Oliver Cromwell

Oliver Cromwell was born on April 25, 1599, in Huntingdon, a royal borough and a pleasant little market town through which the river Ouse gently flows. Its population was under two thousand, but it contained four churches. At one of them, that of St John the Baptist, Oliver was christened four days after his birth. In those times everyone went to church, but two generations later few in Huntingdon did, for by then most of the inhabitants were non-conformists - a change that crystallized the revolution through which Cromwell was going to live.

When Oliver was a child, the Cromwells were the most important people in the town. His uncle, the head of the family, occupied the lovely Elizabethan manor-house of Hinchingbrooke, which had been built by his grandfather just the other side of the river from the High Street; thence it held sway over the neighbourbood like a little palace.

Huntingdonshire was a rural county with modest pretensions to prosperity; it was agreeable enough in summer, but hard going for travellers when the rains came. Much of the county was a swamp, forming part of the fenland of 700,000 acres that composed a huge watery wasteland in eastern England: Huntingdon and Cambridge were western frontier towns of the Fenland, which was bounded on the east by the coasts of Lincolnshire and Norfolk. Amid the silt and mud a rough class of men and women scraped a precarious livelihood.

Only six years before Cromwell was born, a man, his wife, and daughter were executed in Huntingdon for the crime of witchcraft. In general, the county was poor and backward, a somewhat austere and flat relic of the Middle Ages. It boasted few or no titled or ancient families. The monks and nuns had long since disappeared, having been ousted or pensioned off; in their places reigned the Cromwells of Hinchingbrooke, with their relatives and friends scattered throughout the county; some of them extremely wealthy, others, including Oliver 's own parents, of more tenuous means; all of them acting as leaders in local affairs and quite a few of them representing their neighbours in the House of Commons whenever it met and even being on friendly terms with the Court.

The Cromwells had, in fact, stepped into the shoes of the old Church in Huntingdonshire as owners of land, directors of public opinion, and dispensers of charity. Their fortunes had been created at the Reformation. Cromwell's great-great-great-grandfather on the paternal side had come from Wales with King Henry VII, bearing the name of Morgan Ap-Williams. He settled in Putney as Steward of the Manor of Wimbledon. In fact, the story of the Cromwells begins (and was later to continue) in what is now the London suburb of Putney but was then a flourishing little port; for at Putney passengers from the City would disembark from the Thames and take to the road. It also had a thriving fishery and breweries, and indeed the son of Morgan Williams - another Morgan - besides holding a post at Court, sold beer on a large scale. This Morgan Williams married Katherine, a daughter of another and less reputable brewer named Walter Cromwell, a vigorous character of Norfolk stock, whose son Thomas rose to be the Minister of King Henry VIII responsible for the dissolution of the monasteries. Richard, son of Morgan Williams and Katherine Cromwell, was virtually adopted by his meteorically successful uncle and took his name. He helped Thomas Cromwell to dispose of the monasteries, was knighted, and won the approval of the King by conducting himself handsomely when jousting.