Ever since Thomas Carlyle first launched his Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell on the world in 1845, the Lord Protector’s published words have exercised an almost mesmeric hold on posterity. Overnight, they transformed a figure who had hitherto been a byword for villainy – was he not the killer of King Charles I? – into a hero for the new Victorian age: a God-fearing, class-transcending champion of ‘russet-coated captains’ who became Britain’s first non-royal head of state. His words resonated with a newly politically ascendant and morally earnest middle class. And in Hamo Thornycroft’s vast sculpture installed outside Westminster Hall in 1899, the Carlylean transformation of Oliver begun by the Letters and Speeches found its embodiment in bronze.

Cromwell’s letters and speeches have long beguiled and frustrated the great man’s biographers. Most concur that they hold the key to the inwardness of this most inscrutable and turbulent of souls, even if, so far, that key has never quite turned in the lock. Ever more scholarly editions of his collected writings have followed. Since 1845, a new one has appeared roughly every fifty years, the latest in 2023, as though if only we could establish an authoritative text of Cromwell’s words the authentic man might finally emerge.

Ronald Hutton’s magnificent new biography, now reaching its second volume, takes a radically different approach. Already in the first volume, published in 2019 and taking Cromwell from his birth in 1599 to 1646, Hutton adopted a far more sceptical attitude towards Cromwellian holy writ, accepting Cromwell’s own account of events only where this could be independently verified. Hutton was fully alive to his extraordinary qualities – to the persuasive if rough-hewn parliamentary orator, the self-taught but brilliant master of military strategy, the born-again Puritan with an intensely personal relationship with an all-guiding God. But careful testing of Cromwell’s own version of events also revealed him as an ambitious self-promoter who lied shamelessly to blacken his rivals and get them out of the way, and as a man who was ruthless in killing ‘God’s enemies’ but seemed to enjoy it a little too much. 

This new volume covers a much shorter period than the first – the seven years from 1647 to 1653 – but it is perhaps the most crisis-filled and controversial in British history, an era that witnessed the rise of the Parliamentarian army as an independent player in British politics, the trial and execution of the king, England’s transformation from a monarchy into a republic, and a succession of bloody wars that imposed the new government’s rule throughout the British Isles.

Those years also saw the most vertiginous rise to power witnessed in Europe before Napoleon’s. At their outset, Cromwell was just one of a number of prominent army officer MPs; by 1653 he was the conqueror of all four Stuart nations and on the verge of becoming their quasi-king. In almost every important event of the intervening years, Cromwell was there.

That, however, is where the historical consensus ends. How much Cromwell was involved; how far he was responsible for outcomes; the motives and purposes of his actions: all these remain hotly disputed. Hutton’s narrative is therefore a miracle of concision. In just under four hundred fast-paced pages, he tracks Cromwell’s involvement in an astonishingly complex and historically contested series of events, confounding any number of hoary orthodoxies along the way.

Hutton is less interested in penetrating the inner recesses of Cromwell’s soul than in gauging his impact on the world around him. In his retelling, Cromwell’s actions lose nothing of their boldness and grandeur, but his account often reveals a deep hypocrisy and consequences that were profoundly malign. Nowhere were these more evident, Hutton contends, than in Cromwell’s actions in obstructing a viable political settlement with the king after the First Civil War’s end in 1646. In the spring of 1647, the English Parliament was on the verge of reaching a settlement with Charles I that would have reinstated the monarch with limited powers and established a new centralised national church, whose expected first task was the suppression of the multitude of religious sects that had proliferated amid the disorders of civil war.

Cromwell, who counted himself one of these sectaries, viewed things very differently. These were ‘God’s people’, the religious radicals whom he had actively favoured as officers, first within his own regiment and then in the ‘new-modelled’ Parliamentarian army. His dependence on their allegiance, Hutton suggests, locked Cromwell into a Faustian pact: he could not abandon his fellow sectaries to future persecution, but that in turn committed him to rejecting any postwar settlement that the majority in Parliament was likely to produce.

Protecting those ‘brethren’ became the lodestar that guided his actions for most of his political career. Apart from an abortive foray into negotiations with the king in the late summer of 1647, Cromwell was consistently at the forefront of the army’s efforts to avert a settlement, from the spring of 1647 through to the army’s full-scale coup d’état over the winter of 1648–9. In the revolution that followed – which saw the trial and execution of the king and the creation of a new English republic – Cromwell sought to create a world that would at last be safe for himself and his fellow Puritan ‘saints’.

Yet there was a mendacious little worm at the centre of Cromwell’s pious heart. In reality, Hutton points out, Cromwell and his religiously radical kind were never more than a small fraction of the population. As early as the end of 1647, they had already alienated ‘a very large number – almost certainly the majority – of the people of England’. And their actions during the revolution of 1648–9, Hutton argues, ‘were a blow to democracy, whether defined by the standards of [their] times or of ours’. Time and again, Cromwell and his army allies claimed to be intervening to uphold the ‘liberties of the people’, while in reality they were ‘acting in [their] own selfish interests’. 

That revolution also propelled Cromwell to the summit of military power. Appointed to command the new republic’s army in the summer of 1649, he was charged with securing the fledgling state against revanchist Royalists, first in Ireland in 1649 and then in Scotland the following year. In his thrilling account of the campaigns (a good third of the book overall), Hutton is never short of admiration for Cromwell’s brilliance as a general. But he is also at pains to reassess impartially what is often alleged as the greatest stain on Cromwell’s reputation: his massacre of surrendering garrisons as part of his programme of holy war. Hutton convicts Cromwell of the mass killing of nearly all the 3,000-strong Royalist force at Drogheda, the first town taken by storm in the Cromwellian reconquest of Ireland, in September 1649, but exonerates him of the charge, long part of Irish nationalist lore, of murdering the entire civilian population there as well.

Contemporary Puritans were of course used to regarding the killing of ‘God’s enemies’ as pious work. Hutton discerns something altogether darker in Cromwell’s attitude to this task: he was someone who ‘had always been a killer’ and who ‘exulted in the pursuit and slaughter of fleeing enemies’ with a zealotry that was extreme even by the standards of the time. During the campaigns in Protestant Scotland, where the surrendering garrisons were smaller, the proportion slaughtered, Hutton suggests, was probably not very different from the proportion killed in the worst of the massacres in Ireland. ‘Oliver’, he concludes, ‘saw himself as an ancient Hebrew prophet … with a direct and ongoing interaction with his deity, to enable a chosen people to achieve the divine plan for it’ – whether the vast majority of these islands’ inhabitants shared it or not.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the chief beneficiary of this revisionism is Charles I, hitherto seen as the prime obstacle to a settlement after the First Civil War. Long characterised as inept and double-dealing, the king has been blamed for recklessly playing one faction off against another until, in the end, he alienated them all. While not blind to Charles’s shortcomings, Hutton nevertheless presents him as a principled figure with whom an agreement would have been possible but for the repeated interventions of the army, and as someone well aware that he, and not General Cromwell, had the majority of the population on his side.

As old assumptions are confounded and reputations reassessed, Hutton still finds time to evoke the visual dimension of the past – the appearance of people, places and landscapes – with cinematographic skill: the ‘dome-headed’ John Lilburne, with his ‘bob of hair and … natty moustache’; Saffron Walden, where the army met in May 1647, with its woodland floors an ‘azure haze of bluebells’; the ‘pale grey stone hulk’ of the Banqueting House in front of which Charles I met his end.

Hutton’s life of Cromwell is still a work in progress. But with two volumes now in print, it is already a monumental achievement – the first in the great battalion of Cromwellian biographies to escape the long shadow cast by the Carlylean figure standing outside Westminster Hall.