Born at almost the end of the 16th Century, Oliver Cromwell would grow to become one of the most important figures of the following century. He was born to a family of the gentry, and lived the first four decades of his life as a gentleman farmer. Had not two changes occurred in his life – an inheritance from an uncle that made him richer, and a conversion to a more Puritan faith.
With these behind him, Cromwell would become first the Member of Parliament for Huntingdon, and rise through the ranks to become Lord-Protector of England by the time of his death. He would also, by this point, by a recigide who had led a civil war against his rightful king, and responsible for an invasion of Ireland that killed thousands, many of them civilians – even today, he is still hated on many parts of Ireland.
The Battle of Marston Moor, which is located near York in northern England, was a decisive engagement in the English Civil War. The Royalist side was soundly defeated by a combined force of Scots Covenanters and Parliamentarians. It was a serious blow to the Royalist side, which more or less abandoned the northern part of the country thereafter.
Oliver Cromwell, at the time little-known, distinguished himself in this battle. He commanded the Ironsides Cavalry, and his leadership and the discipline of his troops were both acknowledged as key factors in the victory. From here, Cromwell’s star would only rise.
Cromwell and Fairfax had recruited their New Model Army in the early months of 1645, taking advantage of King Charles I’s hesitation in attacking them to consolidate and train.
At Naseby, on June 14, 1645, the decisive battle of the English Civil War was fought. The Parliamentarian forces, under Cromwell, outnumbered the Royalists by almost two to one, and also commanded a stronger position. As the battle drew on, many of the Royalist soldiers surrendered, while other withdrew in disarray. The King, soundly defeated, fled to Scotland.
There were those who never expected Charles to live to adulthood, let alone become king. The second son of James VI of Scotland, he was judged too fragile and sickly to travel to London with his family when James became King of England. And his older brother Henry was heir ahead of him.
But Henry died of diptheria when he was 18, and Charles, two weeks short of his 12th birthday, became the heir to the throne. Charles was 25 when he himself became King of England and Scotland, and few would have predicted that his reign would have the results it did – neither Cromwell’s uprising nor Charles’ later (posthumous) canonisation seemed very likely in 1625.
At the direction of Cromwell, Colonel Thomas Pride took elements of their forces – his own Regiment of Foot and Nathaniel Rich’s Regiment of Horse – and they moved to control access to the Houses of Parliament. As the Members arrived, they were checked off against a list that Pride had been issued by Lord Grey of Groby. Continue reading 1648 – Colonel Pride purges the Houses of Parliament
The Rump Parliament was what remained of the British Parliament after Colonel Pride had purged it a month earlier, leaving only those parliamentarians who supported the army.
On January 6, 1649, the Parliament appointed a total of 135 men to constitute a High Court for the trial of King Charles I for tyranny. A quorum was declated to be twenty of these appointees.
The trial of Charles I commenced shortly thereafter, and duly returned the guilty verdict it was intended to.
The initial stages of Cromwell’s invasion of Ireland started well for him. His forces triumphed over the Royalist and Irish forces at the battle of Rathmines on August 2, 1649, and Cromwell himself landed in Dublin on August 15, with a fleet of 35 ships. 77 more ships, also loaded with troops and materiel, landed two days later, reinforcing the already substantial forces of Cromwell.
His conquest of Ireland was bloody and brutal. Cromwell’s religious tolerance did not extend to Catholics, whose numbers included the over-whelming majority of the Irish. Cromwell’s invasion marked the beginning of more than three and half centuries of oppression of the Irish Catholic majority by their Protestant British conquerors, ending only in 1922 when the independent Repblic of Eire was formed – and arguably not even then, considering the endless fighting between Protestant and Catholic in Northern Ireland even today.
Another thing that continues to the current day is the upopularity of Oliver Cromwell in Ireland, for understandable reasons.
Hated by the Irish for his invasion the previous decade, Oliver Cromwell’s manner of death must have given them some satisfaction. He died from a malarial fever contracted during the invasion (and complicated by what appears to have been kidney stones).
Cromwell had come far and acheived much in his 59 years, but little that he had built long-survived him. His son Richard, who succeeded him as Lord Protector, resigned from that role due to a lack of political support less than a year later, and King Charles II was invited back to England to reinstate the monarchy the year after that.
In 1661, on the anniversary of King Charles I’s execution, Cromwell’s corpse was exhumed, and a symbolic posthumous beheading was carried out. His severed head would be a collector’s item for some years thereafter, before being reburied in 1960.
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