READING your comments in reply to Councillor Dave Hollins remarks (Letters, November 10), on "rewriting" history, I couldn't help thinking that he and John Blunt aren't the only ones with a prepared script concerning Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans.

Taking the actual charge of Cromwell causing distress and suffering to thousands, that is still the subject of contention and debate among students of 17th-century history.

The fact is that trying to impose 20th-century morals and standards against the period under discussion is futile, as E.H. Carr and other notable historians have said.

We are prisoners of our own time and, therefore, cannot judge others from a different time scale, especially one 300 years in the past.

On the caustic note of Cromwell and his cronies, it should not be forgotten that a check on royal power and the formulating of parliament as the place where accountability of lords and commoners begins and ends, starts here.

If Cromwell can be praised for any sole thing he accomplished, it's that the Lords do not sit by any divine right.

DUNCAN McVEE, Robin Bank Road, Darwen.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.