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Don’t fear the fairies – but do allow a little enchantment into your life
In an age in which we are no longer mortally afraid of the supernatural, there's space to enjoy freely magic and ritual, Professor Ronald Hutton tells David Musgrove
Most of us, these days, do not believe in fairies. But maybe we should allow a little more enchantment into our lives – that is the Life Lesson from History that Professor Ronald Hutton would have us consider. In late December every year, on the winter solstice, I like to make a mini-pilgrimage to Avebury at dawn. Avebury is, of course, one of Britain’s most impressive prehistoric megalithic monuments – a huge Neolithic stone circle, surrounded by a massive bank and ditch, with two smaller stone circles inside. It’s so big, in fact, that inside the stone circle is an entire village and a pub (which are obviously substantially later in date than the megaliths). I’m not alone in heading to this huge henge for the solstice – many are drawn to it, and there is something of a carnival vibe. I get up at about 4am and generally make some of my friends get up as well (they thank me not for this). We drive for an hour in the dark and then go for a jog for a few miles from the stone circle, past the enormous and abundantly enigmatic Silbury Hill, up to the West Kennet Long Barrow, and then back along the avenue of standing stones that leads into the henge and circle. I try to plan it to arrive back in Avebury as dawn breaks, but I never get the timing right, and it’s invariably overcast anyway, so I’ve never witnessed an impressive spiritual sunrise moment. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/05/HEPKG2avebury-846ee37.jpg" width="5100" height="3400" alt="A large rock takes up half the image. In the background a long line of people gather together under the purple sky" title="Avebury in Wiltshire is home to Britain’s largest stone circle, which is so big that inside are an entire village and a pub (built much later) (Image by Alamy)" /> I thought about Avebury after I’d chatted to Professor Hutton, one of the leading experts on the history of belief, ritual and the supernatural. I invited him to talk about his life lessons from history and I was delighted when he promptly replied, with the following message: “Perhaps I could offer some thought on the conveniences of living in a modern disenchanted world, in which we no longer feel generally menaced by fairies, ghosts, demons or spirits, and people who do feel the presence of a spirit world or the divine can interact with it as a private matter and without being called to account for it by authorities.” I was keen to understand what he meant by the ‘modern disenchanted world’, and he explained that it was in essence a place where fairies are not at large to cause mischief, witches won’t make your children ill, and lettuce leaves are unlikely to harbour demons (I’ll come back to that last point). “ I hear a lot these days about the world having lost that thrilling sense of the supernatural: a real belief in dragons, fairies, witches and wizards, and a general sense of wonder in the world. And I understand that feeling, having spent quite a lot of my professional life studying beliefs in exactly these things, but my basic argument is it’s actually a real asset living in a disenchanted world,” Professor Hutton says. “First, because you don’t have to be afraid of the supernatural. And second, because most people don’t have to be afraid of the supernatural in you.” Back at Avebury, I’m guessing that quite a lot of the people turning up there on the winter solstice have not lost that sense of the supernatural. There are always crowds of people flowing around the stones, and more people stood crowning the top of the henge bank. It’s a busy place on the winter solstice. Among the stones, you’ll find people dressed in garb that you might describe as druidic, actively celebrating and communing, banging drums, singing, chanting, blowing horns and things that look suspiciously like didgeridoos. They appear to be practising what I imagine are pagan rites. I’ve never asked these celebrants what they’re doing, and I’ve never felt any need to either join in or intervene. I assume they are looking for something that isn’t readily available in the 21st century. I also guess that there are a lot of people who are spectators, looking in from the disenchanted world, sitting on the sidelines and hoping for entertainment over enlightenment. As far as I can tell, there is no sense of antagonism between these groups, and no obvious sign of anyone being challenged for their actions or beliefs, even if they might be somewhat unorthodox. This, says Hutton, is something we should celebrate, and use to our advantage. “People can actually be what they wish – express themselves – without their neighbours beating them up, dragging them into court, or in modern times, breaking their windows or posting horrid things through their letter boxes.” If we wish, we are afforded the best of both worlds. We can bewitch ourselves with ritual, legend, spirituality – but we don’t have to live in fear of being accused of sorcery. “It’s only safe to be a witch in a society that doesn’t believe you’re a witch,” points out Hutton. Read more | A medieval mystery: the green-coloured children found in an English village Policing the unknown Ronald Hutton has spent his academic life exploring these fears – what they meant, how they manifested, and crucially, how they were policed. “There was the constant nagging fear of orthodoxy needing to be policed, to get rid of heretics,” he explains. Such fears included “a real belief that if your child falls sick and the local doctor, if there is one, can’t work out what’s wrong with them – they’ve actually been bewitched by a neighbour.” Obviously it would be ridiculous to suggest that we don’t still live with fears today, but says Professor Hutton, they are of a different magnitude to what people had to contend with in the past. “Today we face all sorts of dangers in daily life – car crashes, muggers, drunken revellers, nutcases, hustlers.” But these, he says, are nothing compared to the terrifying reach of the unseen that haunted our ancestors. “If you went out at night in the countryside, you were in danger of being blighted by fairies or led astray by goblins. And there was also the issue of people being afraid of what you might do or believe in supernatural terms.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/05/2AHX04Edemons-ea8e85e.jpg" width="4724" height="3188" alt="A woodcut depicts gremlins, dragons and goblins. In the centre a warlock or wizard sits at a table" title="An early woodcut showing gremlins, dragons and goblins, summoned by a wizard or warlock. Magical creatures were once a source of fear in society (Image by Alamy)" /> And sometimes the fear went further still: not just suspicion of others, but fear of the world itself. “The lurking presence of demons in the air all around you. There’s an anecdote about a 14th-century nun who forgot to make the sign of the cross over a lettuce leaf in a salad. As a result, she swallowed a demon that was sitting invisibly upon it and was inflicted with all sorts of terrible digestive problems until she was exorcised.” That might sound a little absurd, I know, but that’s because we are today so far removed from the world view that these people had. I’m reminded of a HistoryExtra podcast conversation I had with the social historian Patrick Joyce, regarding his book about the vanished world of European peasants, Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World (Penguin, 2024). In his mind, that is a place most of us simply don’t understand at all. “Their world was full of spirits, but then the world was a kind of a thing in itself, a natural thing, in which they didn’t invoke spirits necessarily,” Professor Joyce told me. “If you behaved to the world as you felt the world should be behaved to, ie you respected the soil and the way in which it should be worked, you showed a solidarity with nature, and if you showed solidarity with nature, nature would show solidarity.” Joyce’s argument is that the rapid decline of peasantry in the 20th century has been overlooked and understudied. So it leaves us with an inability to understand properly how they saw things, and I guess what they were afraid of. A sense of control Back to Professor Hutton: “People in charge of society all over Europe began to lose their fear of these things from about 1660 onwards, but ordinary people, especially in the countryside, were burdened by them right up to the early 20th century.” So how did this change? What led us away from that weird world of magic and menace? According to Ronald Hutton, it’s a matter of pragmatism. Let’s take witches for instance. “One very good reason why witch-hunting came to an end in Europe is that Europeans realised there were no benefits. Communities that had witch hunts and put to death their neighbours as witches did not have healthier children, better weather, or better working farm equipment. On the contrary, they tended to be decimated, divided, and traumatised. It just wasn’t profitable.” If these fears didn’t produce positive results, the obvious question is why did they persist? What human need did they serve? Ronald Hutton is clear: they gave people a sense of agency. “You have someone to blame. The world seems a bit more manageable, because you can take action: hunt a witch; carry out an exorcism; hang up a rowan wood cross over your door to keep out bad luck.” And more deeply, they offered explanations for the inexplicable. “All over the world, people have wanted to blame somebody for things going remorselessly wrong. There are three entities on the hit list, and if you believe in one of these, you don’t tend to believe in the others. So societies dotted around worldwide tend to divide up between them.” First to blame, says Hutton, are angry or evil land spirits, fairies, demons. Secondly, “the human dead who’ve taken a dislike to you, vengeful ghosts, offended ancestors”. And the third, he explains, are evil human beings who’ve been working magic, in other words, witches. “But the point about all these three are there are remedies to all of them. So people feel less vulnerable and more empowered in the midst of what traditionally is an overwhelmingly powerful natural world, which nobody really understands.” Where it gets a little sobering though, is that the fear wasn’t just psychological – it could be fatal. Hutton recounts studies from American doctors in the 1940s, trying to understand why soldiers fighting in the Pacific were dying of minor wounds, apparently under the misapprehension that they had been seriously injured. These American medics looked at interwar medical records from doctors working in colonial possessions of imperial powers. They carried out autopsies on indigenous people in these colonies who believed they’d been fatally cursed, and observed why that might have happened. “Your system is bombarded by a constant tidal wave of adrenaline, which suppresses the immune system,” said Hutton, “and if you have a latent defect in a vital organ, the body breaks that open and people die.” So yes, it seems that believing in the supernatural could kill, under those circumstances. This is why, Hutton says, it’s such a gift that we no longer have to believe. “It’s so nice to have got rid of all that stuff.” A time for enchantment On the flip side of that though, if you do want a little magic in your life, that’s not a bad thing, according to the professor. “People often stabilise their lives in all sorts of societies by having what scholars slightly patronisingly call a ‘myth to live by’. A religion. A personal guardian spirit. A belief in certain aspects of the preternatural. These are not just comforting – they’re beneficial. They give confidence. They build character. They enable people to explore the world profitably in all sorts of ways. They work extremely well. I would be the last person to suggest that none of these entities actually exist. I’d never suggest that these belief systems are necessarily false. It’s just they’re not proven so we can take or leave them.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/05/GettyImages-2188133124chirstianity-478107c.jpg" width="3896" height="5564" alt="A drawn illustration shows the Virgin Mary, dressed in blue robes and holding baby Jesus. They are surrounded by a pink rose frame" title="The Virgin Mary and Child, surrounded by a pink rose, are depicted in this illustrated Vita Christi (Life of Christ) from the 15th century (Image by Getty Images)" /> Over recent decades people have been leaving, rather than taking, Christianity in the UK. Church of England attendance has been on the decline, though a recent survey does suggest a revival of late. But this is where the lesson from history comes in because now, maybe more than most other times in history, you can – if you wish – DIY your own religion. You can look to whatever spiritual or magical force you choose, and engage with it however you wish. There’s one time and place, where we might draw a parallel though: Roman London. If you travelled back in time to there, Hutton says, “you’d find yourself surrounded by an enormous range of deities, philosophies, and belief systems … with no formal structure to decide which are best. “And we’re simply reverting to that, with the tremendous multiculturalism and multi-ethnicity now – which Roman Britain had.” Read more | Prehistoric religion: a pagan riddle we will never solve? That might sound chaotic – but for Professor Hutton, it’s full of possibility. “Given that diversity and multiculturalism – whether people like it or not – has actually happened, people will get more used to it. And, with that wonderful adaptability of our species, find ways of turning it to their advantage. “I also take an immense comfort from the fact that I get complete radio silence from the supernatural with so much else to worry about in my professional and personal life. It’s great to be able to dispense with that. It’s great to be able to – if I am alone – go to bed alone in a particular room and not worry about anything else being there.” Ronald Hutton, I think, seems to be quite optimistic about the possibilities open to us if we do allow a little bit of room for the unknown in our disenchanted environment. “We can have the best of both worlds. The excitement of belief and possible encounters with supernatural worlds – without needing to be terrified of them as people often were in the past. And without needing to fear that our neighbours or the authorities will arrest us or beat us up because they think we have the wrong attitude to these things.” DIYing my beliefs I’ve never met a spirit, or a fairy, goblin or anything else out of the ordinary in the night. But I do love a good ghost story – Danny Robins’s Uncanny podcasts are my go-to when I’m not checking over HistoryExtra episodes. And I do love visiting prehistoric monuments, particularly at times of the year when I think people in the past have identified a certain liminal looseness in the boundary with the supernatural world. Having chatted to Ronald Hutton, I suspect this is all driven by an unmet need for that thrilling sense of the supernatural. So maybe next solstice, I shouldn’t run past, but rather stop and ask those folks celebrating around the stones at Avebury what they are actually doing. The beauty of being alive today, in Britain at least, is that they are at liberty to do whatever it is they think makes sense, and this quote from Hutton’s excellent book Pagan Britain (Yale University Press, 2013) sums it up nicely: “The relics of Britain’s pagan past offer a powerful challenge and stimulus to the modern imagination. They also have in common … an ability to defy full understanding and confident interpretation … One logical response to this trait is to encourage a multiplicity of interpretations, in which different people, and groups of them, reconstruct the pagan past subjectively, according to their own instincts and desires, within the limits of the available evidence.” Read more | Scotland's season of the witch Obviously I couldn’t finish my chat with Professor Hutton without asking him the question that I’m sure he gets asked any time anyone interviews him: what does he actually believe in? “If I have met a spirit, I haven’t been aware of the fact, so I have no personal experience of the divine or the supernatural. I have met an awful lot of people who have had these experiences, or at least believe they have them, and they sound pretty convincing to me. “So I have no overall frame of interpretation as to the nature of the cosmos. I find beliefs very exciting. I find some more attractive than others. Those that are more liberal and permissive and less prescriptive and repressive. But that’s a reflection of my personal politics. If you come down to the question: do I have religion? What do I believe in? I always in the end give the same answer, which is that, I never say.” This article is part of HistoryExtra's new Life Lessons from History Substack newsletter. Subscribe to the newsletter for more articles and podcasts exploring the ways in which history can help us live better, happier, healthier or more productive lives.
How The Winter King brings Arthurian Britain to life
How do you approach the role of historical advisor on a TV series set in Arthurian Britain, when evidence of what happened is somewhere between scarce and non-existent? Professor Ronald Hutton tells us about his work on the new ITVX Arthurian drama The Winter King – and about life and death in fifth-century England
The car park adjacent to The Mall Cribbs Causeway shopping centre in north Bristol is not a location you would immediately associate with Arthurian Britain. On the day of our visit, it is grey and drab. However, behind the walls of a nearby warehouse lies the unexpected: a recreated world of Arthurian Britain – constructed for The Winter King. This series is a new adaptation of The Warlord Chronicles trilogy, novels written by Bernard Cornwell of The Last Kingdom fame, which are themselves an adaptation of the story of King Arthur. Here, in a space you might expect to see forklift trucks or light manufacturing, and which is noticeably colder than the mizzling day outside, the production crew have been busy building ‘rock’ walls from polyurethane, as well as cave interiors and vast menhirs. It’s fantastical and incongruous, but then who can say with any confidence what’s authentically Arthurian? After all, according to the show’s historical advisor, Professor Ronald Hutton of Bristol University, interviewed in the significantly warmer environs of his office, we know little about the years between the Romans leaving Britain, in AD 410, and St Augustine arriving, in AD 597. “It is a major event and the records don’t start to go darker and darker – the plug is pulled,” he says of the early fifth century after Rome’s legions withdrew. “Instantaneously, the lights go out and it changes Britain completely. You have Saxons and post-Roman Britons roaming around this post-nuclear landscape of gigantic ruins. Technology crashes, people actually lose the art of making pottery for a while.” To understand why there was such turmoil, it helps to consider the Romano-British economy. Cash arriving to pay the army created “an immensely rich society”, Hutton says. This in turn attracted settlers from elsewhere in the empire, who built houses, and farmed and consolidated estates. When the Romans withdrew because the empire faced multiple attacks from barbarian tribes, the economy imploded. “There’s no modern comparison, mercifully,” says Hutton when HistoryExtra offers the idea of a precursor to a modern-day failed state – although he’s amused by the analogy of a zombie apocalypse, with “the invading Anglo-Saxons standing in for the zombies, maybe, and the Irish and people from the north, Picts and Scots”. All of which begs a question, what precisely is the role of a historical advisor if there’s so little actual history to advise on? Consistency, says Hutton, is key. Not only is it the advisor’s job to help head off any “obvious anachronisms” but also to ensure that characters are “operating with a common set of cultural references”. The alternative, even when viewers can’t quite put a finger on exactly what’s wrong, can be jarring. “What you don’t want to do is to have somebody using a 14th-century sword, a fifth-century ornamentation and speaking a 19th-century script,” says Hutton. The end of Roman Britain Member exclusive| What really happened in Britain as Roman influence waned? David Musgrove investigates what we know about the end of imperial rule in fifth-century Britain in this HistoryExtra podcast miniseries. Listen now Who is the Winter King? These kinds of anachronisms often bedevil period adaptations. The problem is particularly acute in Arthurian tales where the King Arthur – or the ‘King That Never Was’ as The Winter King’s promotional material has it – is a mishmash based on different stories. The earliest of these dates from around 300 years after Arthur might have been around, and reach down the years to the present day via, among others, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Thomas Malory, the Romantic poets and TH White. It hardly helps matters here that we don’t know if Arthur ever lived. “There’s a spectrum of possibilities, from a great national leader of the British resistance to non-existent,” says Hutton. In this context, it’s fascinating to see how Bernard Cornwell’s novels made Arthurian Britain so believable, and avoided being hemmed in by competing stories. “He was suggesting something that might actually have happened [in The Warlord Chronicles],” says Hutton, “but taking back people with later medieval names into that earlier period. That’s entirely legitimate. This is, after all, a work of fiction.” In Hutton’s estimation, Cornwell is “a superb storyteller”. Cornwell’s source material thus offers the creators of The Winter King TV series a solid base from which to create a believable world. But what about the real era? Why would anyone want to come to Britain if it was so grim? How The Winter King depicts Arthurian Britain As well as push factors – population pressures in Ireland and in Anglo-Saxon lands on the continent, including in the latter case lowlands adjacent to the North Sea where sea level rise was a problem – there were definite temptations. “The great thing about the Roman province of Britain is that it’s still very rich,” Hutton explains. “It has great farmland, but also it has the amount of wealth that Roman Britain had accumulated, which can be looted in precious metals, valuable objects and plunder. The option of crossing the sea to Britain and laying your hands on this stuff is very attractive.” DNA evidence, says Hutton, “suggests a lot of people coming from what’s now Germany” while the historical record, in so far as it exists, suggests a local population suffering violence and trauma. “That’s the Saxons coming in bulk, slaughtering people, driving them off and taking the land. That’s the Bernard Cornwell scenario.” Another view, sometimes expressed by archaeologists is that there is “no material evidence for massacres or a drop in [the existing] population”. But Hutton highlights that it seems likely Roman villas and towns would already have been deserted. “Anybody who reads accounts of early medieval battles knows that you don’t have war graves. When you slaughter an army you leave it for the crows or the bones just disintegrate.” For Hutton, compelling evidence for mass Anglo-Saxon immigration lies in linguistic changes and “the complete loss of Celtic languages”. The incomers are numerous enough to “bring a language with them and keep it”. In contrast, the invaders who arrived in the Norman Conquest 1066 spoke French, but two centuries later English was the country’s main language. It’s fascinating that early accounts of Arthur associate him not with the south, as Cornwell does, but with the north of England and with military prowess. “Archaeologically, interesting things are happening,” Hutton says. “For example, the Hadrian’s Wall forts were repaired sometime around AD 500 as a coherent military system, and seemingly linked again to the old Roman city of York. The title of the Roman governor of that area, the military leader, was the dux Britanniarum, the ‘British leader’. The title given to Arthur in The History of The Britons [cAD 828] is the dux bellorum, the ‘leader of the battles’.” Not, it’s worth emphasising, that Hutton is here identifying the ‘real’ Arthur. Whatever the truth, the world of the fifth-century remains elusive. It is Hutton’s estimation that historians, archaeologists, DNA specialists and linguistics experts need to reconcile evidence “that is pulling them in different directions”. It’s a place that only really begins to come back into focus when Augustine, sent on a mission to Christianise the Kingdom of Kent, became the first archbishop of Canterbury. “It’s a religion dependent on books,” says Hutton, “and so the more Christians you have, especially the more monasteries, which are the places that do the writing, the more records you have.” Back at Cribbs Causeway, we’ve been invited to watch filming, a scene involving a rescue from the Isle of the Dead. Once again, you find yourself reflecting on how this is a fantastical take on the story of Arthur and his cohorts. Crucially, it’s also one created with a huge attention to detail and its own internal consistency. The Winter King, starring Iain De Caestecker as Arthur Pendragon, begins streaming via ITVX on Thursday 21 December. Bad Wolf, the production house behind His Dark Materials and Russell T Davies’ second Doctor Who reboot, is making the show Read next | The Winter King: the true story of the King Arthur drama
Prehistoric religion: a pagan riddle we will never solve?
If you believe that nothing is beyond the wit of modern historical research, think again – we will never unlock the secrets of Britain's ancient religions, according to Ronald Hutton
The opening of the long-awaited Stonehenge visitor centre highlights, with unusual clarity, how much we now know, and don’t know, about ancient Britain. An ever-increasing sophistication in the theoretical and technological techniques at their disposal enables archaeologists to say, better than ever before, who built the world’s most famous prehistoric monument – and when and how they did it. We can tell from where they came, what they ate, what they looked like, what tools they used, how they lived, and what the climate and landscape were like when they did so. The missing element, which is apparently lost forever, is what they thought. We have no better idea now than we had 200 years ago of what their political, social, legal or moral systems were like, what their gender relations were, or – this being the really big one where Stonehenge is concerned – of what their religion consisted. As a result, each generation has had to make up answers to these questions for itself. In the case of the religion practised at Stonehenge, these answers spring from people’s attitude to religious behaviour in general, which in turn are generated by their attitudes to their fellow human beings. In practice, the results have always been polarised. In one camp are those who want to see the monument as one inspired by an admirable spirituality, characterised by love of and care for the natural world and an instinctual understanding of its ways. In the other are those who view the monument as the product of a primitive and bloodthirsty world, representing ignorance, savagery and superstition. Digging for the Bible: 10 key discoveries from the Holy Land How does Easter relate to Jesus? The first school of thought is what draws many people to celebrate the midsummer sunrise at Stonehenge each year. The second offers a clue as to why one of the fallen megaliths has been known as ‘Slaughter Stone’ (with no justification) since the 18th century. The first response has tended to be manifested by people unhappy with their own society, who long for one that was simpler, more decent and better connected to the natural or the divine. It makes a neat fit with modern concerns about the environment and anxieties about the consequences of urbanised and industrialised lifestyles. It also chimes with a very old language about the degeneration of humanity from an original wisdom and happiness, based on the Bible and the ancient Greek and Roman classics. The second, more hostile reaction is just as venerable, having been deployed for thousands of years by people who consider themselves civilised against those whom they despise as savages. The images on which it is based were originally developed by the ancient Hebrews and Romans, to condemn people who resisted the religion of the former and the rule of the latter. Christianity then used such hostility against other faiths, while particular types of Christians turned it into a metaphor for other strains of Christianity. In particular, evangelical Protestants used vivid portraits of what they imagined had gone on inside Stonehenge to condemn by implication what they disliked about Catholicism. With equal facility, modern people who hated and feared religion in general used fantasies about prehistory as a means of attacking what they took to be the worst aspects of religious zeal. Finally, the hostile view of prehistoric religion made a good fit with two other trends of modernity. One was a cult of progress, which decreed that – with crushing inevitability – the further back in time you go, the worse life was. The other was imperialism, which equated the imagined barbarism of the British past with the savagery alleged against modern Asians, Africans, Polynesians, Native Americans and Australian aborigines. According to this world view, the latter could be civilised and improved, to everybody’s benefit, even as the former had been before. Want to read more about Stonehenge? Here are some of our most popular articles... Stonehenge: a prehistoric tourist trap Stonehenge mystery solved: where do the large stones come from? Was Stonehenge first built in Wales? So where does that leave us today? The fact is that when we imagine the beliefs that inspired the building of Stonehenge, we draw on one or the other of these two banks of imagery. They have just proved too useful and convenient to abandon. What is true of Stonehenge also applies to the other evidence for ritual and religious belief surviving from British prehistory. And it’s worth emphasising how very rich that evidence is. When an inhabitant of modern Iceland, Germany, Estonia, Russia, Italy, Greece or many other European nations thinks of their pagan heritage, they tend to do so in terms of just a single pantheon of deities and set of ancient monuments. Britain, however, has impressive remains surviving from four successive ages of prehistoric religious traditions. These traditions look very different from each other: the carved designs put onto cave walls in the Old Stone Age; the stone-chambered long barrows and dolmens of the earlier New Stone Age; the stone circles, circular embankments and burial mounds of the later New Stone Age and Bronze Age; and so- called hill forts (actually also ceremonial precincts) and ritual deposits of beautiful metalwork in water, from the later Bronze Age and the Iron Age. When the Romans conquered most of Britain, they brought with them not only their own religion, but also those of other peoples in the Roman empire, from as far afield as Syria and Egypt. Some four centuries later, the Anglo-Saxons arrived with their own – northern – variety of paganism, followed by the Vikings with theirs. This all adds up to an inheritance of pre-Christian monuments, objects, designs and (eventually) inscriptions of a remarkable abundance and complexity. Read more about Anglo-Saxons’ adoption of Christianity – and why it was powered by the threat of violence Even in the cases of the later examples of these – from periods for which written records survive – our knowledge of the nature, let alone the inner content, of the religions concerned is limited enough to leave ample room for differences of modern interpretation. An argument could be made that this is not a problem at all, but an asset. After all, the modern British are now members of a multi-ethnic, multi-faith society that prizes individuality and choice, while enabling people to live in very different ways and with different beliefs within a common framework of loyalty to the nation. Surely, this argument runs, the enigmatic nature of prehistoric religions is admirably suited to such a situation, inviting people to take personal messages from it according to their own tastes, prejudices, judgments and needs. To employ one example, let us suppose that the body of a young man, dated to the Iron Age, is found in a peat bog and shows signs of a violent death. Some people may conclude that he was a victim of human sacrifice. Perhaps that sacrifice was performed by the priests of the age, the druids, and so exemplifies the horrors of prehistoric religion – and perhaps of barbarism or paganism in general. All of these readings would have an equal legitimacy and likelihood. In this context, heritage managers would retain their value as the experts who protect the evidence of the past, and display it to the public in such a way as to enable its members to make the best-informed possible choices for themselves. Historians and archaeologists would remain the national experts in identifying and dating finds, explaining the nature of sites, reconstructing ancient lifestyles and reading, translating and editing texts. Having done this crucial work, they would then, in the case of ancient religion, stand back to allow others to form their own personal attitudes and conclusions. Who could possibly find anything disturbing, inappropriate or counter-intuitive in a situation such as this? The answer is, a great many people, for it runs counter to some of the most deeply held instincts and values in our society. One is the belief that the state (which means its taxpayers) pays or subsidises professional experts to produce solid results, which are generally taken to mean clear answers. Just as scientists are expected to make major and lasting discoveries about the physical nature of the world, which have a practical use for humanity, so specialists in history and prehistory are expected to produce new and enduring information about the past, which enables a better understanding of it, and so of ourselves. Talk of empowering members of the public to make informed decisions for themselves can sound like a betrayal of this trust, and recent attitudes to the funding of research, embodied in expressions such as accountability, proof of impact, and value for money, only reinforce such a response. The policy of encouraging multiple interpretations of evidence also runs counter to a faith in progress. One of the defining doctrines of modernity is the belief that every generation should be better-informed, as well as healthier, wealthier and (so) happier than that before. The suggestion that we may never actually know more – at any rate with certainty – about major aspects of the remote past, is profoundly unsettling for those who value this doctrine. The acceptance – or even the celebration – of indefinite individual choice also violates some deeper and older instincts. Not everybody regards the creation of a multi-ethnic, multi- faith society with equanimity, and many who do are still concerned about its potential for severing the bonds that hold a nation together. Nation states are, by definition, historical creations, often erected upon a common narrative of the past. And plenty of people still feel the need for a common national ‘story’, which everybody knows and understands in outline, to unite compatriots who now differ in so many cultural traits. This perceived need is far older than nations. Most traditional human communities are defined and bonded by a commonly held set of stories and assumptions about their collective origin and previous achievements. Behind the historian, there's a bard Behind the figure of the historian lies that of the bard, whose role it was to ensure that everybody knew these tales and understood their significance. Many professional historians would probably trace their own descent from figures like Edward Gibbon (author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) or Leopold von Ranke (a founder of modern source-based history). Those with a longer sense of evolution may even regard themselves as the successors of the ancient Greek historians Herodotus or Thucydides. In a deeper and very important sense, however, they are really the heirs of bards such as Homer and Taliesin. What’s more, the acceptance of multiple choices does not fit easily into one of the most popular and effective modes of expression for historical or archaeological research: the quest romance. This portrays the practitioner as somebody in search of the answer to a question about the past, which they finally solve triumphantly by a glittering application of the skills of their discipline. It is the easiest way to present the scholar as a heroic figure, and taps into one of the most enduring themes of world literature. There are indeed none that are older, for the most ancient surviving complete story on the planet, the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, includes a hero on a quest, and so does the oldest known example of European literature, the poetry of Homer. The Golden Fleece, the Holy Grail and Frodo’s ring represent three nodal points in different millennia of the progression of this theme to the present, and its vitality in contemporary culture owes much to the fact that it is such a fine structure within which to pitch a television documentary. By contrast, a proposal for a programme that sets out to present viewers with an open answer is unlikely to get commissioned. Finally, offering a range of interpretations of equal legitimacy runs up against the addiction of our culture to competition. Indeed it is possible that no other civilisation has been so wedded to the competitive spirit since the ancient Greeks. The prevailing model of academic enquiry has always been for experts to draw individual conclusions from their evidence, and then pit them against each other. From this contest, one theory emerges as the strongest, and rules until it is defeated by a still finer newcomer. This way of doing things – in which the winner takes it all – seems better than ever suited to a society that now uses the free market as its exemplar for most forms of human activity. It is also the basis for most popular forms of entertainment, whether embodied as sport, reality TV, quizzes or games shows. It is even the basis for our whole political system. However, it is clearly a way of behaving completely incompatible with the approach to prehistoric religion that I’ve advocated here. Nonetheless, that advocacy must still be made – not because of any liberal attachment to diversity and mutual toleration as virtues in their own right – but because those seem best suited to enquiries into the most remote aspects of Britain’s past. The study of ancient religions simply cannot deliver the certain and enduring conclusions to which we are so wedded. We seem to be compelled to accept that the evidence left to us by the practitioners of ancient religion is ample and exciting in its own right. And we surely must acknowledge that each generation – not to mention individual people and interest groups within each generation – will read different things into it. This being so, we may as well make it a cause for celebration and utilise its benefits to the full. Want to read more about the history of religion? Here are some of our most popular articles... What are indulgences? Explore how were they abused in medieval times, and what have to do with the Reformation Europe’s greatest martyr: how Thomas Becket rose from the dead Charles Darwin vs God: did the ‘Origin of Species’ cause a clash between church and science? Ronald Hutton is professor of history at the University of Bristol. His books include Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain (Yale, 2011) and The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford, 1995) This article was first published in the Christmas 2013 issue of BBC History Magazine
The victor of the Civil Wars described himself as pious, honest and selfless. But, as all too many victims of his lies and malice would have attested, the reality was often more sinister, writes Professor Ronald Hutton
Listen to this article: Historical trends may ebb and flow but Oliver Cromwell never goes out of fashion. This brilliant general and statesman has proved a source of enormous fascination to generations of historians – and, more than 350 years after his death, that interest shows no sign of dimming. There can be few, if any, heads of the English state who have been studied as often and intensely as Cromwell. In the past three decades alone, he has been the subject of five full-length biographies, three studies of his career as a soldier, and a further three major collections of essays. Piled around these are numerous books and articles dissecting every episode of his remarkable career – from the causes of his radical Puritanism to his role in the execution of King Charles I. Given Cromwell’s unique importance to English history, this tidal wave of words is hardly surprising. After all, his is the story of a sensational rise from obscurity to supreme power, of a soldier who never lost a full-scale battle, of the only English commoner to become the sovereign authority in the nation. Cromwell’s pre-eminence is reflected in the statue that stands at the entrance of the House of Commons, and the fact that he has more streets named after him than anybody other than Queen Victoria and (perhaps) the Duke of Wellington. In 2002, a BBC poll voted him the tenth greatest Briton of all time, ahead of all monarchs except Elizabeth I. Cromwell’s tremendous stature is not, however, the whole reason for the intense and sustained attention paid to him by historians. That has been propelled also by an uneasy feeling that the man himself is still eluding us. There is a disturbing chasm between Cromwell as he represented himself – as an honest, pious, patriotic, dutiful and selfless servant of his God and his nation – and as most of contemporaries saw him. Those, including many who knew him well, found him to be ruthless, devious and self-promoting, with a track record of abandoning or overthrowing people, ideas and institutions to which he had previously professed loyalty. So how have historians attempted to bridge the chasm between how Cromwell described himself, and how he was viewed by the people around him? Over the past 150 years, Cromwell’s biographers have largely discounted the criticisms and condemnation. This is chiefly because they have taken him at his own estimation, treating that vast body of his surviving words as direct access to the workings of his mind. It is beguilingly easy to use his letters and speeches as the scaffolding on which to hang a biography. Over the past two decades experts have become more aware of this problem, but a solution is difficult to reach because of the complexity of the events in which Cromwell took part and the great quantity of records, and of conflicting and unreliable testimony, that they have generated. Matching Cromwell’s representation of events against these sources is a seriously daunting task. My first published work on Cromwell appeared in 1990 and, over the following two and a half decades, I turned over in my mind possible solutions to the problem. The one on which I settled for my new biography on Cromwell was to deal with his little-known early life and the first part of his public career, up to the end of the first phase of the Civil War in 1646. This is a span of time with a volume of material that could be treated in detail within a book of normal size. The project confirmed to me that Cromwell had been a person of remarkable talents and great virtues. He was a superb military leader – efficient and charismatic – who inspired fervent loyalty in his soldiers because he made sure that they were paid and supplied and gave them a sense of common participation in a divinely ordained cause. He was also a fine parliamentarian, speaking effectively and persuasively, working well with political allies and winning the sympathy of a large number of fellow MPs. In both spheres, he consistently showed a remarkable aptitude for learning on the job, and remained unwaveringly committed to parliament’s cause in the Civil War, even in times of reverse and possible defeat. Cromwell certainly enjoyed considerable good luck: in possessing a robust physical constitution; supporting the right politics at the right moment; escaping serious injury in military action; and receiving particular strokes of fortune that rescued his career’s upward trajectory whenever it seemed likely to falter. In each case, however, he made the most of his opportunities. Cromwell’s passionate, Puritan religiosity was certainly genuine, and his conversion to it the defining experience of his life. It also made his career, linking him to a national and regional network of fellow believers, which got him into the Long Parliament (so called because it ran from 1640–60) and gave him a reliable group of political and military allies there. His attachment to the radical wing of Puritans – who loathed clerical power and wanted freedom for groups who wished to worship outside the national church – sprang from deep conviction but served up a practical dividend: it provided him with a following that his birth and wealth were not sufficient to attract. All this is quite familiar to scholars of the period, but my research also revealed less attractive – and less often noticed – aspects of Cromwell’s personality. One is his relentless pursuit of self-promotion. He grabbed the attention of the Long Parliament, almost as soon as it was elected, by speaking on behalf of the famous radical Puritan John Lilburne, who had been imprisoned by the royal government. Cromwell had never met the man, but that didn’t prevent him from using his misfortune as an opportunity to further his career. Listen | Ronald Hutton discusses Oliver Cromwell’s early life and career, exploring the brilliance and cruelty of the future Lord Protector Gaining recognition for his military prowess proved more of a challenge for Cromwell because his actions were for a long time minor, local and far from the capital. He solved it by securing the attention of supportive journalists who trumpeted his achievements nationally. We do not know if Cromwell briefed them himself or had a friend or follower do the job for him but the result was always the same: magnifying his contribution to military successes over that of his fellow commanders. The taking of the towns of Lowestoft in March 1643 and Crowland the following month, and a clash at Belton in Lincolnshire on 13 May 1643, are all examples of actions in which Cromwell monopolised the credit for what were, in fact, team efforts. It was Norfolk dragoons who entered and subdued Lowestoft – but that didn’t stop every newspaper crediting the victory to Cromwell, one saying he had taken it in a “hot charge”. The first achievement of Cromwell’s regiment – quashing an attempted royalist uprising at St Albans in January 1643 – became part of his personal portfolio of successes, even though he does not seem to have been there. In his own accounts of military actions, Cromwell adopted a standard tactic: of according all glory to God and extolling the achievements of his side in the plural form, without mentioning names, save those of his immediate subordinates. This served at once to give an appearance of modesty while completely eclipsing his fellow commanders. Cromwell was also a master of massaging the truth in order to airbrush his missteps on the battlefield. Belton was a drawn skirmish at which he committed the elementary mistake of abandoning the field to pursue a fleeing enemy wing before the action was won. In his (published) report, it was a total, glittering victory. His next battle, at Gainsborough on 28 July 1643, ended in disaster when an invading royalist army chased Cromwell’s party out of Lincolnshire, causing a town he had been sent to save to be lost. In Cromwell’s account of the episode, however, it was explicitly a glorious success. Following the genuinely stunning victory at Marston Moor the following year, Cromwell scorned the part played by his Scottish allies, dismissing them as “a few Scots in our rear”, despite the fact that they had given his cavalry wing its decisive numerical superiority. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2021/09/GettyImages-150616900-c3cf180.jpg" width="1024" height="702" alt="Cromwell shown at the head of his troops after the battle of Marston Moor" title="Cromwell shown at the head of his troops after the battle of Marston Moor in an early 20th-century painting. By routinely demonising his enemies, Cromwell legitimised the massacre of royalists that followed this parliamentarian victory (Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images)" /> After Marston Moor, Cromwell had less need to promote himself directly in this way, because he had a trusty set of admiring journalists who could normally be relied upon to eulogise him. In his service with the New Model Army, the national force established in 1645 that eventually won the war for his cause, there was no call for self-promotion, because his actions were always represented with admiration in all the official despatches to parliament. Like most Civil War propagandists, Cromwell also routinely gave the impression that in every action his enemies outnumbered his own men, so making the ensuing successes the more superlative. The rising Cromwell undoubtedly believed that the glory of God was best served by winning the maximum glory for himself. This characteristic was accompanied by another tendency: to demonise his opponents. Throughout his career, Cromwell saw the universe as a battlefield between good and evil, in which he was invariably ranged on the side of good (and, by extension, the side of his deity). This view of the cosmos is built into evangelical Christianity – and so, inevitably, into Puritanism. In Cromwell’s case, however, it was reinforced by his personality. No sooner had he manifested his religious conversion in 1635 than he was already referring to the executors of royal religious policy as “the enemies of God”. This trait carried straight into the burgeoning political and then military crisis of the 1640s (when tensions between the king and his critics erupted into outright conflict) for which he made a natural holy warrior. From the start, he was anxious to obtain savage retaliation against his ideological enemies, calling first for the prosecution of leading churchmen who had enacted royal policy and then for action against emerging defenders of the king. When war broke out in 1642, Cromwell was able to employ physical violence in place of legal action, and revelled in it, exulting over “doing execution” on fleeing royalists at Belton and the killing of an enemy commander at Gainsborough. He gleefully reported how one of his captains slew the wretched man “with a thrust under his short ribs” as he lay wounded on the ground. A pamphlet eulogising his campaign around Stamford in July 1643 celebrated the slaughter of a band of armed countrymen near the town. All this led up to the prodigious massacre of the defeated royalists at Marston Moor, whom in his own account Cromwell systematically dehumanised in a pair of images that made them first mechanical and then demonic: “stubble to our swords” and “His [ie God’s] enemies”. This attitude to warfare was scripted by Old Testament accounts of genocide against heathen tribes, but these matched naturally with the savage streak in Cromwell’s own nature. By the time of his campaigns with the New Model Army, he appears to have learned to rein in such savagery, becoming apparently more aware of the propaganda rewards of clemency. He applied punctiliously the New Model’s usual tariff of terms accorded to governors of royalist fortresses who offered to accept terms. This held good even at the Roman Catholic stronghold of Basing House. But even here, Cromwell’s mercy had its limits. Aside from the governor, Basing House was treated with the greatest severity because it attempted surrender only after the attacking soldiers had got into the precinct. What’s more, Cromwell prepared his soldiers to inflict violence and retribution before the assault by quoting a biblical text which called for the cleansing of the land of idolators, declaring of Catholic images that “they that make them are like unto them” and so should be destroyed with them. His notorious massacre at the Irish town of Drogheda, later in his career, was long presaged. And it wasn’t just royalists and Catholics who felt the full force of Cromwell’s brutality. His tendency to view his own ideological opponents as enemies of God was accompanied in turn by a readiness to dispose of members of his own wartime party who had become inconvenient. There was an early illustration of this trait in a botched attempt in his youth to get his uncle declared a lunatic so that he could obtain immediate access to the old man’s estate. Once the Civil War was under way, Cromwell had better success with a trio of upper-class officers whom he found to be liabilities as fellow commanders in 1643: Lord Grey of Groby, John Hotham, and Lord Willoughby of Parham. Grey got off lightest, as Cromwell simply denounced him behind his back to fellow parliamentarians and got him rebuked and ordered to cooperate. Hotham proved an ideological opponent as well as an incompetent commander, and so was arrested and charged with treachery – he was dragged from his bed to prison in the middle of the night by Cromwell’s musketeers. Hotham was ruined as a politician and a soldier but Cromwell wasn’t satisfied until he had hounded him to his death. Hotham had brought down his father in his fall (persuading him to flee to the royalists with him), but Cromwell pressed a vendetta against both men, first by testifying at the trial of the son and then by fighting attempts to postpone or reprieve the execution of the father. He was successful in getting both beheaded. Willoughby, the most capable and least culpable, was the hardest to dislodge, but Cromwell managed it by a campaign of defamation within parliament in which he told blatant untruths, charging the former with inefficiency and mismanagement in the defence of Lincolnshire. As a result, Willoughby lost his military command. Cromwell’s final and most eminent victim of this kind was Edward Montagu, 2nd Earl of Manchester, his commander in parliament’s Eastern Association army in 1643– 44. The tactic was identical to that employed against Willoughby: a campaign of accusation to destroy the earl’s reputation both as a soldier and as a reliable supporter of the war itself. Once more Cromwell supported his charges with a catalogue of lies and misrepresentations. Manchester fought back with unexpected determination and made equally damaging allegations against Cromwell himself, the truth of which cannot now be established. Cromwell’s reaction was swift and decisive: to abandon the contest and support a solution that would result in Manchester and Cromwell both resigning along with most of the other generals. From then on, Cromwell felled no more colleagues, because he didn’t need to. His superior in the New Model Army, Sir Thomas Fairfax, was the perfect commander for him: capable and dynamic, popular with his officers, and prepared to support Cromwell. It may be concluded, therefore, that Cromwell suffered from no inherent inability to accept subordination to another’s authority and no innate tendency to quarrel with anybody with whom he was partnered. Instead he targeted men who had become obstructive and inconvenient to him, and he did so with a high degree of ability and ruthlessness. He also bore grudges. One example of this is his treatment of Robert Bernard, a smooth lawyer who outmanoeuvred and humiliated Cromwell at Huntingdon in his youth and so precipitated his abandonment of the Cambridgeshire town in which he had grown up. The petty and sustained malice with which Cromwell persecuted this man in 1643, when he became vulnerable to arrest and interrogation by Cromwell’s soldiers, is revealing. After the wretched fellow sent letters from himself and a parliamentarian magnate, protesting his innocence, in April 1643 Cromwell replied curtly that “we know you are disaffected to the parliament”, so accusing Bernard of being a traitor to the cause, without troubling to supply evidence. These are the actions of a man in a critical period of his life – one that turned him from an obscure provincial into an enduring national figure. Even in this first and establishing phase of his career, a close reconsideration of the records reveals the complexity of Cromwell’s nature. He was as courageous, devout, resolute, principled, intelligent, eloquent, able, adaptable and dedicated as historical reputation has long made him. He was also, however, self-seeking, unscrupulous, dishonest, manipulative, vindictive and bloodthirsty. Above all, he is not somebody to be taken at his word. Ronald Hutton is a professor of history at the University of Bristol and a leading authority on the British Isles in the 16th and 17th centuries. His biography, The Making of Oliver Cromwell, is published by Yale in August 2021. This article first appeared in the August 2021 issue of BBC History Magazine
Oliver Cromwell’s remarkable rise to power
Ronald Hutton discusses Oliver Cromwell’s early life and career, exploring the brilliance and cruelty of the future Lord Protector
Historian Ronald Hutton discusses Oliver Cromwell’s early life and career, exploring the brilliance and cruelty of the future Lord Protector and explaining how he rose from obscurity to become one of the dominant figures of the age. Ronald Hutton is the author of The Making of Oliver Cromwell (Yale, due to be published 10 August) Buy now on Bookshop.org Buy now on Amazon <a href="https://www.awin1.com/cread.php?id=489797&clickref=historyextra-183816&awinmid=3787&p=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.waterstones.com%2Fbook%2Fthe-making-of-oliver-cromwell%2Fronald-hutton%2F%2F9780300257458%3Fawaid%3D3787%26utm_source%3Dredbrain%26utm_medium%3Dshopping%26utm_campaign%3Dcss%26gclid%3DCjwKCAjwr56IBhAvEiwA1fuqGqetttghKWSLjkPVav_MzUTX1JTfW1D-68Vgr8muo23kdTYq-PzZwhoC1pYQAvD_BwE" target="_blank" rel="sponsored">Buy now on Waterstones
10 great misconceptions of the Civil War
The Civil War (1642-51) was an accidental war. It was fought by gentlemen, and Cromwell was the key to victory... right? There are many myths and misconceptions about the seismic 17th-century conflict, which saw fighting break out between supporters of King Charles I and opposing groups in each of Charles's kingdoms (including Parliamentarians in England, Covenanters in Scotland and Confederates in Ireland). But what's fact and what's fiction? Here, a panel of experts debunk 10 Civil War myths...
War broke out by accident Wrong, says John Adamson This misconception has a long pedigree. It came about because, at the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, a number of those involved in raising forces against the king were still alive. They peddled the idea that the war was an accident and that no one was to blame; that the war “came out of the mist”, as the parliamentarian Bulstrode Whitelock had it. But it’s untrue. Recent archival research has revealed that Charles I’s aristocratic opponents, particularly the group around the Earl of Warwick, were preparing to use military force as early as the summer of 1640. They did this by calling in the Scottish army and by suborning English militia regiments that had been mobilised to meet the Scottish challenge. Warwick’s group had a military strategy in case the king refused to call a parliament: four Yorkshire militia regiments were to join the Scots and march on London. Browse | Expert articles, podcasts and video on the Civil War This was the backdrop to the first two years of the Long Parliament, called by Charles I in November 1640 in an attempt to raise money for war against the Scots. The king was aware that this group had committed treason. In fact, that was one of the reasons it was so difficult to reach settlement over the constitutional impasse in 1640. The stakes had been raised for both sides. Charles I showed himself ready to risk a civil war from May 1640 with the plan to use Spanish troops against his own subjects. He also tried to arrest five members of parliament in January 1642. The parliamentarians expected to win a decisive victory that would force the king to accept his subordinate position. The war that followed was longer and bloodier than the belligerents had expected, but its outbreak was anything but accidental. John Adamson is author of The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2007) Cavaliers were aristocrats, Roundheads were yeomen Wrong, says Ronald Hutton When I was a schoolboy, there was a textbook on the Tudor and Stuart period, part of which followed the fortune of a mythical family from 1485–1660. When the family divided during the Civil War, the two brothers were pictured arguing; the text pointed out that the elder, the Cavalier, wore satin and lace, while the younger, the Roundhead, wore linen and leather. It went on to state that the Cavaliers were mostly formed of aristocracy and gentry, while the Roundheads were drawn from the lesser gentry and the middle classes. The reality was that, to challenge the authority of the king, parliament had to have a substantial number of great nobles on its side. In the words of John Adamson, it was a “noble revolt”. The older nobility, who had served in government and at court, tended to fight against the king (their long-establishment gave them a greater confidence in challenging the crown). The classic royalist noble tended to hail from a family that had not been involved in government or court, or a nouveau riche who had got their title since 1600. Both sides had more or less equal support among the rest of society. And on both sides, rank-and-file troops on the ground came from the lower classes and fought for the same reasons: partly ideological, but mostly because big money was offered upfront for service at the beginning of the war. Then, when the money ran out, they were conscripted by force by both sides. But there is a twist to the story. Both sides gradually pushed out the nobility from their armies during the course of the war, because in order to win, they had to grab talent wherever they found it rising. By 1649, just 8 per cent of the senior officers in parliament’s New Model Army had been to university, by then the mark of a gentleman. When you look at the king’s field officers throughout the war, you find that three-quarters of them didn’t have a coat of arms. In other words, they weren’t even drawn from the class that traditionally ran local government, let alone central government. Ronald Hutton is professor of history at the University of Bristol The 1641 massacres in Ireland were a one-sided affair Wrong, says Micheál Ó Siochrú The Irish rebellion of 1641 began as an attempt by Irish Catholics to defend their interests and recover lands that had been lost to Protestant settlers from England and Scotland. But it descended into a horrifying sectarian bloodbath. It is one of the great defining moments in Irish history. But what actually happened remains highly contested. The focus of historical attention has been on the scale and ferocity of Catholic attacks on the Protestant settlers, and on the suffering of that community. Part of the reason for that is the surviving source material. When Protestant settlers fled the rebellion for Dublin, many gave testimony about their experiences and about 8,000 of the depositions survive today, housed at Trinity College Dublin. The sheer amount of this evidence has meant that the narrative has been dominated by the Protestant experience. What isn’t present in the depositions, or in most surviving evidence, is the Catholic side of the story. Read more | The history of Ireland: 11 milestone moments There is no question that the Protestant settler community underwent a traumatic experience. But in the initial weeks of the rising, there were relatively few killings. What really triggered the cycle of violence were the brutal and absolutely indiscriminate retaliatory attacks carried out by the colonial government in November and December 1641. What quickly became clear was that they were targeting the entire Catholic population. You had summary justice, mass executions and the destruction of entire communities. This unrestrained violence generated a reaction and the violence spiralled, escalating into a full-scale sectarian bloodbath. The narrative of Protestants suffering at the hands of savage Catholics has played a key role in creating the British Protestant identity still very much in evidence in the north of Ireland today. But it doesn’t explain what really went on in the first six months of the rebellion. This was not a one-sided massacre but a period of unrestrained warfare, from both sides, with all its attendant horrors. Micheál Ó Siochrú is author of God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland (Faber & Faber, 2009) Large numbers of people were unaffected Wrong, says Ann Hughes At least one in 10 – or perhaps as many as one in five – men in England and Wales fought in the Civil War. It has been calculated that loss of life, in proportion to the national population of the time, was greater than in the First World War. Perhaps 85,000 people, mostly men but also women camp followers, died in combat. Up to 130,000 people were killed indirectly, primarily as a result of disease spread by troops. Many parts of the country saw fighting, but everyone was affected by recruitment of troops and troop movements, which brought disease and compulsory boarding, usually without payment. National taxation was heavier than ever before: perhaps 10 times prewar rates. And it reached down the social scale; an excise on many consumer goods had an effect on even those people too poor to pay taxes based on land or goods. Administration was affected in many areas, too, which meant poor relief was disrupted. The birth rate was 10 per cent lower in the 1650s than it had been 20 years earlier and the population stagnated. Disruption of trade and bad harvests meant the late 1640s were some of the hardest on record for ordinary people. So, the social, economic and cultural impact of the war is significantly underestimated. It involved a massive and enduring expansion of the state’s capacity to extract resources from the population, and there was significant familial and demographic upheaval. It was so traumatic in an English context that it was easier to try to forget about it. Ann Hughes is professor of early modern history at Keele University It was a restrained and gentlemanly conflict Wrong, says Peter Gaunt In some quarters, there remains an impression that the Civil War was an almost ‘civilised’ conflict, waged in an restrained and reluctant manner by a small number of elite gentlemen. Commanders on both sides generally did try to adhere to the military codes of conduct and rules of war set out by king and parliament, but they had none of the squeamishness for war that has been suggested. They were committed warriors, fighting for what they often believed to be a just cause, glorying in the defeat and, where necessary, destruction of the opposing force. The Civil War was a conflict of major battles and incessant, dour skirmishing, raiding and counter-raiding, of siege and storm. Although the scale of the fighting, and of the atrocities was not as great as that seen on the continent during the Thirty Years’ War of 1618–48, many historians now suggest that the English and Welsh experience was not so different from that particular European war as was once thought. To take one example, in December 1643 a party of royalist troops entered the village of Barthomley in Cheshire, whereupon a group of around 20 locals, including women, sought refuge in the tower of St Bertoline’s Church. The royalist troops entered the church and forced the locals to come back down to ground level, both by burning pews and rushes at the foot of the tower to smoke them out – and by offering them quarter. However, when they emerged, 12 men were killed on the spot. Following the king’s truce in late summer 1643 with the Irish Catholic rebels who controlled most of Ireland – and his attempts to ship over troops from Ireland to fight for him – parliament took a hard line against so-called ‘Irish’ royalist troops. Parliamentarian troops often treated any royalist soldiers and camp followers who were thought to have Irish connections brutally. Summary execution, with the killing, wounding or maiming of the women found travelling with them, almost became a matter of routine. So the image of a restrained, gentlemanly affair is fundamentally wrong, and should have no place now in our interpretations of the Civil War. Peter Gaunt is author of The English Civil War: A Military History (IB Tauris, 2014) Cromwell won the war for parliament Wrong, says Diane Purkiss Although Oliver Cromwell was important, the general who in fact led the New Model Army to victory was Thomas Fairfax, who was in charge of the infantry forces. It was Fairfax who shaped the New Model Army, who trained them, and who developed the strategy critical to their overall success. Parliament had to create the New Model Army because its own army had been destroyed. They were scraping around. People who were manifestly unfit for military service were called up, and it was Fairfax who was trusted with turning this job lot of ruffians into a proper military force. One of the crucial decisions he took was to promote to officer rank on merit, rather than on social rank. Fairfax had to fight a real political battle in the Commons and the Lords to push this through, but he succeeded, creating an army that was pretty much a meritocracy. In June 1645, Fairfax and his New Model Army caught up with the king outside Naseby in Northamptonshire, where parliament won a sweeping victory. Cromwell was responsible for the overall battle plan, but it was Fairfax who took the initiative in changing that plan during the battle. The royalists had assumed that the parliamentarians’ numerical advantage would be outweighed by the fact that they were a rabble of idiots. But when they realised the New Model Army was, thanks to Fairfax, actually very disciplined and well organised, they collapsed and fled. Fairfax wasn’t one to brag about his own military skills, but in a crisis he had a terrific sense of what needed to be done – and he did it. Eventually, his New Model Army besieged Oxford, capturing what was then the royal capital. What was also remarkable was that he did it all very decently. In contrast to the late-stage royalist army, which was renowned for looting and pillaging, Fairfax’s army was so disciplined and controlled that it’s rare to find an account of it leaving a trail of death and destruction through the countryside. Fairfax retired to the country rather than accept the laurels due to him as victor – one of the reasons that the misconception about Cromwell winning the war arose. Diane Purkiss is author of The English Civil War: A People’s History (Harper Perennial, 2007) Only British people fought Wrong, says Mark Stoyle In the last few decades, historians have been keen to emphasise the British-ness of the Civil War, but it’s often forgotten that there were quite large numbers of people from outside the British Isles involved. Most famous are the king’s relatives: Henrietta Maria, his French wife, who was head of a royalist army in the north in 1643, and his two half-German nephews, Prince Rupert and Prince Maurice. But scores of foreign specialists – experts in military engineering, artillery and fortification – and cavalry commanders led both royalist and parliamentarian efforts. England had been at peace with itself for a long time, so English gentlemen didn’t have the military skills required. The majority of foreign soldiers came from France. There were also Protestants from France and the Netherlands who wanted to fight against a king who often seemed to be allied with Catholicism. Then there were participants from outside western Europe. One of the most famous foreign mercenaries was a Croat called Captain Carlo Fantom, who fought for parliament. When asked why he’d come to fight, he said: “I care not for your cause, I come to fight for your half crowns and your handsome women.” Some came from even further afield. The most exotic cavalry regiment was one that contained soldiers from Egypt, Mesopotamia and Ethiopia. When the New Model Army was first formed, there were few foreigners involved. Indeed, several parliamentarians revelled in the idea that it was an army “entirely of our own nation”. Towards the end of war, there were three regiments of French cavalry fighting for the king, which the parliamentarians made great use of in their propaganda. Such perceptions meant that ‘outlanders’ had an influence out of all proportion to their numbers. Mark Stoyle is professor of early modern history at the University of Southampton For parliamentarians, it was a war of religion Wrong, says Rachel Foxley It has been tempting to assume that the parliamentarians thought it was legitimate to go to war to defend religious liberty. It’s quite an easy assumption to fall into because it’s true that there was a huge amount of religious motivation whipping up parliamentarians. A lot of Puritans definitely thought that they would be instruments of God in fighting the Civil War. And it’s tempting to see Cromwell as a godly warrior because his rhetoric is so religious. But when you look closely at what he believed, it’s clear that he didn’t think you could fight a war of religion. In a speech from 1655 when looking back at the war, Cromwell said: “Religion was not the thing at the first contested for, but God brought it to that issue at last and gave it to us by way of redundancy, and at last it proved that which is most dear to us.” Historians have often dismissed this as a mistake or hindsight on Cromwell’s part, but I think he was quite serious: it was God, not people, who had the power to bring religious reform out of civil war. The godly could not set out to fight a war of religion. So parliamentarians and Puritans like Cromwell were quite careful to avoid saying that religion could be a justification for war. Instead, they justified their war by saying they were fighting for a set of liberties protected by law and that Charles I, in their view, had been attacking. They didn’t think it was legitimate to fight for religion with the sword because religion could only be fought for with spiritual weapons. But they did think it legitimate to take up arms against a ruler who was breaking the law of the land. Along with political liberties and rights, this also included religion because the English Reformation had been established through parliamentary statute. Rachel Foxley is associate professor of history at the University of Reading Wales was against the king Wrong, says Lloyd Bowen Wrong, says Lloyd Bowen When you suggest that the Welsh were among the most ardent royalists, people are usually really surprised. Our historical memory has been refracted through a more modern tradition of leftwing radical politics. Many historians working in the shadow of that tradition have feted Welsh parliamentarians and republicans, suggesting they were more representative of the country than was the case. There was no more fervent hotbed of royalist sentiment during the Civil War than in Wales, earning it the soubriquet of the “nursery of the king’s infantry”. The propaganda of the time suggests Wales was really enthusiastic in its support for Charles I. One pamphlet noted how the appearance of the king made the men of north Wales “flock to [his] standard like wilde geese”. Read more about Wales in the Civil War Wales saw itself as having a special relationship with the crown, one to be defended with blood. An important part of that was Charles I’s defence of a conservative Protestantism, one sold to the Welsh as a rediscovery of their ancient aboriginal religion, rather than the more radical version promulgated by the parliamentarians. They became passionate defenders of a particular type of church, with the king at its apex. There was a smattering of support for parliament in some towns like Wrexham and Cardiff, but these were minority voices. For the king, Wales was a reliable source of money and troops, and it provided a bridgehead to bring troops from Ireland. Lloyd Bowen is senior lecturer in early modern and Welsh history at the University of Cardiff Parliament wanted union with Scotland Wrong, says John Morrill There is a perception that, in the mid-17th century, the English parliament forced Scotland to integrate into a greater Britain. Actually, parliament had been trying to avoid union for years and only entered into it reluctantly. Throughout the 1640s, the Scots had been calling for a union because they believed that there could be no future for Scotland except in a defined federal relationship. The English parliament resisted for two main reasons. It was determined not to let Scotland impose strict separation of church and state and clerical supremacy. And it did not wish to allow the Scottish parliament to have any kind of veto over policies in England. In return for Scottish support during the wars, parliament had promised federal union and a united church. But when parliament abolished the monarchy in England and Ireland after the execution of Charles I in 1649, it told the Scots they were an independent nation free to go their own way. The Scots refused to accept this and voted to fight to instate Charles II as king of England, Scotland and Ireland. After Cromwell defeated the Scots at Worcester in 1651, the English had to make a choice: they could either withdraw or they could occupy Scotland to prevent constant attacks on England. Eventually, they decided to quell the threat by uniting England and Scotland. So it was a reluctant conquest. There may have been no great enthusiasm for union, but it was deemed necessary. John Morrill is professor of British and Irish history at the University of Cambridge This article was first published in the May 2015 issue of BBC History Magazine
HistoryExtra Academy history of witchcraft course
Historian Ronald Hutton reveals how the witch has been a symbol of fear across the globe for more than 2,000 years
We speak to Professor Ronald Hutton about his book The Witch, which reveals how societies throughout the globe have lived in fear of witchcraft for more than 2,000 years. Discover more learning from week two of the HistoryExtra Academy history of witchcraft course Video lecture: Demonology, with Professor Marion Gibson – watching time 15 mins Europe's holy war: how the Reformation convulsed a continent – reading time 9 mins From healing spells to conjuring demons: the medieval obsession with magic – reading time 8 mins Medieval magic at work: 7 spells and charms our ancestors used – reading time 2 mins
"Witch-hunting has been found in every inhabited continent of the world": Ronald Hutton talks to Charlotte Hodgman about his new book examining the global figure of the witch – from ancient times to the present day...
This article was first published in the August 2017 issue of BBC History Magazine In context The European witch trials of the early modern period did much to create an enduring perception of the figure of the witch. But these trials were influenced by global, ancient, medieval and folkloric traditions whose history has often been overlooked. Ronald Hutton’s book sets European witchcraft in an ancient and global context to revise our understanding of the witch around the world. Your book takes a global view on 2,000 years of witchcraft and magic. Why did you choose to tackle such a huge topic? It’s a subject that has interested me since I was a teenager. There’s been an enormous amount of work done on the witch trials of the early modern period, but significantly less on witchcraft in ancient times and across the rest of the world. This book is my attempt to redress the balance, and it has taken me 25 years to research and write. When was the term ‘witch’ first used, and what does it mean? The word has different interpretations. The two oldest define a witch as someone who uses magic to hurt people, or somebody who uses magic for any purpose. The feminist reading of the term is a woman of independent spirit who is persecuted for it by men in an age of patriarchy. Others see a witch as being a practitioner of a surviving pagan religion. The term ‘witch’ itself is Anglo-Saxon but what it means is not actually all that clear. There are hints in the law codes that ‘witch’ could refer to someone who works harmful magic. But we can’t be sure. Academics also argue endlessly about the definition of ‘magic’. I define it as being a set of techniques employed by humans in the hope of exploiting supernatural power for their own purposes. How does Europe’s witchcraft history compare to that of the rest of the world? It stands out from the rest of the world for two main reasons. On the one hand it is the only place that associated witchcraft with a demonic anti-religion – a fully developed religion worshipping the devil, which was pitted against the established religion. But on the other hand, it is the only area on the planet whose peoples traditionally believed in witchcraft in the past but who have officially ceased to believe in it. There are several reasons for this loss of belief. In the 15th century, Christian theologians developed the paranoiac idea of a satanic conspiracy that sought to destroy the human race using evil people (witches) who had been given magical powers by demons. The idea caught on and was employed as a solution to daily problems. In other words, it was thought that if you wiped out presumed witches in your area, you would stop being unlucky in general. But it didn’t work. Areas that hosted massive witch hunts were actually more traumatised, more divided and, in some cases, more depopulated than those that didn’t. What’s more, the areas that failed to persecute witches were seen to experience as much good luck – healthy children and livestock, good weather – as those that did. And so witch hunting was given up as a bad idea. Have you found evidence of witch hunting outside Europe? Witch-hunting has been found in every single inhabited continent of the world and among most of the peoples who have inhabited the Earth. But it’s not a universal human trait. The largest witch-free area on the planet is Siberia, which covers a third of the northern hemisphere. So there are some quite big exceptions. But the majority of human beings through history have feared magic and have persecuted people they believe to have used it wrongly. Globally, witch hunts have taken pretty much the same format as their European equivalents. All you needed was a population under economic and social pressure in which people felt pushed to the margins and where a bit of bad luck could ruin their lives. When this bad luck struck – a bad harvest, for example – they blamed witchcraft. But you also needed the witch hunters – people who claimed to be capable of detecting witches and of dealing with them. When these men or women got their hands on a population that was in a ferment of fear, the results were explosive. The best known of all witch hunts was the Salem witch trials of 1692. Why is this case so infamous? Salem stands out because it was the only big witch hunt in the British colonies of America, and also because it’s a well-recorded and incredibly dramatic story. It was a divided community, one in which a group of adolescent women – and some adults – believed themselves to be bewitched. They were stirred up by a crazy minister who, in a bid to salvage his ailing career, launched a witch hunt. The fall-out was huge, with hundreds of people coming under suspicion, and around 20 people being executed. Has the European witch always been seen as predominately female? Overwhelmingly, Europeans have traditionally associated women, rather than men, with magic. They thought that men were able to learn magic but that women had magic within them. This is why women in European culture have traditionally featured as prophetesses, sibyls and oracles. They come in when the men can’t figure out what’s going on. On the flip side, if women were natural magicians then, it was believed, they could also work evil magic far more spontaneously than men. For all that, there were areas of Europe – Iceland, Normandy and some of the Austrian lands – where people overwhelmingly suspected men of being witches. Outside Europe there was no real pattern to who might be accused of witchcraft. In some areas women were the suspected group; in others, it was men. To some, the old or rich came under suspicion, while elsewhere it could be the young or poor. How did ancient societies view witches? Ancient Egypt is notable for a distinct lack of belief in witchcraft and little fear of magic. Elsewhere, across the whole fertile crescent there was an acute fear of witchcraft that was associated with an even stronger fear of demons (evil spirits in the natural world). Like the Egyptians, the ancient Greeks had little fear of witchcraft, although they did occasionally execute magicians for impiety. As for the Romans, they had a sharp image of the witch as an evil woman, and used witch hunters on a big scale. The perceptions of witchcraft in ancient Rome and the fertile crescent did most to shape attitudes in medieval and early modern Europe – fed through the prism of the Bible. What impact has Christianity had on witchcraft and magic? The initial effect of Christianity was to dampen down witch hunting. Christians believed that, with an all-powerful God in control of the cosmos, there was less room for evil to operate unless humans embraced it voluntarily. There were whole areas of magic, such as a belief in night-flying witches and of demonesses working together to persecute humans, on which the church frowned. But the early medieval church was incredibly confident, mainly because of the speed at which Christianity was spreading. During the high Middle Ages, the Christian church, especially in the west, lost a lot of this confidence. Plague was killing thousands; the climate was getting worse; Islam was fighting back in the holy lands. As a result Christianity began to turn on what it saw as enemies within. It was this that bred a new and lethal idea of the satanic witch. James VI of Scotland was known for his fear of witches. Did other rulers feel the same? Across most of the world, and certainly in Britain, rulers tended to stay out of witch hunts. There were exceptions here and there when a monarch or a chief used the fear of witches to enhance his or her own power. James VI is the outstanding example in Britain, although later, when he was also ruling England as James I, he became sceptical about witch accusations. Shaka, the great Zulu king, was a notable witch hunter, as was Handsome Lake, the Seneca leader of the Iroquois people in North America. Was there ever a time when practising magic was seen as a positive thing? Those who worked magic to help people were often respected and much demanded figures in their communities. I tend not to use the word witch to describe these characters – not because I have any deep-rooted hostility towards the idea, but because there has always been a big distinction between those who worked good magic (often known as cunning folk or service magicians) and witches. These individuals generally escaped persecution and even helped identify witches during witch hunts. Your book also explores the relationship between fairies, folklore and magic. How are they related? In certain parts of Europe, mostly on the fringes, fairies played an important role in magic and a lot of service magicians claimed to have learned their skills from the fairies. Britain in particular has a strong folklore history, particularly across the Gaelic world – the Highlands and islands of Scotland, the Isle of Man and Ireland. Here, fairies were believed to be bigger and much more dangerous, and in these areas they largely took over the role of witches in being seen as the main magical threat to humans. Fairies further south, around cities and in the south-east of England, were seen as smaller and more mischievous. Consequently they played far less of a role in the evidence given at witch trials. Will our fear of magic ever disappear? Attitudes are changing. We’ve come a long way since the witch trials of the early modern period. But for many there is still an ancestral tendency to seek magical or supernatural explanations for uncanny fortune or misfortune. There is a massive post-Christian, post-early modern hangover among many people who no longer have religious beliefs but who still have a vague, formless fear of magic. Ronald Hutton is author of The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present (Yale, 376 pages, £25).
Dr Ronald Hutton and Daniel Cossins visit Banqueting House in London to explore the overthrow of the British Commonwealth and Charles II's perilous path to the throne in 1660...
This article was first published in the December 2014 issue of BBC History Magazine The road from Blackheath to London was lined with people. Tapestries hung from windows, trumpets parped and church bells peeled, and wine flowed freely. It was 29 May 1660. Charles II, turning 30 that day, rode at the front of a great procession heading for the political heart of the capital. He had come to reclaim the thrones of three kingdoms after more than a decade of republican government, and he was welcomed as a redeemer by a restless public that had seen the Commonwealth collapse from within. “The public was tired of years of political insecurity, crushing over-taxation and military rule,” says Ronald Hutton, professor of early modern history at the University of Bristol. “They imagined that, whatever the king stood for, he was bound to be better than that.” The press of the crowd was such that the cavalcade took seven hours to get through London. Finally, at 7pm, Charles reached the Palace of Whitehall, where English royalty had resided for more than a century before the monarchy was swept away following the Civil War. In the opulent surroundings of Banqueting House, both houses of parliament declared their loyalty to the king. In response, Charles made a promise: “I find my heart set really to endeavour by all means for the restoring of this nation to freedom and happiness; and hope by the advice of my parliament to effect it.” Commissioned by James VI and I and completed in 1622, Banqueting House was the first major classical building in England – and, with its Palladian facade, it certainly stood out from the Tudor-style brick buildings that made up the rest of the palace. It was designed by Inigo Jones to provide the setting for banquets and court masques, extravagant mélanges of poetry, dance, music and song performed for (and often involving) kings, queens and their courtiers. By the time Charles II was resident at Whitehall, Banqueting House no longer played host to masques. It had been decided that the flaming torches used to light such productions would damage the magnificent ceiling canvases painted by the Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens for Charles I. Instead, it was now the setting for state occasions such as royal proclamations and receptions for foreign ambassadors. “It was the stage – the public arena of royalty,” says Hutton. Today, Banqueting House is the only surviving part of the old Palace of Whitehall, which was destroyed by fire in 1698. Climbing the stairs and entering the cavernous main hall, with its two tiers of enormous windows set between towering white columns, it’s easy to imagine the royal occasions held here. In December 1662, for example, the diarist Samuel Pepys was present at Banqueting House to witness the visit of the Russian ambassadors. “I saw all the presents, being rich furs, hawks, carpets, cloths of tissue, and sea-horse teeth,” wrote Pepys. “The king took two or three hawks upon his fist, having a glove on, wrought with gold, given him for the purpose. The son of one of the Embassadors was in the richest suit for pearl and tissue that ever I did see, or shall, I believe.” At the far end of the main hall stands the modest throne, upholstered in red velvet, where Charles II ennobled worthy subjects and performed ‘healing ceremonies’ for the less fortunate. The throne is out of bounds but visitors can lounge in beanbags on the floor and gaze up at the nine ceiling paintings by Rubens, each contained in an ornate golden frame. It was this masterpiece under which Charles I passed in January 1649 as he walked out to face his execution. “The point of the paintings is to illustrate the classic doctrine of the divine right of kings,” says Hutton. “So to have to walk across the hall, right underneath this portrait of the invincibility and triumph of monarchy, must have been pretty bitter. Still, I would guess that if you’ve lost three kingdoms and you’re about to have your head cut off, the presence of paintings doesn’t make an enormous amount of difference.” Today, a bust of Charles I above the entrance marks the approximate location of the window (now gone) from which he stepped onto the scaffold and to his death. “It was freezing cold, with occasional snowflakes,” says Hutton. “Charles wore two shirts underneath his clothes to avoid shivering with cold and giving an impression of being afraid. When the king’s head fell – and it fell at one blow – an enormous groan rang out. People rushed forward to dip their handkerchiefs in his blood as souvenirs.” Charles II was in exile in the Netherlands when he heard of his father’s death. He was crowned king of Scotland in January 1651, and later that year marched into England, only to be crushed by Cromwell’s forces at Worcester. Forced to flee, Charles made a dramatic escape, hiding out in royalist households and even an oak tree before getting away to France and exile once more. Hope for royalists returned in the late 1650s when the republican regime began to unravel. “The Commonwealth was always sitting on a time bomb, which was financial and ideological,” says Hutton. “Financial in that, in order to hold down the conquered British Isles, the government needed a huge army.” The regime downsized the army and reduced taxes to keep the people happy, but the income wouldn’t suffice. “The result was a slow slide into arrears, with too many soldiers now chasing too small a treasury,” says Hutton. Then there was the ideological problem. The Civil War had shattered the Church of England into competing Protestant creeds. Cromwell’s government opted for toleration but it didn’t work, says Hutton: “The tension between those who wanted a Church of England and the new radical minority who wanted to let it go altogether was growing, and we seemed to be heading for a new civil war.” When Cromwell died in 1658, his son, Richard, succeeded him as lord protector. Richard’s plan was to throw out the radical reforms demanded by the army – reformed parliaments, toleration of unorthodox religious beliefs, a broader Church of England – in return for parliament’s acceptance of his government and funds for the army. But his attempt to rally his supporters in the army failed, and in May 1659 Richard was forced to resign. “Richard was overthrown, his parliament thrown out and the Protectorate abolished,” says Hutton. “In its place the army, after an awful lot of argument, called back the one parliament from the previous 10 years that had seemed most receptive to its reform programme.” That was the purged parliament, or the Rump Parliament – the rump of the Long Parliament that in 1648 had been purged of MPs unlikely to support the army’s goal of punishing Charles I. It took just four months for old enmities to flare. In October, the army dismissed the Rump and seized power. As a result, the winter of 1659–60 was one of agitation, with the people demanding a return to constitutional propriety. “There was a clamour for a freely elected parliament that wasn’t told what to do by an army, and whatever that parliament decided, the majority of people in England and Wales were happy to accept,” says Hutton. Into the confusion strode General George Monck, commander of the army in Scotland. On hearing the news that the Rump had been thrown out, Monck ordered it restored, and marched into England in January 1660. Starved of pay, the English army gave up and submitted to Monck as he marched on the capital. Having seen the discontent in London, Monck went with the will of the people, ordering the dissolution of the Rump and the free election of a new parliament. All the while, he was in secret contact with the exiled king. And on 1 May, the new Convention Parliament received a letter from the king in which he promised to grant a general pardon for traitors. A week later, parliament proclaimed England a monarchy once more, and invited Charles to return. Though no legislation could be passed without the king’s consent, Charles had to accept the central role of parliament. Two months after his glorious return, the Convention Parliament pardoned almost everyone except those involved in the trial and execution of Charles I who did not immediately surrender themselves. It also confirmed that all legal actions of the past 20 years were binding, and granted the king money to disband all the armies. “This was pretty healing,” say Hutton. “But then, in 1661, a very different parliament arrived: the Cavalier Parliament, far more embittered and vengeful and old royalist.” It proceeded to pass a series of measures designed to ensure that the nobility held all the power, preventing anyone – including the Crown – from ever again overturning law and order. It also ordered the exhumation of Oliver Cromwell and two of his comrades, to be hanged and decapitated at Tyburn. Ultimately, Charles II learned that old animosities die hard. “England struggled to recover from the mauling of the Civil War,” says Hutton. Three great problems remained: whether ultimate power should lie with the king alone or with the king and parliament; what to do with religious sects that refused to worship within the Church of England; and how to address the balance of power between England, Scotland and Ireland. “It took another reign and another revolution, that of 1688, to settle those questions,” says Hutton. Five more places to explore Moseley Old Hall, Staffordshire Where the escaping Charles II hid from Cromwell’s troops Having marched from Scotland in 1651, Charles II’s forces were crushed at Worcester. He narrowly evaded capture, hiding at Boscobel House in Shropshire, then at Moseley Old Hall, before fleeing to France. At Moseley Old Hall, the best preserved of Charles’s hideouts, visitors can see the priest hole in which he hid. Visit nationaltrust.org.uk York Castle Museum, York Where visitors can see one of Cromwell’s death masks When Oliver Cromwell died, in 1658, the Protectorate began to fall apart. In the days after Cromwell’s demise, several death masks were sent around the country as evidence. One of the masks can be seen, warts and all, at York Castle Museum. Visit yorkcastlemuseum.org.uk Edgehill, Warwickshire Where General Lambert tried to prevent the Restoration In April 1660, die-hard republican Major-General John Lambert rallied supporters to the hamlet of Edgehill, site of the first pitched battle of the Civil War in 1642. Monck’s forces easily saw off the few hundred mounted parliamentary troops, and Lambert was sent to the Tower. Visit battlefieldstrust.com White cliffs of Dover, Kent Where the returning Charles II stepped ashore On the morning of 25 May 1660 a 20-strong fleet carrying Charles II approached the white cliffs of Dover, where crowds cheered the return of the king. As cannon fired in celebration from Dover Castle, General Monck greeted Charles on the beach. Visit whitecliffscountry.org.uk Westminster Abbey Where Charles II was crowned king On 23 April 1661, Charles II was crowned in the magnificent surroundings of Westminster Abbey, the setting for coronations since 1066. The abbey was packed with spectators, including diarist Samuel Pepys, all desperate to catch a glimpse of their returning king. A stone tablet in the abbey’s RAF Chapel, normally covered by a carpet, marks the spot where Cromwell was buried before he was exhumed in January 1661. Visit westminster-abbey.org Ronald Hutton is author of The Restoration: A Political and Religious History of England and Wales, 1658-1667 (OUP, 1997).