just treatment, and the protection of the invading force. The refusal of the garrison at Drogheda to do this, even after the walls had been breached, meant that Cromwell's orders – "I forbade them to spare any that were in arms in the town" – while severe, were not unusual by the standards of the day. Cromwell wanted his severity at Drogheda to act as a deterrent to Irish resistance, in his own words, "it will tend to prevent effusion of blood for the future". Moreover, where Cromwell negotiated the surrender of fortified towns, as at Carlow, New Ross and Clonmel, he respected the terms of surrender and protected the lives and property of the townspeople. Cromwell never accepted that he was responsible for the killing of civilians in Ireland, claiming that he had acted harshly, but only against those "in arms." In fact, the worst atrocities committed in Ireland, such as mass evictions, killings and deportation for slave labour to Bermuda and Barbados, were carried out by Cromwell's subordinates after he had left for England. William Petty estimated in his demographic survey of Ireland in the 1650s that the war of 1641-53 had resulted in the death or exile of over 600,000 people, or around one third of Ireland's pre-war population . In the wake of the Cromwellian conquest, the public practice of Catholicism was banned, priests were executed when captured and all Catholic-owned land was confiscated in the Act for the Settlement of Ireland 1652 and given to Scottish and English settlers, the Parliament's financial creditors and Parliamentary soldiers (see Plantations of Ireland). Scottish Campaign: 1650-1651 Cromwell left Ireland in May 1650 and several months later, invaded Scotland after the Scots had proclaimed Charles I's son as Charles II. Cromwell was much less hostile to Scottish Presbyterians (some of whom had been his allies in the first Civil War) than he was to Irish Catholics, and saw them as, God's people, "though deceived". He made a famous appeal to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, urging them to see the error of the royal alliance-I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken. His appeal rejected, Cromwell's veteran troops went on to defeat Scottish armies at the battles of Dunbar and the Worcester. Many of the prisoners of war taken in the campaigns died of disease, and others were sent to penal colonies in Barbados. In the final stages of the Scottish campaign, Cromwell's men, under George Monck sacked the town of Dundee. During the Commonwealth, Scotland was ruled from England, and was kept under military occupation, with a line of fortifications sealing off the Highlands, which had provided manpower for Royalist armies in Scotland, from the rest of the country. Presbyterianism was allowed to be practised as before, but the Kirk (the Scottish church) did not have the backing of the civil courts to impose its rulings, as it had previously. Cromwell's conquest, unwelcome as it was, left no significant lasting legacy of bitterness in Scotland. The rule of the Commonwealth and Protectorate was largely peaceful and fair, and there were no wholesale confiscations of land or property. Ireland, in contrast, saw the wholesale transfer of land from the Gaelic Catholic population to Parliamentary creditors, existing Protestant settlers from Britain and veterans of the New Model Army. This created a poisonous legacy, far exceeding the memories left by the sack of Drogheda and Wexford. Although not thought of by Scots in an extremely favourable manner, his name is not met with the same hatred there as it does in Ireland. The Rump Parliament After the execution of the King, a republic was declared, known as the Commonwealth of England. A Council of State was appointed to manage affairs, which included Cromwell among its members. His real power base was in the army; Cromwell tried but failed to unite the original group of 'Royal Independents' centred around St John and Saye and Sele, but only St John was persuaded to retain his seat in Parliament. From the middle of 1649 until 1651, Cromwell was away on campaign. In the meantime, with the king gone (and with him their common cause), the various factions in Parliament began to engage in infighting. On his return, Cromwell tried to galvanise the Rump into setting dates for new elections, uniting the three kingdoms under one polity, and to put in place a broad-brush, tolerant national church. However, the Rump vacillated in setting election dates, and although it put in place a basic liberty of conscience, it failed to produce an alternative for tithes or dismantle other aspects of the existing religious settlement. In frustration, Cromwell eventually dismissed the Rump Parliament in 1653. Barebones Parliament After the dissolution of the Rump, power passed temporarily to a council that debated what form the constitution should take. They took up the suggestion of Major-General Thomas Harrison for a "sanhedrin" of saints. Although Cromwell did not subscribe to Harrison's apocalyptic, Fifth Monarchist beliefs – which saw a sanhedrin as the starting point for Christ's rule on earth – he was attracted by the idea of an assembly made up of a cross-section of sects. In his speech at the opening of the assembly on 4 July 1653, Cromwell thanked God’s providence that he believed had brought England to this point and set out their divine mission: “truly God hath called you to this work by, I think, as wonderful providences as ever passed upon the sons of men in so sort a time”. Sometimes known as the Parliament of Saints, the assembly was also called the Barebone's Parliament after one of its members, Praise-God Barebone. The assembly was tasked with finding a permanent constitutional and religious settlement (Cromwell was invited to be a member but declined). However, the assembly’s failure to do so led to its members voting to dissolve it on 12 December 1653. The Protectorate: 1653-1658 After the dissolution of the Barebone's Parliament, John Lambert put forward a new constitution known as the Instrument of Government, closely modelled on the Heads of Proposals. It made Cromwell Lord Protector for life to undertake “the chief magistracy and the administration of government”. He had the power to call and dissolve parliaments but obliged under the Instrument to seek the majority vote of a council of state. However, Cromwell's power was also buttressed by his continuing popularity among the army, which he had built up during the civil wars, and which he subsequently prudently guarded. Cromwell was sworn in as Lord Protector on 15 December 1653. The first Protectorate parliament met on 4 September 1653, and after some initial gestures approving appointments previously made by Cromwell, began to work on a moderate programme of constitutional reform. Rather than opposing Parliament’s bill, Cromwell dissolved them on 22 January 1655. After a royalist uprising led by Sir John Penruddock, Cromwell (influenced by Lambert) divided England into military districts ruled by Army Major Generals who answered only to him. The 15 major generals and deputy major generals – called "godly governors" – were central not only to national security, but Cromwell's moral crusade. The generals not only supervised militia forces and security commissions, but collected taxes and insured support for the government in the English and Welsh provinces. Commissioners for securing the peace of the commonwealth were appointed to work with them in every county. While a few of these commissioners were career politicians, most were zealous puritans who welcomed the major-generals with open arms and embraced their work with enthusiasm. However, the major-generals lasted less than a year. Many feared they threatened their reform efforts and authority. Their position was further harmed by a tax proposal by Major General John Desborough to provide financial backing for their work, which the second Protectorate parliament – instated in September 1656 – voted down for fear of a permanent military state. Ultimately, however, Cromwell's failure to support his men, sacrificing them to his opponents, caused their demise. Their activities between November 1655 and September 1656 had, however, reopened the wounds of the 1640s and deepened antipathies to the regime. During this period Cromwell also faced challenges in foreign policy. The First Anglo-Dutch War which had broken out in 1652, against the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands, was eventually won by Admiral Robert Blake in 1654. As Lord Protector he was aware of the contibution the Jewish community made to the economic success of Holland, now England's leading commercial rival. It was this – allied to Cromwell’s toleration of the right to private worship of those who fell outside evangelical puritanism – that led to his encouraging Jews to return to England, 350 years after their banishment by Edward I, in the hope that they would help speed up the recovery of the country after the disruption of the Civil Wars. In 1657, Cromwell was offered the crown by Parliament as part of a revised constitutional settlement, presenting him with a dilemma, since he had been 'instrumental' in abolishing the monarchy. Cromwell agonised for six weeks over the offer. He was attracted by the prospect of stability it held out, but in a speech on 13 April 1657 he made clear that God’s providence had spoken against the office of king: “I would not seek to set up that which Providence hath destroyed and laid in the dust, and I would not build Jericho again”. The reference to Jericho harks back to a previous occasion on which Cromwell had wrestled with his conscience when the news reached England of the defeat of an expedition against the Spanish-held island of Hispaniola in the West Indies in 1655 – comparing himself to Achan, who had brought the Israelites defeat after bringing plunder back to camp after the capture of Jericho. Instead, Cromwell was ceremonially re-installed as "Lord Protector" (with greater powers than had previously been granted him under this title) at Westminster Hall, sitting upon King Edward's Chair which was specially moved from Westminster Abbey for the occasion. The event in part echoed a coronation, utilising many of its symbols and regalia, such as a purple ermine-lined robe, a sword of justice and a sceptre (but not a crown or an orb). But, most notably, the office of Lord Protector was still not to become hereditary, though Cromwell was now able to nominate his own successor. Cromwell's new rights and powers were laid out in the Humble Petition and Advice, a legislative instrument which replaced the Instrument of Government. Cromwell himself, however, was at pains to minimise his role, describing himself as a constable or watchman. Death and posthumous execution
Posthumous reputation There has been a wide range of evaluations of Cromwell. During his lifetime, some tracts painted him as a hypocrite motivated by power – for example, The Machiavilian Cromwell and The Juglers Discovered, both part of an attack on Cromwell by the Levellers after 1647, present him as a Machiavellian figure. More positive contemporary assessments – for instance John Spittlehouse in A Warning Piece Discharged – typically compared him to Moses, rescuing the English by taking them safely through the Red Sea of the civil wars. Several biographies were published soon after his death. An example is The Perfect Politician by the anonymous "L.S.", which described how Cromwell "loved men more than books" and gave a nuanced assessment of him as an energetic campaigner for liberty of conscience brought down by pride and ambition. In the early eighteenth-century, Cromwell’s image began to be adopted and reshaped by the Whigs, as part of a wider project to give their political objectives historical legitimacy. A version of Edmund Ludlow’s Memoirs, re-written by John Toland to excise the radical puritan elements and replace them with a Whiggish brand of republicanism, presented the Cromwellian Protectorate as a military tyranny. Through Ludlow, Toland portrayed Cromwell as a despot who crushed the beginnings of democratic rule in the 1640s. Thomas Carlyle began a reassessment of Cromwell in the 1840s by presenting Cromwell as a hero in the battle between good and evil and a model for restoring morality to an age Carlyle believed to be dominated by timidity, meaningless rhetoric, and moral compromise. Cromwell's actions, including his campaigns in Ireland and his dissolution of the Long Parliament, according to Carlyle, had to be appreciated and praised as a whole. However, readers were free to interpret Carlyle selectively. His picture of Cromwell appealed to nonconformists, who saw him as a champion of denominational independence, and to working-class radicals, who saw him as a man of the people who had stood up against monarchical and aristocratic oppression. Nonconformist churches supported a campaign to have Cromwell's statute erected outside the Palace of Westminster. In 1899, when commemorative events to mark the anniversary of Cromwell's birth took place, they were all organized by the Congregational and Baptist churches. At the London ceremony David Lloyd George said that he believed in Cromwell because "he was a great fighting dissenter" By the late nineteenth century, Carlyle’s portrayal of Cromwell, stressing the centrality of puritan morality and earnestness, had become assimilated into Whig and Liberal historiography. The civil war historian Samuel Rawson Gardiner concluded that "the man – it is ever so with the noblest – was greater than his work". Gardiner stressed Cromwell’s dynamic and mercurial character, and his role in dismantling absolute monarchy, while underestimating Cromwell’s religious conviction. Cromwell’s foreign policy also provided an attractive forerunner of Victorian imperial expansion, with Gardiner stressing his “constancy of effort to make England great by land and sea”. Late twentieth-century historians have re-examined the nature of Cromwell’s faith, and of his authoritarian regime. Austin Woolrych explored the issue of "dictatorship" in depth, arguing that Cromwell was subject to two conflicting forces: his obligation to the army and his desire to achieve a lasting settlement by winning back the confidence of the political nation as a whole. Woolrych argued that the dictatorial elements of Cromwell's rule stemmed not so much from its military origins or the participation of army officers in civil government as from his constant commitment to the interest of the people of God, and his conviction that suppressing vice and encouraging virtue constituted the chief end of government. Historians such as John Morrill, Blair Worden and J.C. Davis have developed this theme, revealing the extent to which Cromwell’s writing and speeches are suffused with biblical references, and arguing that his radical actions were driven by his zeal for godly reformation. Locally Cromwell has retained popularity in Cambridgeshire, where he was known as "Lord of the Fens". In Cambridge, he is commemorated in a painted glass window portrait in the Emmanuel United Reformed Church; St Ives, Cambridgeshire has erected his statue in the town centre. Various songs reference Cromwell. In 1989 Monty Python released a song entitled Oliver Cromwell, a parody of Cromwell's biography. The song Oliver's Army by Elvis Costello references the New Model Army. A number of other songs are more critical. The song Young Ned of the Hill by The Pogues criticizes Cromwell's exploits in Ireland. On 2004 album You Are the Quarry, UK artist Morrissey recorded a song Irish Blood, English Heart with lyrics: "I've been dreaming of a time when, The English are sick to death of Labour, And Tories, And spit upon the name Oliver Cromwell, And denounce this royal line that still salute him, And will salute him forever". The song Tobacco Island by Flogging Molly is about Cromwell deporting Irish workers to Barbados. The Finnish doom metal band Reverend Bizarre recorded a song called Cromwell as part of the album II: Crush the Insects(2005). Cromwell's character has also featured in a number of plays and films. Victor Hugo wrote a play about Cromwell in 1827. The 1970 film Cromwell, starring Richard Harris, is based on the life of Oliver Cromwell. British actor Tim Roth took on the role in the 2003 film To Kill a King. In 2003 playwright Steve Newman produced his An Evening With Oliver Cromwell, which looked at the relationship between Cromwell and Major General Thomas Harrison. The play was performed in the 'Shreeves House' in Stratford-upon-Avon where Cromwell is thought to have stayed prior to the battle of Worcester. The Doctor Who 2006 Big Finish audio play The Settling, written by Simon Guerrier, centres on Cromwell during the sieges of Drogheda and Wexford. Biographies Military studies Surveys of era Primary sources Footnotes | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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