cromwell essay

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Was Oliver Cromwell a hero or a villain? Its answer is really hard to clarify even for some scholars who have had dissimilar opinions about it and have been arguing about him for centuries. Cromwell has became seen as a devil incarnate, duelled fanatic, hero and man of God. For some historians such as Thomas Carlyle and Samuel Rawson Gardiner, Oliver Cromwell was a hero of liberty while to some others such as David Hume and Christopher Hill he was a regicidal dictator. But, the controversial vision about this figure is still present in our decade. In 2002, the BBC carried out a poll in Britain in which he was elected as one of the Top 10 Britons of all time. But, who is right? What is a reasonable evaluation of Cromwell today?

Oliver Cromwell was born on the 25th of April 1599, in Huntingdon near Cambridge. His family was constituted by his mother Elizabeth Steward and his father Robert who descended from Catherine Cromwell, one of Tudor statesman Thomas Cromwell’s sister. Thomas Cromwell thus was Oliver’s great-great-great-uncle. At Oliver Cromwell’s birth, the social status of his family was quite low having in account that it belonged the gentry’s class. So, the inheritance of Robert was restricted to a house at Huntingdon and a small land. Oliver Cromwell went to school at Huntingdon Grammar, which is now the Cromwell Museum, and later studied at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge that he left in June 1617 without taking a degree. That happened immediately after the death of his father. After that moment in his life, Cromwell lived in London the next few years. He was more likely to return to Huntingdon because of his widow mother and his seven unmarried sisters; so, he was needed at home to help the family. Being returned to his small state, he farmed a land where his reputation made him well known as a champion of the poor. In spite of the impoverished conditions in which Cromwell was, many circumstances took place to interact with some powerful and influential people belonged to the court. The reason was he frequently entertained royalty and court officials in his grandfather’s house located outside Huntingdon. Besides that, he got contact with merchants and Puritan figures in London thanks his father in low, Sir James Bourchier. The hard situations in Cromwell’s life provoked him periods of deep depression and spiritual torment. The existence of a letter written in 1626 to an Arminian minister called Henry Downhall evidences in his discourse an important influence from radical Puritanism. Also, between 1620’s and 1630’s Cromwell went through a period in which he lived a personal crisis and a mental breakdown. At that point, he underwent a powerful religious conversion that triggered a feeling of being certain about himself as an instrument of God and waiting for a mission. In 1930, Cromwell was called before the Privy Council. The reason was he was caught up after being found in a fight among the gentry of Huntingdon over a new charter for the town. The following year, he sold some properties in Huntingdon and moved to St Ives, probably as a result of his dispute. This decision meant go down in the society’s scale belonging to a very different position to the one he had had previously. This fact, affected him spiritually and emotionally in some measure. Later in 1638, Cromwell wrote a letter to his cousin which denotes a deep change in a spiritual level. He related how being “the chief of sinners” he became one of the members of “the congregation of the firstborn”. This is the basement of his beliefs about the Reformation, his perception of England as a place of sins and the Catholic doctrine needed to be removed from the church. Around 1636, Cromwell’s destiny led another path. His income seemed to rise caused by inherited properties from his uncle and mother’s side; so, he retrieved his social range. On the other hand, the political context was that England had ruled for eleven years by Charles I, who pursued
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