He divided opinion among his contemporaries, and has continued to do so ever since. For some, he is a hero: a champion of liberty who stood up against the tyranny of Charles I. For others especially in Ireland , he is a villain: a religious zealot and would-be dictator who brutally rode roughshod over anyone who opposed him. Some see him as idealistic and genuinely principled; others as a hypocrite and a Machiavellian power-seeker.
One thing is clear: regardless of whether you love him or loathe him, it is impossible to ignore Oliver Cromwell. To me, this is the source of his unending fascination as an historical figure. Professor Peter Gaunt is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Chester and a leading historian of the military, political and constitutional history of mid-seventeenth century England.
Professor Peter Gaunt. He was a critical admirer of Cromwell and his name will be forever linked with his magisterial The Stuart Age: a history of England This lecture was given at the launch of the Cromwell Collection in Huntingdon Library in , and is an engaging insight into why Cromwell was so fascinating to Barry Coward.
Professor Barry Coward. The first of the three or four reasons that I have to put to you that might make you in particular study Cromwell is that, since most of you are presumably locals who live in these parts, you might be interested in studying the life of a local boy, who of course was born in this town and who lived in this region for most of his life.
For the first 40 years of his life from his birth in this town in , he only left East Anglia to visit London three times. In fact, his life in Huntingdon and East Anglia between and was not a resounding success. Far from it. As far as one can see, his marriage to Elizabeth Bouchier, which produced nine children, appears to have been blissfully happy.
Admittedly, the historical evidence of the private Cromwell is thin on the ground, but in the few letters that survive between Mr and Mrs Cromwell, husband and wife wrote to each other with great affection. In there is a solitary letter from Mrs Cromwell to Oliver.
And despite all the probing of his enemies and there were many no-one ever found evidence of marital infidelities, but only evidence of domestic contentment.
When he lived in Huntingdon he was hardly well-off, just about maintaining a position as a minor gentleman, and in he lost out in a struggle for power in this town, and in the following year he decided to sell the majority of his property here and to decamp to St Ives, where he became a tenant farmer, suffering a very definite demotion out of the gentry class.
Significantly, during the early s, the steady flow of Cromwell babies stopped, perhaps a sign of the prolonged crisis his economic and public life was undergoing. Although in things picked up, when Oliver received a bequest of property from his maternal uncle, including a comfortable house in Ely, where he moved to and where life did get better so that Cromwell could call himself legitimately a gentleman again, his position in gentry society was very precarious.
Also, although, probably because of his distant family relationship with more powerful people, he got elected as MP for Cambridge in the two parliamentary elections of , at that time he was a political lightweight. At the point when he left East Anglia for London in he was a man only on the fringes of the gentry class, with a record of economic troubles behind him, and hardly any political experience. What makes the local story of Oliver Cromwell so worthy of study, then, is that there is so little that we know of him when he lived in these parts that marked him out as someone who was going to make a big splash on the public life of Britain and Ireland.
A second reason why Cromwell is worth studying that might appeal to you is that you might be interested in the military side of his career after There are, I think, at least two aspects of his military career that make it worth studying. One is simply the remarkable fact that he became a successful soldier at all. That he became one of the greatest generals of the Civil War is not in doubt.
His contribution to some royalist defeats on the battlefield were extraordinary. Another is the way that his military career general Eisenhower-like launched him into a very successful career in the world of politics. The curse of Cromwell upon you is an Irish curse.
There have been two significant films about the Civil War , both of which concentrate on the personality of Cromwell rather than the events. Cromwell portrays Cromwell as a good and excessively godly man forced against his will to fight in the civil war, whereas To Kill a King portrays him as a violent killer. Both films were over-simplified and filled with historical errors. Interpretations of Oliver Cromwell At first, after the Restoration, Cromwell was understandably hated.
Cromwell the hero? Cromwell the tyrant? While the rebellion was undoubtedly brutal, a lot of anti-Catholic propaganda was also circulated in England afterwards, amping up the atrocities and even throwing in allegations of cannibalism. It was basically 'fake news', designed to inflame the hatred of men like Cromwell. He partly regarded his own actions as righteous vengeance against the 'wretches' who had killed the Protestant settlers. The siege of Drogheda, though incredibly violent, could be regarded as obeying the rules of warfare at the time.
Cromwell, to his credit, did send the enemy forces a letter promising that 'the effusion of blood may be prevented' if they surrendered. More generally, Cromwell also laid down rules of conduct during the invasion of Ireland, stipulating that his men should treat civilians with respect and that all food and supplies should be fairly purchased rather than simply plundered.
After he left to attend to other matters, his forces tightened their grip on the country, pillaging towns and forcing Catholics from their land in an example of ethnic cleansing. The long, bloody process of colonising Ireland caused — directly or indirectly — the deaths of such a huge section of the population that the word 'genocide' has even been used.
It changed the course of history, leading to turbulent relations with England for centuries to come. And yet another reason why everyone hates the English. View Show.
Oliver Cromwell: the most hated man in Irish history? Battles Kings and Queens Religion. Soldiers seeking refuge in a church steeple were burnt alive when the building was set alight After a stand-off with the commander in charge of enemy forces there, Cromwell ordered the town to be stormed. Cromwell, a staunch Puritan, regarded Ireland as a dangerous and morally reprehensible bastion of Catholicism Question is, can his conduct in Ireland be in any way justified?
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