A war hero and a perfect politician or a despot and a monster?
Cromwell is one of the most controversial figures in British and Irish history, considered a regicidal dictator, a military dictator, a bourgeois revolutionary, and a hero of liberty. His tolerance of Protestant sects did not extend to Catholics, and some later scholars have characterised the measures he took against them, particularly in Ireland, as genocidal or near-genocidal. His record is strongly criticised in Ireland, although the worst atrocities took place after he had returned to England. He was selected as one of the ten greatest Britons of all time in a 2002 BBC poll.