HE FAMOUSLY wanted his portrait “warts and all”, but Oliver Cromwell was not the hero of the English Civil War that history has painted him.

According to a new book, victory for the Roundheads, as the Parliamentary forces were known, was secured by battle-hardened Scottish troops who were more comfortable slaughtering Englishmen than southern soldiers forced to fight their fellow countrymen.

A key battle at Marston Moor in 1644, which turned the tide of the 17th-century conflict between the Roundheads and the Cavaliers – King Charles I’s royalist forces – over who controls Parliament, was won by Colonel Hugh Fraser, a Scots soldier from Inverness, rather than Cromwell, who was wounded and forced off the battlefield.

The controversial new study of the bloody military campaign – in which 80,000 people died – also compares the Scottish Army of the Covenant, battalions supported by the Kirk who wished to protect Presbyterianism against the religious policies of Charles I, with the Taleban of modern day Afghanistan....