Still as divisive as ever

PROFILE OLIVER CROMWELL:For many, he is the personification of English opression, for others a revolutionary leader of democracy - but the brief nine months that Oliver Cromwell spent in Ireland continue to define his unapologetic legacy

IN ONE OF THE first biographies of Oliver Cromwell, written shortly after his death in 1658, Richard Flecknoe concluded "that a greater and more excellent personage had nowhere been produced by this latter age, nor perhaps (in our Nation) by any former ones".

Less than three years later, on January 26th, 1661, the embalmed body of this excellent personage was pulled from its grand tomb in Westminster Abbey, while the workmen charged onlookers sixpence a head to see the infamous corpse. It was dragged to Tyburn, hanged on the gallows from nine in the morning until six that evening, then hauled down and decapitated. The head was stolen as a souvenir, the body thrown into the common pit for executed criminals.

This was the first time that the corpse of the man who dominated Britain and Ireland in the 1640s and 1650s was exhumed, but certainly not the last. The latest disinterring is the compelling two-part RTÉ series on Cromwell's catastrophic campaign in Ireland, God's Executioner, and it has already provoked passionate debates on the airwaves. If it seems strange that the Irish are still trying to get to grips with Cromwell on the 350th anniversary of his death, it is well to remember that his native land has never been quite sure what to make of him either.

The busy London traffic at Marble Arch now passes over the ignominious pit that contains his bones, but his statue keeps a lone guard outside the houses of parliament at Westminster. His demand that the painter Peter Lely depict him "warts and all" in an official portrait makes him the epitome of the plain, honest Englishman. But in the 1960s, a proposal by the Labour government to put that same homely face on a postage stamp was reportedly vetoed by the Queen.

Even the statue of him at Westminster tells its own story: a proposal to pay for it from public funds was withdrawn from parliament in 1902, after opposition from conservative and Irish MPs, and it had to be paid for by private donations. "There are," writes the historian Peter Gaunt, "so many uncertainties and inconsistencies in Cromwell's career that almost any event and action can be read in a good or bad light."

This ambivalence reflects the profound ambiguity of Cromwell himself. On the one hand, he was the champion of parliamentary rights against the authority of kings, and therefore an important harbinger of democracy. On the other, he crushed dissent in England and took imperial ruthlessness to new heights in Ireland.

On the one hand, he was known to those who followed him as a man of "wonderful civility, generosity and bounty". On the other, his report to parliament on the massacre he ordered after the storming of Drogheda in September 1649 is full of murderous triumphalism: "I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches".

His great appeal for openness of thought, uttered before the general assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1650, echoes through the ages: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken." Yet, especially in Ireland, the possibility that he might be mistaken seems to have been very far indeed from Cromwell's own thoughts.

Some of this ambivalence is rooted in Cromwell's life before he became famous. When he was born in April 1599 in Huntington, Cambridgeshire, Elizabeth I was on the throne and an English monarchical culture was at its height. Shakespeare was flourishing; the Spanish armada had been seen off; the Protestant succession was apparently well established and the threat of internal English revolts was arguably more distant than it had been for centuries. England was certainly not without religious and social tensions, but its ruling class, and the privileged caste that surrounded it, seemed secure.

Cromwell was very much a part of this world. His father was the younger son of Sir Henry Cromwell, who gloried in the title of the golden knight of Hinchingbrooke. Protestantism sat easily: one of his ancestors was a minister of Henry VIII (currently being portrayed in The Tudors), Thomas Cromwell, architect of the English reformation. On both sides of his family, the ancestral fortune was founded on the dispossession of the monasteries. Cromwell was connected to some of the most powerful families in England. When first elected to the House of Commons that sat briefly in 1628, he would find nine cousins already there.

But Cromwell's branch of the family was in decline. Much of its money had been squandered, leaving the young Oliver in the socially ambiguous position of borderline gentility.

He was, in the words of his biographer Christopher Hill, "a rough, boisterous, practical-joking boy". But he was schooled by a Puritan minister, Thomas Beard, whose writings, according to Hill, picture "the whole of existence as a struggle between God and the powers of darkness, in which the elect fight for God and are certain of victory in so far as they obey his laws". When Cromwell went to Cambridge University (which he left without a degree), it was to the most puritan of its colleges, where the same Calvinist theology of eternal struggle between the elect and the damned held sway. Cromwell's upbringing thus combined membership of a privileged ruling elite with a religious ideology that embraced struggle and disruption.

EVEN AFTER HE married the daughter of a wealthy London merchant in 1620, Cromwell was not rich enough to be indolent and, for 16 years afterwards, he was a farmer in the low, dismal landscape of the Fens, with an income "barely sufficient to maintain the status and lifestyle of a gentleman". He was not happy: in 1628, he consulted a well-known physician whose surviving notes describe him as "extremely melancholy". (His tendency to swing between periods of debilitating gloom and of high elation suggest that he may have suffered from manic depression.) He seems even to have contemplated emigration to America, before a rich uncle died childless in 1636, leaving him his estates and making Cromwell, for the first time, a man of real wealth and standing.

This sudden good fortune seems to have been connected in his mind to God's providence, and to have been related to a renewed religious awakening. In 1638, he described a recent conversion experience, before which he had "loved darkness and hated the light. I was a chief, the chiefest of sinners." After this pivotal moment, he saw himself as an agent of providence whose actions were not those of a mere individual, but the working-out of divine destiny. When the king, Charles I, summoned a new parliament in 1640, Cromwell was 41 and ready to make an extraordinary leap from agricultural obscurity to world history.

King and parliament quickly became locked in a fierce struggle for power. Cromwell gradually emerged as an irascible and blunt, but increasingly prominent, parliamentary operator. It was, however, the outbreak of civil war that made Cromwell a national figure. He saw it as God's work that he was, in his own words, "suddenly preferred and lifted up from lesser trusts to greater, from my first being a captain of a troop of horse". In reality, his rise had more to do with his energy and zeal, and the ability to earn the trust of his troops, which were rooted in his absolute conviction. Choosing his officers from "plain men" rather than the higher echelons of society, he built a "godly" force loyal to himself. When the decisive Battle of Naseby, in 1645, was won by Cromwell's cavalry, he emerged as a pre-eminent force on the parliamentary side.

Until September 1651, he remained a soldier, campaigning briefly in England and then in Ireland and Scotland. But he was also a superb political and parliamentary tactician, who accumulated power as much by cunning and guile as by righteousness. He may have declared in 1649 that "it matters not who is our commander-in-chief if God be so", but God had an uncanny knack of choosing Oliver as his deputy. From 1653 until his death in September 1658, Cromwell was head of state, appointed lord protector for life with the powers of a military dictator.

EVEN FOR THOSE English radicals who admire Cromwell as an anti-monarchical revolutionary, his conduct in Ireland, where he stayed for just nine months in 1649 and 1650 but left a legacy that has lasted centuries, remains the most uncomfortable aspect of his extraordinary career. Some have tried to play down the extreme violence he used, especially in the taking of Drogheda (3,000 soldiers and what he called "many inhabitants" were killed) and Wexford (where, in his own words, his men killed "all that came in their way" - about 2,000 soldiers and civilians), as acceptable by the standards of the time. But Hill, for example, acknowledges of Drogheda that "the savagery of the massacre was different from anything that had happened in the English civil wars (except to Irish camp followers)".

The difference was ethnic and religious - Cromwell, like most Englishmen of his time, viewed the Irish as inferior barbarians, and "papists" as idolaters. He believed he had a god-given mission to avenge the massacres of Protestants by Catholic rebels in 1641, and the methods he adopted were terror, collective punishment and ethnic cleansing. Whatever they were called in the 17th century, we would rightly call them war crimes.

These crimes were not, however, a perverse deviation from Cromwell's remarkable achievements. They were rooted in precisely the same sense of absolute conviction that God was on his side. In the "warts and all" portrait that he himself called for, we can see the marks of an all-too-familiar psychosis on the face of the plain Englishman. In that, he needs to be remembered, not as an excuse for other collective hatreds, but as a warning to all zealots.

CV OLIVER CROMWELL

Why he's in the news:Last Wednesday was the 350th anniversary of his death. RTÉ is to screen God's Executioner, a two-part reconstruction of his Irish campaign, beginning on Tuesday night

Favourite book?The Bible - he never quoted anything else

Fashion tips?"Plain black clothes with grey worsted stockings"

Sense of humour?Adolescent and scatological. He called the Magna Carta the Magna Farta and the Petition of Right the Petition of Shite

Favourite tipple?No dour puritan, he declared the idea of "keeping wine out of the country lest men be drunk" absurd

Favourite poets?John Milton and Andrew Marvell, especially their odes to Cromwell

Most likely to say?"God made me do it"

Least likely to say?"Live and let live"