Antonia Fraser's enormous biography [Cromwell: The Lord Protector] succeeds in what I take to be its aim: it can be read with pleasure and profit by almost anyone who can afford it, however well or ill acquainted with Cromwell's period. The pleasure might have been doubled, and the profit scarcely diminished, if the length had been halved; but even the most knowledgeable of seventeenth-century historians may feel awed by the thoroughness of Lady Antonia's research….

There are, as one might expect, no startling discoveries, for the challenge to Cromwell's modern biographers is less to unearth new evidence than to make fresh sense of the old; and none of Lady Antonia's perceptions can be said to be very original. Nevertheless, the book is distinguished by narrative skill (especially marked in the accounts of military campaigns) and by unerring good sense. No biographer has dealt so sensitively or so persuasively with Cromwell's friendships and family relationships, a theme which illuminates the public as well as the private man. The factual errors are mostly trivial. There is an occasional tendency to lean on unreliable sources, but otherwise Lady Antonia's judgments command respect even where one dissents from them.

These are admirable qualities. They are, indeed, qualities that reviewers always seem to find themselves describing as admirable. The trouble is that Oliver Cromwell was a great man, and this book, for all its merits, does not begin to convey the measure of his greatness. Why not?

To answer that the limitations of any book reflect the limitations of its author would be as inadequate as it would be ungallant. A writer capable of a book as good as this is capable of a better one. It is true that Lady Antonia does not seem to be abreast of the more esoteric of academic controversies, and that there are those who will imagine that this matters….

Other deficiencies, perhaps, are more serious. Lady Antonia, more at home with Cromwell the soldier than with Cromwell the statesman, shows little grasp of the way politics works or of the political circumstances in which Cromwell operated. Consequently, like many of his other biographers, she is weaker on the 1650s than on the 1640s. A general criticism of the book is that the background of the story is notably less impressive than the foreground. In this respect Cromwell is a much tougher biographical challenge than Mary Queen of Scots, the subject of Lady Antonia's previous book, and at times one senses that she feels out of her depth. When her confidence wilts, her prose tends to wilt too.

These are disconcerting weaknesses, of the kind reviewers always call disconcerting. But they do not answer our question. Similar criticisms could be made, with far more force, of the one indisputably great work to have been published on Cromwell: Thomas Carlyle's edition, first printed in 1845, of Cromwell's letters and speeches….

No one would wish Lady Antonia to have imitated Carlyle's histrionics. He made appalling mistakes, as editor, as historian, and as biographer. But somewhere in the recesses of his mind—that sulphurous mixture of rigid Scottish Calvinism and woolly German Romanticism—a bond was forged between Carlyle and his subject; and from that bond came a depth of inspiration missing from all biographies of Cromwell before and since. (p. 24)

Of course, [Lady Antonia] could not pretend to Carlyle's genius; but she can pretend to talent. Need she imprison it in so nerveless a literary genre? No safe biography of Cromwell could be a satisfying one. The question to which Lady Antonia really addresses herself is not whether Cromwell was a great man, but whether he was a nice man: the kind of man, in fact, whom the general reader could safely invite to dinner. We know the answer from the start. There are black marks, it is true; but the judicial murder of Charles I and the massacres at Drogheda and Wexford, events for which Oliver is severely rebuked (and in her treatment of these Lady Antonia is at her most perceptive), are the only large blemishes on what otherwise, as the almost headmistressish concluding paragraphs make clear, has been a most satisfactory semester.

Yet the fact—from which Lady Antonia is not the only modern historian to avert her gaze—is that in many respects Cromwell was not a nice man at all. (pp. 24-5)

The springs of greatness are often elemental, and hence morally neutral. Cromwell's greatest feats owed as much to his vices as to his virtues. The virtues were, in fact, quite extraordinary, but we cannot grasp their stature if we doctor Cromwell's whole personality for the benefit of those who, as George Eliot put it, "are incapable of assimilating ideas unless they are administered in a highly diluted form." We need always to set them against what Lady Antonia euphemistically calls "the darker side to his nature." Cromwell's virtues were not born in him: they were earned. His achievement was to tame himself, and to appreciate the magnitude of the process we have to know the beast he tamed. (p. 25)