Titans of History

Cromwell first sat as an MP in the Parliament of 1628–9, making little impact. Charles I ruled without Parliament for the next 11 years, and Cromwell did not sit as an MP again until 1640. As tensions between Charles and the so-called Long Parliament began to build toward violent crisis, Cromwell’s puritan and oppositionist credentials began to come to the fore. But he showed his real worth as the Civil War broke out, first captaining a troop of cavalry at the Battle of Edgehill (October 23, 1642) and the next year forming his regiment of “Ironsides,” who were victorious at the Battle of Gainsborough (July 28, 1643). His handling of the cavalry at the Parliamentary victory of Marston Moor (July 2, 1644) secured his reputation nationally—though Cromwell was not interested in fame, regarding military success as an expression of God’s will in the struggle for English liberties. By now he was leader of Parliament’s Independent faction, determined not to compromise with the Royalists.

Cromwell and Parliament’s supreme military leader Thomas Fairfax created a disciplined new force, the New Model Army, which in the mid-1640s changed the course of the war in Parliament’s favor. The victorious Battle of Naseby (June 14, 1645) determined the outcome of the First Civil War.

Cromwell’s political centrality emerged in the years 1646–9, when he became power-broker between army, Parliament and the now-captive Charles in an attempt to restore a constitutional basis for government. But dealing with the slippery and inflexible Stuart monarch, who at root would brook no compromise to (as he saw it) his divinely inspired kingship, exhausted Cromwell. When Charles temporarily escaped in 1647 and sought to restart the war with the Scottish Presbyterians in support, Cromwell’s attitude hardened. Defeating the Royalist, Welsh and Scottish rebels in 1648, he backed the trial for treason of the king, a show trial that ended, predictably enough, in the execution of Charles. On the cold morning of Tuesday January 30, 1649, after a last walk in St. James’s Park, King Charles I, wearing two shirts lest his shivering against the cold be misinterpreted as fear, mounted the scaffold erected outside the Banqueting Hall in Whitehall. He had been condemned to death as “a tyrant, traitor, murderer and public enemy to the good of the nation.”

Charles, unrepentant and convinced that his death would make him a martyr for the Royalist cause, addressed the crowd. If his life was disastrous, his leaving it was heroic:

I think it is my duty to God first and to my country for to clear myself both as an honest man and a good King, and a good Christian. I shall begin first with my innocence

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In troth I think it not very needful for me to insist long upon this, for all the world knows that I never did begin a War with the two Houses of Parliament … they began upon me …

I have forgiven all the world, and even those in particular that have been the chief causes of my death. Who they are, God knows, I do not desire to know, God forgive them …

After inspecting the ax, he said:

I go from a corruptible, to an incorruptible Crown; where no disturbance can be, no disturbance in the World.

Having given the executioner his final instructions, the king knelt down, and his head was severed from his body with a single blow. That night, Cromwell reputedly gazed at the royal body and murmured “cruel necessity.”

Cromwell was now the most powerful man in England—head of the army and chairman of the council of state that ruled the new Commonwealth. But pro-Stuart Scotland and Ireland remained to be tamed.

Cromwell arrived in Ireland fearing that Charles I’s son and heir, Charles, Prince of Wales, would attempt to launch an invasion of England from Ireland, whose Catholic population was sympathetic to the Royalist cause. He determined to conquer the country as soon as possible, fearful of running out of funds and alarmed by the prospect of further political instability back in England.

One of Cromwell’s first targets in his campaign was the garrison town of Drogheda, to the north of Dublin. Commanding the garrison of just over 3000 English Royalist and Catholic Irish troops was an English Royalist, Sir Arthur Ashton. On September 10, 1649 Cromwell ordered Ashton to surrender, or the town would face the consequences.