Royal Hunt

Act of Oblivion is a spellbinding historical novel that brilliantly imagines one of the greatest manhunts in history: the search of two Englishmen involved in the killing of King Charles I and the implacable foe on their trail- an epic journey into the wilds of seventeenth-century New England. 1660 England, General Edward Whalley, and his son-in-law Colonel William Goffe board a ship bound for the New World.  Whalley was Cromwell’s cousin, a veteran of the wars, and a close confidant of the Lord Protector. Geoff was married to Whalley’s daughter Frances. They are on the run, wanted for the murder of King Charles I, a brazen execution that marked the culmination of the English Civil War, in which parliamentarians successfully battled royalists for control.

We encounter them first as they arrive in North America hoping to find sanctuary among sympathetic nonconformists, as safety proves elusive. Royal Warrants pursue them, and the locals’ compassion for their co-religionists vies with their fear of Royal vengeance and lust for lucrative trading privileges with England. The pair are forged to dodge from one dismal hideout to the next.  They did not enjoy divine favour, as their increasingly miserable condition is a cruel comeuppance and a puzzlement. Goffe’s attempt to spear a fish when they are subsisting on an open rock ledge in Connecticut, Whalley muses that they are “Christian gentlemen no longer. We have turned into savages, save we lack their bodily grace and competence”.

 In London, the unrelenting chase is on having dispatched all the capture regicides in the traditional gruesome manner, returns to the runaways.

 Now ten years after Charles’ beheading, the royalists have returned to power. Under the provisions of the Act of Oblivion, the fifty-nine men who signed the King’s death warrant and participated in his execution have been found guilty in absentia of high treason. Some of the Roundheads, including Oliver Cromwell, are already dead. Others have been captured, hung, drawn, and quartered. A few are imprisoned for life. But two have escaped to America by boat.

In London Richard Naylor, secretary of the regicide committee of the Privy Council is charged with bringing the traitors to justice and he will stop at nothing to find them. A substantial bounty hangs over their heads for their capture  -dead or Alive.

Harris’s Act of Oblivion is an epic true story to tell of religion, vengeance, and power and the costs to those who wield it.

When Oliver Cromwell’s republican regime collapsed in 1660, two years after the death of its founding generalissimo,  a period of bloody score-settling seemed in prospect as the new King avenged his martyred father, the executed Charles I. While the Puritans were marginalized, there was no generalized purge of all the official, soldiers, and politicians who have assisted in the civil wars and the interregnum, let alone a bloodbath.  Many simply carried on with their lives under the restored monarchy. More concerned with womanizing and flaunting his newfound Kingly status, Charles II had little appetite for the business of exacting revenge, resulting in a pragmatic modus vivendi: under the Merry Monarch, only those guilty of the heaviest crime – that of regicide itself- were to get in the neck.

 Act of Oblivion by Robert Harris, Hutchinson Heinemann £22, 480 pages.