More vindictive than merry

At first I thought this was going to be a terrible book. It starts like a Hollywood B-movie Western on which Ingmar Bergman has done a quick rewrite. This, for example, is how the authors convey the simple fact that Oliver Cromwell died on 3 September 1658: ‘Death finally caught up with Oliver Cromwell on a muggy summer afternoon in 1658.’ All it needs is the dusty main street of the frontier town with two men, one all in black, facing each other against the sky, with one of Dmitri Tiomkin’s lush orchestral soundtracks gulping away in the background.

Another death — that of Charles I by execution on 29 January 1649 in Whitehall: carpenters are putting the finishing touches to his scaffold and, according to the authors, the sound awakens the King. Fair enough. Carpenters hammer, they saw: many of us have been woken by carpenters. But then Messrs Jordan and Walsh go further.

Sitting up, he pulled back the heavy curtains surrounding his bed. Cold air rushed around his face. By the light of the large candle left burning through the night he read the dial of the little silver clock hanging on the bedpost. It was just after five o’clock in the morning.

All right, this is what a waking man would do. It is just that we do not know if this is what Charles did, for no source is quoted. Cold air, yes; consulting a clock, yes, a man would have done this, especially one on the morning of his execution. It is just that to introduce such specific detail in the interest of colour brings with it the steady drip of suspicion that fact has become probability, and this is fatal for it throws a historical work off balance.