Buchan sets out to redress popular opinion of this English soldier and statesman. His biography achieves that aim, commencing with Cromwell’s childhood and youth. He wrote of Cromwell: ‘He is a soldier now on the grand scale, strategist as well as tactician, statesman as well as fighting man, and it is by this new phase of his military career that his place is to be adjudged in the hierarchy of the great captains’.