Dan Snow's History Hit - The Murder of Charles I

Episode Date: February 6, 2023

It's 1660 and General Edward Whalley and his son-in-law board a ship bound for the New World. They're on the run, wanted for the murder of King Charles I. His execution, the culmination of the English Civil War, sees control taken from the royalists by Oliver Cromwell and his parliamentarians for ten years. But, when the royalists return to power, an epic manhunt ensues for the fugitives hiding out in America.This is the plot of celebrated author Robert Harris' new historical novel Oblivions which takes a reader on a journey into the wilds of seventeenth-century New England. Robert joins Dan to talk about writing historical fiction, the history behind it and the unlikely way this story came to him.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!Download the History Hit app from the Google Play store.Download the History Hit app from the Apple Store.

Hey everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. I went to the house of Robert Harris, one of the best-selling authors in the UK, a man who writes astonishingly good historical fiction. From Fatherland, one of his earliest books, imagining what life would be like if Germany had won the Second World War, right through to his most recent novel, Act of Oblivion, which is his take, an embellishment, on a story that actually happened. Astonishing story, which describes one of the greatest manhunts in history. When Charles II regained the throne in 1660, there was a broad amnesty for most people who had taken part in the British Republic. But some people who weren't going to get let off

were those who'd signed the death warrant of his father, King Charles I. If you put your name on that piece of paper, you're going to die, and you're going to die horribly. Well, two Englishmen had signed that warrant, General Edward Whaley and his son-in-law, Colonel William Gough, but they managed to escape. They managed to evade justice. They took a ship for the New World, and then they went on the run through the colonies of New England. And Robert Harris tells this story brilliantly, and it's a chance to think about this fascinating period in both English and North American history. I went and sat in the study of the master of historical novels, Robert Harris, and we had a great chat about the greatest manhunt of the 17th century. Enjoy. T-minus 10. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Robert, we are here in your beautiful studies. Is this where it all happens? Yes, I've written 14 novels in this room. Every novel I've written except Fatherland I wrote here.

Fatherland paid for the roof, I should say. And it is absolutely wall to ceiling with wonderful, nearly all history books looking around, a lot of biography. You write historical fiction. Is the history where it all needs to start? Do you spend a bit of time getting immersed in the history? Yes. I mean, a book can come from anywhere. The latest one was, I think, a tweet. It may even have been your tweet saying, the greatest manhunt of the 17th century, which I clicked on and then followed and discovered what

the story was. It had never occurred to me to write a novel set in the 17th century, but that was just how it came about. They just sort of, you wander around and someone suggests something or your eyes caught by something, and then you research it and the characters suggest themselves and you think, that might work. I've always thought the 17th century was a very hard century. I was terrified about it at university.

I'm always nervous about it when I make programmes. Do you find, because you've now written such a massive span of history, are there periods where you're like, I am struggling to get my head into these people and what they believe and how they talk? Yes, I've always had that. I mean, I had that with Pompeii, my first venture into ancient Rome. Could I really write a novel set in the ancient world? It became a novel about plumbing, really, or about a load of guys, engineers, going to fix a problem on an aqueduct. And I realised that essentially that's what they would be.

They would be the engineers going out to fix a problem. The 19th century France I knew nothing about. And yet the moment I came across this character, Colonel Picard, I realised this was an interesting whistleblower really figure to follow in the French army and write about the Dreyfus affair and with this book the idea of creating this guy who's on the trail of the regicides trying to hunt them down if I can find a character and give him a job, describe the procedure. I mean, with the Dreyfus novel, I found out where Colonel Picard's flat was near La Toile, and the walk that he had each day to the

war ministry down on the other side of the river. And I thought, yeah, I take him from his flat, through the door, into the war ministry, get him to his desk. He's running the intelligence unit. What goes on each day? Then I can build up a character and then I can enter the world. So it began with a walk. Yeah. Or when I did a book about Enigma, The Codebreakers, just saying to them, what time did you start? Where did you sit?

What did it entail? How do you do it? My favourite feature in journalism really is that life in the day at the back of the Sunday Times magazine. If you get someone's daily routine, you can begin to build their character. I need to ask you, do you give yourself marks for historical accuracy? Or is it all about narratives? It doesn't matter if the history doesn't work out. Or is there a pleasure that you get sitting at this desk thinking,

I want to keep this as close as possible to what actually happened? Oh, I love to keep things as accurate as possible. I mean, in this book, there's a lot of days of the week, you know, Friday, Monday, Wednesday, they are the actual days of the week. There are a lot of moons, phases of the moons that these men are on the run. They are actually the phases of the moon in New England in the 1660s. I have a neurotic desire to get all those tiny little details right, because I feel that if I can convince myself, then I can convince the reader. So my rule is never to put anything in a novel that I know for certain didn't happen. But beyond that, then I'm free to speculate. I was very struck with your description of the death of Charles I. It must be fun in your novels taking on the big set pieces that people

would be more familiar with. Yes. I mean, this is the child in me, really. You know, I was there. What would it be like to witness that? And so, obviously, I read most of the eyewitness accounts of the execution and worked out precisely where it was and where you'd have to stand and you'd get up on the wall and look. Then you'd be really just 30 yards away 40 yards away from it and then it was a very obviously dramatic execution full of all sorts of tiny rather gruesome details for instance the block he had to lie on his stomach and they'd put staples on the scaffold here and here and behind in case he had to be tied down. Of course, he went to his death very bravely, and it was the beginning, actually, of the process

that led to the restoration of the Stuarts because he handled himself so well. And it was a cold day and he didn't want to shiver. It was a freezing cold day. His head was severed with a single blow, and this great groan is supposed to have gone down Whitehall from all the hundreds and thousands of people who had gathered to watch

and then the blood dripped through the planking of the scaffolding and people dipped their handkerchiefs in the martyr's blood his head was sewn back onto his body and exhibited in a coffin so that people could see that he was really dead. And Cromwell is supposed to have said, cruel necessity, as he looked down at the body, which I wouldn't be surprised if that wasn't actually true. The death of Charles I and then the arrival of Charles II, you writing about those events made

me feel that London was a very small place. The state was small. It was personal. You could be someone on the front line discharging royal business, and within 10 minutes you were in the Royal Council. You were sitting next to the Earl of Clarendon. There was an intimacy there. Yes. Even as a child, I was obsessed with making maps of imaginary countries or real countries. And so the first thing I do really is to get my bearings,

I mean, to really kind of work out where everything is. So with London, there's the city of London, this very populous, hundreds of thousands of people living cheek by jowl around, you know, what is now the city of London, St. Paul's and so on. And then the Strand, running along Strand, meaning beach, really running along the Thames with these great houses backing onto the river, which feature in the novel. And then you reach Whitehall, where the palace is, the King's Palace, then where Cromwell lived, where the Privy Council met,

and then beyond that, Westminster, where the Abbey is and where Parliament is. And if you get this in your head, this again helps add authenticity. Richard Naylor, my regicide hunter, walks from Essex House along the Strand to Whitehall Palace. One of the regicides that I follow particularly, Colonel Edward Whaley, lived in King Street next door to the Palace of Whitehall because he was Cromwell's cousin and effectively his head of securities, and they were very close. The geography of power fascinates me. And the intimacy, there's a scene in your book where he sort of interrupts Charles II and his

little brother James, boozing, hanging out with ladies. The idea that we'd ever get close enough, normal people like us would get close enough to the royal family these days is impossible, but they would have had a reputation in London for that. Exactly. They went to the theatre, they were seen around. Cromwell, certainly before he became protector, was a familiar figure in London. because he was not only a military genius, but he had this huge personality, which enabled him to fill the power vacuum once the sovereign had gone. And, you know, that sort of detail, as you say, that sort of proximity to power is fascinating. The book is called Acts of Oblivion, which is such a powerful idea, but it's also a very real one. What was the Act of Oblivion? but it's also a very real one. What was the Act of Oblivion?

The Act of Oblivion effectively was the deal struck between Parliament and the exiled Charles. They decided that they needed to invite him back or invite the Stuarts back to give them some stability. The Republic had failed. Once Cromwell was taken out of the picture, it was nothing to hold it together. But of course, these people had taken up arms against the king. So a deal was sort of struck between General Monk and Sir Edward Hyde, who became Clarendon, who was the king's advisor. And it was a piece of legislation that was laid before Parliament, even before Charles returned to England from exile on the continent. And essentially, it said, we draw a line under the past, forget it all. And it was incredibly effective to the extent that Cromwell's own sons,

Richard, his successor's protector, and Henry, who commanded in Ireland, they were both left unmolested for their whole lives. The only exception to this sweetness and light was anyone who'd had a hand in the death of the king. Everyone was let off apart from a small group. They went through all the papers and all the records. They seized them. So they got the transcripts of the trial. And eventually they tracked down the death warrant itself with 59 signatories on it, most of whom were still alive.

A dozen and a half had died. So those were wanted men. The judges, they had the record of how many days each judge had attended. There were, in theory, over 100 judges, and so those names could be added. So they ended up with a long list of wanted men. These were published, and you were required, if you were on that list, to hand yourself in for the king's mercy. And some poor fools did so.

Big mistake, because there wasn't really to be very much mercy. Effectively, you either got life imprisonment, and some of them taken out on the anniversary of the king's death every year, and made to stand in Tyburn with a rope around their necks and their faces smeared in blood. That was, if you were the lucky ones. The unlucky ones, the ones who said, yes, I did it, and I'm not sorry, they were hanged, drawn and quartered, which was an extremely unpleasant way to go. And about 15 of them were hanged, drawn and quartered. Isn't it interesting that you can raise arms against

the king, you can defeat him in battle, you can be at the battle and they hold senior positions, but it's the judicial process they went after. Yes, it was this horrendous, inconceivable crime of regicide. I also think the regicides probably became a bit of a scapegoat or a safety valve that, okay, we can't go after everybody, but by God, we will go after this group. And they were pitilessly hunted down. And that gives me my novel because this quest didn't end in 1660. It was still going on in the 1670s. Rewards on people's heads, informers paid, spies watching. There was no peace. They would go on until you died. So that's interesting. You mentioned it's a sort of pressure release mechanism. Did you get the impression during your research that the Isles were traumatized by this experience?

We now think more people died per capita than during the First World War. I mean, was there enmity, hatred? Were there plenty of candidates to be the informants and to be hunting these people down? Yes, as you say, it was a slaughter and pitted family against family, communities were split. It was enormously bloody and it was incredible. I mean, for 11 years, England was a republic in the 17th century. The House of Lords abolished, the bishops abolished. Cromwell said, we will cut off the king's head with the crown upon it. They weren't going to just get out rid of Charles I. They were going to get rid of the whole institution. This is sensational. So yes, the feelings to say that they ran high would be putting it mildly. The

Act of Oblivion was incredibly successful in drawing a line under this. And what followed, really, was the great years of British imperial expansion, if you want to describe them in those terms, and of course, commercial dominance. So it did its job. In fact, it did its job so well that there's still, I detect, a bit of a reluctance to face up to this great upheaval in our history, as if buried down in our folk memory as a desire to put it behind us. We're still exercising oblivion. We're still oblivious. You bring in North America, which is hugely important. They were obviously English colonies. And you draw in some of the really important moments of English colonialism, whether it's the capture of New York, the failure to establish the colonial boundaries as they're being drawn up. Was that quite an

exciting part of your research? It was. My starting point was, why don't I invent a manhunter on the trail of these regicides? There must have been someone like that, but we don't know who it is. So I thought that that would be interesting. And then the other thing was, because the two of the most interesting regicides were this father-in-law and son-in-law, Colonel Whaley and Colonel Goff, who fled to New England and were on the run for year after year after year, hiding in attics and cellars and living rough in the open. And I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to follow them across the landscape of New England as it was opening up. I mean, they had to walk hundreds of miles, follow Indian paths, encounter Native American settlements and deal with these extreme Puritans,

many of whom did not recognize the authority of the king and were willing to hide them. the king and were willing to hide them. But they then became split between the more shrewd, pragmatic people in Massachusetts, where they started, then Connecticut, and then in New Haven, they followed Mosaic law and they were the real ultras. The Sabbath began on a Saturday at sundown and went on till dawn on the Monday, and you weren't allowed to cook or travel. And into this world, they were pitched. So it did give me the opportunity to write about the DNA of modern America in a way, which you can still see today, the importance of the religious right and the importance of the Bible in American politics. Prohibition, the readiness with which you can buy a gun in your teenage years, but you can't buy a beer is real puritan frontier hangover i think

you're listening to dan snow's history we're talking about a 17th century manhunt more coming up i'm matt lewis and i'm dr alan or 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.

Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. I was very pleased when you worked in the capture of New Amsterdam as well, the Dutch colony by the Duke of York, thus becoming New York.

Yes. And that's an extraordinary moment in English, well, in world history. The expedition for Manowar with 400 soldiers thereabouts came over from England to take New Amsterdam in 1664. But at the same time, those 400 soldiers were then redeployed after the capture of New Amsterdam to hunt for Whaley and Gough. They fanned out across New Haven and across the country around there. And they came very close, I think, to capturing them because they were hiding out on the coast near Long Island Sound. So they were very close. In my novel, they see the flotilla of warships going by to take New Amsterdam. So it's wonderful to put that in. Harvard College existed in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1660 and looks down

over the village where they're hiding. And yet at the same time, Indian war canoes are going up and down the Charles River. I mean, this is really, really strange, extraordinary time. You speculate that one of the colonels looked back on his career, looked back at the Republic and became uncertain whether it had all been worth it, the creep towards Cromwell as a monarchical figure. Is that something your research told you that many of those people did feel? Well, I think there was two things. First of all, Colonel Whaley, we know, was a political moderate.

He opposed the punitive expedition to Ireland, spoke out against it at the Army Council. He was known as a fancy dresser. He liked horse racing. He was very close to Cromwell. He also had custody of the King for about eight months during the war. And the King actually escaped from Hampton Court on his watch. And he also got quite close to Charles I. So I thought, this is an extraordinary eyewitness to history.

And these guys did write memoirs. General Ludlow wrote a memoir. Clarendon, of course, famously wrote a memoir. Lucy Hutchinson wrote the memoirs of her husband. And my guy, Whaley, he's got a lot of time on his hands. You know, bear in mind that these men succeeded in the New Model Army, this phenomenal military organization, because they believed they had God on their side. Cromwell always ascribed every victory to God. I thought that after a while, Charles II has come to the throne and the years drag by and it's clear they're not going home. The republic is over. It's failed. A thinking man like Whaley would say, perhaps God wasn't on our side then because he sure as hell isn't on our side now. And that gave me a perspective. And he addresses

this memoir to his daughter and it enables me to bring in figures like Cromwell and Charles I. So I think that it's not implausible that he could have had that crisis of conscience. What I love about the Republic is the idea that in any period, today included, there are lying all around us, amongst us, in the shops, in the cinema next to us, there are military geniuses, there are dictators. And it's like poppy seeds that are disturbed by the First World War and then bloom in disturbed earth. And they'll probably go to their grave, never being a brilliant cavalry commander or a dictator. And yet this generation of people emerged from virtually nowhere to wield great power. Yes, it's amazing. I mean, as far as we know, Cromwell had no military

experience. And I can't see that Whaley, his cousin, did either. Whaley had been a draper, a failed farmer and a merchant. And then 1642 comes along and the Civil War begins and Cromwell famously raises his regiment, five troops of cavalry of 100 men each. One of them he gives command to his cousin, Cambridge contemporary, Ned Whaley, and who's even then in his 40s, early 40s. And they forged this astonishing instrument. And one of the most moving lines I came across was some old historian. Many years, centuries later, the bones of Whaley, he was a tall man, were discovered buried next to a cellar in the little town of Hadley in Connecticut.

It was an unmarked grave. And someone said, here lay the bones of Colonel Edward Whaley, who had pierced Prince Rupert's line at Marston Moor, which they did. I mean, they took on the professional soldiers of the king and they beat them. You talk about two regicides who escaped justice for over a decade. Of the regicides, how many did make it or how many were hunted down? Well, yes, the numbers are complicated. As I say, 15 were hanged, drawn and quartered or executed.

I think about another 25 or so were given life imprisonment. There were about 12 or more on the run. There were about 12 or more on the run. Some of those who escaped abroad died, like Valentine Walton Cromwell's brother-in-law. He ended up working as a gardener in poverty in Flanders and died. Some fled to Switzerland. Lud of legal stage manager of the trial and they really wanted to get him they sent assassination squads actually a group of renegade royalist officers ambushed him as he was going into church i put this in the novel i couldn't resist it he was going into church and they came up behind him with what was called a musketoon which he looked like a trumpet you know musket with a great flared barrel, and shot him in the back. And then they scarpered him, they could escape, and left him lying on the steps of the church, dead. So, assassination squads, posses, treachery, intrigue.

A particularly unpleasant character I came across in the novel is Sir George Downing, who had been a Puritan. He had been educated at Harvard in the seminary for Puritans. At the start of the Civil War, he'd come over to England. He'd been taken up by Colonel John Oakey, who made him chaplain of his regiment. He came to Cromwell's attention. Eventually, he made his way to become ambassador to the Hague. When he saw that the Republic was failing, he started passing information to the exiled king, who then made him ambassador to the Hague. His old friends weren't aware that he'd completely changed sides, and he offered them safe conduct to come and meet their wives in Delft, and they set off. And of course, it was a trap, and he delivered three of them to a terrible fate

of hanging, drawing, and quartering, one of them being Colonel John Oakey, who had treated him as if he was his son. It seems appropriate that we should now chiefly remember Downing for giving the name to the street where the prime minister lives. Anyway, he was a particularly obnoxious fellow. Having done all this research, and I always ask scholars of this period, Charles II comes in, acts of oblivion. The idea is very much to emphasise continuity.

Let's pretend it never happened. The monarchy is intact, divine rights even. But actually, realistically, did the memories of the 1640s and 50s linger a long time? Did it help create the kind of constitutional monarchy that would then go on and develop through the next? Oh, yes. Yes, definitely. I mean, of course, Charles did try to dispense with Parliament and rule without it just as his father

had done but there's no doubt that if your father's head has been cut off and you've had to escape from the Battle of Worcester you know that divine right is all very well in theory but in practice you're in trouble. So yes, the monarchy's wings were effectively clipped. And of course, then when James took over, James II, then we get the final act of settlement so that we begin to move into the kind of constitutional monarchy we have now. You know, what is interesting, you may even say tragic, is that we could maybe have had all this in 1649, that if it was impossible to do a deal with Charles I, as I think probably it was, they could have cut off Charles I's head and done a deal with one of

his sons or cousin, or they could have brought someone to the throne and given them a kind of constitutional settlement we have now, the king and parliament together. They didn't do that. Cromwell didn't want that. They wanted now the full-on revolution. The radical wing of the army wouldn't stand for a monarch. They wanted no bishops, no lords, a direct relationship between a man and his god, as it were. And this is a tremendously radical idea. I mean, 150 years before the French cut off the head of their king, 250 years before the Russians got rid of the Tsar, the English had this astonishing revolution. I mean, it is amazing. Do you think Cromwell behaves in a more monarchical way because he can't find any

other settlement? Or do you think he's just ambitious and wants to be a king? Well, the interesting thing about Cromwell is that nobody really knows. And maybe he didn't know himself where the idea that he was merely God's instrument coincided with personal ambition. But I mean, to go from really not very successful farmer and kind of backbench MP to being dictator of England and conqueror of Ireland and Scotland is a pretty extraordinary thing if he had absolutely no ambition. And he did become very grand. He was addressed as your highness. He traveled around with a throne and with a large retinue, a bodyguard of at least 32 men wherever he went.

And he would, I'm sure, have taken the crown, which some elements of the army wanted to offer him. But in the end, he didn't do it because there was a sufficiently sizable, dangerous faction of the army who would not have put up with it, who said, we didn't cut off that of one king in order to crown Oliver Cromwell the king in his place. So this is another fascinating thing that happens during that period, the debate as to whether he should become King Oliver. I'm always amazed, you talk about the army refusing to accept Cromwell's king, and yet, almost without bloodshed, Charles II does come back very soon after Cromwell's death. So you'd think they're all the ingredients, really, for the outbreak of another civil war, and yet,

for some reason, it doesn't happen. Yes, and this must have taken the regicides who were on the run by surprise. I think that they thought they'd fled to America and after a few months they'd be able to go back because the whole thing would have been a war again. But it wasn't. Lambert tried to raise the army against Parliament's idea of negotiating with the king. He didn't get very far. Whaley and Gough were both with him when he was captured and they had to then flee the country. It never got anywhere. There was a fifth monarchist uprising at the beginning of 1661, but it amounted to very little. And I think

that Charles and his ministers were astonished by how quiescent the population was. I think there must just have been great war exhaustion. And, you know, the army was just broken up and dispersed to the sticks. It lacked really the leadership to pull it together. And so, astonishingly, the act of oblivion was a success. And we did move into a period of stability and prosperity, really. What I thought was great about your book was how you reminded us all that the revolution and republicanism was much bigger than just being about England. It stretches across the Atlantic into North America. Yes, I think one of the things I took

away from writing the book most strongly was the sense to which the Puritan revolution failed in England. The king returned, the republic was ended. But these seeds, as it were, blew across the Atlantic and sprouted in this other land. And that was where eventually the king was removed, the republic was established. And in those small towns, many of which, almost all of which in New England are named after English settlements, you really feel that this is where Cromwellian England actually had in the end its victory. And that is the final flowering and success of the regime. And that is where in the values of modern America to a degree today,

you can see the success of the Puritan revolution. You've blown my mind. So rather than being a historic dead end, which we sometimes think of English Republican as a being, in fact, we sometimes think of English Republican as a being. In fact, the future belonged to Cromwell. Via America, they won. Yes, I think this idea of God and the gun, that is pure new model army, and that is in the DNA of America. I have some stories, immersion, you've done Holocaust of Fatherland, appalling Roman civil wars, 17th century, Second World War, of course. Are some periods more depressing? Do you find yourself affected more by them? Or are you able to maintain detachment? I maintain detachment. There's always a kind of thumping heartbeat of life in any of these periods, be it France in the 1890s, or even London in 1944-45, or the Roman Republic, or Pompeii on the eve of

its destruction. And in the 17th century, there is a terrific kind of vibrancy, a sense of possibilities. I mean, these men in New England, however one may recoil from their religious principles, they were astonishingly serious, brave figures who really did think that they were creating God's world on earth and the hardships they endured and so on. It is fascinating to see what human beings are capable of. I think that's what I always feel. So I don't find periods particularly depressing.

I find characters endlessly fascinating. Any periods that you want to write about? Or again, it's about a story. It's not a period that draws you in. For me, it's about a character, an event or a world, a series of things which you know are going to happen that might be interesting. I always think of it in the kind of 3D,

like the model of the double helix. I can put that there and that there and I start to see it. And that will really work in any period because to a degree, I don't believe that human beings have changed much. Of course, the religion is different and the technology has made everything completely different and communication and so on. But fundamentally, people live and die. They fall in love, they fight, they are ambitious, they are duped, they scheme. One can recognize, be it in Renaissance Italy, Cicero's Rome, the court of Charles II, you know, you can see the similar things happening.

Thank you very much, Robert, for coming on the podcast. I would just say, everyone out there, the knowledge that you might tweet and Robert Harris might see it and write his next book on that little fragment of information that you share, it's very inspiring. Get tweeting, everybody. Keep sharing.

Yes, but just don't come and ask me for any royalties. you