Some people think of him as an unselfish, tolerant, liberty-loving Christian, whose only desire was to serve God and England. Others think of him as a ruthless, cunning tyrant, who was interested only in power for himself. Oliver Cromwell, Dictator of England as he is known is a subject of as much argument as there is over Henry VIII.It is quite difficult to interpret his words and deeds which seem to support either opinion. His love for power of himself was clearly shown when he took power openly, and not serving a government known as the commonwealth. In 1653 A.D.he ruled the Commonwealth of Britain with the title of Protector.

Many people did not like the protector; Cromwell began his rule with many people against him than for him. Just look back at all those whom he and the army had put down and you can make a list of Cromwell’s enemies. Cromwell thought that God had given him the duty of protecting “God”s people’, by which Cromwell meant Puritans. So he had to make sure that there was no danger from Catholics, either in Britain or abroad. Therefore he tried to make the Church of England puritan by dismissing the vicars and replacing puritan ministers. His belief in making English behave in a “Godly” way resulted in stopping many sports and festivities (including Christmas celebrations), and firmly stamping out drunkenness and any sort of disorder.

Such a clever person was Cromwell that he divide England and Wales into Eleven districts, each governed by a major-general and his soldiers, to watch for any signs of plots against him. people detested this puritan behavior. To make matters worse,they had to pay higher and higher taxes to support his army

It was not that Cromwell was happy at being a military dictator. Next to believing in doing what he thought was God’s work, he believed that England should be ruled by a free Parliament. Three times he tried to find a way of working with different sorts of Parliament, trying to get Parliaments which might agree with him by changing the method of electing them.

Every time, after starting off in a friendly way, the Protector and his Parliament disagreed, and the real reason behind the disagreement was that Parliament, however it had been elected, tried to persuade Cromwell to give up relying on the army. Since Cromwell knew well enough that this would give his enemies a chance to overthrow him, and Puritanism too, he could never agree.

In 1657 he and his third Parliament tried to get out of the dilemma by going back to something like the old system of government under the king. They brought back an Upper House, like the old House of Lords.

The Parliament even asked Cromwell to take the title of king, and he nearly did, even though this would have meant that he would have less power than as Protector. He decided against becoming king because many of the officers of the army protested about it, and these were men whom he dared not offend.