# Oliver Cromwell
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oliver-cromwell/48567
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [January 5, 2001, 2:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oliver-cromwell/48567 "2001-01-05T14:01:51Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@ronan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ronan)
#### Post date: [January 5, 2001, 2:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oliver-cromwell/48567/1 "2001-01-05T14:01:51Z")
Why is he regarded as a hero in England. I know that he tried (and succeeded for a while) in getting rid of the Monarchy and that he declared himself Lord Protector, but surely he was just a crazy Puritan who was hell bent on destroying the Irish and the Scots. Was he not a wood-be dictator and a bigot who was out for personal power and glory?
What do you folks think ?
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### Author:  [@tclouie](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tclouie)
#### Post date: [January 5, 2001, 2:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oliver-cromwell/48567/2 "2001-01-05T14:10:07Z")
What makes you think he’s regarded as a hero in England?
They wouldn’t be praying for his soul in any Anglican or Catholic church…maybe in a Presbyterian one…
(slight hijack0
The guy we really have to rehabilitate is that poor New Yorker, Captain William kidd.
Let’s get the New York State legislature to petition the British admiralty for a posthumous pardon!
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### Author:  [@Duck\_Duck\_Goose](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Duck_Duck_Goose)
#### Post date: [January 5, 2001, 2:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oliver-cromwell/48567/3 "2001-01-05T14:12:52Z")
I’ve never heard of Cromwell being considered a hero in England. Maybe it depends on what part of England you’re from.
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### Author:  [@ronan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ronan)
#### Post date: [January 5, 2001, 2:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oliver-cromwell/48567/4 "2001-01-05T14:17:38Z")
I could be wrong (but I don’t think I am) but as far as I know Cromwell is seen as a hero and a great reformer in English history, I just want to know why ?
Just a small point but Captain William Kidd was British and not a New Yorker.
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### Author:  [@Duck\_Duck\_Goose](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Duck_Duck_Goose)
#### Post date: [January 5, 2001, 2:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oliver-cromwell/48567/5 "2001-01-05T14:17:48Z")
Putting “Cromwell hero” into Google brought up this.
[http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/Exhibitions/Cromwell/cromwell.htm](http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/Exhibitions/Cromwell/cromwell.htm)
> [@](#):
>
> …His reputation took nearly two centuries to recover, and over the past 150 years he has remained the most contentious figure in British history. From the 1840s, his radical Christian paternalism and his commitment to freedom for “the poorest Christian, the most mistaken Christian” canonised him as a hero of many political reformers and religious dissenters; while his fierce (fanatical?) Calvinism and his gloating massacres in Ireland demonised him in the memory of others.
So I guess it depends on who you are and where you’re from.
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### Author:  [@APB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/APB)
#### Post date: [January 5, 2001, 2:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oliver-cromwell/48567/6 "2001-01-05T14:39:44Z")
It is far too simple to say that Cromwell is regarded as a hero in Britain. Some admire him as a defender of Parliament, a supporter of religious toleration and an enemy of the monarchy; others dismiss him as a military dictator, a religious bigot and an enemy of the monarchy. Those who are most embarassed by his conduct in Ireland tend to be those who admire the other aspects of his career. The (unofficial) celebrations in 1999 to mark the 400th anniversary of his birth were rather muted.
It is also far too simple to say that ‘he was just a crazy Puritan who was hell bent on destroying the Irish and the Scots’. Although he was personally unpopular in Scotland, his attitudes to the Scots were very different from those he held regarding the native Irish. To him, the Scots, as doctrinaire Presbyterians, were just misguided Protestants who happened to prefer Charles Stuart (Charles II). His aim was to integrate them into a unified British state.
The invasion of Ireland was mainly revenge for the ‘massacres’ of 1641 and a pre-emptive strike against a perceived threat from a possible invasion of England by the Irish. Of course both of these assumptions were dubious in the extreme. The reports which had reached England during the Irish Rebellion had mostly been invented. Such is the danger of relying on second-hand reports of military attrocities. The possibility that Charles Stuart might use Ireland as the launch pad for an invasion of England was always unlikely, but remember that this was just what his brother would try to do in 1689. The fear that Charles I might link up with the Irish rebels had run deep within England throughout the 1640s.
The general view among modern non-Irish historians is that Cromwell’s conduct during the Irish campaign, with the possible exception of Drogheda, moreorless conformed to contemporary conventions of warfare. All seventeenth-century wars were brutal affairs.
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### Author:  [@Northern\_Piper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Northern_Piper)
#### Post date: [January 5, 2001, 2:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oliver-cromwell/48567/7 "2001-01-05T14:42:48Z")
The first time he was First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill tried to have a destroyer or battleship named after Oliver Cromwell. King George V refused, on good monarchical principles, to have “H.M.S. Oliver Cromwell” on the lists of the Royal Navy.
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### Author:  [@Northern\_Piper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Northern_Piper)
#### Post date: [January 5, 2001, 2:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oliver-cromwell/48567/8 "2001-01-05T14:44:27Z")
> [@](#):
>
> All seventeenth-century wars were brutal affairs.
As opposed to our nice twentieth-century wars?
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### Author:  [@ronan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ronan)
#### Post date: [January 5, 2001, 2:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oliver-cromwell/48567/9 "2001-01-05T14:55:26Z")
Fred and Rossemary West (famous British serial killers) killed and concelled the bodies of their victims in their house on Cromwell street. It is good to see that the brutallity his name brings up still lives on nearly 400 years later.
APB you obviously know your history, but how can any nation not condem a man who systematically tried to wipe out a nation (the Irish) killing women and children, taking the good land off the Irish and forcing them west to the barren land of west Connacht. Hence the quote “to hell or Connacht” because that is the choice he gave.
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### Author:  [@steph](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/steph)
#### Post date: [January 5, 2001, 2:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oliver-cromwell/48567/10 "2001-01-05T14:58:50Z")
APB,
You wouldn’t happen to be a Glasgow Rangers supporter by any chance.
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### Author:  [@APB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/APB)
#### Post date: [January 5, 2001, 3:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oliver-cromwell/48567/11 "2001-01-05T15:20:22Z")
steph. No.
ronan. It is difficult to think of anyone on ‘the mainland’ (outwith the ranks of the supporters of Rangers FC) who is not deeply uncomfortable with the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland. Although never genocide, it was a very bloody war intended to displace most of the native population. The ideals of the seventeenth century are not those of the twentieth. The reason why attitudes to Cromwell are so contradictory is that he is now such an alien figure.
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### Author:  [@ronan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ronan)
#### Post date: [January 5, 2001, 3:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oliver-cromwell/48567/12 "2001-01-05T15:38:16Z")
APB, I’m glad to see that there is at least some people who are “deeply unconfortable” with what Cormwell did. I hope I’m not coming over Anti-English, because I’m not. It just allways annoys me they way certain figures are portrayed throughout history (and the English aren’t the only people to do this). It always strikes me as extremely hypocritical how a nation can portray historical figures of some nations as being monsters while conveniently ignoring past attrocities of their own.
Who was worse Napoleon or Cormwell ?
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### Author:  [@tclouie](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tclouie)
#### Post date: [January 5, 2001, 3:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oliver-cromwell/48567/13 "2001-01-05T15:53:39Z")
Cromwell was worse. I have not heard of Napoleon’s army systematically attacking non-combatants (except maybe in Russia, but they were desperate). Ironically, Napoleon is the one who gets demonized by British historians.
Also, Napoleon left a code of laws which is still used by many countries today.
Cromwell left us Puritan refugees in America, the forerunners of the Moral Majority. Thanks a lot.
The independent Parliament thing? Would have happened anyway. (And Cromwell closed down Parliament, to rule as Lord protector.) Cromwell’s death inspired a Great Literary Period. And the Brits threw out another King fifty years later–the Puritan revolt wasn’t even necessary.
Today the Brits are still stuck with a monarch, who is in no danger of losing her head. Cromwell’s work was all for naught.
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### Author:  [@ronan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ronan)
#### Post date: [January 5, 2001, 3:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oliver-cromwell/48567/14 "2001-01-05T15:58:04Z")
My Point exactly and yet Napoleon was known as the First Anti-Christ, Hitler being No. 2 (I admit he was a lot worse).
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### Author:  [@Northern\_Piper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Northern_Piper)
#### Post date: [January 5, 2001, 5:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oliver-cromwell/48567/15 "2001-01-05T17:02:15Z")
> [@](#):
>
> Today the Brits are still stuck with a monarch, who is in no danger of losing her head. Cromwell’s work was all for naught.
Interstingly, the only part of Cromwell’s body to survive is his head. Charles II had the body exhumed and the head cut off. The body parts got hung up, in the traditional treatment for traitors, but the family managed to keep the head. It’s buried in one of the chapels at Cambridge University, I think.
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### Author:  [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)
#### Post date: [January 5, 2001, 5:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oliver-cromwell/48567/16 "2001-01-05T17:24:33Z")
I have not seen Cromwell hailed as a British hero. Most of the “good” commentary on him is in regards to bureaucratic reforms rather than his actual actions affecting Parliament.
Interestingly, the [Encyclopædia Britannica](http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/0/0,5716,117760+1+109638,00.html?query=cromwell%20oliver) gives him a rather favorable treatment, (especially in the **Assessment** section on [this page](http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/0/0,5716,117760+10+109638,00.html)), to the point of saying something along the lines of “OH, and he had a spot of trouble in Ireland, too.”
Drogheda is generally singled out as his “worst” act (and it “only” had 3,000 victims). This, of course, ignores the disruption of the Irish people as they were forced off their farms and into starvation. His war making was probably no worse than many 17th century generals, but his overall governance of Ireland was very close to genocide.
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### Author:  [@Guinastasia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Guinastasia)
#### Post date: [January 5, 2001, 5:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oliver-cromwell/48567/17 "2001-01-05T17:55:09Z")
I thought it was THOMAS Cromwell who went against the Irish, or am I thinking of something else entirely?
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### Author:  [@MEBuckner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MEBuckner)
#### Post date: [January 5, 2001, 6:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oliver-cromwell/48567/18 "2001-01-05T18:10:13Z")
> [@](#):
>
> They wouldn’t be praying for his soul in any Anglican or Catholic church…maybe in a Presbyterian one…
Actually, your real [hard-core, true-blue, frothing-at-the-mouth Presbyterians](http://www.swrb.com/newslett/actualNLs/crom.htm) loathe Cromwell (who was himself an Independent or Congregationalist):
> [@](#):
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> Cromwell’s wicked, antichristian views regarding toleration and liberty of conscience helped open the floodgates to modern atheistic pluralism (Cromwell being a “theological pluralist,” which is an oxymoron if there ever was one, for pluralism, of whatever form, of necessity assumes more that one truth, and thus is ultimately to deny both God and His Word).
To quote the [_Britannica_](http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/0/0,5716,117760+1,00.html) :
> [@](#):
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> A man of outstanding gifts and a forceful character, he was one of the most remarkable rulers in modern European history, for although a convinced Calvinist, he believed deeply in the value of religious toleration.
Cromwell supported allowing the Jews, who had been barred from the kingdom since 1290, to be re-admitted. IIRC his toleration didn’t extend to Catholics or Presbyterians; I believe those groups were seen as subversive in that they wouldn’t accept the principle of religious liberty for other Christians. Extending them equal rights was seen as giving liberty to people who would only seek to use their own freedoms to destroy the freedom of everyone else. I wouldn’t accept his views on religious freedom if they were being advanced by someone today, but _for his time_, he was a rather progressive figure.
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### Author:  [@Northern\_Piper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Northern_Piper)
#### Post date: [January 5, 2001, 6:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oliver-cromwell/48567/19 "2001-01-05T18:43:51Z")
**Guinastasia** , Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex, was in the previous century. He was one of Henry VIII’s main advisors, after Sir/Saint Thos. More resigned.
Thos. Cromwell was one of the architects of the English Reformation, including the Act of Supremacy. He was also in charge of the visitations of the monasteries, which ultimately led to their dissolutions. His nickname was the “hammer of the monks.” Don’t think he ever had any military service in Ireland. He may have been an ancestor of Oliver, but it’s difficult to be sure.
Leo McKern (better known as Rumpole) played Thos. Cromwell in the movie version of “A Man for All Seasons,” as the unprincipled lawyer tempting Thos. More to support the king. When that failed, Thos. Cromwell ensured More’s downfall.
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### Author:  [@yojimbo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/yojimbo)
#### Post date: [January 5, 2001, 7:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oliver-cromwell/48567/20 "2001-01-05T19:13:02Z")
Another thing that Cromwell did was to reinforce the protestant absentee landlords.
A huge amount of land was taken from catholics and given to Cromwells soldiers. The catholics were sent to Connacht(or killed) where the land was very poor. A lot of the soldiers didn’t stay in Ireland and appointed agents to look after their new property. These agents were not known for their generosity to the Irish. And so it continued for a long time after.
Cromwell is universally hated over here in Ireland and quite rightly so IMO.
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