ABSTRACT
The novelist and biographer John Buchan, Lord Tweedsmuir, felt that Oliver had underplayed his origins. Cromwell once said ‘I was by birth a gentleman, living neither in any considerable height nor yet in obscurity’. Buchan suggested that he might ‘have put the claim higher’, because of his family’s prominence in the region. Many biographers and historians across the past three and a half centuries have been mesmerised by Oliver’s apparent rise from obscurity to prominence and national leadership. To some nineteenth century commentators, imbued with the virtues of Samuel Smiles’s ‘self-help’ mentality, Cromwell’s ‘self-made man’ image was irresistible. It still lingers in recent works, although over time historians have questioned it. Maurice Ashley stressed that the Cromwell family’s status meant that the implication of obscurity is hard to justify. Yet it has almost become a commonplace in many ways to see Cromwell appearing as it were from nowhere. Several factors have been ascribed in this rise, a combination of his natural talents with the cataclysmic movements of class struggle unleashed by the revolutionary times, or to the rise of the puritans, with which Cromwell has been long associated. The notion of obscurity is a complex phenomenon with at least two facets appropriate to Cromwell’s life. One facet is the aspect of being hidden or lost: this can be examined with regard to Cromwell’s early life and development. A few of the usual records, those confi rming birth and baptism exist, but there are few details of Oliver’s childhood.
