Cromwell saved my ancestors from monsters that were throwing my ancestors in rivers while tied in sacks because they weren’t catholic.
Cromwell to me is a hero.
Cromwell is the reason my family which was Catholic left England and landed in the Jamestown settlement in 1649. Cromwell to me is a bloodthirsty oppressive tyrant, a bigot and a monster.
The extent of “fatal persecution” of Catholics and dissenting Protestants by Henry VIII and Edward VI is generally exaggerated, as is the persecution of Protestants by Mary I. During the reign of Elizabeth the religiously motivated murder of Catholics and dissenting Protestants ticked up into the thousands, but pales in comparison to the scale of Cromwell’s slaughter.
If your ancestors were plantation settlers in Ireland (assuming you’re referring to the Portadown drownings) — they went for a swim less for being Protestants and more for decades of brutal occupation as a foreign, so-called elite ruling class, replete with dispossession, starvation, enslavement, religious persecution and massacres of the natives. The occupier victims of 1641, generally speaking, deserve to be mourned no more than Nazis killed by the Polish resistance.