Firelocks assemble outside Torrington. Where are those blasted Pikemen?
Dark times ahead for Hopton and the Royals holed up in the small westcountry town. Indeed dark days for all.
“No man rises so high as he knows not whither he goes.”
Oliver Cromwell was an English military and political leader best known for his involvement in making England into a republican Commonwealth and for his later role as Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland. He was one of the commanders of the New Model Army, which defeated the royalists in the English Civil War. After the execution of King Charles I in 1649, Cromwell dominated the short-lived Commonwealth of England, conquered Ireland and Scotland, and ruled as Lord Protector from 1653 until his death in 1658.
Cromwell was born into the ranks of the middle gentry, and remained relatively obscure for the first 40 years of his life, slipping down to the level of yeoman farmer for a number of years in the 1630s before returning to the ranks of the gentry thanks to an inheritance from his uncle. After undergoing a religious conversion during the same decade, he made an Independent style of Puritanism a core tenet of his life. Cromwell was elected Member of Parliament for Cambridge in the Short and Long Parliaments, and later entered the English Civil War on the side of the "Roundheads" or Parliamentarians.
