Cromwell, Oliver(Old Noll)

1599 - He was born on the 25th day of April this year in Huntingdon. He attended Huntingdon grammar school. He went on to study at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, which was then a recently founded college with a strong puritan ethos.

1617 - He left in June of this year without taking a degree, immediately after the death of his father.

1620 – He married Elizabeth Bourchier on the 22nd day of August this year.

1626 – In this year, his letter to Henry Downhall, an Arminian minister, suggests that Cromwell had yet to be influenced by radical puritanism. However, there is evidence that he went through a period of personal crisis during the late 1620s and early 1630s.

1628 - He sought treatment for valde melancolicus (depression) from London doctor Theodore Mayerne in this year. He also became the Member of Parliament for Huntingdon in the Parliament of 1628–1629, as a client of the Montagus.

1630 – This year, he was also caught up in a fight amongst the gentry of Huntingdon over a new charter for the town, as a result of which he was called before the Privy Council.

1631 – He sold most of his properties in Huntingdon probably as a result of the dispute and moved to a farmstead in St Ives. This was a major step down in society and seems to have had a major emotional and spiritual impact.

1640 - Charles I ruled without a Parliament for the next eleven years having dissolved Parliament, of which Cromwell was a member, in 1629. When Charles was facing a Scottish rebellion known as the Bishops War, he was forced by shortage of funds to call a Parliament again in this year.

1641 - It was Cromwell who put forward the second reading of the Annual Parliaments Bill, and who later took a role in drafting the Root and Branch Bill for the abolition of episcopacy.

1647 – He suffered from an illness that kept him out of political life for over a month. By the time of his recovery, the Parliamentarians were split over the issue of the king.
1648, Cromwell's letters and speeches became drenched in biblical imagery, many of them meditations on the meaning of particular passages.

1653 - Politically he took control of England, Scotland, and Ireland as Lord Protector, from December 16, 1653 until his death.

1657 – He was offered the crown by Parliament as part of a revised constitutional settlement, presenting him with a dilemma, since he had been "instrumental" in abolishing the monarchy. Cromwell agonized for six weeks over the offer.

1658 – He passed away on the 3rd day of September this year.

• "He who stops being better stops being good."
• "Make the iron hot by striking it."