How is oliver cromwell viewed today

Taxes, including those levied specifically against ex-Royalists, helped to stabilise finances, pay for a standing Army and for reforms. The Navy was also enlarged. Jews were formally readmitted into the country for the first time since The strategy was deeply unpopular. Charles II was restored to the throne in and the backlash against the republican hero began.

Cromwell was declared a traitor, his body hauled from Westminster Abbey and subjected to posthumous execution. Even today mystery surrounds the whereabouts of his remains, although his head was bequeathed in to his old Cambridge college where it is immured in the anti-chapel.

The country got on with life under the Merry Monarch Charles II, but Cromwell and the ideals of the Commonwealth were not so easily forgotten. If Cromwell had acted in a despotic manner, it was later argued, this was not due to self-righteous hypocrisy, but because the turbulent times demanded it. Reform had been patchy yet social order had been maintained; the republican experiment had failed but a decisive blow for the rights of Parliament had been struck on the way to fairer government that would include constitutional monarchy.

Click here to subscribe! Consider the opposing points of view and make your own thoughts felt below. Sounds over the top? Not really. Oliver Cromwell was a brutal military leader who believed in not just beating his enemies but decimating them.

No wonder the English Civil War helped make his name, propelling him to the top of the Roundhead food chain in the battle against Royalist forces. But war is necessarily bloody and brutal, you might say. Fair enough, but what of Cromwell's vicious, almost genocidal conquest of Ireland?

In the wake of Charles I's execution, Cromwell led his army to take on the Catholics and Royalists in Ireland, whom he regarded as a threat to the new republic. This was no mere political issue, though. Cromwell's bigotry was also behind it: his contempt for Catholicism meant he would show no mercy during this notoriously violent campaign.

In September , Cromwell's men entered the town of Drogheda and slaughtered almost everyone they found. It's estimated that around 3, locals were killed by Cromwell's forces, including many hundreds of ordinary civilians. Historians still debate the nuances of this outrageous event, and Cromwell's culpability. But let's take the man's own word for it, because Cromwell himself wrote of the massacre: "I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches.

He rose to become the first commoner to become Head of State in British history. Cromwell divides opinions: partly this is down to those after the Restoration who wanted blacken his name, partly because some of his actions, such as his Irish campaign, were controversial even during his lifetime and continue to cause discussion and debate even today.

Some love him; others loathe him — either way he is impossible to ignore. The modern British army was founded from the New Modelled Army that Cromwell helped found and led so effectively. Cromwell was a key figure in the trial and execution of King Charles I. This was the first time that a monarch had been deposed and put on trial by his own people, as opposed to being simply deposed by a rival royal.

For most of the 18th century, Cromwell was seen as a dictator who ruled by force. In the 19th century, however, the Whig historians liked Cromwell's strict morality and strong foreign policy. They portrayed him as the hero of democracy who saved the country from the tyranny of Charles I. S R Gardiner — who was a descendent of Cromwell — declared him the greatest Englishman of all time. Cromwell's reputation took a nose-dive in the s.