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Oliver Cromwell died in 1658 after an attack of "malaria" followed by a bout with a kidney infection. But his enemies didn't consider such a death good enough for the man who led England through its period of Puritan dominance. Two years after Cromwell's death, Parliament restored Charles II to the throne, and royalists exhumed Cromwell's body from Westminster Abbey, hanged it, cut off its head and put it on a pole at Westminster Hall.

Richard Baxter later reflected, "Never man was higher extolled, and never man was baselier reported and vilified than he." Cromwell's fighting men adored him, and Puritan giants like John Owen and John Milton backed him. Yet history largely reviles him. Foreign leaders feared and admired him. But the English public loathed many of the reforms he endorsed. He deposed a king and dabbled with republican ideas far ahead of their time. Still, he ruled with an iron fist and gained infamy for ruthlessly butchering Irish rebels. The great Puritan leader embodies the contradictions of these remarkable years.

Cromwell was born in 1599, four years before Queen Elizabeth died. His family, like most Puritans, wholeheartedly supported the queen as she projected English power against the hated Spanish Catholics. The queen, however, did not support the Puritans' relentless efforts to finish the Reformation, purge the church of incompetent clergy, and remove high-church elements from the Book of Common Prayer.

James I, who succeeded Elizabeth in 1603, clashed with the Puritans—who composed an influential minority in Parliament—over his foreign policy, especially his failure to give enough aid to Protestants fighting the Thirty Years War on the continent. He also thumbed his nose at the Puritans' observance of the Sabbath by publishing the Book of Sports, which allowed games on Sunday after church.

Yet no ruler attracted Puritan ire like James's son Charles I. Charles married a Catholic in 1625 and enjoyed Anglican ceremonialism. Parliament and the ambitious, unyielding new king immediately jousted for power. Charles led Britain into costly wars in mainland Europe and later an ill-fated campaign against the Scots after they rebelled against his efforts to impose the Book of Common Prayer. Parliament retaliated against Charles by refusing to fund his wars. Charles tried to avoid the problem by not calling a Parliament from 1629 to 1640.

The king picked a fight with the Puritans in particular when he appointed William Laud archbishop of Canterbury in 1633. The notorious Laud imposed Catholic forms of worship, advocated Arminian theology, and forced Puritan ministers to read the Book of Sports from their pulpits. His ruthless suppression of opponents—three protesters had their ears cut off in 1637—prompted many Puritans to leave England for the Netherlands or America.

When Parliament returned in 1640, they tried to ban bishops, whom they saw as agents of the king. Charles stood by his father James's dictum: "No bishops, no king." He fervently guarded the "divine right of kings" to rule with absolute authority.

But republican sentiment was spreading, and Charles could only resist Parliament for so long. He reluctantly allowed them to imprison Laud, whom they eventually executed. When Charles launched one final scheme to suppress Parliament by attempting to seize its leaders in 1641, they sniffed out the plot and escaped. Both sides readied for war.

During the war's first year, Parliament's armies dominated London and most other major English cities. Their navy cut off Charles from his allies on the continent. To offset his opponents' advantages, Charles negotiated with the Scots and offered to limit his monarchy and impose their Presbyterian state church on England. But the Scots chose to ally with their Calvinist kin in Parliament.

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