Oliver Cromwell: ruthless in battle – but nice to his men

One of the first retrospective accounts of Oliver Cromwell’s early career, Andrew Marvell’s ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’ (1650), maintained that its subject was difficult to capture. Perhaps the finest political poem in the English language, it was written shortly after Cromwell’s return from a brutally successful military campaign overseas, which witnessed infamous atrocities at Drogheda and Wexford. It celebrates Cromwell as a victorious military commander, a supernatural epic hero who burns through the air, destroying all who block his path to establishing England as the greatest nation on Earth.

But for all its praise and hyperbole, the abiding impression of the poem is that there is something elusive, frightening and disquietingly off about Cromwell. Not the least of this is his sudden emergence from rural obscurity in East Anglia, from his ‘private gardens, where/ He lived reserved and austere’, through bloody civil war and on to the international political stage.