Boing Boing Staging

This children's book about Oliver Cromwell is like playful colonialist violence for kids

There’s been a lot of news lately about taking down monuments to terrible people, or renaming buildings that were christened after them.

In related news, there’s still a statue of Oliver Cromwell outside of the UK House of Commons in Westminster. Cromwell led English Army against King Charles I and served as Lord Protector of the British Isles until his death in 1658. In 2002, he was chosen as one of the 10 greatest Britons by the BBC. He was also responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths in Ireland, and the export of thousands more Irish into forced (non-chatel) servitude in the Caribbean.

But you wouldn’t know any of it from this delightful children’s book about his life!

Even Winston Churchill — who did not have a particularly positive relationship with the Irish — thought Cromwell was a dictator:

Cromwell’s record was a lasting bane. By an uncompleted process of terror, by an iniquitous land settlement, by the virtual proscription of the Catholic religion, by the bloody deeds already described, he cut new gulfs between the nations and the creeds….The native inhabitants…across three hundred years, have used as their keenest expression of hatred “The Curse of Cromwell on you.”

But hey, cute children’s book glorifying history! Yay!

(The Pogues did a much better job of memorializing him.)

Oliver Cromwell: An Adventure From History by L. Du Garde Peach

Image: Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

Exit mobile version