Act of Oblivion: The Sunday Times Bestseller

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I have been waiting for most of my life for Robert Harris to write a novel that is not gripping, insightful and entertaining. I am waiting still -- Ben Macintyre * The Times * The antagonist of Harris’s novel is a man by the name of Richard Nayler. The only fictional character among an otherwise historically accurate cast, Nayler is a royalist, a member of the Privy Council, loyal to the king, Charles II, and obsessively fixated on bringing the remaining regicides to justice. More than a decade after the execution of the king at the hands of Cromwell, Nayler has yet to lose his thirst for vengeance: The best historical fiction combines a gripping plot with meticulous research - leaving the reader inspired to learn more about the real-life protagonists. And the latest release from Robert Harris once more proves his mastery of the genre * Soldier *

The joy is in the vivid re-creation of 17th Century England and America and in the sly parallels with today that Harris teases out * Mail on Sunday * But 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. The Act of Oblivion may seem no more than a curiosity today. Congress has never passed such an Act, nor is it likely to do so. Yet as Meyler has shown in a piece titled Pardon, but Don’t Forget 26 Open this footnote Close this footnote 26 Meyler, supra note 23. … Open this footnote Close in the Take Care blog, the Anglo-American rejection of the Acts of Oblivion may itself illuminate contemporary legal life.

As the German poet and philosopher Novalis remarked more than two centuries ago, novels arise out of the shortcomings of history. Harris sets out to plug the gaps in the record, and succeeds remarkably well. He’s writing fiction, but he treats the few available facts and the more plausible theories with respect, and skilfully extrapolates from them. Harris has placed two of those men at the center of his book. Edward Whalley and William Goffe, both signers of the king’s death warrant, fled to New England with the help of an American man by the name of Daniel Gookin. Knowing that they were both high profile targets for New England Royalists, they kept a low profile, spending much of their time hidden in homes of local sympathetic families, praying for the day their charges would be dropped, and they could safely reunite with their families. X. Exceptions out of this pardon. All murders not comprised in the first clause of this pardon excepted. Piracy excepted. Buggery. Rape and the wilful taking away any maid excepted. Double marriages excepted Witchcraft excepted I. Jac. I. C. II. Accounts of certain treasures and receivers. 13 Car. 2. Stat. I. C. 3. So this is a negative review, however 3 stars are given. The pluses were the writing style was excellent, it wasn’t a drag to read to the point of grumbling, sighing, or eye-rolling. It had just enough to read large sections at a time.

XV. Discharges and quietus est given in the exchequer. Accounts of the revenues of churches in Wales. Bribery, subornation, forging, debentures, &c. witnesses.May 1660, Bill of Pardon and Oblivion, British History On-line House of Commons Journal Volume 8 (www.british-history.ac.uk) August 1660 Bills passed, British History On-line House of Lords Journal Volume 11 (www.british-history.ac.uk) The execution of the king was the defining event of this struggle. Harris chooses to focus instead on the lives in exile of two of the regicides, Goffe and Edward Whalley. In 1660, they fled to America, where many of the colonists were Puritans with no love for the king. Both men were distinguished soldiers. Whalley was Oliver Cromwell’s cousin, a trusted member of the Lord Protector’s inner circle, and Goffe was Whalley’s son-in-law. We know tantalisingly little about their lives in America. They lived in hiding, in constant fear of arrest by the royalist agents who were searching for them. Whalley begins as a pious and ruthless military commander. He’s a religious fanatic obsessed, as all Puritans in the novel are, with the idea of a Christian republic of England – a land where God rules supreme. Harris's cleverness, judgment and eye for detail are second to none -- Dominic Sandbrook * Sunday Times *

The town’s unknown saviour became known as the Angel of Hadley. The mystery of his identity soon gained an extra frisson: it was rumoured that the Angel was the fugitive Major General William Goffe, a man with a huge reward on his head. Goffe was one of the regicides, the men who signed Charles I’s death warrant, whose lives had become forfeit after the Restoration of the monarchy. Charles II, 1660: An Act of Free and Generall Pardon Indemnity and Oblivion, Statutes of the Realm: volume 5: 1628–80 (1819), pp.226–34. Act Of Oblivion offers a resonant history of both England and America as they struggle to forge a myth of nationhood out of opposing ideologies * Daily Mail *

Media Reviews

The stuff about the new settlements in America was the most interesting part for me, although Harris dragged it out for far too long. He assumes people will know the basic history of Cromwell and the Restoration, and puts no political element into the plot. I felt that more concentration on the Restoration and less on these two runaways would have given scope for more interest. There’s only so much you can say about two men hiding in a barn, or a cellar, or an attic, or even the wilderness. Every quarry needs a hunter. Harris counterbalances Whalley and Goffe with Richard Nayler, the fictional secretary to the regicide committee of the privy council, who has a powerful personal reason to want them dead. Meanwhile in London, Frances, Goffe’s devoted wife and Whalley’s daughter, provides another viewpoint. The novel’s narrative structure moves to and fro between them, ultimately leading to a brisk if slightly implausible conclusion. The problem is that this is the majority of the novel because there isn’t a great deal to the story itself. It takes an age for Nayler to get across the pond to the colonies and even longer for anything further to happen. And then nothing really happens after that until the cheesy Hollywood-esque ending.