Summary: a fine and elegantly written, though overwhelmingly Anglo-centric, account of Cromwell’s dictatorship

In the 2001 film, Rat Race, one family participating in the race stumble upon a “Barbie Museum”. It turns out this does not house a collection of the beloved children’s toy, but rather is a homage to the Nazi war criminal, Klaus Barbie. As one of the deranged guides tell them, “People don’t remember just what a wonderful ballroom dancer he was.”

I thought of that movie while reading Anna Keay’s rather affectionate portrait of Oliver Cromwell in the Restless Republic. He may have overseen the massacres of thousands of people, soldiers and civilians alike, children, women and men, in his racist campaigning in Ireland – something that is mentioned rather than described in any detail in this book. But “Oliver” loved music and could be moved to tears at the accomplishments of his beloved children.

The planned wholesale theft of Irish land by the Cromwellian government and the planned complete ethnic cleansing of Catholics from eastern Ireland required remarkable technical organisation and unprecedented accomplishments in land surveying. This Keay does describe in admiring detail. But eventually, before it could reach its genocidal climax, this “ugly episode in Irish history” was brought to an end. Obviously, as Irish history, it is not something that the English need feel too much responsibility for.

Keay choses to tell the story of the short-lived English republic through the eyes of a range of characters, almost exclusively English, but including both Royalist and Parliamentarian perspectives. It is an imaginative approach and engagingly done, with a strong narrative drive. For example, towards the end, her account of Monck and Fairfax’s machinations to bring about the restoration of the monarchy is quite gripping.

Overall, the Restless Republic is an illuminating and elegantly written work of history. But, appropriate to the theocratic monstrosity of which Keay writes, and to the spirit of Brexit Britain too, I suppose, it is written with negligible empathy for the aspirations and experiences of those non-English people who bore, and continue to bear, the brunt of the English Parliament’s ignorance and crass prejudices.