The religious history of the Reformation is a lot more complicated than the simple minded "Calvanists versus Catholics" view of Conservapedia,
e.g. why, after 1650, was the Presbyterian church supporting Charles II against Cromwell?
Posted on 12/31/2010 10:16:57 PM PST by Alex Murphy
In many ways, though, what drove Cromwell was his burning religious passion.
Around 1630, when his financial woes were at their worst, he went through a dramatic religious conversion, becoming convinced that God had marked him out for eternal salvation.
‘Oh, have I lived in and loved darkness and hated the light,’ he wrote a few years later. ‘I was a chief, the chief of sinners . . . I hated godliness; yet God had mercy upon me. O the riches of His mercy!’
But Cromwell was not merely exceptionally religious. He belonged to a particular religious group — the Puritans — who believed that the frivolous Charles I, with his stubborn faith in the Divine Right of Kings and his fondness for elaborate Catholic-style church ceremonies, was betraying the Protestant Reformation.
A century earlier, Henry VIII’s tumultuous break with Roman Catholicism had given rise to a new sense of English identity, rooted in Protestant independence, localism and individualism, and fiercely antagonistic to Continental European influence. But to England’s Protestant middle classes, the return of Papal rule remained a genuine and terrifying threat.
Given his wild mood swings between jubilation and gloom, some biographers have suggested that he suffered from manic depression. That might explain why he laughed ‘as if he had been drunk’ after the Battle of Dunbar. To men like Cromwell, the sinister armies of international Catholicism were always poised to strike across the Channel and extinguish English Protestantism for ever.
And to those who remembered the Spanish Armada and the Gunpowder Plot, and who were horrified by news of the Thirty Years War, the gigantic conflict that tore much of central Europe apart as Spain, France, Sweden and Holland battled for supremacy at the cost of some ten million lives, their fears seemed all too realistic.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
LOL. Hungover, or still drunk?
What?
After the execution of King Charles I in 1649, Cromwell dominated the short-lived Commonwealth of England, conquered Ireland and Scotland, and ruled as Lord Protector from 1653 until his death from a combination of malarial fever and septicaemia in 1658.
from wikepedia and other sites...
Cromwell wasn't 'offed.' Cromwell wasn't a 'mass murderer.' I'm guessing you were born too late for No Child Left Behind?
That would be the ONLY Englishman the English themselves granted the sobriquet “Greast” to: Alfred the Great, the man who kept England from going down completely to the Danes.
Thank you;)
It does help to read the article in full - and to remember that for 400 years, history has been written by Royalists and the Vatican.
Irish Catholics were given Cromwell as a boogy-man while the Monarchs and Popes continued to control and oppress (taxes & tythes).
That imposed a French aristocracy on England for about three centuries, but the underlying English culture was little changed.
Now Hengst's little excursion six centuries earlier, that was a game changer.
Words that would be apropos to the most recent session of the US congress.
The religious history of the Reformation is a lot more complicated than the simple minded "Calvanists versus Catholics" view of Conservapedia,
e.g. why, after 1650, was the Presbyterian church supporting Charles II against Cromwell?
You are wasting your time, although I admire the effort. I don’t think I have ever seen such an historically illiterate set of posts on FR. The “grudge” was manufactured by centuries of Stuart and Catholic historiography. This thread resembles nothing so much as Orwell’s three minute hate.
If you want to read a contemporary account of Cromwell and his life, Lady Antonia Frazier’s biography is detailed and quite good.
Elizabeth I
Cromwell was the devil personified.
Worse. It might be similar if Sherman took ownership the land for good.
Um, no. Cromwell was a tyrant in matters of religion as in other matters, who imposed by force of arms his own Calvinist views on the Church of England. If he was for religious freedom, it was religious freedom for me, but not for thee. The same as his fellow Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
The real champions of religious freedom were the Quakers and the "recusants" (as persistent Latins in England were called), and the same when it came to this side of the Atlantic: William Penn and Lord Baltimore established colonies with religious freedom. Puritan Congregationalism was established in Massachusetts, and Anglicanism in Virginia.
Yeah, right. The kind where you can got to Hell or to Connacht.
“When Charles II finally resumed the throne of England, he had Cromwell executed and Cromwell’s body was left hanging in public for a very long time.”
Cromwell died of illness, and was later “posthumously executed” - and then his body was left hanging.
During time of the English Civil War, it would be difficult to end up universally appreciated. One can surmise that that a “posthumous execution” could be an indicator of a lack of universal appreciation.
Cromwell was a great leader at a time England needed one. Those that would judge him by standards of today change very little, most especially their own ignorance - just as those who “executed” him changed little, from a practical standpoint.
I suspect neither England nor America would be the same without him - for better or worse.
Excellent and succinct post.
“I don’t think I have ever seen such an historically illiterate set of posts on FR.”
Bravo. You can’t fix this sort of willful, trained ignorance, so you may as well laugh at it.
Some of the Williams who settled Rhode Island and later Connecticut were supposedly related to Cromwell.
I’m just a lonely boy
Lonely and blue
I’m all alone
With nothin’ to do
I’ve got everything
You could think of
But all I want
Is someone to love
Someone, yes, someone to love
Someone to kiss
Someone to hold
At a moment like this
I’d like to hear
Somebody say
I’ll give you my love
Each night and day
I’m just a lonely boy
Lonely and blue
I’m all alone
With nothin’ to do
I’ve got everything
You could think of
But all I want
Is someone to love
Somebody, somebody
Somebody, please
Send her to me
I’ll make her happy
Just wait and see
I prayed so hard
To the heavens above
That I might find
Someone to love
I’m just a lonely boy
lonely and blue
I’m all alone
With nothin’ to do
I’ve got everything
You could think of
But all I want
Is someone to love
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