The Rest Is History - 4. We’re all so 17th Century

Episode Date: November 9, 2020

Plague, pestilence and statue smashing are back in business. Has 2020 turned out to be the 17th Century in disguise? And if so, has Boris Johnson become the new Oliver Cromwell, determined to crack down on the excesses of Christmas? Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland suggest things now are not as bad as we thought. Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook 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 podcast that knows its plague from its pestilence. Do you know, I'm reading that from script and basically plague is pestilence, isn't it? But whatever. Okay, anyway, moving on. I'm Tom Holland. I'm a historian of the ancient world. And I am Dominic Sandbrook, historian of the moderns. Tom, that introduction was seamless. Beginning as I hope we carry on. Today, what we're going to ask is, what with pestilence, or plague, depending what you want to call it, statue smashing, the government on the verge of

treating Christmas as a time of solemn humiliation. Are we living through a 17th century moment? So we'll tease that out very shortly. But before that, we've had some interesting correspondence following our first two episodes. We have indeed, Tom. So our first episode, as you may remember, was about greatness. And we asked why, Tom, apart, we don't have any great people anymore. And we had now the British ambassador to Lugash. That is a splendid Return of the Pink Panther reference there. The British

ambassador to Lugash got in touch to say, he says, I think you may have underplayed Xi. The arc of development and change he will see to fruition is exactly is exactly what gets the great tag i'm not saying it's right but china has entered modernity and regained self-regard the evils will be glossed over as will the credit due to the west actually there's a lot of truth in that i think xi jinping will go down in chinese sort of memory is a great leader um but will he be called will he be called the great thing i mean that's that's will he be well in chinese maybe he will yeah well it's i mean it's it's you know we we said yet in in the episode that it's a greek thing um and so very suitably we have something from hypatia cassandra 2020 who suggests i think you have to be a conqueror or at least a unifier

erdogan would certainly like the title since he buried Ataturkism and brought back a more Ottoman mindset, but I don't think posterity would give it to him. Well, I guess it depends if he conquers Vienna. We'll have to wait and see. Yeah. Well, he has the self-image though, doesn't he? As great people do. He believes himself to be great and that's often half the battle. Anyway, other suggestions. We had The Queen and Jimmy Anderson. I assume they were both from you, Tom, right? I completely agree about Jimmy Anderson, yeah.

And Graham Burton wins this one with the very straightforward suggestion, Boris the Great Big Idiot. Martin Bright, the distinguished journalist, who was played by Matt Smith in the film Official Secrets, said that an admiral had a long lunch with him around 1999 and said, give me a militia and my own newspaper and I could provoke a civil war between England and Scotland tomorrow. I guess that would actually be quite a lot easier now than it was in 1999. Which of us hasn't dreamed of having his own militia in his own newspaper? I mean if I won the lottery they're the two things I would immediately you know I'd buy the Chipping Norton advertiser and set up my own branch of some guy who knows yeah you kind of want your

own militia don't you Tom? Yeah of course. Brixton Defence Force. Yes, I'd start with Brickston, then a next South London. And from there, I'd gradually move out and it would be the world. Well, we have one other point from John Zmirak before we move on. He says, an excellent podcast. What a fine judge he is. I would suggest that Tom consider whether, yeah, Tom, consider whether the moral claims to greatness filed by the like of Nelson Mandela are just a different means of asserting power. Yes, I mean, sainthood traditionally was a source of power, but not, I think, power in

the kind of Alexander the Great sense. So anyway, thanks to all those comments on the idea of greatness. In episode two, we wondered about the conditions required for a civil war to take place in a modern industrial country. The splendidly named General Whiskers got in touch with regard to the US and said, tricky to see how the current red and blue states of the USA could divide as formally. But with current so-called leadership, it is possible. Central states versus peripheral states, an interesting scenario. I did see one idea that the red states might want to break off and form their own country and the blue states could perhaps join Canada. Yeah, it's unrealistic, but not impossible, isn't it? I mean, that's how... It seems completely unrealistic to me. But if you were going to imagine a nightmare scenario for the US

in the next, let's say in the next hundred years, so maybe when you and I are dead, but when our children are dead... Is that you getting at it? Yeah, I'm predicting something that's going to happen when I'm dead. I'm pretty confident that I won't be held to account for it. It's not utterly implausible to imagine secession, right? Or to imagine some kind of situation where you have the state governments no longer taking direction from the federal government.

I mean, you have these standoffs in the American system all the time. What you've got right now is this entrenched division, don't you, between the coasts and the centre, between the heartland and the kind of liberal metropolitan fringes. And you see that. I mean, that's the extraordinary thing about this election right now, is that despite the last four years, Donald Trump's support has been so resilient. And these are people who, you know, now are going to say that the election was stolen from him and all the rest of it. So, you know, those divisions are not going to go away. And it's not entirely,

I mean, okay, it's very, very very unrealistic but strange things happen do you really think that canada would uh would annex yeah the restoration of british north america i mean that's basically what i live for and um yes and so so british english engagement in north america uh really yeah kind of kicked in in the 17th century, doesn't it, Dominic? Which enables us to pivot fluidly. That is actually seamless. That is seamless.

Yes. Yes. So it's time to turn our attention to this week's subject, pestilence and plague, statue bashing, solemnity at Christmas, civil war, plots,

all the rest of it. Tom Holland, are we actually returning to the 17th century? Well, first of all, give us some sense. A lot of people don't know, you know, won't know what we're talking about. So give us some sense of what happened. Okay, great tips. Elizabeth I dies. She gets succeeded by James VI of Scotland, Stuart King, who becomes James I of England. He is succeeded by his son, Charles I, who has a pointy beard and a sensational moustache. They end up in England, Scotland, Ireland as well, which the Stuart monarchy rules,

implodes into a civil war. Charles I has his head chopped off. A protectorate is established under Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell dies. Charles I's son, Charles II, is restored. Plague hits London in 1665. The following year, London burns down. Charles II is a merry monarch, has affairs with all kinds of people, including Nell Gwynne. He dies, is replaced by his brother, James who is a Catholic this is not popular with massive majority Protestant England who James II ends up getting chased out is replaced by William who is a Dutchman and this essentially establishes a kind of model that then goes through under the reign of Queen Anne into the 18th century. Good stuff, Tom. That was a bravura performance. People can do their A-levels after that.

So let's just go in on one of those things, maybe the plague, because that's the most obvious. Obviously, we're doing this on the first day of the lockdown. They had a lockdown too in London, didn't they, effectively, in 1665 when the plague hit? Yes, and the court retreats to Oxford, where the most entertaining detail, the antiquary Anthony Wood, who lived in Oxford, reports that they kind of camped out in the various Oxford colleges and so on. And when the court then left, when the plague had ended, people moved back in and discovered that the courtiers had left turds all over their accommodation. Yeah. Very nasty. They stand at Oxford Behaviour, surely.

Very nasty and beastly, Anthony Wood says. Yeah, and there's so many funny parallels, aren't there? So I was reading Samuel Pepys's diary. Pepys, as many people will know, is this guy who writes this fantastic diary during the 1660s of Charles II's restoration and life in London and so on. And Peep sort of says things like, you know, he doesn't want to get a wig. He doesn't want to get a new wig because he fears it will basically be sort of suffused with plague. Yeah, infected with plague virus. And he says, he wonders how many people are going to be getting wigs because they'll be so

worried that they're infected. And that's just like, you know, people disinfecting their post or whatever it is people do. And they're very alarmed about getting COVID. Yeah, I think, I mean, obviously, plague and pestilence has swept Britain across history. You know, we've heard all about them over the experience of this current pandemic. But I think that one of the things that is interesting about the 17th century experience of plague and catastrophes generally is that it's linked to a sense of climate change. So that is a kind of interesting parallel again today. Right, because this is the period of the Little Ice Age, isn't it? So temperatures dropped, I think, by about a degree, generally across Europe. Yeah, and there's a fantastic book by the great historian Geoffrey Parker,

Global Crisis, where he puts the experience of Britain, the implosion of Britain into civil war, the experience of pandemic against this backdrop of climate change, and he puts it in an entirely global perspective and kind of traces the sense that across the entire world, this is a devastating period of revolution, of war, of collapse. And whether future historians will look back at the early 21st century and say that the convulsions that we're living through were driven by climate change, I don't know. But it's kind of, it is an interesting parallel. But it's a terrifying parallel, right, Tom? Because I've read that book.

It's about 6,000 pages long. I mean, just a colossal book. And in that book, he points out that in much of Europe, the population in the 17th century actually dropped by about a third. In Germany, it fell by half. So in Germany, you've got the 30 years war going on. People are being kind of murdered, raped, butchered, tortured, left, right and centre in villages all across Germany.

And if you think, you know, one in every two people basically dies you get a sense of the sort of the massive cultural scar that that century left on people's sort of psyche well that's why i thought that it would be interesting to uh to look not only at the parallels of our present age with the 17th century but also the contrast because i thought that that would cheer people up because terrible though things may seem at the moment they're not as bad as they were and of course you know our experience of of of covid is as nothing compared to london's experience of of plague in 1665 about a hundred thousand people i think died in london in 16. That's about a quarter of the population. And, you know, there's all these stories about bodies being dumped in plague pits and all the rest of it.

We're not in that situation, are we? We are not in that situation. And of course, although we may feel now that the country is riven with divisions, they are nothing like the divisions that afflicted Britain over the course of the 17th century. And of course, particularly in the decades that had preceded the plague of London in 1665. So over the course of the 1640s and 50s, when England and Scotland too and Wales was really ravaged by violent civil war. I mean, on a kind of lethal scale, I think, Dominic. Yeah, I think more people died in the Civil Wars of the 1640s per head than died in either of the World Wars.

I mean, that tells you all you need to know. But you know what, Tom, talking about the divisions, something that I think is a fascinating parallel is the extent to which the divisions are driven by technology and new media. So in the 17th century, you have the printing press, you have pamphlets, you have the birth of newspapers, really. So people are reading these incredibly inflammatory newspapers telling them about atrocities that Protestants are suffering in Europe or that Catholics are supposedly carrying out in Ireland. And this is sort of whipping them up into a frenzy.

And really, is that so different from the extent to which people are whipped up into a frenzy by false information, misinformation on Twitter and Facebook and all the rest of it. It's a society struggling to manage an explosion of information, as we are. And also you have, I guess, what we would call the mainstream media being replaced by alternative news sources. And you very much have that. What's the mainstream media in the 17th century? Well, I suppose the mainstream media is is is um pamphlets that are licensed um right by the crown and of course as as the crown's authority particularly in london collapses and then goes completely in the 1650s you do have this

incredible explosion um and the the man who famously celebrates this is John Milton. The poet. The poet, author of Paradise Lost. Secretary to Cromwell during the Commonwealth. The most prominent international defender of the execution of Charles I. So in a sense, the kind of, you know, the chief of propaganda for Cromwell's regime. But he completely celebrates this idea, you know, the chief of propaganda for Cromwell's regime. But he completely celebrates this idea, you know, let a million flowers bloom. Freedom of speech,

completely. But of course, people, rather as we do now, people start to say, oh, I'm not actually sure whether we want this kind of stuff coming out. I think we need to try and rein it in, try and regulate it. So they have this whole freedom of speech battle as we do, right? I mean, this is a big issue for them. I suppose it's an old order trying to put a lid on new technological development, on a growing illiterate population. Is that a fair? Yeah, but it's also about the explosion of what it is possible to believe and to express publicly, because part of what the Civil War is about is religious. And if you live in a devoutly Christian country, which England certainly was in the 17th century, then what people are saying about religion matters

hugely. But a lot of people will be baffled by that, won't they? Because I remember when I did, you know, I loved the 17th century. I did it for A-level. But I can remember talking to an editor at a very big publishing house about 10 years ago. And I was telling him how brilliant the 17th century was. And he said, nobody ever buys books in the 17th century because it's all completely baffling. It's all about the placement of the altar. And, you know, are you allowed to have pictures of saints?

And are you allowed, is a priest, people are killing each other about what vestments a priest should wear or whatever, or what prayer book they use. To a lot of people that's completely baffling. Yes, I agree. And I think that that's why I say, you know, there's much greater interest in other periods of history that seem to be less baffling. But I really think the 17th century does matter. Religion matters because it's fundamental to people's sense of where the country is going. And if you have a passionate sense of what God wants, then it's important for most people in the middle of the 17th century that everybody in the country subscribes to that, because if they don't, the wrath of God will descend on the country. And so therefore, the question of what the national church should be,

what beliefs people subscribe to, is hugely significant. And part of what happens over the course of the 1650s, after the execution of the king, the establishment of the protectorate, is that that understanding starts to fragment and you get increasing numbers of religious groups who come to feel that it doesn't actually matter whether the whole country believes what you think. What matters is a kind of freedom of conscience, a freedom to express your religious views. And in a sense, you know, that is looking forward to the future. That is where ultimately the country will end up. Nice. All right. Perfect place to take a short break. And when we return, we're going to be answering some of your questions on the subject of everything so 17th century i'm marina hyde and i'm richard osmond 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 the resterestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. Do please subscribe, rate and review the pod if you've enjoyed it and get in touch with us on Twitter with your comments, questions, abuse and corrections. This one is from Jonathan Healy, who tweets as SocialHistoryFox.

I believe he's slagging off on Twitter in the past, but anyway, we'll let that go. A very, very, very distinguished historian of the 17th century and very active on Twitter, Dominic, so be careful what you say. I thought you were talking about me for a second until you mentioned the 17th century. Note that he says that we also have a ruler who has picked a fight with the episcopacy, i.e. bishops. He has a problematic relationship with Scotland and has now banned Guy Fawkes Knight. Who on earth could he be talking about, Tom Holland? So there he is,

I think, comparing Boris Johnson to James II, who did all those things, the Catholic monarch, who obviously was not very happy about Guy Fawkes' night. So who is Boris? I mean, Boris does seem quite a 17th century figure, doesn't he? Rumbustious, kind of boisterous, slightly unreliable, indeed very unreliable, some might say. Who is he? Charles II? Yes, I mean, when he came in after Theresa May, who was a kind of famously roundhead figure, sober and doer, I think there was a feeling on the part of his admirers that he was going to be a kind of merry monarch. And he'd be hanging out with orange sellers and the theatres would be open and there'd be cavaliers in ruffs and silks, roistering and doistering. But of course, the experience of the past year, he's basically turned into Oliver Cromwell. He's just rushed around banning everything and turning things down.

Although important to say, of course, famously, that people think Cromwell banned Christmas. So the banning Christmas is interesting, isn't it? So they kind of did ban Christmas because they didn't think the Puritans, this is, in the 1640s and 1650s, because they thought that Christmas shouldn't be all about jollity and presents and sort of stuffing yourself with chocolate. It should actually be about silent contemplation of the divinity of

Christ or whatever. Is that right? They were not in favour of giving liberty to carnal and sensual delights. Right. Which, of course course is pretty much what boris johnson is about which is well he is what he's about carnal delight he's about carnal and sensual delights isn't he i mean i think that's very much his kind of shtick um which is why by the way yes that he's kind of closing down shops and you know telling people that they can't gather and have fun is is kind of quite the transformation but cromwell himself there's this weird thing isn't it that people think cromwell was terribly door and that cromwell was theresa may and yet cromwell himself actually was a much more jolly figure i mean there's sort of stories about him at his daughter's wedding yeah you know dancing

and having great a great i think of cromwell as a great laugh anyway well he loved his music he loved his music as well loved his music yeah we've got another question here Hugh Bourne says on the theme of cancelling Christmas can you talk about Oliver Cromwell hero or villain I always thought Richard Harris made him quite compelling you seen that film Tom Richard Harris playing Cromwell yes years ago and that's Alec Guinness Alec Guinness is uh Alec Guinness is a brilliant Charles the First actually yeah there have been two great Charles the First in my lifetime um Alec Guinness and Peter Capaldi played him on telly. Yes, he was very good, wasn't he? Yes, he was very good.

Yes, he was, yes. He was the best. It was sort of agitprop, lefty kind of. It was all about John Lilburn, as I remember, and the Levellers. And Peter Capaldi stole the show, sort of channeling Alec Guinness playing Charles I. Well, on the topic of that, of course, that's another intriguing parallel, is the Levellers,

people who had very radical, for the time, very kind of universal suffrage, all that kind of stuff. So they're the sort of Corbynistas of the 17th century well well or more specifically the benites because you as a huge admirer of tony ben will know that that um that tony ben kind of discovered the levelers with a huge sense of excitement ever heard of them and i think tony ben's own mind no one had ever heard of them and i think didn't he he tony blen kind of um he compared Oliver Cromwell to Harold Wilson, which seems... No, he, yes, he said, he said, I'm the leveller of the 1970s.

You know, I'm this sort of hero who fights for the people and is, you know, the prophet of the socialist new dawn. And he says, so who's the Cromwell? Well, it's either Harold Wilson or Dennis Healy. I mean, it's clearly Dennis Healy. Anyone who knows anything, I mean, it's a whole different can of worms. Anyone who knows anything about the 1970s will know Dennis Healy would have derived great pleasure from using the army to crush his radical opponents. I mean, I think that kind of does highlight another way

in which when we compare the 17th century to the present day, it's not just about kind of maybe faintly tendentious parallels. It's also about this kind of sense of a line of descent. And the line of descent is often quite a bogus one, but it gets picked up by people and believed in it. So Michael Foote's father, Isaac Foote, famously said that, you know, what I want to know about someone is which side would he have fought on at the Battle of Marston Moor, one of the decisive battles in the civil war between roundheads and cavaliers, between Parliament and King.

And Michael Foot, who was, you know, I mean, incredibly well read in all this, absolutely identified with that kind of, you know, the good old cause, the dissenting. Which side would I have fought on? I am a kind of naturally conservative person who always swings round to the victor. So I imagine I would have begun fighting for the king and then swung round very rapidly to fight for parliament. That's interesting. I've always been, I mean, I'm quite a naturally conservative person too,

but I always thought I would be a roundhead. I mean, I genuinely have a very round head. Oh, there is that. Yes. You couldn't have worn one of those floppy hats because it just wouldn't have stayed on. But I sort of see myself as one of those people who, you know, I'd be all in favour of the later crackdown on radicalism

and on, you know, using the major generals, as Cromwell did, to kind of crush opposition and to sort of take all the fun and spirit out of the revolution. That's what I'm all about. That would have been your thing. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. The doerness I love. I really like that. I think it would have been more fun to be a cavalier. Oh, it would. Of course it would.

But obviously not under Cromwell, because then it would be too risky. No. You see yourself wearing a ruff. I could be a kind of Vicar of Bray figure, who is the Vicar of Bray famously swinging with the wind. So I think that's probably what I would have done. I don't think I would have believed in either cause strongly enough to have taken a strong position on it. So you'd have been one of, I mean, we talked about these guys

in the last episode, the club men. Yeah, yeah. I regard them as quite, they seem quite rustic. That's all right. They're not in they're not in coffee houses reading these newfangled newspapers are they you know they're centred very much in Wiltshire which is where I come from and they they kind of hang out in woods and I quite like hanging out in the wood I don't know yeah we'll see anyway um but I agree with you Tom on the

serious point about the dissent by the way I think trace, you know, conservatism and liberalism, later conservatives and Labour, even leave and remain. They can, I mean, of course, it is a bit spurious, but you can kind of tease out a line of dissent from the great passions of the 17th century. And there's a brilliant book, which you probably know very well, The English and Their History by Professor Robert Toombs, who's a Brexiteer and a Cambridge professor. And he basically argues that British politics is a huge argument about the meaning of the 17th century. You know, our Whigs and Tories, which kind of come about at the end of the 17th century.

And this sort of, the division between, you know, the sort of Tory vision of the sort of John Bull and all of that kind of thing. And then the spirit of dissent and high-mindedness and Puritanism. You can trace those things back, can't you? Yeah, I think that what is interesting is a number of studies that were done in the wake of the Brexit vote,

which mapped areas that supported the king in the Civil War and supported Parliament onto areas that had voted for Brexit and those that had voted for Remain. And the match was pretty good. It was London. It was the kind of areas that have profited from close contacts with the European continental economy, both in the 21st century and in the 17th century.

And it was kind of the left behind areas and in the 17th century. And it was kind of the left behind areas that in the 17th century had backed the king. So the king is Brexit. That's what you're saying. That's what Maddy's at. But essentially, yes, essentially the royalist areas map onto the Brexit supporting areas. Yeah, that's interesting, isn't it?

Because Brexiteers, super keen Brexiteers, sort of loonies like Daniel Hannan, the Tory MEP, they see themselves as the descendants of the Roundheads. But that's what's so glorious about it, is that there is no clear line of descent. It's all incredibly confusing and muddling. And exactly who Tories and Whigs are, I mean, they're kind of constantly switching sides and over the course of the late 17th century into the 18th century. So that sense of a line of dissent

is kind of there and kind of not. And the same in the Victorian period, the way in which people on opposite sides of the political divide in the Victorian period are identifying themselves with the Royalists, particularly with Cromwell. I mean, the sense of Cromwell as the father of liberalism, which is, you know, I mean, it explains why that statue is up outside the Houses of Parliament. It's not really about Cromwell himself. It's about how late Victorian liberals understand

themselves. And, you know, that again is part of the fascination of the history, is that people are constantly using it, and by using it are kind of changing the sense of it. And I think that actually, you know, on another kind of huge political division that the country is facing now, again, we see that, which is the relationship between England and Scotland. Yeah, of course. Because, you know, the thing about the 17th century is that that provides us with a model of what an independent Scotland cut loose from England and Wales, what it might look like.

And I think that it's perhaps not an example. I think it would start in the same way, Tom, with a woman throwing a stool at a person's cross about the new prayer book. Is that how you see Nicola Sturgeon? Well, I do think... So one of the things that ends up precipitating the civil wars that convulses the whole of Britain and Ireland is the attempt by Charles I to impose...

Your prayer book. Yeah, a particular model of religion and what is seen in Scotland as an English model of religion on Scotland. You look at it and you can see that this religious stuff matters profoundly. It's capable of shaking entire nations. It completely affects how people see and understand the world. And the print of that endures even after Christian faith perhaps evaporates. And I think that the line of descent of modern Scottish nationalism from a kind of biblically infused sense of the Scots as being an elect is absolutely a part of contemporary politics. As listeners will know, it takes very little effort to get Tom to opine for hours on end

about his thoughts on A, Christianity, and B, Scottish nationalism. But we're running out of time. Just one last thought. Witches. This is the great age of witch hunting and witch burning. And I can't help thinking of somebody else with Scottish, or certainly Scottish associations, J.K. Rowling, and the online attacks on her and all that. Is there any parallel there with witch hunts of the 17th century?

I think that J.K. Rowling is more significant as a kind, I mean, she's the equivalent of a religious leader, because witches were, by and large, they were kind of uneducated people who could be punished precisely because they were so marginal, precisely because they didn't have a loud voice. J.K. Rowling has an incredible voice, and that's what's made her a lightning rod, both the people who support her position and those who don't. So I think that J.K. Rowling is kind of someone who's very active in the equivalent of what would have been in the 17th century pamphlet wars. But that impetus to find scapegoats, to name and shame people who have fallen from the true faith, to attribute the ills of society to the moral failings of particular individuals, particularly people who you can pick on and you can kind of bully.

I mean, that feels very, you know, like 17th century witch hunting, doesn't it? Yes, and I think what's interesting, I mean, pulling out from just Britain and looking at the whole of Europe, one of the incredibly depressing things about the witch craze is that it's pretty much the only ecumenical thing that happens it's the only thing that catholics and protestants completely share in is a desire to persecute witches and again maybe that's something that we see in the present that the um actually there's perhaps more that joins extremes of left and right yeah then so much divides us but we can all unite around turning on on women who speak out of place yeah oh god um let us move on to a very different subject very quickly right at the end a quick note from the fabulously named cfjc75 so presumably a cousin

of c3po uh gentleman he says he's a fine judge, or she's a very fine judge. Gentleman, just enjoyed your first two podcasts while walking around Greenwich Park. It would be great if you did a podcast on history book recommendations from each century and each decade of the 20th century. Well, that is a good idea. I think we should just do a quick recommendation about the 17th century. Tom, give us a couple of 17th century books that you think listeners might enjoy. Well, I mentioned one already, which is Geoffrey Parker's Global Crisis. Not just about Britain, about the whole sweep of the world. Really stupefying book and interesting in almost every way it's possible to be interesting. I'd also recommend a book that came out earlier this

year. Paul Lay's fantastic book uh the protectorate cromwell's period in power um called providence lost so play there on paradise lost um incredibly readable incredibly gripping um completely fascinating and i'll give a couple of uh my own a couple of older books uh there's a book on crromwell called God's Englishman by Christopher Hill, which is short. A lot of 17th century books are very long, so it's a short book, and it really gets under Cromwell's skin and is a great introduction to the period, actually. And the other book is one of my favourite books of all time, which I think absolutely everybody should read, even if they have no interest in history of the 17th century at all, which is

The Diary of Samuel Pepys. Now, it's very long, but you can read short versions. And I can't think of many other books that get you into the mind of somebody living in an entirely different era. I mean, you know, Samuel Pepys, by the time you finish that book, as well as you know yourself or your husband or your wife or your closest friends, and you kind of, you know, you're living in his head. It's a fantastic book, a fantastic guide to what life was actually like sort of on the ground in the 17th century. And Dominic, just before we end, one novel which I think is possibly absolutely top of my list of historical novels, it's called Instance of the Fingerpost by Ian Pears

and it's set against the backdrop of the end of the protectorate, the restoration of Charles II. It's a kind of a mystery. You have four different perspectives. The denouement is out of this world. Do read it. It's brilliant.

I could not agree with you more, Tom. That is an absolutely brilliant book. I remember I stayed up all night reading that book. It's so rifting. It's right up there with The Secret History or The Name of the Rose or any of these kind of great books. It's one of the great, great historical novels. It is indeed.

Well, anyway, I kind of feel we've only scratched the surface and there is so much more to say, but we've had fun and I hope you have too. So that's it for this week. Thank you for listening. We're going to be here every Monday to start your week with a historical bang. Historical bang, who knows what that could be. So do please subscribe. Do please rate us on Apple Podcasts

and thank you for listening. 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.