The Journal of Military History

After the British monarchy was restored in 1660, Charles II punished all those responsible for his father's execution, most of them being hung, drawn, and quartered. Since Oliver Cromwell and Henry Ireton were dead, their bodies were exhumed, and hung in chains as a grisly reminder of the dangers facing all revolutionaries on the losing side. They made an appropriate pair, not just because Ireton had married Cromwell's daughter, Bridget, but because, as David Farr argues, no two men did more to further the English Revolution. Ireton and Cromwell had much in common. Obsessed by wanting to do God's will (which after much spiritual anguish invariably turned out to coincide with their own), they were from the lower gentry and found a purpose in war. Shared military experiences bonded them, making both more radical. Without doubt Ireton was the most radical, writing many revolutionary tracts in the couple of years after the end of the first civil war, when the army felt that their gains on the battlefield entitled the rank and file to political rights. After Charles I reneged on his surrender, precipitating a second civil war in 1648, Ireton was one of the leading generals who argued that as "a man of blood" the king must die. Following Charles's execution in 1649, Ireton went on to fight in Ireland, completing much of the conquest Cromwell had begun. His premature death in November 1651, from a fever caught while campaigning, removed him from the vibrant army politics of the commonwealth period, in which he would have surely played a dominant role.

David Farr has written an exhaustively researched study of Ireton, setting him into the framework of his complicated times. He has read all the contemporary pamphlets which flooded off the press like a Tsunami as the tectonic plates in English history shifted as never before or since. Farr has also immersed himself in the vast corpus of secondary writings, particularly the work of Ian Gentles and John Morrill—perhaps too much so, since at times it is hard to discern what he thinks, obscuring his portrait of Ireton. While students of military history might be disappointed that Farr does not pay enough attention to Ireton's career on the battlefield, nonetheless in Henry Ireton and the English Revolution they will find a sophisticated study of what happens when an army officer gets caught up in radical politics off the field of battle.