A surprising development

You guys. This is a little frightening.

...I might be turning into something of a Cromwellian.

Before you start throwing rotten tomatoes at me, PLEASE let me qualify that statement. I still hate the man's guts for the Irish massacres, the Welsh harpists, and the English playhouses. Nothing's going to make up for those atrocities. And he's a bundle of contradictions - I don't think even he could quite make sense of himself, let alone historians and students 350+ years later.

Buuut...

He's also kind of cool. His string of victories with the New Model Army is pretty much unbroken, so clearly he's got a clever head on his shoulders. He actually advocates religious tolerance - granted, for Protestants only, but given that ten years before, the country was gnawing off its own front leg over two Protestant sects being treated as two separate religions, recognizing that the Protestant churches are all rooted in the same church is pretty damn revolutionary. And the ludicrous belief that everything is "providential," aka it's all God's call, rings less hollow in him than in his contemporaries, because he believed. It's hard to mock him when he agonizes for weeks over killing Charles, because he truly doesn't know what's right.

Add that to my essay topic this week - I'm arguing that he's the only person who could have kept the Commonwealth/Protectorate going, and therefore without him no stable non-monarchical regime could have been established - and I'm having to come to grips with a developing fondness for the man. This is WEIRD.