... and of course, like all good civil wars, the embers are still not fully extinguished and allegiance markers are still very visible in some places. The Orange Order are basically the remnants of the "purity squad", complete with pro-Cromwell banners. There are "Oliver Cromwell" or "Cromwell Arms" pubs.
It's a complex set of allegiance politics that I don't think we Brits are usually taught properly, and by properly I mean with the massive dose of cynical realpolitik necessary to see it for what it was.
Absolutely. I think most nations have similar highly warped popular views of their pasts -- Belgium hasn't dealt with Leopold II, America's popular founding story has Puritans as poor innocents, mere victims of unfair oppression who left for freedom in New England. They rarely learn what puritanism was, or that they started oppressing and killing off other religions once there in the freedom of the colonies. Or that many came back to fight Cromwell's war with Charles I to help create that Puritan Paradise in England and Ireland.
The Irish difficulty gets some context when you learn of William of Orange, Cromwell's attempts to remove Popery and royalism from Ireland, whilst giving the land of the recently massacred to his troops in place of pay.
I think schools do a mostly terrible job in setting the "national myth" in context of what was actually happening. So Cromwell ends up placed in BBC millennium votes of top 100 Britons. Somehow I think they didn't hear the whole story, or actually much of it at all. :)
It's a complex set of allegiance politics that I don't think we Brits are usually taught properly, and by properly I mean with the massive dose of cynical realpolitik necessary to see it for what it was.