The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England

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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 .”

The book states that between the mid-sixteenth century and the second quarter of the seventeenth century, the yeomen saw their wealth rise fourteenfold, which I found remarkable. ↩︎ 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. This is a wonderful book, exhaustively researched, vigorously argued and teeming with the furious joy of seventeenth-century life' The Times To Cromwell we come then. His influence arose from his successful military leadership of the "New Model" Army under Charles, new as in its national scope with central government funding (p. 196) and its disciplined professional soldiers. As in so many other factional disputes like enumerated above, officers and fighting men often had different political and religious viewpoints, which may explain why no military coup was attempted through the revolutionary century. In fact when Charles finally surrendered it was "Not to Parliament [and its New Model Army]. . . but to the [Scottish] Covenanters." (p. 208). The path from surrender to execution (p. 256) was political not military, as was the selection of Cromwell as leader: "The new regime had toppled the monarchy and established the power of the Commons, but they had done so without rooting the new government in actual popular consent." (p. 258). Cromwell was the executive of the government, and "there was no doubt that Cromwell was the leading political figure of the nation" (p. 280) but he still ruled through Parliament and other councils of state. In his own words, "I am ready to serve not as a King, but as a Constable" (p. 306), to which Healey offers the assessment that "one of the great tragedies of Cromwell was that he prevented the Republic being so much more. He was, at heart, a conservative East Anglian landowner." (p. 310) A continuous thread runs from the accession of England’s first Stuart king, James I, in 1603, to the dynasty’s fall in the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688-89. Yet historians often balk at telling the tumultuous, ideologically charged story in one go. Often it is divided into three chunks. First come increasing resistance to absolutism and religious intolerance, civil war, the parliamentary army’s victory, the execution of Charles I, and the establishment of the Protectorate under Oliver Cromwell. Next, the monarchy’s restoration under Charles II; finally, the disastrous reign of James II and invitation to William of Orange to take his place and establish a proto-constitutional monarchy.This book details many such changes in fortunes and makes clear that most modern aristocrats wouldn’t have managed to hang on to their titles over the last few centuries without the peace and stability of democracy. An irony if ever there was one.

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. In his wide-ranging new history of revolutionary England, Jonathan Healey has given us a masterly account of a period that urgently needs to be reclaimed and recognised for its importance and interest. . . . Perhaps the greatest strength of Jonathan Healey’s book is how much it reveals of the lives and interests of those whom their contemporaries were pleased to describe as ‘the middling sort’. During the seventeenth century their voices were being raised—and heard—more vociferously and eloquently as the years went by. He is also very good on the role of women in society. . . . Painstakingly researched and elegantly written, The Blazing World is that rare achievement—a window into the past that is at once profoundly different and yet startlingly familiar.” —Dr Linda Porter, Writing Desk

By Valerie Trouet

A zesty and gripping account of England’s ‘century of revolution.’” —Edward Vallance, Literary Review Throughout the blurred action, sharp profiles of personality do emerge. Ronald Hutton’s marvellous “ The Making of Oliver Cromwell” (Yale) sees the Revolution in convincingly personal terms, with the King and Cromwell as opposed in character as they were in political belief. Reading lives of both Charles and Cromwell, one can only recall Alice’s sound verdict on the Walrus and the Carpenter: that they were both very unpleasant characters. Charles was, the worst thing for an autocrat, both impulsive and inefficient, and incapable of seeing reality until it was literally at his throat. Cromwell was cruel, self-righteous, and bloodthirsty. Healey’s coverage is vast. He provides a whistlestop tour of various facets of English society: law, print, migration, witchcraft, moral reform, radicalism and so forth. While coverage of Scotland and Ireland is thinner, Healey has ensured this is not merely a straightforward narrative of high politics or events in London. Crucially the individual experiences of ordinary men and women, and the engrossing political affairs at Whitehall and Westminster are properly contextualized within the wider political, social and religious conditions that gripped seventeenth-century society. Crisis under Charles I The seventeenth century began as the English suddenly found themselves ruled by a Scotsman, and ended in the shadow of an invasion by the Dutch. Under James I, the country 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 no boundaries to politics. In the coffee shops and alehouses of plague-ridden London, new ideas were forged that were angry, populist and almost impossible for monarchs to control. 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’.

Donald Trump appears to have had plenty of experience of the American legal system without it improving his regard for the country's constitution. ↩︎ It could be said that Healey somewhat overstates the relative calm of the 1630s, but it is undoubtedly true that the King was able to establish a measure of stability as he got control of his coffers and brought wars on the continent to the end. The year 1637 would prove to be a turning point, as the King sought to impose his conservative Laudian religious settlement on the Scots who rebelled, while domestic opposition to the crown’s financial and religious policies mounted. With the war against the Scots going badly, the period of personal rule was brought to an abrupt halt in 1640, as Charles was once again forced to turn to parliament to raise money. The 17th century was the most dramatic and consequential in British history, the period during which the modern world was formed, and Jonathan Healey is as assured a guide to its twists and turns, its tragedies and triumphs as one could wish for. The Blazing World is a triumph of scholarship and concision.” —Paul Lay, historian, author of Providence Lost The similarities between those times and our own (on both sides of the Atlantic) are impossible to ignore. At the beginning of the 1600s, harvests were good, so England experienced a period of increased prosperity. Due to improving schools, literacy swelled and publications proliferated, creating a better-informed middle class. For perhaps the first time, those beneath the gentry engaged with new ideas and had the confidence to take their debates out of the taverns and into Parliament. Although it finished on a nice note, I could have read on! I would have loved to see the impact of the French Revolution on the UK.The political arrangements of the reigns of William and Mar y as the c entur y drew to a close would have been “unthinkable” to James I at its start and were a closer approximation to the political system under Elizabeth II than Elizabeth I. Through 100 years of turbulence arose a “remarkable new world, one which — for better or worse — was blazing a path towards our own ”. 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.