Blood and Confusion

Few places​ celebrated the Restoration in 1660 with more enthusiasm than Sherborne in Dorset. It was late May, and crowds piled into the tight streets of the ancient castle town. Wine flowed and hogsheads of beer and baskets of white bread were put out for the poor. Some five thousand troops gathered, on horse and foot, as Sir John Strangways, a local royalist, proclaimed the end of eleven years of the republic. A contemporary source describes a procession of ‘maidens, at least a hundred in number’, dressed in white waistcoats and led by a woman beating a drum; ‘both sexes’ vied ‘to express their loyalty to his Majesty’. Four flags of St George flew from the abbey tower and, in the evening, ‘some of the witty wags of the town’ put on a mock trial, condemning and hanging effigies of John Bradshaw, the man who presided over the prosecution of Charles I, and Oliver Cromwell. The regalia of the vanquished republic was torn down and burned in great bonfires, three of which were positioned on nearby hills and were said to have blazed so brightly you could see them from Wales.

The traditionally royalist town had been the site of much action during the civil wars between 1642 and 1651. Its medieval castle was besieged and bombarded; much of its fabric was destroyed. Wounds suffered in battle there were still the subject of pitiful petitions years later. In 1663 George Yearsley of Cheshire was going about on crutches after being ‘sore wounded’ at Sherborne and lying ‘under the surgeon’s hand half a year’, during which he ‘did undergo much pain and sorrow’. Margaret Walker of Coggeshall in Essex lost her husband at Sherborne; he was in the revolutionary Thomas Rainborough’s regiment, and left her ‘a poor distressed widow’. There were hundreds of similar stories.

Strangways was himself a victim. The man who proclaimed the king’s return to the town had been captured at the castle in 1645, imprisoned in the Tower of London and heavily fined. By 1660 he was in his mid-seventies and the years and defeats had taken their toll. When it was time to read the proclamation, his voice was so weak that no one could really hear him. He was in any case no braying Cavalier. In the 1620s and 1630s, he had been a rather truculent opponent of Charles I. But when the king’s rule collapsed after 1640 and radical voices sprang up in its place, many moderate reformists like Strangways found themselves alienated. Attempts to abolish England’s bishops, driven by Scottish Presbyterians, appeared to open the door to social revolution. So Strangways rallied behind a king who seemed, whatever his failings, to offer stability and order.

By 1642 there were members of Parliament who wanted to take away the king’s right to appoint his own government, and even to control his military. When civil war broke out that summer, more former reformists became royalists. The lords of Sherborne Castle themselves took this path: George Digby, later earl of Bristol, had been a moderate who once castigated the many failings of Charles’s rule, but was appalled by the populist drift of the king’s enemies. In the conflict that followed, allegiances were bewilderingly complex. Families in England were torn apart and individuals changed sides, often more than once. Some of these coat-turns were opportunistic, some born of disillusion. They show how intricate the ideological fissuring had become, along lines of religion, constitutional law, localism, loyalism, culture and nationality. As the old order creaked, new ideas flourished, particularly in religion: radical sects emerged not only from the London streets but from country towns and the ranks of the parliamentary army.

By the time the Parliamentarians won in 1646, their own side had split irreconcilably. The Presbyterians wanted a strict Puritan church and were happy to make a deal with Charles to get it. To their left were the Independents, who wanted above all to protect the new religious groups: they were prepared, if necessary, to depose the king to get their way. Among the Independent Parliamentarians, some – including Rainborough – went so far as to call for manhood suffrage, since ‘the poorest he … hath a life to live as the greatest he.’ At an exhilarating moment of ideological creativity – much of it involving people outside the social elite – there arose Quakers, Levellers, Seekers, Fifth Monarchists, Muggletonians, Ranters and the communistic groups known as the Diggers. There was even briefly the chance of a social revolution.

Despite the splits, the primary aim of the Parliamentarian victors was to reach a lasting settlement. More than revolution, most wanted peace and stability, and the likely path to this remained a treaty with Charles. Whether such a deal was ever possible is a matter of debate. Just as a treaty seemed briefly achievable, in the summer and autumn of 1647, Charles slipped away from comfortable captivity at Hampton Court, made an alliance with the Scots, and embroiled the country in another conflict.

The second civil war was short and nasty, largely owing to the anger of the Parliamentary army at having to risk their lives again. There was no chance now that things could ever return to the way they were. Many Parliamentarians continued to treat with Charles, but the victorious soldiers had been roused. Generals such as Oliver Cromwell and his son-in-law Henry Ireton combined a Bible-grounded vengeance against Charles as a ‘man of blood’ with the more practical realisation that a stricken king would always try to win back power. Negotiations, they thought, had to stop. Claiming necessity and the ‘safety of the people’, the army leadership staged a bloodless coup. A file of soldiers was placed outside the Palace of Westminster.

Such was the inauspicious birth of the English republic: not a glorious uprising by the people, or a successful vote in Parliament, but Pride’s Purge, an army operation named after the colonel who managed the coup. Provided with a list of unsympathetic members, Pride and his soldiers were told to keep them out. What was left would be known, derisively, as the Rump Parliament, the last remnant of the body that first met in 1640.

Within weeks of the purge, Charles was tried and executed. It was an outcome few expected and to which many reacted with revulsion. Even Cromwell’s sister Katherine Whitstone was ‘very troubled at that stroke which took the head of this poor kingdom from us, and truly had I been able to have purchased his life, I am confident I could with all willingness have laid down mine’. Charles met a dignified end on the scaffold; meanwhile the army acted to quell the radical challenge. Levellers had been briefly consulted on a new constitution, but the discussions were quietly forgotten once the business of deposing and killing the king was done. Their last significant challenge to the new regime was a sadly quixotic mutiny, defeated by the army leadership at Burford, making the honey-coloured Cotswold town an unlikely site of pilgrimage for later radicals.

The republic that followed isn’t recalled with much fondness by anyone. It is known as a fun-sapping entity that cancelled Christmas and banned the theatre. To royalists and conservatives it will for ever be contaminated by the killing of an anointed sovereign. The left remembers the betrayal of the Levellers, a genuine movement for democracy (for men at least). Worst of all, Cromwell’s regime carried out atrocities in Ireland, where, after a conquest that caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, most Catholic-owned land was seized and given to English and Scottish settlers.

Republican England had many enemies. For its first two years it spent its energies on defeating the counter-revolutionary challenge: initially in Ireland, then in Scotland, and finally when the pretender, Charles, eldest son of the late king, invaded England. It was only once royalist hopes were finally crushed, in a battle at Worcester in 1651, that the new government could finally start to rule. Once again, peace and stability took precedence over revolution. In February 1652, Parliament, or what was left of it, passed an Act of Oblivion, which drew a line under deeds committed during the civil wars. After a decade of conflict, the elusive goal of moving on seemed achievable, notwithstanding the shattered castles and broken bodies. Domestic peace was coupled with the stirrings of success abroad. Continental powers, which had recoiled in horror at the regicide, now started to recognise the strength, and therefore the diplomatic importance, of their troubled archipelagic neighbour.

But the republic went sour again. In 1653 the Rump Parliament was still sitting, despite promising to dissolve itself and call new elections. The people couldn’t quite be trusted yet: they might elect a host of royalists. Meanwhile reform, not least of the Church, was proceeding too slowly for some Parliamentarians, including Cromwell, who was now head of the army. In another notorious set piece, he brought troops once more to Westminster. The Rump was sent away, and with it the last remnants of the Long Parliament that had first challenged the king in 1640. This time, unlike during Pride’s Purge, the soldiers came into the chamber and ushered members out. More experimentation followed: first an assembly of 140 nominated ‘saints’, which was supposed to guide the country on a righteous path but instead got bogged down in law reform and the knotty question of how to fund the Church. In the end, members of its large moderate faction simply turned up one day and voted to dissolve themselves. The English Commonwealth gave way to something else: a pseudo-monarchy, with government shared by a ‘single person’ – Oliver Cromwell, lord protector – and Parliament. Cromwell was backed by a written constitution, the work of another soldier, John Lambert, which focused on moderate franchise reform, checks and balances, and a certain degree of religious toleration. It was inaugurated in a grand, if somewhat muted, ceremony, with Cromwell riding in a coach, along with Lambert, to Westminster. During the rest of the 1650s, governments rose and tumbled, further constitutions were written and abandoned, and there seemed to be more opinions, as one contemporary complaint had it, than there were faces.

Until recently,​  trade publishers have avoided England’s republic – as too dowdy, perhaps, and too complex. But now it’s all the rage. Just possibly the death of Queen Elizabeth II, which brought an end to a long age of stability for the British monarchy, has opened up the prospect that the country might one day want to think of alternatives. Whatever the reason, the resurgence in interest is to be welcomed. The republic is a fascinating era, in which constitutional, legal and religious questions were contested; a time of ferment and danger, and of colourful, albeit often grimy, characters.

Alice Hunt’s Republic follows Paul Lay’s entertaining history of Cromwell’s rule, Providence Lost, published in 2020, and Anna Keay’s acclaimed The Restless Republic (2022). It is therefore less of a stand-out than it would have been five years ago, but deserves to find many readers. Keay’s book is grounded in character studies of relatively minor players. Hunt tends to focus on the bigger picture, but has a remarkable breadth of material. She is especially good on culture. The titanic figures of Marvell and Milton receive their due. The story of the sale of Charles’s Whitehall paintings is well told: masterpieces fell into the hands of merchants and musicians, and erotic Titians were bought by Puritan captains. Hunt also enlivens other key moments, such as the readmission of the Jews in 1656, a personal project for Cromwell, undertaken partly for reasons of toleration, partly for reasons of providence – hoping for a reconversion that would bring the Second Coming – and partly because it would help the commerce of the City of London. She also includes the story of the ill-fated Sindercombe plot in 1657 to assassinate Cromwell, in which pistols were hidden in a violin case. Sindercombe was a former Parliamentarian and a Leveller, who believed the lord protector had betrayed the cause. After abandoning a series of madcap murderous schemes, he was betrayed and arrested. Sentenced to a traitor’s death, he cheated the hangman by taking poison, smuggled into the Tower by his sister.

Against current trends in history writing, Hunt proceeds chronologically with a chapter devoted to each year. This could have been as clunky as a civil war musket, but instead becomes a means of capturing each bracing innovation in an extraordinary period. Inevitably some important topics are passed over. She discusses the projected tithe reform of the Nominated Assembly (or Barebone’s Parliament) but says nothing of its attempt to simplify the laws. As with Keay’s book, Hunt’s narrative sometimes feels top-down; readers wanting social history should look to Bernard Capp’s England’s Culture Wars (2012). But her emphasis on fervour and political experimentation provides a useful counterbalance to the ennui and cynicism of many of Keay’s characters in The Restless Republic. For Hunt it is an era not only of novelty but of enlightenment, encapsulated by figures such as Samuel Hartlib, the émigré reformer who dared to dream of far-reaching social renewal. Could not England be turned into an educated utopia, where wealth and success were open to talent, and poverty was a thing of the past? It is instructive that Keay chose to focus on the journalist Marchamont Nedham, a disreputable character who wrote for both sides in the war and for whom principles were an annoyance, while Hunt is more at home with Nedham’s visionary friend Milton.

All historians of this period must grapple with the question of whether or not the republic had a chance of succeeding. Could any kingless constitution have survived? In many interpretations a turning point arrived in 1656 and 1657. Shocked by a new royalist uprising in south-west England in the spring of 1655, and reeling from the failure of Cromwell’s Western Design to capture Spanish Hispaniola, the government made a series of bad decisions. A Decimation Tax was imposed on former royalists, an explicit abandonment of the policy of ‘healing and settling’: it confiscated a tenth of the annual value of the property of those who had supported the king. Major-generals from the army were appointed: busybody superintendents to watch over the counties. This was one of the most disastrous policy experiments in English history. For a year or so, the Protectorate began to look like a military dictatorship, a dishonour that has stuck.

One of the new radical groups, the Quakers, was enjoying success of a kind that seemed to tug at the foundations of society. As Hunt notes, nearly half of all pamphlets written in England by women in the 1650s were by Quakers. The sect had comparatively little respect for the old ways. To conservatives within the regime, this suggested that the toleration offered in Lambert’s 1653 constitution had gone too far. By late 1656, the Protectorate had reached a crisis. It had always struggled to unite disparate agendas: religious reform, toleration, stability, healing. Now this incompatibility contributed to a constitutional maelstrom. The Quaker James Nayler entered Bristol seated on an ass, reimagining Christ’s entry to Jerusalem. It was a clear case of blasphemy. But Parliament’s brutal means of punishing him – with whipping, bodily mutilation and perpetual imprisonment – was retrogressive: it had assumed the old judicial role of the disbanded House of Lords. No one was happy.

In 1657 the enemies of the new constitution were ready to attack. They did so by offering Cromwell a way out: he would be made king. The new monarchy would be created, quite explicitly, by Parliament: the House of Cromwell would owe its sovereignty not to God but to a grant from the people’s representatives. But he refused. Cromwell always had at least one eye on the Old Testament, and picking up the crown, he believed, would be to commit the sin of Achan: disobedience and covetousness so that ‘the anger of the Lord was kindled against the children of Israel.’ He did, though, approve the rest of the new civilian constitution. The arrangement was a fudge, and though it might just have worked, it alienated some key players in the army. Cromwell had turned his back on the soldiers, just as he had on the Republicans in 1653.

At​ its end, most historians argue, the republic was barely hanging together, by now wholly dependent on Cromwell’s charisma. Much of the army tolerated the regime while their old comrade-in-arms was alive to lead it, but once he was gone, their loyalty evaporated. This analysis is, however, challenged by Henry Reece in The Fall, which asks us to rethink whether the demise of the republic was so predictable. When Cromwell died in September 1658, he passed his title to his eldest son, Richard: the Protectorate was to be hereditary. Richard was popular, but not feared nor sufficiently respected. ‘The Vulture died,’ a royalist quipped, ‘and out of his ashes rose a Titmouse.’ More important, he had little support from his father’s army. Within months he had resigned, after which there was a year of jockeying between representatives of the old Rump Parliament and the army. The chaos ended only when George Monck marched his Scottish army south to London and demanded a ‘free Parliament’, one in which elections were on the old franchise, and not couched with restrictions on royalists. As Reece sees it, the fall of the republic happened as the result of bad choices by its leading politicians. Richard Cromwell’s Protectorate was more financially stable and less militarised than later Stuart regimes; nothing was inevitable. Everything came down to the folly of weak men. Charles Fleetwood, a leading commander and one of Oliver Cromwell’s many sons-in-law, suffered from ‘negligent passivity’. Lambert, for his many talents, was the wrong man at the wrong time. Ireton might have had the skill and drive to make the republic work but had died in 1651.

Reece argues that the person most responsible for the republic’s fall was Arthur Haselrig. Once an obscure Leicester knight, by 1659 he was arguably the leading figure of the day as a prominent MP and a member of the Council of State. But he was pompous, inflexible and unpopular, disliked by Cromwellians and royalists alike. When the Rump was recalled in 1660, Haselrig quickly had it purged. As he soon discovered, expelling dissent had the consequence of removing much needed talent.

Fairly soon, the Rump collapsed and a cacophony of scurrilous rhymes was heard across England. The republic was a great age for English satire. Royalist laughs had been generated by rejecting certain social norms and annoying Puritans with wilful impurity – fart jokes, heavy drinking and a celebration of sex and dancing. This was the origin of the aristocratic libertinism that would characterise the 1660s: a world that had been turned upside down was inverted once more. The most famous collection of anti-republican jingles was called Arsy-Versy, a coarse way of saying ‘topsy-turvy’. One poem in the collection marks the occasion on which Londoners ‘roasted the rump’ in relief at Parliament’s demise (effigies of members of the Rump were burned and rump steaks cooked). The verse hails the fall of Haselrig as much as it does the imminent return of the king: ‘It endur’d the first heat, and proved no starter/But sung in the midst of the flames like a Martyr/And whisk’d the tail like a terrible Farter/And sounded most cheerfully, Vive Sir Arthur.’

In the spring of 1660 Charles II was being openly toasted across England; by June, he was safely on the throne. The old Parliamentarian Samuel Gott summed up how it had all come about. ‘Any government,’ he said, ‘is better than no government, and any civil better than a military government … Shall we go back into blood and confusion again?’ To Reece, the Restoration didn’t signify a swell of support for monarchism; it was merely the last hope for stability after months of turmoil. As the republican Lucy Hutchinson recalled several years after the event: ‘The whole nation began to set their eyes upon the king beyond the sea, and think a bad settlement under him better than none at all.’

Even though Haselrig hadn’t signed the late king’s death warrant, he was singled out for vengeance by the new Stuart regime. Imprisoned in the Tower, he quickly succumbed to illness. The Restoration had its ugly side: it was libertine, but also repressive, forgiving to some and vindictive to others. In Sherborne, just weeks after Charles had assumed the crown, a group of thirty Quakers were arrested, beaten up and imprisoned. Hauled before a magistrate, they protested that the new king had promised them religious toleration. No chance, the magistrate replied. They stood before the court bareheaded, an egalitarian gesture beloved of the movement, but this was itself seen as a challenge to the king’s authority. They were sent back to prison.