[This 2022 novel is in four parts. I am reading one part at a time, then I write about each one before reading on. So far I have finished Part 1, 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.’
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