Oliver Cromwell: Pretender, Puritan, Statesman, Paradox?

Few contemporaries boasted that they really knew Cromwell. Perhaps he did not know himself. He thought of himself as an ordinary Englishman, yet it is apparent that he was an extraordinary man. Cromwell rose to greatness suddenly, and in middle age; but unlike others whose rise was swift, he was never an adventurer in politics, nor a wayward genius whose life's blood was refreshed by political play. Despite the charges of the jealous and the alienated, he seems to have had no lust for high office and no pretensions to pomp and circumstance. One tends to think of Cromwell as the spawn of the revolution, thrown to prominence and power in the cataract of events after 1642, and to forget that he was also a cause of the revolution, embodying in his person some of the sources of discontent in the kingdom and nurturing the bracing spirit which made the waging of a civil war both thinkable and feasible. - Introduction.