Oliver Cromwell (Penguin Monarchs): England's Protector

Oliver Cromwell (Penguin Monarchs): England's Protector

by David Horspool (Author), David Horspool (Author)

Synopsis

The acclaimed Penguin Monarchs series: short, fresh, expert accounts of England's rulers - now in paperback Although he styled himself 'His Highness', adopted the court ritual of his royal predecessors, and lived in the former royal palaces of Whitehall and Hampton Court, Oliver Cromwell was not a king - in spite of the best efforts of his supporters to crown him. Yet, as David Horspool shows in this illuminating new portrait of England's Lord Protector, Cromwell, the Puritan son of Cambridgeshire gentry, wielded such influence that it would be a pretence to say that power really lay with the collective. The years of Cromwell's rise to power, shaped by a decade-long civil war, saw a sustained attempt at the collective government of England; the first attempts at a real Union of Britain; the beginnings of empire; a radically new solution to the idea of a national religion; atrocities in Ireland; and the readmission to England of the Jews, a people officially banned for over three and a half centuries. At the end of it, Oliver Cromwell had emerged as the country's sole ruler: to his enemies, and probably to most of his countrymen, his legacy looked as likely to last as that of the Stuart dynasty he had replaced.

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More Information

Format: paperback
Publisher: Penguin
Published:

ISBN 10: 014198869X
ISBN 13: 9780141988696
Book Overview: The acclaimed Penguin Monarchs series- short, fresh, expert accounts of England's rulers - now in paperback.

Media Reviews
Accessible and compelling. --Guardian
Author Bio
David Horspool is the History Editor of the Times Literary Supplement, and the author of Why Alfred Burned the Cakes: A king and his eleven-hundred-year afterlife, The English Rebel: One thousand years of troublemaking from the Normans to the Nineties, and Richard III: A ruler and his reputation. He co-edited The People Speak: Voices that changed Britain with Anthony Arnove and Colin Firth.