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Was Oliver Cromwell - founder of the British empire - the greatest ever Englishman?
The Daily Mail UK ^ | 1st January 2011 | Dominic Sandbrook

Posted on 12/31/2010 10:16:57 PM PST by Alex Murphy

In many ways, though, what drove Cromwell was his burning religious passion.

Around 1630, when his financial woes were at their worst, he went through a dramatic religious conversion, becoming convinced that God had marked him out for eternal salvation.

‘Oh, have I lived in and loved darkness and hated the light,’ he wrote a few years later. ‘I was a chief, the chief of sinners . . . I hated godliness; yet God had mercy upon me. O the riches of His mercy!’

But Cromwell was not merely exceptionally religious. He belonged to a particular religious group — the Puritans — who believed that the frivolous Charles I, with his stubborn faith in the Divine Right of Kings and his fondness for elaborate Catholic-style church ceremonies, was betraying the Protestant Reformation.

A century earlier, Henry VIII’s tumultuous break with Roman Catholicism had given rise to a new sense of English identity, rooted in Protestant independence, localism and individualism, and fiercely antagonistic to Continental European influence. But to England’s Protestant middle classes, the return of Papal rule remained a genuine and terrifying threat.

Given his wild mood swings between jubilation and gloom, some biographers have suggested that he suffered from manic depression. That might explain why he laughed ‘as if he had been drunk’ after the Battle of Dunbar. To men like Cromwell, the sinister armies of international Catholicism were always poised to strike across the Channel and extinguish English Protestantism for ever.

And to those who remembered the Spanish Armada and the Gunpowder Plot, and who were horrified by news of the Thirty Years War, the gigantic conflict that tore much of central Europe apart as Spain, France, Sweden and Holland battled for supremacy at the cost of some ten million lives, their fears seemed all too realistic.

(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...


TOPICS: Catholic; History; Mainline Protestant; Religion & Politics
KEYWORDS: dominicsandbrook; serialmurderer
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To: mmercier
...I think Arthur is the most famous Britisher, specifically because his existence is in question. Oliver Cromwell... No one today knows or cares about him...

LOL. Hungover, or still drunk?

61 posted on 01/01/2011 4:55:25 AM PST by Byron_the_Aussie (Michelle Obama, The Early Years: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBYGxBlFOSU)
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To: NoControllingLegalAuthority
...when Charles II finally resumed the throne of England, he had Cromwell executed...

What?

62 posted on 01/01/2011 4:58:29 AM PST by Byron_the_Aussie (Michelle Obama, The Early Years: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBYGxBlFOSU)
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To: NoControllingLegalAuthority

After the execution of King Charles I in 1649, Cromwell dominated the short-lived Commonwealth of England, conquered Ireland and Scotland, and ruled as Lord Protector from 1653 until his death from a combination of malarial fever and septicaemia in 1658.

from wikepedia and other sites...


63 posted on 01/01/2011 5:02:58 AM PST by nikos1121 (Praying for the big -24 today and -27 by the end of the month.)
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To: Darren McCarty
..should Cromwell have been offed much sooner than he was? Absolutely, for being in the same class of mass murderer as Saddam Hussein, Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot...

Cromwell wasn't 'offed.' Cromwell wasn't a 'mass murderer.' I'm guessing you were born too late for No Child Left Behind?

64 posted on 01/01/2011 5:12:10 AM PST by Byron_the_Aussie (Michelle Obama, The Early Years: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBYGxBlFOSU)
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To: Alex Murphy

That would be the ONLY Englishman the English themselves granted the sobriquet “Greast” to: Alfred the Great, the man who kept England from going down completely to the Danes.


65 posted on 01/01/2011 5:42:25 AM PST by PzLdr ("The Emperor is not as forgiving as I am" - Darth Vader)
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To: Byron_the_Aussie

Thank you;)

It does help to read the article in full - and to remember that for 400 years, history has been written by Royalists and the Vatican.

Irish Catholics were given Cromwell as a boogy-man while the Monarchs and Popes continued to control and oppress (taxes & tythes).


66 posted on 01/01/2011 5:46:03 AM PST by sodpoodle (Despair; man's surrender. Laughter; God 's redemption.)
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To: catfish1957
I don't know if you would consider him the greatest, but William's little excursion in 1066 is most profound event in Anglo history.

That imposed a French aristocracy on England for about three centuries, but the underlying English culture was little changed.

Now Hengst's little excursion six centuries earlier, that was a game changer.

67 posted on 01/01/2011 6:03:17 AM PST by Oztrich Boy (History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce - Karl Marx)
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To: skeptoid

Words that would be apropos to the most recent session of the US congress.


68 posted on 01/01/2011 6:04:01 AM PST by Senator John Blutarski (The progress of government: republic, democracy, technocracy, bureaucracy, plutocracy, kleptocracy,)
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To: Persevero
The information I posted was obtained from Conservapedia

The religious history of the Reformation is a lot more complicated than the simple minded "Calvanists versus Catholics" view of Conservapedia,

e.g. why, after 1650, was the Presbyterian church supporting Charles II against Cromwell?

69 posted on 01/01/2011 6:10:40 AM PST by Oztrich Boy (History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce - Karl Marx)
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To: RegulatorCountry

You are wasting your time, although I admire the effort. I don’t think I have ever seen such an historically illiterate set of posts on FR. The “grudge” was manufactured by centuries of Stuart and Catholic historiography. This thread resembles nothing so much as Orwell’s three minute hate.

If you want to read a contemporary account of Cromwell and his life, Lady Antonia Frazier’s biography is detailed and quite good.


70 posted on 01/01/2011 6:19:01 AM PST by achilles2000 ("I'll agree to save the whales as long as we can deport the liberals")
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To: mmercier

Elizabeth I


71 posted on 01/01/2011 6:20:57 AM PST by reg45
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To: Alex Murphy

Cromwell was the devil personified.


72 posted on 01/01/2011 6:35:36 AM PST by frithguild (The Democrat Party Brand - Big Government protecting Entrenched Interests from Competition)
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To: RegulatorCountry
Well, in the spirit of historical comparison, Cromwell is to Irish Catholics what William Tecumseh Sherman is to southerners.

Worse. It might be similar if Sherman took ownership the land for good.

73 posted on 01/01/2011 6:39:53 AM PST by frithguild (The Democrat Party Brand - Big Government protecting Entrenched Interests from Competition)
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To: familyop
Cromwell was one of the predecessors of our American founding fathers for religious freedom.

Um, no. Cromwell was a tyrant in matters of religion as in other matters, who imposed by force of arms his own Calvinist views on the Church of England. If he was for religious freedom, it was religious freedom for me, but not for thee. The same as his fellow Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

The real champions of religious freedom were the Quakers and the "recusants" (as persistent Latins in England were called), and the same when it came to this side of the Atlantic: William Penn and Lord Baltimore established colonies with religious freedom. Puritan Congregationalism was established in Massachusetts, and Anglicanism in Virginia.

74 posted on 01/01/2011 6:44:24 AM PST by The_Reader_David (And when they behead your own people in the wars which are to come, then you will know. . .)
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To: familyop
Cromwell was one of the predecessors of our American founding fathers for religious freedom.

Yeah, right. The kind where you can got to Hell or to Connacht.

75 posted on 01/01/2011 6:58:02 AM PST by frithguild (The Democrat Party Brand - Big Government protecting Entrenched Interests from Competition)
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To: NoControllingLegalAuthority

“When Charles II finally resumed the throne of England, he had Cromwell executed and Cromwell’s body was left hanging in public for a very long time.”

Cromwell died of illness, and was later “posthumously executed” - and then his body was left hanging.

During time of the English Civil War, it would be difficult to end up universally appreciated. One can surmise that that a “posthumous execution” could be an indicator of a lack of universal appreciation.

Cromwell was a great leader at a time England needed one. Those that would judge him by standards of today change very little, most especially their own ignorance - just as those who “executed” him changed little, from a practical standpoint.

I suspect neither England nor America would be the same without him - for better or worse.


76 posted on 01/01/2011 7:01:51 AM PST by RFEngineer
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To: Brass Lamp

Excellent and succinct post.


77 posted on 01/01/2011 7:06:57 AM PST by headsonpikes (Genocide is the highest sacrament of socialism - "Who-whom?")
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To: achilles2000

“I don’t think I have ever seen such an historically illiterate set of posts on FR.”

Bravo. You can’t fix this sort of willful, trained ignorance, so you may as well laugh at it.


78 posted on 01/01/2011 7:08:08 AM PST by RFEngineer
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To: Brass Lamp; familyop

Some of the Williams who settled Rhode Island and later Connecticut were supposedly related to Cromwell.


79 posted on 01/01/2011 7:17:49 AM PST by ladyjane
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To: Alex Murphy

I’m just a lonely boy
Lonely and blue
I’m all alone
With nothin’ to do

I’ve got everything
You could think of
But all I want
Is someone to love

Someone, yes, someone to love
Someone to kiss
Someone to hold
At a moment like this

I’d like to hear
Somebody say
I’ll give you my love
Each night and day

I’m just a lonely boy
Lonely and blue
I’m all alone
With nothin’ to do

I’ve got everything
You could think of
But all I want
Is someone to love

Somebody, somebody
Somebody, please
Send her to me
I’ll make her happy
Just wait and see

I prayed so hard
To the heavens above
That I might find
Someone to love

I’m just a lonely boy
lonely and blue
I’m all alone
With nothin’ to do

I’ve got everything
You could think of
But all I want
Is someone to love


80 posted on 01/01/2011 7:38:52 AM PST by Oratam
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