The English Civil Wars were and are just as contentious – but luckily for me I’m a novelist, not a historian, and the question I had to answer wasn’t ‘What really happened?’ but ‘What would my protagonists think had happened?’ Was Charles I really a bloody tyrant, and were Ireton and Cromwell scheming ambitious hypocrites? Most modern historians think not. Did the Levellers believe they were? Undoubtedly! The history in this book is a Leveller view of the Second Civil War – as interpreted, of course, by a twenty-first century female novelist. For what it’s worth, however, I’ve tried hard to be accurate. The big events all happened much as described, many of the characters are based on real people, and all the quotations from newsbooks, pamphlets and documents are genuine. The two main characters, of course, are purely fictional, as are their letters.
As in my previous Civil War novel, the language used for dialogue is a compromise between modern and seventeenth century, adopted because I wanted something that fitted in with the period documents but didn’t completely alienate the modern reader. If it didn’t work for you – well, I’m sorry!
King Charles I was tried and executed in January 1649, and over the course of that year the Levellers were crushed. There was a crackdown on press freedom in the autumn of 1649. (Gilbert Mabbot had been pushed out of the Licensorship before then.) The Moderate and Mercurius Pragmaticus were alike shut down, and the vast array of Civil War newsbooks shrank to one official mouthpiece: Mercurius Politicus. The editor? None other than Marchamont Nedham. He’d stuck with the Royalist cause until well after the King’s execution, but when he was finally caught he bought his freedom by turning his coat. He exploited his monopoly on newsprint, married profitably, and supported the Protectorate with such panache that all the Royalists in exile hated him – but at the Restoration he was wealthy enough to buy himself a pardon.
John Wildman did not turn his coat, but his adroit dealings in confiscated lands made him extremely wealthy. He was a perpetual conspirator, first against Cromwell and then against Charles II and James II, but his wealth – coupled with some double- or possibly triple-agenting – allowed him to escape the consequences whenever he was caught. He was in the thick of the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, and was briefly rewarded with the position of Postmaster General, but lost it after he forged letters to discredit opponents.
Honest John Lilburne predictably fared less well. In the spring of 1649 he attacked Cromwell and his government in a pamphlet called England’s New Chains Discover’d. He was arrested for this and other forms of agitation and was twice tried for treason: the jury acquitted him on both occasions, but he nonetheless spent most of the rest of his life in prison. He died in his wife’s arms in 1657, during a brief spell out on parole, at the age of forty-two.
Just over a year later, Cromwell, too, was dead. If Ireton had still been alive at the time the history of England might have been very different – but Ireton had died of fever in 1651 while campaigning in Ireland. Oliver’s eldest son, Richard Cromwell, inherited his father’s title, but could not hold the Commonwealth together, and Charles II was restored to his father’s throne in 1660.
The Overtons seem to have retreated from both politics and publishing and moved to the Netherlands before that triumph. Their voices, like those of so many others, disappear from history. Their ideas, however, are alive and powerful today, in constitutions all over the world, and in the minds and hearts of those who love democracy.
A Corruptible Crown Page 29
