Continuing Commonwealth of England - unitary state, unitary identity?

If Cromwell's Commonwealth continued, under a more talented leader than his son, what is the most likely end state for the British Isles? To me, the state power, the religious enforcement and the ethnic cleansing point to a more brutal, less pleasant history for the islands. But they also point to a place that is more religiously unified and also more ethnically unified.

The Celtic Irish will be effectively pushed to hell, Connaught or Jamaica. The Highlanders will be "othered" and likely wiped out, so unlikely to be reincorporate into Scottish identity in the 1800s. And both Ireland and the Highlands will likely have more plantations from Lowland Scots/English stock. The English, Anglo-Irish and lowland Scots will likely all end up with a common Calvinist religious faith, weakening the difference between them. And likely they will all have a single legal system and unitary governance.

The combination of this points to an eventual unified British Isles identity, despite the name of the Commonwealth specifying England, Ireland and Scotland separately. I suspect the name would change in time, and people would consider themselves primarily British, just as the French Revolution and its resulting political structures ended up wiping out Breton, Norman and Provencal as primary identities.
 
Or.....a second civil war within the next decade or so. There was a lot of radical political ferment within the New Model Army. The Levellers in particular would not have supported a permanent military dictatorship or the draconian laws that such a state would have made necessary.
 
The New England colonies would be happy and would want to be directly incorporated into the Commonwealth. Other British colonies from Pennsylvania up to at least the Tidewater parts of North Carolina would be horrified and would lend their support more to Charles II. New Netherland, New Sweden, and New France would carry on as before. The West Indies and South Carolina would be open questions. Now, if the Commonwealth were to survive, regardless of successor to Cromwell, would require some major reformations to the state including to share more power with Parliament; whether the Lord Protector's successor is up to the job is an open question.
 
The Celtic Irish will be effectively pushed to hell, Connaught or Jamaica. The Highlanders will be "othered" and likely wiped out, so unlikely to be reincorporate into Scottish identity in the 1800s. And both Ireland and the Highlands will likely have more plantations from Lowland Scots/English stock. The English, Anglo-Irish and lowland Scots will likely all end up with a common Calvinist religious faith, weakening the difference between them. And likely they will all have a single legal system and unitary governance.

Actually I don't think Cromwell's government was notably different in its treatment of Ireland and the Highlands than other 17th-century English governments were, so the situation there will probably be much the same as IOTL.

Also, religious enforcement was very much de rigeur in early modern Europe, and the Protectorate wasn't even unusually stringent in this regard, so again, probably minimal change compared to OTL.
 
Or.....a second civil war within the next decade or so. There was a lot of radical political ferment within the New Model Army. The Levellers in particular would not have supported a permanent military dictatorship or the draconian laws that such a state would have made necessary.

To be fair, the OP did speak of a more compitent leader than Cromwell II, and one of the best ways to pick one would to look to Parliment to elect a new Lord-Protector, which could easily result in a rotational government very similar to the Prime Ministership. Assuming they could get the spiralling backpay under control (the bane of revolutionary regeimes throughout history), they could stabilize things and pull a vital plank out from support for the radicals.
 
Apparently Oliver Cromwell's second son Henry was widely considered quite competent. So you could simply have Richard predecease Oliver, leaving the protectorship to pass on to Henry instead.
 
Actually I don't think Cromwell's government was notably different in its treatment of Ireland and the Highlands than other 17th-century English governments were, so the situation there will probably be much the same as IOTL.

Also, religious enforcement was very much de rigeur in early modern Europe, and the Protectorate wasn't even unusually stringent in this regard, so again, probably minimal change compared to OTL.

Do you have sources for these?
 
Do you have sources for these?

My main source on Cromwell's life is Antonia Fraser's biography of him, although regarding the comparison of Cromwell with other governments, I mostly came to that conclusion just by looking at what others were doing. Mary, Elizabeth, James I, the Rump Parliament, and William of Orange all engaged in large-scale plantations in Ireland, and (as I think Fraser says), Cromwell's Irish policy was basically just a continuation of the Rump's. As for the Highlanders, I don't recall Cromwell doing much regarding that part of the country, and anything he did do doesn't seem to have had a major effect, since the clan system remained in place for the best part of a century after his death. As for religious persecution, I trust the popularity of such practices in early modern Europe is sufficiently well-known that I don't need to give examples. I will point out, though, that Cromwell seems to have treated Catholics about as well as Charles I and Charles II did, which in turn was better than how James I and Elizabeth had treated them. According to Fraser there were even rumours that Cromwell would sign an agreement with the pope whereby English Catholics were granted freedom of worship in return for papal recognition of Cromwell as the legitimate ruler of England; obviously any such proposals never came to anything, if indeed they were even made in the first place, but it's unlikely that such a rumour would ever gain currency if Cromwell had a reputation for implacable religious bigotry.
 
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