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Oliver Cromwell

  • SOURCE: Telegraph (UK)
    7-28-13

    'Lost' Civil War battlefield added to English Heritage register

    The fighting took place at two separate battles, fought around ten days apart, over August and September 1644, near Lostwithiel, Cornwall.The Royalists had tracked a heavily outnumbered Parliamentarian army to the town and gradually closed in on them. King Charles I himself was present during the campaign and is said to have slept in a hedge. Part of the fighting centred around the ruins of Restormel Castle.The Parliamentarians had hoped that their navy would be able to navigate into the Fowey estuary to evacuate their troops, but unfavourable weather conditions prevented this. In the end, 6,000 men surrendered and the Parliamentarian leader, the Earl of Essex, was able to escape only after being taken off in a fishing boat.The two locations are the first new battlefields to be added to English Heritage’s register since it was created in 1995. They take the number on there from 43 to 45....

  • SOURCE: The Scotsman (UK)
    7-28-13

    How Scots ‘Taleban’ and crack forces won Civil War

    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....