Providence Lost
A historical examination of Oliver Cromwell's role in English history and the consequences of his rise to power during the English Civil War.
Almost immediately following the introduction of the scheme in October 1655, William Prynne, Puritan politician and polemicist, predicted that such military governance would ‘acquire the perpetual infamy of the most detestable perjury, treachery, hypocrisy, fraud, impiety, apostasy, tyranny, atheism that ever any Christian saint-like army and officer were guilty of in the eyes of God’. And so it has proved, not least in the longstanding British aversion to standing armies: no man in uniform has ruled Britain since Cromwell.
one of Cromwell’s most famous phrases put it, you trusted in God, but it was up to you to keep your powder dry.
Consider this: an East Anglian, nonconformist, philosemite, suspicious of, though not fundamentally opposed to, monarchy; a unionist uncomprehending of Ireland, a courageous advocate of military action, who left considerable problems of succession to those who came after them? It appears that Margaret Thatcher was cut from similar cloth to the Protector. And it may take just as long for a statue near Parliament to be raised to her.