After the King
375 years ago today – on 30 January 1649 – King Charles I was executed on the orders of a tiny group of men. Britain’s revolution was complete.
The story of the next eleven years is absolutely fascinating, not least because it is barely remembered in Britain today. Oliver Cromwell still has a statue outside the Houses of Parliament (an irony if ever there was one, for he was no lover of parliaments) and the abolition of Christmas is still occasionally recalled, but otherwise those tumultuous years have largely disappeared from the national memory. So, we should be grateful to Anna Keay for her excellent book, The Restless Republic: Britain Without a Crown, in which she retells the stories of 1649-1660 with great narrative aplomb.
The success of Keay’s book is largely down to its structure. She builds her narrative around the lives of a group of fascinating characters whose lives were changed, for good or for ill, during Britain’s unhappy republican era. Starting with John Bradshaw, a relatively minor Cheshire lawyer who presided over Charles I’s trial, she goes on to describe the actions of Gerrard Winstanley, leader of the ill-fated Diggers, Charlotte de la Trémoille, Countess of Derby, who saw off the great Thomas Fairfax himself during the first civil war and subsequently helped lead royalist resistance to the republican regime from her base in the Isle of Man, to name but three. Each of these characters has a chapter to himself or herself, but, increasingly as the book goes on, their stories overlap in intriguing ways.
Rather than start with the obvious big guns – Oliver Cromwell only appears some way into the book – Keay is determined to show the impact of the restless republic on people outside London. We travel to Norfolk with Hamon L’Estrange, to Ireland with William Petty (a fascinating character who went to sea aged 13, fell from the rigging and broke his leg, was abandoned in Normandy, made ends meet by doing card tricks, was educated by Jesuits, and ended up in Oxford where he became Professor of Astronomy, replacing the previous incumbent who “could not endure the sight of a bloody body”), and, eventually, to Scotland with General Monck, who eventually restored Charles II to the throne in 1660.
En route, we meet a whole host of other colourful characters, including newspaperman, Marchamont Nedham, whose spectacular success owed a great deal to his ability to change sides with amazing rapidity, and Anna Trapnel, a visionary Fifth Monarchist. In fact, one of the strengths of Keay’s book is its depiction of the lives of some remarkable, though not always admirable, women, as well as some remarkable, though not often admirable, men. We also learn – or, at least, I also learned – some surprising facts about some of the era’s main players: I never knew, for instance, that General Monck murdered a man at the tender age of sixteen and later married a woman who was already married and whose husband was quietly bought off.
The Restless Republic, in other words, has many of the merits of a good novel, but, sadly, there are also one or two key omissions. As Keay acknowledges herself, the Britain of her title – “rather as was the case with the first ‘British’ parliament of 1656-9 – is weighted towards England.” Similarly, and this time unacknowledged, the book is weighted towards Protestantism with Catholics playing only an occasional walk-on role. Nowhere is this more egregious than in the chapters on Ireland, which, as Keay explains, was treated appallingly during the republic. Some of the horrors of those years, which shaped the next 300+ years of Irish history, are told in graphic detail, but her chapter on ‘The End of Ireland’ ends on a strangely hopeful note because we have been shown Ireland’s suffering through the eyes of an Englishman, William Petty. What would this chapter have been like, I wondered, if seen through Catholic Irish eyes?
Increasingly, I felt myself wanting another chapter or two, on Richard Cromwell, for instance, a fascinating character who surely deserves a book, and probably a novel, of his own. Or perhaps on John Wall, a Lancastrian who became a priest and returned to England shortly before the execution of Charles I. Despite the deeply ingrained anti-Catholicism of that time, he served the Catholics of Warwickshire for 23 years, possibly serving at Harvington Hall where St Nicholas Owen built many remarkable priest hides, before being executed during the apparently more propitious reign of Charles II.
However, it would be unfair to judge a book on what it doesn’t say. The Restless Republic is certainly worth reading, as the anniversary of the execution of Charles I is worth remembering. And if reading it makes us what to find out more, that can only be a good thing.