[Music] I think that's a really difficult question yeah was Lenin a hero or villain he frayed the Russian people from centuries of oppression from the czars Cromwell was a man of his times and had some pretty reprehensible views about Catholics which resulted in bloodshed and murder there's no doubt about that but in terms of the times if you're fighting the Antichrist you can't you know have a boxing match you have to win and you Cromwell showed that it was possible for the British nation to rule without the formal need of kingship or an established church
and that that's a pretty impressive thing to have achieved and the fact that a man as rigorous as John Milton was quite happy in although he changed his mind towards the end but quite happy to venerate this new order it was a Commonwealth it was an argument that said government was for the people and almost by the people now the great things that are thrust against Cromwell's reputation is the role of the major generals you know if you read the wrong pamphlet England is under military occupation but that's not really an accurate account they did
in fact have governors who were military figures but they were pursuing the same old phrase Godley rule and all forms of political power at this period worked by brokerage you couldn't just turn up even if you were the New Model Army and occupy and make people do things you had to have the cooperation of local elites and local figures so Cromwell I believe is one of those tricky figures you know Churchill gets a lot of positive press but he did terrible things in the Indian subcontinent and in the Northeast and he set the troops on
unions Cromwell had it precisely those sorts of problems he had to deal with difficult and pressing issues and he dealt with them in the way a 17th century person would which to us is very very reprehensible and and certainly the Cromwellian conduct in Ireland they were atrocities and you know if you if you want to look into the past to learn a little bit about the present understanding the Cromwellian impact on Ireland is why the issue of a hard border between Ireland and the the UK now is such a problematic one because that was so
brutal now I'm not making excuses for cromwell and i think in one sense it's not the role of the historian to give people marks out of ten but to try and understand what their project was we can say that you know an imperial project in ireland or even in the Jamaica's is not a very good one and that we wouldn't pursue it today but it happened so we need to understand why it happened yeah we should always remember as well that Cromwell and the Regicides all of those figures who put Charles the first on trial
and sign the death warrant were of course either executed or disinterred and had their bodies desecrated by the return of the Royal monarchy in the 1660s so these people were pretty unpleasant as well you know what we always forget is were playing for very high stakes God was in the land or not and if you did the wrong thing you got punished [Music]
