Cromwell

The chief minister of the Reformation, and the Lord Protector.

Territory of Cromwell

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What does the Cromwell name mean?

Locative, from the Nottinghamshire-Yorkshire village of Cromwell (Old English *crom* + *well*, a winding stream). The senior line was a Putney-Welsh gentry family of the fifteenth century; the Welsh-Cromwell line came up to London under Henry VII and produced two of the most consequential English political figures of the modern period: Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex (c.1485–1540), chief minister of Henry VIII and architect of the dissolution of the monasteries; and his great-great-grand-nephew Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658), Lord Protector of the Commonwealth.

The history of Cromwell

The Cromwells of Putney trace to the late-fifteenth-century Welsh-emigrant Cromwell line. Thomas Cromwell (c.1485–1540), born at Putney to Walter Cromwell the blacksmith-cum-fuller, served as a soldier in Italy, lawyer in London, and eventually as chief minister to Henry VIII from 1532 to 1540. He drafted and pushed through the Reformation Parliament's legislative programme that broke with Rome, dissolved the monasteries, and laid the foundations of the modern English state. He was executed at Tower Hill on the twenty-eighth of July 1540 on a charge of treason concocted by his enemies after the political failure of the Anne of Cleves marriage. His great-great-grand-nephew Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658), the Huntingdonshire country gentleman who became MP for Cambridge in 1640, was the parliamentary general of the English Civil War of 1642–46, the principal architect of the Pride's Purge and the trial and execution of Charles I in January 1649, and Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland from 1653 to his death on the third of September 1658. He is buried (and was disinterred and posthumously executed at Tyburn in 1661) in the Henry VII Lady Chapel at Westminster Abbey, then under the Tyburn gallows, and finally at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.

Notable bearers of the Cromwell name

Thomas Cromwell, 1st Earl of Essex (c.1485–1540), chief minister of Henry VIII
Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658), Lord Protector of the Commonwealth
Richard Cromwell (1626–1712), Lord Protector 1658–59

Stories of Cromwell

You have sat too long for any good you have been doing
1653
On the morning of the twentieth of April 1653, in the Chamber of the House of Commons at Westminster, Oliver Cromwell, fifty-four years old, the Lord General of the Commonwealth armies, walked in to the sitting of the Rump Parliament (the fifty-three Members of Parliament who had remained after the 1648 *Pride's Purge* of the Long Parliament), sat down on a back bench for about ten minutes in silence, stood up, made a speech of about ten minutes' duration in which he attacked the members for their self-interest and failure to enact the legal-and-religious reforms the Commonwealth had been promising for four years, called in a file of musketeers under his Colonel Worsley, and physically dismissed the Members from the Chamber. The climax of the speech, the most-quoted parliamentary line in modern British history, was the peroration: *you have sat too long for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!* The Mace (the symbol of parliamentary authority), Cromwell ordered removed with the line *what shall we do with this bauble?* The Rump Parliament was dissolved. The Barebones Parliament of nominated members sat for six months. The Instrument of Government of December 1653 established the Protectorate with Cromwell as Lord Protector. The English Commonwealth ran for the remaining five years of Cromwell's life and one further year under his son Richard, before the Restoration of Charles II in May 1660.
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Frequently asked

What does the surname Cromwell mean?

Where does the Cromwell family come from?

The Cromwell family was historically based in East of England in England, in particular Cambridgeshire & the Fens.

Who are some famous Cromwells?

Notable bearers of the Cromwell name include Thomas Cromwell, 1st Earl of Essex (c.1485–1540), chief minister of Henry VIII, Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658), Lord Protector of the Commonwealth and Richard Cromwell (1626–1712), Lord Protector 1658–59.