PROVIDENCE LOST
THE RISE AND FALL OF CROMWELL’S PROTECTORATE
PAUL LAY
Head of Zeus, 326pp, £30
‘If the whole period of the 17th century is shockingly unfamiliar to too many general readers, the Protectorate is most of all so,’ wrote Minoo Dinshaw in the Daily Telegraph. ‘Partly this is a question of the imaginative distance involved in relating to an era of such apparently alien zealotry – a time for both fanatics and pragmatists, presided over by a fanatical pragmatist.’ Paul Lay, editor of History Today, has chosen to concentrate on the period from 1653 to 1659 during which first Oliver and then, briefly, his eldest son Richard served as Lord Protector. Lay ‘allows himself ample time and space to linger on those few confusing years, following a thread that contrives to carry both thematic variety and tragic, narrative force’.
Cromwell’s Protectorate ‘was one of the most extraordinary, exhilarating, innovative and anxietyinducing periods in British history’, wrote Jessie Childs in the Guardian. ‘The providence of Lay’s title is the lodestone Protestant belief that God in his mystery had a hand in all things. Nothing could happen, not salvation, nor a sneeze, without divine direction. This made the hotter sort of Protestants, the Puritans, off-balance and twitchy for approval, like social media addicts, Lay observes. None was more hooked on providence than Cromwell...’
As Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, explained in his New Statesman review, ‘the appeal to divine providence both energised and paralysed the Commonwealth regime’, which followed ‘a pattern familiar in revolutionary narratives: the point at which it ought at last to be obvious to all that the revolution was right and justified, when one could be confident of being on the side of history, keeps slipping over the horizon. Someone must be blamed and the revolution inexorably descends into factional warfare.’ For Leanda de Lisle, writing in the Times, Lay’s ‘witty and incisive book’ is ‘a reminder why the English, in particular, hate the bossy pieties of a Puritanical elite, and distrust radicalism’.