Over the last 400 years, Oliver Cromwell has remained one of the most controversial and divisive characters in British modern history. Sir Winston Churchill considered Cromwell to be a ‘military dictator’, while John Milton referred to Cromwell as ‘a hero of liberty’, who would later become forever immortalized in Milton’s 1652 sonnet To the Lord General Cromwell.

Oliver Cromwell was born on 25 April 1599, in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire to Elizabeth Steward and Robert Cromwell, a former MP and justice of the peace. Cromwell’s great-great-grandfather, Morgan ap William, a brewer from Glamorgan, created a formidable dynasty of politicians and statesmen after he married Katherine Cromwell, the sister of Thomas Cromwell, the chief minister to Henry VIII. The Cromwells’ illustrious line also included Morgan’s son, Richard, a Welsh soldier and courtier, who became Thomas’s protégé, a Gentleman of the Privy Council and the MP for Huntingdon.