Royal revenge
Robert Harris discusses the hunt for the killers of Charles I that inspired Act of Oblivion
What prompted you to write about the regicides?
I saw a tweet referring to the greatest manhunt of the 17th century. The conjunction of “manhunt” and “17th century” intrigued me. And the more I read about it, the more intrigued I became, because it seemed that this extraordinary manhunt lacked a man hunter. Someone must have drawn up the list of regicides and interrogated people, but that person didn’t exist in the sources. So I began to create this character, Richard Nayler, who would be my hunter.
Other than creating that character, how close to the historical record did you stay with Act of Oblivion?
Very close indeed. I followed two regicides, Colonel Edward Whalley and his son-in-law, Colonel William Goffe, who fled together to New 'ngland. And wherever the historical record shows that they went, I sent them there. Whoever they hid with, I had them hide with. I followed all the known facts.
Of course, there are huge gaps in the historical record where no one knows what they were doing – for instance, nobody knows what ultimately happened to Goffe. And it was into those spaces that I was able to insert invention.
Did you uncover any new historical information during your research?
First, nobody seemed to agree on how old William Goffe was, but I discovered his baptismal record and found out that he was born in Wales. So that is new.
And I believe I have cleared up the mystery of Whalley’s wife’s family. She was called Catherine Middleton, bizarrely enough. I found that she was descended from a good Puritan family, and that her grandfather had been lord mayor of London. So in terms of those two finds,
I think I’ve pushed the boundary.
Act of Oblivion
by Robert Harris
Hutchinson Heinemann, 464 pages, £22
In the final years of the 18th century, the German town of Jena became, for a brief period, the meeting place for a group of men and women whose ideas about the self would shape the modern world. Jena’s governance was shared among four different duchies, with the result that rules determining what could and couldn’t be taught at its university were rarely enforced. “There was,” writes Andrea Wulf in Magnificent Rebels, “no university like it in Europe.”
In the two decades following 1790, Jena became the home of a group that included the philosophers Johann Fichte, Georg Hegel and Friedrich Schelling, the writers August and Friedrich Schlegel, and the playwright Friedrich Schiller. The writers Goethe and Novalis lived nearby and visited regularly, as did the explorer Alexander von Humboldt. Linking them was the extraordinary figure of Caroline Böhmer-Schlegel-Schelling (1763–1809). Widowed in 1788, she married August Schlegel in 1796, then Friedrich Schelling in 1803.
Caroline’s story sits at the heart of Magnificent Rebels. Partly that’s because of the central role she played in yoking the philosophers of Jena into a community, but also because she personified many of that community’s ideals. In 1793 she was imprisoned, along with her daughter Auguste, in Königstein Fortress by Prussian forces who suspected her of links with French revolutionary forces. Newly pregnant by a French soldier, she sent frantic letters from her cell to old friends with connections at the Prussian court, pleading for help before her pregnancy was discovered. Having been freed, and following the early death of the baby born shortly after her release, Caroline married August Schlegel and set about rebuilding her life with August in Jena.
Wulf clearly sees in Caroline a model for how to be in the world: adventurous, unafraid and thirsty for new ideas. Magnificent Rebels
Wulf’s book is a testament to the powers of the mind, of friendship, of free will, and the possibility of snatching delight from the jaws of despair
is all of these things, and Wulf is herself a brilliant guide who takes complicated ideas and renders them for the reader with clarity and generosity. Her story reveals how the men built on the ideas of Immanuel Kant to develop theories of the self and free will. Fichte posited subjectivity and the “pure-I” as the centre of scientific, religious, ethical and legal systems. And in the poetic dreamscapes imagined by Novalis, the mind transcends the body to build the world on its own terms, in defiance of the mechanisation of the modern world.
Caroline, meanwhile, put their ideas into practice, and claimed her right to embrace the things that made life worth living. “In spite of God and man I want to be happy,” she declared, and “I can live without love, but taking friendship away from me takes away everything that makes me love life.” That is an apposite declaration for a book concerned not simply with the ideas of its protagonists but with the way in which the company of others made those ideas thrive and grow.
Wulf’s book is a magnificent achievement. It is a testament to the powers of the mind, certainly, but also to the power of friendship, free will and the possibility of snatching delight from the jaws of despair. “The Jena set gave wings to our minds,” Wulf writes in conclusion. “How we use them is up to us.”