Dan Snow's History Hit - The 1650s: Britain's Decade Without a Crown

Episode Date: May 9, 2022

In 1649 Britain was engulfed by revolution. Charles I was executed for treason and within weeks the English monarchy had been abolished and the House of Lords discarded. The people, it was announced, ...were now the sovereign force in the land. What did this mean for the decade that would follow?Anna Keay is a historian, broadcaster and Director of the Landmark Trust. Anna joins Dan on the podcast to discuss the extraordinary and experimental decade of the 1650s - how these tempestuous years set the British Isles on a new course and what happened when a conservative people tried revolution.Produced by Hannah WardMixed and Mastered by Dougal PatmoreIf you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Hi buddy, welcome to Dan Snow's History. It's in 1649 King Charles I had been executed. Something like a quarter of a million people in Britain and Ireland were dead, perhaps more. Per capita, that's thought to be a bigger death toll than the First or the Second World Wars. Hundreds of villages, houses, towns, cities were shattered and broken. And the Constitution was pretty comprehensively smashed up as well. What happened next was a turbulent decade as people tried to work out how they would live politically, culturally, religiously, and commercially.
Starting point is 00:00:38 I've got Anna Kay on the podcast. She's been on before. She wrote a lovely biography of the Duke of Monmouth, Charles II's illegitimate son, who fought his uncle, James II, for the crown in 1685. It's a great story, and she's brought her typical flair to this subject as well. If you wish to listen to the sort of straight politics
Starting point is 00:00:57 that appear, I urge you to go back and listen to one of our most successful podcasts ever done, actually, with Paul Ley, the former editor of the History Today magazine. He wrote a beautiful account of these 10 years, really getting into the politics, Cromwell, and the jostling for power, and the jostling for legitimacy in this decade, the 1650s. So Anna and I don't talk too much about that. Instead, we look at what life was like for normal people in Britain and Ireland in this period. We look at a range of characters in a range of fields. So if you want to go back and
Starting point is 00:01:25 listen to podcasts like the excellent Paul Leys on the 1650s, please go to History Hit TV. It is our Netflix history. It's our digital history channel. We've got all the podcasts and there are thousands of podcasts and TV shows. It's quite exciting, actually. It's all growing very nicely. Tens of thousands of people subscribing. Please follow the link in the description of this pod. Click on it right now and get two weeks free. And for a very small subscription, you get access to the world's best history channel. No aliens on there, no ancient nonsenses, all good prop history. You're going to absolutely love it. But in the meantime, folks, here's the very brilliant Anna Kay. Enjoy. Anna Kay
Starting point is 00:02:05 thank you very much for coming back on the podcast lovely to be here as you know I'm the biggest fan of your previous book about Monmouth and I'm so glad
Starting point is 00:02:14 you're back in the game because you've got a day job I'm so glad you found time to write but this is a monster book tell me about England and Britain and Ireland in 1649 I guess there's all this
Starting point is 00:02:23 modern research setting it might be the bloodiest war by capita in sort of recent, like the last thousand years of British history. How bad was the end of the Civil War for this country? Well, like lots of wars, it was the same with the 30 Years' War on the Continent. There's the deaths in combat, you know, which are one thing, but then there's all the rest of the kind of destruction and disease and death that comes as a kind of knock-on effect. So trying to kind of put a number on how many people died is a sort of fool's game really, because we don't have the statistics, but it's pretty clear when
Starting point is 00:02:57 you follow the story of any given town or family that the impact of the war was tremendous, because not only were the people killed who were fighting, which happened all over the place in many battles, biggest one, Marston Moor, you know, probably biggest battle ever fought in Britain. But then if you were having soldiers quartered on you, on your family, and they were eating all your seed corn, and then you had nothing left to eat, the sort of starvation or famine that would follow that was tremendous, the trade that completely ground to a halt, and then people went out of business and the destruction that came from that. The knocking down of huge amounts of the outskirts of towns so that they could be defended in the event of a siege and so on. For an island which has done a lot of its fighting over the centuries in other places, it's hard to think of a period
Starting point is 00:03:40 where the sustained impact was greater in terms of a war than the Civil War. where the sustained impact was greater in terms of a war than the Civil War. And in the period in which Britain and Ireland was ruled without a king, putting us under politics for a second, how quickly do you get the sense that was life able to return to normal? Was this a traumatised society? What would life have been like in that decade that followed 1649? Obviously, it was still fighting, still major combat operations, various little wars breaking out and foreign wars.
Starting point is 00:04:06 But what's your sense of what it was like in the country? Well, that is exactly the question, really, that I wanted to try to address. Because, of course, you know, like we know in politics now, there can be a tremendous political changes going on. The shenanigans in Westminster can be moment by moment. And yet the question is, to what extent is that sort of Westminster bubblery? And to what extent does it actually make a difference if you're a farmer in
Starting point is 00:04:28 Norfolk or, you know, a fuller in Cornwall or whatever? And experiences were very different. I think it's definitely the case that the impact was much greater in different areas in different parts of life than it was in some than others. So for example, there's a very interesting comment that Arthur Hazelrigg, who's one of the big political figures of the period makes, when there's a conversation about what regime is favoured. And he says, essentially, people don't really care who's in charge, as long as they can plough and go to market. One of the things that's really interesting is that in Britain as a whole, by 1649, everyone is exhausted. They are exhausted after nearly a decade of war and all of the knock-on effects of that. And actually, to be able to simply get on with life, to be able to plough
Starting point is 00:05:12 your fields, marry your daughters, buy and sell land, whatever it is, is actually a more pressing concern than kind of whether or not the person in charge in London is a Lord Protector or a King. So although I think that people on the whole are very conservative, probably generally, and certainly in this period in the kind of landscape as a whole. And so the kind of loss of the monarchy is a great shock, sort of intellectual shock. On the other hand, you know, just give me peace is what I think was the overriding view of most people. And so the people's willingness to sort of just kind of lump it, even though they were a bit appalled by the thought of the loss of monarchy, is much greater than you might imagine.
Starting point is 00:05:50 And I think it's one of the reasons why it wasn't a foregone conclusion, the whole thing was going to fail, even though it wasn't in any sense like a popular or democratic thing that the king was executed. So yeah, let's stay away from the Westminster who who's in who's out game but just on the widest of politics or the kind of cultural societal politics was this britain's island's real revolution i mean other landed the traditional anglo-norman aristocracy toppled or landed estates broken up the churches how revolutionary was the sort of i don't want to say political economy but it's that idea the sort of um the politics the want to say political economy, but it's that idea, the sort of the politics, the land, the society. I think it was a revolution, my take on it. I mean, you know,
Starting point is 00:06:31 massive political change, the end of the monarchy, the abolition of the House of Lords, the complete sort of recasting of the nation of sovereignty to be parliament rather than those institutions is a big deal. But what it wasn't really was a social revolution. I mean, it's not like France in the first years of the French Revolution, where you've got this kind of mass, unbelievably bloody kind of destruction of everything to do with sort of status and, you know, the nobility and so on. That absolutely is not what's happening in England and Scotland and Ireland in the 1650s. I mean, the House of Lords is abolished so that the nobility has no kind of automatic role in the governance of the nation, but the titles all remain. And if
Starting point is 00:07:11 you hadn't lotted your copy book with the people in charge, you could carry on farming your 10,000 acres or whatever it was. That said, there was significant redistribution of lands, but it wasn't on the basis that we've got to bleed the rich. It was on the basis that the people who had been paid up supporters of Charles I as royalists were subject to having land sequestered, sort of taken off them and then having to essentially pay big fines in order to regain their lands. But ultimately, at the end of the period, that process meant that actually most of the people, you know, almost everybody really who'd been significant landowner at the beginning of the period kind of still was because there was enough capital around that you could borrow some money, pay the fine, get it back.
Starting point is 00:07:52 So that didn't see the kind of disenfranchisement of the kind of landed classes. But at the same time, the royal estates were sold. Significant chunks of church holdings were sold. The crown jewels were melted down. So there were some big changes affected through that sort of act of realising capital, realising money to pay off the army. But it was more for those reasons than because there was a sort of determined desire to sort of emasculate a class, which wasn't part of it. And yet there's quite a lot of utopian thinking around that. There's quite a lot of reorganising, isn't there? Like after the French
Starting point is 00:08:24 Revolution, when people like Napoleon were able to slash through all these years of conservatism and sort of semi-feudal structures. From your book, there seems to be quite a lot of people either really reimagining society or doing things in Ireland, like mapping Ireland and dispossessing the Irish of their land. For some reason, there was something in the air, wasn't there, that people were prepared to have a dig at making some big changes? Yeah, and I think there's a couple of things there one is that because you lose for periods of time really a single powerful authority force of authority that says this is
Starting point is 00:08:54 what you're allowed to say not allowed to say or this is the licensing process you have to go through to get a book published or not because all that kind of breaks down for periods it's possible for people to express very outlandish, as it were, then, you know, kind of original different views about how things might be done in a way that previously would have been unthinkable. And secondly, the throwing up of the existing institutions, you know, abolishing the monarchy, obviously begs the question, what are you going to have instead? And so that opens a debate which hadn't existed before about, you know, what's the right structure for a society and how should power work, how should people relate to each other. So you take those two things, and then you add in the third cocktail, which is the sudden explosion in print and publication of books and so on, but crucially of newspapers, which hadn't existed a generation before, a newspaper wasn't a thing, and suddenly now they're everywhere. So new ideas get kind of
Starting point is 00:09:42 communicated around the place at tremendous speed in a way that before wouldn't have happened. So you get people like the Diggers, this group of very sort of idealistic, middling sort people in a village in Surrey, led by a slightly sort of otherworldly visionary, this chap Gerald Winstanley. And he has a vision that common ownership is the answer to all our problems. And all this talk of kind of a new way of doing things, new freedom is leading us to this. And so he starts tilling the soil in common land and saying, if we all plant carrots here, there'll be enough for everyone and no one will go hungry. So that's something like that, which gets loads of coverage. It's in all the papers and it rather alarms people who live in the local area and is thought to be very sort of weird and wacky by lots of other people. There's a kind of opportunity for that kind of thinking to happen and for it to be talked about and to be given some currency, which really hadn't existed in a previous period.
Starting point is 00:10:33 There are people who are coming up with very original, radical ideas about how society might be remodelled. Most people aren't. Most people are just thinking about how am I going to have enough seeds to plant for my crops next year? And also, basically, the diggers are a very good case, which is actually when the diggers were doing their kind of communist undertaking in Surrey, the high command in London weren't bothered about it at all. They thought it was rather sort of charming and Fairfax goes to see them and we know sort of says, carry on, that's fine. It's the people locally who are horrified because they're from the next door parish and they've come into their parish and they're planting carrots on their parish lands and so they're the ones that actually end up crushing them so there's an interesting kind
Starting point is 00:11:12 of thing about to what extent things are played out because of big national resistance or support and to what extent it's actually the sort of timeless nimbyism that causes in that case that particular movement to be crushed you You did mention the media there. Obviously, we're living through an era of an explosion of access to information, good and bad. And it's presenting us all sorts of interesting new challenges around propaganda and what people believe and what is truth. Surely the key figure in this history in Britain is your man, Marchmont Nedham, who is just an extraordinary character, right?
Starting point is 00:11:44 Because newspapers were a completely new concept of that sort of generation, people are interested in and are able to access stuff about what's going on around the world, near and far, which didn't exist before. So you've got a kind of news market. And this fascinating man, Marchmont Nedham is the kind of first great newspaper editor, if you like. He doesn't have a kind of allegiance to, as it were, either side in the Civil War. He's kind of ducking and diving. He edits a paper that supports the parliamentarians and then one that supports the royalists, then he goes back to the parliamentarians, managing quite often to make his move at kind of precisely the wrong moment. But as well as the fact that news exists and the idea has become
Starting point is 00:12:23 common currency, it's a bit like at the moment, isn't it? You know, when you've got stuff going on, you know, all this business going on in Westminster at the moment about parties at number 10, and so on, suddenly, you just really want to know what's happening, you know, and you're looking at Twitter, or you're looking at the BBC website to see whether there's been any developments. And similarly, with the kind of huge political shifts of that period, people wanted to know, you know, has Charles II landed in Scotland, we hear, or has he? And where is he? And so that market suddenly comes about. And it, of course, becomes a circle, because then as soon as you start feeding that, you have an opportunity
Starting point is 00:12:53 to guide those views, as well as to be feeding the appetite. And he gets put in prison by the sort of parliamentarian regime. And then he convinces them essentially to take him on on their side, to produce a newspaper for the Republic that's going to be the thing that's going to convince everyone the Republic is a good thing. Because ever since the revolution of 1648, 49, the new regime knows that they've got a kind of PR issue.
Starting point is 00:13:19 But although the language of what they're talking about, you know, in the first year of the restoration of freedom and the name of the people, all this kind of stuff is very grounded into the popular support. The reality is the vast majority of people, if they'd been a plebiscite, wouldn't have voted to abolish the monarchy. So setting up your own newspaper and having a brilliant newspaper man who knows how to write kind of funny, engaging, witty, irreverent prose that people are really going to enjoy reading, but also at the same time is kind of promoting your view, is a kind of brilliant realisation. And so this paper, Mercurius Politicus, which is produced weekly all the way through the 1650s, becomes the first proper sort of big national staple paper, and is incredibly influential.
Starting point is 00:14:01 But it also is incredibly accurate, the news network that's set up to feed this paper is not just about what's going on in the UK, it's about what's going on in France and Germany and the Caribbean, has news from China. So the idea of foreign correspondence has adverts in it. People sort of put an advert saying, I've lost my dog. Has anyone seen it? Lost on the strand. So it's the beginning of a whole of kind of mass media communication of the story. It's so familiar to us now, but hadn't really existed in anything like a recognisable form. You listen to Dan Snow's history, we're talking about the most turbulent decade in British and Irish history. Maybe. More coming up.
Starting point is 00:14:49 history? Maybe. More coming up. Hi, I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and on my podcast, Not Just the Tudors, we talk about everyone from Thomas Cromwell to Oliver Cromwell, from Catherine Parr to Catherine de' Medici. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Subscribe from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends.
Starting point is 00:15:33 Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. And the more I listen to you talking about this, the more it's clear to me just what a transformative and important period of history this is
Starting point is 00:15:59 for our subsequent sort of progression. And yet it's overlooked. Is that because it was an embarrassment when the monarchy came back? We just wanted those years to sort of disappear. And of it's overlooked. Is that because it was an embarrassment when the monarchy came back? We just wanted those years to sort of disappear. And of course, the Church of England as well, two very powerful vested interests that just did not want to talk about what had happened. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. Once the restoration had happened, which hadn't happened because everyone was so desperate for the monarchy to return, it happened because the absolute failure of every kind of variety of the Republic that had been tried and hadn't worked out. But anyway,
Starting point is 00:16:30 when it did happen, the kind of whole attitude of Charles II and those around him was that it had never happened, as in the Republic had never happened. And so, you know, it's that thing that Charles II's regnal year in 1660 is 14. The line is he has been king ever since 1649. And in fact, that's part of the language related to the Declaration of Breda and so on when the restoration itself is affected. So it's a very interesting period right at the beginning in 1660 to 1 where there's an attempt for a sort of more moderated settlement that maybe some of these people who've been followers of the Puritan sects, they might be somehow encompassed within the Church of England. But as soon as there's an election to Parliament, and there's a kind of full on community of cavaliers in the House of Commons, there's no
Starting point is 00:17:13 way there's any kind of concession to what's happened. And so it's full blown, it's 1649, and before come back, and so we paper over it. And so it isn't referred to and isn't talked about. Although, of course, the reality is that lots of the things that had long term consequences from those years get completed in a sort of final act, if you like, which happens with the Glorious Revolution when things like the Act of Toleration and the Bill of Rights and the Licensing Act of Lapsing and so on means you get freedom of the press and you get much greater freedom of worship and so on. So it has kind of been written out in a way, I think, as a decade. I think those people who are interested in sort of radical history think, you know, the fact was a failure is a bit embarrassing because why wasn't it a success if a sort of progressive state was tried? And those who were in favour entirely of the Ancien Régime arrangements didn't want to talk about it.
Starting point is 00:18:04 It was to be forgotten. And the only way it's really used was as a sort of cautionary tale, as a kind of ghoul to summon up. So, you know, when, for example, in Charles II's reign, there's a big debate about the succession, when people were talking about, well, maybe we could change the rules of succession so James II doesn't become king, the Tories are quick to say, oh, well, it'll be 1649 or 1642 all over again.
Starting point is 00:18:25 And similarly, in the 18th century, when, you know, oh, well, it'll be 1649 or 1642 all over again. And similarly, in the 18th century, when there's discussion about political arrangements, and obviously revolutionary France is all unfolding, there's lots of deliberately comparing Thomas Paine and people to the radicals of the 17th century and saying, well, look what happened to them and look what came of that. On both sides, it's been kind of buried. One of the reasons I wanted to write the book was I thought, you know, these were all people. They were all people who, on the whole, thought that they were acting for the best. And so what was it that motivated them to do something so radical? And you think we think of things like Brexit and think that was quite radical.
Starting point is 00:18:56 But you think there was nothing compared to what they did in 1649. I mean, nothing. And in the course of whatever it was, you know, six or eight weeks, the king has been executed, the monarchy has been abolished, the Church of England is sort of unrecognisable, House of Lords is gone, crown jewels are up for sale. I mean, it's just astonishing. And yet they managed to make a functioning state out of it, in spite of the fact that it was really a sort of army coup,
Starting point is 00:19:19 which was affected by a very small number of people. And it lasted over a decade. And I guess its repercussions in Ireland are even more profound. I mean, are they practically more profound or are they just remembered in such a powerful way? No, they were more profound. They were unquestionably more profound. I find it interesting that we talk a lot about the kind of shame and or some people do about kind of shame or regret attached to something horrific like the transatlantic business of slavery but i think the treatment of ireland in terms of if you're going to be outraged about the past and how people have
Starting point is 00:19:54 behaved i think it's really up there because what happened in ireland was the whole scale confiscation of the lands of the vast majority of Irish people and the reallocation of that to Protestant, largely English people. It wasn't particularly a Cromwellian or even a Republican enterprise. I mean, this was baked in from the beginning. Charles I, when he had sent an English army over to put down a Catholic uprising in 1641, it had been done on the basis that those people who invested in it were going to be paid in the lands that were going to be confiscated from the losers. So that was not a kind of sinister new bit of engineering done by the Republicans at all. It was already there.
Starting point is 00:20:36 If Charles I had won the Civil War, it would still have been the same. But what happened was that whereas people who had supported the royal cause in England and in Scotland were fined broadly and then could get their lands back in Ireland. There was mass dispossession. And what it meant was that the outbreak of the Civil War, Ireland was owned sort of broadly two thirds by Irish Catholics. And by the late 1650s, it was three quarters owned by English and Scots Protestants. And that was not undone in 1660. So that was absolutely wholesale. And it reflected the fact that essentially the view, whether you're a parliamentarian or a royalist, that the view of Protestant English people in the 17th century was that Irish people were kind of lesser, and they deserved less in the way of humane treatment.
Starting point is 00:21:25 They were Catholics, and so therefore, inherently sort of ungovernable rebellious needed to be kind of kept under your heel. And so a completely different kind of settlement was meted out in Ireland compared to, say, in Scotland. And that has caused sort of scarring in terms of Irish history ever since. I mean, there were also the really nasty sieges when significant, significant numbers of civilians were killed, which was also horrific, and which has burned bright in memories for since then, for good reason. But actually, in terms of the real long term impact, it's that land distribution that just basically completely disenfranchises the Catholic Irish from then on.
Starting point is 00:22:02 It's interesting that it was obviously accelerated, but the attitude towards Ireland seemed quite similar from before and into the Republic. Also, what about the colonial attitude, attitudes towards the Atlantic world or in the Indian Ocean? Is that something you see the Republic sharting a different cause? Well, the thing about the Republic was because it was essentially a regime that was very, from the first, unstable because it didn't have widespread popular or political support. In order to hold it in existence, it had to have a massive military presence in a the Republic had kind of military power on a scale which was quite different to what had gone before. And so what happened was that in terms of the international aspects of things, that when in the mid-1650s the Republican regimes managed to sort
Starting point is 00:22:58 of pacify Scotland, pacify Ireland, essentially to establish conquest of both of those. They then have a lovely big navy sort of sitting there. And Cromwell, who's very, by this time at the fore, very seized with the idea that, which is after all, really a religious revolution, that this sort of Puritan nation that they are, needs now to export this proper form of arranging yourselves in the eyes of God to other parts of the world. And actually the Caribbean, where the Spanish are very much in charge, Spanish, of course, Catholics and just the sort of people you want to be converting to your view of rightful religious arrangements, they then send a great expedition off to the Caribbean
Starting point is 00:23:36 to try and take the island of Hispaniola from the Spanish. Cromwell also has quite romantic ideas about the sort of Elizabethan buccaneering sailors high seas sort of Raleigh and people so he likes the thought of this sort of glorious English protestant presence on the high seas and so anyway he sends this huge expedition essentially trying to take Hispaniola just at the moment where the Caribbean is really being exploited for the beginning to Barbados and other places have already been established as sort of essentially trade based outposts of England. And the expedition to Hispaniola is a disaster, but they managed to grab Jamaica on the way back and come back saying, well, sorry, we didn't manage to get this really big island, we've got a slightly smaller one. But because
Starting point is 00:24:18 it's a state sponsored military expedition to take a place, and then having taken it, they then keep it and settle it and it becomes a territorial outpost. It's really the beginning of colonialism as opposed to sort of trade expansionism. And that, of course, becomes a massive characteristic of international activity from Britain in the centuries and decades that would follow. The Navigation Act is passed, which is essentially something done to annoy the Dutch, which says only British ships can carry produce to the places that we've got trading or colonial outposts. And that just becomes a kind of bit of legislation that actually transforms the impact, if you like, of international expansion in other places into India and so on later in the century. So I suppose there's a kind of,
Starting point is 00:24:59 the world is becoming more outward looking, technology in terms of ships and so on is changing, trade networks are changing, but then you layer over that a republican regime that's very tooled up with the navy and has got a kind of ideological cause that it wants to export and that makes for a big shift in that sphere. And I guess war, as war tends to do, produces astonishing leaders and you've got Blake on the sea and you've got Cromwell on land, who are two of the most successful military commanders in British history, which probably helps. Well, it sort of helps, except, of course, Cromwell at this stage, by the time you get to the mid-1650s, he's trying to lead the country.
Starting point is 00:25:37 He's not leading an army. And he was great at leading an army. He really knew how to do that. He was brilliant with his soldiers. He was brilliant with tactician and strategist and so on, charismatic leader of them. But when it comes to actually being in charge, and this is one of the things I think is very interesting, which is we might think of others who are brilliant on campaign, whether it's military or other sorts of campaigning. But when it comes to actually ruling and having to do
Starting point is 00:25:59 the kind of grunt work, the compromise, the trying to understand how to reconcile factions, grunt work, the compromise, the trying to understand how to reconcile factions. I think he found the terrain of peace very difficult. And ultimately, his son said he thought the Cromwell was the only thing that was holding the protectorate together in the last years of his life. And even Monk said that he thought if Oliver Cromwell had lived, his regime would probably have collapsed because his ability to hold it together was beginning to kind of give way. So he's an interesting example of someone who, you know, I suppose Wellington, there are other people, aren't there, who are both big soldiers and who then become political leaders and how they get on.
Starting point is 00:26:32 Anna Kay, that was superb. Thank you so much for talking us through this remarkable decade. And what's your new book called? It's called The Restless Republic, Britain Without a Crown. And there's lots of stuff in it that isn't about fighting. Restless Republic, Britain Without a Crown. And there's lots of stuff in it that isn't about fighting. There's lots about life because the first decade where people went to coffee shops,
Starting point is 00:26:55 wore makeup, men wore wigs, opera began, all sorts of lovely things that we don't think about in this period also were happening. So it's about life in Britain in those unfamiliar years. And presumably that is coming back to the beginning. It's because A, the world world's changing as you mentioned earlier we are globalising at this point in world history but also there's just a freshness to it fashion science new people are being promoted there's a sort of I don't know is it creative anarchy to it as well? Well I think it's partly that on the one hand, there's a big clear out because in order to keep your job, if you were, for example, a professor at Oxford, you had to sign
Starting point is 00:27:29 the engagement, you had to sign an oath saying that you supported the regime, and lots of them didn't because they were royalists. And so suddenly, you get loads of young people promoted into positions of seniority that they hadn't, would never otherwise have got to forever. And so all these young scientists in Oxford, example are suddenly given these very senior posts and it really sort of accelerates madly the kind of movement of ideas and so on and similarly when it comes to entertainments because theatres were closed down because they were seen as places where plotting and sort of royalist schemes could be hatched people had to be inventive because people still wanted to have fun you know that doesn't go away and so things things like opera, for example, is put forward. They've
Starting point is 00:28:09 got this wonderful thing they're doing in Italy, which is great. It's not theatre, don't worry, it's completely different. And so the first operas are performed in Common Garden. So there's a way that actually a society which has prohibitions is one which is incredibly creative because it forces people instead of doing same old, same old to think about, okay, well, what other way can we do this? In a weird sort of way, it's a bit like some of the conversations people have been having about COVID and actually the sort of power of necessity, although it might come from something that's horrible in terms of making you do things differently, be creative, have better ideas, find different ways. You can't underestimate it. And I think this period really is a case in point.
Starting point is 00:28:45 Well, thank you very much. Thank you, Anna, for coming on. Great pleasure. I feel we have the history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thanks, folks, you've made it to the end of the episode. Congratulations, well done, you.
Starting point is 00:29:04 I hope you're not fast asleep. If you did fancy supporting everything we do here at History Hit, we'd love it if you would go and wherever you get these pods, give it a rating, five stars or its equivalent. A review would be great. Thank you very much indeed. That really does make a huge difference. It's one of the funny things the algorithm loves to take into account. So please don't ever do that.
Starting point is 00:29:23 It can seem like a small thing, but actually it's kind of a big deal for us. I really appreciate it. See you next time.

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