Harris now had his ‘chief manhunter’, but which fugitive regicide would he select for his novel? “I had to choose which of the men he was hunting I should focus on. Having decided that his subject would be a fugitive hunt, Harris thought “it would be interesting to create the character of the chief manhunter.” While most characters in Act of Oblivion are based on historical figures, Richard Nayler is fictional and styled by the author as the secretary of the regicide committee of the Privy Council. When Charles II offered a substantial reward for their capture dead or alive, the regicides all became hunted men. These ‘regicides’ knew that all they could expect of the new king was the agony of a traitor’s death, and most quickly fled into exile. An Act of Free and Generall Pardon Indempnity and Oblivion pardoned all past treason against the Crown but specifically excluded those involved in the trial and execution of his father. “I read about the hunt in 1660 for the men who had signed the death warrant of King Charles I or had sat as judges at his trial.” That hunt began almost immediately after the restoration of the executed king’s son, Charles II. In his latest novel, author Robert Harris “set out to create an epic.” He soon found himself on a marathon journey, admitting that Act of Oblivion (Hutchinson Heinemann UK/Harper US, 2022) was “the hardest of all my fifteen novels to write.” Where did this narrative trek begin? Harris’s attention was initially caught by “a reference somewhere to ‘the greatest manhunt of the 17th century’”, he says.
The Hunter & the Hunted: Robert Harris’s Act of Oblivion
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