- In December, 1651, the young Dutchman Ludovik
Huygens arrived in London as part of a diplomatic mission to the new Commonwealth of England. His party was taken on a
tour of Whitehall Palace, once the principle residence
of the Stuart monarchs, and now the headquarters of the republic. Here, he heard a sermon
preached in the chapel, and he admired among the large crowd there an attractive and rather
bejeweled young lady. She was listening
attentively and taking notes. In the great audience
chamber, the banqueting house, which still stands, they were shown the window through which Charles I
had gone to the scaffold, and were encouraged to lean
out to get the full effect. Overhead, Rubens' paintings of the "Apotheosis of
James I" still soared, but many of the palace's walls bore smoky shadows, where Charles I's great painting
collection had once hung, recently taken down and sold
to pay the state's bills. Since the execution of the
king two years earlier, there had been no single sovereign to whom diplomats could
present their credentials. Instead, the Dutch party was
ushered into the great room that had once been the
queen's presence chamber, and was now a grand committee room. Here, 24 members of the
executive Council of State were meeting around a long table. Chairing the meeting that day was the lawyer Bulstrode Whitelocke. Missing from the meeting, due to illness, was the head of the army,
one General Cromwell. The counselors rose respectfully, and the ceremony of arrival was performed. The diplomats' papers were accepted on behalf of the republic, by Whitelocke for the council, and by the speaker of the House of Commons on behalf of the people. Being from a republic themselves, the Dutchmen were untroubled
by all this novelty. Already, the clocks had been reset, and the audience took place
in what was solemnly called the third year of freedom
by God's blessing restored. As far as they or anyone else knew, monarchy was gone for good. Periods of crisis are
quickeners of change. As we've all learned these past two years, however unwelcome, prohibitions and restrictions
can act as catalysts, hastening things on in the adoption of technology,
in working practices, in personal habits and priorities. And so it was that the
decade of republicanism in the British Isles, though destructive in many ways, acted as an extraordinary stimulus. It was a constitutional failure, the monarchy was restored in 1660, and has never returned in Britain, although of course it has done in Ireland, but other aspects of life in
a time of crisis and conflict were not only to endure, but would become fundamental to the development of
Britain and British history ever after. The English Republic came into being in the early weeks of 1649. For much of the previous decade, the British Isles had
been embroiled, of course, in a destructive civil war, sparked by a conflict over
religion and political authority. Some 130,000 people died, in combat, and of disease and famine, and tens of thousands were made homeless. Almost 200 country houses were destroyed, among them, wonderful Old Campden House, which I show you a slide of the remnant of there on the right, which the Landmark Trust
is now the owner of, but this was only one of 200
significant country houses that were destroyed. Over 150 towns were extensively damaged. Royalists and Parliamentarians
alike wrought destruction. Some towns and cities were
hammered by actual fighting, Colchester and Pontefract among them, others saw wholesale demolition in anticipation of attack. Churches were targeted by
Puritans inside and out, their monuments and fittings
considered abominably papist, and were pulled down as a consequence. Stained glass was
smashed, altars torn down, and cathedral spires, such as that at Lichfield, bombarded with artillery. But notwithstanding all this
violence and iconoclasm, this had never been a war between
royalists and republicans. Very few people contemplated anything so radical as a republic during the years of war. Instead, the argument was about
what form of Protestantism the nations of the British
Isles should espouse, and what the extent of
royal power should be, not whether there should be royal power. During those years, the
rank and file of the army had become increasingly radical, and soon had aspirations for change which outstripped those
of many of their officers and the wider political nation. After the Parliamentarians won the war, and it looked likely a deal
would be done with the king that would see him reinstated
on restricted terms, the army intervened. The House of Commons was
suddenly and unexpectedly purged by army officers on the 6th of December, 1648, and 186 moderate MPs
were physically prevented from entering the chamber. A further 86 members
left in protest at this, leaving behind what would come to be known as the Rump Parliament, the residue of around 200 MPs considered radical enough by the army to be allowed to remain. This group voted to put the king on trial, and on the 30th of January, 1649, he was beheaded before a transfixed crowd on the street we now call Whitehall, near where the Cenotaph stands today. The office of king was abolished, as was the House of Lords, and the Church of England was already being radically reformed, with the abolition of bishops and of the "Book of Common Prayer." For the following 11 years, England would remain a republic on a series of changing
constitutional terms, with Ireland and Scotland
soon bound to it by conquest. For four years, known as the commonwealth, the House of Commons was the single sovereign
body and government in the hands of a council of state. For a further five years, a modified version of this
prevailed, the protectorate, in which sovereignty was
shared between Parliament and a powerful steward in the form of the lord protector, a position held first by the
soldier and MP Oliver Cromwell, and then briefly by his son Richard. For the final year, an attempt to reinstate the commonwealth gave way to bitter fighting between Parliament and the army, from the chaos of which the restoration of the monarchy emerged as the only remaining solution. Much debate and discussion has
been had over the centuries about who were the heroes
and who the villains of this extraordinary time. The authors of the great historical satire "1066 and All That" as ever perfectly encapsulated
the contradictions of what they called the struggle between the Cavaliers, wrong but romantic, and the Roundheads, right but repulsive. (audience laughs) Was Charles I wronged? Were the moving figures of the republic right-minded progressives
or murderous despots? The decade has also been dominated by discussion of the figure
of this man, of course, Oliver Cromwell. The purpose of this talk, which may be a disappointment, is not to deal with either of those issue. The matter of who was
right and who was wrong is, to my mind, perhaps the least
interesting question to ask, mired as it inevitably is in modern attitudes to
what is right or wrong, and the difficulties of navigating those when looking at the behavior
of people in the past, when attitudes were very different. Instead, it seems much more fruitful to think about why
people acted as they did, and how the changes of the period actually affected people's lives. Secondly, I'm not really
going to talk at all about Oliver Cromwell, although he is discussed
at length in my book, because while he was the
single most important figure of the republican decade, he did not bring the republic about, he was not its founding father, he was not the head of the
army that won the civil war, he was not even in England for much of the formative first
two years of the republic. The purpose of this talk
is instead to explore what the reality of that
exceptional time was through a series of others who lived and breathed its unfamiliar air. First, we turn to the man who sat at the fore of the event that heralded in the republic, the trial of Charles I. John Bradshaw, who you
see here on the left, was 46 when he acted as
president of the high court convened to try the king. He was a lawyer by
profession, active in London, but he didn't come from
revolutionary stock. He'd been born and brought
up in comfort and wealth at Marple Hall, which you see here, in Cheshire. His was a respectable family, who gave money to the church plate, dressed in fashionable textiles,
drank alcohol, and gambled. Bradshaw was tutored in the strongly providential
views of the day. All unexplained or exceptional occurrences were to be understood as God's actions, interventions in which his
judgment was expressed. So for instance, when the performing bear at the Mayday festivities in his town mauled its owner, the meaning was clear: God was expressing his
disapproval of such events. Bradshaw had trained as a lawyer in London and then returned to his native Cheshire. A second son, he established his own base
in the town of Congleton, where he rose to become mayor. And it was in this position
that catastrophe hit: a ferocious wave of bubonic plague overtook the town in 1641. Bradshaw struggled to contain it, the plague preparations
that he had put in hand were completely overwhelmed. Timber quarantine cabins were built to house those in forced isolation, dogs and cats were exterminated, as being thought to spread infection, grave diggers were paid danger money to bury the piles of infected corpses, and shops were closed, bringing the economic life of the town to a complete standstill. It took two years for
Congleton to be free of plague, and when it finally was, Bradshaw packed his bags
and made for London. In the years that followed, John Bradshaw became closely associated with the Parliamentarian cause. His religious views aligned with many of those who
criticized Charles I, a man he came to regard
as more cruel than Nero. He rose to be a judge. Nonetheless, when he was asked to chair the court
created to try Charles I in January, 1649, he hesitated. He tried to decline, as many others did, but in the end, agreed, believing that God required it, because, in his words, it was as much a sin to spare the guilty as it was to condemn the innocent. This is a famous engraving of the trial. Highlighted in yellow is the figure of Charles
I in the dock there, with his back to us, and then, on the dais are the four of the
commissioners of the trial, John Bradshaw facing him. Charles I never entered a plea, refusing to acknowledge the
legitimacy of the court, and he was condemned as a consequence. Bradshaw held his nerve throughout, remaining calm and dignified
in the conduct of his office. When the new Council
of State was appointed, Bradshaw was asked to take its chair. For better or worse, he had bought into the
concept of the new republic, in which the people in Parliament were now the source of all sovereignty, and he would devote the rest of his life to trying to uphold it. And this famously is the
seal of the republic. The great seal normally had a picture
of the sovereign on it, and here, it was replaced
with this remarkable image of the assembled members of Parliament, as the new representatives of sovereignty. Watching the astonishing
political events of the year 1649 with as sharp an eye as any was Marchamont Nedham. A small, pot-bellied man in his 20s with a sharp wit and a
talent for friendship, Nedham was the vigilante publisher of the Royalist newspaper
"Mercurius Pragmaticus." The name of his paper was a head-on acknowledgment
of his political position. He had started his career in journalism working for a Parliamentary title, but having got into political hot water, had changed sides. Journalism was an entirely new profession. A generation before, newspapers had not even
existed in Britain. Since they first appeared around 1620, their popularity and number
had expanded dramatically, hastened by the political
controversies of the civil war. Now, newspapers were in the
hands of innkeepers and weavers, apothecaries and apprentices
across the country. So strong was the hand
of the army on London during Charles I's trial that Nedham didn't managed to
get a paper to press at all in those eventful weeks. Parliamentary agents were on his tail, working now for the Council of State, chaired by John Bradshaw. Nedham used the suspense
as a journalistic device, opening his issue on the 1st
of May, 1649, with the words, "Now the beagles must go a-hunting again, "and I must be the hare, "for so it pleaseth Master Bradshaw." While much 17th century prose was written in long, complex sentences, this was not Marchamont Nedham's way. He knew how to excite and
engage his readership, and it was precisely his
fearless satirical writing that had got him in trouble. He taunted the lord president
of the council himself as, "Bradshaw, that dirty upstart, "that half man and beast,
that prodigious monster, "that walking hell, "one who had to be guarded by soldiers "to prevent the people
tearing him in pieces." He repeatedly denounced the
Rump Parliament in print, reminding his readers of
its unorthodox beginnings, and the soaring irony of its
claim to represent the people. As a number of MPs who had
been excluded in the army purge resumed their seats, Nedham marveled that they
didn't stumble at the door, "though His Majesty's blood
lie at the threshold." For all their talk of liberty and taste for grandiose
symbols of their new authority, these men of the House
of Commons, he said, "were supreme puppets, "while poor Liberty lies fettered now "like a fly in a cobweb." Reporting on a civic procession in which the lord mayor of
London surrendered his sword to the speaker of the Commons in recognition of
parliamentary sovereignty, Nedham told his readers that, "Oliver laughed in his sleeve, "knowing that it was
with his own steel blade "and the might of the army "that true authority now lay." Marchamont Nedham was
captured in 1649, June, and clapped in Newgate Prison. After failing to negotiate his release, and with his trial drawing closer, he decided to take matters
into his own hands, and somehow escaped. As he did so, the new republic struggled
with its own problems. A rising by the radical
Levellers was put down, and an army was sent to prevent Ireland from falling into the hands
of young titular king, Charles II. The massacre of a large
number of civilians on the Irish campaign was incendiary news, and a crackdown on all newspaper
publishing was set in train just as reports reached
England in September, 1649. The republic had a massive
public relations challenge on its hands, and Marchamont Nedham, in hiding, saw his opportunity. He wrote to John Bradshaw, and proposed that he, Nedham, should be released from all charges, and be taken on instead to produce a new paper that would transform the
republic's reputation. The leaders of the commonwealth
must have hesitated to deal with someone who had so relentlessly
insulted and excoriated them, but with Charles I's purported
memoirs, "Eikon Basilike," a runaway bestseller, and a cult of the martyred
king fast forming, they knew they had a fight on their hands. Swallowing their misgivings, Marchamont Nedham was hired. The first issue of his new
paper, "Mercurius Politicus," "The News of the State," was published in early June, 1650. It opened with the memorable challenge, "Why should not the
commonwealth have a fool "as well as the king had?" For the following nine years, this sparky, snappy paper would appear weekly, on a Thursday, and become the indispensable house journal of the English Republic. Nedham was paid for his efforts, but he soon hardly needed to be, as the success of his paper, and the income from the classified
ads he was soon running, made it a money-spinner. While he had a lively, irreverent style, Nedham also prided himself on the reliability of his content, and his network of news gatherers
and foreign correspondents soon made "Mercurius Politicus" widely read right across Europe, and also on the other
side of the Atlantic. Nedham knew where his
financial loyalties lay, and was careful to steer clear of the most controversial
aspects of the new regime. The army returned mud and blood-splattered from conquering Ireland and Scotland to find that the Rump Parliament hadn't effected the wholesale
religious and social reforms that they had sought. Nedham made no mention of
the anger this generated. And when, on the 23rd of April, 1653, Oliver Cromwell evicted
the Rump MPs by force from the chamber, famously telling them
that they had sat too long for all the good that they had done, or words to that effect, Nedham apologized to
his readers that, sadly, lack of space prevented him from going into any further details. "Mercurius Politicus"
was on sale in London from the mercury sellers'
baskets on a Thursday, reaching the market towns in
much of the rest of England by the weekend. Among the many who received
the weekly news packet were the Le Strange family of
Hunstanton, in North Norfolk. Sir Hamon Le Strange, the elderly head of the family, had fought briefly for the king at the very beginning of the civil war, before being defeated at the
Siege of King's Lynn in 1643. By the mid 1650s, he and his wife had become
reconciled to the new regime. Hamon and his two older sons
had signed the engagement, which was the oath of
loyalty to the new republic, required of all adult men. And they took no part
in Charles II's attempt to reclaim the throne in 1651. The Le Stranges had been
hard hit financially. The terms of the
settlement after the siege had required them to pay
for much of the damage that was done to the town as a result. This included rebuilding the
medieval almshouses at Gaywood, which, as the stone plaque records on the outside of the building, had been burned down during the siege. Like other Royalists, they had also had lands sequestered, and had to pay hefty fines
to regain possession. It was in print too that
Hamon and Alice Le Strange learned of the new constitution instituted in December, 1653. The republic lived on in name, but it was now to be a mixed
constitution, a protectorate, in which the new Lord
Protector, Oliver Cromwell, would share sovereignty with Parliament. Hamon Le Strange acquired a copy of the written constitution, which you see here on the left, known as "The Instrument of Government," our first written constitution, and shelved it alongside a
wide range of other titles in the Hunstanton Hall library. The republic had brought changes
to the Le Strange family, as it had done to many others. The Church of England had
been radically reformed in the mid 1640s to strip it of the residue
of medieval traditions beloved of Charles I, of which the Puritans disapproved on the basis that they were
not mentioned in the Bible. Church interiors had become much simpler, and I show you a surviving church from the late 1650s here at Guyhirn, the interiors had become much simpler, the church festivals of
Christmas and Easter, Whitsun and Michaelmas,
Candlemas and All Saints', had all gone, as had the bishops and the structure that they had furnished. Marriages were now secular,
not church affairs, and the "Book of Common Prayer," which had specified all the
festivals and ceremonies of the church year, was replaced with a new,
spare directory of worship. Meanwhile, a new degree of acceptance was extended to those who were
considered properly godly, but who wished to organize themselves into independent congregations
outside the national church. In reality, only a tiny
proportion of the population fell into one of these
nonconformist groups, Baptists, Quakers, Fifth Monarchists, and all their brethren accounting for less than 5%
of the population as a whole. While traditional Anglicans were denied the familiar forms of worship, no amount of Westminster prohibition could just stop centuries of tradition. Music and merrymaking in
church was now banned, but what went on elsewhere was another matter altogether. At Hunstanton Hall, as
in many other places, Christmas festivities
continued despite the bans, with the accompanying
feasting, music and dancing, giving and receiving of presents, eating of plum puddings,
and playing of games. And this is a lovely engraving which shows Father
Christmas here in the middle turning up in England to be told to go away by the gentleman on the left of the slide, a well-to-do urbanite, and welcomed in by the countryman
of the right-hand side, which is quite a nice
encapsulation of that tension. The Le Strange family always sent New Year's gifts of venison to their favored neighbors, and by the mid 1650s, they were including their
erstwhile civil war opponents among the recipients, including Oliver
Cromwell's brother-in-law, the Parliamentarian
governor of King's Lynn. Trade now traversed the
world as never before, spurred on by the more
stable trading conditions since 1649, and furs from Russia, textiles from India, and spices from the Far East graced the affluent parlors of England. Both the pomposity and prim affectations of the high church bishops
beloved by Charles I and the disorderliness
of nonconformist meetings led by itinerant preachers provoked peals of laughter
at Hunstanton Hall. As a family, the Le Stranges shared an
irrepressible sense of humor, and they noted down hundreds of their favorite
jokes and anecdotes in a ledger that still survives. These included stories of drunken evenings in provincial inns, of ribald Norwich prostitutes and dour Dutch drainage engineers, of Cuckold, their neighbor's dog, and Wiggett, the Hunstanton fool, and of the many
misadventures of Mr. Prick, the unfortunately named minister
of the next-door parish. Incomers of all unfamiliar tastes were regarded as suspect. Norfolk and its traditional ways was their home ground. As was remarked at Hunstanton Hall, "London would be a
marvelous, fine, sweet place "if only it stood in the country." After centuries of being at the heart of the
government of their locality, the Le Stranges had had to
bow out of public affairs. They could no longer be MPs, those who had fought for the king were ineligible to stand, and their traditional place
as justices of the peace, members of the local commissions that managed most of
the day-to-day business of county government, had also gone. But with Alice Le Strange's
careful management of their financial affairs, they had been able to regain their lands and seemed to have resolved
to accept the new world order as they found it. An act of oblivion
passed in February, 1652 formally declared the crimes and misdemeanors
of the civil war forgiven and forgotten. Old enmities were to be set aside in the interests of healing and settling, the spirit of reconciliation
was in the air. Most people of all classes
had not, after all, actively fought for either
side in the civil war. As one seasoned Parliamentarian
noted in the 1650s, "Most people care not what
government they live under "so long as they may
plow and go to market." Had this period of calm lasted, the republic might well have endured, but it was not to be. In 1655, the new protectorate suffered two major
blows to its confidence. First, a plan for a
widespread Royalist uprising was unearthed. Second, an ambitious enterprise to seize Spanish territories
in the Caribbean, part of a plan to export
the godly republic abroad, ended in disaster. The lord protector and his
councilors were left stunned. Their plan had been to try to seize the island of Hispaniola, which is the pink island in the middle of that engraving there, and they had been thwarted in this, and felt very humiliated as a result. The lord protector and his councilors were left stunned. After the almost unbroken
military victories of the civil war, God now dealt them a colossal defeat. The message was clear, they were disappointing him. There followed a wave of new measures to further moral and religious reform. Key to implementing these was the creation of a
network of major generals, regional military rulers who were given the job of overseeing this
process of greater reform. It was to be paid for by a new 10% tax to be levied on all
Royalists and Catholics. In a stroke, the process of
reconciliation was halted, old enmities were reignited, and unforgettable indignities visited on families like the Le Stranges by the energetic band
of young major generals, backed by heavily armed militias. The requirement on all adult men to sign the oath of engagement, the oath of loyalty to the republic, had seen those who refused
lose their positions. Heavily Royalist places suffered the most, and few were more Royalist than Oxford, where Charles I had been based for the first years of the civil war. The beneficiaries of the exodus from university positions that followed were the young academics, who might otherwise have waited long years to acquire a post. Among them was a tall,
shortsighted, young man with a head of thick, brown hair. William Petty did not
come from a gentry family, like John Bradshaw or Hamon Le Strange, he didn't have an educated
clergyman as a stepfather like Marchamont Nedham. His father was a small-time
clothier on the South Coast, and it was only misadventure
as a young sailor that had caused his
course to radically alter. Having been put ashore
injured and penniless, he found his way to the
Jesuit university in Caen, his extraordinary memory and
his conspicuous cleverness recommending him. The 1640s saw William Petty in Paris, and by 1649, he was studying anatomy in Oxford. Here he met a crowd of ambitious young men who, like him, were exhilarated by the
new scientific thinking. The assumptions of classical science about the elements, the
continents, and the skies were being shaken, and now this group of young men, promoted fast by political turmoil, and operating in a world where political, as well as philosophical
holy cows had been slain, were coming to the fore. William Petty was studying anatomy, and just a year after
completing his doctorate, found himself appointed
Oxford professor of anatomy. Since 1649, petty and his
fellow young scientists had been meeting weekly in his rooms on the High Street in Oxford, calling themselves the Oxford
Experimental Philosophy Club. His downstairs neighbor, the chemist and apothecary John Clarke, provided the exotic ingredients for many of their activities. This was the first proper
scientific research society, with regular meetings and rules for election and
the management of business. Individually and collectively, this group would, through trial and error, observation and measurement, bring about fundamental changes in the human understanding of the world. Each week, at their meeting, this group of young men, almost all in their 20s and 30s, undertook practical experiments, the lifeblood of their association. Their research ranged across
a dazzling array of subjects, from the valves of the veins, to the spots on the Sun
and its rotational axis, from the existence or not of vacuums to the weight of air, from the hypotheses of Copernicus to the works of Galileo, and diverse other things of like nature. Among their number was John Wilkins, the recently-appointed
warden of Wadham College, who, with his talented young
protege Christopher Wren, was having an enormous telescope built for examining the Moon. Another, Seth Ward, the first Oxford professor
astronomy to teach Copernicus, was setting up a chemical elaboratory. To Wilkins, it was clear that
there are many secret truths which the ancients have passed over that are yet left to make
some of our age famous for their discovery. In 1652, William Petty was
offered a lucrative position as physician to the
commonwealth army in Ireland. The republic's bloody campaign there, which Cromwell himself had led, was now over. Hundreds of thousands had died to bring the island under the control of the Puritan English Government. The bodies may have been buried, but the financial cost had yet to be paid. In a fateful formulation that dated to Charles I's time, both the funders and the
fighters of the English army were to be paid in lands confiscated from
the vanquished Irish. Until this could be achieved, the army could not be disbanded and the immense costs
would continue to mount. But the crucial stumbling block in this was the lack of information. Accurate maps simply did not
exist for most of Ireland, which was crucial for this reallocation of the lands of the conquered
Irish to be effected. A group of professional surveyors had been tasked with remedying this. As they bustled in and out
of meetings in Dublin Castle, William Petty looked on with disbelief. The task was clearly going
to take most of a decade, and the costs would be astronomical, and the results unreliable. William Petty could not stop
himself from intervening. He put it to his master, the protector's able
second son, Henry Cromwell, that he should be given
the contract instead. He would sack the surveyors and train up the under-employed
soldiers in their place, teaching them to undertake each aspect of the cartographical process, measuring, calculating,
drawing, scaling, and so on. He would create far more accurate maps, produce them for a much lower cost, and undertake the entire
exercise in one year. So it was that the most
ambitious mapping project in the history of the
British Isles was launched. It would be two centuries before England would be mapped
with comparable accuracy. William Petty would
confound his many skeptics to complete the task in 13 months. The Down Survey, as it was called, set new standards in mapping and in the management of men and projects, and provided the basis for an
epic redistribution of land. Petty himself was no particular fan of the process of redistribution, and he took issue with aspects of the whole enterprise, but he felt that if it were to be done, it should be done accurately. Before 1640, about 2/3 of Ireland had been
owned by Irish men and women, mostly Catholics. By 1660, thanks to the
program of confiscations, 3/4 of Ireland was in
the hands of Protestants from mainland Britain. There it would remain. The disenfranchisement of
the Irish had been effected, and the consequences would
reverberate down the centuries. The tensions between
the army and Parliament with which the republic had begun never went away. The kingless state had
never enjoyed the support of the political nation, and the real possibility that people might have
learned to live with it was wiped out by the invasive policies of the mid 1650s. After Oliver Cromwell died, his dominating presence was gone, and the all-out conflict
between Parliament and the army was the consequence. Out of this maelstrom, the restoration of the
monarchy soon seemed to many, including plenty who had
fought against Charles I, as the more likely route to stability. Crucial among those who
became convinced of this was Anne Clarges, wife of the soldier General George Monck, head of the commonwealth army in Scotland. Anne had met her husband 15 years earlier, in a remarkable encounter, when he was a prisoner
in the Tower of London and she the laundrywoman who took care of the prisoners' clothes. The pair had married, almost certainly bigamously, and she enjoyed her husband's
complete confidence. As the couple looked on at
the political chaos in London following Cromwell's
death many years later, she urged her husband to act. He declared his opposition to his fellow army officers in London, and his determination
to uphold Parliament. Only a respected soldier could turn the formidable republican army against its senior officers, and, spurred on by Anne, this is exactly what George Monck did. Once a full Parliament was
at last allowed to meet, it voted, as it probably
always would have done, to restore the monarchy. While the republic ended in May, 1660, the experiences of the past decade could not simply be struck out. The old world order had gone, and in spite of the
restoration of the monarchy, the effects of those years would endure. The military force necessary to wage war and to keep
control once it had been won had brought with it a significant
expansion in the state. Central government had grown considerably, the major generals had
been just one ingredient of the far more centralized state that had operated in those years. And we have to really remember
here that until this time, the government of England, and
indeed of the British Isles, was overwhelmingly a local enterprise, the central government was,
compared to today, tiny, but the effects of the
centralized management of the army and of the major generals'
regime through the 1650s saw a real increase in the
scale of central government in a way that would not go
away at the restoration. Maintaining a standing army and a navy strong enough to
shore up a revolutionary regime had meant higher taxes, and more men and administrative machinery, and much of this would
outlive the republic. It wasn't in Charles'
II's interests in 1660 to forego the much greater
financial resources that the state had had at its disposal during those years of the mid 1650s. The need to see off
challenges to the new regime had forced a deeper integration
of the British Isles than had ever been attempted: Scotland and Ireland had both
been conquered militarily by the English republican army. Ireland was subject to the
wholesale redistribution of land that would disenfranchise
its Catholic population, and Scotland was bound
together with England in a parliamentary union that would be reborn in
the Act of Union of 1707. From 1656, for the rest of the decade, we see that, after that act
of union had been passed, MPs from Ireland and from
Scotland came to Westminster, and it was a British parliament for the first time in the
history of the British Isles, and that was a foretelling of what would happen permanently in 1707. People were more literate
than ever before, daily consumption of
newspapers and printed works had brought the nation
into regular contact with national and international affairs. In 1660, the Oxford scientists
would move to London. Following a lecture by Christopher
Wren at Gresham College, august institution, they renamed themselves the Royal Society, and attracted the restored
king himself as their patron, and Charles II would be a great supporter of the activities of
this new Royal Society. And when William Petty met
Charles II for the first time, and had an interview with him, he was at pains to apologize to Charles II for the fact that he had been
part of the republican regime, he'd worked for Henry Cromwell, and as he was stammering out his apology, Charles II interrupted him and said, I'm not interested in that, tell me about your plans for a new design for a double-hulled boat. Here was a sovereign who was
really, really interested in this whole new world
of scientific thinking. The members of the Royal Society would of course go on
to be at the forefront of a new era of scientific endeavor, that itself would go on to help spark an industrial revolution. New tastes had been established during those tumultuous years that would never fade. There was, famously, a ban on theaters for much of the 1650s, theatrical productions were prohibited, principally because
they were seen as events where Royalists were likely to congregate and plot against the republic. But that in itself, that prohibition, created an incentive for impresarios to come
up with alternatives. The most enduring among them was a new art form known as opera, and the first opera was performed
in Convent Garden in 1656, right in the middle of this period. The first coffee house
had opened in England in Oxford, in 1651, and come the restoration, as is familiar to us today, a coffee shop was to be found on the corner of almost every street in the West End of London. In many ways, it was the restoration of 1660, rather than the commonwealth
years of the 1650s, that would prove the aberration. In that remarkable decade were sown the seeds
which would soon flower. By the end of the century, much that the republic had pioneered had become part of the
mainstream of the British Isles: freedom of the press, freedom of worship, naval and military might,
scientific endeavor, and a belief in the
supremacy of Parliament. In 1657, the East India Company
was granted a new charter, and the British state embarked upon its first
transoceanic colonial mission. While the expedition to take Hispaniola had been unsuccessful, the island of Jamaica was taken instead on the return journey, and there was established
the first British colony in the island of Jamaica. Just as that island had
not been the original goal, so the consequences would be unexpected. As British endeavors overseas prospered, and the miserable human cargoes were transported across the Atlantic to work the sun-baked
fields of the Caribbean, so began the international expansionism that would dominate the relationship between the British
Archipelago and the world for centuries to come. Charles Dickens' words on the
French Revolution, therefore, offer something of a fitting epilogue to the story of the English
Revolution a century before. As he famously put it in the opening lines of the great novel "A Tale of Two Cities," "It was the best of times,
it was the worst of times, "it was the age of wisdom, it
was the age of foolishness, "it was the epoch of belief, "it was the epoch of incredulity, "it was the season of light,
it was the season of darkness, "it was the spring of hope, "and it was the winter of despair." Thank you very much. (audience applauds) - Thank you very much, Dr. Keay. I'm going to start with a
couple of questions from online before we go to the audience in the room. The first question is about
Cromwell's army being in power, is it known how the population reacted? Were they extremely fearful, or did they endeavor to be invisible and get on with their lives? - The experience of there
being this enormous army was a really defining one of the period. Of course, the thing you
always have to remember about this decade, the 1650s, is it came after nearly a decade of war, and that wasn't Cromwell's army, that was a royal army and
a Parliamentarian army, Cromwell was an officer in it but it wasn't his, and there is no doubt that the experience of the nation putting up with that army was a really horrible one. Because, of course, there was no tradition of having an army, there was no infrastructure, there weren't barracks,
and victualing yards, and all the kind of stuff
that would come later, these were thousands and thousands of men who had to have food to eat, had to have somewhere to stay, and what that meant was, essentially, they were foisted on the population. So if you lived in Guildford,
or you lived in Grantham, wherever it was, suddenly, from nowhere, there'd be this enormous band of soldiers, and they could essentially
requisition anything of yours. There was supposed to be a
system where they gave you a chit and you got paid for it, but it never really worked. And so that would mean
that all your supplies, your seed corn, your oats, and everything that you
laid in for the winter would all be grabbed
and fed to the horses, and meanwhile, they might well be busy pulling down the ornaments in your church, or doing whatever it was. So it was a horrible experience, and it is definitely the case that a lot of what people
felt in the 1650s, I think, you can only understand
off the back of that, which is to say everyone was desperate
for that not to continue. So people's exhaustion
with war was very great, and most of the deaths that were caused were not directly caused by
fighting in the civil war, but were caused by the consequences, disease, deprivation, famine, which followed it. So I don't think there were many people that welcomed Oliver's army, or indeed the Royalist army, and people longed for it to be over. - Second question from online, how far can the English Civil War be explained in terms of class conflict? - This is a big area of discussion about what were the causes
of the English Civil War. There was a time, particularly very much
influenced by Marxist writing, where the lens through which the English
Civil War was looked at was very much one of class conflict, of the sort that was informed by things like the Russian Revolution. I think that, now, is absolutely not how we
understand it, really. The leaders of both sides
were, on the whole, gentry, it wasn't one class against another class. As my book tries to show, somebody like John Bradshaw, he tries the king, he's not part of the
dispossessed, toiling, urban clothier population, or something, he's a gentry figure. There were arguments about religion, and about the extent of
authority of the king that were really the big issues. There was clearly an appetite
for wider social change, not least as voiced by
groups like the Levellers, but I think to see it as
one class against another is absolutely not what the
English Civil War was about, although there were aspects of it in terms of what was being argued for that would have improved the
lot of one group of people rather than another. - [Questioner] Dr. Keay,
thank you very much. I was fascinated by what you said about the mapping of Ireland, particularly because you then said that there was great
centralization of government in the rest of the United Kingdom. So why didn't that centralized government want to have their land mapped with a similar degree
of accuracy and detail? - Why didn't they want that, did you say? It's very interesting. The mapping of Ireland was
done, as I was explaining, for a very particular purpose, it was to be able to
define what land you had in order to take it from you to give it to somebody else, so it wasn't a process that
was viewed with any favor by almost anybody in Ireland, and actually, the book talks at length about what I found fascinating, which is the actual process of how do you go about
mapping an entire country, and one that has very
complicated geography, and so on. So it was serving a very
clear political purpose, if you like. And the very interesting thing is that William Petty was
incredibly proud of the maps, he said, I've mapped the equivalent of
three times round the world, it was a most astonishing undertaking. You can look at those maps online, and I really encourage you to do it, there's a website called the Down Survey, and you can see every tiny,
little sub-parish in Ireland as it was in the 1650s, with churches, what land was boggy, it's amazing. But the reason that that wasn't
then extended to England, or more broadly, is really that mapping
was a tool of conquest. So when we see the mapping of Scotland, which really happens in the 18th century with William Roy's great maps, it's similarly about
trying to control the Scots at the time of the Jacobite uprisings. There was a great suspicion about mapping, and actually, it's really not until the
Ordnance Survey gets going in the middle of the 19th century that England was mapped, and it was a lot to do with
people's resistance to it, because people didn't want to have that level of control exerted over them. And it was a measure of how fundamentally
Ireland was in the grip of the Puritan regime that their sovereignty involved this kind of detailed
capturing of that nation in order, then, to
engineer a redistribution, which wasn't ever effected completely, but certainly, on a scale that was to change Ireland's history fundamentally forever. - [Questioner] I was interested in your comment about newspapers, and the chap who was taken on to do communications for the commonwealth, and the suppression of material that was antithetical to them. Was there, later in the commonwealth, the emergence of what you might
call seditious publications, of those who did not support the way the commonwealth was going, did that emerge, or did they keep a firm hand
on the media, as it were, of the time? - Essentially, what happens
is that during the 1640s, the censorship regime breaks down largely, so you get this massive
explosion of different viewpoints as expressed in print, which is characterized by some of those things I was quoting, describing the leaders to the
republic in all those terms. The republic manages to reestablish a reasonable
amount of control over publications, but it never goes back to how it was. So for example, when Cromwell dies, and there's a big question mark, really, about what's going to happen, you really see that expressed in pamphlets and popular
print and literature. And when John Bradshaw dies, which he does just before the
restoration of the monarchy, he dies in the autumn of 1659, loads of fake obituaries
are written for him, joke obituaries, saying, the prince of darkness
is waiting to receive him with his wife, the Whore of Babylon, it's real black humor. So a market is established for subversive, or seditious, counter to the regime in power view which never goes away, and that's a really big change, 'cause that is about live debate, or a questioning of the regime of a sort which, if you
go back a generation, you absolutely weren't getting to anything like the the same degree. - George Monck's role is key to the start and end of the commonwealth, why is he virtually
unknown in our history? - Ah, a question after my own heart. I would add to that, I would say why is George Monck unknown, and why is his wife completely unknown? Anne Monck, George Monck's wife, who I mentioned very briefly, does not even have an entry in the "Dictionary of National Biography," which has 60,000 entries in it, and she doesn't even get one, and she was absolutely, clearly the person who talked her husband into leading a great army, marching to London to reestablish Parliament's right to sit. It's very interesting, aside from her role, which I think is, and I've done a piece for
"History Today" about it, I think it's a really interesting story about how women get
written out of history, but together, both of them
have really lost their spot. At the time, in 1660, there's no doubt George
Monck, with Anne at his side, pretty much single-handedly
restored the monarchy, 'cause he was an army general, he was the only person who had the authority, the power, the number of people under
him, and the judgment to pull off a business where he got the army, as it were, to be the agent of the restoration, and he's been written out. What I was going to say
is that, at the time, people said, they will
build statues to you, your name will be remembered, everyone at school will be
able to recite your dates; nothing, there's only one statue, which is the one put up by his son, which is on his tomb in Westminster Abbey, nothing else. Outside Parliament,
who's there a statue of? Oliver Cromwell. He's the one who, on about
six separate occasions, physically expels
parliamentarians from Parliament. So it's a very interesting thing. From the point of view of the reason why, I think it's a lot to do with the fact that once the restoration happens, none of the Royalist establishment really wants to draw attention to the fact that they hadn't always been there, that there'd been the
need for this soldier, who had of course been a soldier who'd fought for Oliver
Cromwell for many years, he'd been a great friend of Cromwell's, that it was his change of attitude that had brought about the restoration. In his lifetime, which didn't go on, he died at the end of the 1660s, he's given titles, a dukedom, and lots of money, and so on, but thereafter, a veil was drawn over it, because it made it clear that it was a pretty close run thing, it wasn't an inevitability, it wasn't acclamation of the population that brought about the restoration, it was the actions of an officer of Oliver Cromwell's own army. - [Questioner] Thank you, that
was a really fantastic talk. I've got a question, we're in the City of London, and I wonder what role the City played during this time of the republic, and what physical traces there are, and you might have already answered that, of this period in the streets of London today, if people are looking for little visual reminders,
or monuments to that time? - Very good question. London is really important, London is very important at every stage, and it is a kind of bellwether of the views of the nation. First of all, London, of course, is the
great financial center, so something like the business of the
military campaign in Ireland is funded by investors from London, and they are told they're
going to be paid back in lands confiscated off the Irish. They're investing in it because they see it as a good investment, as ever, the talking power of money. And during the beginning of the period, when the civil war happens, and Charles I flees London, and so on, it is very much to do with the fact that London's sympathies are very much with the Parliamentarians. However, once we get into the 1650s, the attitude of London
is really important, and crucially, the fall of the republic is very much connected
to the view of Londoners, and really interestingly, to the views of young people, because London has this huge
population of apprentices, because people are learning their trades, they spend seven years, I think it is, between the age of, whatever it is, 15 and 22, or something like that, and by the time you get
to the end of the 1650s, you've got this really
big population of people for whom the arguments of the civil war might as well be arguments
about the Armada, it was that long ago, you're talking about 15 years ago, they might not even have been born when the civil war broke out. And all the talk about Charles I trampling
on people's liberties, extending taxes, and so on, those people are looking
around and saying, well hang on a second, taxes are much higher now, if they were to calculate it, than they ever had been under Charles I, which they definitely were. And as for liberties, look at this, there's the Rump Parliament, and then they're expelled, and then there's other parliaments, and then they're given
their marching orders. So the view of London is crucial, and when George Monck marches
to London with his army, the point about marching
to London is partly about because that's where the
headquarters of the army are, and Parliament meets, but it's also because that is London. And when George Monck finally decides he's definitely going to part company with the republican regime, it's when he moves his
headquarters from Westminster into the City of London, and it's right here,
within the Square Mile, that he essentially makes the announcement about upholding a free parliament, that is the klaxon that the
game is up on the republic. And having the power of London with him was crucial to that, so London is really, really important. In terms of things that still survive, the banqueting house, which I showed you, is still there on Whitehall, where Charles I walked out of the window, and the diplomats leaned out, that's absolutely still there, St. James' Palace was one
of the big army headquarters during the civil war, which is still there, the Tudor building as we know it, the Tower of London was
a very important site, the loss of the Tower to Charles I during the civil war was the first step in the loss of London, because it's where all the gunpowder, the great store of ordnance was kept, and you can see there very much, still, the geography and the physicality
of the world of this time, and many churches too. - Thank you again, Dr. Keay, thank you so much. (audience applauds)
