The Fall of Cromwell's Republic and the Return of the King: From Commonwealth to Stuart Monarchy, 1657‐1670TimothyVenning. Barnsley, Yorkshire, and Havertown, PA: Pen and Sword Books, 2023. lix + 267 pp. <scp>ISBN</scp> 13: 9781526789396. $49.95 (clo

This is the second book to be published in a trilogy of studies by Timothy Venning, preceded by his Cromwell's Failed State (2020) and followed later in 2023 by The Road to Civil War, all from Pen and Sword Books. This pivotal period in British history—in the view of many, the pivotal period in British history—has attracted a wonderfully rich scholarly literature stretching densely back through John Morrill, Blair Worden, Austin Woolrych, and Christopher Hill, among others, to Charles Firth and S. R. Gardiner, and it shows no sign of abating. In the last thirty or forty years there have been studies of the period covered in the book under review by Gary De Krey (2005), Tim Harris (1993 and 2006), Richard L. Greaves (1986 and 1990), Ronald Hutton (1985 and 1989), N. H. Keeble (2002), Ruth Mayers (2004), Steven Pincus (1996), and Paul Seaward (1991), as well as new editions from Oxford University Press of key primary sources, such as Cromwell's writings (2022), Richard Baxter's Reliquiae Baxterianae (2020), and Clarendon (forthcoming). What is distinctive about Timothy Venning's addition to this list is its forcefully dynamic presentation of the sheer confusion and bewilderment of the experience of living through the Restoration years. Knowing, as we do, how it all worked out, it is very difficult to recover a perspective from which the outcome remains in doubt, still more one from which it is all but impossible to decide between the many, and contradictory, intimations and speculations about what is going on. Venning's is a compelling account of the “bewildering succession of events” (67) through which the Protectorate collapsed in 1658-59 and the equally bewildering succession of events through which the king returned and monarchy was restored but “the elusive target of stability” (xlvi) yet remained out of reach. Particularly striking are his accounts of the interplay among rival political, military and popular ambitions and of the many apparently unconnected decisions and actions in London and beyond through which momentum gradually shifted to enable the return of Charles II “with miraculous expedition,” as Clarendon put it, catching nearly everyone, including the royalists, by surprise. Venning is very good, for example, at drawing out the interplay between the legal and constitutional issues around the titles of “Protector” and “King” and the competing self-interested motives among their advocates (lvi-lvii, 6-9, 14-23), on the tensions within and between Army and Parliament in 1659 (51-87) and on the local circumstances that enabled royalists, despite their prohibition, to stand in elections to the Convention (125-26). One way that Venning recovers the contingency and doubtfulness of the times is through the formulation of his topics as questions. The first of five chapters is headed: “A Monarchy Without a King. Stability Thwarted or Cromwell Loses his Nerve? The Offer of the Crown, 1657”; the second: “1658-9: The Collapse of Richard Cromwell's Protectorate. Inevitably Doomed — Or Is This Only Hindsight?”; the fourth: “The Restoration, 1660: a missed opportunity for moderation? If so, who was to blame?” Section headings within chapters are similarly phrased: “Cromwell's last-minute change of mind, 6-8 May 1657: principle or panic? Was he threatened with a military mutiny?” (19); “Breach of faith on: religious `inclusion’? The `Clarendon Code’” (194); “Lack of coherence, and a divided Court and administration. Nothing new for a Stuart regime, and inevitable given the context? How much can be blamed on Charles II?” (216). Venning is fond of posing similar questions within the text: did Richard Cromwell “lean on the wrong man” in Charles Fleetwood, “an ambitious one … or a broken reed” (52)? “Was sending charismatic Lambert rather than Desborough to confront Monck a disaster?” (104). This is a rhetorical device that neatly summarizes the issues and possible interpretations of events. Some readers will find it thought-provoking and engaging, other perhaps irritating, since Venning does not explicitly answer the questions he poses: the fall of Richard Cromwell prompts three questions in succession about possible outcomes had Army officers acted differently (68); all left hanging. A section headed “Finance: An `Achilles Heel’ for an under-funded government? Badly-handled by a lax administration, or par for the era?” (206) never settles on any one of these options. Similarly, speculation whether John Thurloe might have hoped that Lambert would restore Richard Cromwell in late 1659 leads to the inconclusive conclusion that, if so, “Lambert put his own ambition or his republican principles first” (83). This is, though, an approach that works rather well with the inscrutable Monck, “the most reserved man then living” in the words of Milton's nephew Edward Phillips, whom “no flesh understands” in the view of John Mordaunt. It is a technique that puts the reader in exactly the position of contemporaries, for whom unanswered questions and unresolved speculation about motives and objectives were the only possible response to a swirl of rumor, accusation and counter accusation. As these examples illustrate, the author's manner is direct and, often, colloquial. He can be assertive and opinionated (William Lenthall was a “short-sighted placeman lacking initiative” (xxix); Henrietta Maria acted with her “usual political crassness” (11)), which can lead to oversimplification (is it so certain that Cromwell was the “mastermind” of the execution of the king [xv]?). Venning has a fondness for drawing contemporary parallels, constructing the past in the image of the present in ways that sometimes are contestable: John Lilburne was imprisoned on Jersey “which now became a Cromwellian Guantanamo Bay” (lvi); Miles Sindercombe was the “the potential Lee Harvey Oswald of the Protectorate” (13); royalist plotters were, like “modern `domestic self-starter’ terrorists” hard to detect (31); unlike the dictator Francisco Franco with Juan Carlos, Cromwell had no time to prepare his heir (40-41); the composition of Cromwell's House of Lords brings to mind “Tony's cronies” (93); the trials of the regicides were akin to “Stalinist show trials” (155); Restoration Quakers were in the position of “British Muslims after 5 July 2005” (178). Perhaps because of its very strengths, this is not a tidy book. It can become difficult to follow the mass of material in its long (up to two pages or more), dense and rather breathless paragraphs, and in sentences that make extensive use of parentheses and subordinate clauses to pack everything in. Details can sometimes overwhelm the narrative, as in the eleven pages (136-47) devoted to enumerating Restoration office holders, followed by ten pages on the regicides (147-57). Even then, it is difficult to make out exactly how many persons were exempted from the Act of Oblivion, and how many others were additionally proceeded against (150-54). The narrative is not always well ordered (Cromwell dies on p. 40 but is alive on pp. 42-44) and is prone to repetition: the composition of Cromwell's House of Lords is discussed on p. 25 and again on p. 29; p. 131 substantially repeats p. 125 on the outcome of the elections to the Convention; Bunyan is imprisoned on p. 175 and again on p. 177; William Goffe and Edmund Whalley flee to New England on p. 154 and p. 192. People and subjects can be abruptly introduced: “the revised constitution” adopted on p. 23 is not identified as the Humble Petition and Advice until p. 68; “the `Booth Rising’” mentioned on p. 50 is not explained until p. 75; the restored Rump meets on p. 68 but with no prior notice when, or by whom, the decision to recall it had been taken; the “promised ecclesiastical conference” on p. 180 is not named as the Savoy until p. 185. An acute account of the election process for the Convention neglects to say just when this was (125-26). The idea of an opening “List of Main Dramatis Personae” (vi-xlii) is a good and helpful one but the criteria for inclusion are unclear: Sir Harbottle Grimston merits only two references in the index, Anne of Austria none, but both are included; Charles Howard, Earl of Carlisle, who has six index entries, is not. Details are not always accurate: Milton's Lycidas is not a “pastoral epic” (xxxii); Edward Reynolds led a Presbyterian delegation to the Hague in May 1660, not earlier in the year (165), when it would have been treasonous; Edmund Calamy did not leave the country for Holland in 1660-61 (168); at the head of p. 173 Argyll is an “unrepentant republican” but five lines later he is said to have “had no truck with republicanism.” Firmer copy-editing would have dealt with such infelicities, and would have picked up errors in presentation, such as inconsistency in the setting of chapter sub-headings, some of which are numbered, some not, and in capitalization, as in the chapter headings cited above. Printing errors are more frequent than one would wish (transposed and omitted letters, reversed inverted commas, missing prepositions and suchlike). The bibliography is commendably wide-ranging in both primary and secondary sources, but it does not include all works cited, and its presentation of publication details is inconsistent: sometimes place of publication is given, sometimes publisher, sometimes both, sometimes neither. No editor, publisher, or date is given in the entry for Lucy Hutchinson's Memoirs, making it impossible to tell which edition is intended (the reference to the Memoirs in n. 15 on p. 248 is similarly reticent). It would not be possible to include all relevant secondary sources (of the dated works mentioned above only those by Hutton are listed) but interested readers might have appreciated pointers to the key recent works on, say, the (re-) introduction of censorship, or the ecclesiastical negotiations of 1660-62.