The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England

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This spirit of inquiry and debate continued as the scientific revolution gathered pace, trade boomed, the population stabilised, social tension eased, violence lessened and in every sphere individuals strived for improvement and prosperity. That sentence of Cromwell’s about the plain captain is a great one, and summed up the spirit of the time.

The Blazing World tells of how the people of England challenged the divine right of kings, toppled tyrants and rejected absolutism by resisting military mobilisation, petitioning and, where necessary, rebelling. In January, 1642, the King entered Parliament and tried to arrest a handful of its more obnoxious members; tensions escalated, and Parliament passed the Militia Ordinance, awarding itself the right to raise its own fighting force, which—a significant part of the story—it was able to do with what must have seemed to the Royalists frightening ease, drawing as it could on the foundation of the London civic militia. Any changes made can be done at any time and will become effective at the end of the trial period, allowing you to retain full access for 4 weeks, even if you downgrade or cancel. When one narrates such a century with concision, bold statements are necessary and Healey can be forgiven those occasions when he misses his mark.The bear-men, who are experimental philosophers, use telescopes to test the bird-men’s hypotheses and microscopes to show the Empress tiny objects, like a fly’s eyes and a piece of charcoal. Rather than advancing a new interpretation, Healey captures the vitality and turbulence of 17th-century England in an effective retelling, with many more players than the typical cast of kings and queens . Healey’s title pays homage to Cavendish as he applauds the movement of ‘science’ from ‘cumbersome manuscripts’ to print, but seems strangely unaware of the fact. Philosophies count, and these hadn’t been, so to speak, left to simmer on Parliament was then, as now, divided into Houses of Lords and Commons, with the first representing the aristocracy and the other the gentry and the common people.

Over two paragraphs, a series of casual connections are made connecting economic change to a more widespread belief in common law civil liberties: as economic growth outpaced the growth of the money supply, credit became more commonplace; that resulted in greater litigation in relation to unpaid debt, and that 'in a culture so saturated with lawyers and litigants, legal ideas inevitably seeped into politics', including ideas about civil liberties. As he puts it at the end of this impressive history: “The people who lived in the seventeenth c entur y were their own . Tension ensued between his need for cash (he even sold peerages) and Parliament’s traditional control over the royal purse strings. Eventually, the rising population led to land scarcity, lower wages, and a correspondingly higher cost of living.I t seems that great popular histories of the Stuart age are like buses: you wait ages for one and then three (or four) come all at once. Still, as Cavendish explains in The Blazing World, she and her husband managed to live a relatively comfortable life.

Healey even reports on what might be a same-sex couple among the radicals: the preacher Thomas Webbe took one John Organ for his “man-wife. Cavendish’s poetry, which Osborne also disparages, illustrates her interest in the masculine field of natural philosophy (or ‘science’); her 100 poems bear titles such as ‘What Atomes Make Change’. 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). Both Clare Jackson and Jonathan Healey avoid the temptation to be too heavy handed with drawing modern parallels, but the subtext is clear – Britain may feel like a mess now, but we've been here before (in the case of the seventeenth century, with a relatively happy ending). It is well known that Tony Benn was a great admirer of the seventeenth century, drawn to the ideals and values espoused by radical groups of the English Revolution.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. 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. For Hill, the clashes of weird seventeenth-century religious beliefs were mere scrapings of butter on the toast of class conflict. In the next few years, Cromwell turned against Parliament, impatient with its slow pace, and eventually staged what was in effect a coup to make himself dictator. Each species group lives independently and follows a unique profession, but they coexist peacefully, without fighting over power.