He’s generally viewed in the U.K. as a misery guts, so not really a heroic figure to be emulated.
And the body count from the Civil Wars was very, very heavy.
Which is a BAD thing.
But that said, as it happened hundreds of years ago, no one here holds strong opinions on him one way or another.
Mind you though long dead, the Irish hate his guts, and I don’t blame them.
Yes, and he was the person with the vote. He forcibly dissolved the Rump Parliament, personally selected the members of the Barebones Parliament, dismissed the First Protectorate Parliament because it wasn’t an instrument of his will, and then barred 100 elected members of the Second Protectorate Parliament (in which election Royalists and Catholics were barred from voting) because they were not God-fearing enough.
Democracy, my ass.
Look up “Qin Shi Huang” (their spelling, same guy) on Wikipedia sometime if you want to see examples of someone who is still loved by some yet unambiguously a bad person. But he unified China! And killed millions And helped build the Great Wall! And burned books and killed scholars whom he didn’t like And he had a cool tomb!
Cromwell also made sure to crush and oppress the Presbyterian Covenanters, as well, after initial alliances. To be fair, I don’t think they were betrayed.
I would think he’d be less popular in Scotland. And it’s not just because of high Irish ancestry, although that’ can’t help his cause.
[hijack]The older I get, the more obvious it becomes to me that his tomb will not be properly excavated in my lifetime. That disappoints me. It’s fascinating.[/hijack]
Actually, I have no idea how it was pronounced in his day, or by Cromwell himself. I was giving my guide’s pronunciation.
By the way, gleaning pronunciation from contemporary rhymes is not a sure way to determine pronunciation. People are perfectly willing to bend the pronunciation in pursuit of a good rhyme or pun. In the preface to The Annotated Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Martin Gardner gives three examples of such contemporary rhymes to show the reader how Samuel Taylor Coleridge pronounced his last name. The three rhymes give three different pronunciations.
Well, English pronunciation of surnames is idiosyncratic ( vide: sinjin for St. John ), and crummle appears to have been what most people would have said then.
With 2 caveats:
Regional differences in pronouncing the same name would have been even more prominent in the unavoidable lack of broadcast mass media.
As a child I was taught that Stuart Court sounded like 20th century Westcountry ( Devonshire & Cornwall with an excursion into Pirate ); others then said it sounded like early 20th century Cockney pronounced in a French accent; others then said it sounded more like Low Scots, with the influx of Jamie I & VI’s entourage.
I stopped believing historical phoneticists.
That is hardly Cromwell’s fault. He had no hand in starting the Civil War. He ended it fairly effectively. Very likely, without him more would have died.
The Irish (well, the republican/Catholic Irish - I think the Northern Ireland Protestant Loyalists might have a different opinion) hate him with good reason, but what he did in Ireland was really only a small part of what he did,and the British, rightly, do not judge him mainly on that. But his legacy in Britain is complex and opinions (amongst those who know and care about history and the fundamentals of politics) may vary quite widely according to present day people’s politics. The political right don’t like him for being complicit in overthrowing and killing the king; the radical left don’t like him for suppressing the more radical factions on the parliamentarian side, such as the Levelers and the Diggers. Nobody much today likes his stern puritanism (although it probably contributed a lot to his popularity and success at the time). I don’t think he is an unequivocal hero to many people today, but (apart from the Irish, or a few nutty unreconstructed Royalists) I don’t think many British people see him as villain either.
Perhaps it was best summed up by 1066 and all that: “Right but revolting.” He was on the right side, and (the Irish campaign aside, perhaps) mostly did the right things, and for the right reasons. He was honest and never corrupt. But he was also very ruthless in pursuit of what he thought was right, and inflexible on religious matters (although that may in part be because he had to keep the lid on far more radical religious elements in the Roundhead army). He is not an easy figure to love, but I think he deserves, and probably gets, a certain amount of admiration.
::Head explodes::
I’m sure that you could look at any leader from Genghis Khan to Mao to Stalin and find a few things they did right, and a few people who admire them for it. You could even approach the Nazis and say “well except for that whole extermination thing. . .”
It’s a little more leeway than I’m willing to give, is what I’m trying to say here.
Hardly. You should look up the Thirty Years War some time. It’s largely one list of massacres after another. Drogheda stands out not because it was an aberration for the time (the rules of war said that if a garrison was outnumbered and refused a surrender, upon victory, the garrison would be slaughtered and the town sacked), but because it was an aberration for the New Model Army.
And really, if you’re going to condemn the New Model Army for a sacking in the Ireland campaign, you should focus on Wexford, not Drogheda. It had more total casualties (2000 soldiers, 1000-1500 civilians, vs Drogheda’s 2500 soldiers, 300 civilians), and it happened in the middle of surrender negotiations.
Also, 40% is a little high for Ireland’s population loss. Most estimates put it at 15-25%.
Well maybe Cromwell was more in line with Napoleon, Peter the Great, and
Frederick the Great. The movie Cromwell I remember was played by Richard Harris.