The Rest Is History - 333: The Republic of Britain: Life under Cromwell

Episode Date: May 18, 2023

It's 1649 and a new republic has been declared, the Commonwealth of England. It's an age of 17th century republicanism, difficult policies in Ireland, and a serious PR problem... writer and historian Anna Keay joins Tom and Dominic to discuss life under Cromwell. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Whereas Charles Stuart, late King of England, Ireland, and the territories and dominions thereunto belonging, hath by authority derived from Parliament been declared to be justly condemned, adjudged to die, and put to death for many treasons, murders and other heinous offences committed by him. And whereas it hath been found by experience that the office of a king in this nation and Ireland is unnecessary, burdensome and dangerous to the liberty, safety and public interest of the people, be it therefore enacted and ordained by this present Parliament, that the office of a king in this nation shall not henceforth be exercised by any one single person. And by the abolition of the

kingly office provided for in this Act, a most happy way is made for this nation to return to its just and ancient right of being governed by its own representatives, from time to time chosen and entrusted for that purpose by the people, as shall most conduce to the lasting freedom and good of this Commonwealth. So Tom Holland, the year is 1649. King Charles I has had his head cut off. And as a loyal reader of The Guardian, you're probably delighted by those words that are read out, aren't you? I was just thinking what a wonderful way to mark the coronation year. You read out the sentence pronounced on Charles I and the abolition of the monarchy. It's such an astonishing moment isn't it

and we did two episodes on um on the trial of charles i which i still think is the single most extraordinary episode in the whole of english history well obviously the question is um what what are people what happens next what happens next because they have cut off the head of the king and then there's this decade which has sort of dropped out of the British imagination, hasn't it? When people think about the 1650s, the years of the Republic and the Commonwealth, they do so in the context of Oliver Cromwell and of the abolition of Christmas. That's what people always talk about. Oh, they banned Christmas. Terrible years.

Terrible years. always talk about oh they banned christmas terrible years terrible years but but actually the extraordinary details of it in the sense that it's both a sort of well is it a dead end or is it a great experiment um i think that's really worth exploring isn't it always absolutely i mean the idea of england especially in this year of all years the idea of england becoming a republic and what its experience of republicanism was, and whether that experience was so traumatic for people, that that is one of the factors in why we are celebrating the coronation of a king this year, I think are very timely questions. Dominic, there has been a superb book published on this very theme, has there not, that was nominated by yourself as your book of the year last year?

It was my book of the year, Tom. So I read a book, which I'm sure we'll be talking about later in this podcast, called An Instance of the Fingerboast. My favourite historical novel, Dominic. It's a great, it's a mystery, isn't it? Set in the 1650s. And I thought at the time, by Ian Pears, and i thought at the time when i read it i would love to read a sort of social and cultural history of the 1650s that brings alive actually what it was

like to live not just the politics but to live through that period when everything had been you know the world had been turned upside down as people said at the time um go on tom i can see you're itching to do some name dropping absolutely because i because i you know i've been going on and on about instances finger paste how it's my favorite historical novel and i actually met ian pears who the author at the gyper literature festival which was held earlier this year of course you did where i also met the author of the restless republic written without a crown anna k who was the author of The Restless Republic, written without a crown, Anna Kay, who was the author of the book that you nominated as your History Book of the Year.

It's a wonderful book. It's a really wonderful book. Everything connects. So Anna is with us. Thanks so much for joining us, Anna. Oh, it's such a pleasure. I'm quite a Restless History groupie, so I'm feeling a bit starstruck.

Well, we are also starstruck because I just finished reading the restless republic and i it would be i would have nominated as my history book of the year as well so too late the moment's passed we're both fanboying here you both can that's fine so anna charles i had his head chopped off the salient thing about this is that it's something that this is not why people went to war against the king in the Civil War, right the way up to the moment of his execution, large numbers of people on the parliamentarian side, very opposed to it. This begs the question, what on earth are they going to put in its place? What's the process? What do they decide on? Well, the amazing thing is, and it is really amazing, that at the point when Charles I

is executed, when the blade hits his neck, nothing has been decided. And there's no clarity about whether this is just the execution of an errant king, whether it's the removal of the Stuart dynasty, or whether it's the end of kingship itself. I mean, it is completely at large, that question. It's because the execution had been kind of hurried through on the back of an army coup, basically, because as you say, the Civil War hadn't been about whether there should be a republic or whether there should be a monarchy. It was about kind of what form the monarchy should take

and what form the church should take. So it had been rushed through very quickly and it took a matter of weeks before the kind of formulation was agreed upon as to what came next. So the first question that had to be decided on was whether just the House of Commons could act alone, which is what had led to the execution of the King, or whether the House of Lords still had a place in the constitution. And there was a vote on that. It was quite close run. Among those who voted for the retention of the House of Lords was Oliver Cromwell, interestingly. And Oliver Cromwell at this point is, I mean, he's not even

the leader of the army, is he? No, I mean, he's a very senior figure in the army, but he's not number one. And he's not the sort of leading light of the trial of Charles I. He was out on the road when the decision was made to purge parliament, which was what was the kind of precursor to the trial. So he's one of the crowd, if you like, of people who are at the centre of things, but he's not number one. So anyway, so essentially, there's a kind of terrible kind of kerfuffle in the weeks after the execution of Charles I when working out what the new constitutional formulation is going to be is under discussion. And to cut to the chase, what is decided upon is that the House of Lords is defunct, and that what they call a Commonwealth, which is sort of

a republic in modern lingo, is the regime that is determined in its place. And that will be run by parliamentary bigwigs in alliance with the army, but there's obviously a tension there from the very beginning because the parliamentary bigwigs and the army officers, well, I mean, I'm being very, very simplistic, but the army tend to be more radical, don't they, than the people in parliament? This is one of the big tensions of the period. So on the one hand, you've got the army, which had become very fired up with particularly sort of religious kind of and political radicalism during the course of the 1640s. And then you've got what we call Parliament, which at this stage is the House of Commons. And it's not just the House of Commons, but it's the House of Commons minus about half its MPs who have been deliberately excluded, purged in something called Pride's Purge

on the basis that they're not radical enough. So you've got two, as it were, relatively radical groupings, but the army more radical, even than the purged parliament. And during the course of the 1649, some of the people who are purged come back into the House of Commons, so it gets a bit more moderate. And the tension between the two is one of the big kind of fissures of the period. And Anna, meanwhile, there are people who are even more radical in their ambitions of what might happen. And I suppose the most famous of these in 1649 is Gerard Winstanley, who is a man who leads a group of people called the Diggers. So can you tell us about them? The Diggers. Well, many of us first

encountered the Diggers in a song by Billy Bragg, which I don't know if anyone listens to anymore. But yeah, they were a group of radicals of a very kind of otherworldly sort. I mean, essentially what happens is during the 1640s, during the kind of otherworldly sort. I mean, essentially what happens is during the 1640s, during the course of the war, there's all sorts of institutions that you're used to are thrown up in the air and all sorts of things are challenged that had been absolutely taken for granted forever, like bishops and, you know, the monarchy and so on. And so various groups come to light coming up with quite sort of wacky ideas about what a new way of doing things might look like. And among these is this actually very small group, but they came to be very well known, called the Diggers.

And they're led by this rather dreamy figure called Gerard Winstanley, who was a failed cloth merchant. And who, having had an emotional breakdown, moved to the countryside. And when he was walking one day through his fields in Surrey, he has this great vision, that sort of epiphany, that the answer to everyone's problems is that land ownership should sort of evaporate. And instead, if people worked together and planted the soil and tilled together in sort of common endeavour,

there would be enough for everyone. I mean, it's not a very carefully thought through political programme. It's a sort of dreamy, optimistic, uplifting vision of the future. He's a teenager, basically. Well, the thing I love about it is that the place that they end up kind of settling and digging is the same place that John Lennon had his house in the 60s. I mean, I don't know if you've ever been to St. George's Hill.

There's something very imagined. Well, it's impossible to get on it because it's now a gated community. It is. I tried to go and find the spot where Winstanley had started planting his beans, but you can't get in because it's got sort of cameras and it's got these ginormous mansions that each cost, you know, £50 million. Golf courses.

Golf course, yeah, I know. Talk about sort of upending of, you know, 50 million pounds. I mean, it's a golf course. Yeah, I know. Talk about sort of upending of, you know, his vision. Anyway, so he, yeah, so he sets about doing this. Much to the bafflement of a lot of people round and about. But, you know, it's part, I suppose, of the spirit of the age that these kind of utterly sort of innovative or, you know, unexpected takes on the world get oxygen in a way that they wouldn't have done before. So how many people does he get? And it's kind of like a commune, isn't it? It's like an agrarian commune. How many people does he get? So he manages to recruit about 50 people from Cobham in Surrey. And there's the guy who's a

shoemaker, and there's a guy who's a brick brickmaker and there's somebody's second son and so on. And they all trot up the hill to St. George's Hill, which is basically a bit of kind of untilled land, actually in the next door parish, which turns out to be a bit of a mistake. And they start planting their beans and peas and things there. And they start publishing about it, which is one of the crucial things.

So even though it's only a really quite small operation, people start reading about this because when Stanley's own account of how this is going to free everybody from, you know, the sort of captivity of ownership is, that's getting out there. And does it end well? Well, funnily enough, Tom, it doesn't end well. It doesn't end well. And it doesn't end well, not because the new Republican regime, you know, is appalled by this radicalism. The new Republican regime in the form of the head of the army, Thomas Fairfax, who goes out to see what's going on, thinks it's all rather touching and kind of harmless and aren't bothered by it really.

But the people who are really appalled by it are the next door neighbours who are very respectable. And the thought of these sort of slightly hippie-ish figures, you know, with their dreamy account of how property ownership is going to dissolve is appalling to them. So basically, these guys are eventually hounded out by the people from the next door parish determined to get rid of the weirdos. Kind of militant nimbyism. Yeah, exactly. Exactly that. Exactly that. So there's kind of the radical extremes on the left, you might say, but then there are also still royalists who are active, aren't there? And perhaps the most famous is this extraordinary woman. Well, tell us about her. Yes. The person that I talk about at some length is this amazing woman called Charlotte Countess

of Derby, who was actually a French woman. She was Charlotte de la Tremouille as her maiden name. And she married the Earl of Derby, a big landowner. And so obviously Charles I executed in 1649. England is under the control of the sort of victorious parliamentarians, but lots of other bits of Charles I's dominions are still to be kind of brought to heel. And the sort of last one really to fall is the Isle of Man. And Charlotte, Countess of Derby, is on the Isle of Man because it's part of the Stanley family, her husband's family estates. And so they've kind of withdrawn, they sort of retreated to the Isle

of Man. And they invite any royalists who want to join them to come to sort of mass on the Isle of Man ready for a reinvasion, which they're totally ill-equipped to do. But she manages to hold it till the last moment, really, with great drama. I mean, what I love about it is that there is a lot of drama and there's a lot of back and forth, but it's not quite as vicious. In a civil war war the aftermath is often incredibly bloody and disputatious and repressive so you know the spanish civil war or something but the english civil war i one of the real the things that surprised me about your book is you don't get that sense so there's a sort of is it weird to talk about a kind of sportsmanship in the sort of you know

she's a defeated opponent but they she's not humiliated. She's not dragged through the streets. And that's the case with a lot of royalists, isn't it? Not put to the death. Her husband is though, isn't he? Yeah. So what happens is that she and her husband hold up on the Isle of Man. And then, of course, in 1651, Charles II, so who has been in exile, son of Charles I, reappears on the scene riding down into England from Scotland with a lot of Scots in his makeshift army to try and retake the kingdom. And the Earl of Derby goes to join him and Charlotte is left to hold the Isle of Man. Charles II is defeated at the Battle of Worcester, famously goes on the run and hides in an oak tree in Boscable Wood for a while. But the Earl of Derby is captured and he is executed. Now, even the fact that he was executed was considered to be

quite hardcore by people on both sides. Again, Oliver Cromwell, among others, argued that he should be showed clemency in the end, partly because of the kind of lobbying of people who had fought against him during the Civil War up in the Northwest. He is executed. But it's quite telling, as you say, Dominic, because there was very little kind of bloodlust there, even though the Derbys, I mean, Charlotte Cantor Derby had during the Civil War itself, had herself led the defense of Latham House, their big estates up in the northwest, in a prolonged siege. Lots of people were killed and so on. But the sort of appetite for bloody retribution is surprisingly kind of curtailed or sort of limited, given what had just gone on.

But what about financial retribution? Because the government is basically bankrupt and presumably all these royalists with their estates must be very tempting to fleece them. That's another thing I think you just have to sort of remember about the English Civil War and our revolution, which definitely was a revolution in my view, is that it's not like a kind of let's bring down the aristocracy

and execute all the dukes kind of revolution. It's a lot of it's to do with religion and about extent of royal power and so when the when the republic comes to the fore they're not trying to kind of exterminate the the sort of the aristocracy but what they are as you say is broke and so they're very keen to raise money and so the formulation that's um hit upon which is i mean one of the things that i always think is amazing about this period is how well they manage the kind of admin of it all, because there's so much admin involved in essentially resting the property of the defeated royalists, granting them back a fifth of the value of their estates, and then forcing them to pay a big fine, which is what they do in the end, to regain the rest of their estates, which is quite a kind of clever way of

realising a lot of money very quickly, which they can then use to pay the army and do various other things. So for example, in the case of the Derbys, even though they're about as hard bitten a lot of royalists as you could imagine, by the end of the period, by the end of the 1650s, they essentially have managed to regain all their estates, which happened pretty much across the piece eventually, I mean, at a big financial cost, but nonetheless, without actually losing land. There's one more person we want to talk about before the break, but just before we do, is one reason that there's not more repression and there's not more sort of bloodshed?

I mean, you talk about the Commonwealth regime, but also the Royalists. Is it the case that actually most people, the vast majority of people who are probably no more interested in politics than people are today, that most people are instinctive royalists and the revolution has happened sort of despite them rather than because of them and the regime knows, the people running the regime for all their millenarian kind of apocalyptic enthusiasm and some of them anyway they know they can't push the public too far because the public are kind of grumblingly plodding along as they always do it's really interesting question i mean i mean yes i think

it's true that the you know the vast majority of people weren't clamoring for a republic most people didn't even know what that meant what that was was. There's not a lot of republicanism around in the 17th century. But on the other hand, it is very telling that when Charles II re-enters England in 1651 with his standard held high, ready for everyone to join up and say, you know, hooray, the monarchy is back. This is what we always wanted. Practically nobody joins him. I think there's also a big thing which is just about people want some peace you know they've had a war for seven eight nine years and they haven't been able to you know kind of blow down their next crops because the seed corn's all been fed the horses of an army and so on so i think even more than people being inherently royalist i think

people inherently just want to get on with life and there's all sorts of unsatisfactory things that might be happening kind of up there or over there. But ultimately, the power of that desperate desire for peace and normality is the biggest thing. And presumably a constitutional settlement, oven ready, one might almost say. We love those. Yeah. So all the oven-ready constitutional settlements over the course of the decade turn out not to be as entirely oven-ready as perhaps their promoters say. And so actually, this yearning for peace, this yearning for some kind of a chance to breathe never actually arrives. And so I'm wondering, do people just kind of block everything out,

the vast mass of the people? Do they just kind of ignore what's happening? Or are there people who are changing their minds and changing their loyalties in response to all the kind of convulsions and changes that are happening? I think for the vast majority of people, you know, what the kind of franchise was was or what the sort of constitutional formulation was, whether there was a, you know, a protectorate or a commonwealth or whatever. I think it meant very little to most people. I think most people, you know, notice what the sort of form of worship is in the parish church that they go to, you know, week in, week out. They notice who the people are who are calling the shots, the county assizes and the justices of the peace and that kind of thing.

Because the vast majority of government in the 17th century is local. The central state is tiny. The scale of it compared to anything that we'd recognise today is micro. So I think they're clearly those who are very political, who are mostly in Westminster or, you know, as MPs or, you know, participants in big politics who care intensely about all that stuff. But I think for the vast majority of people, that's quite a long way away. And one of the things I wanted to try and do writing the book is to get more of a sense of that, because I think, you know, we can all home in much too much on, you know, what the bill that was introduced into parliament on tuesday afternoon was and actually if you're you know if you're a an innkeeper in in lancashire you know so what but tom tom mentions people changing their minds or sort of trimming their their their their colors or whatever um and my favorite character i think in the book which

probably says a great deal about my own instincts and privileges. It's this guy, Marchmont Needham, who was initially a firebrand newspaperman in favor of the royalists, wasn't he? And then he just completely changes. So he ends up running Mercurius Politicus. I mean, some people say he's the first great newspaperman because he basically, he tailors his opinions to the regime, doesn't he? That's unheard of. Well, I mean, nobody involved with the rest of his history would ever behave like that, I think it's fair to say. No.

So tell us a bit about him and tell us whether he's, is he as cynical and ruthless as he appears, or is there a case to be made for him? But anyway, tell us who he is. Okay, so yeah, March McNeidham. So he is something that you could literally never have been in any previous generation, which is a newspaper editor, because the rise of newspapers is a big, fascinating thing that happens during the 1630s and 40s. And Marchmont Needham, actually, he starts very originally, starts off as a

parliamentarian newspaper man. Then he switches to editing a paper with a royalist line. And then just after Charles I's execution, he is captured and put in prison by the new Republican regime because he writes this wonderful, utterly sort of scurrilous, excoriating prose in his newspapers. It's easy to think of the idea of 17th century newspaper as being a really heavy going, you know, sort of stodgy thing to read. But actually, if you read these now, they're still around.

Anyway, so March McNeill is put in prison by the new Republican regime because he publishes this pro-royalist newspaper that's full of sort of slanderous caricatures of Oliveriver cromwell as he called he calls him the town bull of ely you know characterizing some kind of monstrous boorish figure but then um because as we've been talking about because the regime has a quite a significant pr problem because it wasn't brought to being on a tide of popular delight and excitement. You know, it was a military coup that brought the Republic into being. They've got a real problem with how to kind of win people's hearts and minds.

Made all the trickier because the massive bestseller of the early 1650s is a book that is purports to be Charles I's sort of final sort of musings called Icon Basilica, which goes through scores and scores of editions. So what happens is that Marchmont Needham is hired by the Republican regime, who he had just been insulting daily or weekly in his paper, to start this new paper, Mercurius Politicus, which is to be a kind of, you know, a great sort of standard bearer for the delights and joys of the new republic.

And so he, you know, he is a turncoat completely. I mean, he switches between these different sides, but I don't think that's, and probably, I don't know, I'm not a journalist, but I suspect journalists would say themselves today that just because you might, you know, work for titles that have different editorial lines, it doesn't mean that you are sort of morally bankrupt. You know,'s just you know you um it's just can we think of can we think can we think of can we think of someone who writes for newspaper who isn't necessarily morally

bankrupt because of it dominic i can't imagine who you're talking about somewhere really well let's should we take a break and we can ponder that question? Just quickly, one last thing. Most people are like, oh, Martin McNeidham. He's changing though. Yeah, I'm not changing the subject. I'm actually returning to, I'm like a dog returning to his vomit, Tom. Martin McNeidham, most people are like him in the 1650s, aren't they? I mean, they're not, you know, when I studied this at school or when people read about it, the tendency of historians is to be drawn to the,

is always to be drawn to the, is always to be drawn to the marginal, to the extremes, to the people who are the most articulate and the most politicized. But aren't most people, I mean, as you were saying, most people, it's extraordinary to me that most people do just kind of, even though they were probably monarchists deep down, they just kind of crack on and carry on with life. They trim their cloth to the demands of the new regime, whether it be a parliamentarian, whether it be Cromwell, because Cromwell carries out a coup in 1653, doesn't he, to take power. And once again, you know, people are maybe grumbling about it

in villages a week later, but they just kind of plod along with life. The reality is that most people aren't great sort of ideological standard bearers. They're trying to get on, trying to buy their neighbour's field, whatever it is. And most people didn't fight for either side in the Civil War. Most people kept their heads down. And a lot of people, like March McNeidham, were looking around them thinking, well, maybe there's an opportunity for me here to make a bit of money. Yet again, Dominic cast himself as the voice of Middle England.

And with that customary manoeuvre, I think we should go to a break. And when we come back, Anna, you mentioned that Cromwell stages a coup in 1653. Let's talk about that when we get back. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment it's your weekly fix of entertainment news

reviews splash of showbiz gossip and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works we have just launched our members club

if you want ad free listening bonus episodes and early access to live tickets head to therestisentertainment.com that's therestisentertainment.com. She saw strange things.

A Christ-like figure surrounded by children bathed in light. A sinister white citadel being attacked by phalanxes of the wise. A great oak whose roots were so shallow it crashed to the ground. Then more immediate scenes, a herd of oxen, one with the perfect face of Oliver Cromwell, who appeared benign at first, but then pinned her down with his great pointed horn, pressed to her chest. The town bull of Ely had taken a new guise. Anna, that's from your wonderful book, The Restless Republic. And it's describing a vision that a young woman called Anna Trapnell had in the autumn of 1653 against the backdrop of the coup that we mentioned just before the break. So first of all, who is Anna Trapnell? And then what's the

significance of this vision she is having of Cromwell as a bull. Yeah, so Anna Trapnell is the daughter of a shipwright, grows up in the east end of London, not the poorest of the poor, but certainly from the kind of working communities along the River Thames. And she's orphaned in her teens, and she is a member of one of the new religious sects that have come to the fore during the course of the 1640s. She's what's called the fifth monarchist. And she is given to these extraordinary visions. She kind of falls into trances when she starts speaking in kind of poetic verses. And then she describes when she comes to what it is she's seen. And the reason this

sort of unlikely figure comes to be like a household name, which she does, is because she starts having visions which seem to foretell really big political things that then happen. So she has a vision of Oliver Cromwell expelling the MPs from the House of Commons. And then four days later, Oliver Cromwell does indeed march into the House of Commons and tells all the MPs to clear off and says, you know, in words that famously we hashed later, you know, you've sat here too long for all the good you've done. Essentially, because he's he comes back from from basically conquering Ireland and Scotland. And he and his men who are covered in blood and seen all the horror feel that the that the MPs of the run parliament have been complacent and haven't brought about the kind of degree of reform of church or state that they hoped for. But Anna Trapnell becomes very significant because having foretold this and one or two other things that

then seemed to happen, she then starts to have visions of Oluwakamal, one of which you just read, where instead of being a kind of heroic figure, he becomes a sinister figure. And those people who are unhappy with his actions seize upon her as God's spokeswoman and try to use her to sort of discredit the regime that Cromwell is part of. And do we know what happened to her or did she just disappear from the records? Well, so a group of MPs who are very unhappy with Cromwell dismissing the Rump Parliament decide that they're going to take her on a sort of campaign. And they take her to Cornwall, which is because their MP is from Cornwall, to introduce her to people and get her to sort of speak of her visions, sort of spread the word that maybe Cornwall isn't the answer. It all ends, so there's a kind of, poor woman, she gets sort of presented to various groups of people in Cornwall

and told to speak her truth. There's great discontent locally amongst the sort of, the JPs and so on that she's sort of disruptive for, so she's put on trial. And then anyway, she eventually ends up in prison in Bridewell, which she's horrified about because she's a very respectable young woman. And Bridewell is for strumpets and all that kind of stuff. Bridewell's full of kind of murderers and prostitutes and things.

And she's, you know, this is not her world. You know, she might have kind of slightly strange visions, but she's not part of the underbelly of society in the way that she felt these people around her were. But she comes out having utterly indignant at this treatment. And then having, until this point, not, you know, not particularly been a political creature. She was somebody who had visions. She becomes very seized that this regime is in fact completely corrupt and doomed to failure. And her own treatment and injustice that she suffered becomes a kind of talisman of that. And so she becomes a spokeswoman for people we might refer to as Cromwell sceptics. Yes.

I mean, essentially Cromwell in getting rid of Parliament altogether is behaving much worse than Charles I had done. Well, this is the great irony. I mean, you know, and I say it as someone who's, I don't, I'm not a kind of taker of sides on it. You know, I have great sympathy and sortromwell in terms of wanting to dispense with MPs who didn't agree with you, wanting to extend your powers, wanting to tell people how to worship, wanting to tax people hard. I mean, Cromwell is, you know, he does it in spades on each can compared to Charles I. Cromwell's in a very difficult position though, Anna, isn't he? I mean, he's just trying to institute efficient government.

OK, Dominic. The Rump Parliament has been very corrupt and incompetent. I think Cromwell's greatly maligned here. So, Dominic, I have to come in on this whole topic because if we're talking about Cromwell's scepticism, it is, of course, an absolutely living tradition on the other side of the irish sea and when uh i mentioned that i'd be talking to you and we you know the theme of um the episode would be the english republic uh somebody said that she'd be very keen on the podcast but she wouldn't be listening to this

because cromwell was the epitome of evil, essentially. And we can't talk about the English Republic without referring to its policy in Ireland. So just very briefly, give us your sense of how Cromwell behaves in Ireland. Is he kind of completely beyond the pale there? Is he behaving according to the rules of law? How bad is his behaviour? how bad is the regime that he sets up in Ireland after he comes back to England yeah so I mean I think my big uh headline would be English people's behavior in Ireland is appalling and there's absolutely the English attitude and in fact Scottish attitude to Ireland is um is sort of shockingly denigratory. Irish people were considered to be not really kind of full human beings, you know, because they were Catholics.

So is it more than that? Is it a Protestant Catholic thing or is it something more than that? It's definitely a Protestant Catholic thing. It's also a kind of the colonised and the coloniser thing. You know, Ireland had been colonised by the English, you know, well, right back in the Middle Ages originally, but pretty, pretty sort of comprehensively during the 16th and 17th centuries. So it's a sort of superiority, I suppose, of the colonizer. But it also is definitely religion. You know, the Irish Catholic, they answer to the Pope,

who's not a, you know, not an Englishman. And, you know, who's, it's a sort of treacherous, treasonous thing to do anyway the reason for saying that is that um the the whole nature of england's interaction with ireland throughout this period is one that i think we you know it's obviously horrible to us now where the even the formulation long before the execution of charles i before even the civil war in england had broken out was that uh that the investors who put up the money to send English soldiers to Ireland would be paid in lands that were confiscated from the defeated Irish. So then to sort of home in on the specifics, Oliver Cromwell is sent to Ireland

by the Republican regime to basically reconquer it. And because it by 1649 what time of the up Charles I's execution it's still not under the thumb of the English parliamentarians and in the course of that campaign unquestionably awful atrocities are carried out on the battlefield in a number of particular uh cases um and generally involving um the execution or the killing of people who'd already surrendered and involving the killing of lots of civilians. And that, I think, is without question. I mean, and Cromwell's leading that campaign. You can't excuse him that. I think what you can say contextually is that the treatment of the Irish on the battlefield wasn't out of all kilter with what was happening during the Thirty Years' War in terms of the treatment of defeated people in conflict of this time

in a kind of religiously motivated context. So it's not kind of uniquely awful, but it is awful. But the thing in a way which I would argue has much bigger sort of long-term practical implications is then the mass dispossession of Irish landowners that follows. And the way you tell that story in the book is really interesting because you tell it through a character called William Petty who, in a different context, so he goes to survey Ireland, doesn't he? And he's an extraordinary figure because, on the one hand,

he's part of that very dark story and yet in a different context one would see him he's a political scientist he's a sort of almost a proto-enlightenment kind of thinker he's friends with robert boyle isn't he he's really in with all these kind of scientific and now he's part of the scientific revolution i suppose he's part of that that milieu that we often think of as coming a little bit later because we think oh the 1650s is all drab puritans banning christmas and being horrible to the irish but actually those those two stories through petty are completely intertwined so do you think sort of repression and um the sort of anglicization of ireland could you almost see that as part of that sort of scientific that proto-scientific kind of worldview well i think what happens is that as

you say i mean just because this is something that's happening across across europe across the west at this point which is what we would now what we we would have judged to be sort of modern science is beginning you know copernicus and galileo and so on have kind of given a new view of what the sort of nature of the universe is, and scientific examination through experimentation rather than just through reading Aristotle is happening all over the place or beginning to. And so you've got a kind of confluence, I suppose,

of something which is happening anyway, beginning to. William Harvey saying that the blood circulates around the body, it doesn't just go outwards and then disappear, kind of intersects with a moment of great change. And what Ireland, what happens with Ireland is that there, because there is a sort of, you know, a kind of whole new dawn in Ireland, for good or bad, and a kind of redistribution of land, the need to kind of rebuild infrastructure and towns and trade and so on after the devastation of the wars. This community of kind of new thinkers who are thinking about economics as well and natural resources and so on, as well as about the elements, come together. And so William Petty is a very good example of that.

And quite a lot of the scientists of the mid-1650s are interested in Ireland because they see it as a sort of, okay, take a country and imagine that it has so many rivers and so many bridges. How might you build something more prosperous from these parts? So I think it's an incredibly interesting time for the, as I say, these things coming together, sort of how are we going to do this thing with a whole world of new ways of thinking, which are much more kind of original and much more evidence-based than had been the case before. I mean, I felt slightly chilling about, more than chilling about him. Because you introduce him, we mentioned the instance of the finger post earlier. So he provides inspiration for an episode that happens in the instance of the finger post, where he is, a colleague wanted to dissect the body of a woman who's been hanged for murdering her baby.

And she comes back to life she's you know she she was never dead and there's a sense when he goes over to ireland that he is he's he's kind of committing dissection on a great living entity and the atrocities that i mean that i mean it's not just dispossession is it it's forced transplantation i mean it's the kind of thing that people from the Assyrians through to the Nazis were doing. I mean, it's on a horrendous scale. And he is kind of complicit in that, even though Henry Cromwell, who goes out to Cromwell's son and he serves with him. I mean, he slightly reigns in the full monstrous scale of it, but it's still, I mean, terrible. I mean, there's no doubt that what went on in Ireland in the 1650s is,

I mean, completely terrible. It's ethnic cleansing on a massive scale. But apropos William Petty, this scientist, this Oxford professor of anatomy who's out there and who then undertakes the mapping of Ireland that is necessary for this redistribution of land to happen. No, I mean, I think he's pretty clear that he thinks that transplantation, as the policy is called, is misconceived and is unfair.

He still does it. Oh, he still does it. Oh, yeah. He's only obeying orders. Well, he undertakes the mapping process, which then is the basis for the land redistribution. So, yeah, I mean, he doesn't resign and say, I'll have no part of this. It's shocking. Equally, he mean, he doesn't resign in saying, I'll have no part of this. It's shocking. Equally, he says, if this is going to happen,

it should at least be based on good maps and good evidence, because otherwise it's going to be even worse. The picture of Cromwell that comes out of your book is, I would say, reasonably sympathetic. So he's a very human figure. He's not, I mean human figure. In religious terms, by the standards of Charles I's reign, he was reasonably radical. But certainly in the mid-1650s, he's a pragmatist who is grappling with the enormous challenge of putting the state back

together and satisfying the different factions and so on. So for example, the dilemma about whether or not he will be king, I mean, he doesn't just sort of leap at the chance and say, great, a supreme power is what I've always wanted. He agonizes, doesn't he, about whether or not to accept the crown. There are some people who sort of, probably more moderate people who think he should because he's a country needs a king and then there are the old army radicals who think he he shouldn't i mean do you think in terms of his sort of attempting to restore order do you think he deserves high marks or not i think he deserves high marks for it's not about self-aggrandizement and i think that's

quite unusual in people in very high positions historically. I think on the whole, the kind of, yeah, you know, yes, I'll take supreme authority. Thank you very much. And, you know, and that country has some money and, you know, jobs for my children, et cetera, is usually what you expect. And I think Cromwell, to me, has taken on his own terms, has an integrity that i think is pretty pretty rare actually amongst people in that sort of position of power i think he's not a good politician because he although yes you're right that he he is trying to kind of reconcile what the army wants how to keep the peace you know what the what the um mps and so on. He doesn't manage it well, ultimately, because

his eyes are always going up. They're always looking up to heaven to see what God's, you know, I always think of him as like somebody divining for water with those sticks, you know, waiting to see when they're going to twitch and cross over and that being the thing that determines. So there's this great sort of new kind of intense military regime that's set up called the Major Generals in the mid-1650s. And it's really prompted by the fact that a force sent to the Caribbean to try and grab some land from Spanish fails desperately. And Cromwell is absolutely devastated by this defeat, not so much because of the loss of lives and so on, because if God was on his side and approved of him, he wouldn't have sent him a defeat. And then so this business of setting up the major general's regime is a sort of direct response to that.

I've got to do more. I've got to go harder. I've got to be more reforming. I mean, I think he is trying to he is trying to reconcile all these things, but it's pretty difficult to do that when you've got the kind of endless wild card of the signs that God is sending you. Right. And so if you were thinking that, and I guess that most of the more radical supporters of the Republic do think that, the fact that Cromwell dies, his son, Richard Cromwell, briefly becomes Lord Protector and then it all fizzles out. And then essentially, the question of what do we do? How do we get out of this? It becomes such an imponderable one that God sends a general up in Scotland and his extraordinary wife to solve the problem. Yes. So as you say, Cromwell dies having not managed to find a satisfactory kind of constitutional compromise. They try all these different things, you know, having something

called the protectorate in two different ways, him maybe becoming king and then he refuses to do it. And then on his deathbed, he names his successor, which he's allowed under the constitution to do. And he names his poor hapless son, Richard Cromwell, who knew nothing of this until, you know, three hours before his father dies. And then is somehow expected to be able to sort it all out, which clearly is. I mean, one of the things I think is a bit, it's a big ask. And actually to Dominic's point about, you know, what's our kind of scorecard on Cromwell? I mean, it might seem a trivial point compared to some of the other things he does. But what an awful thing to do to your child, to your son,

to just hand him all this without, not having said, I'm going to do it, so let me make sure you know these people and you've learned about this, and just chucking it at him at the last possible minute. Anyway, it ends terribly. And he's given the shove very quickly. But the chaos that results, as you say, is something that a number of people looking on, thinking, what on earth can we do

about this? But most of them have no means to intervene, because it's basically they're still, as is the thing, all the way through this period, there is a great big whopping, you know, 10, 20,000 strong army backing up the regime in the middle of things. But the one person who is in a position to do something is the general who's in charge of the army in Scotland, who's just a remarkable figure, George Monk, who's kind of so little talked about in the study of British history, which I find amazing given how sort of seismic his intervention was, because it is essentially him. He was a friend of Oliver Cromwell's. He was a very loyal parliamentarian general of the north of Scotland. And that he is going to stand up for parliament and he is prepared to march on London and fight to the final drop of blood in his veins to see them allowed to meet and to kind of, you know, to carry out their sort of constitutional responsibility. So hold on, he's standing up.

So George Monk, when he decides, and he makes this extraordinary decision, he's going to lead his troops down to London. He's not doing that, in inverted commas, to restore Charles II. It's to restore Parliament. And those are two different things. Completely different things.

He is absolutely clear this is not about restoring Charles II. The fact that he would be in a position potentially to do that was obvious. And so there have been various attempts to send kind of messages with kind of letters from Charles II. I mean, he refuses to even open them. His intervention is to allow Parliament to meet because the army's expelled Parliament again, and there's just an army kind of junta in control. And that doesn't seem to be a kind of bit of obfuscation. It seems to be very clearly held in his view, in his mind, that that ship has sailed, we've sold all the world lands,

we've melted down the crown jewels, you know, that's gone. This is about having a republic that's based on sort of this kind of proper parliamentary sovereignty. But Anna, this is where his wife comes in, right? Who I mean, seems the most extraordinary woman, Anne, who is from a very humble background, who actually has a big miscarriage once she's married George Monk. And he's completely devoted to her.

And she is a bit of a royalist. And they're very much a kind of a team. And is she kind of playing a crucial role in saying, well, what about bringing back the king? She plays an utterly crucial role. I mean, it is an amazing thing because he was the son of a knight, you know, it's a pretty gentry, established family. She was the laundry woman at the Tower of London when he was a prisoner there in 1640. She literally came and, you know, collected his socks. Washed his pants. But when push comes to shove and everyone's looking at the chaos of the death of Oliver Cromwell, it is she who has the kind of relationship with her husband.

And it's spoken and unbowed by sort of convention who says to him, surely you've got to do something. Surely you've got to act. You've got to intervene, both initially to intervene for the restoration of parliament. And then when it becomes clear, having done that, that the Rump Parliament, which is the thing that gets restored, is going to demand that General Monk do various things to sort of oppress the city of London. So I want to say, surely, surely now you've got to think about the king. Not so much because I think she was always, you know, died in the Royal Royalist, but because I think she was very clear-sighted and she didn't have some hang-ups about,

we can't possibly do this, that ship sailed. She just sort of saw that that was going to be the only way that this was going to end well. And is there an alternative universe in which it ends differently, in which it doesn't, the 1650s don't end with the restoration of Charles II? Or do you think, so in other words, is the story of this decade a series of experiments that for different contingent reasons don't work?

Or is it genuinely the story of a cul-de-sac, a kind of dead end, and the king was always coming back because most people deep down were monarchists? I don't think it was inevitable. I think if Oliver Cromwell, when he was dying, had named his second son Henry Cromwell rather than his oldest son Richard Cromwell as his successor, for instance, Henry Cromwell got very able, soldier, politician, moderate,

done a very good job of reconstruction in Ireland, then I think it could well have, it could well have sort of taken root. And so what then? It would be a hereditary Lord Protectorship? Yeah, it would be a kind of, you know, it's a sort of Lord Steward of the Nation kind of thing. So, I mean, I suppose you could argue about, you know, to what extent is that actually not just sort of monarchy? Because that would be filling a monarchy-shaped hole, wouldn't it? Yeah, it would be. It would be. But nonetheless, but nonetheless it you know it wouldn't have been the restoration of the monarchy on the terms of you know from before the revolution in the way that that did that did that did then happen but i think the thing to say is that i think we i think

it's really um narrow-minded to think of it as a cul-de-sac and i think because constitutionally it was a failure the regime or the series of different regimes that were tried but this period as in terms of the influence that it had or what was to come afterwards just had some soaring significance because so many of the things although the you know that that came to the fore or were first experienced or were kind of um kind of flourished during those years. Religious toleration, for example. The Great Britain as a construct, because there was a union between England and Scotland

during this period. The size of the state really expanding to something which actually meant you had something big enough to have an army and fund overseas expeditions and all this kind of stuff. The idea that Parliament, that MPs in Parliament are the basis of sovereignty. All these things really originate or germinate and kind of start to grow during this decade.

And for all that comes 60 and 60, the kind of constitutional formulation returns to monarchy. All those things are still there. So loads of interesting thoughts there, Anna. And your book, The Restless Republic, Britain Without a Crown, I believe is now out in paperback. Am I right? Yes. With absolutely top historians endorsing it, as I understand, Tom. Yeah.

Tom Holland, not among them, I'm sad to say. Sadly, it wasn't his book of the year. Otherwise, he could have been on the cover. Tells its own rather lamentable story, doesn't it? Right. On that bombshell, Anna, thank you so much for joining us. It's an amazingly interesting story i i heartily recommend it and uh tom we'll be back next time with more

historical shenanigans of various kinds bye-bye bye-bye goodbye Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com.