The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England

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Jonathan Healey's book reveals how Britain was in a state of flux in the 17th century. Its people were still very primitive and violent with fabricated witch trials and executions commonplace. Vengeance was still in charge - Healey writes how after the monarchy was restored, Charles II had Cromwell's body dug up, his head chopped off and placed on a pike at Westminster for thirty years.

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! A sparkling account of a period that is crucial for any understanding of the history of the UK, Europe and the world beyond.” —Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads To cover such a long period I am sure that Healey has had to make many choices over what to emphasise and what to omit, but for me as a lay reader, the book gives a wonderful understanding of a complex period. There are many detours that can be taken into the various Protestant religious sects (Quakers, Socinians, Muggletonians, Seekers etc) and political groups (Levellers, Diggers etc), which are mentioned sufficiently, but which don’t lose the overall narrative drive of the book. I really enjoyed this and highly recommend it to the interested reader of popular history. The book was at times slightly hard going with a lot of characters and documents popping up that weren’t re-explained, so a bit easy to get lost if you’d put it down for a while. It would have been good to have an index of characters and key laws/treaties. But I soldiered on through and got the main thrust of it. 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 book is split into twenty chapters and for my own reference I have made well over a hundred notes. Healy] makes a convincing argument that the turbulent era qualifies as truly ‘revolutionary,’ not simply because of its cascading political upheavals, but in terms of far-reaching changes within society.... Wryly humorous and occasionally bawdy”— The Wall Street Journal The 1600's gave us so much else entertainingly and so interestingly written about by John Healey in The Blazing World. I was keen to read about the Levellers, a group so ahead of its time and its aspirations still in the 21st century a pipe dream in a country still defined by its class system and elite with the royals at the top.Each chapter ends with a very well thought out summary. His analysis of how much blame Charles I bears for the disastrous end of his reign is masterful. (The answer is, "allot") In Elizabeth’s reign, a prophecy had circulated widely:‘When Hempe is spun, England’s done.’‘Hempe’ was an acronym for the Tudor monarchs since the break with Rome: Henry, Edward, Mary and Philip (II of Spain, Mary’s husband), and Elizabeth. Prophecies were taken seriously, as signs of God’s plan, and the belief was that once Elizabeth died, England would collapse into anarchy. But the peaceful accession of James allowed a more benign conclusion: now England and Scotland were under the same ruler. England was done: long live Britain. Ugaz’s case is all too familiar in Peru, where powerful groups regularly use the courts to silence journalists by fabricating criminal allegations against them.’

Did you ever wonder what happened after Queen Elizabeth I died after a long reign but did not have an heir? Did you ever wonder what happened to King Charles I and King Charles II? If you have wondered about these questions, then this book is for you. Jonathan Healey has written a one volume history of England from the coming of King James I, who succeeded Elizabeth I, through the Civil War and the execution of Charles I. There followed the Commonwealth under Cromwell and the Restoration of the monarchy under Charles II. The history concludes with the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, with the ouster of James II out of concerns regarding absolutism and the reestablishment of Catholicism, and the subsequent establishment of William and Mary on the throne. It is tempting to use a book such as this to draw parallels with the England and United Kingdom of today, and indeed many of the other reviewers of Healey’s work have sought to do just that. For sure, there are some parallels- both were/are times of great national division and culture wars, times where the nature of the Island nations’ relationship with Europe were questioned. There is also a certain parallel in the questioning of the nature of monarchy today with that of the 1600’s, although it is fair to say that Charles III doesn’t run quite the same risk of losing his crown and his head as his ancestor Charles I (indeed, the ghost of Oliver Cromwell still haunts English republicanism to this day). The 17th century saw an explosion of new ways of disseminating information and spreading news and, also then as now, disinformation. The rise of print media in the form of pamphlets and journals was as revolutionary in the 17th century as the rise of social media has been in the 21st. Britain today finds itself in the grip of volatility and division, as it did in the C17th. But trying to draw more comparisons starts to become stretched and forced. The 17th century is, as the author himself concludes, unique and entirely alien to any that came before or after.The Restoration, widely welcomed, saw a return towards monarchical absolutism, for which Louis XIV, the French Sun King, was the model and apogee. James II, who inherited the Crown after his brother Charles II’s death in 1685, had learnt nothing from the tumultuous age into which he had been born. His misjudgments climaxed in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which ensured the Protestant Crown in Parliament under William and Mary, in whose reign scientific and economic innovations would pave a path to global ascendancy. 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?