Straight out of Jacobean England (Daniel LEAL / POOL / AFP)

A sunny Wednesday in early June 1665, and Samuel Pepys was suffering in the heat. It was âthe hottest day that ever I felt in my lifeâ, he confided to his diary, âand it is confessed so by all other people the hottest they ever knew in Englandâ.
Pepys spent some of the day strolling with friends in the New Exchange, a shopping arcade on the south side of the Strand, before repairing to Vauxhallâs Spring Gardens, where he âwalked an hour or two with great pleasureâ. There was something on his mind, though. For as long as he could remember, relations with Englandâs neighbours had been distinctly fraught, and Lord Sandwichâs fleet was currently engaged in a struggle with the Dutch. London simmered with rumours about the outcome of the battle, but there was no certainty: as Pepys put it, âill reports run up and down of his being killed, but without groundâ.
By evening, âweary with walking and with the mighty heat of the weatherâ, the diarist had returned to his house in the City. The day had been pleasant enough, but now something else was troubling him. In Drury Lane, he had seen âtwo or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and âLord have mercy upon usâ writ thereâ. Pepys knew immediately what that meant. Plague â the first sign of the epidemic that would kill an estimated 100,000 people, a quarter of the capitalâs population, in the next 18 months. To calm his nerves, he noted: âI was forced to buy some roll-tobacco to smell to and [chew], which took away the apprehension.â
Reading Pepysâs diary, you sometimes forget that he was born almost four centuries ago. In many respects he was utterly different from us, with assumptions and anxieties we can scarcely understand; and yet often he feels almost thrillingly contemporary, as if you might bump into him in the street tomorrow afternoon. Indeed, you merely have to re-read that diary entry, and you might be looking in a mirror: the stifling heat, the fears of disease, the foreign wars, the fake news.
The past is never just a mirror, of course, and itâs the height of narcissism to cast our predecessors as mere foreshadowings of ourselves. But there are times when, for obvious reasons, a particular historical moment catches the imagination â as is the case today with Pepysâs moment, the mid-17th century.
Just look, for example, at the titles in Britainâs bookshops. For a long time, commercial publishers were terrified of the 17th century. The Stuarts werenât as sexy as the Tudors, and the age of Oliver Cromwell seemed too dark, too violent, too religious, too complicated for ordinary readers. Why read about perhaps the most significant moment in all our history â the titanic revolutionary conflict of the 1640s and 1650s, when armies surged across the map of our islands, a king was tried and executed, and a farmer from East Anglia tried to turn Britain into a religious commonwealth â when you could read yet another book about Catherine Howard?
And then, as if responding to some subterranean shift in the cultural landscape, something changed. The last few years alone have given us excellent books on Cromwell by Paul Lay and Ronald Hutton, as well as Anna Keayâs dazzling social history of Britain in the 1650s, and Malcolm Gaskillâs haunting account of witchcraft among the settlers who tried to build a new England on the other side of the Atlantic. Meanwhile, Robert Harrisâs most recent blockbuster, Act of Oblivion, follows the hunt for Charles Iâs Parliamentarian killers from England to America.
Even politicians are at it. In the Conservative MP Jesse Normanâs new novel The Winding Stair, which charts the bitter feud between Sir Francis Bacon, father of the Scientific Revolution, and Sir Edward Coke, the most influential jurist of the early modern era, we appear to be plunged back into the world of early 17th-century Jacobean England. But right from the first few pages, the parallels are obvious. Among his characters, for example, is James I, a man with âbulging, expressive eyesâ and an âawkward gaitâ, who âdresses finely, yet somehow manages to look ill-kemptâ, and always âloves to display his learning with a classical or biblical lineâ. Even if you didnât know that Norman had been at Eton with Boris Johnson, worked for him as a junior minister and eventually released a blistering public letter calling for his removal, youâd probably spot the parallel.
Why does the Stuart era suddenly feel so resonant? Some of the answers are obvious. People in the 17th century, like us, were struggling to come to terms with an extraordinary advance in information technology â in their case, the printing press. The political and religious passions of the Civil War werenât merely reflected in the papers and pamphlets of the day: they were fuelled by them, too.
Then as now, readers craved paranoia, hysteria, sensation and scandal, exemplified by the coverage of the rebellion of Irish Catholics in 1641. The pamphlets of the time claimed that some 200,000 Protestants had been massacred; in reality, the true figure was probably lower than 10,000. Illustrations showed the rebels literally spearing babies on their pitchforks and ripping womenâs bodies open with bestial savagery. âA woman mangled in so horred a maner that it was not possible shee should be knowneâ, read one cheery caption. Fake news, as it turned out. But fake news mattered, for when Cromwellâs troops landed in Ireland eight years later, bent on vengeance, such pictures were seared into their imaginations.
Then as now, technology also mattered because it allowed news to spread more quickly than ever before, not least from abroad. The political climate before the Civil War was all the more feverish because people were addicted to the latest reports from the Thirty Years War, the ferociously complicated religious and political conflict that tore central Europe apart and killed millions of people across vast tracts of Germany. Like todayâs war in Ukraine, the Thirty Years War became a kind of Rorschach test: what you saw depended on your existing religious and political prejudices.
And with news came ideas: the proto-rationalism of RenĂŠ Descartes and Baruch Spinoza, the republicanism of John Milton, the liberalism of John Locke, the ruthless realism of Thomas Hobbes. No wonder that, as in 2023, many people felt dizzy at the pace of change â particularly in the aftermath of the Civil War, when the king had lost his crown, the radicals were in the ascendant and even the calendar, stripped of the festivals of old, had been rewritten with revolutionary zeal. âHoly-dayes are despisâd, new fashions are devisâd. / Old Christmas is kickt out of Town,â runs one celebrated ballad of the day. âYet letâs be content, and the times lament, you see the world turnâd upside down.â
This belief that the world had been turned on its head â the kind of thing you often hear today, whether about Brexit, or transgenderism, or whatever â was remarkably common in the 17th century. âGod Almighty has had a quarrel lately with all Mankind,â lamented the Welsh historian James Howell in 1647, âfor within these twelve years there have been the strangest Revolutions and horridest things happened, not only in Europe but all the world over.â The world, he thought, was âoff its hingesâ.
He wasnât alone. As armies trudged across the British countryside, rebellion tore holes in the empires of the Ming and the Ottomans, and the casualties mounted in central Europe, other commentators sank into despair. Every day, recorded the Oxford scholar Robert Burton, brought news of âwar, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions; of towns taken, cities besieged in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia, Poland etcâ. Four years later, a Spanish tract suggested a terrifying but increasingly popular explanation: âThis seems to be one of the epochs in which every nation is turned upside down, leading some great minds to suspect that we are now approaching the end of the world.â
Behind all this, some historians believe, lay another anxiety very familiar to us today: climate change. Pepys may have been sweating like a pig that day in June 1665. But as one of the great scholars of the early modern world, Geoffrey Parker, points out in his book, Global Crisis, this was the Little Ice Age, in which temperatures plunged across the world.
Snow fell in subtropical Japan; sub-Saharan Africa suffered a five-year drought; the rivers of modern Mexico and Virginia dried up; across Europe, harvests failed and thousands starved. The first months of 1621 were so cold that people walked across the frozen Bosphorus from Constantinople to Asia. In China, Poland, Russia and the Ottoman Empire, the population fell by about a third. In some parts of Germany, the population fell by half. In 1651, Hobbes warned that, without a strong state, life would be âsolitary, poor, nasty, brutish and shortâ. For many people, it was like that already.
Finally, inevitable, thereâs the W-word. The radical Puritans at the heart of the convulsions of the mid-17th century, whose zealous righteousness seems so off-putting to us today, never referred to themselves as âwokeâ. But theyâd have recognised the social justice movementâs ethos immediately. They too believed that they had been awakened to injustice and set apart from the fallen masses. They too believed that the world was divided into the saved and the sinners, those who walked in the light of the Lord and those who dwelt in the valley of darkness. They too believed that life was an unending struggle against sin, in which you must always do better, and in which there were few greater crimes than heresy and apostasy. And they too lived in dread of that most wicked and dreaded figure of all: the witch â the old woman next door who had cursed your cow; the neighbourâs wife who made faces at your children; the bestselling novelist who knew what a woman was.
Perhaps we should go easy on the Puritans, though. Even Pepys, whose hedonistic humanity seems so divorced from their joyless moralising, thought they made an unsatisfyingly easy target. Three years after that hot day in 1665, he saw a production of Ben Jonsonâs play Bartholomew Fair, long a favourite of his. âIt is an excellent play,â he wrote afterwards: âthe more I see it, the more I love the wit of it.â But there was a caveat. âOnly the business of abusing the Puritans begins to grow stale, and of no use, they being the people that, at last, will be found the wisest.â But Pepys could afford to say that, because his Puritans had been beaten. Our own are still with us, moreâs the pity.
Still, if the 17th-century parallel really does hold up, then think whatâs just around the corner! A new age of pleasure-loving debauchery. The revival of the coffee house. The triumph of the beefsteak. The return of the wig. Canât wait.
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Dominic Sandbrook discusses the 17th century with Anna Keay and Malcolm Gaskill in two recent episodes of his podcast, The Rest is History.
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