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In 1660, the Restoration of the Monarchy made the question of remembering and memorialising the English Revolution not only controversial, but also dangerous.
In that year, the Act of Oblivion and Indemnity pardoned those other than the regicides who had rebelled against the Crown during the Civil Wars and the Interregnum. The Act commanded the people to forget the wars. It forbade the settling of old scores and reserved the right to take revenge on former enemies to Charles II himself.
Controversial from the outset, the Act of Oblivion failed to prevent or heal disputes over the people’s different memories of the wars and revolution. Professor Ted Vallance, Dean of Research and Doctoral Studies at the University of Roehampton, explains how the revolution was remembered in this programme.
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In the words of the historians, George Southcombe and Grant Tapsell, after the Restoration of monarchy in 1660, ‘remembering was figured as Rebellion’. The Act of Indemnity and Oblivion passed by the Convention Parliament and given the Royal assent in August that year afforded freedom from prosecution for acts committed during the Civil Wars and Interregnum to all Royalists and most Parliamentarians. (Only a handful of revolutionaries, notably those who were involved in the trial and execution of Charles I, were excluded from its protection). In addition to this broad Indemnity, however, the statute also required that memory of the revolution should not be invoked for the next three years. It prohibited anyone
“malitiously to call or alledge of, or object against any other person or persons any name or names, or other words of reproach any way tending to revive the memory of the late Differences or the occasions thereof.”
As the historian, Ed Legon, has argued, this element of the act is sometimes misunderstood as designed to consign the celebration of the Parliamentarian ‘Good Old Cause’ to oblivion. Instead, the intent of the statute was to enact a form of historical amnesty which would actually free former Parliamentarians from having to make disavowals of a cause that many continued to feel had been just and, indeed, providentially ordained by God. The Act therefore fashioned its own interpretation of the recent past in which only a tiny minority of individuals had undertaken actions which were truly unforgiveable.
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The Act of Indemnity and Oblivion’s attempt to secure a truce on the use of the memory of the English Revolution would soon be undermined, however, as the Cavalier Parliament drove through a much narrower political and religious settlement. This legislative backlash came on the back of a wave of Royalist hostility to the generosity of the Act of Indemnity. Much of this public criticism of the Act blatantly flaunted the statute’s prohibition on invoking the memory of the Civil Wars in disputes. These Royalists attacks on the generosity of the Act to adherents of the Parliamentarian cause were given further credibility by the outbreak of a serious insurrection in London in January 1661. Known as ‘Venner’s Rising’ and led by former Parliamentarian soldiers, the Rising suggested that the threat posed by so-called ‘fanatics’ was very real, and that the Restoration regime had been naïve to imagine that it was only a small fraction of former revolutionaries who should be exempted from pardon.
The Cavalier Parliament which succeeded the Convention, as it name implies, was dominated by MPs with Royalist sympathies. It passed a suite of legislation in the summer of 1661 which fundamentally altered the historical narrative which the Act of Indemnity had sought to establish. The Militia Act directly challenged the legitimacy of Parliament’s war against Charles I, stating that neither house of Parliament could lawfully
“raise or leavy any Warr Offensive or Defensive against His Majesty His Heires or lawfull Successors”.
The Tumultuous Petitioning Act contested the claim that the revolution had been the work of a radical minority, instead arguing that mass petitioning had been a
“great meanes of the late unhappy Wars Confusions and Calamities in this Nation.”
The Sedition Act even went so far as to indirectly criticise the Crown for approving such a broad Indemnity. While the king’s clemency had, it said, ’enflamed the hearts’ of his loyal subjects, it had also given freedom to others to produce ‘seditious Sermons Pamphlets and Speeches’ which defamed ‘the Person and Government of Your Majestie’ and which helped inspire Venner’s insurrection in January.
Although the Militia Act would tie these disturbances specifically to the actions of ‘Fanaticks’ and ‘Sectarys’, the tenor of much of this legislation was aimed at a much broader swathe of Parliamentarianism. For example, the Sedition Act’s declaration of the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643 as an ‘unlawful oath’ was targeted at Presbyterians who, under the initial Restoration settlement, had been accommodated into both the church and the government of Charles II.
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The memory of the English revolution was critical, therefore, to shaping the Restoration settlement and exerted a profound influence on political and religious disputes in the later seventeenth century. As we will see, even as a Royalist interpretation of the Civil Wars and Interregnum emerged as the dominant public narrative, there was no element of England’s revolutionary decades which remained uncontested. Even the trial and execution of the King, considered anathema by many former Parliamentarians as well as Royalists, was celebrated by some as an act of providential justice against a tyrannical king.
These disputes over the memory of the revolution were not confined to print but were also conveyed orally and embedded in public commemorations. Critically, these debates over the Civil Wars and Interregnum were not defined by a simple Royalist/Parliamentarian split but reflected a variety of political and religious standpoints and were shaped by local as well as national narratives and memories. Moreover, as a conflict which had affected all sections of society, it was not only the political or social elite who engaged with the memory of the revolution, but also ordinary men and women, for example, those claiming relief on the basis of their service and suffering during the Civil Wars. As that example indicates, remembrance was not largely a reflective exercise but one which informed how individuals understood the present and imagined the future. Remembering the revolution was a way of justifying actions and interventions, affirming political and religious identities and shaping horizons of possibility.
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This is evident in one of the most well-known ways in which the memory of the Civil Wars and revolution was recorded: life-writing. Again, though, it was not only in memoirists’ recollections of the 1640s and 1650s that the memory of the revolution exerted an influence. The Great Fire of London of 1666 is one of the best remembered events in seventeenth century England. Schoolchildren still learn how the fire first started in a bakery on Pudding Lane on 2 September before spreading quickly through the City, its progress encouraged by a combination of high winds, closely packed wooden houses and the delay in implementing fire-fighting measures.
In the eyes of some contemporaries, however, the fire was no accident but a judgement from God. Edmund Ludlow had served as MP for Wiltshire during the Long Parliament and was one of the ‘regicides’ who signed Charles I’s death warrant in January 1649. At the Restoration, Ludlow escaped punishment for his role in the King’s execution by fleeing into exile, settling in Vevey, Switzerland. Here Ludlow spent much of his time writing an autobiographical work that he entitled ‘A Voyce from the Watch Tower’.
Ludlow’s ‘A Voyce from the Watch Tower’ demonstrates the importance of the memory of the English revolution both in the seventeenth century and beyond. In its original, manuscript form, Ludlow’s account was profoundly shaped by the memory of two events. The first was the trial and execution of Charles I, an event that Ludlow believed was justified by the law of God and by Parliament’s status, in his view, as the supreme authority in the land. The second was the trial and execution of his fellow regicides by the Restoration regime. In total, between 1660 and 1662, thirteen of the men involved in the trial and execution of Charles I were subjected to the full punishment for treason: hanging, drawing and quartering. For Ludlow, these men were not evil king-killers receiving their legal just desserts for their treasonable actions, but ‘martyrs’ whose suffering on the scaffold was a testimony of their commitment to the cause of God.
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While a significant (and now lost) part of the work was retrospective, discussing events during the Civil War and Interregnum, Ludlow also reflected on events in both England and Europe more broadly after the Restoration.
In his account of the Great Fire of London, Ludlow noted that
“this fire began in sight of, and neare to ye place, where most of those heads who suffered for the Testimony they bore for ye Lord [meaning the executed regicides] are exposed to publique view, that it burnt several Gates where their Limbs were placed, and burnt ye whole howse where they were tried, and unjustly condemned.”
The course of the conflagration was, as Ludlow saw it, directed by God at expunging the crime of the city in brutally punishing his servants. For Ludlow, this was a holy fire that not only purged but also punished. It claimed the life, Ludlow alleged, of the daughter ‘great wth Child’ of the foreman the jury that tried his fellow Regicide, Thomas Harrison. In this way, according to Ludlow, the Lord showed his displeasure ‘to this sinfull & Apostate Citty’.
In writing this work, Ludlow was also intent on doing much more than simply trying to record an account of events of his lifetime. The act of remembering in ‘A Voyce from the Watch Tower’ had clear political and confessional objectives. In religious terms, recounting the sacrifice of the regicides was intended to support the ‘conviction, conversion, edification & strengthening of others’. In political terms, the graphic retelling of their deaths was intended to shame those who had turned their backs on the ‘Cause’ and had instead accommodated themselves to the (in Ludlow’s eyes), usurping and tyrannical regime of Charles II. The act of remembering was, therefore, not purely backward looking but represented a commentary on the present and an intervention designed to shape the future.
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Ludlow’s work remained in manuscript during his lifetime but was published after his death as The Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow in three volumes produced between 1698 and 1699. The Memoirs became a key source for historians of the Civil Wars and revolution and a scholarly edition was produced by CH Firth in 1895. In the 1970s, however, the historian, Blair Worden, rediscovered the surviving portions of Ludlow’s manuscript in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. While the section discussing the period before 1660 was sadly missing from the Bodleian manuscript, the surviving portions laid bare the substantial differences between the Memoirs and the original ‘A Voyce from the Watch Tower’.
Worden’s analysis made clear that Ludlow’s editor, probably the Deist republican John Toland, had fundamentally transformed the original text, cutting vast sections of Ludlow’s commentary and substantially re-writing most of what remained. In particular, Worden noted how the editor had effectively obscured Ludlow’s radical Puritan pre-occupation with God’s providence. The change wrought by Ludlow’s editor on the original text was nowhere more evident than in the Memoirs’ rendering of the execution of Ludlow’s fellow regicides. As Worden eloquently put it, whereas in the manuscript, the regicides died like ‘early Christian martyrs’, in the Memoirs they died ‘like Romans’. The end result was to repackage Ludlow to serve late seventeenth century political ends.
Ludlow’s ‘Voyce’ was not the only memoir of the Civil War to undergo such repackaging. Lucy Hutchinson’s life of her husband, the Regicide Colonel John Hutchinson, underwent a similar, if less extensive, process of excision at the hands of nineteenth century editors. As with Ludlow, served to obscure the Puritan zeal on display in the manuscript original. As these two examples also demonstrate, remembering the Civil Wars could intensify rather than diminish Puritan apocalypticism, especially in works written in the context of what, to their authors, was a seemingly godless, libertine Restoration culture.
Life-writing was not exclusive to prominent figures such as Ludlow and Hutchinson or to extensive works of biography or autobiography. As historians such as Mark Stoyle have demonstrated, petitions for relief by Civil War veterans or their families, rehearsed political narratives in miniature as a critical part of justifying their requests for support. These narratives often glossed over the complexities of political allegiance during the 1640s and 1650s to present an image of unqualified loyalty to the Royalist cause as a means of securing support. The petition of Martha Kershawe of Rochdale, Lancashire, presented at the Michaelmas Session of the Peace in Preston in 1660, for example, detailed her late husband’s
“seruice for the Kings Majestie vnder the Comand of S[i]r George Booth…proclaimeing the Kings Majestie att the Towne of Rachdale where yo[u]r Petic[i]on[e]rs said husband was shott…and there slaine in the street…leauing att his death Fyue small Children which formerly hee had well mainetained by his Industry and Callinge.”
Kershawe’s petition for relief for herself and her children was grounded on her husband’s support for a Royalist uprising that had been led by a former Parliamentarian, George Booth, who would be made Lord Delamere in April 1661 for his services to the Crown. Petitions for relief of this kind showed women as well as men employing the memory of the Civil Wars strategically, overlooking such side-changing to present a convincing case for support. As noted by Matthew Neufeld, the presentation of unequivocal loyalty to the Crown was particularly necessary after 1662 when legislation made any who had deserted the Royalist cause or switched sides during the conflict (both common occurrences during the 1640s) ineligible for relief.
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These requests also intertwined local and national events. For example, the petition of Grace Batishill, a widow from Plymstock, Devon, recalled the Regicide in its reference to ‘the late martyred King Charles the First of most Glorious memory’. It also explored incidents around the siege of Plymouth between 1644 and 1646 which led to her husband George Batishill’s death at the hands of Parliamentarian forces. The effect of combining these national and local events was to amplify her spouse’s service and sacrifice for the Royalist cause. Although the outcome of Batishill’s petition is unknown, many other women petitioners certainly did secure relief through these strategies.
However, subscriptional texts such as petitions, that is texts which individuals subscribed either with signatures or marks, could also be used to throw into doubt claims of loyalty to the Crown. Practices of mass oath-taking and petitioning during the Civil Wars and Interregnum and the circulation of such texts in print left records of individuals’ support for the Parliamentarian cause and the Interregnum regimes. These left hostages to fortune which were used to political effect in the Restoration period. For example, a Great Yarmouth coffeehouse keeper and government informer, Richard Bower, used the corporation’s address of loyalty to the Lord Protector Richard Cromwell in 1658 to attack the town’s nonconformists.
On 12 July 1676, Bower wrote to Charles II’s Secretary of State and chief spy-master, Sir Joseph Williamson, enclosing a manuscript copy of what he described as:
“our towne’s Address to Rich., Protector, (wch came from one yt was formerly of theire Assembly), where you will finde severall of our new Militia officers, as our Coll[onel], Sr George England, our Major, Bayliff Thaxter: & Capt. Richard Huntington, besides severall of ye old Presbiterian gang, that are at present justices & aldermen of our towne, whoo are marked wth P. there is alsoe ye chiefe of our Independts now in towne marked wth I…”
Bower urged Williamson to consider the document carefully:
“if you please to p[er]use ye Address from this towne to Richard, Protector: you will finde those cheifly concerned in yt Address, to have ye greatest share in the government of this towne from ye yeare ’65 to this present day, from whence the Nonconformists here, tooke encouragement to contemne both ye laws & ye King’s Comands & to grow So numerous as now they are.”
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Bower’s concern with the influence wielded by men such as England and Thaxter was long-standing – indeed, he had previously supplied his own narrative history of the town to Williamson, detailing what he saw as the takeover of the corporation by men who had been supporters of the ‘late Rebellion’. The connections between Yarmouth’s current governors and the Parliamentarian cause were repeatedly emphasised in Bower’s letters: he assiduously reported the reputed presence of the old Cromwellians Oliver St John and John Desborough in the area, and gave detailed accounts of the activities of the veteran Independent minister William Bridges. He noted the refusal of men including Bridges’ son-in-law to renounce the Parliamentarian Solemn League and Covenant, and he attributed the confidence of the town’s nonconformists to the fact that the Militia was now in the hands of men who ‘joined with them in the government in the late unhappy times’. These specific, local accusations were connected to Bower’s broader view, also articulated to Williamson, that dissenters were primarily responsible for the Civil War.
In Bower’s use of the Cromwellian address, we can see documentary evidence from the Interregnum being used to fashion a version of the English revolution that reflected both local contexts and national narratives. Bower’s employment of England’s revolutionary history also allowed him to assign particular religious identities to individuals within a wider dissenting culture that he saw as inseparable from Civil War Puritanism. As Ed Legon has shown, Bower’s activities here were part of a wider trend of informants providing lists of former Parliamentarians to the Restoration authorities in a bid to encourage and support surveillance of these individuals.
These claims regarding the political affiliations of individuals, like those made in petitions, often elided the complexities of loyalty and allegiance during the Civil Wars and Interregnum. Bower almost certainly exaggerated the commitment of Yarmouth’s officials to the Cromwellian regime. While the corporation received the proclamation announcing Richard’s succession in early September 1658 and celebrated the event shortly afterwards, it would not be until November of the same year that the town would agree on the text of an address and only in early 1659 that the address appeared in print. It is notable, in contrast, that when Charles II was restored to the throne, the corporation was able to appoint the committee to produce a loyal address and agree the text all in the same day.
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In common with many other addresses sent to Richard Cromwell, Yarmouth’s 1658 text avoided direct acknowledgement of Richard’s right to rule as conferred through the Humble Petition and Advice, instead preferring to emphasise the role of divine providence. The use of providence in these addresses, far from simply being a means of flattering Richard as a new ‘Joshua’ (the most common biblical allusion in these texts), was actually a means of avoiding publicly endorsing either the Protectoral constitution or the new Protector’s legal title. Bower, therefore, was ‘spinning’ the content of the Yarmouth address to emphasise the dubious political loyalties of some of the town’s magistrates. Ultimately, Bower’s attempt to blacken the name of these members of the corporation would backfire: as a result of the pressure exerted by England, Huntington and Thaxter and the Lord Lieutenant of Norfolk, Viscount Yarmouth, Bower’s coffee-house business was shutdown and his correspondence with Williamson drastically curtailed. The damage to the reputation of these magistrates, however, had been done. By their own admission, the Cromwellian address had become ‘the common subject of discourse’ in the town. Indeed, the persistence of nonconformist dynasties such as the Englands in Great Yarmouth’s government, would ensure that the Cromwellian address would remain political contentious well into the eighteenth century.
Another example of the use of these subscriptional texts to question the loyalty of individuals can be found in the case of Thomas Beaumont, MP for Leicestershire during the Interregnum. Beaumont had been granted a baronetcy by Oliver Cromwell and sought after the Restoration to have this title conferred through Royal Letters Patent. While this was eventually confirmed, the process was delayed a year, Beaumont complained, by the ’untrue suggestions’ of some regarding his activities during the 1640s and 1650s. Beaumont had been accused of signing a petition in the autumn of 1648 calling for Charles I to be brought to justice. Indeed, allegations that Beaumont had been involved in the drafting of a ‘no treaty, no king’ petition had been made at the time in the Royalist newsbook Mercurius Politicus. They are credible, given that Beaumont was a client of the Regicide Thomas, Lord Grey of Groby, who was most likely the architect of Leicestershire’s petition against the King.
The complexities of political allegiance in the 1640s and 1650s are further revealed by a petition of April 1661 in support of Beaumont signed by sixty-six Leicestershire gentleman. Many of these subscribers were individuals, such as Beaumont’s fellow MP Thomas Pochin, who had earlier signed the county’s address to Lord Protector Richard Cromwell. An (alleged) promoter of Regicide was therefore being defended by old Cromwellians in his attempt to secure confirmation of his baronetcy from the Restoration monarchy. Yet, though this petition was ultimately successful in helping secure the confirmation of Beaumont’s title, it is clear that locally, significant antipathy towards him remained: Beaumont was excluded from the county bench for most of the 1660s.
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The vast amounts of printed and manuscript commentary on the events of the Civil Wars provided a rich bank of resources for contemporaries to establish and challenge local, national and individual narratives concerning the English revolution. However, as historians such as Ian Atherton have demonstrated, the conflict was not only remembered in writing but also commemorated through local as well as national events and rituals. At a national level, the remembrance of the execution of Charles I on 30 January and the celebration of the Restoration of monarchy on 29 May, provided occasions for the rehearsal of narratives and counter-narratives regarding the revolution: for example, though many commemorated the ‘martyrdom’ of the King and of other Royalists, there were those such as Edmund Ludlow whose memorialisation identified the true martyrs as the executed regicides. As Atherton has shown, however, communities were not only focused on celebrating national ‘deliverance’ but also on recalling the salvation of their own localities, following events such as the lifting of Parliamentarian or Royalist sieges.
Again, the identities fashioned through these commemorations were more complex and embodied more than a simple Parliamentarian/Royalist divide. In Taunton, Somerset, local Presbyterian ministers in the 1650s had established a celebration on 11 May which marked the raising of a Royalist siege of the town. Yet the celebration was also a demonstration of their refusal to honour the fasts and thanksgivings established by the Republican regime. These commemorations continued into the Restoration period but were notably adjusted to fit with the times: the Parliamentarian saviour of the town was now celebrated as the Presbyterian Colonel Edward Massey rather than Sir Thomas Fairfax, now tainted by his associations with the Regicide and with radical Puritanism.
These celebrations continued on into the late seventeenth century and beyond. Consequently, they came to involve those who were not born when the siege had originally been raised. In this way, some scholars have identified in the memorialising of the English revolution, elements of what Marianne Hirsch has defined as ‘post-memory’, that is the impact of ‘overwhelming inherited memories’ on subsequent generations. Deliberate transmission of what Ed Legon has termed ‘seditious memories’ in this way may have informed the creation of radical political groups in the post-Restoration era. For example, the Whig Green Ribbon Club, whose symbol itself harked back to the ‘sea-green’ of the Leveller movement, included old revolutionaries such as Slingsby Bethel, as well as the sons of regicides, notably Simon Maine, and Rumpers, such as Sir Arthur Hesilrige.
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Critically, the transmission of the memory of the Civil War and revolution across generations appears to have been conducted orally rather than in print. As the example of their influence on the radical Whigs indicates, these positive recollections of the revolution represented much more than political or religious nostalgia. The articulation of these memories was often in private and only captured for posterity when it caught the attention of informers and spies. Even in these private recollections, however, the rehearsing of counter-narratives served to challenge and resist the dominant Royalist mythology of the revolution. More than this, such counter-narratives justified the struggle against the twin evils of ‘Popery’ and ‘arbitrary government’ in the Restoration period and supported a continued belief in the ’Good Old Cause’ of civil and religious liberty.
As we have seen, the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion has been somewhat misunderstood. It was less an exercise in national forgetting than an attempt to secure an amnesty on the use of history for polemical/political ends. This mnemonic truce was, as Erin Peters has argued, in tension with the requirement to nonetheless commemorate certain elements of the recent past, notably the King’s execution. It was also threatened by both Royalist hostility to Indemnifying former enemies and discontent from radicals such as Ludlow who objected to drawing a veil over acts that represented (to them) the fulfilment of both earthly justice and divine will.
It was further challenged by particular local contexts and rivalries which encouraged the deployment of specific memories of the Civil Wars, distinct from national narratives. These readings did not represent merely wistful recollections of better times, but informed the formation of political groupings, themselves deliberately redolent of Civil War movements. The recent past was thereby placed in the service of the imminent political future.
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This has been one of a series of talks by Professor Vallance which you can find on our website, www.worldturnedupsidedown.co.uk.
These include discussions of the importance of radicalism and an insightful description and analysis of the debates conducted in Putney Church in 1647. This was a landmark event in western political history. In a further programme, Professor Vallance tackles the question “what were the real objectives behind the execution of Charles I?”
These are just a few of the more than 100 fascinating and free programmes, now available on the website and our Spotify, Apple Podcast and YouTube channels, to which new programmes with leading historians are added weekly.
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