In Our Time - The Interregnum

Episode Date: May 27, 2021

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the period between the execution of Charles I in 1649 and the unexpected restoration of his son Charles II in 1660, known as The Interregnum. It was marked in England by an elusive pursuit of stability, with serious consequences in Scotland and notorious ones in Ireland. When Parliament executed Charles it had also killed Scotland and Ireland’s king, without their consent; Scotland immediately declared Charles II king of Britain, and Ireland too favoured Charles. In the interests of political and financial security, Parliament's forces, led by Oliver Cromwell, soon invaded Ireland and then turned to defeating Scotland. However, the improvised power structures in England did not last and Oliver Cromwell's death in 1658 was followed by the threat of anarchy. In England, Charles II had some success in overturning the changes of the 1650s but there were lasting consequences for Scotland and the notorious changes in Ireland were entrenched.The Dutch image of Oliver Cromwell, above, was published by Joost Hartgers c1649With Clare Jackson Senior Tutor at Trinity Hall, University of CambridgeMicheál Ó Siochrú Professor in Modern History at Trinity College DublinAndLaura Stewart Professor in Early Modern History at the University of YorkProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programmes if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programmes. Hello, in 1649, England's Parliament executed Charles I, as it couldn't rule with the monarch, and spent the next decade learning it couldn't rule without one.

That decade's known as the Interregnum. When Charles II was restored, he aimed to help England reset and forget the 1650s. But in Scotland, and notoriously in Ireland, the legacy of conquest was indelible. With me to discuss the interregnum our Loris Stewart, Professor in Early Modern History at the University of York, Mihalo Shokru, Professor of Modern History at Trinity College Dublin, and Claire Jackson, Senior Tutor at Trinity Hall University of Cambridge. Claire Jackson, what plan, if any, did Parliament have

but who would rule after the execution of Charles I think that's a very good question. I think it's a good question that a lot of contemporaries would have been asking. It's quite hard to underestimate just how radical events were. I mean, never before had a divinely ordained monarch been put on trial in such a public way before a fee-paying public with it all being reported. The answer was Parliament after the regicide Parliament plays legislative catch-up on the 6th of February, a week after Charles's execution, the House of Lords is abolished, the next day the monarchy is abolished, so that Trinity that had governed England

for centuries of King, Lords and Commons is smashed. But probably the mistake is to think that there is a plan. I think for contemporaries, it would have seemed much more uncertain. The Spanish ambassador three days after the regicide writes back to Madrid, saying, we are here in utter chaos, living without religion. king or law subject only to the power of the sword. But it's probably important to think as well what we mean by Parliament at this stage. There had been a coup d'etat by the new model army in December that's known as Pride's Purge, in which the army had become so frustrated with Parliament's determination

to keep negotiating with Charles I at the end of the Civil Wars that troops had surrounded Parliament and all the moderate members of Parliament had either been arrested or precluded from entering. So it was really only the more radical MPs who were going to agree with Parliament that Charles himself was not only the reason that the wars had broken out in the first place, but also the reason that no peace had been achieved.

It's quite a radical way of getting a House of Commons majority. But when we talk about Parliament, we're still only talking about a rump parliament and that in itself brought notions of illegitimacy. And the clearance was done by Colonel Pride, and that brings us to the army. the Parliament that was left after he'd taken away those people who didn't agree with him. How linked was it to the military?

It was linked. The New Model Army was Parliament's Army, and it had repeatedly and very decisively won the civil wars for Parliament. But there were really almost beginning to be two different sets of power bases. The New Model Army was the first professional standing army that had been created in 1645. And it had a very broad spectrum. of opinion, including quite a lot of radical political and religious opinion within its ranks. Parliament, by contrast, was the same Parliament before Pride's Purge, the same Parliament that

had been elected in the 1640s, and didn't really seem to have any other script, but to keep negotiating with Charles. And those two power bases began to diverge. And the New Model Army, particularly, was not only in pay arrears, but also fearing that not only could Charles not be trusted, and although peace proposals had been serially imagined and negotiated and there have been series after series, it hadn't ended the bloodshed. So those two power bases have become really quite separate. The one person who can straddle them increasingly emerges as Oliver Cromwell. He's not the army's commander in chief, that's Lord General Fairfax,

but Fairfax had opposed the regicide and later opposed the idea of even fighting against Protestant Scots. whereas Cromwell, after Pride's Purge, is very visible at Westminster. He signs Charles's death warrant. And he seems increasingly to be the one person that can straddle those two camps, if you like. Thank you. Michael, Shockro. Oliver Cromwell was dominant in Parliament and England. And one of his first acts was to lead an invasion of Ireland.

Why did he do that? Well, there's multiple reasons why the English decide to turn their attention to Ireland very shortly. after the regicide. And I suppose one of the old edges of politics is that if you're unpopular at home, it's great to start a war abroad. And that's very much what the new regime decides to do. And what better enemy than the hated Catholic Irish. But the English at this stage believed that they'd every right to be in Ireland. It was one of their oldest colonies. And they had lost control of much of the country with the outbreak of a rebellion in 1641, during which there had been massacre of thousands of English and Scottish Protestant settlers.

So the English really wanted to reassert their control in Ireland and at the same time to avenge these massacres, which have been widely reported in London and England during the early stages of the 1640s. So that was the very clear immediate agenda. But there was a number of other reasons. Like in Scotland, they didn't really accept the regicides in Ireland, and there were those who still adhered to the king

and they were afraid in England that there would be a royalist resurgence in Ireland, which could then be brought into England. And also more directly as well, there was a financial imperative here because the English Parliament had raised large sums of money through merchant adventurers, primarily in London, to finance the English Civil War.

And this money had been raised primarily using the hope of confiscated Catholic estates in Ireland as security for those loans. So now was payback time and the English needed to conquer Ireland and to seize this land in order to pay back those loans. And finally, Claire has mentioned there that the army pay was in arrears and you had tens of thousands of soldiers whose pay was in arrears. And again, Irish land would now be used to help pay back these soldiers. So there was very clear immediate and long-term political. and military reasons as well as financial reasons for the English intervention in Ireland in 1649.

The battles were infamous in Ireland and we'll hear later what followed. But can you tell us briefly about Wexford and Droidur? Well, I think the storming of Drogheda, which is about 30 miles north of Dublin, and then Wexford a month later, which is to the south of the capital, where the two most notorious military encounters

of the first few months of the Cromwellian invasion of Ireland. And in both cases, the storming were successful. The garrisons of about 3,000 in Drahad and 2000 in Wexford were completely annihilated. But what really caused such outrage at the time, both in Ireland, and indeed more widely, where it was very widely reported in Europe as well, was the killing of civilians. And it seemed as if that this was a war of extermination and that Cromwell had arrived. and that he saw all of the Catholic Irish, regardless of whether they were involved

in the initial rebellion back in 1641, as guilty of these crimes, and that they would all pay for these crimes. Alternatively, it's been argued, and I think with some justification, that Cromwell probably hoped that the war in Ireland could be brought to a rapid conclusion by striking hard and quickly.

And it's very much the same sort of tactics that were adopted, you could say, by the Americans when it came to Japan in 1945, with the dropping of the atomic bombs with knowing that this was going to cause a serious loss of life, but hoping in the process that it would destroy the morale of the enemy

and therefore bring the war to a rapid conclusion allowing Cromwell to return back to England. Thank you very much. Laura Stewart, in 1650, England was controlled by Parliament and was at war in Ireland. Who was uncontrolled in Scotland? So, Michels already explained to us

that the Kingdom of Ireland is a dependency of the English crown. It's very different when we look at the relationship with Scotland. Scotland is a separate kingdom at this time, but it's been united with England in what we call the Regal Union, created in 1603 by Charles I father, James Sixth of Scotland, who exceeds to the Crown of England. By 1638, 39, Scotland is governed by a group of people called the Covenanters, and they're so-called the Covenanters after the 1638 National Covenant. And the point of this document is that implies that kings at their coronation enter into contract with the people whose obedience rests on the king acting as the defender of the true Protestant religion. The new model army commanded by Oliver Cromwell comes to Scotland in 1648. And he installs a group of politicians that Cromwell thinks he's going to be able to deal with as he tries to negotiate a peace settlement in England.

And these Scottish politicians, and these Scottish politicians, yeah. Yes. Now in 1649, the people that Cromwell has helped to install in Scotland, they might have countenance the trial if the outcome had been the preservation of the king's life, perhaps is title. But what they cannot countenance is regicide. It's impossible for them to accept that. And so what they do is not only do they protest against the execution of the king, but they declare for the king's son, Prince Charles, within days of Charles's execution. was that a complicated process and how was it received? It's fair to say I think that the declaration of Prince Charles is not well received in England. That act puts Scotland and England potentially on a collision course with one another. The Scots declare Charles II King of Britain and that word is important and it's important

because the English regicides have very deliberately executed a king of England. It's just unfortunate he happens to be wearing the Crowns of Ireland in Scotland as well. What that does is effectively break the legal union between Scotland and England. There are a number of things the Scottish Covenanthus can do here. The thing they could have done is declare Charles II king of Scots only. But Charles II would never have accepted such a demotion. He considers himself king of Britain. Had the Scottish government not declared Charles II according to his own title, then there would have been a civil war in Scotland as royalists who wanted to support, Charles II and his regaining of his thrones would have tried to topple covenanted government.

So by declaring Charles II King of Britain, despite the fact it's putting them on a collision course with the English Republic, it's the only pragmatic thing to do. However, the Scots don't simply hand over active support Charles II. They have some conditions. He must sign then 1638 covenant and a second document, the 1643 solemn legal covenant, which had been agreed between the Scottish and the English parliaments at the height of the English Civil War. That's the treaty that have brought the Scots into the war in England against Charles I. Charles II, not surprisingly, rejects this offer,

but with the conquest of Ireland, he's been left with little alternative. Against the advice of his mother, Queen Henrietta Maria, who's then in France, he grudgingly signs these documents and he's sitting on board a ship in the Murray Firth in the north of Scotland and he finally puts his signature to it and he's permitted to step onto Scottish soil. What's striking here is that Charles arrives in Scotland

in June 1650, he's not crowned in a thread-based ceremony at the ancient capital of Schoon until January 1651 and he spends the intervening period a virtual prisoner forced to sit through these interminable sermons by Scottish clerics haranguing him for the actions of his father and reminding him of his duties

and obligations of the Covenanters. And just to finish off, this is an experience so humiliating for Charles that in later years he will tell people, I'd rather be hanged in return to Scotland. Claire Jackson, what was Cromwell's status in the early 1650s in relation to Parliament in London? He's been an MP for a long time since the late 1620s.

By the early 1650s, as one historian's put it, he's prominent in Parliament, but not dominant. But it is important to remember, as Lauren Mihal have just been outlining, he's not there for most of the early period after the regicide. He assumes command for the new... He signed for the regicide. He was the third signature on the list, yes.

He signed for it, but he's not physically in Parliament very much after the regicide or through 1649 through 1650 because he's in either Ireland or Scotland. But once he comes back to London in roundabouts, September 1651, he then devotes himself to national politics thereafter. Is it fruitful to talk about his relation to God? Very fruitful. It's a very close relationship. Cromwell, like many people in the 17th century, sees the world through the prism of providence. Everything that happens is divinely ordained, and God's plan for England, Cromwell, is convinced, is not only a very special one,

but will reveal itself in various actions. And all of the stunning military successes that Cromwell has enjoyed, he attributes very directly to Providence. So, for example, when he'd been fighting royalist forces at Preston in 1648, he'd been massively outnumbered and yet scored a stunning victory. That was entirely God's doing. And this reliance on Providence is very positive when it's explaining positive actions. It can also, of course, work in the other way.

And when Cromwell later suffers military defeats overseas in the later 1650s, Providence doesn't favour England's enterprises, then that is equally as catastrophic. The providential nature of all this in Ireland is also very clear as well. I mean, following the notorious massacre at Drogheda, Cromwell himself, says this is a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches who have imbrewed their hands in so much innocent blood, referring back to the 1641 killings.

So right throughout that and every action he takes, he constantly, as one historian has put it, he battles with his conscience, but he always seems to win. And, you know, he sees very clearly that in Ireland he is doing God's work and God's will, and that is evident from his writings throughout his brief time in Ireland. Crumwell said that in Ireland he wanted, quote, a clean slate.

What did he mean by that and how did it go about it? Well, I think what they decided that in a way, they want to build a new Ireland and to simply to sweep away what they see as the remnants of the old Catholic Irish society and to replace it with a new English Protestant version. Which they did very dramatically and brutally, didn't they? Absolutely. I think it was in two stages. The first was the military conquest itself, which is very brutal. And we have, by the English accounts themselves, a sort of population loss of somewhere in the region of 30 to 40%. So on the military side alone, it's very brutal.

This is very much the actions of the English state of which Cromwell obviously is one of the chief agents, but only one of a number. But then in the wake of the military conquest comes the second stage of this planning, which is, of course, the land settlement, which involves clearing out. the Catholic landowners and their dependents. They're corralled across the River Shannon in the western most province of Connacht. Cromwell, of course, is famously, as supposed to have said to Hell or to Connacht, which, of course, he didn't say,

but it's kind of stuck there as a phrase, kind of encapsulating what's going on at the time. And then large numbers of people, soldiers were tens of thousands of them were shipped across to the continent to fight in the armies of France and Spain. and similarly tens of thousands of displaced peoples, men, women and children were transported across the Atlantic to colonies in the Americas and in the Caribbean.

So really the scale of the upheaval here is quite extraordinary and unprecedented. And the idea being then to bring in new Protestant landowners and settlers that would refashion the country entirely this clean slate that Cromwell is talking about. and to create, if you like, in the image of England a new society, one dominated by the English Protestant interest. And to some degree, they were successful in that. Laura Stewart, Cromwell then took on Scottish forces, mentioned Dunbar in 1650. Why does that battle stand out, the Battle of Dunbar? Dunbar is a really, really important battle. Every battle is important to Cromwell, but potentially in his own eyes,

it is his greatest victory because it's a complete disaster for the Scots. So the Battle of Dunbar comes about in the autumn of 1650. Cromwell has marched his troops properly provisioned up to the Scottish border, but he's up against a pretty formidable talented commander in David Leslie, the commander of the Scottish forces. Leslie does tactically the smart thing. What you don't want to do is fight the new mortal army. Even if you win, you're going to lose all.

lot of men. So Leslie constructs a set of defensive lines at Edinburgh. He burns everything to the south so that Cromwell's army has no shelter and no food and he sits behind those lines until the inevitable happens. English soldiers start sickening and starving

pretty quickly. So Cromwell needs to entice Leslie out from behind these defensive lines and he's able to do that partly because Leslie is under so much pressure from Scottish clerics to show God, hand by defeating Cromwell in battle. And as a result of that, Leslie makes a mistake and Cromwell is

able to take advantage of it. The Scottish army is more or less destroyed. But as said, it's not the end of the war yet. Charles II then came into England with a Scottish army and there was the Battle of Worcester. It's more of a footnote now, but could you briskly tell us what it wasn't, why it failed? What Cromwell now needs to do is smash the rest of the Scottish army. Again, he finds himself in the position whereby he has to try and get Leslie out from behind defensive lines. Again, Cromwell is able to do that because Leslie is now under so much pressure from Charles II and his supporters to make a dash for England. And that's exactly what happens. Cromwell knows it's going to happen. Led by Charles II, a Scottish army comes down, the west side of England.

Charles and second is hoping that the English people will rise when they see their king at the head of an army. But of course, the problem is it's a Scottish army, our predominantly Scottish army. And this is the third time that the north of England has seen an army crossing onto its soil. So the largely Scottish army is shadowed to Worcester about 125 miles northwest of London. And when it gets there, it's corralled into the town of Worcester, by Cromwell and by His Second of Command, John Lambert, and it's a pretty nasty battle. They're fighting street by street. Eventually, Charles II, who's been fighting bravely, has to flee for his life.

And this is the bit that many listeners probably know about. It's Charles wandering in disguise around England for six weeks, hiding in unlikely places, including the famous oak tree, until he's able to take ship and join his mother in France. And later in life, Charles II will never tire of telling the to, the stories of his escape from the Battle of Worcester. Thank you. Claire, it's said that Cromwell, in this interregnum, encouraged some forms of toleration, including religious toleration.

Is that true? And where would it look for it elsewhere? Yes, it's interesting in this discussion. We're having sort of, we can see two sides, a sort of Janus-faced approach to Cromwell's legacy. I mean, Mihal's been describing in, you know, really quite searing detail. Cromwell's actions in Ireland and the sort of sectarian atrocities and the ways in which that has seared itself into a sort of national consciousness, among other religious groups, if one thinks about their experiences in England in the 1650s, it looks on the face of it more positive. We've talked about Cromwell's own quite close relationship with God. I mean, it was an intensely sort of personal and spiritual one.

And that also extended into Cromwell's views on religion more generally, a sort of instinctive distrust for all. organized forms of religion. I mean, for Cromwell, the route to godliness was sort of conscience. It wasn't ceremonial forms or particular types of liturgy or ecclesiastical structure. Yeah, but he was tolerant of Quakers, as I understand it, and Baptists, not as we've heard of Roman Catholics. The Jews were allowed to come back into England. There's a bit of a strand of toleration there. There's certainly a strand of toleration. And as Mihal said, not all of this is Cromwell. This is part of a much stronger drive away from religious persecution. In September 1650, the Rump Parliament rejects the principle of religious uniformity in England.

It passes legislation that no longer makes attendance at the established Church of England on Sunday's compulsory. This is the first time since 1559 that the Church of England doesn't have a monopoly on public worship. And it's still expected that people will go to some form of Christian worship and that magistrates will prosecute heresy. but it's no longer the case that non-conformists will be persecuted. There seems to be an increase in press freedom at this time, many, many pamphlets and so on, and yet at the same time the theatres are closing down, so it's a closed down. So it's a bit of a bumpy ride there. It's a mixed picture, but I mean, if you're looking from the perspective of the 18th and 19th century,

all of the non-conformist congregations like Baptists, Congregationalists, independents, they would look back at the 1650s as the time when they moved from being an underground clandestine sect into a settled community that could sow seeds that would survive the restoration and the return to religious uniformity

and that would later sort of flourish. There is, as you say, much less censorship. It's almost as though there's a sort of marketplace of religious ideas and people could try lots of sort of things. Along with that went a much more, what we would sort of loosely term, sort of puritanical move away from things like

theatres and sort of forms of behaviour and alehouses. But in terms of religious belief, there is more diversity of practice. Thank you. Mihal. Let's go back to Ireland. They were most feeling, as you explained so graphically, the impact of Cromwell's rule. How deeply did it dig then? Well, I mean, I think that's really the Cromwellian settlement, as we now call it, post-war, is transformative and it really refashions and reshapes Ireland in very fundamental

ways, not only in terms of land-owning classes, but in terms of how people live their daily lives, that agricultural practices are changed, Catholics are driven out of all urban areas. The towns, for the most part, become entirely Protestant. And when we're talking about, as Claire has done, the sort of struggle that they have in terms of religion, where there's this hostility from Cromwell and others to organized religious practice.

And yet we have this liberty of conscience. And Cromwell himself said in Ireland that he would meddle not with any man's conscience. And people could believe and be Catholic and believe that, but there would not be any right to celebrate mass or to practice their religion openly in any way. Now, we have religious minorities right across Europe at this time. But Ireland is unique in the sense that the majority population, and over 80% of the population are Catholic are prohibited in this way from practicing their own religion.

And as I said, this is quite a unique situation. So Ireland and the experience of Ireland in the 1650s is demonstratively different to both England and Scotland. Could I turn to you now, Laura? How would you compare Cromwell in Ireland with Cromwell in Scotland? Mihal has just used the word transformative. That's not the word. you would use to describe the occupation of Scotland by the English New Model Army.

The first difference with Ireland is there's comparatively little killing in Scotland. If Cromwell really wanted to make a legacy for himself in Scotland, he could have killed lots of people. He doesn't do that. And that's because Lowland Scots, at least, share with England broad affinities and language, religion, and socio-political structures. And that does affect the attitude of the invaders. It's possible that less than a few thousand people die in battle against Cromwell, there is only one major town that's sacked. That's Dundee, and reports suggest maybe a few hundred dead. And there's no way that Dundee resonates in the popular imagination

in the way that Drogadone-Wexford do. The second difference with Ireland is that Scotland is not to be treated as a conquered province. The English can't or perceive that they can't just treat Scotland as they please. And this is an absolutely remarkable thing. England's military leaders propose the incorporation of Scotland into the English Commonwealth with their own consent.

And it's probable again that we see here Cromwell's personal influence at work. He contends, it's reported, that England and Scotland should become one nation, by which he means, of course, not Britain, but a greater England. And it's difficult to know what Cromwell thinks on this in any detail, but it's probable that he believes that the Scots will benefit from having the lo, liberties of the English extended to them. So the English offer the Scots what's called the tender of incorporation, and they invite Scottish commissioners from shires and boroughs to agree to it. And what's remarkable here, given that Scotland has just been conquered, is that there are

Scots who feel able to say no. It doesn't make any difference, but the fact they do is really interesting. The Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Government is abolished, but Scotland is instead offered 30 representatives to sit in the Westminster Parliament. And although there's trouble getting people to fill those seats in 1654, in 1657, they do manage to fill them all. And half of those people are actually Scots, they're English representatives for Scotland as well. I think what's going on here is a mixture of pragmatism and idealism. If you can get the Scots to govern themselves, it's going to cost a lot less than a military establishment. But there's also the idea here that once the Scottish people see the benefits

of being ruled according to English customs and laws, they will throw off the shackles imposed on them by Scotland's powerful landowners and they'll become a law-abiding, peaceful people who are committed importantly to their own economic betterment. Claire, Claire Jackson, were there positive constitutional achievements in the Interregnum and some indications that they would become a stable and lasting government. It's not a decade known for its stability. There's a bewildering array. I mean, it's an erratic decade.

I think if one thinks just almost where we started, this begins with a regicide of unimaginable. I mean, this was not what people had fought for during the civil wars. The killing of the king. Yes, the killing of the king was not what was envisaged. by the majority, I mean, the vast majority of people, even who'd taken up arms against that king, what most people were assuming would be, would there would be some negotiation with the king, some return to what is often referred to as an ancient constitution and that some of

Charles I's more extreme actions could be curtailed. That doesn't happen. A much more radical solution is found as the outcome of the trial. And from then on, that's a very unstable basis, really on which then to build a new Republican state. The Commonwealth that is established in 1649 lasts really till 1653 with the Rump Parliament, but

eventually the MPs don't seem to be proceeding with the pace of change that the army wants. And I think that is something about revolutionary regimes. They respond to a different kinetic. They can't derive their legitimacy from having been in place for decades and they have an onus on them to

sort of achieve that Cromwell uses the army to dissolve the Rump Parliament. There's a nominated assembly for several months. And then one begins to see with the installation of Cromwell as Lord Protector at the end of 1653 a more conservative element introduced. The Lord Protectorate becomes almost quasi-monarchical. Why didn't he accept the persuasions of people that he should become king? Well, that's one of the elements of stability that perhaps people are looking for.

Certainly among foreign ambassadors, there is an expectation that the ways in which the English state seems to be heading is towards known forms of government. And perhaps this will end up being a sort of contest between the House of Cromwell and the House of Stuart. Finally, in 1657, a formal offer of the Crown is made to Cromwell, amid widespread expectation that he will accept. And Cromwell eventually turns it down after a period of introspection. I mean, at one point he calls a crown just a feather in a man's hat. But it's also a much deeper conviction that through his victories for Parliament on the battlefield, God has already spoken about what he thinks about monarchy as an institution. And as he says, very powerfully, I would not seek to set up that which Providence hath destroyed and laid in the dust.

I would not build Jericho again. So it would be against God's will to accept the crown. He will remain as Lord Protector. and there's a lot of trappings that go with being Lord Protector that look reassuringly monarchical to people who are craving stability. All of the sort of Cromwellian trappings of power. He lives in the royal palaces, a lot of the protrature, the way in which he signs himself Oliver Pee, looks very like Charles R,

the way in which he interacts with foreign ambassadors, all looks reassuringly monarchical. But it doesn't have the legitimacy, obviously, of the stewards who are always a threat on the continent. Just very quick, I mean, I think Claire is absolutely right, talking about a sort of bewildering array of constitutional arrangements during the 1650s, but I think sort of the elephant in the room here, of course, is the army. And to some extent, what we see is the established of the military dictatorship, because Cromwell's power ultimately relies entirely on the army. And go to your question as to why he didn't accept the crown in 1657, well, one of the key reasons that he doesn't accept the crown is, of course, the army won't accept it and that there's, you know, great resistance. in the army to the idea of King Oliver. Can I stay with you, Meehold, for a second. When Cromwell died in 1658, what was left of his Republican project?

Well, I think as Claire has pointed out, that really what we see as the 1650s progress is increasingly a conservative arrangement and one that has, as she has outlined, these monarchical trappings. And so we're moving very clearly into a situation where there is a real. that perhaps the decision to dismantle the traditional forms of government has proved extraordinarily problematic. And of course, the big issue is the one of succession because what happens when Cromwell dies. And of course, with the Humboldt Petition of advice from 1657, he is allowed to name his successor, which he does. Now, he makes a very odd choice because he chooses his eldest son,

which again is very much a traditional approach. However, he's a younger son, Henry, who's far more capable, probably would have been a much more effective Lord Protector. And very quickly, the entire experiment simply unravels, because without the firm hand of Oliver Cromwell on the tiller of government, it just simply will not wash. So really, by Cromwell's death, much of the sort of Republican idealism of the early stages of the English Revolution

had by now more or less disappeared. Laura, Laura Stewart, what stirred the English general George Monk into action in the late 1650s, so bringing the interregnum to an end? And what action did he take? So this is where Scotland holds back into view. And General George Monk is from 1654, commander of the English forces in Scotland. By autumn 1659, it looks like England is sliding into anarchy with dismissal of the rump, the army has set up a committee of safety as a temporary government, but it has no legitimacy. And it's quickly starting to lose control of the capital.

And this is really important. You lose control of London. You've had it. There are tax strikes threatening. The law courts are closing their doors because they say our commissions have come to an end. There is no legitimate authority to replace them. And at this point, faced with a breakdown on law and order, the person who is leading the army in England, Charles Fleetwood,

who's actually a relation of protector Richard Cromwell, he panics and he recalls the rump. And it's at this point that Monk decides to intervene. In January 1660, he declares his support for the rump. And then he marches his army to the Anglo-Scottish border. At the same time, you can't move an army of this size without people noticing. So Oliver Cromwell's erstwhile ally, John Lambert, takes forces up towards the north to confront Monk. And then this really symbolically important thing happens.

Monk calls on someone that Claire mentioned right at the beginning of this programme, so Thomas Fairfax, who been commander of the new model army, and says, Fairfax, can you help me, divert Lambert, raise the Yorkshire gentry. And Fairfax gets in his coach, he's quite old and gouty at this point. and he musters them on Marston Moore, seen of one of the great victories of the parliamentarian armies 16 years earlier, and I just wonder what the atmosphere must have been like when he did that. Meanwhile, Monk is able to march down to London.

He arrives in February, where he finds that the English army's regiments are in mutiny, they haven't been paid. He recalls the MPs have been purged from the long parliament in 1648, and at that point, because these are people who were sympathetic to Charles I, the only viable political option now is the return of Charles II. Claire, Charles II sought some kind of reconciliation with his enemies. How effective was that? It's very effective.

And I think just listening to this discussion, the language we use to describe this decade is important. We often refer to it as a sort of default shorthand as the interregnum, as though it's always going to be bookended by one monarch's death and another monarch's return, as though the whole 1650s is just some kind of curious. anomaly. But it certainly is not the most likely outcome that Charles would find himself Charles the second, invited back to become king by the very same army that had been responsible for putting his father on trial and for his father's death. And in a way, the exiled court has had to play

this waiting game for over a decade. It has had Charles II and the people around him have had to look sufficiently credible that they could at any point reclaim the thrones, but at the same time not jump every time there was a rumour of a royalist uprising or something walk into any kind of parliamentarian trap. But then they find themselves in this very inexpensive constellation of events and do respond strategically. Lines of communication are opened with Monk and others in London. And with the help of Edward Hyde from Brader to where Charles has also tactically moved, he's moved to Protestant Brader in the Dutch Republic from his former Catholic base in Brussels. He issues a very strategically worded Declaration of Braida

that makes very clear that the whole tone and the whole animus of any royal restoration will not be one of vengeance. Charles is very clear in the Declaration of Brader that amnesty will be offered to everyone, apart from a few named regicides, the people who'd

signed his father's death war. Only nine of whom were executed. Yes, only nine of whom are executed. Yes, only nine of whom are. His policy works, and he comes back, as we're reading peeps and other people, in some sort of triumphal re-entry. Yes, and it's again beautifully choreographed in that he can re-enter London or enter London, you know, as King for the first time on his 30th birthday. That language of reconciliation is also mirrored in legislation passed by what's still the Convention Parliament in August 1660, which passes an act of indemnity and oblivion that really tries to sort of, again, promote this message that we will not, you know, we will not seek to open up old sores. Thank you. Mihul. How did the restoration affect Ireland? Well, I mean, I think as Claire pointed out very, very astutely. I mean, the outcome with the restoration was, you know, very unexpected and in many ways the most unlikely outcome of the turmoil of 1659 to 60.

but very quickly it was the Irish Protestant interest those who had benefited from the Cromwellian settlement, land settlement, who watching the sort of collapse of the English Republic decided very decisively that they needed now to support a restoration and a restoration on their terms. And their terms were that there would be no turning back of the clock as really happened in many ways in England

where we sort of turn the clock back to 1640 and pretend those 20 years never happened. in Ireland, that was not going to be the case because the Irish Protestant interests said they would support the restoration, but only on condition that the Cromwellian land settlement would not be overturned and that we would not have, if you like, the resurgence of the Catholic interest in Ireland. So the restoration basically consolidated the Cromwellian land settlement and proved a massive disappointment to the Irish Catholic interest, which had hoped with the return of the Stuarts that they would recover the lands that they had lost so dramatically during the 1650s. And that simply didn't happen. Thank you very much. Laura, finally. Laura Stewart, what would you say with the longer term consequences of this interregnum for relations between England, Scotland and Ireland?

On the most basic level, the military power of the Republic, which Michael has already talked about, the power of that sword, reconfigures the Regal Union. Undoubtedly, it confirms English dominance of the archipelago in a way that's entirely unrivaled since the age of King Edward I in the first in the 1290s. And I think in that sense it can look as if the Union of 1707 and the state that we live in today is a near inevitability. that's not the case. It's far more complicated than that. And I think the 1650s has a paradox in it. There's so much that's paradoxical about this period, but one of its paradoxes is that the 1650s confirms the distinctiveness and resilience of civil society in Scotland. Unlike an Ireland where we've heard from Mijo, there's a wholesale programme to redistribute land to the English conquerors and to Irish Protestants. That's implemented. Scotland doesn't experience a lasting effort to re-orrected. order society. It affects the type of union that's going to be on offer at the start of the 18th century.

What becomes the union of 1707 has to be negotiated broadly on terms of equality. English ministers in London realise the need for a union by consent. And so in that sense, I think this union of 1707, which was still just about living in today, owes something in all its peculiarities to the experiences of the 1650s. Well, thank you very much. Thanks, Laura Stewart, Claire Jackson, and me, Shoukru and to our studio engineer Jackie Meijeram. Next week, it's Kant's Copernican Revolution, one of his most influential ideas on the relationship

between the mind and reality. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What did we miss out that was important, do you think? Claire, would you like to start? Yes. I think one of the areas that we could have talked a little bit about

was one of the, Cromwell's success on the foreign policy front because we were talking about failures, but that's often an aspect of Cromwell that's seen to be successful, particularly among his contemporaries at the time. As I said, one of the problems with revolutionary regimes is that they need to sort of keep generating results. And Cromwell has this fantastic army and an increasingly large navy at his disposal.

And the speed with which other foreign powers wish to make Cromwell's alliance also says that they're not quite so worried about the Republic's legitimacy or otherwise. There's a real fear among most European courts that once Cromwell has suppressed all his domestic enemies, he's not going to suddenly demobilize this terrific armed force, and it's really where it might be deployed next. And Cronwell's decision to try and seize Hispaniola, like modern-day Haiti, is a sort of classic piece of sort of strategic opportunism. I mean, it's never before has an established colony been stolen from, an established colonising power, the Spanish. It doesn't work, and that is one of the moments that Providence doesn't seem to favour Cromwell's attempt.

He takes this incredibly seriously as a sort of a mark of divine disfavor. The Spanish successfully repulse the protectorate fleet, but he does gain Jamaica as a consolation prize. And it's quite telling that the poet Andrew Marvell observes at one point that Cromwell remains at home, a subject on the equal floor, but a broader king, he seems, and something more. And a lot of that is just the fact that he gives English, England, particularly, this reputation for military and naval success that it hasn't really had since the days of Henry V. And compares very favourably to the engagement in European war by Charles I and Charles II, Charles I, Charles I,

disastrous entry into the 30 years wars. Charles II will fight the Dutch as Cromwell has done, and that doesn't go very well. I very much agree with Claire in terms of the success, if you like, that England becomes really a player on the international stage in a way that just hasn't been the case, certainly under the Stuarts in the early decades of the 17th century. And that then persists. And I think perhaps that where we may have focused

or could have focused a little bit more in terms of the legacy, because I think the legacy is probably a little bit more complex than perhaps is understood because the clock may be turned back in England to some degree and yet the impact of this period, the 1650s in particular, on subsequent events in England, be it the glorious revolution,

the 1680s and through into the 18th century, is very profound indeed in terms of the relationship between King and Parliament in terms of the relationship with the army and we've mentioned before the standing army and the reluctance to have a standing army. So that legacy is actually, I think, quite a profound one and quite a long-lasting one, but maybe perhaps not as obvious as it is in an Irish case.

And I think that we have mentioned, or I've mentioned a couple of times, the issue of a transformative nature in Ireland, whereas that really persists right through to the present day. And if you ask anybody in Ireland about Cromwell, you will immediately get an incredibly negative reaction. They may not know exactly why they're being so negative, but you do get a negative reaction because what is set up in the 1650s

essentially outlines the nature of Irish society for the next 250 years by establishing this Protestant descendancy that controls every aspect of Irish life. So really this is not something that is a huge impact at the time but also I think the legacy of this being more obviously in the Irish case but I think perhaps also in England and Scotland

and obviously Claire and Laura could talk more to that I think is perhaps more profound and long-lasting than people realise. I think there's a very interesting irony as well at the heart of the moment that the interregnum, if that's what it now is, needs to be both forgotten and remembered simultaneously. The restoration starts on this sort of big programme of national amnesia, sort of ripping out all the records that detail events in the 1650s, declaring Charles II to have been king since his father's execution. sort of imposing this amnesia.

And yet at the same time insisting that everybody must celebrate the 30th of January. That's the date they choose to exhume Cromwell's corpse and make it go, make it undergo the sort of ritual punishments of a traitor's death. And it really sort of imprisons that restoration generation in this sort of schizophrenic desire to forget, but complete inability to forget the traumas of the civil wars and the interregnum. And I think Meil's exactly right. I mean, the memory of this is such that this is a, a generation that keeps seeing the past reflected in any form of current instability. So you hear

the whole way through the restoration. You know, 1641 has come again. Or the restoration generation is also described at one point as being like a sort of pan of water that's recently boiled, that's all too ready to boil over again. And certainly when they're confronted by another vacuum of power in 1688, it's very much the middle, moderate ground that holds firm. And there's a desperate concerted attempt not to have an effusion of blood and not to allow a radicalised minority to drive events as had happened in 1649. So I think Mihal's exactly right that it's mostly a negative memory of all the sorts of things that might have gone wrong or seen by that generation to have gone wrong that really haunts the restoration generation. And I think the issue of memory is different

again in Scotland. I think it's the memory of the 1640s that Charles II has a real problem with after 1660. Indeed, you can argue that, you know, picking up again on what Michal's had to say about the way that this period has been described as a military dictatorship, there is no doubt that Scotland is governed by garrisons in the 1650s. And yet, the regime by introducing toleration and by its attitude towards worship in Scotland is far more benign in the 1650s, then it will be in the 1660s. In the 1650s, the covenant is not out. Lord, and most people continue to worship in their parish churches. The 1660s sees the restoration of a church governed by bishops.

That has not been the case in the 1640s, and people are persecuted in the 1660s and 70s in a way that must have seemed extraordinary to them, given that a military regime didn't do that in the 1650s. Laura, I skipped over the easing of press censorship. Could you say a little more to that? I think for a lot of historians in previous generations, it was the 1640s that excited our interest because a parliamentarian regime at war is just not really able to control the press and you have this print explosion where there's tens of thousands of things being printed. The Cromwellian regime, the Commonwealth and Petitre, is more effective at licensing the press and that can make it seem as if it's a less exciting period. But the regime does have its own news book and fortunately Mercurius Politicus is edited by one of the great editors and writers of this period. Someone's sometimes known as a turncoat, Marchmont Nedden, he will give his pen to the

people who are willing to pay him for it. And so I think historians are now looking at the 1650s as a period that's more interesting in that regard than perhaps it hitherto being the case. But something we could also have talked about a little bit more is the wider political culture of this period, in particular thinking about the satirising of Cromwell. It's hard to do it in England, obviously, but there are things coming off the presses, particularly in the Dutch provinces, that satirise Cromwell. And there are people picking out some of the tensions between the kind of religious reform that Cromwell is pursuing and the fact that, as Claire was saying earlier, he likes his weekends at Hampton Court. He, in

enjoys a sociable life with the people around him. And those tensions are something that his critics can attack. And the other great achievement that Cromwell facilitates is an intelligence service. I mean, the English Republic cannot sit comfortable as long as it knows that the exiled Stewart court will be continually agitating. So Cromwell devises an intelligence network on a scale that's just never been seen before that provides the Republican state and the Commonwealth and then with the protectorate with essential intelligence and certainly serves to frustrate a lot of assassination plots and planned royalist uprisings. And it is far too useful for the restoration regime to abolish. So Charles just takes on even the same personnel. Samuel Morland then starts working

for Charles II, having been working for the Cromwellian regime beforehand. Well, thank you very much indeed. Thank you. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Charlie, I have been so excited to speak to you. Hello, Manor. Hello, how are you, Joe? I'm Joe Wicks, and I'm back for the second series of my podcast that's all about sharing ways to help you live a happier and healthier life.

Doing a bit of research, and apparently you're into something called Inversion Farah, where you hang upside down. What's that like a bat? Exactly. I do it every day. You know, it all just sort of... Clears your head a little bit. Yeah. I get to speak to some heroes of mine from the legend that is Sir Tom Jones, who I'm literally obsessed with,

to one of our most successful UK athletes, Sir Mo Farrah. You have to be smart and control the race in the way that you want to... It just settles me. It organizes my brain. Meditation, I think, is the cultivation of a space within you that if you don't turn to it, life will get in the way. Subscribe now on BBC Sound so you never miss an episode. And you can also check out every single episode in video format on BBC Eye Player. The Joe Wicks podcast for BBC Radio 4.