Images of Oliver Cromwell

Oliver Cromwell has been both applauded and reviled and his memory invoked in periods and in countries other than his own. This complex historiography has left us today with many different versions of Cromwell as man, general and statesman of which the conflicting images are the subject of this book.

Available in paperback for the first time, this classic study is based on the unfinished magnum opus of the leading scholar of seventeenth-century history, Roger Howell (1936?89). It includes chapters by a team of leading international experts on a broad range of subjects originally planned by Howell himself. It includes Howell’s studies of the reactions to Cromwell in the Restoration period and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Added to these are reprints of his essays on psychohistorical approaches to Cromwell and on Cromwell’s contribution to English liberty. Further historiographical portraits of the Protector are offered in chapters which consider Cromwell and the Glorious Revolution; Carlyle’s Cromwell; Irish images of the Protector; American interpretations; and the comparisons made between Cromwell and the twentieth-century dictators.