The history of the English Revolution was sufficiently powerful during the American Revolution that mothers in the back roads of New England would frequently name their sons Oliver in memory of King Charles’s best-known adversary. But the habit must have predated the 1770s, for another Oliver Cromwell — the black continental soldier, not the Lord Protector — was born on May 24, 1752, near Burlington in the colony of New Jersey. That Oliver Cromwell lived to be 101, dying in 1853.

A year before that, on his one hundredth birthday, he told the Burlington Gazette of his remarkable service in the Revolutionary War. He had enlisted in the Second New Jersey Regiment and fought in practically every major battle of the conflict: Trenton, Princeton, Brandywine, Monmouth, and Yorktown, “at which latter place  . . .  he saw the last man killed.” He told the Gazette details of the march from Trenton to Princeton and recounted “with much humor, that they ‘knocked the British about lively’ at the latter place.”

Cromwell claimed to have been with George Washington at the crossing of the Delaware River, and there is a suggestion that he may be one of two black men pictured in the boat in the famous 1851 painting Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Leutze, although this is a matter of contention among historians. Washington certainly personally signed Cromwell’s discharge papers in 1783, awarding him the Badge of Military Merit. Since he could not write, Cromwell signed the papers with a mark, a fact that was later used to deprive him of his pension.

Remarkable as the name and military service of the black Oliver Cromwell are, he was not alone in bearing that name into battle against the British years after the Lord Protector’s demise.

Saybrook was an early English colony established in 1635 at the mouth of the Connecticut River. It was named after two aristocratic and determined opponents of Charles I: William Fiennes, Lord Saye and Sele, and the more radical Robert Greville, Lord Brooke. John Winthrop was its first governor. Investors in Saybrook represented a roll call of Parliament’s most outspoken supporters: John Pym, John Hampden, and Arthur Hesilrige. Another investor was a man named Oliver Cromwell.

So it was fitting that the three-masted brig carrying twenty guns launched at Saybrook in 1776 was named the Oliver Cromwell. This Oliver Cromwell was the Continental Navy’s largest warship. She captured nine British vessels before, in 1779, three British ships and a brig caught her off Sandy Hook. After a two-hour battle, she was captured. And as if to prove that American colonists were not the only ones with long memories, she was renamed Restoration. The naming of the black Oliver Cromwell and the ship Oliver Cromwell, however, were not the only ways in which King Charles’s best-known judge was remembered in America.

Founding Father John Adams was strikingly familiar with Cromwell, referring to him simply as Oliver in his correspondence. He had read Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion and discussed his view of “Pym and Hampden, and Cromwell” in a letter to his wife, Abigail. Adams thought he might become a military leader himself, as “Old Noll” Cromwell did, but Cromwell provided a bad example because he had “trampled on Liberty with Armies.” Despite some admiration for the Lord Protector, Adams believed that American republicanism must hold itself to a higher standard since “there was never a greater self-deceiver than Oliver Cromwell,” a view that echoes the great Leveller leader John Lilburne’s later attitude.

After the 1770 Boston Massacre, recalled Adams, “all the writings relative to the revolutions in England became fashionable reading.” Later, in 1786, Adams and Thomas Jefferson were to visit England and travel to Edgehill and Worcester, respectively the first and last battlefields of the civil war. These, wrote Adams, were “interesting to us, as Scenes where Freemen had fought for their Rights.” They were shocked that locals at Worcester “appeared so ignorant and careless.” Adams asked,

And do Englishmen so soon forget the Ground where Liberty was fought for? Tell your Neighbours and your Children that this is holy Ground, much holier than that on which your Churches stand. All England should come in Pilgrimage to this Hill, once a Year.

Jefferson himself, as Fred Donnelly’s careful research has revealed, was related to the family of Lilburne. Jefferson “was a fifth generation descendant of their uncle, one George Lilburne (1586–1676), a substantial businessman of Sunderland who was briefly John Lilburne’s financial partner in a London brewery.” The Lilburne name was deliberately retained by the Jefferson family and their relatives. Jefferson’s sister Lucy married her first cousin Charles Lilburne Lewis. Their son, born in 1776, was named Lilburne. Jefferson’s younger brother, Randolph, also married into the Lewis family and had a son named Lilburne, born in 1789. Jefferson named his daughter Jane Randolph Jefferson after his mother, Jane Randolph. Her mother was Jane Rogers, and her grandmother Jane Lilburne was second cousin to “Freeborn” John Lilburne himself.

Jefferson was also an avid reader of John Rushworth’s contemporary record of the English Revolution, in which Lilburne’s exploits are extensively recounted. Indeed, the entire text of the Levellers’ An Agreement of the People is to be found in Rushworth’s papers. For Jefferson, these texts were an instruction manual. In 1774, he wrote,

We [the Virginia House of Burgesses] were under the conviction of the necessity of arousing our people from the lethargy into which they had fallen as to passing events; and thought that the appointment of a day of general fasting and prayer would be most likely to call up and alarm their attention.

But there was no clear precedent for using sermons in this way in America. So Jefferson went back to Rushworth and “rummaged over for the revolutionary precedents and form of the Puritans of that day, preserved by him.”

Continental Congress delegate John Henry thought Washington interested enough in Cromwell to send him an unknown “piece of Antiquity” that had been a personal possession of Cromwell’s. Washington wrote back describing the mysterious gift as “invaluable.” In the eyes of Loyalists, Samuel Adams, the driving force in the Sons of Liberty, was a “would-be Cromwell.” Patriot James Otis praised Cromwell and approved of the execution of Charles I in his battle against the Crown’s writs of assistance used by the king’s soldiers to search homes without warrants.

But it was not just the Founding Fathers who could utilize the memory of the English Revolution for American purposes. In many ways, they were reacting to plebeian historical memories and deployments of revolutionary history.

John Leacock’s satirical and immensely popular American Chronicles of the Times were published in six books across several cities in America between 1774 and 1775. In these mock biblical texts, the ills befalling Boston will be resolved by no less than the “sword of the Lord and of Oliver.” Cromwell himself appears and issues a proclamation as “Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay” and beckons forth his old generals: “Awake and rouse up my faithful Fairfax, Lambert, and the rest of my brave warriors.”

Certainly the revolutionary crisis in America had created the audience for such material, but the references to the English Revolution were the direct by-product of a folk tradition of pro-Cromwell sentiment stretching back to the earliest days of the American colonies. “To have fought in Cromwell’s army remained a badge of honour for generations,” wrote Alfred F. Young. Some wrote proudly in letters that they were “the descendants of Oliver Cromwell’s army” or that they were the “descendants of Cromwell’s elect.”

In Boston, the sign for the Cromwell’s Head Tavern was engraved by Paul Revere. It was deliberately hung so low that passersby had to duck to pass under it, thus making them bow to the Lord Protector. The innkeeper, Joshua Brackett, was a member of the Sons of Liberty. The inn’s sign was pulled down by British soldiers, but when they were gone, Brackett had it hung once more.

Jefferson’s scheme to reproduce fast-day sermons as instruments of popular mobilization sharply divided Patriots and Loyalists. Reverend Jonathan Boucher, the Loyalist rector of Queen Anne’s Parish in Maryland, refused to read them and insisted on giving his own pro-British sermons. Boucher admitted there was widespread revolutionary sentiment in his parish but stuck to his guns (literally). He took two loaded pistols into the pulpit and kept them on a cushion in front of him while he preached. It took insurgent Osborn Sprigg and two hundred armed men to dislodge him. Boucher was soon on his way to England, where congregations were less hostile.

Each generation confronts its own set of challenges, shaped by the circumstances of its time. While these issues are distinct, they are rarely without precedent. As a result, the lessons of the past are continually reinterpreted through the lens of the present. The American revolutionaries had the whole of the English Revolution before them, and they used all of it: from Cromwell’s rise to the Levellers’ mobilizations, the Restoration as well as the Commonwealth. Insofar as they borrowed from the English Revolution — and perhaps they took more than is often acknowledged — they sought to learn from its triumphs and avoid its failures as they understood them.

The Americans had made a revolution that, for the first time since the restoration of the monarchy in England in 1660, had ended the rule of kings, queens, princes, barons, dukes, and earls. They had formed a society in which addressing someone as “sir” was merely good manners and not the acknowledgment of a knighthood. But inequality and class division remained, and so, therefore, did the vocabulary of rank, which could now be mobilized to challenge new rulers whose power was based on capital, especially when that power seemed to cut free of all democratic restraint, and when government once again seemed to be a court, not a constitutional administration.

That is perhaps why an exhausted and disgraced monarchy in England and a flailing and corrupt ruling coterie in America still hear the shout of “No kings” ringing in their ears.