Oliver Cromwell - LoveToKnow 1911(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-01)
Cromwell was perhaps arrested in his project by his succession in 1636 to the estate of his uncle Sir Thomas Steward, and to his office of farmer of the cathedral tithes at Ely, whither he now removed.
Cromwell was present at the sieges of Bridgwater, Bath, Sherborne and Bristol; and later, in command of four regiments of foot and three of horse, he was employed in clearing Wiltshire and Hampshire of the royalist garrisons.
Cromwell was essentially a conservative reformer; in his attempts to purge the court of chancery of its most flagrant abuses, and to settle the ecclesiastical affairs of the nation, he showed himself anxious to retain as much of the existing system as could be left untouched without doing positive evil.
Oliver Cromwell was descended from Catherine Cromwell (born circa 1482), an older sister of Tudor statesman Thomas Cromwell.
Cromwell's alleged paternal ancestor, Jasper Tudor, was a younger brother of Edmund Tudor, 1st Earl of Richmond, uncle to his son Henry VII of England, and son of Owen Tudor and Catherine of Valois, daughter of Charles VI of France and Isabeau of Bavaria.
Cromwell led a Parliamentary invasion of Ireland from 1649-50, with the twin aims of eliminating the military threat posed by the alliance, signed in 1649, between the Irish Confederate Catholics and English Royalists to the Commonwealth and punishing the Irish for their rebellion of 1641.
Henry and Wolsey staged a meeting with Francis I on French territory in June 1520 that was to be the prelude to further diplomacy.
In December 1534, Cromwell was appointed Henry's vicegerent (or deputy) in spirituals and instructed to investigate the wealth and condition of the monasteries.
She was the daughter of Sir Thomas Parr, Henry's master of the wards and comptroller of the household, and the widow of Lord Latimer.
Cromwell could be most useful to the government in parliament, and the government, represented by Norfolk, undertook to use its influence in procuring him a seat, on the natural understanding that Cromwell should do his best to further government business in the House of Commons.
Cromwell was not affected by the iniquities of the monks except as arguments for the confiscation of their property.
Cromwell, however, succeeded in suspending the execution of the act, and was allowed to proceed with his one independent essay in foreign policy.
Henry VIII was born at Greenwich on 28 June 1491, the second son of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York.
Henry's interest in foreign policy was focused on Western Europe, which was a shifting pattern of alliances centred round the kings of Spain and France, and the Holy Roman Emperor.
Henry got rid of Anne on charges of treason (presided over by Thomas Cromwell) which were almost certainly false, and she was executed in 1536.
www.royal.gov.uk /output/Page19.asp (1526 words)
Wikinfo | Oliver Cromwell(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-01)
Oliver was born in Huntingdon, in the county of Huntingdonshire in East Anglia.
Cromwell's influence as a military commander and politician during the English Civil War dramatically altered the military and the political landscape of the British Isles.
Cromwell felt justified in ordering the massacre because the city's defenders had continued to fight, in violation of what were then the norms of warfare, after the walls had been breached.
With the beheading of Thomas Cromwell and Henry's wife Katherine Howard, the executions of numerous individuals both Protestant and Catholic for their faith, and the expensive, rather futile war in France in the mid-1540s, Henry firmed up his historical reputation as a great tyrant.
Henry was no doubt feared as a tyrant by those who knew him and by those who swore allegiance to him from afar as their king.
Henry's ruthless actions in the name of the Church of England can be somewhat counterbalanced by the conviction of many loyal to the new regime that the changes, both religious and political, were of the greatest importance to England and occasionally called for strong-armed enforcement.
Cromwell had been injured in the leg during an attack by the Prince of Parma’s forces, when the English "little by little were forced to retire under the walls of Ghent, where they set themselves in good order of battle, and then made a noble stout skirmish with the enemy".
Cromwell’s early return from Ireland was, according to his own words, due to "his colonelship there was taken from him, the command of the town (Dundalk) where he lay given to another, his company cashiered, and his goods stayed or rifled".
Cromwell’s wife "made humble suit to the council on behalf of her Lord that is a prisoner in the Tower, in regard that he is corpulent and sickly he may take the air".
Cromwell was not directly descended from Henry VIII’s chief minister Thomas Cromwell, who was elevated to the earldom of Essex but was condemned and executed in 1540 when he fell from favour, though he was connected to him via Thomas’s sister.
Henry, himself in due course knighted, had eleven children by his first wife (six sons and five daughters), most of whom survived into adulthood, married and had children of their own.
Jane Cromwell (born 1606) married in 1636 John Disbrowe, who became a senior commander in the parliamentarian army, a close colleague of Oliver’s, a member of the Protectoral Council of State throughout the Protectorate and one of the Major Generals of 1655-6.
Cromwell's rise to power was extraordinary and occurred just when Henry needed a minister of great administrative imagination and genius, uninterested in the squabbles of his council and determined to empower the machinery of state.
Henry was so pleased with this unexpected docility that he gave her status second only to his daughters, Princesses Mary and Elizabeth, both of whom came to befriend Anne.
Henry and Cromwell's enemies were in the midst of finding scapegoats for the marriage, while not yet assured of its outcome.
Oliver Cromwell - Gurupedia(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-01)
In the wake of victory, the monarchy was abolished, and between 1649 and 1653 the country became a republic, long rare in Europe.
In 1657 Cromwell was offered the kingship by a reconstituted parliament, presenting him with a dilemma since he had been instrumental in abolishing the monarchy.
This should have been the end of the story but in 1661 Oliver Cromwell's body was exhumed from Westminster Abbey and was subjected to the ritual of a posthumous execution - on January 30, the same date that Charles I had been executed.
Cromwell (1970)(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-01)
Cromwell, was a Greek drollery based on the foolish notion that there are extraordinary possibilities in very ordinary people.
It clearly makes Cromwell out to be too important from the start: rather than being one of the key leaders in the beginning, he really started out as a military commander and simply rose to prominence over time.
Finally, Cromwell, despite some of his autocratic tendency coming through, is still shown to be too much the reluctant, noble hero, and the film only hints at his other face, one which in short order made him none too popular in England, let alone Ireland.
us.imdb.com /Details?0065593 (545 words)
Anne of Cleves' Story(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-01)
Henry's right-hand man, Thomas Cromwell, was in favor of a political alliance with a Protestant country.
Anne of Cleves was one of the candidates that Cromwell brought to Henry's attention.
Henry may have still thought himself the handsomest prince in Christendom, but in all reality, he was no longer the golden Adonis of his youth.
Colonel Williams —“Cromwell that was”— appears to have been HenryCromwell, grandson of Sir Oliver Cromwell, and first cousin, once removed, to the Protector.
He was seated at Bodsey House, in the parish of Ramsey, which had been his father’s residence, and held the commission of a colonel.
“It was a measure of the King’s forgiveness that by a decade after the Restoration he was accepting hospitality from HenryCromwell, second son of the late Protector, at his home in Newmarket.”
