Introduction

The national memory of the civil wars and Interregnum is, naturally, dominated by the image of Oliver Cromwell. Hezekiah Haynes' experience can still add to what we know about the failure of Oliver Cromwell’s godly revolution of the 1650s, particularly in the localities. Haynes’ emergence as a Puritan activist for Parliament in 1642 and his subsequent relative religious and political conservatism in the 1650s, in contrast and reaction to the new religious radicals he had to manage, notably Fifth Monarchists and Quakers, allow us to try to understand the kind of men who had a personal bond with Cromwell and shared goal of godly reformation. Haynes’ early years and family history from 1594 give us another view of how Puritanism developed and connected across counties in East Anglia and out to the Atlantic world to 1704. Haynes, as an active Major-General, also moved between the centre and localities.