Pepys spent some of the day strolling with friends in the New Exchange, a shopping arcade on the south side of the Strand, before repairing to Vauxhall’s Spring Gardens, where he “walked an hour or two with great pleasure”. There was something on his mind, though. For as long as he could remember, relations with England’s neighbours had been distinctly fraught, and Lord Sandwich’s fleet was currently engaged in a struggle with the Dutch. London simmered with rumours about the outcome of the battle, but there was no certainty: as Pepys put it, “ill reports run up and down of his being killed, but without ground”.

By evening, “weary with walking and with the mighty heat of the weather”, the diarist had returned to his house in the City. The day had been pleasant enough, but now something else was troubling him. In Drury Lane, he had seen “two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and ‘Lord have mercy upon us’ writ there”. Pepys knew immediately what that meant. Plague — the first sign of the epidemic that would kill an estimated 100,000 people, a quarter of the capital’s population, in the next 18 months. To calm his nerves, he noted: “I was forced to buy some roll-tobacco to smell to and [chew], which took away the apprehension.”

Reading Pepys’s diary, you sometimes forget that he was born almost four centuries ago. In many respects he was utterly different from us, with assumptions and anxieties we can scarcely understand; and yet often he feels almost thrillingly contemporary, as if you might bump into him in the street tomorrow afternoon. Indeed, you merely have to re-read that diary entry, and you might be looking in a mirror: the stifling heat, the fears of disease, the foreign wars, the fake news.

The past is never just a mirror, of course, and it’s the height of narcissism to cast our predecessors as mere foreshadowings of ourselves. But there are times when, for obvious reasons, a particular historical moment catches the imagination — as is the case today with Pepys’s moment, the mid-17th century.

Just look, for example, at the titles in Britain’s bookshops. For a long time, commercial publishers were terrified of the 17th century. The Stuarts weren’t as sexy as the Tudors, and the age of Oliver Cromwell seemed too dark, too violent, too religious, too complicated for ordinary readers. Why read about perhaps the most significant moment in all our history — the titanic revolutionary conflict of the 1640s and 1650s, when armies surged across the map of our islands, a king was tried and executed, and a farmer from East Anglia tried to turn Britain into a religious commonwealth — when you could read yet another book about Catherine Howard?

And then, as if responding to some subterranean shift in the cultural landscape, something changed. The last few years alone have given us excellent books on Cromwell by Paul Lay and Ronald Hutton, as well as Anna Keay’s dazzling social history of Britain in the 1650s, and Malcolm Gaskill’s haunting account of witchcraft among the settlers who tried to build a new England on the other side of the Atlantic. Meanwhile, Robert Harris’s most recent blockbuster, Act of Oblivion, follows the hunt for Charles I’s Parliamentarian killers from England to America.

Even politicians are at it. In the Conservative MP Jesse Norman’s new novel The Winding Stair, which charts the bitter feud between Sir Francis Bacon, father of the Scientific Revolution, and Sir Edward Coke, the most influential jurist of the early modern era, we appear to be plunged back into the world of early 17th-century Jacobean England. But right from the first few pages, the parallels are obvious. Among his characters, for example, is James I, a man with “bulging, expressive eyes” and an “awkward gait”, who “dresses finely, yet somehow manages to look ill-kempt”, and always “loves to display his learning with a classical or biblical line”. Even if you didn’t know that Norman had been at Eton with Boris Johnson, worked for him as a junior minister and eventually released a blistering public letter calling for his removal, you’d probably spot the parallel.

Why does the Stuart era suddenly feel so resonant? Some of the answers are obvious. People in the 17th century, like us, were struggling to come to terms with an extraordinary advance in information technology — in their case, the printing press. The political and religious passions of the Civil War weren’t merely reflected in the papers and pamphlets of the day: they were fuelled by them, too.

Then as now, readers craved paranoia, hysteria, sensation and scandal, exemplified by the coverage of the rebellion of Irish Catholics in 1641. The pamphlets of the time claimed that some 200,000 Protestants had been massacred; in reality, the true figure was probably lower than 10,000. Illustrations showed the rebels literally spearing babies on their pitchforks and ripping women’s bodies open with bestial savagery. “A woman mangled in so horred a maner that it was not possible shee should be knowne”, read one cheery caption. Fake news, as it turned out. But fake news mattered, for when Cromwell’s troops landed in Ireland eight years later, bent on vengeance, such pictures were seared into their imaginations.

Then as now, technology also mattered because it allowed news to spread more quickly than ever before, not least from abroad. The political climate before the Civil War was all the more feverish because people were addicted to the latest reports from the Thirty Years War, the ferociously complicated religious and political conflict that tore central Europe apart and killed millions of people across vast tracts of Germany. Like today’s war in Ukraine, the Thirty Years War became a kind of Rorschach test: what you saw depended on your existing religious and political prejudices.

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Britain needs more Stanley Baldwins

By Dominic Sandbrook

And with news came ideas: the proto-rationalism of René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza, the republicanism of John Milton, the liberalism of John Locke, the ruthless realism of Thomas Hobbes. No wonder that, as in 2023, many people felt dizzy at the pace of change — particularly in the aftermath of the Civil War, when the king had lost his crown, the radicals were in the ascendant and even the calendar, stripped of the festivals of old, had been rewritten with revolutionary zeal. “Holy-dayes are despis’d, new fashions are devis’d. / Old Christmas is kickt out of Town,” runs one celebrated ballad of the day. “Yet let’s be content, and the times lament, you see the world turn’d upside down.”

This belief that the world had been turned on its head — the kind of thing you often hear today, whether about Brexit, or transgenderism, or whatever — was remarkably common in the 17th century. “God Almighty has had a quarrel lately with all Mankind,” lamented the Welsh historian James Howell in 1647, “for within these twelve years there have been the strangest Revolutions and horridest things happened, not only in Europe but all the world over.” The world, he thought, was “off its hinges”.

He wasn’t alone. As armies trudged across the British countryside, rebellion tore holes in the empires of the Ming and the Ottomans, and the casualties mounted in central Europe, other commentators sank into despair. Every day, recorded the Oxford scholar Robert Burton, brought news of “war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions; of towns taken, cities besieged in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia, Poland etc”. Four years later, a Spanish tract suggested a terrifying but increasingly popular explanation: “This seems to be one of the epochs in which every nation is turned upside down, leading some great minds to suspect that we are now approaching the end of the world.”

Behind all this, some historians believe, lay another anxiety very familiar to us today: climate change. Pepys may have been sweating like a pig that day in June 1665. But as one of the great scholars of the early modern world, Geoffrey Parker, points out in his book, Global Crisis, this was the Little Ice Age, in which temperatures plunged across the world.

Snow fell in subtropical Japan; sub-Saharan Africa suffered a five-year drought; the rivers of modern Mexico and Virginia dried up; across Europe, harvests failed and thousands starved. The first months of 1621 were so cold that people walked across the frozen Bosphorus from Constantinople to Asia. In China, Poland, Russia and the Ottoman Empire, the population fell by about a third. In some parts of Germany, the population fell by half. In 1651, Hobbes warned that, without a strong state, life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. For many people, it was like that already.

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Finally, inevitable, there’s the W-word. The radical Puritans at the heart of the convulsions of the mid-17th century, whose zealous righteousness seems so off-putting to us today, never referred to themselves as “woke”. But they’d have recognised the social justice movement’s ethos immediately. They too believed that they had been awakened to injustice and set apart from the fallen masses. They too believed that the world was divided into the saved and the sinners, those who walked in the light of the Lord and those who dwelt in the valley of darkness. They too believed that life was an unending struggle against sin, in which you must always do better, and in which there were few greater crimes than heresy and apostasy. And they too lived in dread of that most wicked and dreaded figure of all: the witch — the old woman next door who had cursed your cow; the neighbour’s wife who made faces at your children; the bestselling novelist who knew what a woman was.

Perhaps we should go easy on the Puritans, though. Even Pepys, whose hedonistic humanity seems so divorced from their joyless moralising, thought they made an unsatisfyingly easy target. Three years after that hot day in 1665, he saw a production of Ben Jonson’s play Bartholomew Fair, long a favourite of his. “It is an excellent play,” he wrote afterwards: “the more I see it, the more I love the wit of it.” But there was a caveat. “Only the business of abusing the Puritans begins to grow stale, and of no use, they being the people that, at last, will be found the wisest.” But Pepys could afford to say that, because his Puritans had been beaten. Our own are still with us, more’s the pity.

Still, if the 17th-century parallel really does hold up, then think what’s just around the corner! A new age of pleasure-loving debauchery. The revival of the coffee house. The triumph of the beefsteak. The return of the wig. Can’t wait.

*

Dominic Sandbrook discusses the 17th century with Anna Keay and Malcolm Gaskill in two recent episodes of his podcast, The Rest is History.

That feeble fifth-place ranking captured the depressing atmosphere of weary run-down rubbishness in which we who lived in the “Auld Grey Toun” were marinaded. Our local bookshop and cinema had closed down by that point, so there was not a lot in the way of culture or entertainment, although — to be fair — we did get the panto every year and I once saw Fife’s premier Frank Zappa tribute act, Frank McZappa, play in a pub. Speaking of pubs, we had no shortage of those, and we were also lucky enough to have a swimming pool, bingo hall and some ruins. You might say it was a bit like Waiting for Godot, only we’d all long since given up waiting.

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By Diane Purkiss

Not that long ago, I would have ridiculed the very notion that Dunfermline contained any mysteries worth bothering about. My teachers did at least try to instill some civic pride: as a child I was taught that my hometown was Scotland’s “ancient capital”; that in the 11th century an important king named Malcolm Canmore built a tower there; that his wife Margaret became a famous saint; and that Robert the Bruce, the last Scottish king to defeat the English in battle, was buried in the Abbey. After that, nothing much seemed to happen for 500 years, until Andrew Carnegie was born. But he had to leave Dunfermline to become successful: a fact that was not lost upon any of us.

That’s a decent amount of history for a small town that nobody visits. And later, I learned more: Charles I, later to attain some notoriety, was born in Dunfermline’s royal palace; and Robert Henryson, a major medieval poet, had been headmaster at the high school.

And yet even to a child it was obvious that Dunfermline was centuries past its prime. Malcolm’s Tower (the “dun” in Dunfermline) was a circle of old bricks in on top of a hill frequented by nobody. The Abbey nave had fallen into disuse after a new bit was added in the 19th century, while all that remained of the royal palace was a wall — which was a great backdrop for staging mock-World War II battles, until Historic Scotland put a gate on it and started, rather too optimistically, charging for entry.

Saddest of all was Saint Margaret’s Cave, a once-sacred grotto, which was accessed through a shed in the car park behind The City Hotel, and which was closed for much of the year (the shed’s design drew heavily upon the “public toilet” school of architecture.) I was told by a guide that the city council had almost filled in the cave completely when they were putting in the car park, but a grassroots campaign had prevented that outrage. Thus even our history seemed a bit rubbish; the town was a place where people did things that were forgotten, or left to achieve greater fame elsewhere. I turned my back on Dunfermline in favour of Moscow, and then Texas, and for a long time I thought that seeing family was the only possible reason for visiting the place.

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But my attitude began to change the first time I brought my children to visit. Little Texans, they were growing up under a bright, limitless blue sky; I took them at Christmas, with the benefit that they would see the town as I remembered it, with horizontal rain and mid-afternoon darkness. One day I took them to visit Robert the Bruce’s tomb in the Abbey. The guide was telling the same story I had first heard 35 years earlier, when suddenly he mentioned, as an aside, that there were six other kings buried in the Abbey grounds, but nobody knew which one was which: “We know where they are, we just don’t know who they are.” Having travelled fairly widely in post-communist Europe and Asia, I had seen many identities assembled on less evidence than that. Yet here was Scotland: a country with a nationalist government sitting just across the bridge from this pile of kingly bones — and neither they nor anybody else seemed to care.

I was impressed by this grand an act of forgetting — this sustained, centuries-long indifference. We’d even managed to lose Robert the Bruce — that most legendary of warriors — for hundreds of years: his tomb was accidentally rediscovered in the early 19th century. And our kings, I later learned, were not the only things that we had mislaid.

When next I returned, I spent a couple of mornings in the local library, reading old books on the history of Dunfermline. It turned out that the Auld Grey Toun had been a major site of pilgrimage for centuries, a place of holiness and miracles. Visitors had come from far and wide to venerate the relics of Saint Margaret. One of those relics was her head, which remained on Earth long after her soul had departed for its eternal reward. It was a fixture at the Abbey right up until the Reformation, at which point concerned Catholics spirited it away — first to Edinburgh, and then to the continent — so that it could escape the orgy of iconoclasm taking place in Scotland. The plan worked, and Saint Margaret’s head survived for a further two centuries, before disappearing in a different orgy of iconoclasm: the French Revolution.

It was also around this time that I picked up a copy of the Arden edition of Macbeth, and, reading the notes, realised that the “Malcolm” who kills Macbeth in Shakespeare’s drama was the same Malcolm who married Saint Margaret and built the very tower that put the “dun” in Dunfermline. You’d think my English teacher might have mentioned this, but she didn’t because — I am sure — she did not know. It was as if Dunfermline, secretly interesting after all, was clouding the minds of those who inhabited it, sustaining a miasma of boredom to prevent anyone from looking too closely. How could a place that had once been so rich in mystery, and a sense of the numinous, now be so bereft of it? Our capacity for forgetting awed me. It still does.

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Don't call Abingdon ordinary

By Eleanor Parker

This time last year I was home again, and decided to follow the Tower Burn into town, a route that many have trod and re-trod over the centuries. Its banks were overgrown with nettles and the section closest to Saint Margaret’s shed (which was closed) was strewn with litter and serving as the last resting place of an errant shopping trolley. From there, I walked through the car park and on to the Glen, where I paid a visit to Malcolm’s Tower. A bit of the ancient tower had fallen off and lay on the ground amid crisp packets and beer cans. Not too far away, Abbot House — a medieval building containing a contemporary mural by the celebrated writer-artist Alasdair Gray — was also boarded up.

I was heading for the Abbey when, all of a sudden, I spotted a numpty with a hurdy-gurdy standing at the entrance. Intrigued, I lingered a few minutes, and the next moment I saw Gordon Brown leaving the building in the company of some people who I assumed were local dignitaries; I think the Earl of Elgin may have been among them. They were celebrating the opening of ‘The Fife Pilgrim Way’, a new walking route that, it was hoped, would lure tourists over the bridge from Edinburgh into Fife so we could extract some money from them while they drank deep of our sacred history. That’ll be the history surrounded by nettles and beer cans, then? My cynicism was so profound that I could feel a “Disgusted of Texas” email to the Dunfermline Press coming on.

But when I got back to the States, the business of life swept me away and it was weeks before I remembered that I was going to write that letter. And now, a year later, I wonder: what if this level of disregard for the past is, well, typical? What if Dunfermline is just a particularly pronounced exemplar of our natural state? I remember visiting Konye-Urgench in Central Asia, where a kid was grazing a goat outside the ruins of an ancient fortress that clearly meant nothing to him; and also VDNKh, the giant Stalinist exhibition centre in Moscow, where shoppers browsed for washing machines and fridges, indifferent to the monumental totalitarian architecture that housed them. I think about the epic of Gilgamesh, which disappeared beneath the sands of Iraq for so long. The heritage industry exists to serve visitors who are disconnected from the history they stare at. Locals, well — they forget.

Even so, all those forgotten things lie heavy upon Dunfermline and everyone in it. The glory of the town is not so much its past but its status as a mysterious monument to aging — to decay, loss and death. It reminds us that glory days once gone do not come back; that you don’t need to be so dramatic as to decline and fall: sometimes to decline is enough. That which is interesting is not visible, and that which is visible is not that interesting. But if you stare long and hard at the town, it will begin to reveal its secrets. It only took 40 years or so for them to start opening up to me, and as the years pass, I find that the heavy gravity of the Auld Grey Toun exerts an ever-stronger pull upon me. Each time I return it is as if I am edging my way ever closer to some central enigma of existence.

Marriage is a legally recognised agreement after all, one that has been shown to confer many benefits for health and wellbeing. Why should I not be able to rent my place as wife and mother in my particular family to others who wish to enjoy some of those benefits?

Ryan Bourne of the Cato Institute recently argued that the technology exists to enable us to trade citizenship rights. Calling the right of British nationals to work in the UK’s high-wage economy “an effective property right we own but can’t currently trade”, he suggests we could ease immigration pressures by implementing an Airbnb-style secondary market in working rights.

If we frame citizenship, or marriage, as something owned by an individual, it is simply a set of bureaucratic permissions. Like the right to live in a house, surely this could be traded in a marketplace? And if the technology exists to create a citizenship market, surely we could do the same for marriage? I could sublet my wifedom and nip off for a weekend on the tiles with the proceeds. Why not?

The problem is obvious — my husband and daughter would, not unreasonably, object. She would no more want her bedtime story read by a stranger than my husband would want to share a bed with that stranger.

My marriage is not a good I own but a relationship, created by mutual consent. In a marriage, I give up some of my autonomy, privacy and private property rights by declaring my commitment to the relationship. What I gain is of immeasurable value: a sphere of belonging, the foundation of my existence as a social creature.

Likewise, citizenship implies relations of belonging, both of me to a community but also a community to me. It also implies commitments on behalf of the community of which I am a citizen. And in exchange it requires commitments of me, as a citizen: to uphold the law, to behave according to its customs and so on. As the late Roger Scruton put it in a 2017 speech:

“The citizen participates in government and does not just submit to it. Although citizens recognise natural law as a moral limit, they accept that they make laws for themselves. They are not just subjects: they appoint the sovereign power and are in a sense parts of that sovereign power, bound to it by a quasi-contract which is also an existential tie. The arrangement is not necessarily democratic, but is rather founded on a relation of mutual accountability.”

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Just as my husband and daughter have a stake in who is entitled to be called “wife” or “Mummy” in our particular context, so other citizens of a nation have a stake in who is entitled to the rights conferred by citizenship.

In this light we can better understand the revulsion that greeted the actions of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex in trademarking “Sussex Royal” for personal commercial gain. Royalty, after all, does not exist in a vacuum. It is not an intrinsic property of a person, like blue eyes or long legs, but something conferred both by the monarchy and also by the subjects of that monarchy.

As Charles I discovered in 1649, ultimately no king can govern save by the consent of his subjects. Royalty is not a private property, but a relationship. The popular disgust and anger engendered by the Sussexes’ move to transfer their stock of royalty from the relational public sphere to that of private property is in truth anger at their privatising something which does not belong to them but to the whole nation.

In The Question Concerning Technology, writes Josh Pauling, Heidegger argues that digital technology uncouples humans from what is real, paving the way for a mindset that treats everything as “standing-reserve”, or in other words “resources to be consumed”. For Heidegger, seeing the world thus is dangerous because it flattens all other perspectives:

Commodifying nature and humanity leads us to discard other understandings of being-in-the-world and the practices, beliefs and ideas that accompany them: all aspects of reality are incorporated into the ordering of standing-reserve.

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John Clare, poet of the Somewheres

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The Sussexes’ move to turn their royalty into royalties provokes anger because it flattens something rich in socially created meaning to the simple order of resource: an ore to be mined. It turns something from a relationship to an object, and is — like mining — destructive of what it consumes. For while relationships, being dialogic, can be infinitely renewed, once the goods created in social relationships are claimed as private property by one party in that relationship, they will cease to be renewed.

My husband’s goodwill would rapidly wear thin were I to Airbnb my role in our family. Similarly, Bourne’s citizenship marketplace fails to consider how the general population would react to seeing fellow citizens renting their right to work to non-citizens and swanning about spending the unearned proceeds. And the goodwill enjoyed by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex while discharging their royal duties has already evaporated, now it transpires they wish to enjoy the privileges of their elevated station without embracing its obligations.

Treated as objects to be exploited, relational meanings wither and die. Treated as dynamic relationships, they are infinitely renewable. In this sense, they are more akin to ecologies in the natural world. In Expecting the Earth, Wendy Wheeler argues that in fact ecologies are systems of meaning: whether at the level of DNA or megafauna, she says, living things deal not in information but in meanings that change dynamically depending on context.

Why does any of this matter? “Modernity is a surprisingly simple deal,”  writes Yuval Noah Harari in Homo Deus. “The entire contract can be summarised in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.” The impressive achievements of modernity might make the loss of meaning seem, to some, a fair exchange.

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But if Wheeler is right, meaning is more than an optional seasoning on the mechanistic business of living. In Man’s Search for Meaning, Victor Frankl observes of his time in Nazi concentration camps that those who felt they had a goal or purpose were also those most likely to survive.

Indeed, the growing phenomenon of “deaths of despair” is driven, some argue, by deterioration in community bonds, good-quality jobs, dignity and social connection — in a word, the relational goods that confer meaning and purpose on life. As Frankl observed, humans need meaning as much as we need air, food and water: “Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon lost.”

An order of commerce that treats relational ecologies as objects that can be exploited will exhaust those objects. That is, in the course of its commercial activities it actively destroys one of the basic preconditions for human flourishing: meaning.

The Estonian thinker Ivar Puura has called the destruction of meaning “semiocide”. As concern mounts about the effects of pollution and emissions on the earth, campaigners have called for new laws to criminalise the destruction of ecologies, which they call “ecocide”. Perhaps we should take semiocide more seriously as well.

A man of remarkable and ruthless achievements — victor of the Civil Wars, first to unite Britain and Ireland, the first commoner to be Britain’s Head of State and architect of a global empire — Cromwell remains an elusive figure.

Most of the public will have heard of him and some will know of his role in the trial and execution of Charles I, but both Cromwell and his turbulent age have little purchase among the British people, unlike, say, the Tudors or the Victorians. It is as if France knew little of its Revolution or America nothing of its Founding Fathers. Yet what a fascinating character he is.

As Lord Protector from 1653 to 1658, Cromwell managed to hold together a fractious and fragile alliance of politicians and soldiers. He was at heart a conservative committed to hierarchy and order, which met with the approval of most MPs, who were of Presbyterian bent and sought an established church, albeit one without bishops. But, an Independent in his religious views, Cromwell was also genuinely committed to liberty of conscience, which allied him with the “Saints” of the army, who, guided to victory by divine providence, believed England an elect nation, the new Israel.

Cromwell would die with this alliance still in place. But it was dependent wholly upon his personal authority and, having refused to accept the offer of Crown made by civilian MPs, in part because of the army’s opposition — “I would not seek to set up that which Providence hath destroyed and laid in the dust, and I would not build Jericho again”, he told Parliament in 1657 — the possibility of a smooth succession grounded in the Ancient Constitution of King, Council and Parliament became ever less likely.

And so Cromwell’s son Richard inherited the tenuous title of Lord Protector but not the loyalty of his father’s allies. Soon after, Charles II was restored, and Britain’s experiment in republicanism was over.

The figure who had made it possible was a manic depressive of relatively humble beginnings, who had proven himself a military leader of genius and a pragmatic politician whose Parliaments were a perpetual disappointment.

Impossible to pin down, he was a man of considerable personal tolerance. When John Biddle, a distinguished, though controversial, biblical scholar, had come under suspicion for denying the Trinity, the Protector had intervened personally to save the life of a man he thought “full of modesty, sobriety and forbearance, no ways contentious”. Banishing Biddle to the Scilly Isles in October 1655, Cromwell allowed him “a hundred crowns per annum for his existence”.

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Though Cromwell was more concerned with political order than religious toleration when the crux came, his personal interventions in private religious matters were striking. Quakers were released on his instruction, and the trial and brutal punishment of the Quaker James Nayler in 1656 made Cromwell question the political role of his Major-Generals. Cromwell paid for the funeral of the Anglican Archbishop Ussher at Westminster Abbey in April 1656. He also refused to restrict admission to Catholic services at the Venetian ambassador’s residence and was friends with the aristocratic Catholic Kenelm Digby, whose father had been implicated in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.

Despite his dour “warts and all” image, the Protector was something of an aesthete. Cromwell and his family moved into the suite of rooms that had served as the Royal Apartments in Whitehall in April 1654, probably after a rushed — and expensive — renovation, for they had been neglected since Charles I left London in January 1642. John Embree, Cromwell’s surveyor-general, spent more than £10,000 a year on refurbishments throughout the duration of the Protectorate, a sum comparable with the Stuarts’ annual expenditure.

Clement Kinnersley, Cromwell’s keeper of the wardrobe, was lavish in his spending. Between February and November 1654 he paid out more than £12,000 on such items as a bed for the Whitehall apartments, “after the Indian fashion”, most of which had been part of the royal collection, along with an array of paintings and tapestries. Whitehall, after all, was part of the public face of the regime, where ambassadors and emissaries from across Europe would seek an audience with Cromwell. Whatever the ideology of the Commonwealth, it would seek to offer similar splendour to its allies and rivals across the Continent.

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Hampton Court, built on the Thames to the west of London by Henry VIII’s chancellor Cardinal Wolsey, was Cromwell’s weekend retreat, where he would gather his family and closest allies. Its renovation was a challenging project, with leaking roofs and negletced garden, but Cromwell and Embree had ambitions for the site. A huge marble fountain was brought from Somerset House to become the focus of Cromwell’s private garden. Originally commissioned as the centrepiece of an assembly of classical figures, like the Banqueting House, it was designed by Inigo Jones for Charles I in the 1630s.

This “Diana Fountain” could hardly be less puritanical in its symbolism, decorated with nymphs, dolphins and sea monsters, the supporting cast to a statue of the goddess Diana atop. The Puritan Mary Netheway was appalled by “those monstres” and wrote to the Protector to remind him that that “while the altars of the idols remained untaken away in Jerusalem, the wrath of God continued against Israel”.

The tapestries at Hampton Court, a particularly expensive form of decoration, are far from puritanical, depicting the sinful, adulterous figures of Vulcan and Venus. Those in the aptly titled Paradise Room went even further in their dabbling with morally dubious narratives, celebrating the Triumphs of the Seven Deadly Sins.

Cromwell’s collection of paintings was no less decadent in its themes. Gentileschi’s Besabe, or Bathsheba washing herself, was unlikely to fulfil puritan requirements of decorum, while Andrea Schiavoni’s Madonna and Child with St Elizabeth and Luca Cambiaso’s Assumption of the Virgin Mary were deeply Catholic devotional works, which sat ill with Cromwell’s professed Calvinism.

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Cromwell loved music. The Royalist Antony Wood reported that the Protector especially enjoyed works by John Hingston, who had trained two boys to accompany him in “Mr Deering’s printed Latin songs for three voices”.

Chamber music was popular, usually in the form of a consort of viols, always a sociable form of conversational music making, with its inwardly circular arrangement of players, though a new instrument from the Continent, the violin, also made the occasional appearance. Wind bands were accompanied by organs, including one removed on the instructions of the Protector from Magdalen College, Oxford to Hampton Court, where Cromwell employed a Mr Farmulo as his own “virginal musician”.

Much of this will come as a surprise, though what remains least understood about Cromwell is, perhaps, his conservatism, which often dragged him into conflict with his more radical supporters. Above all, it was Charles I, his head turned by the new ideology of European absolutism, who was the innovator. Cromwell preferred to hold to some form of the Ancient Constitution — though he bowed to “cruel necessity” on more than one occasion, for none of his Parliaments came close to his ideal. Nor, ultimately, did his nation, which he had hoped was rather more saintly than it actually was. In that, he has a more recent historical parallel.

Consider this: an East Anglian, nonconformist, philosemite, suspicious of, though not fundamentally opposed to, monarchy; a unionist uncomprehending of Ireland, a courageous advocate of military action, who left considerable problems of succession to those who came after them? It appears that Margaret Thatcher was cut from similar cloth to the Protector. And it may take just as long for a statue near Parliament to be raised to her.