Böcker av David Horspool

Although he styled himself 'His Highness', adopted the court ritual of his royal predecessors, and lived in the former royal palaces of Whitehall and Hampton Court, Oliver Cromwell was not a king - in spite of the best efforts of his supporters to crown him.Yet, as David Horspool shows in this illuminating new portrait of England's Lord Protector, Cromwell, the Puritan son of Cambridgeshire gentry, wielded such influence that it would be a pretence to say that power really lay with the collective. The years of Cromwell's rise to power, shaped by a decade-long civil war, saw a sustained attempt at the collective government of England; the first attempts at a real Union of Britain; the beginnings of empire; a radically new solution to the idea of a national religion; atrocities in Ireland; and the readmission to England of the Jews, a people officially banned for over three and a half centuries. At the end of it, Oliver Cromwell had emerged as the country's sole ruler: to his enemies, and probably to most of his countrymen, his legacy looked as likely to last as that of the Stuart dynasty he had replaced.

The English have a rich and glorious history of making trouble for themselves. One hundred and forty years before the French Revolution, the English executed their king and instituted a radical revolutionary government. In 1215, more than 570 years before the United States ratified its Bill of Rights, England's barons forced King John to accept the Magna Carta. In 1926 over 1.5 million strikers brought the nation to its knees. From the Peasants' Revolt to the suffragettes, from Oliver Cromwell to Arthur Scargill, this ground-breaking and hugely enjoyable book describes a rich and continuous tradition of resistance, rebellion and radicalism, of violent and charismatic individuals with axes to grind, and of social eruptions and political earthquakes that have shaped England's whole culture and character.

The life of the warrior king of England whose remains have sensationally just been discovered in Winchester.