CROMWELL THE VILLAIN, THE HERO,
THE SOLDIER... AND THE TANKOver the years, Oliver Cromwell has been immortalised
in numerous different guisesA Cromwell tank ‘jumps’ from a concrete ramp
during a demonstration in June 1952Richard Harris (left) plays the lord protector
alongside Alec Guinness in Cromwell (1970)Cromwell as depicted during
Cromwell as usurper of the British crown the Victorian eraTIME & LIFE PICTURES/GETTY IMAGES, BRIDGEMAN IMAGES, GETTY IMAGES, ALAMY
Contemporary portraits have been
endlessly reproduced. These generally
show Cromwell as a soldier, as a martial
man of God, evoking (sympathetically or
unsympathetically) his puritanism, either
through the characteristic plain style of his
collars protruding from his armour or the
act of holding a bible. The first statue of
him by Noble was erected in Manchester in
1875, followed by three more statues in his
tercentenary year at Westminster,
Warrington and St Ives. More surprisingly
he is memorialised in stained glass, in
prominent windows in the Victorian
Congregationalist Churches in both
Cambridge and Oxford.
Cromwell is also remembered in music.
A folk song bearing his name was edited by
Benjamin Britten in 1938, while a nursery
rhyme, which can be traced back to the late
17th century, begins, “Oliver Cromwell lay
buried and dead, hee-haw, buried and
dead”. Yet the most extraordinary piece is
undoubtedly the rendering of a John Cleese
prose poem by the Monty Python team in
1989 that tells the life of Cromwell set to
the music of a polonaise by Chopin.
Isaac Foot, prominent Liberal politician
of the 1920s and 1930s, established in 1935
the Cromwell Association, which has
worked effectively to extend knowledge of
the lord protector and of his age by erecting
memorial plaques on battlefields and other
Cromwellian sites, and holding an annualJohn Morrill is professor of British and Irish
history at the University of Cambridge and a
Fellow of Selw y n College. He is author of Oliver
Cromwell (OU P, 20 07)service of thanksgiving by the statue
next to the Palace of Westminster. The
Association has collected many artefacts
associated with the man and these
form the basis of the collection held by
the Cromwell Museum, which is in the
Huntingdon schoolroom he once
attended. It is doubtful if any other
non-royal Englishman has ever been
so diversely commemorated.
Cromwell is also memorialised by name.
Winston Churchill could not persuade
George V to christen a battleship in his
honour in 1915, but he did create the
Cromwell tank when he was prime
minister. More than 250 roads in Britain
are named after Cromwell – no lay person
other than Wellington approaches him in
this respect.
As you’d expect from one of the most
controversial characters in English history,
Cromwell has exercised the imaginations
of numerous dramatists, novelists and
poets. The earliest play bearing his name
was produced in 1752 and others followed,
including one by Victor Hugo in 1828. He
was the anti-hero of Henry William
Herbert’s Oliver Cromwell: a Historical
Novel (1838), and he had more than a
walk-on part in Captain Marryat’s
children’s classic Children of the New Forest
(1847). For the most part, he is portrayed as
a grim, self-righteous puritan, a literary
equivalent of William Frederick Yeames’spainting And When Did You Last See Your
Father?, which shows parliamentarian
soldiers quizzing a young boy about the
whereabouts of his Royalist father.
Cromwell is just as prominent in film
and TV. His appearances on the silver
screen include the Hammer Horror
Witchfinder General (1968) and Cromwell
(1970), which improbably cast the Irish
tearaway-actor Richard Harris as the hero.
TV dramas in which he figures include
John Hopkins’s Cruel Necessity (19 62) a n d
the 1970s serialisation of Children of the
New Forest.
Cromwell remains a deeply contentious
figure. Yet when in 1999 Radio 4 ran a
phone-in to find the greatest Briton of the
second millennium, he came third. And
this was no flash in the pan, for when BBC
TV ran a similar contest in 2002, he made
the top ten. More than 150 biographies of
Cromwell have been published over the
past 150 years, the overwhelming majority
of them favourable. So it would appear that
his own words, pleading for liberty, have in
the end proved more influential than the
testimony of his contemporaries that he
was a canting hypocrite. But, history being
history, the tide is bound to turn...