Oliver Cromwell

Sophie leverages her extensive knowledge of British history in this intriguing expose on Oliver Cromwell - statesman, farmer and, ultimately, Lord Protector.  Fittingly, and in typical fashion, she chooses as her modern subject a highly controversial political and religious leader, who was, and is, both revered and reviled.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Music by Gregor Quendel from Pixabay 

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2599997/episodes/18768959

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Oliver Cromwell and the Conscience That Conquered a Kingdom, a podcast by Sophie Manners. Hello and welcome back. I'm Sophie Manners, Professor of European History at Queen's College, Cambridge, author of biographies of people who changed history, while being absolutely certain God was on their side, which is a quality that appears in this series with a frequency that I find professionally interesting and personally somewhat alarming. Wearer of a scarf that my colleague in the early modern history faculty described this morning as appropriately Puritan in its restraint, which I considered deeply unfair, given that it is a perfectly lovely deep burgundy silk, and today you'll guide through a subject that I approach with a very particular kind of historical vertigo, because today we are staying home. We have visited Macedonia and Alexandria and the Scottish Lowlands and Siberia, and the Dutch East Indies, and Hammondsport, New York. Today we are going approximately sixty miles from where I am sitting. We are going to Huntingdon, in Cambridgeshire, and we are going to spend the next half hour with the most divisive figure in English history, a man about whom the English cannot agree, have never agreed, and who provokes four hundred years after his death, a quality of partisan feeling in British historical discussion that I find both professionally fascinating and socially inconvenient, particularly at faculty dinners. Oliver Cromwell born april twenty fifth, fifteen ninety nine, in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, died september third, sixteen fifty eight, in Whitehall, London. In between a Cambridge education he did not complete, a conversion experience of apparently shattering personal intensity, a career as a minor country gentleman, election to Parliament, command of cavalry in the English Civil War, the decisive victories of Marston Moore and Naisby, the trial and execution of King Charles I, the conquest of Ireland, the conquest of Scotland, the dissolution of Parliament by force, the establishment of the Protectorate, and eleven years as the effective ruler of England, Scotland, and Ireland under a title Lord Protector. That was not king but was, in every practical and many ceremonial respects, indistinguishable from one. He was also, and I want to establish this before we go any further because it matters enormously to everything that follows, a man of genuine, profound, and entirely sincere religious conviction. He was not a hypocrite using religion as political cover. He was not a cynical operator who deployed the language of providence for self-interested ends, or not only that, or not primarily that. He believed with the completeness and the force and the occasional terrifying certainty of someone for whom God was not a concept, but a living presence directing events, that he was an instrument of divine will. He believed that the victories he won in battle were proofs of divine favour. He believed that the political transformations he oversaw were the working out of providence in history. He believed this in the specific, experiential, unmediated way of seventeenth century radical Protestantism, and that belief shaped every decision he made, including the worst ones and including the best ones, and separating the two is one of the central challenges of Cromwellian historiography. He is, I will say it plainly, the most difficult subject I have chosen for this series, not because the history is obscure, it is not obscure, it is extensively documented, but because the history is so contested, so entangled with questions that are still live in British political and cultural life, that achieving the quality of honest reckoning I attempt in these episodes requires me to hold several very uncomfortable things simultaneously. He was a military genius. He was a political visionary of sorts, or at least a political improviser of extraordinary capability. He was also the man who ordered the massacres at Drogoda and Wexford, whose name in Ireland carries a weight of grief and anger that for centuries have not diminished, and who dissolved Parliament when Parliament stopped doing what he wanted it to do, which is precisely the kind of action that Democrats of any era should be slow to celebrate, regardless of the stated justification. I am going to try to hold all of that at once. I cannot promise I will always succeed, but I will try. Let us begin in Huntingdon, which is a pleasant market town in the Cambridgeshire Fens that has, for historical purposes, significantly overperformed its apparent significance. Cromwell was born there in fifteen ninety nine, the son of Robert Cromwell, a minor gentleman farmer, and Elizabeth Steward, whose family had rather more distinguished connections. She was a relation of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's great minister, which gave Oliver a modest but genuine connection to the previous great disruption of English governance and religion. He grew up in comfortable but not grand circumstances. He attended the Huntingdon Free School, where his schoolmaster was Thomas Beard, a Calvinist of fierce conviction who wrote a book called The Theatre of God's Judgments, in which he documented the various horrible fates visited by Providence upon sinners, Catholics, and other categories of the deserving unfortunate. Whether this early education shaped Cromwell's theology or merely confirmed a disposition that was already forming is impossible to say, but Beard's influence on his pupil is the most significant educational relationship in this story. He went up to Sydney Sussex College, Cambridge in 1616, Sydney Sussex being, I should note, a college that was itself founded on Protestant principles, and that maintained and still maintains, a certain vigorous plainness of institutional character, that is entirely consistent with its most famous alumnus. He left Cambridge after a year, following the death of his father, to manage the family estates and support his mother and sisters. He did not take a degree. He was, at this point, nineteen years old, the male head of a modestly landed family with a Cambridge year behind him, and no particular distinction ahead. He married Elizabeth Bourchier in 1620. They appear, by the evidence of his surviving letters, to have had a genuinely affectionate and mutually sustaining marriage across nearly forty years, which is more than could be said for many of the marriages in this series, and which I mention because it is a human fact about him that the historical tradition tends to subordinate to the political and military narrative. In the late 1620s, Cromwell underwent what he described as a conversion experience, a spiritual crisis and resolution that he wrote about with an unusual degree of personal openness for a man of his era and his class. He described himself as having lived before the conversion in darkness, as the chief of sinners, as a man to whom the mercy of God had seemed inaccessible. He described the conversion as sudden illumination, the specific experiential structure of Calvinist conversion, in which the elect soul moves from the despair of damnation to the assurance of grace. The theological content of this experience was standard reformed Protestantism. The intensity of it and the degree to which it reorganized his entire sense of identity and purpose was not standard at all. He emerged from it as someone who knew himself to be chosen. Not chosen for a specific mission yet. The specific mission was still years away, but chosen in the Calvinist sense of the elect, saved, secure in grace, operating within the direct sight of a providential God who managed history and had a role for him in it. This is the foundation of everything. Without understanding the conversion, nothing that follows makes sense, not the cavalry command, not the new model army, not the regicide, not Ireland, not the protectorate. He was a man who believed he was doing God's work, and the terrifying thing about people who believe they are doing God's work is that the belief does not necessarily produce either wisdom or mercy, and in Cromwell's case it produced both at intervals, and their absence at other intervals, and the combination is what makes him so persistently unresolvable. He was elected to Parliament for Huntingdon in sixteen twenty eight, briefly, and then for Cambridge in sixteen forty. The Long Parliament, the Parliament that would govern England through the Civil War, and that he would eventually dissolve at Sword Point. He was, in the early sixteen forties, not a prominent figure. He spoke occasionally, was known as a man of intense religious conviction, and as an advocate for godly Puritans in his constituency, but was not in the first rank of parliamentary leadership. John Pym was the dominant parliamentary figure. Oliver Cromwell was a backbencher from Huntingdon. War changed that, as it has changed a great many people in this series and in history generally. The English Civil War, the war between Parliament and the Crown that began in sixteen forty two, the product of a constitutional, religious and fiscal crisis that had been building for decades under the early Stuarts, found in Oliver Cromwell a man whose gifts were precisely those the moment required. He was forty three years old when the war began. He had no military training, no military experience, no inherited martial culture. What he had was an exceptional ability to identify and recruit capable men, regardless of social rank. He famously said that he would rather have a plain russet coated captain who knows what he fights for and loves what he knows than what you call a gentleman and is nothing else. And an instinctive tactical intelligence that he appears to have developed from first principles with a speed that his more conventionally trained opponents consistently underestimated. His cavalry, the Ironsides, as Prince Rupert's men name them, intending insult and producing a compliment, were different from any cavalry that had previously fought in England. They were motivated by religious conviction as much as military discipline. They were trained to charge, to break enemy formations, and critically, distinctively, to remain under control after the charge, to regroup rather than dispersing in pursuit, which was the habitual failing of cavalry in the period, and which had lost more than one battle for forces whose horses outrode their discipline. Cromwell's cavalry won their engagements and then turned to assist the infantry rather than disappearing over the horizon after fleeing enemies. This was not a small tactical innovation. It was the decisive one. At Marston Moor in 1644, the largest battle ever fought on English soil, approximately forty five thousand men engaged. Cromwell's cavalry was the decisive factor in a parliamentary victory that effectively ended Royalist power in the north of England. At Naesby in 1645, commanding the left wing of the new model army, the reorganised parliamentary force, of which he was effectively the architect alongside Thomas Fairfax. His cavalry again broke the Royalist horse and turned to destroy the Royalist infantry, ending the First Civil War. I want to pause here and say something about Cromwell as a military commander, because I think it illuminates something important about the kind of intelligence he possessed. He was not a theoretician of warfare. He did not write treatises, did not study Caesar and Vegetius, and the classical tradition of military writing that educated gentlemen studied. He learned by doing at an age when most soldiers have long since formed their habits and either succeed or fail with the habits they have. He was adaptable in a way that his opponents were not, flexible, responsive to specific ground and specific circumstances, and not committed to a predetermined system. And he was possessed of what I can only call the ability to be cold when cold was required, and to understand, in the midst of chaos, what the chaos required next. This is a very specific and very rare quality, and it is the quality that turns capable soldiers into great ones. After Naceby, the First Civil War was effectively over. Charles I was captured, then handed to Parliament by the Scots who had been holding him. And here begins the most controversial chapter of Cromwell's life, and the one that requires the most careful handling. The trial and execution of Charles I, in January 1649, was the most constitutionally audacious act in English history. It was not inevitable. Most of the parliamentary leadership, most of the senior army officers, most of the country wanted a negotiated settlement that would limit royal power without removing the king. What they could not agree on was what that settlement should look like, and Charles I, who was a man of genuine personal courage and genuine political inflexibility, a combination that tends toward martyrdom in the circumstances he occupied, declined repeatedly to accept the constraints that would have permitted a settlement, believing with apparent sincerity, that to do so would be to betray his god given royal authority. Cromwell did not begin as a regicide. He spent months attempting to negotiate a settlement with the king. He was, the evidence suggests, genuinely uncertain about whether the execution was the right course. What appears to have resolved his uncertainty was the Second Civil War, Charles' alliance with Scottish Royalists in 1648, which Cromwell took as evidence that the king was a man of blood, who could not be trusted, and with whom no lasting settlement was possible, and that Providence, having delivered victory to Parliament twice, was indicating that more decisive action was required. The regicide was, for Cromwell, not primarily a political calculation. It was a theological conclusion. He signed the death warrant, he was the third signatory, he was not coerced, he was not reluctant at the moment of signing. The killing of the king was, he believed, the will of God, and he acted accordingly. The Commonwealth that followed was the first republic in English history, and it governed a nation that had not asked for a republic, that was deeply uncertain about what it had done in killing its king, and that was surrounded by hostile European monarchies who viewed the English experiment with a combination of horror and cautious interest. Cromwell's role in the Commonwealth was significant but not initially dominant. He remained primarily a military commander. And then Ireland. The Irish campaign of sixteen forty nine to sixteen fifty is the entry in Cromwell's account that no honest historian can minimise, and I will not minimise it. The Confederate Ireland of the sixteen forties had been in a complex and violent internal conflict involving Irish Catholics, Ulster Scots Presbyterians, and various royalist and parliamentary factions, in which atrocities had been committed by multiple parties, the massacres of Protestant settlers in the Ulster Rebellion of sixteen forty one, in which perhaps four thousand settlers were killed, and the legend of which was politically inflated in England to a much higher figure, had created a climate of fear, anger, and demand for revenge in English parliamentary circles that preceded Cromwell's arrival. He arrived in Ireland in August 1649 with a parliamentary army of approximately twelve thousand men, and moved immediately against the Royalist and Confederate Catholic garrisons. At Drogoda in September 1649, following the town's refusal to surrender and a successful storm of its walls, he ordered the killing of the garrison, approximately 2,500 soldiers, and a number of civilians, clergy, and priests. At Wexford in October, a similar massacre occurred, though in that case it appears to have developed somewhat outside Cromwell's direct orders during the chaos of the assault. The massacres at Drogoda and Wexford were not unique events in the context of seventeenth century siege warfare. The rules of war of the period held that a garrison that refused surrender terms and was subsequently taken by storm could be put to the sword. This was legally and by the military conventions of the era within the accepted rules of conflict. Cromwell himself justified Drogoda on exactly these grounds, as a legitimate military action designed to reduce further bloodshed by demonstrating the cost of resistance. He also, in his letters, described it in terms that invoke providence. The massacre was God's judgment on a Catholic royalist garrison. All of this is historically accurate, and none of it is sufficient to account for what happened, or to explain why Drogoda and Wexford remained. Remain four centuries later, the names most associated with Cromwell in Ireland above all others. The Cromwellian conquest of Ireland that followed killed through war, famine, and displacement an estimated fifteen to forty per cent of Ireland's pre-war population. The Cromwellian land settlement that followed the conquest dispossessed the Catholic Irish landowning class almost entirely, transferring vast estates to English Protestant settlers and soldiers in lieu of pay. The consequences of that settlement, in terms of land ownership, religious discrimination, colonial governance, and the embedded grievances that would generate centuries of conflict extend to living memory, and in some respects to the present. This is Cromwell's Island, it is not separate from his other achievements. It is part of the same man, the same conviction, the same belief that he was doing God's work, and the fact that he was doing it efficiently, that the military campaign was well organised, that his administrative follow through was thorough. None of that makes it better. It makes it worse in the way that systematic violence is always worse than chaotic violence, because it reflects choices rather than losses of control. Scotland followed. Cromwell defeated the Scottish army at Dunbar in sixteen fifty in another display of tactical brilliance that is still studied by military historians, and at Worcester in 1651, the battle he called his crowning mercy, he effectively ended Scottish military resistance and brought Scotland under Commonwealth control. The constitutional history of the Interregnum, the years between the execution of Charles I in 1649 and the restoration of Charles II in 1660 is a sequence of increasingly frustrated attempts to find a stable governmental form for England without a king. The Rump Parliament, the nominated assembly or bare bones parliament, the first protectorate parliament, the second protectorate parliament, each represented a different attempt to solve the same problem, which was how to create a legitimate governing authority for a country whose constitutional tradition was entirely organised around the monarchy, and whose people, taken as a whole, remained more conservative in their religious and political instincts than the army officers who had fought the Civil War on Parliament's behalf. Cromwell dissolved the Rump Parliament in April sixteen fifty three in one of the most dramatic scenes in English parliamentary history. He entered the house with a company of musketeers, addressed the assembled MPS with increasing anger, calling them drunkards, corrupt men, servants of mammon, and finally pointing to the mace, the symbol of parliamentary authority, said Take away that fool's bauble and had the soldiers clear the chamber. He was at that moment a military dictator who had dissolved by force the representative body of the nation he had claimed to be fighting to restore to its rights. The contradiction between his stated principles and his actions at that moment is not subtle and is not available for minimization. He was offered the crown in sixteen fifty seven by a parliament that had concluded that the only way to create constitutional stability was to put him in the role that the constitutional tradition recognized. He declined it after weeks of agonized consideration. Declined it, his letters suggest, primarily because he could not reconcile acceptance with his theological understanding of what Providence was doing. He did not believe God had called him to be a king. He had called him to be something else, something without a name yet, something that the old categories of governance could not contain. He died on september third, sixteen fifty eight, the anniversary of Dunbar and Worcester, the two great military victories that he regarded as the most signaled proofs of divine favour he had received. Whether the date was coincidence or something more, his health had been declining through the summer, and he may have been more ill than those around him knew. The timing has the quality of Cromwellian legend, which is to say, too perfect to be invented, too convenient to be entirely trusted. He died of what appears to have been a combination of malaria, recurrent since his Irish campaign, and a urinary tract infection that developed into septicemia. He was fifty nine years old. He was not replaced by a constitutional settlement that worked. His son Richard succeeded as Lord Protector, lasted eight months, and resigned. Within two years Charles II was restored to the throne, the interregnum was officially treated as though it had not happened, and the greatest constitutional revolution in English history was buried under the relief of a country that wanted its king back, and was prepared to pretend officially that the preceding eleven years had been an embarrassing anomaly rather than a transformation. Cromwell was buried in Westminster Abbey with royal ceremony. Two years later, following the restoration, his body was exhumed, subjected to a posthumous attainder, hanged in its shroud at Tyburn, beheaded, and his head placed on a pole above Westminster Hall, where it remained for twenty years before being blown down in a storm. It passed through various hands and various indignities for the next two and a half centuries. It is a measure of Cromwell's effect on English imagination that his head was treated as a relic or a trophy, depending on the possessor's politics, and was finally interred at Sydney Sussex College, Cambridge, in nineteen sixty. His head is thirty two miles from where I am sitting. I find this fact every time I encounter it, somehow both absurd and entirely appropriate. Now the T's picture someone of deep personal conviction, a conviction so total and so organizing of the self that it functions less as a belief held and more as an identity inhabited. Someone for whom the question of what is right is not primarily philosophical but experiential, who feels the answer rather than reasons to it, and who is therefore resistant to the kind of argument that addresses the reasoning rather than the feeling. Picture someone who rose to power and prominence not through hereditary position or institutional appointment, but through demonstrated effectiveness in a crisis, someone whose authority was earned rather than inherited, whose legitimacy derived from performance rather than position, and who therefore had a somewhat complicated relationship to the institutional forms through which conventional authority was expressed. Picture someone whose genuine achievements were extraordinary and whose genuine failures were also extraordinary, and who was unable, perhaps incapable of fully acknowledging the failures, because the framework of conviction through which they viewed their own actions consistently reclassified the failures as necessary steps in a larger plan that only they could fully perceive. Picture someone who had an exceptionally complicated relationship with representative institutions, who genuinely believed in the principle of governance by consent, who genuinely wanted a parliamentary basis for the authority they exercised, and who repeatedly found that the parliament available to them was not the parliament they needed, and who acted accordingly in ways that were constitutionally alarming. Picture someone who was simultaneously a revolutionary, someone who made things that had never existed before, and a conservative, someone who justified the revolution in terms of restoring something ancient and legitimate that had been corrupted, someone whose radicalism was always dressed in the language of tradition, whose innovations were always framed as recovery. Picture someone whose legacy is the most contested in the history of their country, someone who is claimed by incompatible political traditions, whose portrait hangs in places where it is meant as honour, and in places where it is meant as warning, whose name is used to mean entirely different things by people who are each in their own terms correct. Picture someone who, when the institutional form available to them proved inadequate to the demands of their vision, was willing to set it aside and replace it with something that had no precedent and no clear legal basis, because the vision was more important than the procedure, because Providence required it, because they were the instrument of something larger than any institution could contain. Who is this? It is Ayatollah Ruhollo Komeni. I will give you a moment I am watching from here the faces of people who are either nodding slowly or deeply troubled, and both reactions reflect an engagement with the comparison that I find more interesting than either easy agreement or easy rejection. Let me build the case carefully because this is the comparison in this series that requires the most careful building. Ruhollo Mostafavi Musavi Kumani was born on September 24th, 1902, in Khomein, a small town in central Iran, the son of a local religious scholar who was murdered when Ruholla was five months old. He was raised by his mother and an older sister, both of whom died when he was relatively young. He was educated in the traditional Islamic scholarly system, the Hausa, studying in Arak and then in Qom, which was and remains the centre of Shia Islamic scholarship in Iran. He became a marja, a source of emulation, a senior religious authority, and a teacher of Islamic philosophy and jurisprudence of considerable reputation. He was not, for most of his adult life, primarily a political figure. He was a religious scholar and teacher. His political engagement intensified in the 1960s in response to the Shah's White Revolution, a programme of land reform, women's suffrage, and other modernizing measures that Khomeini regarded as an assault on Islamic values and on the position of the clergy. He was arrested, exiled, and spent the next fifteen years in Turkey, Iraq, and finally France, continuing to teach, to write, and crucially to record cassette tapes of his sermons and lectures that were smuggled into Iran and distributed throughout the country with a reach that the Shah's security apparatus consistently failed to suppress. The Islamic Revolution of 1978 to 1979 brought Khomeini back to Iran in February 1979 after the Shah had fled. He returned to a reception of approximately five million people lining the route from the airport to Tehran. He established the Islamic Republic, introducing the concept of Vilayat Eifaki, the guardianship of the Islamic jurist as the governing principle, the idea that in the absence of the hidden Imam, authority should be exercised by the most qualified Islamic scholar. Who would govern in accordance with Islamic law until the Imam's return? He became supreme leader. He held that position until his death in june nineteen eighty nine. The parallels with Cromwell are structural and deep, and they are also at points, precise enough to be striking. First, the foundational conviction Cromwell's Calvinist assurance of election, the certainty of divine chosenness, and Comaney's sheer scholarly authority and personal conviction that he was implementing God's will in history are not the same theology, but they are the same psychological and political structure. Both men were animated by a conviction that was not primarily rational but experiential, that was resistant to external argument because it was grounded in internal certainty, and that provided the energy and the ruthlessness and the absolute quality of commitment that their respective projects required. Second, the rise through crisis. Cromwell was an obscure backbencher until the Civil War revealed his military and political gifts. Khomeini was a respected but not uniquely prominent religious scholar until the Shah's modernizing programme and the revolutionary crisis of the nineteen seventies created the conditions in which his specific gifts, his rhetorical power, his absolute refusal of compromise, his capacity to project certainty in circumstances that destroyed the certainty of others became precisely what the moment required. Third, the complicated relationship with representative institutions. Cromwell believed in parliamentary governance and dissolved parliaments that did not govern as he required. Khomeini established a constitution for the Islamic Republic that included an elected parliament and an elected president, and the supreme leader has consistently maintained authority over both, intervening when elected bodies produced results that conflict with the requirements of Vila Tefa. Both men created institutional structures that formally included representative elements while maintaining personal authority that superseded them. Fourth, the violence that the conviction required. Cromwell's Ireland is Cromwell's Ireland. Khomeini's regime executed political opponents, monarchists, communists, liberals, members of opposition groups, at a rate that international human rights organizations documented extensively and approved the mass execution of political prisoners in 1988 that killed thousands of people, the exact number still disputed, and still the subject of active suppression in Iran. Both men were capable of authorizing violence against people they regarded as enemies of God's work, and of regarding that violence as justified by the larger purpose. Both described what they did in the language of necessity and providence, or its Islamic equivalent. Fifth, the contested and durable legacy. Cromwell's legacy in England has been contested for four hundred years and remains so. His head spent twenty years on a pole and three hundred years being passed from hand to hand, and was finally buried in the college, where he briefly studied. The Islamic Republic that Khomeini founded is forty-five years after the revolution, still governing Iran, still contested internally by reformists and conservatives, and by a population whose relationship to the revolutionary principles is complex and generationally divided, and still generating in the wider world. A quality of strong partisan feeling that defies simple assessment. Both men built things that outlasted them. Both things are still being argued about. Sixth, the question of what they replaced and what they created. Cromwell replaced monarchy with a republic that couldn't sustain itself and eventually produced a restored monarchy. Komaini replaced a monarchy with a theocracy that has sustained itself for over four decades. In terms of the durability of what was created, Kamay's institutional legacy has proved more durable than Cromwell's. Whether it has proved more just is a question I leave to those with stronger opinions about the relative merits of theocratic governance and early modern Republican experiment. Where do the parallels strain? Cromwell did not found a dynasty or create an institution that claimed his specific authority as heritable. The protectorate was personal to him. Richard Cromwell's failure demonstrated that it could not survive without him, and was never intended to be a permanent form of government in the way that the Islamic Republic was. Khomeini created an institution designed to outlast him, and it has. The religious traditions are not equivalent in ways that matter. Calvinist Protestantism in seventeenth century England was one tradition competing within a broader Protestant settlement. Shia Islam in Iran was and is the majority tradition of the majority population, and the claim of the Fuq to govern in accordance with it has a different relationship to democratic legitimacy than Cromwell's claim to govern in accordance with the will of godly Puritans who were a minority in their own country. And Cromwell's England at its most repressive, the major generals, the restrictions on theatre and festivals, the decimation tax on royalists was not the same order of repression as the Islamic Republic's treatment of political opponents, religious minorities, women's rights, and the press. The English were bored and briefly censored. The comparison requires precision about the differences in scale and kind. The verdict Cromwell and I reach this verdict through a different route than any previous episode in this series. Not because Cromwell was more admirable than Kamey, the honest answer is that neither is straightforwardly admirable, and I think the comparison is more useful precisely because both figures force us to think about what we mean by admirable in contexts where conviction and violence are inseparable. Not because Cromwell was more historically consequential. Khomeini's revolution reshaped the Middle East, and its consequences are still unfolding. But because Cromwell's story contains a specific and peculiar English quality that I find, as an English historian, more illuminating of something I actually Actually, I need to understand about my own country and my own tradition. He is the moment at which England confronted the question of what legitimate authority means when the traditional form of that authority has failed, when the king betrays his covenant with his people, when the institutions of governance no longer serve their purpose, when the God sanctioned order reveals itself as a protection racket for an indefensible status quo. And England answered that question badly and brilliantly and with enormous violence, and with the complete constitutional inability to sustain the answer, and then pretended the answer had never been given, and put the king's son back on the throne, and carried the unresolved question forward into the glorious revolution of sixteen eighty eight and the constitutional settlement that has shaped British politics ever since. Cromwell is the hinge on which that story turns. He is the man who did the thing that England needed to do and could not admit it had done. He is in some deep and persistently uncomfortable sense the answer to a question that the English have been trying to unask for four hundred years. I grew up in Kingston upon Thames. Charles I reviewed his army at Kingston in sixteen forty seven. The market cross in the town centre is the one under which the town council swore loyalty to the Commonwealth after the regicide. Oliver Cromwell is, in a sense I did not fully appreciate, until I started reading him seriously, local history. He is thirty two miles away and four centuries back, and he is not finished with us yet. He was not a saint, he was not a monster, though there are communities in Ireland for whom that characterization is not merely metaphorical, and whose position I respect and do not contest. He was a man of his time and also a man who broke his time, who shattered the political and constitutional framework within which he had been formed, and tried to build something new from the pieces, and who found, as everyone who does this finds, that the new thing required the ruthlessness of the revolutionary and the patience of the statesman, and that he had the first in abundance and the second only intermittently. He asked with genuine anguish, it is in his letters, unmistakably, whether it is possible to govern a nation justly in circumstances of crisis, an urgent necessity. He did not answer it satisfactorily. No one has entirely. The question is still open. That is why he is still interesting. Oliver Cromwell, born Huntingdon, fifteen ninety nine, died Whitehall, sixteen fifty eight, soldier, regicide, Lord Protector of England, Scotland, and Ireland. The man who asked whether a nation could govern itself without a king, in a voice loud enough to change history, and died before finding out the answer. His head is in a box in Cambridge. Make of that what you will. Thank you for being here. John Morrill's work on Cromwell is the best scholarly starting point, and Blair Worden's essays on the Cromwellian Protectorate are beautifully written and scrupulously honest about the difficulty of the subject. Both are available to anyone with a university library card, and I recommend them without reservation. Good night.