Oliver Cromwell


Oliver Cromwell was an English statesman, farmer and soldier, widely regarded as one of the most important figures in British history. He came to prominence during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, initially as a senior commander in the Parliamentarian army and later as a politician. A leading advocate of the execution of Charles I in January 1649, which led to the establishment of the Commonwealth of England, Cromwell ruled as Lord Protector from December 1653 until his death.
Although elected Member of Parliament for Huntingdon in 1628, much of Cromwell's life prior to 1640 was marked by financial and personal failure. He briefly contemplated emigration to New England but became a religious Independent in the 1630s and thereafter believed his successes were the result of divine providence. In 1640, he was served as MP for Cambridge in the Short and Long Parliaments. He joined the Parliamentarian army when the First English Civil War began in August 1642 and quickly demonstrated his military prowess. In 1645, he was appointed commander of the New Model Army cavalry under Thomas Fairfax, and he played a key role in winning the English Civil War.
The death of Charles I and exile of his son Charles II, followed by military victories in Ireland and in Scotland, firmly established the Commonwealth and Cromwell's dominance of the new regime. In December 1653, he was named Lord Protector, a position he retained for the remaining five years of his life. After his death in 1658, he was succeeded by his son Richard, whose weakness led to a power vacuum. This culminated in the 1660 Stuart Restoration, after which Cromwell's body was removed from Westminster Abbey and re-hanged at Tyburn on 30 January 1661. His head was cut off and displayed on the roof of Westminster Hall. It remained there until at least 1684.
Cromwell's historical reputation is continually debated. He is a controversial figure due to his use of military force to acquire and retain political power, his role in the execution of Charles I, and the brutality of his 1649 conquest of Ireland. Winston Churchill described Cromwell as a military dictator, while others view him a hero of liberty.
First proposed in 1856, his statue outside the Houses of Parliament was not erected until 1895, with most of the funds privately supplied by Prime Minister Archibald Primrose.

Early life

Oliver Cromwell was born in Huntingdon on 25 April 1599 to Robert Cromwell and his second wife Elizabeth, daughter of William Steward. His birthplace, the Grade II listed Cromwell House, was at that time the site of Huntingdon Priory, and is commemorated by a plaque. The family's estate derived from Oliver's great-great-grandfather Morgan ap William, a brewer from Glamorgan, Wales, who settled at Putney and married Katherine Cromwell, the sister of Thomas Cromwell, who would become the famous chief minister to Henry VIII. The Cromwells acquired great wealth as occasional beneficiaries of Thomas's administration of the Dissolution of the Monasteries.
Oliver's father Robert Williams, alias Cromwell, married Elizabeth Steward, probably in 1591. Cromwell's paternal grandfather, Henry Williams, was one of the two wealthiest landowners in Huntingdonshire. Cromwell's father was of modest means but still a member of the landed gentry. As a younger son with many siblings, Robert inherited only a house at Huntingdon and a small amount of land. This land would have generated an income of up to £300 a year, near the bottom of the range of gentry incomes. In 1654 Cromwell said, "I was by birth a gentleman, living neither in considerable height, nor yet in obscurity." They had ten children, but Oliver, the fifth child, was the only boy to survive infancy.
Oliver Cromwell was baptised on 29 April 1599 at St John's Church, and attended Huntingdon Grammar School. He went on to study at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, then a recently founded college with a strong Puritan ethos. He left in June 1617 without taking a degree, immediately after his father's death. Early biographers claim that he then attended Lincoln's Inn, but the Inn's archives retain no record of him. Antonia Fraser concludes that it is likely that he did train at one of the London Inns of Court during this time. His grandfather, his father and two of his uncles had attended Lincoln's Inn, and Cromwell sent his son Richard there in 1647.
Cromwell probably returned home to Huntingdon after his father's death. As his mother was widowed, and his seven sisters unmarried, he would have been needed at home to help his family.

Marriage and family

Cromwell married Elizabeth Bourchier on 22 August 1620 at St Giles-without-Cripplegate on Fore Street, London. Elizabeth's father, James Bourchier, was a London leather-merchant who owned extensive lands in Essex and had strong connections with Puritan gentry families there. The marriage brought Cromwell into contact with Oliver St John and leading members of London's merchant community, and behind them the influence of the Earls of Warwick and Holland. A place in this influential network proved crucial to Cromwell's military and political career. The couple had nine children:
Little evidence exists of Cromwell's religion in his early years. His 1626 letter to Henry Downhall, an Arminian minister, suggests that he had yet to be influenced by radical Puritanism. But there is evidence that Cromwell underwent a personal crisis during the late 1620s and early 1630s. In 1628 he was elected to Parliament from the Huntingdonshire county town of Huntingdon. Later that year, he sought treatment from the Swiss-born London doctor Théodore de Mayerne for a variety of physical and emotional ailments, including valde melancholicus. In 1629 Cromwell became involved in a dispute among the gentry of Huntingdon involving a new charter for the town. As a result, he was called before the Privy Council in 1630.
In 1631, likely as a result of the dispute, Cromwell sold most of his properties in Huntingdon and moved to a farmstead in nearby St Ives. This move, a significant step down in society for the Cromwells, also had significant emotional and spiritual impact on Cromwell; an extant 1638 letter from him to his cousin, the wife of Oliver St John, gives an account of his spiritual awakening at this time in which he describes himself as having been the "chief of sinners", describes his calling as among "the congregation of the firstborn". The letter's language, particularly the inclusion of numerous biblical quotations, shows Cromwell's belief that he was saved from his previous sins by God's mercy, and indicates his religiously Independent beliefs, chief among them that the Reformation had not gone far enough, that much of England was still living in sin, and that Catholic beliefs and practices must be fully removed from the church. It appears that in 1634 Cromwell attempted to emigrate to what became the Connecticut Colony in the Americas, but was prevented by the government from leaving.
Along with his brother Henry, Cromwell had kept a smallholding of chickens and sheep, selling eggs and wool to support himself, his lifestyle resembling that of a yeoman farmer. In 1636 Cromwell inherited control of various properties in Ely from his uncle on his mother's side, and his uncle's job as tithe-collector for Ely Cathedral. As a result, his income is likely to have risen to around £300–400 per year; by the end of the 1630s Cromwell had returned to the ranks of acknowledged gentry. He had become a committed Puritan and had established important family links to leading families in London and Essex.

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 Montagu family of Hinchingbrooke House. He made little impression: parliamentary records show only one speech, which was poorly received. After dissolving this Parliament, Charles I ruled without a Parliament for the next 11 years. When Charles faced the Scottish rebellion in the Bishops' Wars, lack of funds forced him to call a Parliament again in 1640. Cromwell was returned to this Parliament as member for Cambridge, but it lasted for only three weeks and became known as the Short Parliament. Cromwell moved his family from Ely to London in 1640.
A second Parliament was called later the same year and became known as the Long Parliament. Cromwell was again returned as member for Cambridge. As with the Parliament of 1628–29, it is likely that he owed his position to the patronage of others, which might explain why in the first week of the Parliament he was in charge of presenting a petition for the release of John Lilburne, who had become a Puritan cause célèbre after his arrest for importing religious tracts from the Netherlands. For the Long Parliament's first two years, Cromwell was linked to the godly group of aristocrats in the House of Lords and Members of the House of Commons with whom he had established familial and religious links in the 1630s, such as the Earls of Essex, Warwick and Bedford, Oliver St John and Viscount Saye and Sele. At this stage, the group had an agenda of reformation: the executive checked by regular parliaments, and the moderate extension of liberty of conscience. Cromwell appears to have taken a role in some of this group's political manoeuvres. In May 1641, for example, he put forward the second reading of the Annual Parliaments Bill, and he later took a role in drafting the Root and Branch Bill for the abolition of episcopacy.