Oliver Cromwell

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school and then for a year attended Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. After his father died he left Cambridge to go care for his mother and sisters but it is believed that he studies at Lincoln's Inn in London, where gentlemen could acquire a smattering of law. In 1620 he married Elizabeth, daughter of Sir James Bourchier, a merchant in London. They had five sons and four daughters. (Kathe, 1984)
Both his father and mother were Protestants who had profited from the destruction of the monasteries during the reign of King Henry VIII, and they probably influenced their son in his religious upbringing. Both his schoolmaster in Huntingdon and the Master of Sidney Sussex College were enthusiastic Calvinists and strongly anti-Catholic. In his youth Cromwell was not very studious, since he enjoyed outdoor sports, such as hunting; but he was an avid reader of the Bible, and he admired Sir Walter Raleigh's The History of the World. Cromwell learned that the sins of man could be punished on ...

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against the king over the levying of ship money, was Cromwell's cousin. Then in 1640 Cromwell was elected a member of the Parliament for the borough of Cambridge (partly because of the important social position he held in Ely and partly because of his fame as "Lord of the Fens,") he found himself among many friends at Westminster who were highly critical of the monarchy. This "Short Parliament" did little since it was dissolved after three weeks, but, when in November 1640 Cromwell returned to Cambridge for the "Long Parliament", which sat until 1653, his public career began. (Smith, 1991)

Cromwell had already become known as a fiery and somewhat uncouth Puritan, in ...

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