Murder most royal
Act of Oblivion By Robert Harris Hutchinson Heinemann £22
When Charles II returned from exile in 1660, Parliament and people were keen to draw a line under the uniquely bloody period of the three civil wars.
The monarchy was to be restored without recriminations against the Parliamentarians, leaderless in the wake of Cromwell’s death.
But the new King insisted that one group be excluded from the general amnesty: the regicides – the men who had taken part in the beheading of his father, Charles I, whether as judges, signatories of his death warrant or functionaries on the scaffold.
The surviving killers of the King made excellent scapegoats, allowing the nation to move forward after the savage sacrifice of men who had held sway during the 11 years when England was a republic.
While some of them surrendered, expecting a pardon, others were arrested without a struggle. One, who had grown rich under Cromwell, hid in disguise in London – until the authorities grew suspicious that particularly expensive food was being delivered to an extremely modest address. He would have got away had a blind man not recognised his voice.
While some of the regicides endured imprisonment so grim that they begged for release through death, the condemned killers faced agonising execution.
Hanging, drawing and quartering involved public degradation: being hanged until unconscious, then being revived, castrated and disembowelled while alive, before being beheaded and split into quarters, such parts being displayed as deterrents to others contemplating high treason.
After their initial rich haul, the Royalists looked abroad for those who had escaped. Robert Harris’s Act of Oblivion builds on the drama of a chase which his publishers call ‘the greatest manhunt of the 17th century’.
The pair Harris concentrates on were two Parliamentary colonels, Edward Whalley and William Goffe. Whalley was Oliver Cromwell’s cousin, while the religious zealot Goffe was Whalley’s son-in-law. They sought safety in America.
We know a lot about this pair, and their attempts to avoid the grisly fate decreed for them. Their true tale more than matches any fiction. There are desperately close calls, as they rely on Puritan help to save their necks, living in a cave, behind a fireplace and in a barn, all the time hunted for their lives. And then came heroic fighting against Native Americans.
Harris’s main problem, when telling a tale that covers two decades and involves both frantic energy and long periods of nothing much, is how to hold it together. He therefore introduces a central character, Richard Nayler, who did not exist, as the person who led the manhunt.
Richard Nayler is a classic relentless pursuer, in the mould of Clint Eastwood in his later Westerns. He carries the wounds of the Civil War on his body and in his heart. He has a particularly painful link to Goffe and Whalley, after the pair roughly ended the celebration of Christmas one day, costing Nayler all he held dear. The flame of vengeance within him never dies.
When the story of Whalley and Goffe cools in America, Harris is able to deploy Nayler elsewhere. Starting as an eyewitness to Charles I’s execution, he is also on hand when three regicides are captured in the Netherlands, and when another is assassinated in Switzerland.
It is a bit of a stretch, though, when Harris credits his fictional character with sowing the seeds that led the English to capture what would become New York.
Harris has no need for depth in his remaining characters, because he does not wish to slow the narrative. So Charles II and his brother the Duke of York are presented merely as oversexed and lazy, and the aristocrats are fat, drawling and entitled, while the colonial famers are muscled sons of the soil. The Puritans’ womenfolk are endlessly loyal and faithful, with their children saying cute things and wanting a puppy.
Meanwhile the posse who help Nayler in one foray are grim ne’er-do-wells, Scots who have suffered slavery through defeat in the civil wars. Harris’s favour is with Parliament, not the King.
Harris gives us interesting snippets: of Cromwell’s fallibility, and also of his welling up at the sound of fine music. New England in the mid-17th century is well painted, and studded with familiar landmarks – Boston, Harvard and the countryside.
Harris is particularly good at the lyrical description of a wilderness, a sky, or a sea. We learn how grim the transatlantic voyages were, with infested food, and cramped conditions below deck. And Harris kindly gives the dialogue in recognisable form rather than some attempt at 17th-century verbiage.
There is a surprising moment when Goffe thinks of his wife and children, across the Atlantic: ‘Frances, Dick, Betty, Frankie, Nan and Judith. What time was it in England? What might they be doing?’
More than two centuries before the imposition of time zones, and in an era when a transatlantic crossing could take two months, it seems improbable that anyone knew of time differences between New England and England.
Equally, Harris portrays Charles as ‘handsome’, when he was famously anything but. There are also two references to Northamptonshire being flat – most puzzlingly at Naseby, where the folds in the landscape greatly assisted the Parliamentary army in its victory.
But Harris’s many fans will ignore these small issues and enjoy the set pieces, as well as the way this seasoned story-teller keeps the tale moving forward. He has taken a truly extraordinary factual tale and turned it into a fun fictional version, with pace throughout, and a crowd-pleasing finale.