From Restoration in 1660 (end of the war), to the fire of London in 1666, there was an incredible vibe in the air in England. Cromwell and the extreme Protestant Taliban were gone; chess, music, plays, dancing were all legal once again. People partied, drank, a sense of freedom, newness, and progress was in the air. It was a heck of a party of 6 years, couldn't last, and the fire was the symbolic end to it.
It really is a fascinating period of history, with so much horror packed in that decade without a monarchy. The rule of the major-generals after the failed adventure to capture Hispaniola was an incredible dystopia that beggars belief. England was not "godly enough", and it must have been hideous to live in through those years.
What better way than to encourage a virtuous, godly population than to employ the military as an extremist Purity Squad waging a nationwide war on fun, closing down the theatres, pubs and probably every hint of a flirt or smile? No team sports, horse racing, no fairs, no fucking, no drinking, no rowdiness, then deal with all those instances of not enough manners, or lack of morals and virtue. Oh and kill off dissenters and royalists, especially in Ireland.
Course the military junta kept enjoying dances and other banned fun. Cromwell had God directing his every action, so that must be OK for good puritan leaders.
His exhumation and posthumous public beheading seems totally unsurprising after that lot.
... and of course, like all good civil wars, the embers are still not fully extinguished and allegiance markers are still very visible in some places. The Orange Order are basically the remnants of the "purity squad", complete with pro-Cromwell banners. There are "Oliver Cromwell" or "Cromwell Arms" pubs.
It's a complex set of allegiance politics that I don't think we Brits are usually taught properly, and by properly I mean with the massive dose of cynical realpolitik necessary to see it for what it was.
Absolutely. I think most nations have similar highly warped popular views of their pasts -- Belgium hasn't dealt with Leopold II, America's popular founding story has Puritans as poor innocents, mere victims of unfair oppression who left for freedom in New England. They rarely learn what puritanism was, or that they started oppressing and killing off other religions once there in the freedom of the colonies. Or that many came back to fight Cromwell's war with Charles I to help create that Puritan Paradise in England and Ireland.
The Irish difficulty gets some context when you learn of William of Orange, Cromwell's attempts to remove Popery and royalism from Ireland, whilst giving the land of the recently massacred to his troops in place of pay.
I think schools do a mostly terrible job in setting the "national myth" in context of what was actually happening. So Cromwell ends up placed in BBC millennium votes of top 100 Britons. Somehow I think they didn't hear the whole story, or actually much of it at all. :)
I assume you learned the above from some sort of literature. Thus, are there any particularly good books you could recommend on this subject, on the era of Cromwell and his demise too if possible?
Read an abridged version of Pepys Diary. Most accounts of 1660s London lift directly from his diary.
March 1st 1662
... thence to the Opera and there saw Romeo and Julett, the first time it was ever acted [after the Restoration] But it is the play of itself the worst that ever I heard in my life, and the worst acted that ever I saw these people do; ....
February 9 1668
Up, and at my chamber all the morning and the office doing business, and also reading a little of “L’escholle des filles,” which is a mighty lewd book, but yet not amiss for a sober man once to read over to inform himself in the villainy of the world.
A fair few of the many, many histories of the period, particularly more recent ones, have "an angle", and attempt to clean up Cromwell's role in history or blacken it (not that's there;s much room to get darker, to be fair), or simply miss out too many events. To some extent it's unavoidable as so much appears to have gone on in those years, but I like to feel I got an overall view with balance rather than unwarranted revisionism. Of those I've come across, the one that puts it in the widest context is:
England's Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context by Jonathan Scott
I wasn't sure about this before reading, as I thought I'd read fairly widely on the period already. In taking the wider perspective you really do get what feels like a better view with what was going on elsewhere those years. The influence and deep seated fear of Popery, Catholic / Protestant struggles in surrounding countries, the rise of William of Orange etc. Perhaps not the lightest read, but well worth it.
The English Civil War: A People's History by Diane Purkiss isn't a comprehensive coverage of the timeline, but being a people's history tries to give a feel for what it might be like living in the times. It's well balanced and shows that in some areas there wasn't much to choose between. Get something of a feel for being a little guy living with a war on fun, family and freedom, to live among the major-generals such as Charles Worsley who's busy breaking records for number of lives ruined, pubs closed, races stopped etc. Thankfully for the people of Manchester and surrounding counties, he died young!
For a quick overall history, try Peter Ackroyd's Civil War: The History of England Volume III (History of England Vol III).
I think he's known as a novelist. He concentrates a little too much on the story than analysis and probing deeply into events, but you do get the shape though unavoidably light on detail. Not a bad introduction then, and similar can be said for the others in the series. It's light, and lacking, but serves its purpose.
For in depth at pushing 1,000 pages, I've not seen anything that surpasses or even gets near Woolrych's Britain in Revolution.
Hopefully there's one that fits, pick your poison. :)
A lot of other reading indirectly points back to Civil War and the Cromwellian era -- it's one of those historic pinch points that shaped everything after. Irish resentments are put into context learning Cromwell killed off 10-20% of Ireland, or giving his ill educated and thuggish troops Irish land in place of pay, just trying to eliminate Popery and royalists. "The Troubles" started here, and the Cromwellian roots of the Orange orders -- which of course also stem from Dutch William of Orange too -- that pjc50 mentions. Or Cromwell's part in creating English language opera (by accident). Plays and bawdy songs were banned, opera escaped for a little while. Playwrights started setting plays to music to get around the anti-fun laws, and so English language opera was born...
I can't find any hard numbers on emigration to America because of this, but it definitely restarted a wave of Puritan emigration that had mostly stopped when Cromwell took power.
If you're interested in sampling the life of the 1660s, I recommend following the Twitter account based on Samuel Pepys' diary from that period: https://twitter.com/samuelpepys
Pepys was a senior British official responsible for naval affairs, but also talks about daily life and his own hopes, fears, desires, and frustrations. He was a philanderer, and his encounters feature in the entries (often switching to French) as do major events of the day -- the Great Fire of 1666, worries about a Dutch invasion, etc.
