A vivid, engrossing portrait of life under Cromwell
To historians of a certain age, the years between the execution of Charles I in 1649 and the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 conjure up just one thing: a world turned upside down. Raised on a diet of Christopher Hill and the other Left-wing polemicists of the 1970s, we can’t help but imagine a nation bursting at the seams with radical Puritan sects: Diggers calling for the abolition of private property; Fifth Monarchists waiting gleefully for the End of Days and the Second Coming; Ranters rushing to obey the commandment to love thy neighbour with rather too much enthusiasm.
If this interpretation had flaws, it was at least an improvement on the traditional view of the Interregnum, which held that the Right-but
Keay’s cast includes mad Anna Trapnel, whose visions made her a celebrity
Repulsive roundheads all wore black, Cromwell cancelled Christmas and the English republic was a ghastly mistake which descended into anarchy before Charles II, the Merry Monarch, returned in the nick of time to rescue his subjects from joyless Puritanism. More recent historians have focused on the struggles to find a suitable way to govern without kings, or have turned their attention to religion, emphasising the belief among republican leaders that they were God’s instruments, put on Earth to do His will – if only they could agree what His will might be.
What has been missing is a sense of what it was really like to live through one of the most difficult and exciting periods in English history. Yes, the institutions of the Church of England were dismantled – but how did it feel to see your old parish priest ejected and replaced by a zealot? How did the rule of the major-generals affect life for an old country squire, pottering around his estate? Who cared whether or not Cromwell assumed the mantle of king? What did such things matter in Cornwall or Cumberland?
In The Restless Republic, Anna Keay offers a much-needed insight into the different perspectives and experiences that informed the Interregnum. In the process, she leads us expertly through the labyrinth that was England in the 1650s, a labyrinth with so many dead ends, so many dashed hopes. And she does it with style.
Her method seems disarmingly simple. The Restless Republic is populated by an eclectic mix of movers and shakers, and her hope, she says, is that “through them the age in which they lived... might become more real”. So it does. Her motley band of brothers (and sisters) consists of soldiers and experimental philosophers and country squires, royalist noblewomen and turncoat pressmen and half-mad Puritan visionaries. For a time, centre-stage is taken by the ardent republican John Bradshaw, who, as President of the High Court of Justice, presided over the trial of Charles I, and who ruled the Council of State before being sidelined by Cromwell for his opposition to the Protectorate. Bradshaw gives place to Gerrard Winstanley and the communistic Digger colony on St George’s Hill, fighting their losing battle not against the system, but against hostile neighbours who found their antics too tiresome for words. We meet Marchamont Nedham, an unprincipled journalist who jettisoned his royalism when he saw which way the wind was blowing and whose broadsheet, Mercurius Politicus, became the main organ of state, relentlessly promoting the government line – whatever that line happened to be.
Keay’s cast also includes powerful women, some better known than others. Anne Fairfax, the wife of the commander-in-chief of Cromwell’s New Model Army, is here, violently disapproving of Charles I’s trial and, according to legend, heckling the court from the gallery in Westminster Hall before vanishing into the crowd when soldiers level their muskets in her direction. Charlotte, Countess of Derby, whose personal courage was matched only by her arrogance, ruled with a rod of iron over the Isle of Man as one of the last bastions of royalism in the nation, grimly and heroically holding it for the king while, on the mainland, her husband fought and died for the Stuart cause. Keay is particularly good on sad, mad Anna Trapnel, the shipwright’s daughter from Stepney whose visions and prophecies turned her into a celebrity – until she began to dream of Oliver Cromwell as a horned beast and announced that he and his cronies were the old monarchy in new clothes. And drifting, marching, stumbling through these pages is Cromwell himself, the music-loving family man whose impatience at his comrades’ inability to see what he saw finally got the better of him and turned him into a king in all but name.
There is no doubt that the picture these characters bring to life, as they step in and out of each other’s stories like old friends at a country dance, is unsettled, at times confusing. But it is always entirely convincing. Keay offers us a world turned upside down; but also a world made real. That’s a remarkable achievement.