S8 Ep546: ### HEADLINE: THE RISE OF GEORGE DOWNING UNDER CROMWELL’S PROTECTORATESUMMARY: Dennis Sewall explores George Downing’s role as Cromwell’s intelligence chief and his mission to study Dutch economic success to help transform England into a trading power. GU

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I'm John Batchett with Dennis Sewell.

We're following the affairs of a man named George Downing,

1623 to 1684.

I did not know of George Downing before I read this book.

He's a secret agent for the Lord protector

and his prime minister, John Thurlow,

in the period of time between the execution of Charles I

and the restoration of Charles II,

that 1649 to 1660.

In that period, England is all a hoey

with religious excessiveness.

Inspiration, sometimes called as Dennis does

in his book, Wittily, Roving Cranks.

Now, we have the Treaty of Westminster.

All seems well with France.

What is the opinion of the military dictatorship

that's now ruling England?

Is it welcome by everyone or is there tension, Dennis?

It's a tremendous amount of tension, really.

The people getting fed up.

The people are now beginning to get fed up

with religious enthusiasm generally.

They've had this made a terrible war

that's killed very, very large number of people.

The total it took on every family in the land.

Somewhere has probably suffered one or two people,

members of the family dead.

They just want peace.

They don't want to be paying for armies,

to come and stay.

They don't want to be made responsible

for feeding horses and soldiers.

They want everybody just to go and have a period

of economic boom and peace and quiet.

However, they don't have a very clear way

of how they're going to get that.

What we find also is there are other countries in Europe

that are doing better than we are.

So George Downing, sort of his pitch,

is that being sent to the hage,

as ambassador to Holland,

he will find out the ways in which the dutch have managed

to make themselves the great merchant princes of Europe.

And he will take notes and find ways

in which England could house them

from their premier position

and become the great trading nation itself?

And is that a conversation he has with Thurlo

and Cromwell, or is this George's idea of the future?

No, it's a constant thing that he talks to them about

and they talk to him about.

And he is involved very much with the dutch

and is sort of learning the ways in which

in terms of finance, in terms of shipping,

the terms of colonial policy that they've managed

to enrich themselves so greatly.

Meanwhile at home, the other slide of the leaf,

but often the fact that people are unhappy about

the major generals who are running the country.

Those major generals, some of them are really just fanatics

who go about doing things like killing the bears in the bear gardens.

They go, they ban all kinds of festivities

around Christmas time.

They kill joys, literally dancing,

and fear to forget it.

They bring in a great times of cultural austerity

and people they like that either.

We have a couple of minutes.

I want to tell the story of James Naylor.

Who is he?

Now James Naylor is, he wants a soldier

at the Battle of Dumbar alongside Downing.

Downing was wounded in that battle, three wounds in the arm.

So it's sort of a former brother in arms, literally,

who were both wounded on the same battlefield.

He then, he's a Quaker, he becomes a Quaker,

and he goes back to his town of Bristol.

And he inacts a sort of tablo

in which he walks in on Palm Sunday on a donkey.

He's he's run to the donkey as if he were Christ.

Now this outrage is the citizens town who say that this is blasphemous.

He's arrested, taken to London and tried at Westminster.

Downing, I should add here, is not only a diplomat,

and a spy, and still, in fact, the head of military intelligence,

but he is also a member of Parliament.

He's a politician as well.

And he gets himself a place trying, Naylor,

on a panel of members of Parliament,

and Downing proposes that Naylor, in order to pay for his,

his frontry, and because he's used his tongue to offend

and blasphemously, he should have his tongue pulled forward

and a bolt driven through it.

And that happens to him, he's then put in stocks,

and he's then whipped through the streets of London.

Isn't it? It's savage treatment.

And that cruelty is Downing's idea, correct?

Yes. Now, Downing, it must be said,

it comes from Massachusetts, where they just can't backwakers.

Downing's uncle is the governor of Massachusetts, John Winthrop.

Back in the day, he wanted to have all Quakers executed, basically.

And they had no time for the tool.

And Downing's sort of inherited a great deal of that.

The book is cram-o-spy.

Dennis Sewell's the author when we come back.

Time for turncotes. I'm John Bachelors.