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If the occasions that prompted Andrew Marvell's two political poems of 1650 had happened in the reverse order—if Tom May had died before Oliver Cromwell's return from Ireland—the opposition between ‘An Horatian Ode’ and ‘Tom May's Death’ could be given a simple explanation. The May poem would be the last of Marvell's royalist poems, and the ode to the first of his Cromwellian ones. One could read the ode as a testament to a conversion from one position to an exactly contrary one. That change was duly followed, by the poem, in 1651, in support of the republic's embassy, led by Cromwell's cousin and intimate ally Oliver St John, who went to The Hague in March of that year with the purpose of undermining the Stuart cause. Instead, the May poem comes between the occasions that produced the ode and the poem on the embassy.

Chapter two explores a selection of play pamphlets and how the paper stage was used to present images of Charles I and Oliver Cromwell. While the regicide silenced some of the criticism levied against Charles, Cromwell was increasingly portrayed as a Machiavellian: the saint and martyred king met his polar opposite in the portrayal of a demonic lord protector. Parliamentarians and royalists used drama as a way of reflecting upon and responding to politics. Through examining play pamphlets that use the place of the fair or the afterlife as a way to respond to the protectorate, this chapter shows that these play pamphlets are not uniform in their depictions of Charles or Cromwell, but share and modify modes of attack and defence on the page.

This chapter describes the different aspects of the visual imaging of Oliver Cromwell in England. One of the things best known about Oliver Cromwell's visual image is known through his supposed instruction to the artist Peter Lely. The warts-and-all Cromwell has passed into history as the plain man, the plain speaker, and plain captain who only reluctantly took the reins of government. During the 1640s, and in the particular case of the medal to commemorate the victory at Dunbar in 1650, Cromwell had resisted a prominent image of him and had advised collective representations of parliament and the army. The visual representations of the Protector in portraits and engravings, as on seals, medals, and coins, were devised to sustain and enhance his authority in shifting historical circumstances no less than the earlier images of kings from which they borrowed.

John Milton welcomed both the coups of 1653. Defensio Secunda supports the attacks of Oliver Cromwell and the army officers on the character of the Rump, endorses its expulsion, and approves its replacement by an assembly chosen by Cromwell and the army officers. Those sentiments were not coloured by retrospect. The passage of Defensio Secunda that reveals the most about Milton's attitude to the Rump was written shortly after its dissolution, with the intention of vindicating Cromwell's action. At that time Milton aimed to please Cromwell. He first proposed, and then approved, the appointment of civilian advisers whom Cromwell chose. The men he named would form the core of the Cromwellian party in Barebone's, and would then sit on the ruling council of the protectorate.

This chapter traces the prolonged military conflict of 1641-53. It examines the elaborate system of government, with headquarters at Kilkenny, established by the Confederate Catholics, as well as the importation into Ireland of the tactics of the European military revolution. It examines the divisions between Royalist and Parliamentarian among Irish Protestants, the former commanded by the earl of Ormond, as well as the shifting allegiances of the Scottish army established in the north east. The arrival in 1649 of a parliamentary army under Oliver Cromwell, and the controversial massacres at Drogheda and Wexford, initiated the last phase of the war. The victorious parliamentary regime initiated a massive scheme of social engineering, transplanting Catholic proprietors to a small western region while redistributing other lands among English settlers.

By 1652, when the five years of the parliamentary visitation ended, the resourceful and bitter resistance of Oxford University's royalism had been worn down. Few more significant challenges, political or military, had faced the victors of the civil wars. The strategic importance of Oxford survived the city's surrender to parliament — and would persist through the Interregnum. Oxford's new puritan rulers experienced a sense of insecurity and isolation which was heightened by the second civil war of 1648, when the university's defiance provoked a more extensive purge than had apparently been intended. Further expulsions followed the coup of 1648–9 which produced the regicide and the rule of the Rump, and which in Oxford as elsewhere diminished such support as the puritans could muster. The stability of puritan rule in Oxford was always proportionate to the stability of puritan rule in England; and the most stabilizing event during the parliamentary visitation was not a local but a national one, the final defeat of the royalists by Oliver Cromwell at Worcester in September 1651.

This chapter focuses on the protectoral performances of Oliver Cromwell in England. Within the walls of the refurbished palaces, at Whitehall and Hampton Court, Cromwell re-established a household and court that at least imitated those of royal the predecessors. The Protectoral court as re-established did not appoint a Lord Steward but the household below stairs was run along similar lines to that of the Stuarts, with a privy kitchen and cellar, spicery and wine cellar, slaughterhouse and scullery. Unlike monarchs who had been expected to live of their own, Cromwell was granted an annual sum to finance household expenses, in recognition, perhaps, that the court of a Protector was public as well as private and as important to the image and dignity of the government as Cromwell himself.

This chapter discusses the contestation and commemoration of Oliver Cromwell in England. From the creation of the Protectorate, Cromwell and the government were the targets not only of satires but of opposition writings of various genres that contested official representations. Although an apologist for the Instrument sought to disparage the opinionators who protested against the new regime, far from fading with time, the attacks on Cromwell personally and the regime generally increased in number and intensity. His new title was a great stumbling block to obeying the government. The collapse of the Protector's first parliament only added fuel to the opposition. The Declaration of the MPs lately dissolved directly accused Cromwell, mighty Conqueror, of tyranny, and published that they had been purged because they had sought to restrain his avarice and ambition.

John Milton's explanation was needed, since his proposed solution, the perpetuation of what remained of the Long Parliament, ran contrary to a fundamental premiss of the commonwealthmen, those spokesmen for the ‘good old cause’, and of none of them more than Marchamont Nedham when he took their part. In another respect, however, Milton was now wholly with the commonwealthmen. His hopes of single rulers, however ‘supremely excellent’, had been destroyed by the rule of Oliver Cromwell. The ruler who had seemed to him a bulwark against the Stuarts now appeared of a kind with them. Milton may not have wanted a newly elected parliament in 1659–60, but he did want one with undivided and unlimited power. Nedham, as he worked his way back from the protectorate to the Rump, had to overcome venomous resistance to his own re-employment from among the commonwealthmen, who particularly resented his orchestration and publication of addresses in the Cromwellian interest.

This chapter traces Petty's career in Cromwellian Ireland, from his arrival as Physician‐General in 1652 through the collapse of the Protectorate. It focuses on the origins, design, execution, and significance of Petty's ‘Down Survey’ — long celebrated as the first ‘scientific’ mapping of Ireland. Setting the survey both in the context of political disputes over the Cromwellian land settlement and against the background of Baconian scientific ‘reformation’ described in Chapter 2, this chapter argues that Petty's project was both a key instrument in the English colonization of Ireland and an organic outgrowth of his work with the Hartlib Circle, as well as the basis of his personal fortune. An empirical and collaborative scientific project geared towards the plantation and improvement of Ireland, the ‘Down Survey’ was both a model of Baconian natural philosophy and Petty's introduction to English and Irish religious politics.

This chapter describes the reconquest of Ireland by Oliver Cromwell. The final defeat of Charles I and the replacement of the monarchy in 1649 by a puritan commonwealth was maintained by an army in which Oliver Cromwell was the ruling power. His first major task was the reconquest of Ireland. This was achieved by his unprecedented offensive of 1649–50, which, as followed up by his successors in Ireland during the next two years, put an end to nearly ten years of anarchy and reduced all the warring elements to submission. The conquest had been made easier by the divisions among the royalist forces: divisions between English and Irish, between Catholic and Protestant and internal divisions between Catholics. O’Neill's agreement with Ormond had been based on the understanding that a new petition be sent to the pope to grant absolution from Rinuccini's censures, thereby reviving an issue which had seriously divided the Catholic hierarchy. No general terms of surrender had been negotiated, and with few exceptions nothing had been guaranteed in the surrenders except freedom from immediate pillage. Cromwell's reply to the bishops' declaration at Clonmacnoise had made it clear that a vast confiscation of property was to be part of any final settlement.

Professional officers who kept abreast of military innovations understood the need to discipline their soldiers and keep them focused on achieving military goals. Armies which foraged and plundered often became involved in secondary wars with local communities, and forfeited the goodwill of those who might offer intelligence and assistance. Regular payment of troops and developed systems of supply obviated the need for plunder, while improved discipline reduced the incidence of mutiny. The articles of war of various British and Irish armies — which were based upon mainland European models — attempted to regulate crimes and depredations by soldiers, generally secured the more humane treatment of prisoners of war, and restrained plundering and atrocities committed against civilian populations. Ireland was an exception to this trend to improve discipline and limit the destructiveness of war. Here, the parliamentary forces, which became captives of their own anti-Catholic propaganda and the determination of Cromwell to achieve total victory, pursued a policy of ‘fire and sword’ and committed atrocities which made the war in Ireland more bitter.

The civil wars, which ended persecution by the bishops, raised, in John Milton's perspective, ‘new forcers of conscience’: ‘new presbyter’, which is ‘but old priest writ large’. At Pride's Purge the programme for a uniform and compulsory Presbyterian Church was seen off, at least for the time being. However, the Rump did not repeal the post-war legislation which had paved the way for the Presbyterian system; indeed it came within one vote of giving it its official blessing. Presbyterian influence in high places persisted. In 1652 what Milton now called ‘new foes’ to liberty of conscience rose again, when parliament considered a scheme for the ‘propagation of the gospel’. It was submitted to parliament in February, published in March, and debated through the spring. The terms were given to the bodies appointed by Oliver Cromwell to vet candidates for church livings and to remove unsatisfactory ministers from the parishes.