ABSTRACT
From his century to ours, Oliver Cromwell has been the most controversial figure of English history. The civil wars and Interregnum, the period which he came to dominate, were a time of revolutionary violence unique in our history. Its passions and divisions have never gone away. If they have exerted less power in the twentieth century than in its predecessors, that is because in modern times the past has lost something of its hold on the political consciousness of the present. In earlier centuries, the centuries covered by this essay, the arguments between Cavaliers and Roundheads were time and again recalled, even relived, by the heirs of those parties: by Tories on the one hand, by Whigs and then Liberals on the other.
