Oliver Cromwell

1599 - 1658

OLIVER CROMWELL died on 3rd September 1658. Cromwell, the MP for Huntingdon, was the leading Parliamentary commander during the English Civil War which began in 1642 and ended in 1649 with the trial and execution of Charles Stuart and the abolition of the monarchy. The Republic of England, or Commonwealth as it was usually styled in English, was proclaimed soon after.
    In 1653 Cromwell became head of state, the Lord Protector. By then the republic Cromwell led included England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, as well as colonies in New England and the Caribbean.
    During its short life the Commonwealth became a force in Europe. Culturally it inspired the great poetry of John Milton and Andrew Marvell and other radical and pacifist religious movements such the Quakers who are still with us today. Oliver Cromwell was succeeded by his son Richard, who was neither a politician nor a soldier. Unable to reconcile republican generals with the demands of the rich merchants and landowners to curb the influence of the New Model Army, Richard Cromwell resigned the following year. The government collapsed. The monarchy was restored in 1660 and the New Model Army was dissolved.
    These days most bourgeois historians simply dismiss Cromwell as an upstart general who made himself dictator through his command of the army. But Marxists have always recognised the historic role of Cromwell and the English Revolution.
    It was, of course, a bourgeois revolution and one that by Cromwell’s terms failed. But the monarchy that came back wasn’t the autocracy Charles Stuart had imagined. The rich merchants and land-owners who wanted an oligarchy were the ultimate victors. They got their “mixed monarchy” when they dumped the last Stuart king in 1688 and put the House of Orange on the throne.
    The English revolution clearly influenced the thinking of the leaders of the later American and French revolutions and the ideas of the Victorian co-operator, Robert Owen. But the question of the monarchy and the House of Lords remains unresolved.