Perhaps the most important evolution which the civil war helped to bring about was the end of absolutism and the divine right of kings. Even though the kings, and indeed Cromwell, dismissed Parliament several times, by the end of the century Parliament was in the ascendancy with power in the hands of the people and the monarch's wings clipped. Yet even today at the recent coronation we saw the bizarre spectacle of the Archbishop of Canterbury anointing Charles III as if he really believes, perhaps he does, that God has put Charles on the throne. Although Cromwell emerges from every biography as a very unlikable man, he was wholly devoted to his idea of God and oddly magnetic in his ability to become the focus of everyone’s attention. In times of war, we seek out the figure who embodies the virtues of the cause and ascribe to him not only his share of the credit but everybody else’s, too. Fairfax tended to be left out of the London reports. He fought the better battles but made the wrong sounds. That sentence of Cromwell’s about the plain captain is a great one, and summed up the spirit of the time. Indeed, the historical figure Cromwell most resembles is Trotsky, who similarly mixed great force of character with instinctive skill at military arrangements against more highly trained but less motivated royal forces. Cromwell clearly had a genius for leadership, and also, at a time when religious convictions were omnipresent and all-important, for assembling a coalition that was open even to the more extreme figures of the dissident side. Without explicitly endorsing any of their positions, Cromwell happily accepted their support, and his ability to create and sustain a broad alliance of Puritan ideologies was as central to his achievement as his cool head with cavalry.

What happened in the English Revolution, or civil wars, took an exhaustingly long time to unfold, and its subplots were as numerous as the bits of the Shakespeare history play the wise director cuts. Where the French Revolution proceeds in neat, systematic French parcels—Revolution, Terror, Directorate, Empire, etc.—the English one is a mess, exhausting to untangle and not always edifying once you have done so. There’s a Short Parliament, a Long Parliament, and a Rump Parliament to distinguish, and, just as one begins to make sense of the English squabbles, the dour Scots intervene to further muddy the story. I get a sense that Jonathan Healey thinks that the royals can be thankful that Oliver Cromwell made such a hash of running Britain as a republic following victory in the Civil War, thereby allowing for the return of monarchy. As a result of the breakdown of state mechanisms such as censorship, religious courts and the episcopal hierarchies during the early 1640s, there was an explosion of dissent, of political and religious radicalism, which began to disseminate into mainstream political cultures and receive wider acceptance as the war went on, and as a political settlement failed to be reached. The 1640s was a period of turmoil and dramatic change which caused people to come up with innovative radical solutions to deal with the extraordinary events that faced them. Traditional institutions, systems, beliefs were all up for question and debate.

There is one chapter (17) which felt out of place, perhaps because I have already read detailed histories of this period, 1665 and 1666, discussing the Dutch naval wars, the Plague and the Great Fire of London. He identifies the opportunities the wars brought to middling men who would not otherwise have troubled the history books — the ultimate example of course being the fenland farmer Oliver Cromwell, who rose to be head of state. As the soldier William Allen said when considering draft peace terms to be put to the king: “I suppose it is not unknown to you that we are most of us but young Statesmen .” It was a century of Guy Fawkes and Oliver Cromwell, of kings executed and monarchy restored, of Parliaments extended and prorogued for years, of witches tried and religious sects tortured and tolerated. If was a world, in short, in literal revolution, a world turned upside down as the British 17th century has been called in history and song. I was curious to learn more about the period based on an essay on 17th century Puritanism by Marianne Robinson in her 5-star classic What are we doing here?. Not that this book wasn’t interesting or worthwhile. For one thing, it reminded me how Protestant views changed the world. These ideas eventually led to the belief that a government should serve at the behest of the people. If you could select your own pastor rather than accept an appointed bishop, then why not select your own ruler as well? If your king is a heretic, isn’t it your duty to resist rather than to obey? One can easily understand the simple progression from battling against hierarchies within a church to fighting against hierarchies anywhere. Conversely, Catholics tended to support royal absolutism.

I read Devil Land last year and thought it was excellent (I would have given it four stars out of five, the same as this book review) but didn't review it at the time as I was a bit occupied with other things (moving house). ↩︎This is a wonderful book, exhaustively researched, vigorously argued and teeming with the furious joy of seventeenth-century life' The Times It definitely confirmed to me that hereditary titles above Baron (which can be earned in the UK) should be abolished, if you can’t “earn” a title like you could when they were relevant, then you shouldn’t be able to pass them on either!

So this book is about raw politics, but it is also about the social change that conditioned those politics. It is narrative history, and for this it makes no apologies, but it’s also about how those two forces combined to create nearly a hundred years of turbulence, out of which arose a remarkable new world, one which – for better or worse – was blazing a path towards our own. Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? The seventeenth century was a revolutionary age for the English. It started as they suddenly found themselves ruled by a Scotsman, and it ended in the shadow of an invasion by the Dutch. Under James I, England suffered terrorism and witch panics. Under his son Charles, state and society collapsed into civil war, to be followed by an army coup and regicide. For a short time—for the only time in history—England was a republic. There were bitter struggles over faith and Parliament asserted itself like never before. There were no boundaries to politics. In fiery, plague-ridden London, in coffee shops and alehouses, new ideas were forged that were angry, populist, and almost impossible for monarchs to control. Donald Trump appears to have had plenty of experience of the American legal system without it improving his regard for the country's constitution. ↩︎Charts th[e] extraordinary course from the Tudors to the Hanoverians. . . . Healey channels the inquiring spirit which came to define this revolutionary age, creating his own survey as rich and wide-ranging as the pioneering work of the seventeenth-century characters he so admires.” —Miranda Malins, The Critic Archival issues aside, Healey’s 17th century is one comprised of incidents great and small – it is in some ways less a grand narrative than a patchwork of narratives, each one of which fascinates as it elucidates his primary theme. It is into this patchwork creation of a world turned upside down that Margaret Cavendish’s 1666 utopian fiction – the source of Healey’s title – ought to slide effortlessly. In her Blazing World, the Duchess of Newcastle describes another planet, ESFI, which contemporaries would have recognised as the Stuart kingdoms of England, Scotland, (France) and Ireland. An absolutist monarchy, ESFI remains both attached to, and an integral part of, Earth. Healey’s Blazing World, however, describes the Stuart kingdoms (primarily England) as if they existed in a vacuum until Cromwell’s rise to prominence: so detached, indeed, that Healey describes the pan-European conflict that raged from 1618-48, which was fought by Swedes, Danes, French, Dutch, Spanish, English, Scots and Irish among others, and featured a Stuart princess at its heart, as a ‘German war’.

The seventeenth century was a revolutionary age for the English. It started as they suddenly found themselves ruled by a Scotsman, and it ended in the shadow of an invasion by the Dutch. Under James I, England suffered terrorism and witch panics. Under his son Charles, state and society collapsed into civil war, to be followed by an army coup and regicide. For a short time—for the only time in history—England was a republic. There were bitter struggles over faith and Parliament asserted itself like never before. There were no boundaries to politics.In fiery, plague-ridden London, in coffee shops and alehouses, new ideas were forged that were angry, populist, and almost impossible for monarchs to control. A fresh, exciting, “readable and informative” history ( The New York Times) of seventeenth-century England, a time of revolution when society was on fire and simultaneously forging the modern world. •“Recapture[s] a lost moment when a radically democratic commonwealth seemed possible.”—Adam Gopnik, The New YorkerTo the extent there is any overarching theme emerging from the book, it is that the Civil War wasn't just about religion – people were also motivated by deeply held beliefs about the constitution and the accountability of those in power to those they ruled. In that sense, the book is a subtle nod towards the original Whig interpretation of events in seventeenth century England (but with due regard given to the importance of religion). One thing I took from this book was how ideas that were quite radical for the time (such as suffrage for all adult males, or something close to it) were discussed and taken seriously (by some within the Parliamentarian side) during the Civil War (for example, at the Putney Debates of 1647). Dross and dung I like narrative history and I like concrete examples to illustrate and amplify the broad story being told. This excellent history of seventeenth century England reads easily, with this from the introduction: Though “an absolutist by nature”, James was canny enough to realise the limits of ambition in his wealthy new kingdom. His son, Charles – the spare who became the heir following the death of his glamorous brother Henry in 1612 – was less flexible. Healey is scathing in his judgment (and, refreshingly, never afraid to judge) about this “man of blood” who in the 1640s led his country into two needless civil wars, describing him as a “stuffy authoritarian… never ruthless enough to be a successful tyrant”, though he concedes, as did Rubens, that the king had a good eye for a painting. Those beliefs, far from being frosting on a cake of competing interests, were the competing interests. The ability of seventeenth-century people to become enraptured, not to say obsessed, with theological differences that seem to us astonishingly minute is the most startling aspect of the story. Despite all attempts to depict these as the mere cosmetic covering of clan loyalties or class interests, those crazy-seeming sectarian disputes were about what they claimed to be about. Men were more likely to face the threat of being ripped open and having their bowels burned in front of their eyes (as happened eventually to the regicides) on behalf of a passionately articulated creed than they were on behalf of an abstract, retrospectively conjured class.