The Birds Have Flown (AW82)

In 1636 Oliver Cromwell and his family moved from his native Huntingdonshire to this old house in Ely.
Six years later Cromwell, country gentleman and Member of Parliament of modest means, had become a captain of cavalry, raising a troop of some sixty horsemen from the area for the Parliamentarian cause in the English Civil War.
He went on to become Lieutenant-General, a signatory to Charles I’s death warrant and, eventually, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of Engand, Scotland and Ireland.
The birds in the title refer to a key event in English history shortly before the war broke out when the king and armed guards entered the Commons intending to arrest five particularly rebellious MPs who, forewarned, had fled the building.