Lord Protector

• 1. Introduction

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  Lord Protector names a title remembered today for one jarring phrase, stamped onto a republic's official style. From December 1653 to September 1658, one such style read: 'By the Grace of God and Republic Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland.' A Commonwealth with no king on its throne still dressed its ruler in royal language. That pairing of words, grace and republic side by side, is the puzzle this documentary sets out to trace.

  Centuries earlier, the same title had nothing to do with republics at all. It named royal princes and nobles who stepped in to guard a kingdom whenever its monarch could not rule, whether through youth, absence, or illness. Long after Cromwell, the same word would resurface again and again, sometimes offered to real regents, sometimes handed to fictional rulers on page and screen. Why could the same word serve both a medieval nobleman guarding an absent king's realm and a republican general who ruled almost like a king?

• 2. Regents For Absent Kings

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  On the 5th of December 1422, John of Lancaster, Duke of Bedford, and Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, became joint Lords Protector for Henry VI. They held the post until the 6th of November 1429, sitting on a regency council for a monarch who could not yet govern himself.

  Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, held the same office three separate times, an unusual pattern for one man. His first term ran from the 3rd of April 1454 to February 1455. His second stretched from the 19th of November 1455 to the 25th of February 1456. His third lasted from the 31st of October to the 30th of December 1460.

  Richard, Duke of Gloucester, took the title 'Lord Protector of the Realm' on the 10th of May 1483. He ruled during the nominal reign of the boy king Edward V, one of the Princes in the Tower. By the 26th of June that year, Richard had set the title aside to take the throne himself as Richard III.

  Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, became Lord Protector on the 4th of February 1547. He guided the early years of the young Edward VI's reign until the 11th of October 1549. Scotland, meanwhile, ran its own parallel system, with its own regents and its own titles.

  John Stewart, Duke of Albany, served as 'Governor and Protector of the Realm' from the 12th of July 1515 to the 16th of November 1524. He stood in for James V of Scotland, who lived from 1512 to 1542. Decades later, James Hamilton, Duke of Châtellerault, held the title 'Governor and Protector of the Kingdom.' He served from the 3rd of January 1543 to the 12th of April 1554, this time as protector for Mary, Queen of Scots.

  None of these protectors, English or Scottish, ever held a republic; that combination was still to come.

• 3. Cromwell's Protectorate

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  In 1653, a document called the Instrument of Government created a new title for Oliver Cromwell. It declared that Cromwell 'shall be, and is hereby declared to be, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland...for his life.' Before Cromwell took that title, a Council of State had already been running the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland. Cromwell held the position from December 1653 until his death in September 1658.

  The Humble Petition and Advice, a replacement constitution from 1657, gave 'His Highness the Lord Protector' the power to name his own successor. Cromwell picked his eldest surviving son, Richard, who had little political experience. This hereditary handover carried royal echoes; the Lord Protector could even award knighthoods, a power once reserved for monarchs.

  Richard Cromwell succeeded his father in September 1658 and held the post for only eight months. He resigned in May 1659, and a second period of Commonwealth rule followed. That second Commonwealth lasted until the Restoration of Charles II in May 1660, when the exiled Stuart heir reclaimed the throne.

  Richard would outlive his own downfall by decades, dying only in 1712.

• 4. After The Protectorate

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  In 1811, George, Prince of Wales, was appointed to the regency. He was referred to as 'His Royal Highness the Prince Regent,' not Lord Protector. George exercised the powers of the monarchy just as Lords Protector once had, but the old title's republican associations had made it distasteful.

  In political life the title was retired, but one older meaning, tied not to a crown but to the church, lingered on.

• 5. Protector Of The Church

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  Advocatus, a Latin term, could also be translated into English as Lord Protector. In this sense, a temporal lord, even a monarch, acted as protector of a part of the church's mainly secular interests. The closest French equivalent was the title of vidame.

  Centuries later, novelists and filmmakers would revive the political sense of the title, giving it to rulers who exist only on the page and screen.

• 6. Fictional Protectors

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  In Mary Shelley's novel The Last Man, Britain becomes a republic whose elected head of state is styled Lord Protector. The title passes first to Lord Raymond, then to a character named Ryland.

  In the 1987 television series The New Statesman, the finale episode carries the title 'The Irresistible Rise of Alan B'Stard.' B'Stard's New Patriotic Party wins a landslide in a special general election called over British membership of the European Economic Community. B'Stard himself has not contested a seat in that election. He briefly considers adopting the title Lord Protector before instead being permitted to serve as an extra-parliamentary prime minister.

  In the 2008 film adaptation of C. S. Lewis's novel Prince Caspian, the antagonist Miraz begins the story as Lord Protector of Narnia. He is later proclaimed king, a change from how the novel ends.

  In the 2020 film Wolfwalkers, a character called the Lord Protector serves as the story's main antagonist.

  Wolfwalkers, from 2020, is the most recent screen use of the title recorded here, and nothing in its history suggests it will be the last.