Oliver Cromwell: New Perspectives

"This book really represents the best work by the younger generation of people who are rethinking Cromwell. It moves away from ideas of “Cromwell the soldier” and “Cromwell the religious enthusiast”, and looks at the much more material aspects of Cromwell’s life. It looks at his wealth. It looks at his acquisition of property. It looks at his patronage of architecture and the arts, and so on, as head of state. It actually deals with a series of questions which have been ignored by everybody up until now. With this book, we see a much more material Cromwell – though actually one who comes out reasonably well. He doesn’t appear to be too greedy or selfish. This approach offers lots of very fresh ideas about him, and therefore – particularly for those who think they know quite a lot about Cromwell – it adds quite a lot. I think the time is right for a really major hostile biography. There have been perhaps 30 biographies of Cromwell since World War II , and all of them take his account of himself very seriously. Now, I also do that myself, but there are rumblings. There are scholars who keep saying, “This needs really to be tested – there’s too much of people repeating themselves.” I think a major new biography could be much more hostile, seeing Cromwell as driven much more by personal ambition, and much less religious than he makes out that he is. The central paradox is that virtually nobody who wrote about Cromwell who knew him personally believed that he was as sincere a Puritan as he made out. They all think he’s a bit of a hypocrite. And on the whole, historians think they’re wrong, and they explain why they think people are wrong to misjudge him. But the time has come to turn that on its head and say, “If we take all this contemporary criticism seriously, what does it add up to?” I think that’s going to be the next major development in Cromwell studies. And if it’s well done, there will be a much more interesting debate."