Turning 406 today...

Today is Oliver Cromwell's birthday. Cromwell led Parliament's armies to victory over Royalist forces during the English Civil War (1642-1649), and subsequently wound-up ruling Britain for the next nine years - at first implicitly, and later explicitly under the title of Lord Protector - until his death (from, most likely, natural causes) in 1658. He also led reconquest campaigns in Scotland and Ireland (occasionally brutal), both of which had moved towards independence before and during the conflict, and played a significant role in the trial and execution of Charles I - all of which have made him a controversial subject, one of endless historical debate. Was Oliver Cromwell a revolutionary bent on destroying everything that made Britain great? Or was the English Civil War - and by extension its most central figure - a major turning point in the history of constitutional republicanism?

I spent much of my college career studying Cromwell, and he remains the historical figure with which I am still most fascinated. Even now, as I write this, I have a framed print on my wall entitled "Cromwell Refusing the Crown of England", which idealizes the moment when Cromwell refused to assume the position of monarch and start a new royal dynasty of Cromwells. (I say "idealizes" because although Cromwell's supporters have argued that he shunned the crown in order to show his devotion to republican ideals, and furthermore as proof that he wasn't interested in personal power, thing weren't so simple, and in fact Cromwell did seriously consider assuming the crown).

He fascinates me for a number of reasons, probably none moreso than his sheer obscurity before the civil war erupted. Cromwell was in his forties before he rose to any sort of prominence, in a time when the life expectancy was 48! He had no prior military experience, and only limited political experience. Yet he emerged as the savior of Parliament's armies on the battlefield, and managed a political balancing act of monumental proportions between 1649 and 1658 as he held both the army and successive Parliaments in place - and away from each other's throats. While his repeated experiments with republican government were undoubtedly failures, they remain Britain's only efforts at a written constitution, 350 years later. And there is no question that James II was thinking of his father's fate when he threw in the towel thirty years later and allowed Parliament to exercise their ultimate supremacy during the Glorious Revolution, seen by many as the (successful) coda to the English Civil War.

That Oliver Cromwell made mistakes, or did things we would find difficult to accept today, is unquestionable. But I have always felt that he was ultimately the right man for a difficult time, as well as a modest and relatively uncorruptible figure who assumed power more for lack of choice than anything else. History is littered with plenty of examples of nations who could have well used a Cromwell-like figure during their time of distress, but were left instead with Napoleons, Lenins, and Francos.

Ironic epilogue: Perhaps by coincidence, the copy of the Stiff Little Fingers' Inflammable Material that I ordered a few weeks ago showed up this morning. I had never heard any of their material before, but had seen them described as "the Irish Clash", so I had a pretty good idea of what to expect. I was quickly hooked by tracks like "Suspect Device" and "Law and Order", and spent most of the day playing the entire CD over and over while I worked. It could have hardly been more incongrous to spend the day thinking of a man who (among many other things) crushed Ireland's nascent independence movement while listening to a record chiefly concerned with the effects of Britain's continued possesssion of (a portion of) Ireland a few centuries later.