ABSTRACT
If nothing else, Heath’s reputation now deserves to be at least partially rehabilitated. Disappointingly, the man behind the caustic polemics remains as enigmatic as ever. But dismissing him without due consideration is no longer good enough. ere are, needless to say, many ways in which he remains as unfashionable as ever. Cromwell’s modern biographers have been more sympathetic than hostile towards the lord protector’s memory. is does not mean that they have ignored his faults. On the contrary, most have dwelt on, even agonized over, the darker aspects of Cromwell’s character and legacy. He is now never portrayed as anything other than all-too-human. But the sins for which Heath condemned him are not the aws which more recent writers have preferred to accentuate. What Heath denounced as shameless ambition and unprincipled cant have come to seem more like the anguish of a man trying – and sometimes failing – to stick to his principles. For Heath, as for so many of his contemporaries, the regicide was a sin of such enormity that it could only be confronted, let alone understood, in the blackest possible moral terms. Few would now be quite so unforgiving. e moral issues have changed in other ways too. ere were some in the latter half of the seventeenth century who did anticipate those modern historians who instead condemn Cromwell for having abandoned the ‘Good Old Cause’. But for most other inhabitants of late-seventeenth century Britain, the idea that this was a bad thing would have been almost incomprehensible.
