Artless

The excellent BBC Four series on the Baroque concluded last night. Having started out at Saint Peter’s, it ended up at Saint Paul’s. Sadly, it omitted the English Baroque poetry of Richard Crashaw, or of John Milton for that matter. Are Catholics and Puritans still that little bit beyond the pale?

But it did at least answer one of Those Questions, namely what, in the end, was Cromwell actually for? What did the Interregnum leave behind? In positive terms, as good as nothing, at least in its won country (it did, of course, provide the regicidal precedent for the French Revolution). Why, only a very short time after the Restoration, burnt-down English churches were being rebuilt, not even in the Mediaeval style destroyed by fire, but in the Baroque. Legislatively or institutionally, as good as nothing of the anti-monarchist experiment survives. Which, given the character of that regime, is just as well.

However, it did result in the important absence from these shores, and therefore in the presence on the Continent, of Charles I’s art collection. So there we have it. At last, a point to Cromwell: he kept England philistine.