How do you like your Cromwell? A versatile dish, served hot or cold, dressed to taste and capable of forming the base ingredient to simple or elaborate concoctions, but always carrying that unmistakeable Oliver tang. Or need that be so? In 2021, Ronald Hutton’s The making of Oliver Cromwell gave us a very different, more than usually pungent, Cromwell, now making a welcome reappearance. The earlier book traced an individual moving from relative obscurity as a minor country gentleman to the second-ranked general of the victorious New Model Army as the first, and most prolonged, bout of civil war in England closed in 1646. The present study leaves him in the spring of 1653, just a few months before the inauguration of the regime which he would head as lord protector, an office he would retain (in amended form) until his death five years later. What lies between are not merely momentous events but a concentration of those which have defined Cromwell for later generations, from his role in the army-led revolution, against both parliament and king, in 1648–9, through the regicide, to the campaigns in Ireland and in Scotland, and on to the final overthrow of his erstwhile masters, the last remaining M.P.s from the parliament first elected in 1640, expelled by troops under Cromwell’s command. The scope is worth mentioning for this is very much a public history of Cromwell. Hutton is very willing to offer assessments of Cromwell the individual, conflating and evaluating the multiple — and often contradictory — accounts offered by contemporaries to that end, rather than making his principal approach through directly Cromwellian resources, now made more readily accessible through the monumental and essential Letters, writings, and speeches of Oliver Cromwell, ed. John Morrill et al. (3 vols, Oxford, 2022). This is a conscious choice. Hutton had eschewed reliance upon materials emanating from the man himself for the ‘basic framework on which to hang a narrative’ in his earlier book, instead ‘questioning much of what Cromwell himself wanted people to believe of him’ and to avoid what he took to be ‘the generally accepting and admiring tone of most previous scholarly writing on him’ (1–2). He accomplished that and, adopting the same procedure here, has succeeded in doing so once again.

Hutton’s book opens with Cromwell setting off on a short walk to the Commons on 20 April 1647. Like that imagined spring day, Hutton’s account of what follows is brisk and clear. So are all the chapters that follow. This is narrative writing of an exceptional order. Even readers less drawn towards the detailing of military campaigns and actions will find here highly readable and intelligible accounts of battles and sieges, clarifying the challenges, complications and significance of the decisions being made on the ground and the implications of the outcomes. Details are harnessed to convey the conditions of combat, knowledge surely not unrelated to Professor Hutton’s ‘long years working field artillery for the Sealed Knot Society’ (416). There are excellent maps. The political narrative passes through more contested territory, churned up by much scholarly traverse. Again, the account given of specific incidents and developments is always lucid and often persuasive. Indeed, the clarity of exposition can somewhat disguise the solidity of the scholarship upon which it is being constructed. Only very rarely does the text reveal direct engagement with other scholars’ arguments, but points of contentions are opened up in extensive endnotes, revealing something of the judiciousness with which Professor Hutton has reached his conclusions.

There is no more telling example than his treatment of the events at Drogheda in September 1649. Here, the narrative is broken in order to make space for a fuller evaluation. The approach is one which offers careful sifting of individual pieces of evidence, appropriate caution in evaluating questions both of what occurred and how far Cromwell’s responsibility might extend, but firm, well-grounded conclusions. Hutton concludes that, if the garrison almost all perished, including some of them most probably after quarter was promised, and some, though not most, non-combatants were also killed, then the result was a ‘body count far in excess of that reached when any other stronghold was stormed’ in any of the three kingdoms. But death on this scale was as a result of the ‘exceptional size’ of the garrison rather than of ‘unusual severity’ being exercised (220), for similar outcomes were endured by other, smaller, garrisons who resisted rather than surrendered, both in and beyond Ireland. The context is that of the rather ‘hazily defined assumptions’ which constituted the ‘conventions’ of war at the time (218) and of choices made by commanders with direct, or indirect, consequences. Hutton places events at Wexford in the latter category. Cromwell’s impatient decision to combine negotiation with continuing attack is seen to have resulted in the breakthrough and assault, in which he ‘lost control of his men’ (234), leading to such death and destruction as to lose him a potential base for winter quarters. As for what this says of Cromwell: ‘he had always been a killer’. Already in England he had ‘exulted in the pursuit and slaughter of fleeing enemies after field actions’, ready to ‘demonize opponents’ and, just sometimes, to give rein to a fierce temper (221). They were traits which would recur. Hutton’s Cromwell is militarily masterful, but unrelenting, even brutal.

With Cromwell the politician we have here, again, an individual of quite consummate skill, and in many of the necessary arts, from well-aimed rhetoric to possessing a shrewd evaluation of the potential of print propaganda; the ‘great networker’ is one ready to listen to, even reconcile with, critics or outright opponents, to handpick and deploy able aides and allies. Instances of all such characteristics are peppered across the volume. But presented here, too, is the ‘slipperiness and deviousness’ which impressed itself on former friends as well as longstanding foes and, across the political spectrum, the ruthlessness in disposing of those who obstructed the march of the ‘cause’. And what was that cause? Hutton reprises his finding from his earlier study that the sustaining principle for Cromwell was the liberty of the ‘people of God’, not ‘toleration’ in any abstract sense, and certainly not a commitment to any particular mode of political governance, but the right of godly Protestants to worship according to conscience, outside the established national church or with some flexibility within it. And that being so, he would choose, in each successive political crisis during the post-war years, to align himself with the army against its currently-chosen foe; an army which was the best, perhaps the only, upholder of his chosen cause.

Indeed, at times it is the army as a corporate actor, and not Cromwell, which takes the starring role. And if not quite the villain, it plays a morally ambiguous lead. For all the talk of liberties, reform and the good of ‘the people’, Hutton is certain that in the end the army’s choices, and Cromwell’s with them, were made to further its own collective interest, and only secondarily that of those constituencies who looked to it as their protector, let alone those of the wider English population. Discussing the intense politicisation of the army in 1647, Hutton notes that ‘Cromwell had only intermittently been clearly in view, most often subsumed in the mass of senior officers’ though ‘obviously … at the centre of events’ (70). And it is certainly the case that then, and on other occasions, the nature of the evidence makes it hard to disentangle his specific contribution from that of those among whom he operated. But that Cromwell slips from view at times is also a result of decisions taken by the author. In choosing to construct his account from the outside in, so to speak, there is some loss as well as gain. Hutton’s Cromwell may be a dissembler, even, to the Scottish (and at one time Ulster-based) Presbyterian minister Robert Blair, a hypocritical ‘greeting [weeping] devil’ (144). But for all the masterly account of the events of, and surrounding, his life in this critical years, and the vivid yet solid portrait which emerges, something is lost when the Oliverian voice is quelled. Here is a very fresh and vibrant serving of Cromwell, though perhaps some of the tang is missing. Yet, for those who may have thought that no original depiction of Cromwell was possible after all the scholarly energy devoted to him, Ronald Hutton has, once again, demonstrated how this may be achieved. And for readers who wish for a guide through the tangled events of these turbulent years, this is a fine place to turn. We can only hope that Hutton’s Cromwell will return for a third instalment.