Cromwell, Restored: A Marxist Critique of the New Oxford Edition of The Letters, Writings, and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell

This extensive three-volume collection — comprising 1,077 documents carefully gathered over years by nine editors — is more than a scholarly achievement. It serves as a challenge in the ongoing ideological debate about the significance of England’s only revolution. For centuries, Cromwell has been co-opted, sanitised, and reinterpreted by those in power to hide the revolutionary aspects of the events he was part of.

This edition, by returning to Cromwell’s actual writings and statements, pierces through the ideological haze and confronts the true historical forces of the seventeenth century: class conflict, religious radicalism as a sign of social upheaval, and the complex figure of Cromwell himself, who represented both the revolutionary overthrow of the old regime and the constraints of the rising bourgeoisie. This isn’t just about fixing footnotes; it’s about reclaiming the English Revolution from two centuries of distortion.

The Manufacture of a Bourgeois Cromwell

Jackie Eales demonstrates that the version of Cromwell familiar to popular memory is mostly a construct from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The commonly cited ‘warts and all” comment—often used as evidence of Cromwell’s supposed modernity—is in fact an eighteenth-century fabrication. Similarly, the well-known quip dismissing the Rump Parliament, “you have sat too long here… in the name of God, go!”, is not from the seventeenth century; it is a 1940 parliamentary remark by Leo Amery, aimed at Chamberlain, and taken from Carlyle’s 1845 edition.

Carlyle played a crucial role in shaping this ideological reconstruction. His edition, once seen as definitive, was created with considerable liberty — including reworded sections, added commentary, and even forged documents. Nonetheless, Carlyle’s portrayal of Cromwell evolved into the archetype for Victorian liberalism — portraying Cromwell as an early parliamentarian, a constitutional moderate, and a revolutionary whose actions could be seen as the nascent stages of bourgeois democracy.

Cromwell and the Manufacture of a Usable Past

Few figures in English history have undergone as prolonged an effort of ideological redefinition as Oliver Cromwell. This redefinition has never been purely academic; since the eighteenth century, it has served as a political tool: transforming a mid-seventeenth-century revolutionary leader into a figure that suits the agendas of subsequent ruling elites. The new Oxford edition of The Letters, Writings, and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell—comprehensive and rigorously faithful to the original documents—presents a direct challenge to this longstanding mythmaking. It urges us to view Cromwell not through the lens of Victorian liberalism nor as a caricature by twentieth-century reactionaries, but as a complex reflection of a society in the midst of revolutionary change.

To understand why Cromwell has been so frequently rewritten, it’s essential to consider the nature of the English Revolution itself. Marxist theory describes it as a bourgeois revolution expressed through religious means: the overthrow of feudal absolutism by a rising class whose ideological language was still tied to theology. The social forces that dismantled the monarchy, abolished the House of Lords, and executed Charles I could not clearly articulate their goals in secular, materialist terms. Instead, they relied on concepts of providence, divine reformation, and divine judgment. Cromwell, as the most skilled military and political leader of this movement, exemplified its contradictions: acting as a revolutionary, yet justified by divine providence; being radical in destruction but conservative in settlement.

Later generations found this complexity unacceptable. The ruling elite after 1688 needed a genealogy that supported its constitutional legitimacy. The English Revolution, with its regicide and republican experiment, was seen as an embarrassment—too radical, violent, and overtly destructive of monarchy. Cromwell had to be softened. The process began in the eighteenth century through anecdotal invention and culminated in the nineteenth century with Carlyle’s extensive yet biased edition of Cromwell’s writings. Carlyle’s Cromwell differed from the original documents; he was portrayed as a Victorian moral hero—characterful, sincere, and an early Liberal ideal. Carlyle altered passages, added commentary, and even included forged documents to craft a Cromwell who could be seen as an ancestor of bourgeois constitutionalism.

This was mythmaking used to reinforce class dominance. The revolutionary Cromwell—who saw regicide as divine will, dissolved parliaments when they opposed him, and prioritised divine commands over constitutional norms—did not align with Britain’s stable parliamentary system in the 19th century. Therefore, a new figure resembling Cromwell needed to be created: one who could be represented as a pioneer of modern liberty instead of a destroyer of the old order.

The twentieth century introduced its own distortions. During crises, Cromwell was frequently reinterpreted. Leo Amery’s 1940 attack on Chamberlain, with its faux quote “in the name of God, go!”, was not a genuine historical remark but a political tool. Cromwell was portrayed as a symbol of parliamentary strength, invoked to defend the constitutional order that his revolution had momentarily overturned. Meanwhile, reactionary historians crafted the opposite myth: portraying Cromwell as a proto-fascist dictator and a forerunner of modern tyranny. Both narratives catered to current agendas and obscured the real historical figure of Cromwell.

The new Oxford edition clearly departs from previous traditions by meticulously assembling the documents, thereby reestablishing Cromwell’s role within the revolutionary crisis that shaped him. The Cromwell presented here is neither a liberal hero nor a fascist villain but a figure influenced by the class forces of his era. His religious language is not indicative of personal eccentricity but represents the ideological framework through which the revolutionary bourgeoisie interpreted its struggles. His political actions—such as military victories, dissolutions of parliament, and constitutional experiments—mirror a class trying to dismantle feudal power while simultaneously fearing the radical potential of the popular forces that contributed to that transformation.

Ireland: The Colonial Violence of the Bourgeois Revolution

Victorian mythmaking never fully captured the history of Cromwell’s 1649 Irish campaign, and the new edition resists sanitisation. The documents affirm what Irish memory has always recognised: Drogheda and Wexford were massacres, not mere battle excesses. Resistance had already ceased before civilians and soldiers were killed. This exposes the limitations of the bourgeois revolution—while it toppled the English monarchy, it also carried out a colonial war marked by extreme brutality. The rising English bourgeoisie, fighting for political power domestically, also pursued imperial dominance internationally. The ideas of providence and a divine mission provided a convenient justification for the material reality: the expansion of English capitalism. Victorian liberalism could not accept this, and twentieth-century parliamentarianism avoided it altogether. The new edition does neither; instead, it restores the record to its full, uncomfortable clarity.

Why does this matter? Because historical mythmaking is never innocent. The transformation of Cromwell into a constitutional moderate was part of a broader ideological project: the rewriting of the English Revolution as a precursor to the stable parliamentary order that followed. This narrative obscures the revolutionary nature of the seventeenth century, erases the class struggle at its core, and transforms a moment of genuine social rupture into a comforting origin story for bourgeois rule.

Restoring Cromwell to history—stripped of Carlylean invention, Victorian sanitisation, and twentieth‑century distortion—is essential for understanding the English Revolution on its own terms. It reveals a society in transition, a class overthrowing feudal power, and a leader whose actions cannot be understood outside the revolutionary dynamics that shaped them.

What the Documents Reveal: Revolution in Religious Form

The Cromwell depicted in the documents isn’t the hero from Carlyle or the caricature of a proto-fascist dictator from the twentieth century. Instead, he is a more historically tangible figure: a revolutionary shaped by the tensions of a society shifting from feudalism to capitalism. Cromwell’s use of religious language was more than mere decoration; it was the ideological language through which the revolutionary bourgeoisie and their allies understood their fight. When Cromwell spoke of his early life as being amid spiritual “darkness,” or saw victories at Marston Moor, Dunbar, and Worcester as divine acts, he was expressing—using the only vocabulary at his disposal—the awareness of a class breaking away from the old order but struggling to articulate its goals in secular, materialist terms.

This is exactly why it is historically incorrect to try to link Cromwell to the tradition of liberal constitutionalism. He justified regicide as divine justice, contemplated the crown in spiritual terms, and prioritised God’s will over constitutional norms. Therefore, transforming him into a Whig predecessor ignores the revolutionary essence of his actions. The editors’ success lies in reestablishing Cromwell as a product of the revolutionary crisis—complex, providential, radical, and closely connected to the class forces he led.

Why Accuracy Matters: Reclaiming the Revolution

Correcting Carlyle’s distortions isn’t just antiquarian fussiness; it’s essential for reclaiming the true story of the English Revolution from bourgeois historiography. Each phase of Cromwell’s mythmaking—whether Walpole’s anecdote, Carlyle’s editorial choices, or Amery’s wartime rhetoric—served to reshape him to fit the ideological needs of the ruling class. As a result, Cromwell has been depicted variably as a democrat, tyrant, patriot, or proto-liberal, depending on the prevailing narrative.

The new edition breaks that cycle. It forces us back to the seventeenth century, to a revolutionary crisis whose central figure was neither a secular constitutionalist nor a simple despot, but a man formed by — and inseparable from — the religious, social, and class upheaval of his age. To understand Cromwell is to understand the English Revolution as a bourgeois revolution in religious form — radical in its destruction of feudal power, limited in its inability to transcend the ideological frameworks of its own class.

Priced at £190 per volume, this edition will primarily reside in university libraries. It features dense annotations and formidable scholarship. However, its importance extends well beyond its expected audience. By removing two centuries of ideological distortions, it repositions Cromwell within the revolution that shaped him—a complex figure marked by contradictions, providence, ruthlessness, and a tendency to resist sanitisation. For scholars of the English Revolution, it is essential. For those interested in how ruling classes craft influential narratives of the past, it offers profound insights.

Sources and Bibliography

Primary Sources

• Cromwell, Oliver. The Letters, Writings, and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, Vols. I–III. Ed. Andrew Barclay, Tim Wales, John Morrill, Elaine Murphy, Micheál Ó Siochrú, Jason Peacey, Joel Halcomb, Patrick Little, and David L. Smith. Oxford University Press, 2023.
• Carlyle, Thomas. Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches: With Elucidations. Chapman and Hall, 1845. (Important chiefly as an example of nineteenth‑century editorial intervention and mythmaking.)
• Walpole, Horace. Anecdotes of Painting in England. 1762–71. (Source of the invented “warts and all” anecdote.)
• Amery, Leo. House of Commons Speech, 7 May 1940. (Origin of the modern “in the name of God, go!” line falsely attributed to Cromwell.)
• Rushworth, John. Historical Collections. 1659–1701. (Contemporary documentary material on the Civil Wars and Interregnum.)
• Thurloe, John. A Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe. 1742. (Key administrative and diplomatic papers from the Protectorate.)

Secondary Sources: Cromwell and the English Revolution

Modern Scholarship

• Morrill, John. Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution. Longman, 1990. (Essential for understanding Cromwell’s religious-political worldview.)
• Eales, Jackie. “The Myth of Cromwell.” History Today, Vol. 73, No. 3 (2023). (Concise account of the invention of Cromwellian myths.)
• Peacey, Jason. Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution. Cambridge University Press, 2013. (On the ideological construction of political figures in the 1640s–50s.)
• Reid, Kirsten. Cromwell’s War Machine: The New Model Army and the Revolution. Manchester University Press, 2021.
• Ó Siochrú, Micheál. God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland. Faber & Faber, 2008. (The definitive account of Drogheda and Wexford.)
• Woolrych, Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625–1660. Oxford University Press, 2002. (A comprehensive political narrative.)
• Smith, David L. Oliver Cromwell: Politics and Religion in the English Revolution. Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Marxist and Materialist Historiography

• Marx, Karl. “Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany.” 1851–52. (Foundational analysis of bourgeois revolutions; relevant for framing the English case.)
• Engels, Friedrich. The Peasant War in Germany. 1850. (On the ideological forms of early bourgeois revolutions.)
• Hill, Christopher.
  • The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. Penguin, 1972.
  • God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution. Penguin, 1970.
  • The English Revolution 1640. Lawrence & Wishart, 1940. (Hill remains indispensable for understanding the class dynamics and ideological contradictions of the revolution.)
• Manning, Brian. The English People and the English Revolution. Bookmarks, 1991. (A class analysis of the revolutionary process.)
• Rees, John. The Leveller Revolution: Radical Political Organisation in England, 1640–1650. Verso, 2016. (On the popular forces whose pressure shaped Cromwell’s actions.)
• Callinicos, Alex. The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx. Bookmarks, 1983. (Useful for framing bourgeois revolutions within Marxist theory.)

Mythmaking, Ideology, and Historical Memory

• Hobsbawm, Eric. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge University Press, 1983. (Framework for understanding Cromwell’s later ideological reconstruction.)
• Cannadine, David. Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire. Penguin, 2001. (On imperial ideology; relevant to Cromwell’s Irish campaign.)
• Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning. University of Chicago Press, 1980. (Useful for analysing how figures like Cromwell are constructed in cultural memory.)
• Kelsey, Sean. “The Death of Oliver Cromwell.” Historical Journal, 1999. (On the political uses of Cromwell’s image after 1658.)

Archival and Documentary Collections

• British Library Manuscripts (Thurloe Papers, State Papers Domestic).
• National Archives (SP 18, SP 25, and Interregnum administrative records).
• Bodleian Library (Carte Manuscripts; Rawlinson MSS).
• Cambridge University Library (Morrill Papers; Cromwellian correspondence).

Suggested Further Reading for Marxist Analysis

• Trotsky, Leon. The History of the Russian Revolution. 1930. (For comparative revolutionary dynamics and the dialectic of leadership and class forces.)
• Anderson, Perry. Lineages of the Absolutist State. Verso, 1974. (On the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Europe.)
• Brenner, Robert. Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653