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Hello, listeners. Welcome to Pods with Nick and James. I'm your co-host, James.
As always, here with me today is Nick. Say hello, Nick.
Hi, James. How are you doing?
Yeah, not too bad. Not too bad.
So today's topic is one of the most controversial figures in English history, at least.
It is the man, the myth, the legend, Oliver Cromwell.
Although there is a lot to discuss on this character, the way that we're going to try and structure this today is that I myself will be trying to put forward Oliver Cromwell
and the Puritan movement, and well, I'd say the Puritan, I mean more the parliamentarian movement in a positive fashion,
whereas Nick will be standing up for the royalists and kind of poo-pooing Oliver Cromwell and the things that he did throughout the course of his life.
Just as a quick backdrop, Oliver Cromwell lived in, well, he was born in 1599 and died in 1658.
So this is slightly after, if I'm honest with you, it's slightly after the Renaissance, but right before the Enlightenment.
Black powder weapons are a thing, but people still use cavalry and people still use swords and armour is still used, so it hasn't been fully phased out.
This is a time of feudal rule, so the king has all of the power, but would often require parliament in order to authenticate their rule, but also to enforce things.
It is a really interesting time in British history, but it's also a time of mass cruelty and corruption,
as there are a number of problems with these systems and we'll get into it.
I'm not quite sure how to start, Nick, do you want me to try and put one thing, like a really positive element of Cromwell's character, which you then come at me from the royalist view?
Yeah, we can do that. Let's just start a conversation from the beginning, I suppose. Where did Oliver Cromwell start?
Okay, so Oliver Cromwell started in his hometown of Huntington. He grew up in this small town and it's interesting that Cromwell's grandfather came from Wales and married into minor English nobility.
Well, the Cromwell family. So, yeah, so Cromwell could argue that he came from nobility from Wales or nobility from England.
His family was incredibly prolific. So if you look up Cromwell through the journals of history, you will find loads of people called Cromwell.
He's such an influential figure that over 250 roads in England are named after him.
And there are more speeches by him on record than any previous leader all the way up until Queen Victoria of the Victorian age.
He was, he had a lot of family. He was very, he had, has a lot of speeches which are written down. But he started from fairly humble beginnings.
He was a minor member of the gentry, but at one point in his life did have to farmland himself in order to make money.
He was always getting bits and pieces. Like he was always sort of wheeler dealing a little bit in his younger years.
And yeah, he, when he had his, when he had his conversion into Puritanism, he, it is very much, yeah, he very much marks upon how he regrets some of the decisions he made in early life.
He, one thing I will say about him is that he, he very rarely took the easy way out. He was definitely not a coward.
And he very much had strong beliefs in how things were done.
One of the things that, so he grew up in a town called Huntington. He moved in his 20s to another town down the River Ouse.
Gotta love that name, calling a river the River Ouse. To St Ives and then further down that same river to Ely.
Something that we've also taken for granted in this country is drainage, which seems to have been a massive problem back then with Ely being almost listed as, or referred to several times as an island.
Well it was called the Isle of Ely wasn't it? If you look on even the old maps, it was the Isle of Ely.
Exactly. And that was due to it being in the middle of the fens and surrounded by basically mire and bog.
It's interesting that you get the same with some of the towns like Rye, close to Romney Marsh and all of that. You get the same sort of thing.
Loads of places being referred to as islands and you look around and it's just like, well I don't see any water.
Well yeah, I mean the history of Rye is a bit different. They added an arm to the river, out the sea and that drained a lot of the flats of the natural sea float that would be there.
Rye originally only had one land bridge, or it was surrounded on three sides by water, self-contained. I suppose it was a peninsula more than anything. Not so much an island, more of a peninsula.
Ely was surrounded by wet, not necessarily water like ocean, but it was definitely bog and streams and rivers and stuff like that. And it was the only hill in sight. I don't know if you've ever been up that way?
One of the most incredible features of that entire landscape is the fact that there isn't a hill in sight until you get to Ely.
I lived in Littleport which is a tiny village, or a little, I suppose it is a village, just outside of Ely. And it's flat, flat as far as the eyes can see. Anyway, that's me digressing. That's a little bit about the geography.
That's fine. Okay, so just as a quick thing, I guess I'll start off is that it almost feels like politics is almost a little bit of a game of the rich at this point in history.
Yeah, but he wasn't rich. He had some money. He didn't even finish his degree at college.
No, but he did speak enough Latin so that later on in his career when being addressed in Latin he could respond.
He could truly fake it until he made it, absolutely. But he dropped out of college and took over family affairs after his father died.
Yeah, no, absolutely. Well, I guess this is my point. He started from fairly humble beginnings and there are elements of integrity.
He didn't like the dramatic. He didn't like flowery language. He was very much in your face, tell it as it is, or at the very least as he sees it.
He didn't appreciate people being on the fence. He was always, you're either with me or you're against me.
One thing I like about him is that during his time in early Parliament, so before the war had even begun, when Charles had called a Parliament together,
he so often championed the rights of the commons or the rights of the common people versus, if I'm honest with you, some pretty dodgy laws and pretty dodgy money-making schemes that the aristocracy were coming into in order to make additional money and suppress the poor.
I don't think I agree with that. The Royals had a right to increase taxes if they chose to. His marriage to Elizabeth Bourdieu was the starting point of this.
It gave him a purpose. She was always aligned with this kind of religious reform movement and she spoke quite highly of moving away from royal rule and wanted more, wanted the power distributed equally to leadership states.
It almost promoted him getting his first election in Huntington as MP. As soon as he got into that position, he started to sow the seeds of, look at the money that they've always, look at how much money the Royals want.
This isn't fair. The issue you've got there is that the money is still required to run the country. As we all know, over time, the cost of that running increases, the taxes go up.
That's all it comes down to. Yet, it gives a very easy standpoint for someone to get their foot in the door because there are always going to be people that are upset about that fact, about the fact that taxes do have to increase.
He used that as a stepping stone to be heard and to get his name out there. That's how I feel.
I'll freely admit that taxes did need to be raised, but that was because Charles, King Charles, who was the son of King James I of England and King James VI of Scotland, not them being two separate people who were in a gay marriage, but them both being the same person.
King James I united England and Scotland, and yet within even 10 years of Charles' rule, even though he is literally the son, he should have had good connections up in Scotland, and yet he turned the Scottish against himself and declared war on other countries and just didn't do stuff.
Also, the particular cases that Cromwell got involved with often didn't necessarily help himself.
It was about protecting the... oh, so, okay, so there used to be something called common land where any farmer could have their cattle grazed, and everywhere used to have these places, yet specifically in Huntington, in St Ives, in Ely, there would always be a noble or a church official
trying to eat into the common land and claim it as their own and say, okay, nobody else can use this, this is mine.
And on a number of occasions he, Cromwell, stepped in and made sure that these lands were kept for the use of the public. This wasn't a time, this wasn't like a fame thing necessarily, he just literally stepped in and always called people out on their wrongs.
ALICE Well, the nobles don't, they're not land keepers themselves, they don't know these laws, like he came from land ownership himself, like Oliver Cromwell probably knew the laws around land ownership better than these nobles did, so he can excuse their ignorance.
BEN Well, I think, no, I think that quite often it was deliberate machinations, if you will, or deliberate schemes in order to gain power.
Although I'm not opposed to bishops myself, Cromwell was also against the mixture of church and state that was going on at this time.
At this time, listeners, just so you know, it wasn't enough to be Christian or not Christian with a lot of the rights that we have now of religious freedom, freedom of speech, you know, freedom of thought, freedom of just politics generally, although these things are slowly being squashed in today's age.
There was none of it, there was no freedom back then.
Not only was church attendance in many places mandatory, but if you were the wrong type of Christian, you could be persecuted against.
It's difficult for me to side with Cromwell's fervour against the Catholics, although I can understand why people might be opposed to Rome having a say in how the English conduct themselves, but this was shortly after the reformation of the church and Protestantism was still going strong.
And yeah, people didn't have the freedom. If you were Catholic, you could, outside of a Catholic community, you could expect to be persecuted.
But it goes even further than that.
Yeah, if you...
Okay, so, Nick, are you aware of the difference between a Calvinist and an Arminian?
No.
No, I'm not.
Okay.
In terms, Calvinist is named after John Calvin, who was a preacher and an Arminian, I can't remember the exact term, but Calvinism believes in divine predestination, in that those who are going to believe and going to be saved and going to go to heaven and be loved by God are already predetermined, so there's nothing you can do about it one way or the other.
Whereas Armenians believe that by preaching, you can save more people, and that you should do everything that you can in order to convince as many people as you can that there's right, but even between those two things, you've then got Puritanism, which has a lot in common with Arminianism,
but also shrugs off any of the reverence for high church.
It's really kind of frustrating as a believer in Jesus myself, seeing just how, I hate to say it, petty a lot of these factions were, like with their theology, the smallest change in, not even change in religion, like this is, if you were Catholic, you were right out, let alone if you were Jewish, Hindu,
Muslim, anything else, if you were Catholic you were right out, if you were part of an Armenian community and you came out as Puritan, you can expect to be expelled from that, if you were from a high church or Lord's background, you could expect just all the different factions were constantly going after each other and vying for power all the time,
and it was just genuinely, it's frustrating, like genuinely speaking it's just frustrating to read about.
It's not divided in secular, especially when it came to religious standing, it wasn't rethinking at all, back then, which I think is frustrating, but it was also 5, 480, 380 years ago.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
The kind of revolution that we're seeing with religion has only come in the last 100.
Yeah, what really frustrates me, okay so this is one of the good things.
At this time, there was, church and state were still intertwined.
And within that, good people would, you know, like do their best to live well, but you would get a lot of bad people who would manipulate the system and manipulate the gray areas and the fine print to their own advantage, as we all do, as we're human beings and Cromwell was a great advocate for standing up for this sort of thing.
For example, a number of bishops were in the House of Lords at this time, this was something that Cromwell opposed, as he was very much, he believed that it was all God's will anyway, but he was very much against people having their hands in too many pockets.
And it's also really interesting that some land owners and some Lords were directly allowed to take a share of the tithes that were given by the poor to the church.
And it was, this is a time where you had some bishops able to tax people on their own land in a secular environment and hold offices in secular government, whilst also being the head of a large religious, not the whole institution but being high up in that institution.
And you had people in political office who were able to sway religious institutions. So just the fact that things were so intertwined, I feel that Cromwell was right to try and separate the two.
He closed Ely Cathedral and used it as a stable for his cavalry for 10 years.
Yeah, I will admit, he was very much against anything that was grand.
And there are several cases of what he did.
He was happy for people to have simple churches, but he did not like the existence of organs, he did not like the existence of stained glass.
He was very austere.
Yeah, if there was too many carvings on a church, then he would hate it. There are several things where he did damage church property because his belief that it should be solely about God and none of the additional flammable.
He sold, when he closed Ely Cathedral and used it as a stable house, he sold most of the lands associated with it.
Most of the lands that were owned by the religious leaders.
I will admit one thing I have, one thing that did seem to come up with this with the Civil War was that all of the money for the Civil War seemed to come from a number of places and it constantly seemed to be both the parliamentarians and the royalists
taking money from the very people that they say that they're fighting for just to use for their own ends.
It also seemed interesting that the parliamentarians, the moment Charles had moved out of London, all of a sudden started almost doing these witch hunts for royalist sympathizers. And the moment you were accused of being a royalist sympathizer, you could have all of your stuff nicked.
And it was considered confiscation rather than theft. But that's probably a different thing.
One thing I did really like about Oliver Cromwell is that he rose through the ranks, got to a point where he was offered the crown and then refused it. It's not like power corrupted him further.
There were flaws in his personality from the get-go. Those flaws remained with him. He didn't unfortunately change and become a nicer person by the end of it, but he at least stuck to his guns.
Yeah, you say he didn't take the crown, but he basically did. And we'll get to it a bit later on I suppose when we get to the latter part.
No, no, no. Okay, fantastic. Alright, so one thing I appreciate about him is he started small, stood up for the rights of the common people on a number of occasions, called out a number of MPs on their stuff.
He wasn't the only parliamentarian like Charles. Charles, was it Charles I or would it be Charles II? Charles I was the king in power that he deposed.
Okay, so Charles I, you know what, Nick, I'd love to hear some good things about Charles because everything I read seemed to be negative. Name a couple of good things that Charles did whilst he was in power.
So Charles, I don't really have, the main things that I've been looking up are like oppositions to Cromwell.
One thing I do know is that he continued the monarchy in the same way that had been the routine for centuries. He lived the way that other monarchs had done. He wasn't doing anything that anybody else hadn't done and it was acceptable for them. So why wouldn't it be acceptable?
The divine right of kings. Yeah, and that's exactly what it was. He was king. He was right to be king by his own birthright.
And it should be his son that it went to after him and so on and so forth. What Cromwell shouldn't have been able to do was upset that status quo because what it effectively did was cause tyranny and disaster all around the country.
And not just England, but in Scotland, in Ireland, like the war, the civil wars that broke out because of Oliver Cromwell's standing and because of Oliver Cromwell, not just Oliver Cromwell, because of the Puritan movement, I suppose you should say, and because of the parliamentarian movement that Cromwell headed for the vast majority of it.
There was a lot of death and a lot of destruction and a lot of upset to that status quo, to the life that everybody was used to living. Not just the royal, but the common people.
Well, I will freely admit whenever these things happen, it is often the common people who end up suffering. But I would argue that the tyranny that the people lived under in Charles I's reign was worth rising up against.
The taxes were ridiculously high. Like we complain nowadays when somebody is able to make over £100,000 a year.
The differences between a labourer and a gentleman were far more extreme than anything we have nowadays, other than the exceptions of the heads of corporations.
Only these weren't people who were, oh you could see their picture on the internet, like Jeffrey Bezos or Elon Musk, these, the people who were directly oppressing you and contributing to your own famine and your own problems, were the people a couple of miles away living on a hill.
And that seems to be the way that it was throughout the country. Do you, like how would you, although people had put up with it for a large amount of time, I don't think simply because people are willing to put up with something doesn't necessarily make it right.
No, but I don't think you can hold Charles accountable for something that had...
No, you're right, you're right there, I will concede. Charles, Charles throughout, okay when looking at the history of monarchs everywhere, Charles was not by no means the most ridiculously extravagant or the most ridiculously warlike or the most ridiculously tyrannical.
What I will say is that he was enough of each of those things to inspire not just Cromwell, but the main part of the gentry at the time to abandon the very lies that they told themselves which justify their own wealth
in order to have them dismiss those lies and go directly against the king and against his own, any sense of status quo, any sense of state of order.
You know that, I have just pulled up some details of Charles I, you know that he actually fought, he actually promoted a lot more religious tolerance especially towards Catholicism in England.
Well his wife was Catholic. He actually managed to build up a lot of strength amongst a lot of European countries through marrying his children out and worked with a lot of his lords to increase relationships around Spain and France.
Okay so internationally you're saying he was a success because he, yeah okay so you're saying that he was able to strengthen relations with our neighbours and trading partners.
Yeah.
Okay that's, you know what, that's not something I'd considered and I will admit although I admire Oliver Cromwell for his conviction, the other side of conviction is always intolerance and derision to those who don't hold the same beliefs as you.
Alright so yeah I'll admit that's a fair point.
Can you say about the increase in taxes? A lot of the work that Charles had done, he worked towards streamlining a lot of where the money was coming from so instead of having like a general tax, he split the taxes for like, he split the taxes so that people knew more what they were paying for.
For example, he applied a ship tax, he needed a navy, the country of England, the monarch of England has always been known for having one of the best navies.
And-
Sorry actually you know what, you complete this and then I've got a counterpoint already.
He also, he also applied taxes on, like he was one of the first people to apply like custom duties, like imports and exports. So it wasn't just the public that were like taxed, it wasn't just the, it was also like the big companies that were trading to make their money, it wasn't just the little guy that was being,
and the little guy was lesser affected by the fact that he was able to source money from these external sources.
Well, I mean I will admit England has always needed a navy in order to have its power. It is our navy which made us so strong for such a huge amount of time.
It is, yeah, the fact that we could for such a long time claim to have such a large navy that we could, that it was bigger than both the French and the Russian navy put together.
But ship tax was always something that was supposed to be done at times of war. And it was something that was done specifically in port towns where there was wealth from shipping.
What Charles did was he taxed, he introduced ship tax at a time when there wasn't a war on at the time that he did the tax, and he applied it. Okay, arguably more fairly because he did it everywhere, but I'd also say more unfairly because a number of the places where he was taxing had no benefit from the existence of ships or not.
And so he turned, although ship tax in Portsmouth makes sense. Ship tax in, I don't know, Nottingham doesn't really make sense. Yeah, ship tax in Stoke doesn't, it just doesn't really work, you know?
I understand, but you are kept safe, but people in those towns are kept safe by the fact that their, like, extremities, their borders are saved by presence of that navy. So why shouldn't they be?
That's a fair point, but also ship tax was supposed to be an emergency procedure where Charles brought it in as a standard.
Yeah, and I understand, but it was becoming more and more important to have an ever present navy.
And the other thing that people might be quite quick to assume is that Charles lived lavishly. He actually effectively, in order to move away from parliament power, he cut down on a lot of the crown spending.
He reduced the size of his court. He did many things that almost counteracted the claims that the parliamentarians, yeah, that's a word that I can't say.
They were, they were putting against him. They raised a lot of concern that Charles was spending and living in quite a lavish way. He lived like a king, don't get me wrong, but he certainly didn't live as well as previous kings.
No, that's true, and like I will admit, it's not like Charles lived like Genghis Khan, you know, or any of the more ridiculous kind of rulers from Egypt or ancient China, or I guess, or like King Solomon.
He lived lavishly, but it was lavishly enough to the point where people took note. And I guess that's the problem. If there is enough fact in a fiction, then that fiction can run wild, you know?
Yeah. I mean, let's go back to Oliver, right? So Oliver is basically a nobody in the grand schemes of things. All of a sudden steps into parliament in Huntingdon, eventually works his way up to what they called Long Parliament, which was like the mainstay state power.
As the representative for Cambridge, like a city's member of parliament, and they had a board of those, didn't they essentially? And at that point, he basically usurped the parliament, the parliament's cavalry leader and took control of the parliament's cavalries.
He organized a cavalry called the Ironsides, which decimated the royal armies around the country. I mean, I have actually got some of the numbers.
Throughout his conquest of England and later Scotland and Ireland, he had numerous battles. At the Battle of Marston Moor, the parliamentarians and Scottish people decided with them, numbered approximately 28,000.
And yet the royalists could only amass 18,000 and approximately 4,000 royalists died and barely any of the cavalry from the parliamentarians died.
At the Battle of Naseby, Oliver Cromwell turned up with roughly 14,000 troops. Royalists could only amass 8,000 and Cromwell killed around a thousand and captured four and a half thousand, decimating over 65% of the royalist army while losing only 400 of their 1,400.
They weren't literally a force that just destroyed everything in its path. I've got more. We can go up to the Battle of Preston.
I can tell you partly why that was. It's because Cromwell actually made sure that his troops were well equipped. So like the parliamentarians were troops were better equipped.
The royals didn't expect to be fighting a front on their own soil. So they weren't prepared to amass an army internally. Whereas it's what the parliamentarians set out to do. They amassed an army built to take the fight internally.
So you'd say that even when the parliamentarians said that the king is making war on his own people, what you would say is that's a lie and it's the fact that it's the parliamentarians making war not just on their people but on their people and the king.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I mean, you only have to look at there's a couple of couple of real horrible events that happened during the English Civil War or the British Civil War.
And there's the siege of Drogheda and the Battle of Dunbar. And the mess of the siege of Drogheda in Ireland was just disgusting because there was only about two and a half thousand people defending the town of Drogheda.
And or whatever it's called is an Irish town. It probably doesn't actually sound like that in pronunciation. And I'm mutilating that because I'm a typical English person with no sense of how the Irish language is spoken.
And I sincerely apologize about that. However, in this instance, two and a half thousand troops defended the town, which was full of civilians on my ad and refused to back down to the force of Oliver Cromwell, who turned up with 12,000 troops and killed everybody.
He killed not just the soldiers, but the civilians trapped inside the city.
The women and the children. Absolutely. Everybody died. Three and a half thousand people died with nobody from pretty much nobody from the parliamentarians dying.
And he needed it solely as a means to make a point that nobody should stand in his way. But the king by this point was pretty much already overthrown. He was he had no power left.
And yet. Cromwell made stands like this where he destroyed destroyed entire armies like the Scots were near Dunbar. The parliamentarians took 11,000 troops up there and through
careful strategy managed to decimate the 20,000 royalists that decided to amass and stand against them, killing 3000 of them and then capturing 10,000 destroying the rest of basically
basically the last royalist from in the in Britain.
But couldn't you. Okay, so I'm never going to get on board with killing civilians. I disagree with the ideas of total war, as we're brought about in the late 18th.
No sorry night late 19th century and early 20th century I disagree with those ideals, but couldn't you argue that 20,000 people or if there is a encampment of 20,000 people.
Is it not better to decimate them now and end a war that could go on for decades, rather than take a little bite out of them and let them run away and reamass.
It was like in in in war is it better to nip something in the bud and be decisive, or is it better to show some compassion only for that people that you set out to lead and rule so the compassion has got to be in there.
You've got to show them that as much as you are going to be their leader, you are not going to be their grim reaper as well you're not going to bring them death and destruction if they don't do as they're told.
They're free to be civilians and they're free to be people with their own minds as long as they follow your lead you know and that's where like I think with the successes of Oliver Cromwell's battle is where the power really went to his head because as soon as he I mean.
He deposed. Sorry he deposed.
He deposed Charles in 1649.
Continued to kill royalists for the next five, four, five years.
He didn't just depose I should just point this out he didn't just depose King Charles.
He had him executed in a corrupt court.
A court that was full of parliamentarians that wanted the king dead.
There was no fair trial. The king was going to die.
He deposed him killed him and then continued to go around the country destroying everybody else that thought that that execution was unfair.
After four years, he then assumed essentially a state of dictatorship at the top of the power chain and dissolved his own parliament that he'd used to get there.
Knowing that he had utter power through the success that he had in his with his cavalry.
He used that fear and that power to assert himself as as it was as he was called Lord Protector because he didn't want the title of king because he didn't want to become the thing.
The very thing he opposed but Lord Protector will do fine.
You know and this is the point that I alluded to before like it might not be King but he asserted himself at the top of the chain on his own without a parliament.
You tell me he was any different to any king prior.
So what you're saying is he just used different names to describe the same thing and because he used different names that is okay.
I will admit though.
He was offered a crown and turned down a crown. That is something.
I wouldn't want to walk around with a massive gold lid on my head.
Yeah.
Okay. He was a stupid man. He was smart enough to know that if he assumed a crown of any description.
Everyone would everybody would say that he's yeah would just call him immediately kill.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
And the point the very point that is power was purely built out of fear is that it's very easy to see when you consider the fact that when he died.
His regime collapsed within 18 months.
His son took over as Lord Protector after he died and with it within I think it was within two years of taking over.
He had already abdicated the proverbial throne given power back.
And I'm pretty sure by 1960 King Charles II was already back in power was already in power and Oliver Cromwell was
posthumously tried and executed or executed was was hanged and beheaded to pay for his crimes.
He was made to pay for what he'd done.
And as I said like he didn't he didn't say when he set out he said I don't know that he set out with with the intent become who he became.
But as you alluded he certainly did not like being told that he was wrong and he made very good use of all of his stratagems and and manipulations to get himself to the very highest point in England and in Britain that he possibly could.
But not through reasonable rule not through an acceptable means otherwise after he passed it would have been able to be maintained.
So you think the true check the true test of fairness of a system or the true test of the benevolence of a leader is the succession of power once they're gone or the sustainability of the systems that they put in place once they've gone.
Absolutely.
Okay. Absolutely. All right. And the fact that the fact that his lasted two years after his death. Not even two years before the kid before King Charles II was back on the throne.
And that was acceptable people people accepted that.
They didn't.
That that that rule continued.
Or we've still got royalty now in the UK.
Yeah.
Okay, well, interestingly,
one thing that he just well he destroyed the original crown jewels of England which is why Scotland's crown jewels are older than ours.
He tried to destroy the Scottish crown jewels as well but they were smuggled out of his reach hidden, and then kind of came back about once his once his regime had gone.
I will admit.
I do find it frustrating that Cromwell did rise to the top, and also, he was fine in his early career, protecting the rights of people but as long as those people were purest and farmers within the.
Yeah, within the realm of Cambridge here. The moment you were
Catholic, for example in Ireland.
He did not show.
He seemed to understand the ideas of the Bible giving rights to the small farmer what he didn't seem to understand was the Bible's call for people mercy.
Before he showed, as you've given examples, right there. None to people who happen to live in a certain town, where the leader of that town was opposing him.
It is.
It is frustrating.
Well, it's interesting though that you talk about the path, although he had power, what I do like though is that he didn't have opulence, like William Cavendish.
One of his rivals during the war had a house, well several houses but his main one was 10 times the size of Cromwell's.
And I'm going to be honest with you is ridiculously beautiful whereas Cromwell's was a small townhouse.
Yeah, you say that Cromwell's is a tiny little house in Ely, however his stable is a cathedral.
But he didn't build that cathedral he just.
He just housed his horses in it.
Yeah.
Hmm.
I think, unfortunately, Nick, I think you've won this one when it comes to.
Although I don't, I don't see, I don't necessarily agree with the divine right of Kings.
And I don't necessarily think that Charles was.
So, you know what, I'm not going to say if Charles deserved to die or not, but I don't believe he was a good ruler and I think Charles paved the way for his own destruction.
It just seems like Oliver Cromwell was an opportunist.
I would disagree that I won based on the fact that I had to delve into the atrocities that Cromwell later committed to justify the need for the royalist movement.
I, throughout the argument, found it very difficult to side with the King or from that standpoint. I did not find it easy in the, like in the, in the first points that the reasons why Cromwell came in to the position he did, that the other fights he was putting out.
Yes, I made valid arguments, but they, they were hollow, let's be completely fair. They were arguments that any royalist would have posed at the time.
But they were absolutely hollow arguments and Cromwell had, he certainly started with the right intention.
And then just went wrong.
And as I said, I feel like his success in the wars made him, or gave him a sense of, I don't know, maybe narcissism, maybe a sense of self-righteousness that turned him into or fed into that behavior trait where he was obviously right.
And obviously that was, that was divine. That is his thought process is always being right, is divine. It really made him different to everybody else.
But yeah, I think, I don't know, Cromwell started right. The royalist ultimately came back into power because better the devil you know. And I think that's exactly what happened when the, when the Cromwell reign ended.
Cromwell had committed massive atrocities all across the, all across Great Britain. And people were unsure of where to go. There was no parliament because he abolished it.
There was only one person that could rule and in that state only the person that designed the system would be able to maintain that. Even the king has got his courtiers.
Or courtisans. I don't know.
No, it is courtisans. It tends to be something else.
Yeah, even a king has his courtiers. He has his, his gentry and people that he can turn to and say like how do I, how do I XYZ? What, what should I do? You know, no one man should be given that amount of power.
And even if you do, you don't share that. When you die, nobody's there to share your vision. So the wills fall off.
I feel like we've come maybe to the end of the debate. We'll leave the analysis for everybody else to kind of, maybe they have a completely different opinion.
Check it on the Reddit. The link hasn't changed. The Reddit is still there. Chuckle your thoughts about Oliver Cromwell in the Reddit. Tell us what your thoughts are about his ideas earlier, his early ideas. Did he start right? Did he end right? Was it at all the royalists fault?
Was it King Charles? Did he live too lavishly and not deserve the power he assumed through his birthright? Why did, ultimately, why did the public go back to royalist rule after? Was my assumption that it's better the devil you know correct or?
Do ends justify means? And when it comes specifically to Cromwell, did his ends justify his means? At what point did he cease being a freedom fighter and start being an oppressor? Or was he always an oppressor and simply rose to the top?
Let us know what you think listeners. And yeah, looking forward to hearing a bit more about it. Just so that I've been completely clear, my, the main source of my information was the first five hours or so of The Making of Oliver Cromwell by Roland Hutton.
And I think that's a, yeah, a book that's narrated by Michael Page on on Audible.
Yeah, wish I had have done more. But unfortunately, he did commit a number of atrocities and it makes it.
You know, focus on the idealized beginnings. This is a case, one of those cases where absolute power does seem to corrupt absolutely.
Absolutely.
Well, thank you all for listening.
That's going to be the end from us so goodbye goodbye from me and goodbye from James.
Thank you.