Books with title Oliver Cromwell,

Although he styled himself 'His Highness', adopted the court ritual of his royal predecessors, and lived in the former royal palaces of Whitehall and Hampton Court, Oliver Cromwell was not a king - in spite of the best efforts of his supporters to crown him.Yet, as David Horspool shows in this illuminating new portrait of England's Lord Protector, Cromwell, the Puritan son of Cambridgeshire gentry, wielded such influence that it would be a pretence to say that power really lay with the collective. The years of Cromwell's rise to power, shaped by a decade-long civil war, saw a sustained attempt at the collective government of England; the first attempts at a real Union of Britain; the beginnings of empire; a radically new solution to the idea of a national religion; atrocities in Ireland; and the readmission to England of the Jews, a people officially banned for over three and a half centuries. At the end of it, Oliver Cromwell had emerged as the country's sole ruler: to his enemies, and probably to most of his countrymen, his legacy looked as likely to last as that of the Stuart dynasty he had replaced.

Although he styled himself 'His Highness', adopted the court ritual of his royal predecessors, and lived in the former royal palaces of Whitehall and Hampton Court, Oliver Cromwell was not a king - in spite of the best efforts of his supporters to crown him. Yet, as David Horspool shows in this illuminating new portrait of England's Lord Protector, Cromwell, the Puritan son of Cambridgeshire gentry, wielded such influence that it would be a pretence to say that power really lay with the collective. The years of Cromwell's rise to power, shaped by a decade-long civil war, saw a sustained attempt at the collective government of England; the first attempts at a real Union of Britain; the beginnings of empire; a radically new solution to the idea of a national religion; atrocities in Ireland; and the readmission to England of the Jews, a people officially banned for over three and a half centuries. At the end of it, Oliver Cromwell had emerged as the country's sole ruler: to his enemies, and probably to most of his countrymen, his legacy looked as likely to last as that of the Stuart dynasty he had replaced.

The career of Oliver Cromwell is full of paradoxes. The man of action who often missed the biggest crises; the promoter of ‘plain, russet-coated captains’ who nevertheless destroyed the Levellers in army and society; the ‘fanatical’ butcher of Drogheda who pioneered a new concept of religious freedom in England; the great parliamentarian who nevertheless subjected parliament to the power of the sword. These areas will be discussed further, but the question now is, were these paradoxes inherent in Puritanism? Was Cromwell a typical example of the puritan ‘conundrum’ when it moved from opposition and covert action to real power and decision-making?

Cromwell's policies were those of a man confident that the English as a people had a special destiny to fulfill in the world, but also of a man whose religious vision was not so bigoted that he could not appreciate economic and political realities. And for this reason, he was a respected European statesman who foreign powers courted and feared. The Navigation Acts (1651) provided English shipping with protection in a Mercantilist age; the Dutch trading rivals were weakened. Jamaica was now English and with the capture of Dunkirk, Cromwellian England once again had a foothold in Europe, the first since the loss of Calais in 1557. Between the great days of the Elizabethan Sea Dogs in the 1580s to the brilliant victories of Marlborough in the early 18th century the Cromwellian ‘interlude’ was probably England’s finest hour.

There were two formative experiences fundamental to the early career and rise to power of Oliver Cromwell. The background events of the 1620s and 1630s which had witnessed an arbitrary non-parliamentary ‘personal rule’ by Charles I (1629-1640), economic dislocation and religious persecution that had deeply scarred the religious and political consciousness of Cromwell and his generation. Secondly, Cromwell’s experiences as a victorious commander in battle and his intoxication with the devoted fraternity of his troops convinced him of the providential righteousness bestowed on his cause. It was these that seemed to mark him out as the instrument of God, as a Moses destined to lead his people out of bondage.

The acclaimed Penguin Monarchs series: short, fresh, expert accounts of England's rulers - now in paperbackAlthough he styled himself 'His Highness', adopted the court ritual of his royal predecessors, and lived in the former royal palaces of Whitehall and Hampton Court, Oliver Cromwell was not a king - in spite of the best efforts of his supporters to crown him.Yet, as David Horspool shows in this illuminating new portrait of England's Lord Protector, Cromwell, the Puritan son of Cambridgeshire gentry, wielded such influence that it would be a pretence to say that power really lay with the collective. The years of Cromwell's rise to power, shaped by a decade-long civil war, saw a sustained attempt at the collective government of England; the first attempts at a real Union of Britain; the beginnings of empire; a radically new solution to the idea of a national religion; atrocities in Ireland; and the readmission to England of the Jews, a people officially banned for over three and a half centuries. At the end of it, Oliver Cromwell had emerged as the country's sole ruler: to his enemies, and probably to most of his countrymen, his legacy looked as likely to last as that of the Stuart dynasty he had replaced.