Oliver Cromwell was a leading general for the Parliamentarians during the English Civil War who eventually became Lord Protector of England from 1653 to 1658. He was born in 1599 in Huntingdon, near Cambridge and is buried in Westminster Abbey. Cromwell controlled a military dictatorship as the head of the New Model Army, dissolving the Rump Parliament and ruling without a monarch from 1653 until his death in 1658. As one of the foremost generals for the Parliamentarians, he was instrumental in their victories over the Royalists at battles such as Edgehill, Marston Moor, and others through his disciplined cavalry and creation of the New Model Army.