#john lambert

Join us in celebrating National Translation Month with these queer novels translated into English, organized by language of origin! Looking for translations of English-language works to other languages? Click here for MG/YA and here for Adult fiction. Afrikaans Fathers and Fugitives by S.J. Naudé, translated by Michiel Heyns Daniel is a worldly and urbane journalist living in London. His…

Miss Constance Biddle

Artist: John Lambert (1861-1907)

Date: ca. 1900

Medium: Oil on canvas

George Monck Makes His Move

General George Monck Entering London with His Troops. Source: Mary Evans Picture Library website

THE FINAL days of the Commonwealth were filled with the very unresolved issues that had dogged the English republican experiment from its start - the question of legitimacy, the unsettled balance of power between the various postwar factions and the yearning of the populace for stable government. However, England’s civil wars had one last drama to play out before the Commonwealth’s denouement.

The Royalist plotters of the Sealed Knot, observing the crisis of the post-Protectorate regime, thought their time had come at last to seize the initiative by force. In July 1659, a series of uprisings across northern England was planned to overthrow the Rump and invite Charles II to assume the throne. As with other of the Sealed Knot’s schemes, this plot was also uncovered and then called off by its instigators, but not before Sir Thomas Myddleton had declared for the King in Wrexham and the Earl of Derby had entered England from the Isle of Man to try to incite Lancashire to rise. Neither succeeded in attracting much support, but Sir George Booth, a local landowner, mayor of Chester, and, significantly a former Parliamentarian, raised an army of 4,000 and proclaimed his support, less for a restored monarchy and more for a fresh Parliament, legitimised by new elections. This call for full Parliamentary representation became the increasing slogan of the growing opposition to the Army and England’s republic. Booth may have anticipated a coming public mood, but that mood was not universal yet. With no other anti-Rump force in the field, Booth headed to Manchester, pursued by a small Parliamentary force under the command of John Lambert. On 18th August the two armies clashed at Hartford Beech in Cheshire. The experienced Parliamentary force soon had the better of what turned out to be a set of running skirmishes until the Royalists finally routed as they attempted to cross Winnington Bridge. Both Myddleton and, eventually, Booth, were captured and the defeated Royalist soldiery were allowed to return to their homes. So ended the last set piece battle of the English civil wars.

Any Parliamentary solidarity that may have been engendered by this brief renewal of fighting in England, did not last long. Lambert, newly emboldened, was determined this time to secure the supreme leadership role he had denied himself after Cromwell’s death out of loyalty to his former commander. His opportunity came when his regiments, based in Derby, issued a proclamation to the Rump, requiring the granting of all the Army’s demands concerning pay, indemnity, religious toleration, the maintenance of republican government and the purging of “delinquent” MPs opposed to the military. Included in the demands was Lambert’s own elevation to second-in-command of the Army under General Charles Fleetwood. Naturally the Rump could not agree to what became termed the “Derby Petition” and retaliated by ordering Fleetwood to arrest Lambert in early October and issued an ordnance overturning all legislation passed during the Protectorate and requiring its validation by the House of Commons. In addition, under the lead of Arthur Heselrige, the Rump passed a further ordnance that reserved all tax-raising powers to the House of Commons and set about establishing a committee to take the control of the Army, ordering the London regiments to rally to defend Parliament. In the event, and perhaps unsurprisingly, it was the Army that won this stand-off: Fleetwood refused to move against Lambert who called on the same London regiments to muster and protect the Commonwealth. This they did, leading to the dissolution of the Rump Parliament yet again by military coup, and the establishment of a Committee of Safety to run the country by the Army’s Council of Officers.

Fleetwood and Lambert were in charge, but they had no practical plan as to what to do next. Lambert favoured restoration of the Protectorate, with himself as Lord Protector, but there was little appetite for this, even within the Army. The Committee of Safety could keep order, but in the absence of Parliament or constitution, it could neither raise taxes nor legitimise its role. It was a stop-gap, and the supporters of the Parliamentary cause saw no alternative to elections to a new and representative lower House. What was new however, was that in their determination to oppose both military rule and, as they saw it, the barely controlled radicalism on the part of the common soldiers, these former enemies of Charles I began to see the restoration of the monarchy as the only way out of this impasse, much to the surprise and delight of the exiled Stuart Court.

Meanwhile, in Scotland, General George Monck observed events south of the border enigmatically. He possessed the only military force of sufficient size and experience capable of challenging Fleetwood and Lambert, but his intentions were far from clear. Although Monck had sent sympathetic messages to Heselrige, he made no move to support the Rump or prevent its dissolution. Charles’ emissaries had contacted him offering the general vast rewards if he would defect to the Royalist side, but Monck had rebuffed their advances. Equally, he had not declared support for Committee of Safety either. The former Royalist turned Cromwellian loyalist was however about the enter the fray of Commonwealth politics decisively.

On 20th October, Monck declared his hand. He stated that he supported Parliamentary government and demanded the Council of Officers recall Parliament, threatening to bring his army into England in order to enforce this if necessary. Lambert and Fleetwood did not react well to this interference from their brother officer and prepared to resist any such incursion from Scotland. Lambert headed north to Newcastle, to rally the New Model forces there, but found to his consternation that the northern army was filled with dissent, infuriated at lack of pay and promised pensions, and that the soldiers too had joined the calls for new elections. Lambert succeeded in calming some of the agitation and he and Monck faced each other warily across the Scottish border. The issue was forced in November when in the south and in Ireland, the troops rebelled and demanded the recall of Parliament. When the fleet revolted too, threatening to blockade the Thames until the House of Commons sat again, Lambert, with his forces of questionable loyalty, knew his game was up. This was confirmed when the aged Sir Thomas Fairfax emerged from retirement to call for the restoration of Parliamentary rule. The northern armies deserted to the much-loved former commander en masse, leaving Lambert with no army and no options.

In December, military rule effectively fell apart, driven as much by the Council of Officers’ inability to pay the men as by the simultaneous and insistent, calls for the restoration of Parliamentary rule. On 26th December, Fleetwood and Lambert were forced to recall the Rump whose first action was to place the Army under Parliamentary control. Lambert, trapped between Monck’s forces and Fairfax’s new volunteer army of deserters, could not prevent this. On New Year’s Day 1660, Monck’s army crossed the Tweed and proceeded south, meeting no resistance. In fact, the Rump had told Monck that with the collapse of the coup, they no longer needed his presence in London, but the general proceeded to the capital anyway. The restoration of the Rump was only the first step in the ever-mysterious Monck’s probable plan.

As for Lambert, he submitted to the authority of the Rump and was immediately arrested and confined in the Tower of London. He would remain a prisoner for the rest of his days, finally dying, almost certainly suffering from dementia, in 1684. It was a sad end to one of the Commonwealth’s most capable politicians and soldiers. If, as he had wished, and others had urged, Cromwell had nominated Lambert as his successor and not his ineffective son, Lambert may have made a success both of the Protectorate and the English republic. Lambert in power would certainly have introduced a written constitution to England, with the formal checks and balances the British system of government lacks to this day. With Lambert leading the country in the late 1650s, the path to the Stuart restoration may have been blocked forever.

Once he reached London, Monck’s alliance of convenience with the Rump swiftly came to an end. It became clear that Heselrige and his allies were intent on calling highly restrictive elections that would ensure that only MPs who supported the Rump’s quasi-republican agenda would be able to serve. When in February, the Rump fell into dispute with the City of London council over proposed tax increases, and ordered Monck to suppress the Council, the general refused. Instead he gave the Rump seven days to dissolve itself and arrange full, unrestricted national elections. Given the impossibility of this deadline, a compromise was reached through an agreement to the restitution of the previous Parliament - the so-called Long Parliament - originally summoned by Charles I in November 1640, and forcibly dissolved in Pride’s Purge. The purged MPs returned to Westminster in triumph, escorted by Monck’s soldiers. The Long Parliament’s sole items of business were to confirm Monck as commander-in-chief of the Army, and to agree a date for its own dissolution and the calling of new elections. This it did on 16th March 1660.

Charles Restored to his Throne

Source: The BBC

SO CLOSE to being able to resume his throne, Charles II displayed a subtlety and flexibility that had always eluded his father, in order to achieve his ultimate goal. In consultation with Monck, the exiled King and his courtiers, principally Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, drew up the Declaration of Breda, a conciliatory document, issued on 4th April 1660, representing Charles’ commitments to the English people, recognising the altered political reality of his soon to be reclaimed Kingdom. The Declaration promised an amnesty for all who had fought against the Stuarts, with the exception of those who had signed Charles I’s death warrant (the so-called “regicides”) and high-ranking republicans. The sale of Royalist estates would remain in situ; the Army’s pay arrears would be made good, and religious toleration extended to all but Roman Catholics. Crucially, regular Parliaments were promised, along with Parliamentary control of the Army. It was a masterful document, designed to placate majority moderate Parliamentary opinion, and by implication, promising no return to Royal absolutism. In this context, Parliamentary elections were held and resulted in a Parliament absolutely committed to the restoration of the King and the terms of the Declaration of Breda. This Parliament, officially called the “Convention Parliament”, given the absence of a constitution to sanction it, unsurprisingly became popularly known as the “Cavalier Parliament”. It did not take long for the new Parliament to take on the appearance of a government of the victors, for all Charles’ bridge-building.

There was one last attempt to resuscitate the Good Old Cause. John Lambert escaped from the Tower and sought to raise a republican army to oppose the Restoration, choosing his rallying spot, perhaps symbolically, as Edgehill, the site of the first battle of England’s civil wars. Some four troops of cavalry joined Lambert, but the Army, firmly under Monck’s control and seduced by Charles’ promises of pensions and back pay, at last turned its back on its former commander. Lambert’s force was soon outnumbered and overpowered by a New Model detachment under the command of one of the regicides, Colonel Ingoldsby, who took his former colleague into custody. Ingoldsby would go on to become a significant figure at Charles’ court, unlike Lambert, for whom a lifetime of imprisonment awaited. On 1st May 1660, the Declaration of Breda was read to both Houses with the understanding that it would form the basis of the restoration of the English monarchy.

The way was prepared. Nothing now stood in the path of Charles’ triumphal return to England. Following a formal and personal invitation to return home by Monck and Sir Thomas Fairfax, Charles set sail from The Hague and landed at Dover on 25th May and from there processed through Kent to the capital, greeted all along his route by cheering and ecstatic crowds. His reception in London, once the centre of Parliamentary revolt against his father, was little short of delirious, characterised by bonfires, tolling bells, tapestries hung from windows and fountains allegedly running with wine. He was escorted by 20,000 soldiers, most derived from New Model regiments - perhaps the greatest irony of what became known as “The Restoration”. On 29th May, Charles received loyal addresses from the Speaker of the House of Commons and the former Parliamentary commander, the Earl of Manchester, representing the Other House. Charles was then proclaimed King.

Although the Restoration is generally viewed as being bloodless and a typically English counter-revolution, there was in fact a considerable amount of reckoning. Despite the narrative being set that the Parliamentarians won the civil wars and that the restored monarchy was a shadow of Charles I’s Personal Rule, this is only partially true. Charles II did ensure Parliament passed an Act of Oblivion and Indemnity, which pardoned all who had fought with the Commonwealth’s armed forces, but many of the stalwarts of the Commonwealth were exempted from the Act. In addition to John Lambert’s life imprisonment, several army officers were executed, the most notable being the New Model general and Fifth Monarchist, Thomas Harrison, who was hung, drawn and quartered, meeting his grisly fate with the cheery confidence of someone who knew he would return at God’s right hand to wreak vengeance on his oppressors. Most of the regicides that the new regime could get its hands on were executed, but some survived or were rehabilitated by the new government. General Charles Fleetwood, head of the Army under the post-Cromwell Protectorate, for instance, despite being sentenced to death, managed to successfully claim he had been coerced into signing Charles I’s death warrant, although the fact Monck vouched for him was probably significant. Most of the Major-Generals managed to escape abroad, usually to Europe, while Edward Whalley fled to North America, where he sought refuge amongst the Puritan communities there. John Desborough actually plotted republican revolt from Europe. Extradited, he managed to avoid trial and ultimately retired to Hackney.

Thomas Fairfax, a known opponent to the trial of Charles I and a crucial figure in securing the success of Monck’s overthrow of the Commonwealth, received a royal pardon, and resumed his peaceful retirement, living until 1679, his reputation intact. Arthur Heselrige, fierce republican but scourge of the Protectorate, was perhaps an ambiguous figure to the Royalist regime. He was not arraigned for treason, but he was imprisoned in the Tower. Any ongoing debate as to what to do with the veteran Parliamentarian was resolved by his death within the year. Richard Cromwell, continued his somewhat charmed existence. After his deposition by the Army, Richard lived in exile in France, and was eventually permitted to return to England, dying in 1680. Richard’s brother Henry, often viewed as potentially a more effective successor to their father as Lord Protector, was left unmolested, and became part of the Anglo-Irish landowning class until his death in 1674. In acts of performative “justice”, the deceased regicides, Oliver Cromwell, Henry Ireton, Thomas Pride and John Bradshaw, had their corpses exhumed, were posthumously beheaded, and their bodies publicly displayed as traitors.

Title: The Kingdom

Author: Emmanuel Carrère, trans. by John Lambert

Genre/s: literary fiction, historical

Content/Trigger Warning/s: misogyny, racism, Islamophobia, antisemitism, fatphobia, ableism

Summary (from the publisher's website): A sweeping fictional account of the early Christians, whose unlikely beliefs conquered the world

Gripped by the tale of a Messiah whose blood we drink and body we eat, the genre-defying author Emmanuel Carrère revisits the story of the early Church in his latest work. With an idiosyncratic and at times iconoclastic take on the charms and foibles of the Church fathers, Carrère ferries readers through his “doors” into the biblical narrative. Once inside, he follows the ragtag group of early Christians through the tumultuous days of the faith’s founding.

Shouldering biblical scholarship like a camcorder, Carrère re-creates the climate of the New Testament with the acumen of a seasoned storyteller, intertwining his own account of reckoning with the central tenets of the faith with the lives of the first Christians. Carrère puts himself in the shoes of Saint Paul and above all Saint Luke, charting Luke’s encounter with the marginal Jewish sect that eventually became Christianity, and retracing his investigation of its founder, an obscure religious freak who died under notorious circumstances.

Boldly blending scholarship with speculation, memoir with journalistic muckraking, Carrère sets out on a headlong chase through the latter part of the Bible, drawing out protagonists who believed they were caught up in the most important events of their time. An expansive and clever meditation on belief, The Kingdom chronicles the advent of a religion, and the ongoing quest to find a place within it.

Buy Here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-kingdom-emmanuel-carrere/1408878

Spoiler-Free Review: Okay. OKAY. This was an interesting ride. And I honestly don’t know any other term to describe it except that.

First things first: the author is VERY egotistical. Like, his ego is large as a planet and it permeates EVERY SINGLE THING in this book. The ENTIRE FIRST FOURTH of the book is just him explaining (though some might argue he’s actually just whining) about how he fell into a deep Catholic fervor for around two years before he drifted out of it after a while.

But, once one gets past this part (or even while reading it), one will also have to deal with the author’s many prejudices, including: misogyny, racism, Islamophobia, antisemitism, fatphobia, ableism, and imperialism. These, on top of the author’s aforementioned ego, will DEFINITELY grind on a reader who tries to get into this based solely on the premise that the book’s blurbs present: that this is a book about the history of the early Church.

If the above two points don’t make a reader drop the book, then this third one probably will: the author’s utter disregard scholarly responsibility. Oh sure, at first it seems like he cares about it, but it quickly becomes clear that he doesn’t really give a damn. He constantly throws out pronouncements that will read like he’s stating fact, when he really, really isn’t. He also has a tendency to pick and choose which version of an idea or theory he prefers, and THEN puts that forward as fact, just because he likes the way it comes together in his head, or supports some prejudice he has, or some other, silly reason that will definitely raise the blood pressure of any scholars who read this book, no matter which subject they study.

There is a moment in the book where, after he claims to have read all the important texts related to early Church history, he says that, like a chef who’s read many cookbooks, he is now ready to do away with the experts and write what he wants. Which, if the reader approaches this book as a nonfiction piece of work - and it certainly feels like it at the beginning - will be utterly rage-inducing because who the hell claims to have read EVERYTHING in terms of scholarly documentation? This is especially true when it comes to a subject like history, which is constantly changing and being updated as discoveries are made and previous evidence is adjusted and altered.

Which brings me to the question of narrative style. This book reads A LOT like nonfiction: like an autobiography at first, and then nonfictional history of the early Church. But there’s a reason why this book is categorized as "fiction": precisely because of the author’s aforementioned tendencies to play VERY fast and loose with facts, both about himself and the story he’s trying to tell about Church history. For a while I contemplated calling the narrative slightly Borgesian, because Borges does a similar thing with his writing where he blurs the edges of the fictional and the nonfictional, but I quickly withdrew that notion. The comparison would be an insult to Borges’ work, not least because his technique is far more subtle than what’s going on here.

Honestly I think the best way to actually get through this book is to think of it as absolutely fictional instead of nonfictional. As in: do not even consider the facts to be facts, just presume they’re all made up. When I started viewing the book that way it became a bit more tolerable because then I could consider the author/narrator as a fictional entity, instead of a real life person who is also an absolute shithead. This also has the benefit of making all the scholarship-related bullshit a bit more tolerable too, because then one can approach the material in the same way one would a historical novel: with some grace to allow for artistic license.

But despite ALL OF THAT, there is something very compelling about this book, and it has to do with reading how the author grapples with his Catholic faith. It’s fascinating to read how the author goes from falling in, then out, of love with Catholicism, and how he basically uses this entire book to wrestle with how he feels about it, struggling to come to a conclusion about how to answer the question: “Do you believe in God?”

Overall, this is definitely a read that will require immense patience, and many readers will give up within one-fourth of the book, maybe even after the first five chapters. But for readers who decide to be stubborn mules about it and hang in there (if for no other reason than they don’t want to be beaten by this asshole of an author), they might find a read that’s complicated and also interesting. There is PLENTY to dislike about this book, very many reasons to put it down before I actually finished it, but as I said, it’s immensely compelling. I attribute that a little bit to the writing style itself (which is a credit to both the author and - especially - to the translator), but I think the main reason I stuck around to the end is because I’m a lapsed Catholic myself and related, in some small way, to what the author was going through when he was struggling with his faith. The final line is the answer to his main question of “Do you believe in God?”, and I have to say: it’s an answer I agree with.