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to pay a physician the equivalent of what a middle-class family earned
in five years.  Often Cromwell scolded his daughter for hanging
around with worldly folk.  Oliver, you see, was a profoundly religious
man.  It never occurred to him that there was anything "worldly" about
his accumulation of huge estates. These were merely God's rewards for
killing.  Sometimes a successful meme can pay its helpers well.
In his own way, Oliver Cromwell could see that he was the
servant of a force battling to impose its form of organization on the
world of men and matter.  He realized that he was a tool in a struggle
between concepts of truly massive scope.  Cromwell regarded war, to
quote his biographer, Antonia Fraser, as "part of an inevitable, deeply
disturbing, deeply exciting process, by which the way of the Lord had
to be fought out in order to be discovered."  God's will, Oliver felt,
would be found in the cannon's mouth.
When Cromwell and his Puritans won the English Civil War, the
entire state was forced to adopt Puritan views.  Alas for the Puritans, it
was not to last.  Eventually, the English grew tired of the dour new
meme and its henchmen.  Two years after Oliver Cromwell's death in
1658, the monarchy was restored.
But the battle between Cromwell and the king had never merely
been a contest between men.  It had been a struggle between ideas.
Ideas had attracted vast hordes of men to their cause, and pitted them
against each other for the possession of England.  Ideas had used a
person who went from killing pigeons to killing men.  Ideas had
manipulated a convenient tool named Oliver Cromwell.
  own) became so wealthy that when he had an ailment, he was able
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