Oliver Cromwell and the Rule of Puritans in England

Sir Charles Firth’s biography of Oliver Cromwell portrays a man who was ‘both soldier and statesman in one’, a man of ‘a large-hearted, expansive vigorous nature’, one who always invokes the might of God to explain his very human acts of revenge and justice. Right up to his death in 1660, argues Firth in a wide-ranging and brilliant study of Puritanism and the man who stood at its head, no man exerted more influence on the religious development of England.