Imogen Peck's richly researched book explores how the civil wars were remembered during the decade of republican rule, before Charles II's peaceful return in 1660 upended the frameworks of public memory created in the wake of his father's execution. Peck calls 1650s England a “post-war state” that, in common with all regimes trying to reestablish legitimate rule after a civil conflict, was compelled to confront the question of what to do with the losers. This encompassed considerably more people than royalists who had taken up arms for the king. Many who had been on the winning side in the later 1640s, after Parliament had defeated the king's forces, now found themselves alienated from a regime founded on an act of regicide and upheld by the sword. How people chose to remember the wars was heavily informed by how they understood their place in the present. Peck's contention is that “heterogenous reconstructions of the past” by people at all social levels interacted with “official” attempts to determine the meaning of recent events, to give the period a richer “memorial culture” than historians have hitherto appreciated (5).
Peck's discussion of the historical narratives produced by supporters of the republican regimes focuses on three key themes: the king's “blood guilt”; the barbarity and treachery of the Scottish Covenanters, Parliament's one-time ally (Peck makes a tiny slip, page 11, when stating that the Scots first arrived in 1644; they had occupied Newcastle in 1640–41); and the providential nature of Parliament's military successes. Blaming the Scots and the king for England's ills enabled these writers to move attention away from divisions within their own society, but as a strategy for aiding reconciliation, it served to keep the divisions of the 1640s alive. Peck rightly contends that, in contrast to the restored monarchy, the republican regimes struggled to contain these expressions of “alternative memories” (95).
The most interesting parts of the book deal with wide-ranging evidence of the ways in which memories of conflict informed interactions between individuals and shaped community identities. Recriminations from civil war days fueled arguments between neighbors in alehouses. There is a sad account of a man shopped to the authorities by his own brother when it came out in a reminiscence, some ten years after the event, that he had killed a parliamentarian soldier in his father's orchards (101). The personal tragedies endured by many English men and women seep out of matter-of-fact legal documents: the loss of “two brothers in the parliament's service” was turned by one man into the seal of his loyalty to the regime. In their descriptions of severed limbs and terrible scarring, petitioners turned their own bodies into living sites of memory (185).
Some veterans, like Sir Hugh Cholmley (called Judas Cholmley in pamphlets of the 1640s), had to address checkered wartime careers. Rather than a write a straightforward self-vindication, Cholmley positioned his actions within a longer history of his family, whose distinguished pedigree he clearly hoped his sons would continue to uphold. What does this say about the role of factors such as gender, status, family, religious affiliations, and personal networks in shaping what and how people chose to remember?
This is a well-written and thought-provoking study. A tension emerges, however, between a book whose core material is bounded by the existence of the republican regimes and a concluding chapter on “post-war states.” Although it succeeds in offering up a more “nuanced picture” of memories of a “catastrophic event” (7), the book provides no extended treatment of how these insights affect historiographies of republican England and its people. One implication is that the jarring of “official” narratives with “heterogenous reconstructions of the past” did little to help people come to terms with what had happened to them.
The book's conclusion instead takes us in a different direction. It seeks to align mid-seventeenth-century England with “post-conflict states” from across time and space, as a means of challenging histories of memorial culture that stress its essential modernity. The comparisons, for me, reinforced why the book was at its best when it focused on historicized social contexts. People in mid-seventeenth-century England did not remember conflict through the prisms of colonialism, as in Zimbabwe, or fascism, as in General Francisco Franco's Spain, or ethno-religious difference, as in Croatia. Peck's final sentence asserts that people in the past “did not do things so very differently there” (202), but I think she shows that they did, and there is much in this fine book that will help readers toward a better sense of why.
