Cromwell [antikvár]

¦ ¦ Ic, ¦ 11 <1 Author's Note To write the biography of Oliver Cromwell is admittedly an ambitious undertaking. In view of the wonderful wealth of material on the subject in existence, to say nothing of the living giants of seventeenth-century research who stalk the land, I hope it may not also seem presumptuous. My aim has however been a different one from that of the scholars from whose works I liave derived such benefit. I have wished more simply to rescue the personality of Oliver Cromwell from the obscurity into which it seemed to me that it had fallen, just because there has been such an invaluable concentration of the political and social trends of the age in which he lived. It is at least possible to claim that Cromwell was the greatest Englishman. In the hopes of explaining to the general reader something of this remarkable man, I have set about my task—as one historian put it to me, half in jest—of "humanizing" Oliver Cromwell. In this context my debt to previous workers in the field will be obvious to all students of the period: In the field of biography alone there are two excellent modern studies: Robert S. Paul's The Lord Protector: Religion and Politics in the Life of Oliver Cromwell (1955) and Christopher Hill's God's Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (1970) whose sub-titles show their special fields. There is John Buchan's highly readable biography first published nearly forty years ago and going still further back Sir Charles Firth's unrivalled Oliver Cromwell and the Rule of the Puritans in England (1900). This is without delving further into the plethora of works pertinent to the subject, foremost among them W. C. Abbott's four-volume edition of Cromwell's Writ- 1 By birth a gentleman 1 was by birth a gentleman, living neither in any considerable height, nor yet in obscurity. oliver cromwell In the spring and on the eve of the seventeenth century, a son was bom to Robert and EUzabeth Cromwell of Huntingdon. The child was named Oliver; the date was 25 April 1599, four years before the end of the long reign of Queen Ehzabeth i. The house where this unexceptional birth took place lay in the main High Street of the little town: for all its modesty it did provide its own echoes of English history, having been built on the site of a thirteenth-century Augusiinian Friary, and in the course of its structure many of the original stones and part of the original foundations had been used.* A tradition arose later that Oliver had been born in the early hours of the morning, the preservation of which may be ascribed to the contemporary preoccupation with horoscopes. While his birth date gave him his sun in florid expansive Taurus, this early hour of his nativity added an ascendant in Aries, ruled by warlike Mars, especially satisfying to those who wanted the stars to give their imprimatur to events long since passed on earth. A later reckoning by John Partridge in the eighteenth century "containing the Nativity of that wonderful Phenomenon Oliver Cromwell calculated methodically according to the Pla-cidian canons" was based on an approximately 1:30 a.m. birth time. Not only was Mars, the planet of action, at home in its own sign of Aries, but there was further evidence of "a natural and native sharpness at all times," based on the conjunction of Mercury and the Sun. * Now known as Cromwell House and used by the Huntingdon Research Centre for their library. Since 1968 it has been marked by a large painted version of the Cromwell coat of arms on the exterior.