Oliver Cromwell (Penguin Monarchs)

<p><b>The acclaimed Penguin Monarchs series: short fresh expert accounts of England's rulers - now in paperback</b><br><br>Although he styled himself 'His Highness' adopted the court ritual of his royal predecessors and lived in the former royal palaces of Whitehall and Hampton Court Oliver Cromwell was not a king - in spite of the best efforts of his supporters to crown him.<br><br>Yet as David Horspool shows in this illuminating new portrait of England's Lord Protector Cromwell the Puritan son of Cambridgeshire gentry wielded such influence that it would be a pretence to say that power really lay with the collective. The years of Cromwell's rise to power shaped by a decade-long civil war saw a sustained attempt at the collective government of England; the first attempts at a real Union of Britain; the beginnings of empire; a radically new solution to the idea of a national religion; atrocities in Ireland; and the readmission to England of the Jews a people officially banned for over three and a half centuries. At the end of it Oliver Cromwell had emerged as the country's sole ruler: to his enemies and probably to most of his countrymen his legacy looked as likely to last as that of the Stuart dynasty he had replaced.</p>