A unique biography of the military commander and politician who remains one of Britain’s most controversial figures centuries after his death. One of the most important figures in British history, Oliver Cromwell was both soldier and politician and the only non-Royal ruler of Britain in a thousand years. His actions and ideas still have political and social consequences today, and his legacy still divides people. Love him or loathe him, Cromwell still matters. This book is a history of his life through the places in Britain and Ireland where he lived, visited, ruled, or fought. Following in the Footsteps of Oliver Cromwell begins in Huntingdon in 1599, with the respectable but unimportant Cromwell family living under the shadow of richer relatives. Civil War and Cromwell’s controversial successes at Marston Moor, Naseby, Basing House, and Worcester transform him into the most powerful person in Britain, saving him from obscurity and moving him from a modest house in Ely to Hampton Court Palace. Cromwell is involved in the execution of King Charles I outside the Banqueting House, his own coronation in Westminster Hall, and bloody slaughter in Ireland. Even his death in 1658 does not end the controversy—as his enemies take revenge on his corpse and the debate about his legacy begins.

This is the Oliver Cromwell biography published in 1900, with all the illustrations, written by the future president of the United States. Excerpt: "For over a century and a half after his death the memory of the greatest Englishman of the seventeenth century was looked upon with horror by the leaders of English thought, political and literary; the very men who were carrying to fruition Cromwell's tremendous policies being often utterly ignorant that they were following in his footsteps. At last the scales began to drop from the most far-seeing eyes. Macaulay, with his eminently sane and wholesome spirit, held Cromwell and the social forces for which he stood-Puritanic and otherwise-at their real worth, and his judgment about them was, in all essentials, accurate. But the true appreciation of the place held by the greatest soldier-statesman of the seventeenth century began with the publication of his life and letters by Carlyle. The gnarled genius of the man who worshipped the heroes of the past as intensely as he feared and distrusted the heroes of the present, enabled him to write with a loftiness and intensity that befitted his subject. But Carlyle's singular incapacity to "see veracity," as he would himself have phrased it, made him at times not merely tell half-truths, but deliberately invert the truth. He was of that not uncommon cloistered type which shrinks shuddering from actual contact with whatever it, in theory, most admires, and which, therefore, is reduced in self-justification to misjudge and misrepresent those facts of past history which form precedents for what is going on before the author's own eyes."

For over a century and a half after his death the memory of the greatest Englishman of the seventeenth century was looked upon with horror by the leaders of English thought, political and literary; the very men who were carrying to fruition Cromwell's tremendous policies being often utterly ignorant that they were following in his footsteps. At last the scales began to drop from the most far-seeing eyes. Macaulay, with his eminently sane and wholesome spirit, held Cromwell and the social forces for which he stood--Puritanic and otherwise--at their real worth, and his judgment about them was, in all essentials, accurate. But the true appreciation of the place held by the greatest soldier-statesman of the seventeenth century began with the publication of his life and letters by Carlyle. The gnarled genius of the man who worshipped the heroes of the past as intensely as he feared and distrusted the heroes of the present, enabled him to write with a loftiness and intensity that befitted his subject. But Carlyle's singular incapacity to "see veracity," as he would himself have phrased it, made him at times not merely tell half-truths, but deliberately invert the truth. He was of that not uncommon cloistered type which shrinks shuddering from actual contact with whatever it, in theory, most admires, and which, therefore, is reduced in self-justification to misjudge and misrepresent those facts of past history which form precedents for what is going on before the author's own eyes.

This book, written by the 26th president of the U.S., Theodore Roosevelt, centers on Oliver Cromwell, an English general and statesman who, first as a subordinate and later as Commander-in-Chief, led armies of the Parliament of England against King Charles I during the English Civil War, subsequently ruling the British Isles as Lord Protector from 1653 until his death in 1658. He acted simultaneously as head of state and head of government of the new republican commonwealth. Cromwell is one of the most controversial figures in British and Irish history, considered a regicidal dictator by historians such as David Sharp, a military dictator by Winston Churchill, a bourgeois revolutionary by Leon Trotsky, and a hero of liberty by John Milton, Thomas Carlyle, and Samuel Rawson Gardiner.

Originally published in 1987, this book compares and contrasts the characters and careers of two great protagonists in the English Civil War and its aftermath. The book shows how Charles I and Oliver Cromwell were confronted with the same problems and therefore, to a surprisingly large extent, were obliged to deal with them in much the same kind of way. The book re-examines their military methods, their approaches to religion, their diplomatic manoeuvres, their domestic policies and the manner in which they handled their parliaments. Above all, it considers how their vastly different personalities determined their actions. Finally it debates how far a revolution, of which Cromwell was the instrument and Charles the victim, can be said to have taken place in the mid-seventeenth century or whether what occurred was simply a political rebellion sparked off by religious passion.