Towards the conclusion of Republic, Alice Hunt’s chronicle of a tempestuous 17th-century experiment with theological republicanism, we glimpse the poet John Milton at home in central London. The freezing winter of 1658, the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell has recently died, and Milton is composing an epic poem exploring the meanings of freedom.
Milton was a champion of Cromwell’s regime and of the values of a virtuous republic – and, in Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve are free to choose, obey, disobey. Hunt notes Milton’s guiding principle that “Spiritual freedom – being free to choose God – could only be enabled by political freedom. Republics, not monarchies, allowed such freedom”.
But with Cromwell’s death, this constitutional experiment teeters – and very soon, a king will again be on the throne, and Cromwell’s corpse exhumed and thrown into a pit. With this portrait of Milton working blindly amid a political maelstrom, Hunt captures the essence of a republican decade: that it was a holy quest to create a new – and free – constitutional compact between the English nation and God.
The book opens – how could it not? – with a survey of Cromwell’s expedition to Ireland, with the facts fairly set out: the massacres of civilians, the laying waste of an island, the “settlement” that followed. Hunt remarks later that Cromwell “remains widely loathed throughout Ireland, where the atrocities at Drogheda and Wexford will never be forgotten and where the subsequent treatment of Catholics and huge-scale redistribution of land are seen as Cromwell’s personal legacy”. This is a very odd comment: given such a legacy, one might imagine that Cromwell would be justifiably loathed rather more widely.
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But this book – and its subtitle notwithstanding – is a story of England: of English politics, culture, theology, and constitutional debate. And so, having given Ireland and Scotland brief glances, the narrative returns to its comfort zone of intrigue in the halls of Westminster, Whitehall and Hampton Court.
This is a disappointment: for in pursuing an English immersion, Hunt misses an opportunity to explore the many differences between England and its neighbours, to reflect more than passingly on Cromwell’s apocalyptic impact on Irish society – and to develop a multi-faceted history that has the courage to free itself, more than merely occasionally, from the palaces and debating chambers of London.
