Hello Miranda. The Rebel Daughter was your second novel about the Cromwell family. You’re also a Trustee of the Cromwell Association. When did your interest in the Cromwells and the Civil War begin and what sparked it?
The spark came when my mother took me to Oliver Cromwell’s House in Ely when I was a teenager. I had already encountered the Civil Wars through fiction and at junior school, but it was walking through the modest rooms of this house and realising that the ordinary family who lived here would later live in the palaces of Whitehall and Hampton Court as Britain’s ruling dynasty that blew my mind. Delving more deeply into the Civil Wars at university, I discovered the most extraordinary period in our history when people fought and argued for the first time not about who should rule, but how they should rule, changing Britain forever. The Commonwealth era that followed is the blip in our neat story of kings and queens and often unfairly overlooked, while Cromwell himself is caricatured or misunderstood. A desire to redress this inspires all my work.
The main character in the novel is Bridget Cromwell. Can you describe Bridget’s character and why you chose to focus on her over her siblings?
Bridget is Oliver Cromwell’s oldest daughter: responsible, serious-minded and godly. You’re probably thinking she doesn’t sound a very promising heroine for a novel! Yet I was drawn to her by the dramatic life she led. She grew up in humble surroundings but would go on to see her father become king in all but name. Bridget herself travelled on this remarkable journey with Oliver, marrying two of the key leaders of Parliament’s army, at times even living in the army camps. Her first husband, Henry Ireton, was the intellectual leader of the army’s politicisation and the driving force behind Pride’s Purge and the trial of King Charles I, placing Bridget herself at the heart of the revolution. And Bridget was no passive spectator to these events. She helped the army’s cause, dined with the King during peace negotiations, advised her husbands on their political decisions and was even a radical literary patron. She is therefore the perfect person through which to tell the exciting story of the Civil Wars themselves.
Was it a challenge to find sources and details about her during your research?
Yes – although I am a historian by background, I chose to write about Cromwell’s daughters in novels because of the limits of the historical record. Women are often marginalised in contemporary sources and so historians have to make imaginative leaps to fully reconstruct their lives. I felt that would be more forgivable (and more readable) in fiction. That said, we do know a lot about Bridget’s life. We have some of her family letters and she pops up in contemporary diaries, personal accounts and indeed in the press. These give a consistent view of her character, show her closeness to her family and suggest the nature of her radical politics and how these were shaped by her two marriages. It was both a thrill and a responsibility to use all of these sources to re-imagine her life.
What made you choose to write in first person and what do you find are the benefits?
This began unconsciously – it was simply how the opening scenes narrated themselves in my head when I started to write these novels. Nevertheless, I came to see that it was the right choice for these books. Seeing the events of the Civil Wars unfold through Bridget’s eyes creates an immediacy and intimacy for the reader. It also helps us to experience the bewildering years of war and political upheaval as contemporaries did, with no sense of what their outcome will be. Experiencing the story this way makes every choice count. The first-person perspective also imposed constraints on the shape of the book which challenged me to write a more original story. As we always have to be with Bridget, I couldn’t place the reader in the front line of the battlefield or into Parliament, but neither did I want to write a succession of scenes where women sat around receiving news from men. This forced me to be much more creative and imagine what was happening off-stage or round the edges of the big set-piece scenes that people already know and the book is much more exciting as a result.
In the book you show how there wasn’t one ‘English Civil War’ but three British Civil Wars. Can you explain the difference and why it matters?
This is a really important point for historians as labels tell us so much. The ‘English Civil War’ conjures a single parochial conflict of set-piece battles between two well-established armies, whereas the reality was more wide-ranging, brutal and scrappy characterised by sieges and skirmishes between shifting coalitions. There were in fact at least three separate wars and these stretched beyond England to Ireland and Scotland, even spilling onto continental Europe, the high seas and the New World. I tend to call these the ‘British Civil Wars’ but the ‘Wars of the Three Kingdoms’ also works. We have the same problem with labelling the 1650s the ‘Interregnum’. The Cromwells and their contemporaries living through that dynamic decade did not think they were killing time between two kings’ reigns. By the late 1650s, the Stuart cause seemed to be dead in the water and Oliver Cromwell looked destined to be the founder of a new ruling dynasty. The Restoration of 1660 was far from inevitable.
Historical fiction is a great entry point into history. Which other historical fiction writers and historians would you recommend to readers once they’ve put down The Rebel Daughter?
Oh so many! Historical fiction was certainly my gateway drug to history. As a child I loved Mary Renault, Rosemary Sutcliff and anything featuring the Civil Wars – The Children of the New Forest, Lorna Doone and Green Knowe. As a teenager I hoovered up Bernard Cornwell, George MacDonald Fraser and Philippa Gregory among others. Since then, I have loved CJ Sansom’s Shardlake series and the novels of Robert Harris, Ken Follett, Madeleine Miller and Rose Tremain to name a few. For anyone inspired to read more Civil War fiction, I can also recommend Andrew Taylor, J. C. Harvey and An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears. Professionally, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind was a key inspiration for The Rebel Daughter with its focus on one side in a civil war, while Hilary Mantel’s breath-taking Wolf Hall trilogy has changed the entire landscape for us all and directly inspired my new history book, The House of Cromwell.
The House of Cromwell is your most recent title, a history of the Cromwell family. Can you tell us more about it and how the experience of writing history rather than historical fiction has been?
Writing The House of Cromwell has been the greatest challenge of my career so far. Wolf Hall set me thinking about the relationship between Thomas and Oliver Cromwell and, researching this, I discovered one of the most remarkable dynastic stories in British history. Oliver was Thomas’s great-great-great nephew and inherited more from Henry VIII’s chief minister than his name alone: heraldry and lineage, shared culture and personality traits, a wider family struggling with the legacy of the Reformation, and Thomas’s own conflicted reputation. There were also striking parallels between their lives. Both rose from obscurity to the centre of political power before their family fell from grace. Both were executed (in Oliver’s case after his death) and have been infamous ever since, revered by some as progressive reformers, reviled by others as manipulators and murderers, and often muddled up with each other. Examining them together for the first time within their shared family frees both men from these myths. It has been exciting to return to non-fiction after my novels and particularly to apply everything I have learned as a novelist about structure, character, plot and pace to my writing. All of these matter just as much in a narrative history as in a novel and I hope readers of The Rebel Daughter and The Puritan Princess will enjoy The House of Cromwell just as much.
Miranda Malins is an historian, trustee of the Cromwell Association and the author of The House of Cromwell: Power, Family and the Making of Modern Britain.
