Cromwell - Analysis

A patriot-saint made into a carnival trophy

Lawson’s central claim is blunt: England disgraced itself by mocking, then forgetting, the kind of hard, competent leadership that once made it formidable. The opening image is meant to sting. They took dead Cromwell from his grave and stuck his head on high, while The Merry Monarch and the crowd laughed, cheered and jeered. Lawson frames this not as justice but as cowardice: these are the same people who ne’er have dared to look / Live Cromwell in the face. The poem begins with a public spectacle—politics as humiliation—and uses it to set up an argument about how nations treat the figures who actually do the hard work of power.

Law, fire, sword: admiration that refuses to be squeamish

From that disgrace, the poem swings into a deliberately muscular praise-song. Cromwell arrives in England’s direst need with law and fire and sword, and Lawson does not soften the violence; he presents it as the cost of survival. The boast A Man in England ruled! is less about monarchy versus parliament than about competence versus drift. Yet a tension runs through this celebration: the qualities being admired—force, certainty, punitive energy—are also the qualities that can curdle into tyranny. Lawson’s praise is not naïve; it’s a wager that in crisis, decisive power is preferable to the humiliations of weakness.

“Little bills” and brooms: England made to count

The middle of the poem piles up concrete episodes that function like evidence in a case. Van Tromp’s taunt—a great broom on the mast to sweep the sea—is answered by Blake who smashed the Dutchman’s broom. Then come the repeated “bills,” which turn national honor into debt collection: sixty thousand pounds demanded from Tuscany, paid in gold; a little bill sent to Spain after prisoners were tortured; a grim message to pirate ports in Africa demanding every captured Englishman and the full value of ships and guns. Lawson’s tone here is almost relish—he admires a government that makes wrongdoing expensive. The point is not that war is glorious, but that under Cromwell England’s power had a clear, enforceable meaning.

Religious freedom by threat—and the private man among pigs and cows

Even the poem’s most liberal-sounding principle arrives with an iron fist. The oppressed Protestants appeal to Noll, and he tells the European Powers that All men must praise God as they chose, / Or he would see to that. Lawson admires the outcome (toleration), but he insists it was achieved through intimidation. Then, in a quiet pivot, Cromwell becomes oddly domestic: after he’s settled foreign rows, he has time to potter round / Amongst his pigs and cows. The poem briefly lets him be human—someone who keeps Of private rows to himself—before delivering its softest grief: a father’s strong heart broke / When Cromwell’s daughter died. This turn complicates the earlier hardness; the same man who sends fleets and bills is also breakable.

The parenthesis as accusation, and the roast that fed a nation

The parenthetical stanza returns to the body dragged from the grave, but widens the insult: they also threw wife’s and daughter’s bones / Into a rubbish hole, along with the remains of Great Pym and Admiral Blake. The aside feels like Lawson can’t bear to keep the outrage in the main line of his argument; it erupts as a moral footnote that’s really the poem’s spine. The later claim that From Charles to Charles England’s name stayed high is granted, but immediately tightened: Englishmen were Englishmen, / While Cromwell carved the roast. That homely metaphor is pointed. Cromwell isn’t just a warrior; he is the one serving substance while others inherit the table.

From Cromwell’s England to Lawson’s Australia: the real “need”

The final turn reveals why Lawson has been insisting so hard. He drags this seventeenth-century argument into my country’s hour of need, imagining Australia run by fools, baffled by the fools at home, and threatened from the sea. The closing prayer—Lord! send a man like Oliver—is not nostalgia so much as a warning: a nation that jeers strong leadership when it has it may beg for it when it’s too late.

A sharper question the poem dares you to ask

If Cromwell’s virtues arrive through fire and sword, and even freedom of worship is enforced by he would see to that, what exactly is Lawson asking to be “sent” to Australia: justice, or coercion that happens to pick the right targets? The poem’s power is that it never fully resolves this—its longing for a Man is also a gamble with the costs of being ruled by one.