Real Dictators - Oliver Cromwell Part 1: The Rise of Ironsides

Episode Date: April 16, 2024

Say “Oliver Cromwell” today and certain things come to mind. He won the English Civil War and prompted the execution of Charles I. He purged the realm with such zeal that he even cancelled Christmas. In Ireland, where Cromwell’s troops besieged its towns with a notorious barbarity, his name is still used as a curse. “The greatest prince that ever ruled England”, as one historian called him? Or, as Winston Churchill would counter, a tyrant and a despot? A Noiser production, written by Jeff Dawson. Many thanks to Peter Gaunt, Clare Jackson, Anna Keay, John Morrill, Nicholas O’Shaughnessy, Micheál Ó Siochrú. This is Part 1 of 4. Get every episode of Real Dictators a week early with Noiser+. You’ll also get ad-free listening, bonus material and early access to shows across the Noiser network. Click the Noiser+ banner to get started. Or, if you’re on Spotify or Android, go to noiser.com/subscriptions Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's Tuesday, November the 14th, 1899. Just before daybreak in London. We're in Parliament Square beneath the great Gothic edifice of the Palace of Westminster. It's cold, quiet. In the gloom by the roadside stands a brand new structure. It's covered in a tarpaulin, prepped for its unveiling. At 22 feet high it's impressive, or so we've been told. Controversy surrounds it.

The details of today's big reveal have been kept rather vague. The better to avoid a scene. In the half-light, a workman checks his pocket watch. He climbs a ladder and cuts a rope. As Big Ben strikes seven, the covering falls. Voila, he announces to his audience, just a lone police constable and a passing newspaper boy. The statue is cast in bronze and set atop a massive granite plinth. cast in bronze and set atop a massive granite plinth. It's of a stern-looking fellow, long hair touching his shoulders,

clad in a leather jerkin and thigh-high riding boots. His right hand rests on the hilt of his sword, his left clutches a Bible. There's a simple inscription, just the years of his lifespan, 1599 to 1658, and his unadorned name, Oliver Cromwell. Erecting this statue has been a labour of love on the part of Cromwell's champions. has been a labour of love on the part of Cromwell's champions. For two hundred years he has been someone best forgotten, a figure of hatred, of ridicule. There have been heated editorials in the Times, satirical sketches in Punch magazine, outrage from Irish nationalist MPs

who suggested Parliament would be better off throwing up a statue of Guy Fawkes. Work was commissioned on the proviso that not a penny came from the public purse. The effigy has been funded by an anonymous donor. The sun rises, the traffic picks up. Cromwell, old Ironsides, will soon settle into his surroundings, and perhaps, it is hoped, into the public consciousness. That night there's a gathering in nearby Queens Hall. Hundreds pack in to hear the speeches of dignitaries. The statue's benefactor, it turns out, is Lord Rosebery, the former Liberal Prime Minister. It is a very illiterate view that Cromwell was a damned psalm-singing humbug who cut off the head of his king, Bellows Rosebery, eulogising him as a great soldier and ruler.

Far from banishing his memory, we could do with a few Cromwells. His faith was in God and freedom, and in the influence of Great Britain as promoting both. This statue is an attempt to rehabilitate a reputation. A matter of recognition for a military statesman who, over a century before the American and French revolutions, led one right here in Britain. The leader of the first and last English Republic. The Lord Protector. From Noiser, this is part one of the Oliver Cromwell story. And this is Real Dictators. Say Oliver Cromwell today and certain things come to mind.

He won the English Civil War and prompted the execution of Charles I. He was a man whose roundhead army defeated the Cavaliers. He purged the realm with such puritanical zeal that he even cancelled Christmas. In Ireland, where Cromwell's troops besieged its towns with a notorious barbarity, his name is still used as a curse. Cromwell emerged from probably the most tumultuous, violent period ever to afflict the British Isles. He was a radical, a man who took on the old order, laying the foundations of the modern British state.

The greatest prince that ever ruled England, as one Whig historian called him. Or as Winston Churchill would counter, a tyrant and a despot. Someone who must stand before history as a representative of dictatorship and military rule. The opt-out answer is it probably depends how you define dictatorship. Cromwell himself is very skilled at talking about power being thrust upon him in a time of emergency and being moved to act in particular ways out of necessity. Cromwell has some of the attributes of a traditional dictator, but I see Cromwell far more as a constitutionalist. Most fascinating of all is that you can't put him in any one category. He's everything and nothing. He is an extraordinary figure.

Oliver Cromwell is a very controversial figure, obviously, historically, and people continue to this day to argue about his legacy. I think certainly by 1653, when he's appointed Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland, here's a man who is effectively ruling with the connivance and absolute bedrock support of the army. And by any consideration, that makes him a dictator. Oliver Cromwell did do some of the things I suppose that we might think of as being characteristics of people who were more clearly dictators, acting for reasons which were quite far away from what other people wanted. But then I don't think he would have considered what other people wanted as the main issue. I mean, I think he considered, and quite

a lot of people in his age considered, what God wanted was the important thing. He's much more like an Ayatollah. That is where I would put him, a man who is so convinced that he is the servant of God and that he's getting direct communications from God. It's the year 1599, 300 years earlier. We're in Huntingdon, in the east of England. This market town sits on the edge of the Fens, an area of flat, low-lying wetland. The people here are hard-working, church-going, albeit not averse to the alehouses. Huntingdon is home to Robert and Elizabeth Cromwell.

They farm the fertile lands in the local surrounds. Robert is a prominent local figure. He is part of a new emerging social group known as the Squirearchy, what you might call middle class. What the family are not is nobility, and neither are they strictly Cromwells. The paternal surname should be Williams. The Williamses had come to England from Glamorgan, South Wales, generations before.

Brewers, by trade, they'd set up shop in Putney, upstream from London. In an unlikely turn of events, the Williams family found themselves propelled into the royal orbit. Robert's great-grandfather was Morgan. He married a woman named Catherine Cromwell. Her brother was none other than Thomas Cromwell, the man who would become Henry VIII's finance minister. Morgan and Catherine had a son, Richard, who duly took on his uncle's famous surname, something with a bit more cachet.

Throughout the dissolution of the monasteries, Richard had risen in the Tudor court. He'd continued to acquire wealth and influence even after Uncle Thomas' notorious beheading. He left a decent inheritance to his family, including land holdings. And so the Williamses of the Welsh Valleys, via the pubs of Putney and the palaces of King Henry, have transmuted into the Cromwells, gentlemen farmers of Huntingdonshire. Robert still signs his signature as Williams, alias Cromwell, as will initially his more famous offspring.

At 3am on April 25th, 1599, Elizabeth gives birth to a son, the fifth of ten children. He will be christened in the Latin manner Oliverus. Two brothers will die in infancy, leaving young Oliver the lone boy among sisters. Elizabeth too comes from a respectable East Anglian family. In a curious twist their surname is Steward. They have a tenuous claim to descent from the Stuarts, the same royal house with which Oliver will one day go to war. Anna Kay is director of the Landmark Trust and author of The Restless Republic. One of the fascinating things about Oliver Cromwell is that he wasn't a kind of revolutionary figure by background at all. He came from what you call gentry, the sort of people wealthy enough to essentially own land, go to university, educate their children, expect to hold local offices.

You know, he kept horses, he had hawks, he always throughout his life loved hunting. He was a countryman. Peter Gaunt is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Chester and author of The English Civil War, A Military History. author of The English Civil War, A Military History. Oliver Cromwell was born into a family that for a time had become one of the leading families of East Anglia. They were never at the absolute pinnacle. They were never peers or aristocrats.

But several members of that family were knighted. Several members of that family were elected to Parliament as MPs and they had quite grand properties in Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire. Oliver's grandfather Sir Henry lives at a nearby stately home, Hinchingbrook, built upon a confiscated nunnery. He is a lavish entertainer. In 1603 Sir Henry even hosts King James VI of Scotland on his journey south to assume the throne of England. It's said that a four-year-old Oliver is invited to play with James' son, a prince, a year his junior.

The young Cromwell gives the future King Charles a black eye. Cromwell gives the future King Charles a black eye. The year of Cromwell's birth, 1599, says as much about him as the circumstances. He breathes his first air in the reign of Elizabeth I, good Queen Bess. He will splutter his last with the monarchy abolished. It is an era of extraordinary change. England has transformed from a feudal society into a centralised mercantile nation-state, in the age of discovery, one with global reach.

As a child, young Oliver is a starry-eyed fan of action hero Sir Walter Raleigh, the explorer who will be responsible for his own lifetime addiction to tobacco. England now has colonies in North America. In Asia, the East India Company is hoovering up trade in cotton, silk, tea and spices. London has swelled to a population of a quarter of a million. Cities like Norwich and Bristol are booming. Clare Jackson is senior tutor of Trinity Hall, Cambridge,

and author of Devil Land, England Under Siege. London becomes the fastest-growing European capital in the 17th century. It's a very urban, literate population. Foreigners often observe on the fact that when you're rowed across the Thames, for example, even the boatmen want to talk politics to you. What's becoming evident, even to the boatmen, is that this enterprising state is being held back. Its dynamism is hampered by an arcane means of governance. hampered by an arcane means of governance. Enemies will later claim the room in which Cromwell was born was adorned with a tapestry

of the devil, that as a baby at Grandad Henry's he was abducted from his cradle by a pet monkey who carried him up onto the roof, something that accounts for his madness. As the son of a gentleman, we do know that Cromwell attends Huntingdon Grammar School. Two days before his 17th birthday, he goes up to Sydney Sussex College, Cambridge. The university is influenced by hardline Protestants, Puritans, whom we shall come to shortly. There's a strict dress code, no long hair, no ruffs, no velvet trousers. There is emphasis on the study of Latin, a prohibition of drinking, dice and cards. But Oliver never completes his studies. After a year, his father dies.

As the last male standing in his family, he must now support his widowed mother and five of his unwed sisters. Money had kind of run out with the generations, so he was forced to go from having this rather comfortable life, you know, being at university and having his hawks and everything, to having to sort of step up to take responsibility for this family without the means. And it was the beginnings of a kind of instability in his life. To wind up his father's estate, he also needs a crash course in law. Next stop, the Inns of Court in London.

Deans of Court in London. The details of Cromwell's time in the capital are hazy. There are reports of him enthusiastically indulging those same vices that were outlawed at college. No stranger, as it were, to the chimes at midnight. It's said that one morning in 1618, Oliver chances upon the public beheading of his old hero, Sir Walter Raleigh, a demonstration that no neck is immune to the executioner's axe. On a visit to his Aunt Joan, young Cromwell is introduced to her neighbour,

a leather merchant called Sir James Boursier. He has a daughter named Elizabeth, like Oliver's mother. She is two years older than he is. It will prove a genuine love match. When Cromwell comes of age at 21, the pair are married at St Giles' Church, Cripplegate. In later years, Oliver's opponents will mock Elizabeth cruelly, as a dumpy plain Jane, not a fashionista like the blingy Queen Henrietta Maria, wife of King Charles I. Cromwell himself has grown into a big man, almost six feet tall, broad-shouldered, strong, with a thatcher brown hair and the ruddy face of an outdoorsman.

He has a large nose and distinguishable warts above an eye and below his lip. His appearance, too, will be misrepresented by his enemies, portrayed as an ogre. The newlyweds move back to Huntingdon. From 1621 they'll proceed to have nine children, not all of whom will survive infancy. Unfortunately life is getting harder as a farmer, not least because the weather has gone crazy. Northern Europe is now in the grip of a deep freeze known as the Little Ice Age. Elsewhere, the bubonic plague is killing tens of thousands. Throw in the horrors of the war that is ravaging the continent,

and there is a sense of impending apocalypse, the end of days. of impending apocalypse, the end of days. It's impossible here to overstate the importance of religion in everyday life. The question of living a good life in the eyes of God is critical to thinking. Good versus evil. I think if you were to walk out of your time machine, you know, once it landed in a field in 1620 or 1630, there are some things that would be very familiar and there are lots of things that would be very different.

England was overwhelmingly rural. Most people didn't go really anywhere beyond their own county. So people's frame of references was quite small. Another thing was that life was absolutely dominated by your relationship with the church, not just from the point of view of faith, but also it was the sort of rhythm of your life. And, you know, the festivities, the feast days, the sort of folk events, maypoles and the Whitsun activities, the Easter activities and so on. People's day-to-day lives had incredibly strong sense

that anything that went wrong in your world, or indeed right, that you couldn't obviously explain, like something being hit by lightning or a flood or a disease it was to be understood in terms of god so if you had awful things happen to you it was because he was unhappy almost a hundred years earlier famously england had severed its ties with rome after the turmoil of the reformation, it is now a Protestant country. The monarch is head of a devolved Anglican church. The English Catholics, or what's left of them, clearly aren't happy about this. But neither are some Protestants. To them, the new status quo doesn't go far enough.

There are those on one wing, they're a minority, but the old Roman Catholics who were holding true to the old faith. But the big attention is on the Protestant side, those who come to believe that the Elizabethan church settlement was but half a reformation. It had held on to too much of the old Catholic system, bishops and archbishops, all sorts of symbolism and ceremonies, bowing and kneeling and all the rest of it. John Morrill is Professor of British and Irish History at Selwyn College, University of Cambridge, and author of an upcoming biography, Oliver Cromwell, the brave bad man of British history. It looked Catholic and sounded Protestant. The worship is a true hybrid. So if you like, Protestant ministers wear Catholic underclothes.

Now, you won't be surprised to hear there are lots of people who think it's a fudge and a compromise. Certain elements of protestantism are doubling down the more the catholic church totes its idols its gold its papal authority the more these hardliners swing the other way the simpler the worship the better the more personal one's connection with the almighty there are many sects within this new creed. Calvinists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Anabaptists. But they're lumped into a broader group, the Puritans. Some have even set sail across the Atlantic to found their own colonies

in New England. East Anglia is a hotbed of Puritanism. This backdrop will become increasingly influential on Oliver Cromwell. It's not just England where this spiritual battle is raging. Across Europe, a cataclysmic struggle has exploded between Protestants and Catholics. Beginning in 1618, it will become known as the Thirty Years' War. With eight million dead, it will be the most destructive conflict to visit the continent until the 20th century, accompanied by slaughter and atrocities on a biblical scale. Events in the British Isles will soon become an adjunct. When Elizabeth I died childless in 1603,

the Crown of England passed to her cousin twice removed, James VI of Scotland. He relocated his court from Edinburgh to London to rule England as James I. It will take another hundred years for the concept of Great Britain to be formalised. But James' accession has meant that the two kingdoms, Scotland and England, are now in a personal union. Joining them is the Principality of Wales, which is annexed to England. Ireland is also ruled as a crowned dominion by the English King. All of this means that for the

first time in history, the British Isles have come under a single monarch, a single head of state. Religiously, however, it's a can of worms. England is officially Anglican, but with a large body of Puritan descent and scattered vestiges of Catholicism. In Scotland, where they make the English Puritans look like a bunch of party animals, Presbyterianism has been adopted as the official religion. And as for affairs across the Irish Sea, Micheál Ó Síochrú is Professor in Modern History at Trinity College Dublin, and author of God's Executioner, Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland. I mean, Ireland in the 17th century is a colony, put it bluntly.

It's a colony that's exploited by the English in their own economic interests, but it's a highly complex society. The vast majority of the people are indigenous native Irish people who have remained steadfastly Catholic. So not only are they suspect, if you like, on ethnic grounds, but they're also suspect on religious grounds. And it's that combination of ethno-religious hostility, I think, that gives a particular nasty edge to Anglo-Irish relations. In addition to that, there are the original colonists who go

back to late 12th, 13th century, who arrived over at the first English engagement called the Old English. Like the native Irish, they have also remained Catholic, and so therefore are in a very strange position because they see themselves as politically loyal, but as far as the English are concerned, they're religiously suspect. And then in the third main grouping, of course, are the Protestant settlers coming over from England and Scotland, probably most famously with the Ulster plantation in the early decades of the 17th century. And they now are increasingly, maybe about half of the Irish land is now under their control. They are now the majority

within the colonial parliament in Dublin. And really the colony is increasingly being totally dominated and controlled by this new Protestant interest. So Ireland's a very volatile society at this time, a very volatile, at times very violent, and, you know, a troubled society. Across his realms, the king must be all things to all people. Using tact and diplomacy to keep his subjects happy.

There's already been a warning. your subject happy. There's already been a warning. Just two years after James's arrival in London, security services thwarted the biggest terrorist attack in English history. The gunpowder plot saw Guy Fawkes and a group of fellow Catholics attempt to blow up the King and Parliament. But by and large, James is regarded as having steadied the ship since. How far should a king accept religious diversity throughout Britain and Ireland? Or was a king required, owing a duty to God, to enforce Protestant uniformity? James VI and I, after 1603, largely takes a laid-back approach, lets sleeping dogs lie, and he dies peacefully in his bed of old age and illness.

It will not be the case with his son. In 1625, when the old king dies, the crown passes to Charles, Charles I. The British Isles are about to be plunged into a series of crises that will change life forever and make a household name of the yet unknown Oliver Cromwell. Charles was never meant to be king. His elder brother, the heir, had died of a fever as a child. At five feet three inches, Charles is a slight figure, weak physically, a result of childhood rickets. Nervousness has left his Scottish-accented speech with a stammer.

He's made up for his frailties with a stubborn streak, ultimately to prove a fatal one. Charles is more comfortable in the world of the arts than with affairs of state. He's especially keen on the new school of painters coming out of the Netherlands. He enlists Antony van Dijk as his court artist. He's regarded as an honourable family man, devoid of the sex scandals that had dogged his father. But he is wedded to the same doctrine

that has been passed down for over a thousand years. The principle that monarchs are ordained by God to govern. The divine right of kings. As a monarch, Charles will fast track his father's centralization of the three kingdoms, ruling by decree. He will show little regard in England for the body that lawfully represents the people. Parliament The Parliament in Westminster is not quite what we would recognise today. Elections of the House of Commons is not by universal suffrage. One must own land to be a candidate, and even to vote.

MPs are essentially elected gentry. Parliament is not in regular session. It's summoned on the whim of the monarch, more often than not when the Crown has run into trouble, more specifically when it's run out of money. Over time, Parliament has acquired increasing responsibilities in terms of raising revenue. The king must come cap in hand. The crown is trying to run the country with a financial system that really dates back to the late medieval period that hasn't reformed and that meant great strain financially in an era of rising costs, in an era of inflation, in an era where just running the country in peacetime, let alone, heaven help us, when the country stumbles into war,

at home or abroad, the costs are huge. In January 1628, Charles I calls a parliament to sign off on military matters and to raid the public coffers to pay for it. Oliver Cromwell, now serving as a local councillor, seems an obvious choice as a candidate for election. On the 23rd of January, he's made MP for Huntingdon, the same seat his father had represented. Aged 28, he travels the 70 miles down to the capital. Aged 28, he travels the 70 miles down to the capital. On March 17th, 1628, he enters the Commons.

The Commons is a roughhouse, a baying bear pit. The benches are raked steeply. There are continual slanging matches across the divide. Amid it all, the hapless speaker attempts to keep order. But Cromwell is in familiar company. There are no less than nine of his cousins on the benches. He takes his seat and soaks up the prevailing mood that in the realm of England things are not going well. of England, things are not going well. King Charles patently is making terrible decisions.

His right-hand man, the Duke of Buckingham, was his late father's secret lover. Buckingham and Charles have got England mixed up in the war across the Channel. They've embarked on disastrous, costly naval raids in Spain and France. The Puritans present are already deeply sceptical about Charles, and none of this is helping. In religion, the new king is an open devotee of high Anglicanism. And then there is his wife. Queen Henrietta Maria is the daughter of Henry IV of France. She's been permitted to conduct open Roman worship with her entourage at Hampton Court.

She's said to be way too influential on her husband, sitting in on meetings of state. The way the Puritans see it, the king is nothing short of a crypto-Catholic, not to mention militarily gullible. To Cromwell, the outrage is palpable. That August, news filters back that Buckingham has been murdered, stabbed in a Portsmouth tavern.

There is open celebration on the House of Commons benches. The King wants his debts paying. In the febrile atmosphere Parliament lays it out. It will stump up the cash, but there's a quid pro quo. Charles must approve a petition of right, a guarantee of certain civil liberties for his subjects. The King begrudgingly accepts the demands. But then, in March 1629, he abruptly dissolves Parliament. It will not be recalled for 11 years.

It's the beginning of a period known as Personal Rule. Personal Rule is nothing unusual. King James called only four English parliaments during his reign. Queen Elizabeth summoned it only thirteen times across forty-five years. From the public there is no great antipathy towards the monarch. Not yet. In 1630, when Henrietta gives birth to a son, the future Charles II, there is national celebration. There is relative prosperity.

Above all, despite Buckingham's escapades, there is relative peace. As far as Charles goes, in his gallery, gazing at his landscapes of rural England, everything is fine and dandy. Nicholas O'Shaughnessy is Emeritus Professor of Communication at Queen Mary, University of London. I think it was Lord Falkland who described the 1630s as the most quiet, serene, and halcyon days that could possibly imagine. Beautiful country rolling skies, hills, brilliant blue, and people in glorious silks and great hats with feathers, and elegant ladies and beautiful vistas of country houses, a kind of

idealized social order. But a lot was bubbling up under the surface. On the streets, unchecked by Parliament, the King is starting to raise money in earnest. His efforts are amounting to a grand larceny, a royal shakedown. And so he returns to ways of raising money which are legally dubious. There is a case for all the things he does, but there is also a case against it. And of course he uses the judges to drive through.

So think of a modern parallel. He uses the Supreme Court to give him the kind of powers which are highly debated. There are hated taxes on salt, on soap. And there was a crippling levy known as ship money, an emergency wartime tax now being enforced full time. There was nothing really to stop him raising it every year across the country. But clearly this was done without consent and without consultation. And people resented being taxed without consent.

Not even the nobility can escape. With wealth taxes and harsh penalties for non-payment, England appears to be sliding into tyranny. And then there is religion again. Charles recently appointed his spiritual enforcer, a man called William Lord, as Archbishop of Canterbury. He has unleashed a whirlwind. Lord is an old-school Anglican.

He believes in episcopacy, the authority of bishops. He's seen as anathema to Puritanism, which sees no place for ecclesiastical hierarchy. Under Lord, old rituals are revived. Gold and crucifixes abound. There is compulsory attendance of his new shimmering Church of England. These impositions are met with horror. In 1637, three dissenting Puritans, William Prynne, John Bastwick and Henry Burton, are sentenced to have their ears cut off. Prynne, for added indignity, is branded on the cheeks.

When the King dissolves Parliament in 1629, Oliver Cromwell returns to Huntingdon. Not yet thirty, he's convinced he's dying. The strains of domestic life, let alone the pressure cooker in Westminster, have taken their toll. Where once Cromwell was apt to japery and practical jokes, the new dark version takes to his bed for days on end. He visits an acclaimed physician, Sir Theodore Mayerne. He diagnoses Cromwell as a sufferer of valde melancholios, depression. It may be down to the drugs he's been taking to ward off the plague. It could even be a recurrence of marsh fever, a strain of malaria that's endemic in England. But Cromwell's nights are now a phantasmagoria of fever dreams and wild hallucinations.

The visions are increasingly religious in nature, images of heaven, hell and salvation. When Cromwell eventually snaps out of it, he's a changed man, one who has had a revelation. He is, as one might put it, born again. He writes a remarkably detailed letter to the wife of one of his cousins, giving details or some details of that conversion experience. And he believes that God had picked him out for a special purpose, that he'd been lifted from a life of darkness and sin. And from that time onwards, he becomes a man of deep faith, godliness, puritanism. His letters and speeches drip with reference to God. It's all God's will. And Cromwell comes to see that God is replaying the story, the Old Testament story of the Israelites.

That God's chosen people, the English parliamentarians, are being rescued from Egyptian Stuart bondage, being led through the Red Sea and into the Promised Land. At a local level, he becomes a firebrand, railing against agricultural injustices. In one Huntingdon meeting, Cromwell expresses his opinion so vociferously that he's thrown off the assembly. He's also forced to leave town. He left Huntingdon under something of a cloud. He sells up most of his land and property that

he'd inherited from his father, and he moves down the road to St Ives. He becomes a tenant farmer. He doesn't own land, but he's moved down the social scale. He's barely clinging on to the bottom rank of the gentry. Cromwell seriously considers putting his family on a ship and sailing to Massachusetts or Connecticut. It is said, in 1634, that he even boards a vessel in London, only for the captain to be denied permission to sail. But God is moving in mysterious ways. In 1636, a rich uncle dies, his mother's brother, childless Sir Thomas Stuart.

Childless Sir Thomas Stuart. Out of the blue, Oliver inherits a fortune, plus extensive lands in the cathedral city of Ely, not far from Huntingdon. It becomes his new home. Oliver Cromwell is a gentleman again, wealthy, and on a mission from God. It was inevitable that Archbishop Lord's reforms would run into trouble. Charged with standardising worship, he creates a common English prayer book. He makes a suicidal mistake

when he attempts to foist it and his system of bishops upon the Scots. Charles I is obviously an extraordinarily intelligent and sensitive man with a very powerful appreciation of aesthetics, but what he does is so utterly dim. To try and impose episcopacy on the Scots is very, very foolish. In Scotland, the kirk, the church, is run by councils of elders. Rule by bishops is unconscionable. And to now batter them over the head

with this prayer book, this heretical English dogma. In 1637, in Edinburgh's St. Giles Cathedral, an enraged woman throws a stool at a minister. It sparks a chain reaction. Soon, swathes of Scotland are engulfed in rioting. In open defiance of the crown, Scottish dignitaries sign a document of refusal, a national covenant. It is an avowal to adhere to and defend the true religion. 300,000 people will add their

names, some signing it in blood. When the king raises troops to restore order, the Scots steal a march on him. In May 1639, the so-called Bishop's Wars begin. They will culminate in a Scottish army of 20,000 men marching across the border to occupy Northumberland and Durham. The Scottish army, it turns out, is in way better shape than the English one. The Scots Brigade has recently been engaged on the continent. Its battle-hardened troops are led by Alexander Leslie, Lord Levin, a field marshal who served under the all-conquering King of Sweden. To be fair, English resistance is half-hearted.

There seems to be little animosity. The gates of Newcastle are thrown open. The Puritans in Westminster, meanwhile, cheer on their Presbyterian liberators. The Scottish invasion is, in effect, a demo, a mass sit-in. They will withdraw only when the King agrees to their demands and pays them for their trouble. 850 pounds a day. As king of both Scotland and England, Charles is conflicted.

He is, quite literally, at war with himself. Whether he's going to fight the Scots or pay them off, he again needs cash. Once again, he must recall Parliament. If he assumes that it will be a pushover, he's got another thing coming. This time, Parliament is a seething mass of pent-up grievances. With his reputation as the people's champion growing, Oliver Cromwell is re-elected to the Commons. His eldest son, Robert, died recently in an accident, so he's in no mood for niceties either.

Having had essentially a kind of nervous breakdown and a financial crisis, he's chosen rather surprisingly to be the MP for Cambridge. It seems to be because people of influence and status within the city have heard him preach and heard his charismatic expostulations. On April the 13th, 1640, when Cromwell re-enters Westminster, he is beholden not to convention, only to his God. At nearly 41, he's getting on a bit, but with his wealth and family connections, he is, in mob terms, a made man. Leading parliamentarians John Hampton, Oliver St John, and Edmund Waller are his first cousins. Valentine Wharton, a Huntingdon knight, is his brother-in-law. Sir Richard Knightley has also married into the clan.

Cromwell's imposing physical presence lends weight to his hellfire and brimstone oratory. His words are delivered in a rude, country manner, and he's certainly not spending his newfound money on himself. There's a wonderful description of him by a courtier who recorded in his memoirs the first time he ever saw Cromwell was in the House of Commons when he was wearing an ill-fitting

suit and had one or two drops of blood on his white collar, which suggests both that he's a poor man who can't afford decent clothes and that he can't even afford a barber to shave him. Who is that sloven, one veteran remarks. That sloven, blasts Hamden, will be the greatest man in England.

Cromwell duly gets a place on the religious committees. In with the ultras. He's part of a group led by the dominant parliamentarian, John Pym. They're spoiling for a fight. Yes, the Commons will grant the king his money, decrees Pym, but it will come with more strings attached. The king must cease and desist with the crazy taxations and the detentions without trial that have become a feature of his personal rule.

Parliament must become a regular body, not just a plaything. It will be convened every three years. There must be restrictions placed upon the King's authority, not least the selection of his advisers. Particular opprobrium is heaped upon Archbishop Lord and a man named Thomas Wentworth, the King's chief advisor and currently Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Sir Thomas Wentworth unites Ireland as very few people have done before or since, because by the late 1630s just about everybody in Ireland hates Sir Thomas Wentworth. They hate his religious policies trying to enforce a high church Protestantism. They hate the taxes he's imposing on Ireland and the Irish. They don't trust him. When he's recalled to England to advise Charles domestically in

London that leaves a power vacuum in Ireland and that enables various groups to manoeuvre. Wentworth, failing upward, as the saying goes, has been rewarded with a title. Julian Obold, the Earl of Stratford, as he's now known, is also spoiling for a fight with the Scots. "'He's resistant to any peaceful settlement. "'However, the suggestion that Parliament should pick his friends for him "'does not please His Majesty.

"'After just three weeks, he shuts it down. "'But, hamstrung, Charles is forced to recall the House again. "'In November 1640, that first short parliament is replaced by an even more hostile long one. Underneath all of this, there is still a deep reverence for the king. He is there by the grace of God. The prevailing notion is that he's just in bad company. Others must pay. Strafford is the first to get it in the neck, quite literally. Rumours come in of him suggesting that his army of Ireland should be brought over to quell not just the Scots, but the English too. Then, prosecutors uncover a smoking gun. A letter written by him to the king offering to reduce this kingdom, in other words, to lead a military coup.

The king is happy to let Stratford be his fall guy. In an eerie foreshadowing of future events, Charles attends the trial and signs his death warrant. Charles attends the trial and signs his death warrant. On May the 12th 1641 at Tower Hill before a vast crowd, Strafford is beheaded. He goes to his death with a shrug, his final words prophetic, put not your trust in princes. Archbishop Lord is the next sacrificial lamb, carted off to the Tower. Parliament will now pay off the Scots, but the King must still accede to their demands, which have been repackaged in a new petition. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, his opponents think, to push ahead and to push through much fuller reform

to shift the balance of power in the running of the country away from the Crown and towards Parliament. And that's why his leading opponents in autumn 1641 draw up a grand shopping list of complaints, the Grand Remonstrance. The Grand Remonstrance only sneaks through the Commons after a tight vote,

but it will mark the dividing line between two factions, Parliamentarian and Royalist. If the Remonstrance had been rejected, says Cromwell, I would have sold all that I had the next morning and never seen England anymore. Predictably, Charles treats the remonstrance with disdain. Plus, there are more pressing matters. On October the 23rd, news comes in. There's an uprising in Ireland. In the late 1630s and early 1640s, you have to look at English, Scottish and Irish history

in its entirety. You cannot look at simply one kingdom. What's happening in each of the other kingdoms also has a knock-on effect. And there's growing unrest in Scotland with the Presbyterian community there. And these people are ferociously anti-Catholic. So their success not only causes problems for King Charles, but also makes people across the Irish Sea in Ireland increasingly wary of what's happening. There is, of course, a longer term context here, which is the violent displacement of the native Irish and the destruction of their society with the arrival of Protestant settlers who are taking all the best land and forcing even the Catholic elite to lose much of their status. So we have it coming together both of long-term factors and short-term context here which of course creates the perfect

storm with the outbreak of the Irish Rebellion in October 1641. Ireland goes up in flames. Back in England, amid a wave of hysteria, there are tales of massacres, of diabolic slaughter of their kinsmen. There were certainly large numbers of Protestants killed and very gruesome accounts of atrocity relayed very quickly back to a terrified English population. And the numbers swelled and the atrocities were exaggerated. But this was really seen as a providential moment in which Protestantism itself was under threat. Charles I himself was slow to distance himself from this and rumours gained ground that he had even sanctioned the Irish rebellion. So for anyone who was looking for signs that Charles was not to be trusted, that he was in the hock of his Catholic wife Henrietta Maria, or that really the Protestant church was in danger, this was the sort

of moment. As ever more money is needed, this time for troops. In the England of the day, there is no such thing as a standing army. Military missions are raised and disbanded according to need. A permanent army is seen as a dangerous thing, open to misuse, not least by a sovereign. It's why even today Britain has a Royal Navy, a Royal Air Force, but not a Royal Army. But can this king be trusted to head any fighting force? In taking on the Scots in the Bishop's Wars, was Charles not already guilty of declaring war on his own people?

The king, the godly appointed king, is automatically commander-in-chief of the armed forces. But can we, if we're raising an English and Welsh army, designed to go over to Ireland to crush the Irish Rebellion, can we really trust Charles I with him? Because if the king got the armies he wanted in order to put down the Irish Rebellion, he would have an army which he could use to put down his English opponents. And they just don't trust him with that army, and that becomes an insoluble issue. So that is why England in the 1640s is in meltdown. The king is outraged by the suggestion that Parliament should hold military authority

instead of him. Goaded by his wife to show who wears the pantaloons, on January 4th, 1642, he does the unthinkable. Accompanied by armed guards, Charles enters the Commons personally to order the arrest of five leading parliamentarians. John Pym, Denzel Hollis, Arthur Hazelry, John Hampton and William Strode. Arthur Hazelry, John Hampton and William Strode. A king has never before set foot in the chamber. It's unprecedented, an affront to parliamentary privilege.

He even sits nonchalantly in the Speaker's chair, scoffing at the disbelieving MPs now gawping at him. The famous five have been tipped off and already on the run. I see the birds have flown, quips Charles. Charles is pushed into a rash and miscalculated counter-strike. It's a direct threat, it's unconstitutional, it's illegal. Even Charles himself, just a few weeks later, was conceding that it was a mistake,

but once it's done, you can't reverse that. And it's a parting of the ways. Chaos reigns. Mobs gather in the capital. The king withdraws for his own safety to Hampton Court. He will never again set foot in London until his trial. With rumours swirling of foreign intervention, local communities begin raising militias. Civil disobedience is rife.

Assured of loyal support in the north of England, the king relocates to York. The queen sails for France. On St. George's Day, April 23, 1642, Charles makes another provocative move. With a band of troops, he attempts to seize the arsenal at Hull. It's stashed with weaponry from the bishop's wars. In humiliation, he finds the town gates locked by the pro-parliament governor. Leading MPs make a last-ditch appeal. They send a concessionary set of propositions.

But the king considers them a mockery. He's gone full rogue. England is dividing. The north and the West declaring for the King. The South and East supporting Parliament. The Midlands in between will be the crucible in the struggle for supremacy. But from Parliament's point of view, it's still about rescuing the King,

saving him from himself. Within Parliament, there are always those who are willing to reach a compromise settlement and there are always those who say a compromise settlement won't do. We have to dictate a settlement after a military victory and our subject here, Oliver Cromwell, is one of those who thinks it's absolutely essential to win an outright victory in order to impose terms on the King. With news that his own Royal Navy is declared for Parliament, the King decides to act. He will march on London and put down this revolt before it has a chance to take hold.

He moves south to the friendly city of Nottingham. On August 22nd, 16 1642 he raises his standard. It is a recruiting rally, but it's also an open declaration of war on his very own parliament and, by association, his very own people. In Westminster MPs approve the mustering of 10,000 militia. Robert Devereaux, Earl of Essex, is appointed head of this new parliamentary army. Raised, quote, for the preservation of the true religion, laws, liberties, and peace of the kingdom.

Cromwell heads home to organise the defence of Cambridge. Across England, towns are now garrisoning, shoring up their walls for what is about to happen. Civil war. In the next episode... As England is plunged into conflict, Oliver Cromwell, an obscure politician,

soon proves himself an outstanding military commander. The king, meanwhile, unveils his own star signing, a dashing young cavalry officer named Prince Rupert. A daring mission featuring the Queen threatens to tip the balance Charles' way. But as Cromwell seizes the initiative on the battlefield, the new model army will prove unstoppable. That's next time.