Person66 Wrote:As an American, I don't understand everything you're talking about, but from what I learned in High School European History: Oliver Cromwell was a religious fanatic who (as OrphsnPip mentions above) shut down the theatres and banned things like celebrating Christmas, until the British people hah had enough. He's hardy a national fugue to revere. Correct me if I'm wrong, as in the U.S. we receive ten times the Amount of American History, as world history, and European history has been further marginalized as schools don't want to seem too "Euro-Cenrtic" (AKA: white).
Cromwell's legacy is complicated.
As a military commander, he was accused even in his own time of using excessive force against the Royalist in Scotland, and against the Catholics in Ireland. He participated in mass slaughters of civilians at a time when that had gone out of style in European warfare.
As a politician, he was fiercely anti-Catholic and his Puritan values resulted in a number of constraints on the lives of the British, based on the idea that the state should be the moral guardian of the people.
However, he also lead the first republican government (in the sense of a government without monarchy) in England. He's a rags to riches story in a sense, since he rose from the middle class to the leader of the nation, largely on the back of his prowess as a military commander. He was a reformer of military strategy, and laid the groundwork for England's professional army. I think Cromwell stands in for the values of the revolution to begin with, which would be personal liberty against a tyrant, but he himself didn't really reflect those values too much in his later years.
Thomas Fairfax, the other prominent military figure of the civil war, had originally supported Cromwell, because he believed in the principles of the civil war. But he eventually withdrew from participation as Cromwell grew increasingly just as bad as what he replaced, specifically Fairfax objected to the execution of Charles and the pre-emptive invasion of Scotland. Milton also grew largely contemptuous of the Cromwell government. He was a contentious figure even for those who knew and worked with him.
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