[This 2022 novel is in four parts. I read one part at a time, then wrote about each one before reading on. Hunt. Spoiler alert: If you read this running commentary, you will find out everything that happens in the book as I read it.]
21 August 2025
Part 1, Hunt
So far, this seems to be the archetypal Robert Harris novel. Take a real historical event, research it, and create a fictional account of how it might have unfolded. If necessary, invent a character or two, then assemble it all into a readable chronology focusing on one or another of the main characters whose motives and inner lives you want to explore. Make it as interesting and, if possible, as exhilarating a ride as you can. Or, if that’s too tall an order, make sure your readers want to know what happens next. You want people to think they’ve learnt something while they’ve been entertained.
As always with Robert Harris, things seem as real as they ever do in historical novels, and he keeps a close eye on the 17th Century religious mindset. Unusually for him, he’s running parallel threads in Part 1, alternating between England immediately after the restoration of Charles II, and the Puritan communities around Boston, Massachusetts. Chapter 1 is where the story begins of two fugitives, Cromwell’s men, who arrive with a Massachusetts settler called Daniel Gookin who has been with them in England. They are to be given shelter by the his family, which is not at all welcome news to Mrs Gookin, who has been alone with their children for what must have been years.
Almost everybody in Cambridge, and all of Massachusetts, is still a loyal Republican. The men seem to be completely safe, but we know this is far from the case. The ‘Act of Oblivion’ of the novel’s title, recently signed into law, was supposed to draw a line under the events that led to the death of Charles 1, but has quickly mutated into an act of revenge. Later in the same year we read how the signatories on the king’s death warrant, many of whom presented themselves voluntarily to the new authorities, are given show trials, followed by a spree of the most barbaric executions imaginable.
In England, starting in Chapter 2, we are mainly with Richard Nayler. He’s an investigating official or, to be more accurate about it, the fictitious would-be nemesis of the two fugitives, Edward Whalley and William Goffe. Near the end of Part 1 his boss warns him that ‘obsession and good judgement seldom sit well together.’ But by this time it’s clear that Nayler really is obsessed with bringing these men to what he would think of as justice. No arguments will be brooked, as many hapless signatories have discovered, because the crime is crystal-clear. These men have killed an anointed king. But Harris has given Nayler another, somewhat far-fetched reason for hating them. They arrested him and had him imprisoned not only for celebrating Christmas but for arguing that this was their right as Christians. His wife, heavily pregnant, miscarried and died as a consequence. You couldn’t make it up.
In one way, the details of the seven months or so from the men’s landing in America to their fleeing for their lives into Connecticut are not massively important. Part 1 is all about setting up the story of Nayler’s pursuit, which it’s clear will begin in earnest in Part 2. Harris, as ever, has done his research, so we can believe that the houses in Cambridge, the little settlement across the river from Boston, would be like this, the relationship between Gooke and his wife would be like this, the details of everyday life would be… etc. All this is a given, and Harris offers us a believable account of how the community would welcome them, of how there would be invitations from the Governor in Boston (no doubt these are in the historical record) and of how, over the summer months, a sense of security would develop. Surely England would soon come to its senses and restore the Commonwealth?
As if. There are danger signs almost from the start when, during their first visit to Boston to take up an invitation, Goffe and Whalley are spotted by a Scots soldier and his cronies who recognise one of them from a particularly cruel battle. Everyone there, including the Governor, assumes that any threats are subject to Massachusetts law and punishable at the Governor’s discretion. Maybe so, but they don’t know how the fervour against all the ‘regicides’ is being whipped up in London by men like Nayler. As the year progresses—we’re in the early summer of 1660 now, the men having arrived in great secrecy in the spring—calls for the severest punishment grow louder. Some, including Nayler’s boss Edward Hyde, want it to be dealt with quickly and get on with governing the country. Perhaps, but Nayler isn’t alone in pressing for all the signatories to be hunted down, the usual process of law to be curtailed, and every one of them executed in the most grotesque manner imaginable.
While this hardening in Parliament’s attitudes is taking place, the chapters set in England are always focused on Nayler. He is the one, in his first chapter, who rides many miles with the wife of one signatory in order to find the original document among her husband’s papers. (If historians know how the document was really discovered, Harris isn’t going to be telling us. Instead, he gives us the rather implausible scene of the woman handing over what she must suspect will be her husband’s death warrant. For Harris, it’s a useful prop, and the details of how and when the signatures were really appended is an unimportant detail.) Once Nayler has the names, he can confirm who needs to be hunted down. Many have fled to Holland and France and, as summer turns to autumn, most are accounted for if not actually apprehended.
But however horrifying the week-long execution spree in early October, described in Horrible Histories detail, and however draconian the publicly-announced punishments for those harbouring fugitives, there’s still absolutely no sign of Whalley and Goffe. Nayler believes Goffe’s Puritan wife when she says the note they found in her possession had been written recently, and for a long time he is convinced that they had probably fled to the Continent, but must now have returned to England. But he now suspects the truth, and sets up a search through ships’ passenger lists since the early spring. Then—I can’t remember exactly how Harris brings it about—a Royalist sea-captain recently returned from Boston offers Nayler his services.
Harris needs a game-changer like this to persuade Nayler’s superiors. Captain Breedon gives them the fullest imaginable account of the fugitives’ lives in Massachusetts, and embellishes it by reporting on the contemptuous way they mock the current government and new king. Even the now long-suffering Hyde is impressed. He’s a government man, but has only reluctantly been going along with Parliament’s ever-harsher policies, and Nayler’s determination to carry them out to the letter. He can tell that with Nayler it’s personal, but if he wants to be the one to pursue the fugitives, he isn’t going to try and stop him. In fact, he’s probably happy to get him out of his hair, but he also wants him to be safe. This is when he warns him not to let his judgment be affected.
Meanwhile, in the American chapters, we’ve been getting to know Whalley and Goffe. To each other they are Ned, a capable administrator as well as soldier, approaching sixty, and Will, his son-in-law. He is Welsh, from an evangelical background, and thoughts of his young family in England make him more conscious of how careful they need to be. (We’ve seen Nayler pursuing his wife after realising she had lied. The new laws have rendered her destitute and homeless, but she has always been able to keep one step ahead of him. She had at first moved in with Whalley’s brother-in-law, but after his own house and assets are seized they keep moving from safe house to safe house.)
Through the summer months , Ned and Will almost begin to regard themselves as settled. News travels slowly across the Atlantic, of course, but by the autumn it’s clear that the new government in England isn’t going to forget them. The proclamation in Massachusetts of their fugitive status, and of the punishments to be applied to anyone who shelters them, makes their lives very precarious. As winter arrives they move into the Gookins’ barn, and the children are told they have fled in the night. But armed men arrive, and the fugitives have to open fire to repel them. The men’s hasty retreat means they were certainly members of an hastily assembled militia rather than the real army, but all the fugitives have done is bought some time. The governor might not be actively seeking them yet, but increased pressure from England and the threat of sanctions could change that quickly. What to do?
Flee to New Haven in Connecticut, that’s what. Daniel Gookin will show them the way—his wife has long ago stopped trying to get him to put the family first—but they will have to travel on foot and it’s over a hundred miles. They will be able to trade with the Indians—Whalley has a supply of wampum—but, luckily, the first heavy snowfall of winter is now turning to ice rather than slush. Ned does his best to persuade Will it’s nothing like as bad as the hardships they have shared in the past, but it isn’t going to be a stroll in the park.
And that’s where we are. The hunter is heading west by ship, the fugitives are heading further west on foot, and the newly anointed king is having a marvellous time with his new mistress and her friends. Even Nayler finds it hard to reconcile his monarch’s reprobate behaviour with his royal status., but he persuades himself he isn’t pursuing the regicides on the new king’s behalf but for upholding of his holy office. But of course… and we 21st Century sophisticates smile at the contortions people used to put themselves through for their supposed beliefs.
Part 2, Chase, 1661
For a long novel, this has a simple trajectory so far. It was typing that section title that brought this back to me—the titles are Hunt, Chase, Hide, Kill—even though I don’t yet know how this is going to pan out. Robert Harris has set himself quite a task to keep the reader interested when, in at least one of the sections (this second one, Chase), the story arc is so predictable. He picks it up from where Hunt ended, and as Naylor disembarks at Boston and will be on horseback as he follows the fugitives west, we know he’s bound to catch up with them. But we know he won’t catch them. Sure, Harris has to create a reason for him having to leave them without knowing how close he was—twenty feet, in a pitch-black cave, if you’re interested—but still, we know by now that he is almost preternaturally good at his job. Is he the most interesting character in the novel? Definitely, in some ways, and it’s worth thinking about the fact that he’s the only main character who is entirely invented.
Do the details matter? Does it matter if some or all of this is true? Harris continues to give us a plausible account of what it would be like for two fugitives in an America that is still, as Nayler helpfully puts it for us, ‘an empty ocean with an archipelago of tiny outposts of civilisation.’ It’s a good image, because it gets us to visualise how present-day conurbations were once tiny settlements. There must be a particular frisson for people who know these towns and cities well, being transported back in time to when they hardly even existed. Cambridge was a village, a horse-ride and a ferry-crossing from Boston.
And, of course, Nayler’s image highlights the perception that 17th Century Europeans had of an empty new world. If the indigenous peoples were considered at all, they were descendants of lost Tribes of Israel, useful for travellers but an irrelevance otherwise. They forfeit any rights because of their heathenish ways, and the ultra-Puritans the fugitives meet consider them lost until their conversion to the true faith. And yet… when Gookin begins the 100-odd mile hike to New Haven, the white men make no pretence of any superiority when it comes to survival skills. It goes far beyond skills, of course. The narrator makes it explicit that the trails Gookin takes them along are the result of centuries of the indigenous people not only making their way through a hostile country, but creating a way of interacting with it on equal terms. They know how to use this land, and the white men take what they need from them. They aren’t doing it by force yet, offering ‘wampum’, as Whalley has already learnt to call the cheap beads and trinkets he has brought. And both he and Goffe learn enough from them to survive alone when they have to. But that comes later.
When they reach New Haven via an overnight stay in a communal wigwam—yes, really—and a quick stopover in Guilford, they are welcomed like Old Testament prophets. It’s a bizarre place even by 17th Century standards, run not by the governor William Leete but by the demagogue John Davenport. He considers himself to be, literally, the new Moses. For him, the Book of Exodus is a foretelling of his chosen people’s own escape from a godless world. And, in his own version of Calvinism, he is the one who chooses the Chosen. He blissfully awaits 1666, only five years away, because that is when they will witness the Second Coming of Christ. He sees the fugitives’ arrival as a kind of advance party…. Goffe, an evangelical preacher before he was a soldier, is convinced. Whalley, older and far more pragmatic, goes along with it—but he doesn’t have Goffe’s unwavering faith, or the belief that their current situation is the direct will of God.
But political realities rudely trample on Davenport’s vision of a new Jerusalem. More specifically, Richard Nayler is the one doing the trampling, warrant in hand, supported by an armed posse he’s put together in Boston. Davenport is definitely not expecting this, but we are. As in Part 1, chapters that follow the fugitives alternate with those following Nayler, and we’ve seen his rapid progress. Harris has invested him with excellent organisational skills… and, more importantly, he has money behind him. He can offer good terms to military men with an axe to grind to become de facto mercenaries on the King’s behalf. Which, as we know, is really his own.
The governor gamely tries to stall them, but Davenport is completely overwhelmed. Perhaps Goffe and Whalley are false prophets—otherwise why would God have allowed Nayler to follow them so easily? The increasing urgency of warnings about the punishments to be inflicted on anybody helping them has already made him have his faithful lieutenant William Jones hide them in his own house a few weeks before. As they had left Davenport’s house, they had made very public farewells and set off as though towards New Amsterdam. Now, when Nayler arrives in the town, Jones bundles them out of their hiding-place to the farm of Richard Sperry, another trusted Republican. He leads them up into the rocky hills above New Haven, to a spot where the town is laid out below them. They see that the militia don’t bother to search the place—Nayler has guessed they won’t be in the town. He has also guessed that their departure west to New Amsterdam is a smokescreen. They will be hiding in the rocky hills.
He can get nothing either from Jones or Sperry who, he notices, is proud to leave his New Model Army coat in plain sight in his house. Naylor’s men become restless as he forces them to search all over the forest. He tells them he knows they are nearby, and makes his way into a cave near what must have been their camp. It’s a set-piece moment, as he forces himself to push himself ever deeper inside until, finally, his own demons get the better of him: ‘it seemed limitless. He could no longer feel the walls. […] He felt entirely disorientated, adrift in space. Suddenly he couldn’t breathe. I am dead and in my tomb, he thought. Oh Sarah, Sarah, I have gone mad, and this is where my madness has brought me. Arms flailing, he lurched in a panic towards where he imagined the wall must be….’ And, eventually, he finds the cave’s entrance. ‘Behind him, at the far end of the cave, their guns still cocked and pointed, the colonels stood motionless in the absolute dark.’
It’s a classic Robert Harris moment—that’s how close it was. But now we are back with Naylor, realising that his men have had enough. He has to give in to their insistence that the fugitives will be in New Amsterdam, on their way to join other regicides in Holland. All Nayler can do is follow them. If they are in Holland, which he strongly doubts, he will find them. If not, he will return to New England. Meanwhile, ‘I have raised such a hue and cry against you,’ he muses, ‘that if you are still here, I believe your lives will be quite wretched. You cannot hide for ever. I shall have you one day.’ And, Harris lets us know without missing a beat, ‘Nayler was correct. From the time of their near encounter in the cave, the colonels’ lives had indeed become quite wretched, almost as if a curse had been put upon them.’
What on earth can they do now? Nayler is right about the climate of fear his failed mission has brought about, and we’ve already seen Davenport’s palpable fear. Sperry’s son, who brings them a little food, takes them even higher into the rocky hills. They make a kind of settlement, relying on a technique they had seen the Indians using to catch fish. They had overwintered in Davenport, and spring turns to summer. As he watches Will trying to catch fish with a home-made spear, Ned muses. ‘Dear God, we are Christian gentlemen no longer. We have turned into savages, save we lack their bodily grace and competence.’ But their faith is still strong. Ned sees it as God’s will, a trial for them to overcome. But Will, scrutinising his bible, realises that they are re-living Christ’s forty days in the wilderness. And, having kept count of the days, he tells Ned it is now coming to its end. They must go back down to New Haven.
Ned knows this is nonsense, but Will is not to be stopped. And, as Ned expected, the citizens are appalled when they gatecrash the Sunday assembly. Davenport, uncharacteristically speechless, comes down from the pulpit ‘making shooing movements with his hands, as if they were a pair of wild animals.’ It’s Jones, just as fearful now, who tells them how everybody in the town have had to lie continually to cover for them, and can’t help a bit of shooing himself. But, before they both return to their camp, Ned does manage to persuade him they will not survive beyond the summer. 56 days later, in August, they are taken to Milford, on the coast. Specifically, they are taken to the cellar of one Micah Tomkins, the local store-owner. ‘Above their heads, the trapdoor dropped.’
Part 3, Hide
Who would want to be a historical novelist? If, like Robert Harris, you’re one of those who hangs his story on historical figures, you sometimes land yourself with a longueur like this one. The chapter title holds a clue—hiding is the only option for the fugitives, for year after year. It isn’t all in the same place, but there’s a limit to how much (metaphorical) mileage an author can get from a couple of changes in location. They endure maybe two years in Micah Tomkins’ cellar before, by chance, they witness something that will force them away. They shouldn’t have been going for that night-time swim in the Sound when one of them happens to sweep the horizon with Ned’s telescope. An English warship! Two! Three…. They realise hundreds of soldiers won’t be there only to find two regicides, but Tomkins never wanted the colonels there to begin with, and now they will have to move on.
But I need to rewind. in Harris’s version of history, the ships wouldn’t have been there had it not been for Nayler. As the colonels slowly get used to days underground becoming weeks, then months, Nayler has turned his attention to Holland. He’s sure Goffe and Whalley never sailed from New Amsterdam, but he has other names on his regicide chart. Making use of a former Cromwellian’s duplicity—he’s changed sides and now has a responsible position in Amsterdam—Nayler lays a trap. It works like clockwork, as three men are lured to an address Nayler is having watched, and he has them. Everything about the plot is revolting, but Nayler is resolute. True, he recognises courage and honesty when he sees it, and allows the men a little time in the fresh air as they sail to England, but the impending horror is inexorable.
Nayler will get his executions, but Hyde, his superior, warns him times are changing. He’s right. The executions are still attended by thousands of spectators, but the butchery seems to have lost some of its appeal. Some people leave before the final dismemberment of the bodies, there isn’t so much relish for the spectacle. Afterwards, Hyde tells Nayler that’s enough, there will be no more public executions. He hints that any further deaths will have to be assassinations, and Nayler can hardly believe it. But he plans one anyway, of a man who wasn’t convinced by the invitation that trapped the three others. It’s successful… but feels like what it is, a mercenary, squalid affair.
Meanwhile, Harris is continuing his parallel narrative in a London that’s a different world. Frances Goffe and her children are still with her uncle, William Hooke. We see him close the door on her as he speaks to four men over from Connecticut, including John Winthrop the governor. The meeting ends in disappointment: Hooke can’t help Winthrop persuade the others to defy English law in order to shield the fugitives. And Winthrop can’t help Frances, when she pleads for information about her husband. He promises to let her know if he ever sees him and Whalley again, but Harris lets us know he deeply hopes he never will.
It’s Hooke’s main purpose in life to collect and disseminate news from the Puritan faithful, and to send money he raises to America. He has just finished writing a long covering letter to go with a banker’s draft for twenty pounds. Cue cloak-and-dagger scene of Frances’s nocturnal visit to Samuel Wilson, the man who is going to take the letter, and a note she’s added secretly. She is followed back—was the man’s house being watched?—but she’s become good at evading pursuers and gets home safely. Phew. But Wilson isn’t so lucky. On board ship, his bags are thoroughly searched and everything is discovered. Nayler has all he needs to convince Hyde that the colonels are still at large. But so? There will be no money for another expedition, so how can Nayler continue his pursuit now?
Answer: use his initiative, and a big shove from a helpful author. It’s in the historical record that Rupert, the Duke of York and the King’s brother, is the man who seized New Amsterdam from the Dutch. Harris has Nayler give him the idea, having discovered on his own expedition how poorly defended the town is. The quid pro quo is that the duke promises to have his men search for the colonels while he’s over there… which is why those ships come sailing along the Sound that fateful night.
Parallel narratives. In their cellar for 23 hours a day, what can the colonels do? Will can smoke meat for Tomkins, who runs the food and supply store. It was one of the trades he learned before the war, but Whalley is getting too old to do anything helpful. He starts to write a memoir, in the form of a letter to Frances… and not only has Harris created a way to help his readers through the yawning emptiness of these long months that start to turn into years. It becomes, for me, the most interesting thing in the novel. Now, when nothing else is happening, we get Whalley remembering childhood games with the young Oliver Cromwell, who grows into a dissolute young man. Mysteriously, he one day returns from an absence to announce his discovery of Christ, and the mission that God has chosen for him.
For readers like me, who only have a shadowy understanding of the Civil War, it’s an eye-opener. Through Whalley, Harris can present an insider’s view of it from its beginning to the restoration of the monarchy. Was he as much of an insider as Harris presents him? It doesn’t matter, because we’re seeing important policy being decided, and a cavalryman’s-eye-view of some key battles. And there are some key take-aways. Cromwell was utterly sincere, believing his role was to fulfil God’s plan to rid England of a tyrant. He was also decisive as a war commander, although the victory over the Royalists, in two phases, left a vacuum neither he nor anyone else knew how to fill. What on earth might a new republic look like?
Charles’s execution became inevitable after he showed, through his actions—escapes, his forging of an alliance with Scottish royalists and their armies, his rallying of aristocratic support in Ireland—that he would never willingly make peace. Not only had he prolonged the war into a second phase through what Parliament judged to be his perfidy… the army, boosted by another round of victories, wanted a true republic. Parliament tried to resist any talk of execution, and it seems that Cromwell felt he had no choice but to publicly remove dissident MPs when they tried to prevent a trial.
Was it exactly what Cromwell and his advisers always wanted? Almost certainly not. Did Charles get a fair trial? He didn’t get a trial at all, or not one that carried any basis in English law. And this ambivalence led to what has always been a running theme in the novel, the reluctance of many of the signatories. Some, it is agreed even by professional historians, were almost forced to sign—but the resulting document is all that Naylor is interested in. There’s no room for nuance in his attitude—if a man signed, he is the killer of an anointed king.
After the sighting of Prince Rupert’s warships, the colonels go into hiding again—in the same spot as before, in and around the cave far above New Haven. They find their old tools and other useful things, and Harris can’t resist a near-repetition of the adventure-yarn moment of jeopardy. Seeing English soldiers approaching New Haven, fresh from their seizure of what is soon to become New York in the duke’s honour, the colonels do their best to hide the signs of their encampment. Soldiers literally pass underneath them as they hide in a tree, but leave empty-handed. Phew. But Whalley and Goffe’s survival through the winter out in the open would be impossible, and the New Haven men come up with a solution. We’re reminded of that archipelago metaphor as they make their way to the ultra-Puritan settlement of Hadley, far from any possible danger but feeling like the edge of the world.
Their host is John Russell, in his mid-forties, but as hard-line in his interpretation of the Bible as the much older Davenport in New Haven. Will, always evangelically-minded, soon becomes immersed in Russell’s world. He is now fully persuaded of the truth of the biblical prophecy that the Second Coming would take place in 1666—not far off now… but this isn’t part of Ned Whalley’s mindset at all. He’s a faithful protestant, but Harris has let us understand his far less austere attitude to Puritan life as he remembers. For him, the high point was living in some luxury in a former courtier’s house in Whitehall, with his wife and growing family. Harris has one of the vanishingly rare letters from Frances include the news of his wife’s death. She had never properly recovered from giving birth to their last child some years before…. There seems nothing left for either of them, beyond a sense of emptiness as they contemplate life of total exile, far away from everything they know.
Meanwhile, Harris has been punctuating this narrative with the unfolding of events in London during these years. The plague of 1665, and the Fire of London the following year offer plenty of opportunities for harrowing descriptions of the characters’ near-permanent sense of almost existential threat. We see Nayler, now promoted to the post of Secretary to Hyde, now Lord Castlemaine and the Lord Chancellor, doing his best to deal with the crisis as his bloated boss’s star wanes. But it’s Frances Goffe whose point of view Harris focuses on, and it becomes like one of the Time Traveller’s Guide histories by Ian Mortimer. Except we see it all from a very particular mindset, Frances’s simple, unwavering faith in the will of God is no match for her uncle’s almost blind fanaticism. William Hooke seems almost joyful at the prophecies of Revelations become, in his eyes, undeniable realities.
Back in Massachusetts, there’s nothing for Ned except his memories of better times. Harris him and Will, who have been so close for so long, gradually run out of anything that feels like a common purpose. Will is suspicious of the memoir, so bulky that Whalley had to leave his bible behind to make room when they could only take away what they could carry from New Haven. It’s a neat, novelistic detail—all fictitious, of course—and Harris needs another to bring matters to a crisis. It comes in the form of a mysterious stranger, who turns out to be John Dixwell, the only other regicide in America. He had made his circuitous way there after years in the Netherlands—he had been the one to suspect the truth of Nayler’s ambush—and now he seems almost ravaged by his experiences. But his strong Puritan views immediately chime with Will’s, whilst Ned has never shared their unquestioning faith in God’s plan. Soon, Will hardly spends any time at all with him, speaking almost exclusively to Dixwell.
Their comfortable talk of the new Jerusalem just around the corner finally exasperates Ned as the end of 1666 approaches, with no sign of it. Instead, they had received news of the Plague the previous year, and now comes detailed news of the Great Fire. ‘Why are Charles Stuart and his wicked court in Whitehall spared, … while the righteous within and without the city are visited by disaster? Is this the deliverance for which we have waited?’ Dixwell’s bland reply—‘Their turn will come’—is too much for Ned. ‘But when? And in the meantime, what are we to do except pray our families are safe?’ Dixwell is unrelenting, demanding whether he is questioning God’s plan. ‘Perhaps I am, for I confess it makes no sense to me.’
This is when the rift occurs between Will and Ned, one that hasn’t been healed by the end of Part 3. It’s all a fiction, of course, a way to make the men’s virtual imprisonment feel vividly engaging. In reality, little has come down to us of their fates beyond their time in Hadley… except for the stroke that incapacitates Whalley. Harris dramatises it at the end of Part 3. Ned experiences a vivid hallucination of Oliver Cromwell, who, eventually, curtly orders him to ‘get up, you milksop.’ Will has heard shouting but now, listening outside Ned’s door, he can only make out uncoherent mutterings. ‘He tried to decide whether he should go in. Relations between them had been so bad for so long, he was fearful of the harsh words he might receive. He did not wish to make matters worse…’ and he goes back to his own room. Oh dear. Ned, desperate to speak to Oliver again, tries to stand. ‘His head ached so much he was almost blind. He took a few tottering steps through the fog towards the door, and stood swaying for a moment before he crashed full-length.’ End of Part 3.
Harris’s genuine attempt to portray attitudes and mindsets might be my main takeaway from this section of the novel. I don’t mean Nayler’s near-monomania, an obsession that has more to do with avenging his wife’s death than with any deep-seated belief in the unforgivable sin of regicide. Harris is explicit about this, just as he often is about other characters’ faith in the ‘will of God’. It’s a comfort, of course, an article of faith, but we see how sometimes the idea is used as a conversation-stopper. We see this in Will, and we see it in Hooke, ranting so loudly as he seems to welcome the distant conflagration, that the other people taking refuge south of the river tell him to shut up. But we also get Ned Whalley, having forced himself to remember every detail of his time overseeing the house-arrest of Charles. As he thinks back to the execution, he realises that Charles’s faith in the rightness of his cause is as complete as that of any Protestant.
Harris is clearly fascinated by the nature of belief. The Catholic narrator’s doubts and self-questioning in Conclave was, for me, one of the best things in the novel.
Part 4, Kill
This is Harris almost exclusively in novelist mode. A historian would feel forced to end it here, or shortly after, with a short paragraph which in fact appears in the Acknowledgments section. After confirming that Edward Whalley eventually died of his stroke, probably in 1674, he gives us this: ‘The eventual fate of William Goffe is unknown. Following the attack on Hadley in 1675, and his removal to Hartford, he was still desperately trying to make contact with his wife in April 1679, and a letter was written to him by Peter Tilton from Hadley in July of that year. Thereafter, all trace of him vanishes.’ That ‘attack on Hadley’ seems to have a basis in truth, and Harris gleefully dramatises it in Part 4. Otherwise, as we’ve just read, nothing is known.
So what’s a novelist to do? First, he has Will nursing Ned as selflessly as you would imagine such a good Christian to do. After a few pages of this, having never recovered any visible mental or physical capacity and seeming close to death for years, Ned finally dies. Along with the only three other men who know about him and Ned, Will buries him and… his sense of emptiness is almost crippling. But there’s to be a final moment of derring-do which, after he has had to reveal himself, forces him to leave Hadley for good. Relations between the Europeans and the indigenous population have hit a crisis. The Indians are being forced out of places where they have made seasonal encampments for generations, and resistance has begun. Harris makes sure we get it that the white men’s attitude to the natives is descending into unthinking prejudice. Retribution is carried out on the tribe with which Will had been trading tools for valuable pelts. He is disgusted when his protest that they had nothing to do with an attack is met with the reply, ‘Probably not. However, they are Indians. That is sufficient.’
Will’s chance to be a hero one last time, based on a possibly true event, is when a large proportion of the colony is on alert. There are English soldiers patrolling, and Indian attacks that are brutally avenged. Will, who has been hiding in the under-floor cell at Russell’s house notices he can no longer hear the noise of billeted soldiers from upstairs and, eventually, climbs out and scans the horizon. He sees a force of men approaching—and realises it’s Indians. What are the chances? But it’s a lucky one—he’s the only man in the place who has any of the knowledge needed to repulse an attack. It’s Sunday, and everyone is in the meeting-house. Fully armed and looking outlandish, he crashes into the prayer meeting… and leads the townsmen in a defensive strategy that leaves all of them alive, and over a dozen Indians dead. The townspeople wonder who this ‘Angel of Hadley’ can be, but nobody’s saying—and he will have to leave. Luckily… oh, never mind. In a day or two, having paid Russell well for all his help, he’s in a new safe house in Hartford. And that’s enough of him…
…because Harris needs to liven things up with a bit of pretty full-on cloak-and-dagger fiction. And whereas the colonels had always been presented in as fully-rounded a way as Harris can manage, Naylor is now re-booted as an obsessive villain. He’s living in Paris, some years after Will has saved Hadley, and happens to pick up an old newspaper from England containing the story. He immediately knows the ‘Angel’ must have been Goffe, settles his affairs (and affair) in Paris, and travels to London. With help from his old secretary, he not only finds Frances Goffe’s address but is able to have a professional forger create such a convincing letter from Will that’s she is completely taken in by it. Luckily, she has no duties remaining in England. Her children are happily settled and her uncle is dead, so she can get a place on the next passenger ship to Boston. Nayler is following her, and now sets up the next part of his fiendish plan.
It’s all preposterous, and I regretted that Harris decided to give her and Will, after all their suffering and heartache, the happiest of happy endings. Nayler is on board ship with Frances, posing as a Puritan returning to America after a previous visit. Slowly, he inveigles his way into Frances’s trust, but—jeopardy alert!—a real Puritan she has been talking to is suspicious. He tests Nayler and discovers he’s a fraud, knowing nothing of Hadley—a place mentioned by Frances, which he pretends to know—and the game’s up. Luckily for Nayler, but unluckily for the man, they are alone on deck. Nayler is able to plunge a knife deep into him and heave him over the side. But this is a real action movie now, and, in order to divert suspicion, Nayler jumps in after him. They mustn’t find the body with its deep would, so he makes sure (how?) that it sinks to the bottom. Nayler is the hero, and now has all of Frances’s trust.
Are we nearly there yet? Yes. They arrive in Boston, Nayler is gallant—he’s starting to wonder if a woman like her would have a man like him once Goffe is out of the way—and he takes her to Gookin’s house in Cambridge. Where she finds out Will is now in Hartford. Where Nayler offers to take her, and to the address Gookin must have mentioned. (I forget. It doesn’t matter anyway.) Cue astonished meeting, after she has watched Nayler ride on his way. Except he hasn’t ridden away at all, of course. But luckily, Will has never lost any of his now ingrained vigilance. He loads both his pistol and Ned’s, and gives one to Frances as he goes scouting the space in front of the house. Cue… guess.
He hears Nayler’s voice behind him, and he has to throw down his pistol. He forces Will to kneel so he can shoot him in the back of the head. Then—how does it go? ‘He knelt. Oh Frances, Frances… / He heard the explosion and fell forwards. / What a moment of triumph for Nayler….’ Except, you remember that pistol Will gave to Frances? Of course you do. Will had only fallen forwards because of the weight of Nayler’s body falling on him from behind. And that’s it. They can have a proper moment of amazed reunion, then they must get down to business. Luckily, it’s Sunday, so nobody is there to catch them hiding the body in a ditch. Then they load everything they will need on to a buggy he has the money to pay for.
‘He had no idea where they would go, or what they would do, or what dangers lay ahead. But with their love, and their Bible, with their absolute certainty in the power of the Lord and the protection of their guns, and with the plentiful vastness of America spread out before them like God’s table – see Corinthians, 10:21 – he had faith that they would make a future.’
The end. ‘He had no idea where they would go’? Neither does Robert Harris, and neither do we. And by now, following such a series of improbable events—and a nemesis turned accidental guide—we know better than to ask.
We can read it for you wholesale 