The dark truth about Oliver Cromwell
Historical trends may ebb and flow but Oliver Cromwell never goes out of fashion. This brilliant general and statesman has proved a source of enormous fascination to generations of historians – and, more than 350 years after his death, that interest shows no sign of dimming. There can be few, if any, heads of the English state who have been studied as often and intensely as Cromwell. In the past three decades alone, he has been the subject of five full-length biographies, three studies of his career as a soldier, and a further three major collections of essays. Piled around these are numerous books and articles dissecting every episode of his remarkable career – from the causes of his radical Puritanism to his role in the execution of King Charles I.
Given Cromwell’s unique importance to English history, this tidal wave of words is hardly surprising. After all, his is the story of a sensational rise from obscurity to supreme power, of a soldier who never lost a full-scale battle, of the only English commoner to become the sovereign authority in the nation.
Cromwell’s pre-eminence is reflected in the statue that stands at the entrance of the House of Commons, and the fact that he has more streets named after him than anybody other than Queen Victoria and (perhaps) the Duke of Wellington. In 2002, a BBC poll voted him the tenth greatest Briton of all time, ahead of all monarchs except Elizabeth I.
Cromwell’s tremendous stature is not, however, the whole reason for the intense and sustained attention paid to him by historians. That has been propelled also by an uneasy feeling that the man himself
