Cromwell’s life has not been written about in full for a surprisingly long time. The last major biography for a general readership was Antonia Fraser’s richly detailed, personal Cromwell: Our Chief of Men (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973, most recently reissued 2008), which came not long after the more scholarly and politically focused but equally readable Life by Christopher Hill, God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970, and London: Penguin, 1990). Both these books remain the most rewarding biographical resources, though naturally some of their interpretations have been overtaken by more recent scholarship. Among shorter treatments, both Barry Coward, Oliver Cromwell (London: Longman, 1991) and Peter Gaunt, Oliver Cromwell (London: British Library Publishing, 2004) take modern scholarly approaches into account while telling the whole story energetically. Ian Gentles’s Oliver Cromwell: God’s Warrior and the English Revolution (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) opens up new lines of enquiry, including Cromwell’s love life, as well as his soldiering, horse-breeding and lay preaching. John Morrill’s lengthy entry on Cromwell in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, online at http://www.oxforddnb.com, and subsequently published as a separate volume by the same press, 2007) is an ideal starting point for a clear, sympathetic but no-nonsense treatment.
Morrill is also one of the editors working on a promised five-volume Oxford University Press edition of ‘all the writings and speeches of Oliver Cromwell’, which will surely encourage a new generation of biographers (of whom one hopes Professor Morrill is one) to take on Oliver in the round. Until then, the pioneering work of Thomas Carlyle, while still fascinating for a nineteenth-century view of seventeenth-century Puritanism (The Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell with elucidations, London: Chapman and Hall, 1845) has given way to the four mighty volumes of Wilbur Cortez Abbott’s Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell with an Introduction, Notes and a Sketch of His Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1937–47) and Ivan Roots’s more reliable, if less compendious, Speeches of Oliver Cromwell (London: Dent, 1989).
Modern scholars, as well as hiving Oliver off into separate, manageable compartments (see John Morrill’s edited essay collection Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution, London: Longman, 1990), have increasingly realized that the huge quantity of Cromwell’s own words can mislead as much as it can enlighten. Work informed by this spirit of thoughtful scepticism includes Patrick Little’s edited collection Oliver Cromwell: New Perspectives (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and J. C. Davis’s volume in a series on Reputations (Oliver Cromwell, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2001).
The Civil Wars that made Cromwell and unmade his opponent have continued to be the engine room of British historiography in the past two decades. This carries on a tradition that began just after the wars themselves, when the Royalist Earl of Clarendon, Edward Hyde, composed his History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England in six volumes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888). There is a more manageable selection of Clarendon’s history and memoirs available, edited by Paul Seaward: The History of the Rebellion: A New Selection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Three of the best modern treatments of this unfailingly fascinating and confusing era are Austin Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, 1625–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), Michael Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars (London: Allen Lane, 2008) and Ian Gentles, The English Revolution and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, 1638–1652 (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2007), which is strongest on the military narrative. For a military view of Oliver himself there is Old Ironsides: The Military Biography of Oliver Cromwell by Frank Kitson (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004), while Ian Gentles’s The New Model Army in England, Ireland and Scotland, 1645–1653 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992) is the definitive history of the fighting force that became a political actor in the drama.
Among the groups that rose to prominence through the army, the Levellers are the most intriguing. H. N. Brailsford’s The Levellers and the English Revolution (Redwood, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1961) is the classic study, supplemented now by Rachel Foxley’s The Levellers: Radical Political Thought in the English Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013) and, too late to be of use in the writing of this book, John Rees’s The Leveller Revolution (London: Verso, 2016). Christopher Hill edited Brailsford’s posthumously published work, and his own publications on the Levellers and the other radical political and religious groups that sprang up during the Interregnum, particularly The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (London: Penguin, 1975), brilliantly evoke and interrogate a unique English historical moment.
The period of the Protectorate has been variously portrayed as authoritarian, reactionary and dysfunctional. For a more even-handed treatment there is Barry Coward’s The Cromwellian Protectorate (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002) and, for an overview of the whole period from the execution of Charles I to the Restoration, The British Republic 1649–1660 by Ronald Hutton (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000). For Cromwell’s attempt to fashion a new identity for his Protectorate, somewhere between regal and republican, and how that fitted into Stuart patterns, see Kevin Sharpe’s Image Wars: Promoting Kings and Commonwealths in England, 1603–1660 (London and New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010). Finally, for the posthumous travels of Oliver’s most famous body part, there is Jonathan Fitzgibbons’s Oliver’s Head (Kew: National Archives, 2008).