Oliver Cromwell: God’s Warrior and the English Revolution by Ian Gentles (review)

Readers of Ian Gentles’s earlier works, The New Model Army in England, Ireland and Scotland, 1645–1653 (Blackwell, 1992) and The English Revolution and the Wars in the Three Kingdoms, 1638–1652 (Pearson/Longman, 2007) have awaited a full-length biography of the man who dominated mid-seventeenth-century England in war and in peace until his death in 1658. Gentles’s Oliver Cromwell does not disappoint.

While biographies of Cromwell abound, the public’s appetite is insatiable for yet another angle-of-vision exploration and evaluation of the man whose name still evokes adulation or execration. In addition, Gentles informs us, new information about Cromwell proliferates at such a rate that more has been discovered about the lord protector in the past twelve years than in the previous fifty. And of course while earlier discussions of Cromwell were responses to questions historians deemed important in their era, succeeding epochs voice different concerns. For this reason alone new investigations and assessments are always in order.

Gentles’s contribution is an even-handed interweaving of the military and political aspects of Cromwell’s life. Not surprisingly he highlights Cromwell’s political adroitness no less than his military prowess, indicating how both arise from a genius that compels recognition, regardless of one’s estimation of the man.

At the same time Gentles never attempts to minimize Cromwell’s unfaltering religious commitment and the place his putative discerning of God’s will, arrived at after fervent, protracted prayer, had in the blessing and bane he visited upon friend and foe respectively. Gentles wrestles less with the theological furniture of Cromwell’s mind than with the faith and fervour of Cromwell’s heart, the latter fortifying the indefectible causes “Old Ironsides” never doubted, despite opposition from royalists (chiefly Anglicans), Catholics, and even fellow Puritans, the last including Scots Presbyterians who abhorred the execution of King Charles i and who wanted a coercive, clergy-controlled Presbyterian Church imposed on the English, as well as Levellers who wanted England rid of all class distinctions and social privileges.

There is no disputing Cromwell’s uncanny intuition (he lacked formal military training) for waging war or his gift for fostering loyalty, the latter feature no doubt assisted by his custom of spearheading the parliamentarian charge, expecting soldiers to follow only that leader who risked as much as they. At Marston Moor, 2 July 1644, he led his 22,000 men to his first major victory. Contemplating 4,000 dead royalists, he announced unforgettably, “God made them as stubble to our swords.” A sensible king would have negotiated peace on the spot.

Naseby, Cromwell’s next major victory, featured more than a military triumph: here the king’s secret correspondence fell into parliamentarians’ hands. It disclosed Charles’s distrust of his own people and, most tellingly, his willingness to grant major concessions to Roman Catholics in return for their support. The public could only conclude that the king was treasonous and merited the penalty accorded traitors.

Cromwell was not to blame, however, for what happened as battleground tumult subsided and royalist prisoners were collared. Included among the latter were hundreds of women, the wives, girlfriends, or prostitutes of royalist soldiers. Noticing that the women spoke no English (they were largely from Wales), and misjudging their long, kitchen knives to be weapons, Roundheads killed two hundred on the spot, mutilating the faces and slitting the noses of the remainder, thereby branding them as whores. Yet lest Cromwell be thought a monster, Gentles bids us note, at his victories at Exeter and Oxford he allowed royalists to surrender, affording them generous terms, wanting only to end the war without humiliating the vanquished.

By 1647 the Army Council had drawn up the “Heads of Proposals,” an offer to the king replete with Cromwell’s generosity. Included were the following: most royalists would be pardoned; social reforms advocated by radical Congregationalists would be implemented; the hated...