During his lifetime, some tracts painted him as a hypocrite motivated by power—for example,
The Machiavilian Cromwell and
The Juglers Discovered, both part of an attack on Cromwell by the
Levellers after 1647, present him as a
Machiavellian figure. More positive contemporary assessments—for instance John Spittlehouse in
A Warning Piece Discharged—typically compared him to Moses, rescuing the English by taking them safely through the Red Sea of the civil wars. Several biographies were published soon after his death. An example is
The Perfect Politician, which described how Cromwell "loved men more than books" and gave a nuanced assessment of him as an energetic campaigner for liberty of conscience brought down by pride and ambition. An equally nuanced but less positive assessment was published in 1667 by
Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon, in his
History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England. Clarendon famously declared that Cromwell "will be looked upon by posterity as a brave bad man". He argued that Cromwell's rise to power had been helped not only by his great spirit and energy, but also by his wickedness and ruthlessness. Clarendon never knew Cromwell well, and his account was written after the
Restoration of the monarchy (which may have shaped the narrative) —but it is still looked upon by some as a "masterpiece".
In the early eighteenth century, Cromwell’s image began to be adopted and reshaped by the
Whigs, as part of a wider project to give their political objectives historical legitimacy. A version of
Edmund Ludlow’s Memoirs, re-written by
John Toland to excise the radical puritan elements and replace them with a
Whiggish brand of republicanism, presented the Cromwellian Protectorate as a military tyranny. Through Ludlow, Toland portrayed Cromwell as a despot who crushed the beginnings of democratic rule in the 1640s.
During the early nineteenth century, Cromwell began to be adopted by
Romantic artists and poets.
Victor Hugo's 1827 play
Cromwell is often considered symbolic of the French romantic movement, and represents Cromwell as a ruthless yet dynamic Romantic hero. Similarly, the French painter
Hippolyte Delaroche painted a picture in 1831 inspired by the legend of Cromwell visiting Charles I's body after his execution that gives a similar impression of a world-changing individual with a strong will and personality.
Thomas Carlyle continued this reassessment of Cromwell in the 1840s by presenting Cromwell as a hero in the battle between good and evil and a model for restoring morality to an age Carlyle believed to be dominated by timidity, meaningless rhetoric, and moral compromise. Cromwell's actions, including his campaigns in Ireland and his dissolution of the Long Parliament, according to Carlyle, had to be appreciated and praised as a whole. However, readers were free to interpret Carlyle selectively. His picture of Cromwell appealed to nonconformists, who saw him as a champion of denominational independence, and to working-class radicals (including some Marxists), who saw him as a man of the people who had stood up against monarchical and aristocratic oppression. Nonconformist churches supported a campaign to have Cromwell's statue erected outside the
Palace of Westminster; Ford Madox Brown and other artists depicted Cromwell as a heroic figure in paintings such as
Cromwell, Protector of the Vaudois. In 1899, when commemorative events to mark the anniversary of Cromwell's birth took place, they were all organised by the
Congregational and
Baptist churches. At the London ceremony
David Lloyd George said that he believed in Cromwell because "he was a great fighting dissenter".
By the late nineteenth century, Carlyle’s portrayal of Cromwell, stressing the centrality of puritan morality and earnestness, had become assimilated into
Whig and
Liberal historiography. The
Oxford civil war historian
Samuel Rawson Gardiner concluded that "the man—it is ever so with the noblest—was greater than his work". Gardiner stressed Cromwell’s dynamic and mercurial character, and his role in dismantling absolute monarchy, while underestimating Cromwell’s religious conviction. Cromwell’s foreign policy also provided an attractive forerunner of Victorian imperial expansion, with Gardiner stressing his “constancy of effort to make England great by land and sea”.
In the first half of the twentieth century, Cromwell's reputation was often shaped by the rise of fascism in
Germany and
Italy. Wilbur Cortez Abbott, for example — a Harvard historian — devoted much of his career to compiling and editing a multi-volume collection of Cromwell's letters and speeches. In the course of this work, which was published between 1937 and 1947, Abbott began to argue that Cromwell was a proto-fascist. However, subsequent historians such as
John Morrill have criticised both Abbott's interpretation of Cromwell and his editorial approach.
Ernest Barker similarly compared the Independents to the Nazis. Nevertheless, not all historical comparisons made at this time drew on contemporary military dictators.
Leon Trotsky, for example, compared Cromwell to
Lenin, arguing that "Lenin is a Proletarian Cromwell of the Twentieth Century".
Late twentieth-century historians have re-examined the nature of Cromwell’s faith and of his authoritarian regime. Austin Woolrych explored the issue of "dictatorship" in depth, arguing that Cromwell was subject to two conflicting forces: his obligation to the army and his desire to achieve a lasting settlement by winning back the confidence of the political nation as a whole. Woolrych argued that the dictatorial elements of Cromwell's rule stemmed not so much from its military origins or the participation of army officers in civil government, as from his constant commitment to the interest of the people of God and his conviction that suppressing vice and encouraging virtue constituted the chief end of government.
Historians such as John Morrill, Blair Worden and J.C. Davis have developed this theme, revealing the extent to which Cromwell’s writing and speeches are suffused with biblical references, and arguing that his radical actions were driven by his zeal for godly reformation.
Locally Cromwell has retained popularity in
Cambridgeshire, where he was known as "Lord of the Fens". In
Cambridge, he is commemorated in a painted glass window portrait in the Emmanuel
United Reformed Church; St Ives, Cambridgeshire has erected his statue in the town centre.
