Cromwell and coffee houses give author a buzz for 1650s London

The Seeker, featuring a Captain of the Guard and officer in the intelligence network of the Cromwellian Protectorate, is the first in a series set in the 1650s London of Oliver Cromwell.

After the Alexander Seaton series set in seventeenth-century Scotland and Ulster, almost every aspect of writing The Seeker was a new departure for me. The Seaton books were born out of my academic research and a profound rootedness in place. Although a native Highlander, I spent over 20 years of my adult life in and around the city of Aberdeen, and my husband is from Co Antrim: a fascination with those places and their history created Alexander Seaton.

The problem for me arose when I returned to the Highlands and discovered that Alexander Seaton would not come with me. My imagination’s response to being back home was to the here and now, a landscape that my teenaged self had been blind to, and social and cultural issues that my childhood subconscious assimilated while the conscious me got on with the business of being a child. There was no place in this imaginative landscape for Alexander Seaton.

My editor suggested I consider setting a book in London. Reluctantly – London was nothing to me – I tried, but soon discovered though that if Alexander Seaton didn’t much fancy moving to the Highlands, there was no way in the world he was going to London. Any ideas in that direction died on my notepad before they got anywhere near the computer screen. Then, BBC 4 aired London, a Tale of Two Cities, a documentary on the seventeenth-century city presented by Dan Cruickshank. Cruickshank’s enthusiasm was engaging, and when he came to the phenomenon of the London coffee house in the 1650s, I was hooked. In these new, amazingly egalitarian institutions, men from all walks of life met, attracted not only by the addictive brew, but the opportunity to talk. Here, fuelled by the rise of a print culture catering for and stoking an astonishing hunger for current affairs, they could endlessly discuss all the issues of the day.

An unmistakeable buzz told me here was my story, this my setting. The coffee house offered the perfect opportunity for a diverse range of characters to meet, interact, befriend or deceive each other in a city that had a character of its own.

The main drawback of this plan was not that it was set in London, but that it was set in London in the 1650s, a little over 10 years before the city I wanted to write about would burn to the ground. Also, by the 1650s the English Civil War was over; the Restoration of the monarchy still to come, and we were firmly in the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell.

I have a PhD in seventeenth-century Scottish history, but didn’t know a great deal about the English civil war as a purely English concept, nor indeed about Oliver Cromwell. The English civil war was only one aspect of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, and at Aberdeen in the late 1990s, we took a self-consciously non Anglo-centric approach. In short, buzzing though I was with the idea for my story, I had a great deal of reading to do.

Two and a half years later, I know, and hope I understand, a lot more about the English civil wars, the ideals of those who fought in them and the ideas born of them. I have come to see that there was something much more visceral, more fundamental to human concerns than the glossy costume drama of Cavalier and Roundhead.

And what of Cromwell? You cannot read about the English civil war without reading about Cromwell. You cannot write about it either. He may have been a genius in the field, but in my reading Cromwell the man emerges as a hypocrite, a bully, a leader who condoned absolute savagery, perhaps a megalomaniac. Antonia Fraser’s 900-page panegyric utterly failed to convince me otherwise. But there is a truth to be glimpsed behind Fraser’s adulation: a yeoman from the fens couldn’t have risen to virtually occupy the throne of England had he not had the mesmeric personality so often seen in men of obscure origins who come to almost complete power. The fact of his person and the force of his personality held together a regime which began to crumble and disintegrate on his death. How does a writer of fiction deal with such a man?

My book is not about Cromwell, but his world. He is a constant presence, but only an intermittent character in its pages. I have always tried not to pass judgement, not to take a moral stance, not to make my characters mouthpieces for my own views. In The Seeker, though, I have found this impossible to do: subsidiary characters – a Royalist widow, a radical lawyer, a Scottish soldier – speak my thoughts for me. I would justify this by the fact that many at the time said the same things.

Damian Seeker, though, the book’s hero, is utterly loyal to Oliver Cromwell. Every time Cromwell strides on to the page I find I write him sympathetically, a no-nonsense man’s man who draws others to him through sheer force of personality. I cannot account for this, other than that I have created characters in the past who have appeared to walk on to the page, take charge of my pen and write themselves. In The Seeker, Cromwell writes himself.

But The Seeker isn’t about Cromwell, it’s about his London, or rather Damian Seeker’s London. Discovering that city through history books, hours spent poring over old maps, drawing my own, getting sore feet walking streets whose layout defied the Great Fire, has been a delight and revelation for me. In my head, after peeling away the past to get to know what lies underneath the city we know today, I won’t be able to say again, “London is nothing to me”.

The Seeker by SG MacLean was published in hardback by Quercus for £19.99 last week