ABSTRACT
When the beginning of the civil wars gave Oliver Cromwell the opportunity to take a leading part in the affairs of his country, he was already forty-three years old and had spent almost his whole life in a primarily agricultural county as the son of a landlord, as a landlord, and as a farmer. Agricultural progress and landed settlements were matters of profound interest to him, 1 and in his expressions of political ideas in later life the preservation of liberty and the security of real property were closely related. 2 All the members of his own family and of the families into which he married his children were landed proprietors, and excepting his wife's father, who was a merchant, so far as we know, none of the intimates of his youth or early middle age was interested in commerce.
