REVIEW BY GRAHAM GOODLAD
It is now three years since Bristol University historian Ronald Hutton’s The Making of Oliver Cromwell appeared. That earlier volume took Britain’s first commoner head of state from his origins as a minor East Anglian landowner to the end of the first Civil War in 1646. Commander in Chief is the keenly awaited sequel, tracing his transformation from victorious Parliamentarian general to supreme national leader. We take our leave of him in April 1653, after his dissolution of the Rump Parliament, a few months before his elevation to the position of Lord Protector.
With several heavyweight Cromwell biographies already in print – and a further one, by John Morrill of Cambridge University, expected next spring – readers may ask whether another one is necessary. What makes Hutton’s work stand out is his departure from what he regards as earlier writers’ over-reliance on Cromwell’s voluminous reported speeches and writings. He made a conscious decision to test his subject’s words against other sources wherever possible. The result is a vivid portrait, more sharply focused on the manipulative, brutal side of Cromwell’s personality than most previous studies.
This is not to say that earlier biographers naively took the Puritan warlord at his own valuation. Back in 1958, the late Christopher Hill wrote that, to his contemporaries, Cromwell’s claim to be ‘waiting on the Lord’ could seem like ‘waiting to see which way the cat would jump’. But Hutton’s assessment is harsher. He is critical of the view of Cromwell, derived from the writings of Victorian liberal historians, which sees him as foreshadowing 19th-century political and religious liberty. Instead, he suggests that with his combination of militarism, religious fervour, and republicanism, he had more in common with the radical Christian right of modern America.
