Oliver Cromwell

Religious beliefs

Cromwell's understanding of religion and politics were very closely intertwined. He was a committed Puritan Protestant, believing that salvation was open to all who obeyed the teachings of the Bible and acted according to their own conscience. He was passionately opposed to the Roman Catholic Church, which he saw as denying the primacy of the Bible in favor of Papal and Clerical authority and which he blamed for tyranny and persecution of Protestants in Europe. For this reason, he was bitterly opposed to Charles I's reforms of the Church of England, which introduced Catholic-style Bishops and Prayer Books in place of Bible study. During Cromwell’s Protectorate, the Book of Common Prayer was replaced with a Directory of Worship, and bishops were abolished. Cromwell did not favor celebrating feasts of saints, or Christmas. His soldiers often desecrated Churches by removing any signs of what they regarded as 'Popish' idolatry, ornaments, statues, or destroying stained-glass depictions of saints. Cromwell's associations of Catholicism and persecution were deepened with the Irish Rebellion of 1641, which were marked by massacres (wildly exaggerated in Puritan circles in Britain) by Irish Catholics of English and Scottish Protestant settlers. This would later be one of the reasons why Cromwell acted so harshly in his military campaign in Ireland.

Cromwell was also opposed to the more radical religious groups on the Protestant side in the Civil Wars. Although he co-operated with Quakers and Presbyterians, he was opposed to their authoritarian imposition of their beliefs on other Protestants. He became associated with the 'Independent' faction, which argued for religious freedom for all Protestants in a post-war settlement. He favored Congregationalism, which first started in 1581 in Norwich when Robert Browne gathered a congregation of believers together, who he said constituted the true church locally as a voluntary, covenanted community under Christ, not the ruler. Congregations were self-governing, choosing their own pastors and elders.

Finally, Cromwell was also a firm believer in Providentialism - the belief that God was actively directing the affairs of the world through the actions of chosen people. He believed himself to be God's instrument and, during the Civil Wars that he interpreted victories as indications of God's approval of his actions and defeats as signs that God was directing him in another direction. However, he also credited his soldiers (701). The leading Puritan thinker and writer, John Bunyan served in his army, while John Milton was his secretary. John Owen, considered the leading Puritan thinker, was his friend and Chaplain. Fraser (2001) cites Milton, who described Cromwell as having stored up a "native vastness of intellect" and his "faith in God" that carried him through life (16). Fraser describes Cromwell's faith of having had "an extraordinary mystical streak" (412).

The Oxford historian Christopher Hill has written a semi-popular account of his influential studies in this area in God's Englishman (1970).