Republic: Britain's Revolutionary Decade 1649-1660

by Alice Hunt

Faber & Faber 2024

Alice Hunt’s Republic, released this September, is the latest in a series of books marking a resurgence of interest in England’s tumultuous republican decade following the English Civil War and the execution of Charles I in 1649. Anna Keay’s 2022 The Restless Republic traced the evolution of the unsteady new regime through a coruscating combination of prodigiously researched mini-biography and socio-cultural and political analysis, whilst Paul Lay’s 2020 Providence Lost devoted itself to a narrower, detailed study of the years of the Protectorate under Oliver Cromwell. Hunt’s work is more in the vein of Keay’s – she goes for a broad-brush general history which focuses a bit more closely on the often-neglected cultural developments of this time. Against the familiar negative stereotype of the Commonwealth, Hunt provides a refreshingly different perspective that seeks to rehabilitate this much-maligned period. As she states in her prologue:

many men and women adapted to their new world and seized the opportunities and changes the 1640s offered. The Polish émigré Samuel Hartlib…became renowned for advocating reform, enterprise and innovation in everything from agriculture to banking. …William Davenant, staged England’s first operas…Women, too, found new roles and voices.

The book divides neatly into three parts (‘Republic’, ‘Protectorate’ and then ‘Republic’ again), composed of chapters on each year of the kingless period.

The novelty of these ‘overturning dayes’ is stressed, but it is not a new thesis – it goes back at least to the Marxist historian Christopher Hill and his seminal 1972 work, The World Turned Upside Down. But as well as the familiar individuals, such as the Quaker founder George Fox, the Leveller leader John Lilburne and the poet John Milton, we meet Samuel Hartlib, a one-man think-tank and master networker who brought together the finest minds in Cromwell’s London and beyond, such as the scientists Robert Boyle and his housemate Robert Hooke, and many others. Together, these foot soldiers of the burgeoning Puritan Enlightenment ‘exchanged ideas about agricultural methods, economic and educational reform, unemployment and poor relief, scientific knowledge.’

The political theorists Thomas Hobbes and Samuel Harrington, authors of Leviathan and Oceana respectively (both offering diametrically opposing views of government), also make their appearance. Hobbes in particular appears a far more colourful figure than the dour authoritarian suggested in his famously grim tract on the necessity of absolute monarchy. The flowering of intellectual life during this period is credited directly to the turmoil of war and revolution.

We learn that ‘In many ways, the new political circumstances of the Commonwealth enabled these innovative and free philosophers.’ After all, it was the Puritan purge of the University of Oxford that allowed people like the science-minded clergyman John Wilkins, Christopher Wren, Boyle and Hooke the opportunity to meet and form the Experimental Philosophy Club that was the precursor to the Royal Society. Meanwhile, other war-weary contemporaries retreated into pacific pursuits like fishing, gardening and novel-writing.

Oliver Cromwell looms large, as ever in any narrative history of this period. A sketch of the Lord Protector himself on horseback dominates the front cover. Hunt’s achievement is to give Cromwell his due without allowing him to take over the narrative. Space is therefore given over to people and events in which he had no direct hand. She narrates the familiar story of his coup against the Rump in 1653, the erection of the Protectorate and the five barren years of failed attempts at a final constitutional settlement. Her assessment of the luckless Richard Cromwell’s short-lived career as his father’s successor is a fair-minded correction to the suggestion that Richard was a weak sovereign without the character to govern – in some ways he was never really given a chance.

A Stuart restoration was not inevitable. Had Cromwell lived longer or taken up the kingship after all, as rumour had it before his death that he ultimately would, history could look very different. Hunt evokes the excitement of the months immediately after Richard’s downfall in the spring of 1659, when the republicans Henry Vane and Arthur Haselrig, and their radical supporters in the army, who had always seen the Protectorate as a backsliding into hated monarchy, looked to be in the ascendant. Meanwhile, London’s coffee-drinking intellectuals gathered at the Rota Club to discuss possible alternatives to the Protectorate short of monarchy. It was not to be – General Monck’s march south from Scotland saw to that.

Hunt is a competent writer who injects a slight literary sensibility to her retelling of this exciting yet traumatic period of English history. One regrets that there are no colour illustrations but only black-and-white sketches – when a portrait of Cromwell is referenced in the text, one would like to see it in the book rather than go Googling. There is, however, a capacious bibliography, increasingly a rarity in published works of history, for which the reader cannot be too grateful.

Aaron Kyereh-Mireku is a writer and reviewer living in London.