I WAS AT MAGDALENE COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE when the death of Queen Elizabeth II was announced on the bright, warm early evening of Thursday 8 September.
I was about to deliver a talk to an assembly of diners on Oliver Cromwell’s resettlement of the Jews in England, an action for which this most contentious of Englishmen garners approval, even among those who revile him as a regicide.
The host toasted the late Queen, welcomed Charles III with a “God Save the King”, and the evening continued in a tone that reflected quietly on the surprising contingencies of the past, on profound events little known, and on Edward I’s vile treatment of a long-persecuted people corrected during what is often considered Britain’s only experiment in republicanism; in fact, by 1656 (from when the resettlement is dated) it was a monarchy in all but name.
Cromwell, I stressed to an audience receptive to the messiness of the past, was not opposed to monarchy, merely one monarch in particular: Charles I, “that man of blood” whose dissembling and deceit had led, in two avoidable civil wars, to the greatest loss of life these islands would endure until the First World War.
Some historians, including that peerless observer of the crises of the seventeenth century, Blair Worden, argue convincingly that the trial and execution of “Charles Stuart” in 1649 is the reason the British monarchy exists to this day. It fractured the continuity that was the proud characteristic of the constitution and, in doing so, induced an enduring