The Achievement of Oliver Cromwell

Abstract

WHEN ALL IS SAID, and when all allowances have been made, it remains impossible to explain the achievement of Cromwell in any simple political terms, whether of the unification of the United Kingdom, or of colonial expansion and imperial policy, or of both. The unification and the expansion were both incidental: they were both by-products, naturally enough thrown out, of great motions of the human mind and the stirring of great events which had other intentions and purposes. Those motions, and that stirring, had produced two civil wars, which lasted from the summer of 1642 to the autumn of 1651. In the course of these civil wars two things, both unprojected and unforeseen, had happened. In the first place all the three countries—England, Scotland, and Ireland—had been involved. The end of the struggle necessarily entailed a new settlement of their relations; and that settlement, which was not originally in debate but had been afterward drawn into debate, was necessarily made by the victor in debate; and necessarily made on the basis of a unified system, congruous with his own ecclesiastical and political ideas. It was an inevitable result; but it was as unintended as it was inevitable, and it proved to be as temporary as it was unintended.