How One Family Remade Britain: Thomas and Oliver Cromwell, with Miranda Malins

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Mia Sorenti (1:00)

Hello, I'm Mia Sorenti and welcome to Intelligence Squared, the podcast about ideas that matter. In each episode, we speak to some of the world's most interesting thinkers, not simply about what they've written or created, but about the ideas that drive their work and why they matter now. History is often seen to be shaped by great men, and in British history, Thomas and Oliver Cromwell were two of the greatest. Thomas helped Henry VIII break with Rome, remake the machinery of government and establish the Church of England. A century later, his distant relative Oliver helped defeat a king, saw that king executed and became Lord Protector of a Republic.

We tend to meet them as two extraordinary commoners who rose alone. But what does this great man view miss? And what if their story is far more interconnected? In this episode, I'm speaking to historian Miranda Malins, who specialises in Oliver Cromwell, his family and the Civil War and Commonwealth period. She has written two historical novels about the Cromwell family and is a long-standing trustee of the Cromwell Association. Her new book is called The House of Cromwell. Together, we're going to interrogate the often overlooked lens of family and how this ties together the money, marriages, faith, loyalties and long memory that made modern Britain.

Miranda, welcome to Intelligence Squared.

Miranda Malins (2:19)

Hi, thank you so much for having me.

Mia Sorenti (2:20)

Fabulous. So, most people know the name Cromwell twice, but may not know that Thomas and Oliver belong to the same extended family. So what became visible to you when you put them into one kind of continuous family story?

Miranda Malins (2:35)

Well, at the most basic level, the fact that they were related at all, it sounds so obvious, but they were great, great, great uncle and nephew. And as you say, very few people know that today. In fact, they exist almost completely separately in their own realms, a hundred years apart. They hardly ever make it into each other's books, only ever as a footnote, maybe a throwaway reference in the introduction or conclusion of biographies of them both. But actually, people at the time did know that they were related. And also, they've been linked together ever since in myth and legend.

So putting them into the same book really helped me to unravel a lot of those myths and also to see some of the similarities and parallels between them.

Mia Sorenti (3:23)

And so the book ranges across more than two centuries, and you kind of further to some kind of contemporary myths and like, you know, current day understanding that they were connected. But was there like a specific document or person or connection that convinced you that this was best kind of seen as a dynasty rather than two separate people?

Miranda Malins (3:42)

Yes, there was actually.

There is a Cromwell in the middle of the family tree, Sir Henry Cromwell. And he was Thomas Cromwell's great nephew and Oliver Cromwell's grandfather. And I worked out that he was the only person who actually knew them both, which is quite amazing, because he was born in 1537 So he was a baby, three years old when Thomas Cromwell died. And we actually know from Thomas Cromwell's accounts that Thomas paid for baby Henry's nappies. So he was very intimately involved in his life. And then this Sir Henry Cromwell lived to a great old age right into the early 17th century. So got to see his grandson, Oliver, toddling around as sort of four, five year old.

But this Sir Henry Cromwell, also in 1602, he commissioned an amazing family tree, this huge, huge kind of parchment document. You can still see it in the Cambridgeshire Archives in Huntingdon. It's many, many metres long. But it has the Cromwell family stretching all the way back to the mythical Welsh princes of Powys right down to the beginning of the 17th century. And it has Thomas Cromwell himself, Earl of Essex, proudly right there in the middle. So really, the person of Sir Henry Cromwell and also the family tree that he commissioned right in the middle of the two centuries that my book covers, he felt like a linchpin to me.