School of War - Ep 213: Paul Lay on Cromwell and the English Civil War

Episode Date: July 8, 2025

Paul Lay, Senior Editor of Engelsberg Ideas and author of Providence Lost: The Rise and Fall of Cromwell's Protectorate,joins the show to talk about the turbulent age of the English Civil War, Cromwell, and the Protectorate. ▪️ Times      •      01:45 Introduction     •      02:00 17th century     •      03:51 The Thirty Years War       •      12:40 Anti-Catholicism      •      15:24 Underlying causes           •      21:46 Cromwell          •      30:34 Thatcher      •      33:04 The Rump Parliament     •      37:07 Western Design     •      54:44 Reverberations Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

I assume most school of war listeners are pretty familiar with the basic facts and consequences of the Civil War, the American Civil War, that is. But today we are going to go two centuries earlier to discuss what in the United States is an undercover subject, the English Civil War. I hope you will find, as I have, that its events and especially the political disputes that underlay it are surprisingly relevant. You can't understand America's founding, its character, and its strategic situation without understanding the violent English politics of the 17th century. And as we talk about today, those Englishmen were obsessed with the meaning and strategic future of the new world. Let's get into it. It is for safety for war. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in it.

A bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the grave situations. We can fight on the beach. standing ground, we'll fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall never surrender. For more, follow School of War on YouTube, Instagram, Substack, and Twitter. And feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today. Paul Lay, historian, senior editor of Engelsberg Ideas, the host of 1666 and all that.

a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, many other honors and accomplishments, and the author recently of Providence Lost, the Rise and Fall of Cromwell's Protectorate. Paul, thank you so much for joining the show. It's my pleasure. Thank you. I'm excited about the opportunity we have today to talk about the English Civil War and its aftermath, a subject that we have never tackled before on the show. How did you come to be someone who has devoted years and years of your life to the 17th century? I was very lucky, as an undergraduate, to meet a department where there were an awful lot of very good 17th century scholars. The likes of people like Barry Coward, Michael Hunter, Vanessa Arding, they were serious, serious figures. And they just thrilled me.

And I think it was a place that had always had a lot of high-end scholarship. but no one had really communicated that to a wider audience. There been a few attempts, Virginia Wedgwood's two-volume history. That goes back to the 50s and 60s. Antonio Fraser a little bit, but no one for a long, long time had attempted to communicate that to a wider audience. So it's seen in the way that I'm something of a historian, something of an editor, something of a writer, it was a perfect combination.

And it is fascinating. And I think it became even more fascinating after events like, say, Brexit, the Scottish independence referendum. There were all kinds of resonances to the 17th century and what's happening in the UK today. Yeah, I mean, obviously, I'm not a scholar of the period like you are, but every time I see, you know, Scottish cooperation with the EU in the newspaper, I have a little chuckle because nothing is actually new. Everything is old again. Everything new is old. So let me ask you this. Would you, would you paint a bit of a picture for us of, we're obviously going to spend most of our time in Britain and, you know, what's now the United Kingdom and Ireland?

But paint a picture for us of Europe at the outset of the major troubles in England. Tell us a bit about the 30 years war. Just give us a bit of a sense of the context and background in which all of this drama in England and the Isle of Britain will take place. Well, Europe was devastated from 1618 onwards up to 1648. I mean, indeed, that's the 30 years of the 30 years war. And it saw carnage. It's the only word for it on a scale that really wasn't equal until the First World War. And when we think about the industrial levels of weaponry that was available in 1914 onwards,

we're talking about the early 17th century when this happened. this vicious sectarian war, you can get some sense of the sheer physical, visceral kind of violence that affected particularly the German lands, what we would now think of as Middle Europa, with that focus on Germany, which of course was not a united nation or state at that point. So it was a vicious series of wars that affected particularly central Europe. and Britain, England, I suppose we should talk specifically then because this is before any union, by and large kept out of it because James I, the first, also James the Sixth of Scotland, of course, who'd united the crowns, if not the nations of England and Scotland,

was someone who thought of himself as a peacemaker. And there was great pressure from Parliament for him to become. involved in the 30 years' war on the Protestant side. James was a Protestant, unlike his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, who was famously not, she was a Catholic. And he managed that by and large, that some of the same sectarian tensions were there in England too. And I think to understand English attitudes towards Catholicism, towards Europe, you have to go really deep. The events of what happens in England in the 1640s, 1650s are often referred to as the English Revolution.

And I think that's debatable because it's seen often as our only revolution. I don't really think that's sustainable. Because I think in order to understand what happens there, you have to think of what I think as the real English Revolution, in the sense that we're not. mean a revolution now being a rupture with the past. And that is what takes place in the 1530s and the break with Rome, which of course is a piece of opportunism by Henry VIII, who died essentially a Catholic in terms of his theological beliefs. I won't go into detail as to what happened. I think most people have got some sense of that. The Tudors are certainly far better

to know the Cromwellian-N-Stuart period. But what he did was transform the country entirely. His officers such as Thomas Walsy and the Archbishop of Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, who articulated visions of England in a theological sense, which works like the Book of Common Prayer, developed a mythology of England as a chosen Protestant country. And that, I think was made even stronger by the events of 1588 during the reign of Elizabeth the first with the Spanish Armada, which was an attempt by the Habsburgs to invade England. It failed catastrophically. Destroyed, it was said, by a Protestant wind.

And it gave this sense among English Protestants, and particularly those called Puritans, who had a more hard-lined sense of that. Calvinists essentially, rather than Lutheran, the revolutions of Martin Luther didn't have a particularly great impact in England. It was more Calvinism that was taken up by Protestants, their Puritans, which is a pretty harsh form of predestination that everyone is either with the sheep or the goats. You are either damned before the beginning of time, or you're not. nothing you can do on earth. It's a pretty harsh theology. So they become this chosen people,

and there is a huge crisis at the end of the 16th century, because Elizabeth I, who has been a very effective monarch for most of that reign, has no successor. And through her clever figures, such as Lord Burley, her secretary of state, he manages just a about to have a peaceful transformation to James I first, who had long been James of Scotland, who comes to the throne in 1603. An intelligent man, a wise man, a man who'd seen a great deal of violence in his youth in Scotland that's seen his mother executed, for example, her lovers, her husbands killed. It's a bloody tale.

And so I think it made James cautious. and it made him a genuine seeker of peace. But two years into his reign, you had the gunpowder plot, which again was seen as a providential saving of the Protestant faith. Had it worked, it would have destroyed the entire House of Commons, quite possibly, and there would have been a bloodbath. But it didn't happen. Guy Fawkes and his Cougainzbrose were caught.

And so that was again seen as a judgment by God that he would look after this elect Protestant nation. James rules pretty well. And he has a son, Henry, who he's regarded as a great champion of Protestantism, of European Protestantism, glamorous, combative, brilliant, but he dies young. And so the heir becomes Charles I, the first, Charles Stewart, eventually Charles. of hers, who is a much more timid figure, he stutters, he's rather self-regarding. But if you want to know, from my interpretation, why Charles becomes the king he does, I think you have to look to something called the Spanish match, an episode when he and the Duke

of Buckingham, who was both his favorite and had been his father's favorite and possibly lover, go to Madrid, the heart of the Hapsburg monarchy, in order to seduce the infanta, the eldest daughter of the Spanish king. We don't do foreign policy like we used to anymore. No, indeed, we don't. But he doesn't fall in love with the infanta. And she certainly doesn't fall in love with him. But what he does fall in love with are two things. One is odd. He had a great eye as a connoisseur. He falls in love with the titians that he sees,

the Hampstburg, the master that he is and the other great masters. And the other things he falls in love with is European absolutism. He likes the idea of a divine king who rules without parliament. and almost immediately just four years into his reign, what becomes known as the personal rule begins. And from 1629 to 1640, Charles rules without a parliament. And that is the setting for the civil war, the beginning of the civil war, a contest between parliament and absolutism. So forgive the ignorant question. To the extent that I have knowledge of the 17th century, it tends to be. later in the century and largely as an accidental consequence of my fascination with Winston Churchill,

who of course writes a great book about his great ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough. So I know a little bit about that period. And of course, then, you know, a lot of the problems that the then restored royal family face is this suspicion that well-founded, it seems that they are Catholic sympathies. And so they are they are enemies of the true essence of England that has developed since the 16th century. The account you just laid out that doesn't seem like that's a major factor for the family, for the Stewart family in the first part of the 17th century. It really is about absolutism and prerogative more than it is about confessional affiliation. Confessional affiliation matters.

Charles is Archbishop William Lord, Archbishop of Canterbury, William Lord. He's seen by some of the more hardline Puritans as a proto-Cathlete. He likes ceremony. he likes the altar facing east, but actually he's very much a Church of England figure. He certainly is on what we would call the high Anglican wing now, but there's never any evidence whatsoever that he's a Catholic. The one Catholic at court is Henrietta Maria, who is Charles's queen. And she is a Catholic, she's allowed to practice privately,

but she cannot use it to proselytize or anything like that. And there's a lot of criticism towards her. I think a lot of this anti-Catholicism comes from the reign of Mary Tudor, Elizabeth I first immediate predecessor who was married to Philip II in Spain, Hapsburg. And there are many, many rather grotesque illustrations of people being burned in one of the selling books in English history, which is Thomas Fox's Book of Martyrs, which outlines in horrific detail the martyrdoms of the Marion period. And this for hardline puritans, and not just

hardline puritans, but certainly to they who are pushing this propaganda, and he's not entirely propaganda, it's rooted in historical truth too, put forward this idea of a fear of Catholic as tyrannical. And so even those who are actually committed to the Anglican Church, but use a lot of ceremony, are suspicious. Is there, look, everything you just outlined certainly seems to be the grounds for great tension, but what follows is not tension, what follows is a decade-long period of awful bloodletting. The country tears itself apart. It's not just a civil war. There's a, you know, there's a Scottish war with England. There's an Irish component. A lot goes very, very wrong. In the United States, you know,

we have this debate about the American Civil War and its causes. And, you know, if you, if you want to be sophisticated, the, you know, the answer of what causes civil war has to be long and kind of complicated. But if you want to be even more sophisticated, it's actually the case that slavery causes the war. There's a desire to expand it in the South. The democracy elects a president who doesn't seem like he's going to countenance that and war we get. Is there an equivalent to that in the English Civil War? Is there a kind of underlying cause? You, you know, Charles's embrace of authoritarianism or however you would characterize. There is an attempt by Charles to impose the prayer book.

That's the book of common prayer, the book of rights of the Church of England, onto the Scots, who are Presbyterians. And they have a different church, a Kirk system. They rule without bishops. It's Charles's belief, shared no doubt by his archbishop William Lord, the phrase no bishops, no kings, that there is a relationship between the Church of England, the Episcopal Church, of course, as it's known in the United States, for the reason that it has bishops at its head. And that goes catastrophically wrong. The Scots really resent it and go to war

with their own king. It's the bishop's wars, as they're called, of which there are too. And this is contained, but it leads to a series of noble figures in England, including the Earl of Essex, to conspire with the Scots against Charles. And it sets the seed of really deep mistrust at the highest level of the aristocracy with their king. So there's a tension there immediately, and that's a real spark. While sets it off too is the rebellion at the beginning of the 1640s in Ireland, in which both sides, the Irish and the English, we should say the Scots there, are involved in awful acts of violence, of sectarian violence that mirrors somewhat what's been happening on the continent in the 30 years' war.

And that kind of propaganda is in the heads of everyone, because one of the reasons being that Charles's sister, Elizabeth, has suffered enormously as Queen of Bohemia, the winter queen. She's deposed. And there is a concern that that kind of bloodshed, that kind of Catholic sectarianism will arrive in England. An island has always been seen as the landing craft for the Habsburgs. If the Habsburgs are going to attack, it won't be via the channel. it will be via Ireland. And all kinds of rumors begin, all kinds of propaganda take shape, much of it false. But it leads to a kind of feebral atmosphere. At the same time that Charles is desperate for

money if he is to do anything about the conflicts that are going on. And so he has to, in the end, summon a parliament. And it's there, I think that we have. that unraveling these complex alliances between those who support royalism. Some will support royalism in a lukewarm kind of way. Others will be supporters of an absolutist style, a divine right style. There are people on the other side who believe in a crown in parliament. There are a few who believe in a republic, but there are actually very, very few people who are genuinely Republican at this point when the civil war begins in 1642. It's a question of the relationship ultimately between Crown and Parliament.

How absolute is the King? How much is he kept in check by Parliament? And those two forces find it irrevocable and they go to war when the King raises his standard at Nottingham. Yeah, to an American listener like me, you know, this mention of republicanism and how it's such a minority view in the early 1640s, that that really captures my attention because, of course, you know, as part of the broader, you know, in my view, collapse of education in the United States, one element of it is nobody studies English history in America anymore, almost at all, you know, to the extent it's covered, you know, it probably starts with the French and Indian War and then the revolution. But there's no, I think, attempt to show, the connections between American politics and the revolution, back to this, essentially, back to the middle at least of the 17th century and the political debates within England, all of which then kind of unfold in complicated ways in American politics.

And it's fascinating to hear that republicanism is just sort of one radical glimmer on the far edge of the English debate, and it eventually becomes very, very important, obviously, in the American context. Yes, and there's a great deal of influence, ultimately, American thought from thinkers at this time, I think, particularly people like James Harrington, who writes a book called Oceana, which is essentially an advice manual. It's intended as an advice manor to Oliver Cromwell as to how to settle the nation. But we can come to that later, but certainly founding fathers would be familiar with the kind

of intellectual ideas about republicanism in England, much of which comes via Venice, as well on Venetian ideas, Machiavellian ideas or republicanism. So all that feeds in, ultimately, to a lot of the intellectual ideas on which the American Republic is founded. Because we shouldn't forget that, in a way, in a real way,

the American Revolution is a British Revolution. Yeah. Yeah. That's sort of the whole point. It just tends to place on the other side of the Atlantic. But these people are Britons, and they merely seek independence. But if we have a revolution in this country, it's as much in the late 18th century as it is in the middle of the 17th century. And the ideas of the revolution, the political debates are our English political debates.

That's why I lament the failure to study it. But we should, we can come back to this as we go on. But so we're we're in, let's say, 1642 or so now, things are really falling apart. Parliament's getting, there's a parliamentary fighting force, the King will have a fighting force. Tell us a little bit about the war. We don't have to go battle by battle. We don't have the time anyway. But make sure, let's let's get to Cromwell. Who is Cromwell? Where does he come from in all of this? Cromwell is a very minor figure at this point. He's a man who's just in his 40s. He takes part in no military adventures whatsoever.

until he's in his early 40s. That's one of the most extraordinary things about him. He's a minor figure of the minor gentry who knows real poverty, probably the poorest MP of his intake, a man who was regarded as a bit uncouth. He'd know real poverty. He'd got a little bit of money in from the inheritance. But in the 1630s, he had a profound religious moment,

the kind of Pauline conversion to Puritanism possibly linked to his depression. He was certainly of a depressive nature. He was a man from the heartland of English Puritanism, which is East Anglia, which is the counties of Cambridge and Norfolk and Suffolk and Essex on the eastern side. But he was not a particularly distinguished figure, but he proved himself as a significant cavalry commander because what he was good at was he was very good horseman. He was fascinated by horses, had been all his life, and he led cavalry charges with a almost pathological belief in himself and that he was doing God's cause. The only thing that really mattered to Cromwell.

And I think this is true of both his military and political career is what is his relationship with God and is he doing God's work? Antonio Fraser, oh, sorry, Christopher Hill, called his biography of Christopher Hill called his biography of Christophil God's Englishman, and that's very much an accurate title of the way he thought of himself and others thought of him.

But it wasn't until relatively late with the formation of the New Model Army that Cromwell really came to the fore. And at the beginning of the war, it didn't go well for Parliament. The king and his army made a few bad decisions. They didn't take London when they could have. And London was very much the Puritan stronghold and obviously important in terms of the economy and connections to Europe.

And he was chased out of London, moved to York, eventually settled a royalist couple at Oxford. But from then on, and we can say this with hindsight. always difficult to win from then on with the loss of London. But there was no means certain that the parliamentarians would win, but they had an extremely effective army, the new model army, which saw themselves as the saints. They were very, very Puritan hard line, excellent cavalry, highly motivated, largely from those areas of the east, one of them,

the people that Cromwell commanded was called the Eastern Association. And these people saw themselves as soldiers of God. People often compare them to jihadists. I think that's going a bit far. But there is an element of a religious campaign that they're taken part, and they think of themselves as chosen people. And Cromwell and people like, Iyerton and Lambert, these extraordinary figures, who should be better known,

Henry Iyton and John Lambert should be better. better know, they prove themselves to be an extremely effective fighting force. They combine with the Scots, they win at Marston Moore and then finally at Naisby, and by then the king is summoned back, and they still desperately seek peace with the king. Many opportunities have given him, even by Henry Iyerton, Hardline, Cromwell's son-in-law, even he negotiates quite generously. But there comes a point when a second civil war opens. And I think from then on, the new model are sick to death of having to fight and die again.

And Charles is called, in biblical terms, a man of blood, a man who has betrayed his own people, who has led once again the nation into a war it can avoid. And from then on, tough figures like Cromwell think he's got to be put on trial, he's put on trial at the end of 1648, and he's executed in January 1649, a quite extraordinary act to put a king on trial and then to execute him publicly. And then they don't really know what to do next because no one's planned for it. The killing of a king is not unusual in English history, Richard the second. Edward II, Henry the 6. It happened before. The English have a reputation as king-killers, but they hadn't put one on trial before.

They hadn't gone through some kind of quasi-judicial process, and they certainly hadn't done it publicly as a form of out-of-justice. So this came as quite a shock to the nation, and then it fell to figures such as Cromwell, who by that point was the prima centiparous really there, the leader, there was no particular leader at that point when they established the Commonwealth. But then there were a couple of things that they had to deal with. First of all, Ireland, they had to settle Ireland, and Parliament passed a great deal of money

to put Cromwell in charge of a brutal campaign in Ireland. We haven't got time, I suppose, to go into that in any detail, but the siege of Drogheda, the siege of Wexford, are well-known episodes. that continue to resonate in Irish history, certainly. There's a lot of new research on that that's contentious, challenging, that challenges a lot of the myths around it. But let's not make any bones about this. When Cromwell went to do something, he did it with four-fors. And there was no doubt a sense of what we would call ethnic cleansing

about the native Irish. Although many of the people who were killed at Droghada, for example, were English royalists. Again, this idea of a landing craft to attack the mainland as part of this culture, and not without some reason there. It was a brutal campaign, but after nine months, Ireland was settled, as they would say, and then they turned their attention to Scotland, which was dealt with less brutally fellow Protestants, of course, and there wasn't quite the same kind of xenophobia towards Scots

as there was towards the native Irish, I should say, because there was also Protestant Irish, there was the old Irish. But it was marked by a particularly brilliant victory, perhaps Cornwell's greatest victory, although I would argue it's actually the world, work of his second-in-command, John Lambert, who will come to in the political process later, but in which a tiny, relatively tiny, outnumbered British, English unit destroyed the Scots at Dunbar, which is in the southeast of the country, and then there was kind of inevitability

of the victory. And by and large, once Charles II, who was still in the country then, was defeated at the Battle of Worcester, exactly a year later, September 3, 1651. Then, I think it's fair to say that there was no chance of a royalist restoration. The entire islands were settled. I had a good friend in graduate school who was from Jahada, and she was just the nicest, sweetest person, you know, kind of person you would say wouldn't hurt a fly. was a scholar of medieval English literature. And man, there are two names that if you mentioned.

One was Cromwell. The other was Margaret Thatcher. You would get the most considering the source, strikingly violent. First response. You know, in the present day, these things are still fresh. In a way that, again, that's not a surprise to you, Paul. But to me, as an American visitor, it was a surprise to me. Yeah, I think that's because, I mean, obviously Ireland and Britain have had a very difficult

relationship over 800 years. Cromwell being by no means the worst agent of those atrocities over time, in my opinion, but he's become to symbolise that entire 800 years. And so there is an element of almost a cartoonish, two-dimensional Cromwell that is the kind of bogey man who represents everything that's bad about those 800 years. And it's interesting you say Margaret Thatcher, Because I always think people say, you know, who is the modern British politician who is most like Cromwell. And I would say, without a shadow of it, it's Margaret Thatcher. For all kinds of reasons, she comes from the same sort of part of the country. She was a nonconformist.

She was a Puritan in many ways. She had a difficult relationship with Ireland. She was belligerent. And I think there was another thing about her that she imagined. the English people as being rather more godly than perhaps they really are. So when she opens her experiments in free trade, she thought that everyone would behave like her father, the Alderman Roberts, who was this dry, puritan, hardworking figure,

but they ended up to be a little bit more like her son. It was a little more raffish and rakish. So there's certain parallels there, I think, with Cromwell and Thatcher, if I'm being mischievous. Amazing. Amazing. So in the 1650s, there's two obvious things we need to explore here. We should talk politics, but what I really want to get to in a minute is the foreign policy of Cromwell and the protectorate and the Western design, which is this fascinating dimension of things that seems quite relevant or the kind of thing that people who are interested in strategy today should study. But on the politics, you know, it does seem that the constitutional form, as you just laid out and as you document in your book, it's fairly improvisatory. you know, the nature of rule as it comes to pass is not really the war aim. In fact, I'm assuming in the middle of the 1640, well, you point out, even maybe in the late 1640s, it's much more natural just to find a, if you can't reconcile with this king, find a better king

who will promote, you know, the political vision that you've got, as indeed happens later in the history of the century with William. That's not what they do. Why do they end up with what they have? And then we'll talk foreign policy in the Spanish. Well, as I said, they don't know what to do next. And the run Parliament, which is this very small group of people who are left after all the purges, what's famously known as Pride's Purge, has promised Cromwell and various leading figures in the regime that it will host elections. And he doesn't. And so Cromwell intervenes and gets rid of it in what is essentially a coup d'etat. And it is replaced by a scheme that is the work of a man called Thomas Harrison, who's had a very distinguished

military career in the cavalry. And he is a member of a group called the Fifth Monarchists. And to explain the Fifth Monarchist's theology would probably take the rest of this program. So I won't try to do it. I wouldn't say that they're a rather radical millenarian sect. But he's well respected because of his military achievement. Harrison. And it's based upon the Jewish Sanhedrine. It's called the nominated assembly because it will consist of 140 members of parliament who are nominated by churches, although actually that doesn't happen. Most of them are nominated by people around Cromwell. And it is the closest that the regime gets to a real religious, fundamentalist.

governance. You won't be surprised that it fails miserably in terms of vision. It makes a few legal reforms that are much needed, but it's a disaster. And Cromwell, it fails. It doesn't live up to Cromwell's expectations. It probably doesn't even live up to Thomas Harrison's expectations. And Cromwell gets rid of it. And that's where we see as Thomas Harrison's star descends, John Landworth's political star ascends. And here is a really fascinating character, because while this nonsense has been going on, as he would see it, he's been sitting in his estate in Wimbledon,

which is in southwest London, and he writes what becomes Britain's only written constitution to this day, called the instrument of government. which re-imagines the old constitutional trinity of King, Lords and Commons as a protector, and that would be Cromwell, a Council of State and an elected parliament. And that's what happens. And that's where we get the, that's why we call it the protectorate. That is the model that is instituted in 1653, and it is the model that survives for the rest of,

that protectorate until it disappears with the restoration in 1660. So it's in a sense a quasi-monarchy. The foreign policy that Cromwell pursues and that you outline in your book is fascinating to me for a number of reasons, not least of which is that it's so ideologically charged. And indeed, that's a theme throughout our conversation is really the inability to separate the strains of ideology, power politics, domestic politics, foreign policy, you know, these things are all just immensely intertangled. And the Puritans, and you have this wonderful vignette at the opening of your book, to illustrate their fascination with the new world and their ambitions

regarding the new world, which, of course, in America we know well, because this is Massachusetts and Plymouth Rock and all that kind of stuff. You can find it in the Caribbean as well. This then becomes an enormously important factor for Cromwell's worldview and, you know, and his view of the role of England in the world. Say more about that. Talk about the Western design and what its failure means for Cromwell, because that seems somewhat crucial. Yeah, it's the turning point.

So in 1653, we've seen the protector has initiated, and we can get its sense of how securities, how stability is. There's a small rising in 1655 called Penroddox rising that takes place in the southwest of the country. It's an abject failure, and it's pretty clear that the regime is in charge militarily. It's brought peace, and stability is very, very important to a people who've just gone through a civil war, who've had bad harvests, who've seen what's happening in Europe or seen what has happened in Europe.

And so you can see the appeal of, even if they're not entirely happy with Conwellian governance, and are sympathetic to monarchy, then you can see why they'd be relatively happy with this settlement. The country's relatively well governed. It's stable. It's peaceful. It's secure. Certainly secure. So what does Commonwealth do next? Well, a very unusual man appears. You'll have to read the book to get his biography. I can't possibly go through it now. But he's a man called Thomas Gage, who was a former Catholic priest in the Americas. in Central America, who returns to England and converts essentially to the more evangelical wing of the Church of England and then becomes a great supporter of Cromwell and actually meets Cronwell.

And he tells Cromwell and convinces Cromwell that Spain is a weak power in the Americas. And the focus of Spanish power is in Cuba, where it's now Cuba, and in what was then called Hispaniola. That is the island that is now shared between Dominican Republic and Haiti. It's rich, it's enticing, and also it would be a deep embarrassment to England's natural enemy. Black Spain, the much mythologized, Antichrist that Spain is, Habsburgs, to go into the heart of the Spanish West Indies and take it and defeat the Spanish there. And of course, Cromwell and his men around him have never known defeat. They are on God's side. And the reason they haven't known defeat is because they are on God's side.

God ensures them victory. That's what providence is. They are providential victors in God's struggle on earth against the Antichrist. So, Cromwell is convinced to put together something that's called the Western design, that is to put together a rather substantial fleet, certainly the greatest state military enterprise that Britain had ever had at that point, and it sails into the heart of the West Indies. it lands at Hispaniola, and it is an utter and complete catastrophe.

Now, you can get over that, but if you have a providential worldview, it's not just a defeat, it is a question of God's judgment. And Cromwell is the sort of man who locks himself away for days, if not weeks, in prayer, in conversation with God. If there's one source, I wish we had for Cromwell that we'll never have, it's his conversations with God. they would be fascinating because these are intense and real conversations. What do I do?

And he draws ultimately the conclusion that they have lost because the British people are on the road to Jerusalem, but they're not there yet. And he uses this expression they are circumcised yet raw. It's a wonderful Cromwellian phrase

that he's full of stuff like that. But it means that the reformation, the moral reformation, has not been pushed through enough. So what's the answer to that? He's convinced to divide the country up into what are essentially cantons, England and Wales this is, Ireland, Scotland, the rules separately as provinces. But it's divided up and each one of these cantones, each one of these regions, is handed over to a major general who is there to enforce the moral reformation of the people. Now, some people do this extremely effectively, some extremely zealously. One of them is so zealous, the major general in Lancashire, that he exhaust himself and he dies,

such are his zealous preoccupations. But others just get on with a local gentry and it carries on as before. But he puts a lot of noses out of joint. because these areas have their natural ruling fanbits. They have their own gentry, and they don't like to see these people, some of whom are pretty low-born, taking over the administrations of these places. And he causes a lot of resentment. And I think Cromwell realizes this.

But the major generals are so out of touch that they say, look, we're doing a really good job. Why don't we hold elections now so that we'll get even more power? And of course, they hold those elections and they're catastrophes, absolute catastrophes. Many people who opponents of the regime win there, and Cromwell is angry about this. And you can see things unravel. There are assassination attempts on Cromwell, ludicrously bad, farcical assassination attempts, but nevertheless, they get under the skin of the regime. There's a trial of a Quaker called James Naler, which I think is a real turning point in the regime because it shows the regime, not Cromwell actually, who warns again this, but some of the regime, becoming both prosecutor and executor of this man. He's not actually executed, but he's tortured, which is very unusual in the Cromwellian period.

He's branded, he's put in the stocks, and he suffers horribly. And the Quakers, I should say at that point, and nothing like the nice Pacific characters we think of Quakers as know. They are seen as wild. They are wild. Many of them have served in the army. They are notorious for things like nudity, lewd practices, blasphemy. And people get the sense that things are running slightly out of control.

But a group of people who are, are supporters of Cromwell, but from the more conservative side, the Presbyterian side, think how do we settle this? The whole thing is unraveling. There's only one way to settle this, and that's a return to monarchy. But not the stewards, it will be Cromwell, who is offered the crown. And indeed he is offered the crown with an amended instrument of government, that's a constitution I was talking about, called a humble petition and advice.

which has a much less tolerant approach to religion. It's much more concerned about cracking down on the independence and reinforcing the Presbyterians with a more conservative wing, and it seeks to offer the crown on something that's parallel. I mean, we've had a quasi-monicus in 1653 anyway, so why not go to Whole Hog and Wend? make it a monarchy. Cromwell takes his offer seriously. He goes away for six weeks and considers the offer, but then comes back and again he tries to listen to God and he believes that God has told him

that he cannot build Jericho again, as he put it. What has happened has happened. And it's not his prerogative to go against the will of God. So he turns down the crown. And this leads to to a real succession crosses. What he's going to follow when he dies? He's not well. He's a man physically worn out by cavalry. Cavalry charges. The kind of life he lead that he only began in his 40s

as a military career is a tough one. He's had malaria from his days in the swamps over in East Anglia and the Fendlands. And so there are a lot of people around him who know that he's hold on power as fragile. He's hold on life. is fragile and what comes next. And it's a mirror image of what happened at the end of Elizabeth's reign. And there is no settlement when Cromwell dies on that fateful day, 3rd of September, the same date as the victory at Worcester, the same day as the victory at Dunbar. He dies on September the 3rd, 1658. And there is no succession. And his secretary, a man called John Thurlow,

gifted man, says, and we have no proof of whether this is true or not, that Cromwell's wish is that the title of Lord Protator goes to his son, Richard. And Richard's a more capable figure than I think a lot of people have thought. There's a lot of revision of stuff there. He's certainly reasonably popular. And indeed, if you look at the way his accession was received by foreign ambassadors, for example, they think this has gone pretty well. Even more troubling for the royalists, they think it's gone pretty well and think, you know, there's no chance of a Stuart recovery. But what Richard doesn't have that Cromwell had is control of the army, the respect and command of the army, the men who'd served under him respected Cromwell enormously.

Richard has no military experience whatsoever. And ultimately, there is now the realization that the whole regime's foundation rests on military might. If the army goes, the whole thing goes. and many in the army who've been radicalized now turn to the idea of a genuine robotic. And the sects that Cromwell kept down emerge again, Anabaptists, diggers, levelers, whatever, all emerge at this point. And John Lambert is so as well. And there is this, I mean, this is making a very complex situation, but there is a sense.

that we are returning again to those dark days of the 1640s. This kind of loggeria of dissent, of radical sects, of anarchy even. And the commander of the Scottish army, this is the parliamentary army in Scotland rather than a Scottish army itself, is a man called George Monk. And Monk has fought for both sides. He was originally, when he first met Cromwell, he was a royalist in the Tower of London. But he and Cromwell, I think as fellow soldiers, respected one another, and Monk went to work for the Cromwellian regime, so trusted that he was put in charge of the army in Scotland.

But he knew this couldn't last. And I think the great mystery of what happens next is what was Monk's motivation for marching south with this well-prepared army, because the Scots were taxed more than the English, so their army was rather better clothed, marched down in the winter into 1660 and gets into London. And from then on, Lambert, who's one of the great tragic figures of English history, gives himself up. He ends up in exile and in prison of the rest of his life, this extraordinary a figure who was influential, it should be said, on the founding fathers in terms of his written constitution, his work on the written constitution, his ideas. And what seems inevitable, wasn't

inevitable, but seems inevitable then is the restoration of Charles II. And what's interesting about when Charles is caught back, Monk is one of the principal agents of that, and he rides with him into London on his return and there is great rejoicing but it's very very interesting that there are almost no restrictions port on Charles II when he comes back now it happens that Charles II plays the game pretty well in terms of being pretty tolerance the only people who are executed on his return are regicides those who actually signed the warrant for the death of his father, Charles I first. Other people are taken into government. And I think he's well advised by his principal secretary who is Lord Clarenth, Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon,

who is also the man who wrote the first great history of what he calls the Great Rebellion, which is the foundation on which all other histories of that period are written. He's a very fine work, very readable even today. It's written lovely Baroque prose. It's well readable. And he takes the view wisely that it has to be a capacious settlement, that it has to be a generous settlement, that it has to be a pragmatic one that brings on board the talented figures that were on the other side.

Because I think when we understand this, there's a lot of people who were reluctant royalists and reluctant parliamentarians. Families were divided by this. Friendships were divided by this. It's not a simple black and white manichean issue. People struggled over this. And people knew one another before the war. And they would begin to know one another again afterwards and often be respectful of one another. So it's a relatively generous settlement. It does rather unravel after that because you have what's called Clarendon Code imposed, which is very anti-descent and it's very strongly Anglican, whereby the only way in which one can advance

is through being a member of the Church of England. And there is a great deal of repression then, ironically, of course, and I haven't mentioned this, Cromwell may not be liked by the Irish, but he does tend to be liked by Jews because he is the man who, for the first time in 350 years, brings Jews back into England. They were expelled in 1290 by Edward I, after vicious pogroms. And he brought Jews back. He had a friendship in particular with a man called Manasseh ben Israel in Amsterdam.

And there were a number of reasons why he wanted Jews to return to England. One, well, skills in as merchants. Two, they had European networks of intelligence that could be used by them. But there was also the idea that if England was the chosen nation of the New Testament as the Jews were the chosen people of the old, then they had to come to England to converse. And that was a principal problem. So it's not quite the humanitarian reasons that some people give. There are complex reasons, but nevertheless, I believe Sigmund Freud, who of course found exile in Britain after the excesses of the 1930s, called one of his sons, Oliver, in tribute to the protector.

Fascinating. So not to be parochial, but I am going to bring us back to America for my closing question. I will say it occurred to me, as you were talking about the rather grim period of the major generals, that it is a clear sign that I grew up in Virginia and not in Massachusetts, that I found it all rather unpleasant sounds. This is a pretty dark, pretty dark phase in English history. Offer some final reflections, if you would, on the reverberations of this in 18th century America, and America more generally. I mean, some we've already sort of pointed to, the way in which the American debate in the 18th century is a British debate, literally, but also kind of deeply in the sense that these questions of who rules and what are the prerogatives of King versus Parliament versus other power centers, families, you know, whatever, individual.

even. What are their rights and can one even speak in that language? And that's where we start to get out to the radical end of the conversation. There's that aspect. And then the second aspect, you know, you and I have talked about this a bit, but there's another dimension to all this, which is sort of the absolute royalist line and its sort of associations one way or the other with the continent and with Catholicism. That's also a thing that though out of favor in English politics sort of ever since and obviously anathema in a way. in American politics, it never really dies. It's always sort of there hovering on the edge that all of this has been a mistake.

Ever has been since the tutor's on, it's all been a mistake. So just final thoughts from you, Paul. I think it's useful sometimes, if simplistic, but I think it's a useful exercise to think of the United States as Britain's counterfactual in the sense that the other side won, ultimately. It's been simplistic, of course it is, but it's a nation founded by Puritans. Much of what we think of as the American moral ethos is that that resonates with that Puritan tradition that is from the eastern counties of England. It always strikes me if you go to New England or you go to the Eastern Seaboard of the names that reflect.

those places that I know in Essex or Suffolk or Norfolk, I mean the very name Norfolk, my goodness, I mean, you're close to that. It is that resonance. It is part of that. I think a lot of, when I read things like the Federalist Papers or I look at the speech of the founding fathers, I was just watching the John Adams documentary again quite recently, you see the same arguments made, but I'm a lot of the same arguments made. but ultimately the other side wins.

And so it's useful to think of the United States and Britain as, you know, the one is born of the other. And I said this at a history, let's quite recently, people say, well, did we have a revolution at all? Well, I said, you know, the revolution we did have is the American Revolution. And it happened, you know, we think it only happens in America. It doesn't. It happens transatlantic. transatlantic way, those ideas are being argued about in London as much as they've been argued about in Boston or anywhere else or Philadelphia.

And so there's that umbilical relationship that is then broken. But I didn't think the world has been ill-served by the fact that those two policies exist. And I've often sometimes had a fractious relationship, but on the whole, I've had a pretty positive relationship. And I would argue, many wouldn't, a pretty positive effect on the rest of the world as well. You'll be amused to hear that I grew up in Fairfax County in Northern Virginia, to your point. So, you know, I guess Cromwell was probably right about several things, but certainly right about one thing that control of the new world was going to be extraordinarily important. And yes, to your point.

And in that sense, the Puritans did kind of win, didn't they? The New World was sort of finally, North America, at least, was finally. finally secured by that trend in English politics. That's wildly oversimplifying. Of course it is. It is oversimplifying it. But I think, you know, just look at the writings of the founding fathers, the speeches of founding fathers, and you see all of that resonate. And you see the references to Lambert and to Harrington and people like that.

It's there. And it's hard to imagine that the United States would exist in anything like the four. the form it does if it hadn't been for events in England during the 17th century. Paul A, author of Providence Lost, The Rise and Fall of Cromwell's Protectorate. This has been a delightful and fascinating conversation. I'm grateful to you for coming on the show. It's my pleasure. Thank you.

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