Loyal and neutral in a moment

Alan Wall

CROMWELL'S EARL by Richard 011ard HarperCollins, £20, pp. 283 Now the Guelphs rule now the Ghi- bellines', wrote Elemer Horvath in his Quatrain for Mandelstam. We nod from a safe distance. Yet in the few years that saw the death of Oliver Cromwell, the fall of Richard Cromwell, and the restoration of the monarchy in the person of Charles II, it might not have looked so different. The decapitation of a king; a Protectorate to, well, protect us from such things ever hap- pening again; then, within 12 years, a king once more. Guelphs and Ghibellines, indeed.

Some wouldn't wear it. Milton famously wouldn't, so that nearly two centuries later Byron could write:

He did not loathe the Sire to laud the Son But closed the tyrant-hater he begun.

The Thirty-Nine Steps are . . . ' But blind and passionate Milton was far from being Everyman. It was the reign of Charles II after all which got the Vicar of Bray going on his oscillating way. Men often learn philosophy when preferment grows elusive. Thus Andrew Marvell:

For men may spare their pains when Nature is at work, and the world will not go the faster for our driving.

Edward Mountagu, the first Earl of Sandwich, is effectively put in the Vicar of Bray's party by the Dictionary of National Biography. Its mighty snootiness and sever- al-pronged innuendoes make it plain that it sees him as a time-server and a self-server, slotting easily into that court of which the not easily exasperated Pepys remarked exasperatedly how factions ruled it, point- lessly.

Richard 011ard has come along to prove otherwise. The Earl of Sandwich, he shows, was a committed and combative Parlia- mentarian, despite his father's equally committed royalism. At 18, he had raised a regiment to fight for Cromwell and he rose to serve in the rank of Major-General in the New Model Army. Then he became one of Cromwell's Generals-at-Sea. He was the Protector's man, and not cynically so.

When the Protectorate fell apart though, Edward Mountagu took a bleak look at the alternatives and chose, in that century of to-ing and fro-ing, the King. It must have been shocking for some — for the likes of Milton, certainly, though 011ard claims that Mountagu may have had a part in softening the hard justice that would other- wise have descended on the unrelenting poet. But it might have been, perhaps, to him at this stage, no more than Guelphs and Ghibellines. Certainly it was unexpect- ed. Pepys's Diary records the courteous astonishment which the writer felt at dis- covering his elder cousin could have had anything to do with the Restoration. Mountagu was a quiet man. He had no gift for self-advertisement. This is what 011ard calls 'his ineptitude for publicity' — a win- ning incompetence, surely?

Within 24 hours of landing on English soil, Charles II made Mountagu a knight of the Garter. He went on to become an Admiral and then ambassador to Spain and Portugal. His diary, which 011ard makes liberal and enlightening use of, records this in Madrid:

The General Vice of Spaine is unchastness to which ye climate disposes very much and also very longe custome.

With these particular Spanish customs one is inevitably reminded once again of Byron:

What men call gallantry and gods adultery Is much more common where the climate's sultry.

Though Mountagu lacked Byron's genius for self-promotion, he shared his non- judgemental eye. And both men spent long periods abroad, gazing (not without amusement) at humanity.

In matters naval, he was an innovator, evolving new battle tactics that were taken up after his death — a death at sea, in a futile and shabby war, of which he disap- proved. He was also an original fellow of the Royal Society and his mind appears characterised by that early, entirely delight- ful, scientific curiosity. He is the 'My Lord' of Pepys's Diary, and Richard 01lard has brought him alive again with much research and, one senses, considerable pleasure. Another restoration.

Alan Wall's poem Jacob and novel Curved Light are published by Bellew this year.