“I hope to render the English name as great and formidable as ever the Roman was”, thus spake Oliver Cromwell, on being made the Lord Protector of England, Scotland, and Ireland in the year 1653.
Oliver Cromwell was an English general and statesman who, first as a subordinate and later as Commander-in-Chief, led armies of the Parliament of England against King Charles I during the English Civil War. Following the King’s execution, he ruled the British Isles as Lord Protector from 1653 until his death in 1658. In the only instance in British History, where the Parliament humbly petitioned someone to accept the Crown of England, and three days later, it was to be refused.
Considered seriously and described variously by chroniclers of eminence, the life of Cromwell excites interest as much as it whets curiosity. Winston Churchill called him a military dictator while John Milton and Thomas Carlyle hailed him as a hero of liberty. He was one amongst the tallest Britons and one of her most outstanding sons. Selected as one of the ten greatest Britons of all time in a 2002 BBC poll, tomes have been written about his contribution and place in British history.
There have been accusations galore as well. The bleakest spot and the ugliest accusation against him relate to his campaigns in Ireland. Between 1645 and 1649, he is accused of massacring thousands from the royalist army, many of them after surrender. But two facts go contrary to this accusation: first, much of the carnage took place after Cromwell had left Ireland; second, Ireland had been harbouring the royalists and had become the rallying point and soil from where the the King and his supporters were raging battle against the Parliamentary forces; not to act against Ireland would have been strategically suicidal and politically unsustainable.
Another accusation concerns his adherence to religious belief, he was a devoted puritan and an anathema for Catholics, to which the royalty then belonged. A subsequent objective assessment has largely found this exaggerated and by no means excessive.
Oliver Cromwell was one of only two persons outside royalty to be appointed as Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland. The other one was his son Richard, a very unworthy and weak successor to his father, whose vacillations and infirmity saw the restoration of monarchy in England and the return of Charles II. When George Monck marched to London as head of the new model army and restored the Long Parliament over the Rump Parliament, the stage was set to get Charles II back in England and restore the monarchy.
On 30th of January of the year 1661, Oliver Cromwell, the first Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland was ritually executed, his head put on a pole and hoisted on Westminster Hall. In one of the rare events in human history, his execution was posthumous and the humiliation to his exhumed body (or whatever remained of that after two years) remains a barbaric act of vengeance and reappraisal, sadly typical of England of those times.
At the time of his execution, Cromwell had been dead for more than two years due to septicemia caused by malarial fever. In August 1658, he was taken to London with the intention of living in St. James’s Palace. But he died in Whitehall at three o’clock on September 3rd, an anniversary of two of his greatest victories. It is believed that the embalmers tasked to preserve his body bungled and his putrefying body was secretly interred several weeks before his state funeral. What was interred in Westminster Abbey on November 23, 1658, in the state funeral was probably an empty coffin.
One of the first acts of the new King, once monarchy again respired, was to exhume the body of Cromwell from Westminster Abbey on 30 January, 1661, advisedly on the 12th anniversary of his father’s beheading. Cromwell was then ritually tried and executed. His body was hanged in chains at Tyburn, London, where criminals are usually hanged and then thrown into a pit. His head was cut off and displayed on a pole outside Westminster Hall until 1685, till Charles II’s reign lasted. His beheaded body was publicly displayed several times at different places and his head, protected and preserved by various hands over a long period of time, was finally buried at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge in 1960. A plaque marks the approximate location and reads,
Near to
This place was buried
On 25 March 1960 the head of
Oliver Cromwell
Lord Protector of the Common-
Wealth of England, Scotland & Ireland, Fellow Commoner
Of this college 1616-7
He was one of the tallest personalities of Europe and the world of his time and undoubtedly one of the boldest and bravest among the pantheon of great leaders Britain has produced. History and the compulsions of time may have occasionally judged this man less than fairly but even the bitterest and most trenchant of his detractors acknowledge that but for him the British Parliamentary system and the institution of a titular monarchy would not have been possible; and the dominance and leadership of Britain in world politics for the next three hundred years may have remained just a distant dream.
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