Oliver Cromwell

Oliver Cromwell was an English soldier and politician who rose from the minor gentry to command Parliament's armies in the civil wars of the 1640s, helped bring King Charles I to trial and execution, and ruled England, Scotland and Ireland as Lord Protector from 1653 until his death in 1658. Admired by some as a champion of Parliament and religious liberty, he is remembered in Ireland above all for the massacres at Drogheda and Wexford and the conquest that followed.

Cromwell was born on 25 April 1599 in Huntingdon, the son of Robert Cromwell, a gentleman of modest means. He was a distant relative of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's minister. He studied briefly at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, a college with a strong Puritan character, and married Elizabeth Bourchier in 1620. In 1628 he was elected to Parliament for Huntingdon. In the early 1630s, after a period of financial difficulty and apparently depression, he went through a religious conversion and became a committed Puritan, convinced that God directed events and had chosen him for a purpose. This belief in providence shaped his whole career.

In 1640 Cromwell was elected to the Long Parliament for Cambridge, and he was among its most outspoken critics of Charles I and of the bishops. When war between king and Parliament broke out in 1642, he raised a troop of cavalry, though he had no military experience. He proved a gifted commander, recruiting godly, disciplined men and promoting them on merit rather than social rank. His cavalry played a decisive part in the Parliamentarian victory at Marston Moor in July 1644, where they earned the nickname Ironsides.

In 1645 Parliament created the New Model Army, a professional national force, and Cromwell became its lieutenant-general of horse under Sir Thomas Fairfax. At Naseby, on 14 June 1645, the New Model Army destroyed the king's main field army, and the first civil war ended in 1646. Negotiations with the captured Charles failed, and a second civil war broke out in 1648, with Scottish forces now fighting for the king. Cromwell defeated them at Preston in August 1648.

Many in the army now saw Charles as a "man of blood" who could not be trusted. In December 1648 troops under Colonel Thomas Pride expelled members of Parliament who still favoured a settlement with him, leaving a smaller body known as the Rump. Cromwell, who had hesitated, came to support putting the king on trial. Charles was tried by a special court and beheaded outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall, London, on 30 January 1649. Cromwell was one of 59 commissioners who signed the death warrant. The monarchy and the House of Lords were abolished and England declared a Commonwealth. In May 1649 Cromwell suppressed a mutiny by Levellers, radicals who wanted much wider political rights, at Burford.

In August 1649 Cromwell landed at Dublin with a large army to reconquer Ireland, where a Catholic rising had begun in 1641 and Catholic Confederates and Royalists now held most of the country. In September his troops stormed Drogheda after its garrison refused to surrender. On Cromwell's orders no quarter was given to those in arms, and about 3,500 people were killed, including roughly 2,700 Royalist soldiers, men of the town, prisoners and Catholic priests. Cromwell described the killings as the righteous judgement of God on the Irish for the massacres of Protestant settlers in 1641, although Drogheda had played no part in them and many of its defenders were English. In October 1649 his soldiers broke into Wexford while surrender terms were being negotiated and killed about 2,000 soldiers and many civilians, perhaps as many as 1,500, and burned much of the town. Historians still debate how far Cromwell ordered or accepted the deaths of civilians, but his own reports to Parliament mentioned the killing of inhabitants.

Cromwell left Ireland in May 1650, but the conquest continued under his son-in-law Henry Ireton and others, with crop burning, famine and plague. Tens of thousands of Irish people were shipped as indentured labourers to the Caribbean. Under the Act for the Settlement of Ireland of 1652, most land owned by Catholics was confiscated and given to soldiers and Parliament's creditors, and many Catholic landowners were forced to move west of the Shannon, to Connacht. Catholic worship was banned. The population of Ireland fell sharply during the wars of 1641 to 1653, by some estimates by a fifth or more.

Cromwell then turned to Scotland, where the Scots had proclaimed Charles II king. He defeated them at Dunbar on 3 September 1650 and destroyed a Scottish Royalist army that had invaded England at Worcester exactly a year later. Charles II escaped to exile in France. Scotland was occupied and united with England.

Frustrated by the Rump's failure to call new elections or carry out reform, Cromwell expelled it with soldiers in April 1653. A nominated assembly of godly men, known as Barebone's Parliament, failed within months, and in December 1653 Cromwell was installed as Lord Protector under a written constitution, the Instrument of Government. He ruled with a council and with parliaments he repeatedly dissolved when they defied him. After a Royalist rising in 1655 he placed England under the rule of regional major-generals, who enforced order and Puritan morality, a period long remembered as military rule.

His regime allowed broad toleration among Protestant groups, though not for Catholics or for public use of the Anglican prayer book, and in 1656 it informally allowed Jews to settle in England again for the first time since 1290. Abroad, Cromwell ended a war with the Dutch Republic in 1654, sent an expedition to the Caribbean that failed at Hispaniola but captured Jamaica from Spain in 1655, and allied with France against Spain, gaining Dunkirk in 1658. In 1657 Parliament offered him the crown. After weeks of hesitation he refused it, but accepted a new constitution that let him name his successor.

Cromwell died at Whitehall on 3 September 1658, probably of malaria and kidney disease, and was succeeded by his son Richard, who lacked his authority and resigned in 1659. In 1660 the monarchy was restored under Charles II. In January 1661 Cromwell's body was dug up from Westminster Abbey and hanged at Tyburn, and his head was displayed on a pole outside Westminster Hall for years. It was finally buried at Sidney Sussex College in 1960.

Cromwell remains one of the most divisive figures in British history. In the nineteenth century the historian Thomas Carlyle and others portrayed him as a hero of liberty and Parliament, and his statue was placed outside the Palace of Westminster in 1899. Others see a military dictator who governed without consent. In Ireland his name is associated with massacre, dispossession and the long hostility between the Irish and English that followed. For the wider story, see the History of the United Kingdom and the Kingdom of England.