Don’t Blame Oliver
Lives in the Shadow of a War that was Won and then Lost
Die gloriously or be forgotten forever, that was the dilemma facing John Thurloe, Cromwell’s Secretary of State and spymaster. Make a defiant speech on the scaffold or save your life by helping a Restoration propagandist distort the history of the English civil war and dismiss your role in it?
Thurloe opted for unctuous survival while secretly penning a counterblast to Lord Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion, a Stuart encomium.
His rollicking account reveals how he exploited the birth of the popular newspaper (when media first went social) and embraced the feminism which briefly dawned when all men were dragged to war. By lionising Cromwell in hearts and minds, Thurloe enabled a wart nosed commoner to replace an anointed king.
His True Account of the Revolution captures the essence of civil war, where what happens on street corners, in parlours, bedchambers, churches, taprooms and brothels is as important as battlefield action. It illuminates England’s march to regicide through Thurloe’s adventures with Marchamont Nedham, the first great journalist; Nicholas Culpeper, the famous herbalist; and Lady Carlisle, the inspiration behind Dumas’s Milady de Winter.
