The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England

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This is a wonderful book, exhaustively researched, vigorously argued and teeming with the furious joy of seventeenth-century life' The Times Wily and pragmatic as well as louche, Charles II may have been the only Stuart to see that public opinion, fed by the proliferating news-sheets and pamphlets, could confer or deny legitimacy. The clumsy attempt by James II, a Catholic, to restore absolutist rule was always doomed to failure. The ferment of ideas about politics, society and religion led inexorably to his ousting in the Glorious Revolution—and Britain’s emergence as a stable modern state. Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil. Jonathan Healey’s The Blazing World gives a vivid and illuminating account of the revolutionary seventeenth century in Britain, finds Waseem Ahmed

These political novices had to build a new world upon the ruins of the old. By the end of the Civil Wars, around 6 2,000 soldiers were dead; perhaps 100,000 more had died from war-related disease; 150 towns had been severely damaged and 10,000 homes destroyed. Within a few more years the king had been executed, the monarchy and House of Lords abolished, and Ireland and Scotland brutally conquered. 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. 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’.

In 1698 Whitehall Palace caught fire. The vast warren of buildings, which had been central to the monarchy since the 1530s, was destroyed. When the area was eventually rebuilt, it was not kings and queens who returned but prime ministers and their governments. This topographical transformation neatly captures what historian Jonathan Healey argues was the most revolutionary change over the course of the 17th c entur y: that “politics was no longer about monarch s” . W riting an accessible history of Britain in the turbulent 17th century, as Jonathan Healey sets out to do in “The Blazing World”, is a noble aim. Starting with the seeds of one revolution and ending with a second, the period teems with ideas about what it means to be a citizen as opposed to a subject, and about how God should be worshipped. By the end of it, a modern concept of the state was emerging. Yet even in Britain it is neglected. 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 .” Yet, in Cromwell’s time, certain moral intuitions and principles appeared that haven’t disappeared; things got said that could never be entirely unsaid. Government of the people resides in their own consent to be governed; representative bodies should be in some way representative; whatever rights kings have are neither divine nor absolute; and, not least, religious differences should be settled by uneasy truces, if not outright toleration.

On these terms, this really was a revolutionary age, with at least seven seismic resets between 1640 and 1688. It was also a time of revolution as we conceive of it today, namely, of fundamental alteration to politics or society. Healey’s ambitious book aims to explore these two connected realms, reanimating the lives of ordinary people through the wealth of sources they left behind. The situation shifted when, in February, 1645, Parliament consolidated the New Model Army, eventually under the double command of the aristocratic Thomas Fairfax, about whom, one woman friend admitted, “there are various opinions about his intellect,” and the grim country Protestant Oliver Cromwell, about whose firm intellect opinions varied not. Ideologically committed, like Napoleon’s armies a century later, and far better disciplined than its Royalist counterparts, at least during battle (they tended to save their atrocities for the after-victory party), the New Model Army was a formidable and modern force. Healey, emphasizing throughout how fluid and unpredictable class lines were, makes it clear that the caste lines of manners were more marked. Though Cromwell was suspicious of the egalitarian democrats within his coalition—the so-called Levellers—he still declared, “I had rather have a plain russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than that which you call a gentleman.” One of the many virtues of Jonathan Healey's exciting new history of England during its most revolutionary period is the skilful way in which he thoroughly dissects the often obscure points of contention while never losing sight of the need to keep the narrative flowing . . . A rich and compelling account of one of the most fascinating and turbulent periods in all our history 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.

He, like many who grew up during the wars, was profoundly shaped by the experience: “I no sooner perceived myself in the world ,” he wrote, “but I found myself in a storm .” Healey has a keen eye for the context which moulds generations, explaining with sympathy that the revolutionaries who came to power after Parliament’s victory over the king had grown up in a world of rising population, social stress and a crime wave, so it was “no wonder they wanted to reform society ”. 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. 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. 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.