On the 29th of January 1649, a document was signed by 59 men. Against each signature was a personal seal, stamped in red wax. The third signature read, “O Cromwell”. The document was the death warrant of King Charles I, beheaded in Whitehall the following day. When the axe fell a loud groan rose from the crowd, but perhaps not from 15-year-old Samuel Pepys who was present and later told his school friends, if he had to preach a sermon on the king, his text would be “The memory of the wicked shall rot”. The triumph of Cromwell and the Puritan faction lasted just 11 years. Following Cromwell’s death in 1658, The Commonwealth was finished. Two years later Charles II landed at Dover, and the monarchy was restored. Now it was time for revenge. Parliament passed the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion and the pursuit of the regicides who had signed the death warrant, and who were not already dead or in The Tower was set in motion.
In Act of Oblivion, Robert Harris recreates the story of this
pursuit and in particular, the hunt for Edward Whalley and his son-in law William
Goffe, who escaped across the Atlantic to the Puritan settlements in
New England. In his introduction Harris states, “The events, dates and locations
are accurate and almost every character is real”. However, he does invent the
character of Richard Nayler, the chief man-hunter who is given a compelling motive for pursuing the regicides to the ends of the earth. Nayler is arrested on Christmas Day by
two Colonels from Cromwell’s army. His crime? - celebrating the Feast of the
Nativity and using the Book of Common Prayer when such celebrations are
forbidden. On the evening of his arrest his pregnant wife Sarah, goes into
premature labour and dies giving birth to a stillborn son. Nayler’s mind is
now implacably set on hunting down the two colonels who arrested him, none other than Edward Walley
and William Goffe now safe, so they think in America.
We first meet Nayler when he is ordered by the Privy Council to accompany Isabelle Hacker to her home, Stathern Hall in Leicestershire, to fetch the warrant with its list of 59 names, that authorised the execution of the King, Her husband, Colonel Hacker is named on the warrant, one of the three officers ordered to carry out the execution and who is now under arrest. Nayler reads the warrant; “Whereas Charles Stuart King of England is and stands convicted and condemned of High Treason …….. to be put to death by the severing of his head from his body”, and so the reader is introduced to one of the most famous documents in English history.
Robert Harris skilfully merges fact and fiction in this excellent
novel – “a chewy, morally murky slice of history” (The Times). The reader begins
to understand the Puritan mindset, the devotion to the bible and prayer; the
over-arching authority of preachers and the church; the belief that they are
the saints, the chosen ones, and that all the events of their lives and the
wider world are in the hands of God – every victory a blessing and every defeat
a punishment. He also uses the device of Edward Walley writing his memoirs to
inform the reader of the main events of the Civil War. Occasionally the action
switches to Europe, with stories of betrayal and murder as the long arm of
Parliament seeks revenge on those regicides who had escaped across the channel.
One of my daughters asked me how she could get into history,
so I suggested reading historical novels and pointed her in the direction of “An
Officer and a Spy” a re-telling of the Dreyfus Affair in 1890’s France, also by
Robert Harris. She read it and enjoyed it, and now knows something of the pernicious
influence of antisemitism. So, if you want to get lost in a book that reads
like a thriller – Hunt, Chase, Hide & Kill are the 4 sections – and at the same
time learn more about the struggle between King & Parliament, the New
England colonies, and the hunger for religious certainty, you can do no better
than read Act of Oblivion.
