Re-Monstering Cromwell

By

Mel Hathorn

While researching my upcoming novel, Celts and Kings, I became aware of Oliver Cromwell and his persecution of the Irish between 1648 and 1652. Some of his many atrocities include: slaughtering several thousand men, women, and children of the city of Drogheda in 1649; herding and burning defenseless citizens of that city in locked catholic churches while those trapped inside screamed in agony; killing one-third of the Irish population in 1650; and, relocating Irish citizens from their fertile lands to the barren lands of Connacht.

At that point, I remembered that I live in the town of Cromwell, Connecticut. My beautiful town is named after a monster! I was horrified! Since my novel is complete, shouldn’t my next project be the re-monstering of Cromwell. After all, if our town is going to be named after a degenerate monster, it might as well be a classier monster. I started thinking about alternatives. Some of my suggestions follow:

1. Lenin’s Landing
Poor Vladimir must be roiling and boiling in his grave at the renaming of Leningrad to St. Petersburg. Could the poor man find some peace by changing Cromwell to Lenin’s Landing?

2. Jeffery’s Junction
Naming a town after Jeffery Dahmar must seen strange. While Jeffery devoured only a few people, Cromwell devoured thousands. Although to our knowledge Cromwell never ingested the Irish, it should be recognized that that surely he must have gobbled up some Irish Stew.

3. Dahmar’s Domain
(See Jeffery’s Junction above.)

4. Torquemada Town
Now here’s a name worthy of Cromwell! The infamous Grand inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition. His tortures put Cromwell’s to shame. Foot-roasting, the rack, suffocation, and slow blood-letting are only a few of his creative touches.

5. Hitler’s Haven
This needs no explanation.

6. Stalin’s Station
Stalin killed more than 20 million of his own people over a twenty-nine year period in bloody purges.

7. Khan’s Kingdom
Genghis Kahn killed countless people in his raids across Asia. At the city of Volohoi, he reassured the city commander that he would leave if the city sent out 1000 cats to Kahn’s armies. Genghis tied rags to their tails and lit them. The cats fled back to the city and started hundreds of fires.

8. Calvin City
John Calvin did not kill as many people as Cromwell. Oliver Cromwell was his protégé. But his ideas did. Could those ideas have inspired people like Cromwell to go on bloody rampages? Perhaps Cromwell in a moment of delusional grandeur was inspired by the Biblical statement that “King Saul (read Calvin) killed his thousands, but King David (read Cromwell) killed his ten thousands.”

9. Rumsfeld’s Run
The Secretary of Defense planned and orchestrated a war that killed almost 1700 of our fine young soldiers, maimed 10,000 more and killed hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children of Iraq.

10. Vlad’s Valley
Vlad Tepes, the impaler, got off on disembowelment, rectal and facial impalement, burning, boiling, skinning and hacking people. He impaled every person, 20,000, in the city of Amlas.

These are only a few of the creative names that we can use to rename our town. Of course, the ideal solution is to rename our beautiful town after a truly good person. I urge the citizens of Cromwell to start a dialogue among ourselves as to a possible new name for Cromwell.