Charles I enters the House of Commons

Though it seems Sir Alec Guinness is depicted as a villain in the film Cromwell (also splendidly portrayed by Richard Harris), the historical events would have been seen differently by both royalists and Irish, both who suffered at the hands of the mad tyrant, Oliver Cromwell.  That no less than Leon Trotsky, the vile Communist theorist and one of the architects of the Soviet Union considered Cromwell a bourgeois revolutionary speaks volumes.  Though he has been lauded for centuries as a hero of England, time hasn’t been kind to him, and his near-genocide of Irish made him and Puritanism in general an ugly stain on English history.