Oliver
Cromwell was born in Huntingdon on April 25th 1599 to Robert Cromwell
& Elizabeth Stewart. His grandparents on his fathers side
were Henry Cromwell & Jane Warren. Elizabeth Stewart's parents
were William Stewart and Catherine Payne. Educated at Huntingdon
grammar school, now the Cromwell Museum, and at Cambridge University,
he became a minor East Anglian landowner. He made a living by
farming and collecting rents, first in his native Huntingdon,
then from 1631 in St Ives and from 1636 in Ely.
Cromwell's
inheritances from his father, who died in 1617, and later from
a maternal uncle were not great. His income was modest and he
had to support his widowed mother, wife and eight children. He
ranked near the bottom of the landed elite, the landowning class
often labeled 'the gentry' which dominated the social and political
life of the county.
At
the end of 1642 after a series of successful sieges and small
battles which helped to secure East Anglia and East Midlands against
the royalists in the first of three civil wars, Cromwell was appointed
lieutenant-general of the Eastern Association army, parliament's
largest and most effective regional army.
Charles
I was a member of the House of Stuart, a Scottish dynasty that
had ruled both England and Scotland since 1601. Although the countries
shared a king, they maintained separate national identities and
distinct bodies of law. They also maintained different established
religions and separate parliaments.
When
Charles I, second of the Stuart kings, acceded to the throne in
1625 he tried to rule as an absolute monarch. This policy brought
him swiftly into conflict with England's Parliament, whose members
strongly preferred a more flexible system of parliamentary monarchy.
In
the late 1630s, Scotland rose up against the King's religious
policies and defeated his English army, Charles I was forced to
call parliament in 1640 and to make concessions to it, reversing
some of his earlier policies. But the political crisis in England
continued, for many within parliament pushed for further political,
constitutional and religious reforms which Charles I, now winning
some sympathy and support within the country, would not accept.
In 1642, as both King and parliament gathered bodies of armed
supporters, the unresolved political crisis deteriorated into
an armed confrontation and civil war.
During
the 1640s, radical religious and political changes were occurring
in Scotland as well. The Scots were deeply loyal to their national
church, the Kirk, the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. When Charles
tried to interfere with the internal affairs of the Kirk, Scottish
nobles and many commoners in 1638 signed a document called the
National Covenant, by which they agreed to resist Charles' proposed
reforms.
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