In later life, wags would joke that Prezza had once “worked for Cunard … and he still works pretty hard to this day”, but his early seafaring career connects us to an increasingly distant past, where a life at sea was still a fairly typical career choice for British young men with a taste for adventure.

During that six-week voyage, Eden had presented Prescott with bottles of beer for his prowess in the ship’s boxing ring, and Prescott would go on to describe Eden as an “old Tory gent” for his courtesy and good manners (although he was less keen on the snobbish Lady Eden). Yet the 18-year-old firebrand still considered the former Conservative Prime Minister a class enemy.

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At sea, Prescott’s union bosses considered him a troublemaker, and a sense of social inadequacy gnawed at him throughout his life. This was sharpened by his educational experiences, first by failing the 11-plus (a source of trauma for so many of his generation); then the embarrassment of unacknowledged dyslexia during his time at Ruskin College; and when a middle class student at Hull University said he belonged to the “lumpen proletariat”, he only realised later that he’d been insulted.

His whole career was a sort of revenge for these humiliations, and the taunts in the Commons chamber from patricians such as Nicholas Soames — “mine’s a gin and tonic, Giovanni, and would you ask my friend what he’s having?” — left Prescott with a seething hatred of the Tories, and a steely commitment to ousting them from the government benches.

This is why Prescott and his one-time flatmate Dennis Skinner (another Ruskin alumnus) parted company; for Prescott’s hero was Ernie Bevin, Attlee’s hard-headed right-hand man. Thus, Prescott rallied to support John Smith over “one member, one vote” in 1993, and then backed Tony Blair over the demise of “Clause IV”, that explicitly socialist commitment to “the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange”, that was perceived by party reformers as a drag on Labour’s electability. For just like Bevin, Prescott always wanted power.

But in the public imagination, his political skills were perhaps under-appreciated (although not by those who worked with him), and it was his human qualities that made him so attractive as a public figure. Yes, he mangled his words, “the green belt is a Labour achievement, and we mean to build on it”‘, or after a rough flight “it’s great to be back on terra cotta”, but that was part of his unrehearsed charm.

To some he was that recognisable type, the bolshie shop steward or the barrack-room lawyer with a combustible temper — but he was also a champagne socialist in the very best sense of “nothing being too good for the workers”. In the Seventies, the NUM leader Joe Gormley had said that he looked forward to a time when every miner “could afford a Rolls Royce in the driveway and a Mini for the wife to go shopping in”, although not many achieved that dream. So though Prescott may have been mocked for his “two Jags” and his enormous mock Tudor house on leafy Saltshouse Road in Hull, with its battlements and gargoyles (known locally as “Prescott Towers”), and for his junkets to the Maldives and croquet on the lawn at Dorneywood, he and his glamorous Liz Taylor-esque wife Pauline, blow-dried to within an inch of her life, lived out the aspirations of so many working class families. At a certain level, you just had to respect the hustle.

Although Oliver Cromwell may have been one of his political heroes, Prescott was no puritan — “never knowingly under-lunched” in the lingo of the Westminster lobby, and only the truly gifted could open their “clack” (as the throat is known in parts of the North) and neck a pint in under five seconds like Prescott could. He had an authenticity, too, and so many of the tributes to him since his death have noted his kindness and consideration, especially to ordinary people, or how he spoke up for those overlooked places in the North unvisited by prosperity.

Here was a man who could literally walk with kings and never lose the common touch — although the future Charles III was perturbed by his habit in meetings with him of sliding down the seat with his legs apart “his crotch pointing a little menacingly” and balancing his teacup and saucer on his paunch.

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It’s depressing that an unabashed working-class figure like Prescott is still treated as a curiosity and a stage Northerner, and says a lot about how little has changed since he entered politics. When he first stood for the deputy leadership of the Labour party, in 1988, around a third of Labour MPs came from working-class jobs, but the proportion has now dropped to just 13%. Little wonder so many politicians struggle to connect with the electorate, as Prezza did so literally.

Throughout the Labour Party’s history, the middle-class and working-class elements of what is still cringingly referred to at moments like these as the Labour movement, were held together in an uneasy alliance. The Labour historian Kenneth O. Morgan noted that although the party was “mostly led by middle class professionals, from the Webbs to the Blairs, [Prescott] was the token proletarian on Labour’s front bench in the grand old tradition of Jimmy Thomas, Ernie Bevin, and George Brown” – and, latterly, we might add, Angela Rayner.

But, ironically, Prescott’s hard-headed devotion to the New Labour project led directly to the final victory of the bourgeois strain in Labour, and the complete dominance of a New Establishment — drawn from the hauts-fonctionnaires of the BBC, universities and public sector — who can be just as snooty and out of touch as the Old Establishment that he first encountered on the deck of the Rangitata.

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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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.

SG Maclean is a historian who lives on the Black Isle in Scotland, which isn’t actually an island. She writes very good crime fiction set in Oliver Cromwell’s England, which isn’t just about Cromwell’s England. She wins prizes for her novels, and deserves more fame to go with them. Especially among people in politics.

On the face of it, Maclean’s Seeker novels are about Damian Seeker, a Yorkshire soldier for Cromwell who becomes the leading enforcer for the Protectorate’s domestic intelligence operation. Slowly and subtly over several books, Maclean explores the essential tension here: how can a fundamentally decent man serve a regime he increasingly recognises as falling short of his own high moral standards?

Seeker’s answers are instructive: because he fought for them once, and against another lot who were worse. But that is not enough to sustain — or deserve — lasting loyalty.

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It is the theme of loyalty that makes the Seeker novels good reading for politicians, who always need to understand why people support causes — and why they stop.

In the end of the series — so far, at least, for there is hope she will write more — Maclean shows Seeker’s break with the collapsing Cromwell regime not as a grand gesture or an exercise in psychodrama but rather the way real people make big decisions — with a resigned shrug.

Cromwell’s story deserves more attention in the Britain that voted for Brexit. It’s a reminder that, no matter what we tell ourselves about our phlegmatic stability, Britain does indeed do revolutions. Cromwell, of course, was no radical from outside the system. A son of the gentry who sat in Parliament, he led a cause that united disgruntled notables and true grassroots revolutionaries — for instance, the Levellers, who were to be marginalised and bitterly disappointed by Cromwell in power.

Maclean’s hero is part of that non-conformist tradition, a Seeker by faith as well as name, he was part of a small, obscure sect before shifting his faith to Cromwell’s cause and its defence against scheming royalists plotting to restore the dissolute Stuart monarchy.

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Such royalists are still a major presence in the England Maclean guides her readers through. Because no revolutionary regime can make its opponents simply disappear — accommodations must be made. The Metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell makes regular appearances as an agent of Seeker’s intelligence operation. Marvell’s precise loyalties were and are unclear: he lionised leading Royalists, but then worked for Thomas Fairfax, the great parliamentary general.

We also meet a young Samuel Pepys, another parliamentarian who converted to Royalism when Cromwell died in 1658.

When that death comes, Seeker is in Bruges tracking the royalist cells that made that city their base while supporting the young Charles Stuart in his designs on the throne amid the shifting backdrop of European politics. This is the setting for the fifth and most recent Seeker novel, The House of Lamentations. It’s a nice way to illustrate the international dimensions of turmoil in British government, as well as a reminder that British leadership worrying about European plots is not a new thing.

The Seeker novels’ lessons for today’s rulers are numerous.  Perhaps the biggest is that taking power is easy enough — just win some big battles — but keeping it is much harder. In the end, the stars of the series are the ordinary folk who lent their support to Cromwell and his cause, but then, tired and resigned, welcome back the Stuart monarchy, albeit briefly. It’s a reminder that while elites take politics and government very seriously, the public on whom those things ultimately depend generally don’t pay too much attention, instead just getting on with their lives. Revolutions are easy to declare but hard to sustain.

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.