Oliver Cromwell, the man who wouldn’t be king | Hacker News Reader

Oliver Cromwell, the man who wouldn’t be king

newstatesman.com

26 pointspepys18 comments

As someone growing up in the US where we think along the lines of the American Revolution, Cromwell Co. come across as very confusing.

They go so far as to execute the king (that isn't something that seemed likely had by some strange reason the American's captured the king (some good fan fiction there)) and yet as far as I can tell really don't seem to have much of a plan / do much to establish much at all after that, and sort of roll over at the end.

It always seems very muddy with all sorts of religious motivations (that admittedly I find hard to understand) from the outside.

Then again the tradition of 'Parliament' (speaking in a larger historical sense) seems to swing wildly as far as its loyalty to the king, or lack of it, power, or lack of power, and so forth.

This is possibly the most confusing and nonsensical period in English history. When you start throwing in the Scottish connections and the protestant vs catholic swirls, it is very difficult to keep track of anything.

When I read about it I can't help but wonder if the regular populous were also a bit confused.

Well if you were Irish - who had been subjects of the deposed king - it's probably unlikely that "confused" would capture your feelings. Estimates vary widely among historians when it comes to proportion of the Irish population that perished during the Cromwellian conquest but the numbers range from 25% to 80%.

I feel like historically speaking as far as Ierland goes if they're not being abused we don't really hear about them... so really any event is bad.

Indeed, I have ancestors involved in this genocide and they don't seem to be the type that would have any loyalty to London. So who exactly is it coming after the irish and why?

To give an example of a specific estimate, here is one claim:

"Throughout the early 1650’s Cromwell’s troops practiced a policy of scorched earth in Ireland which lead to the death by starvation and other causes of at least 200,000 and possibly as many as 600,000 in a total population of 2 million."

https://scholarworks.umt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=118...

Cromwell was one of the leaders of a Revolution. By the time of the American one you had the example of this one as well as the French Revolution, anything becomes easier to get right after a few iterations.

An alternative viewpoint to it being about religion is this [1].

[1] https://www.marxists.org/archive/hill-christopher/english-re...

Yeah I didn't mean to judge them by the standard of later revolutions as much as indicate as to why I find it confusing / where I'm coming from.

But I still find it confusing even if they didn't have a sort of age of enlightenment like spin in the sense that ... they really didn't seem to have a good plan and it just sort of ends abruptly.

The French Revolution came after the American one didn't it?

Shows how important the American one seems in Europe, I suppose.

This is a revisionist post

Because the main issue was constitutional, not whether the king was alive or dead. The issue with Charles I, his father, and James II was (ultimately) that they did stuff that really pissed everyone off (and were often very disinterested leaders)...which was to a large extent based on a difference of opinion about what being king actually meant (even in today's authoritarian regimes, there is a concept of ruling with the consent of the people...China is a good example of this).

The religious motivation is fairly simple if you consider the period slightly before: Spain was predominant, England had gone to war with Spain, England was relatively weak, and Catholics had just tried to blow up Parliament...yes, England had lots of Catholics near government (which ended up being part of the problem) but it was a Protestant nation (the Thirty Years War happened in Europe too, this kind of religious conflict was not unknown). The extreme position that Cromwell took was also probably not a reflection of public opinion either btw (he was unquestionably not the leader of some democratic cause, and he just stepped into a power vacuum with leadership that was lacking elsewhere...the majority of his notable actions would be called religious genocide today).

To see the religious issue more clearly btw: if England had indeed had a Catholic ruler, it would have been like the Spanish Netherlands...that is the fear that existed at the time.

> To see the religious issue more clearly btw: if England had indeed had a Catholic ruler, it would have been like the Spanish Netherlands...that is the fear that existed at the time.

I think you're overestimating the average US citizen's knowledge of this and how it relates historically and politically to the area. I say this as someone who just had to look up what the Spanish Netherlands was, because at first I thought you were just talking about a hypothetical, not an actual region that existed.

I highly recommend Mike Duncans 'revolutions' podcast for a thorough and entertaining history of Cromwell and the entire English revolution - as well as the American revolution, French (my current season) and about 6 others.

If anyone besides me just sort of thinks of this as “a long long time ago”, to put a timeframe I have a better grasp of on these events: Newton was 6 years old when Charles I was beheaded.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200122223823/https://www.newst...

Monty Python's take on Oliver Cromwell taught me all I needed to know about it for quite a while, I admit: https://youtu.be/dBPf6P332uM

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