The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England

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Healey presents early-seventeenth-century England as highly fractured. Changing socio-economic conditions, a rising gentry and middling sort that was becoming increasingly politicised, religious polarisation tied to Puritan moralising reform and anti-Puritans attached to traditional culture (one would be forgiven for seeing the parallel with contemporary culture wars), debates over the nature of sovereignty and an increasingly litigious society. Civil war was not inevitable, but as one leading historian argued, it was made possible by these conflicting views over politics, religion and society. An entertaining and easy to read overview of seventeenth century England, taking in civil war, plague, fire, and revolution. 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?. 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

A zesty and gripping account of England’s ‘century of revolution.’” —Edward Vallance, Literary Review 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. 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.The early years of Charles I’s reign would be marked by one crisis after another. Intransigent parliaments were unwilling to provide necessary financial supply, and sought to curtail the monarch’s absolutist tendencies. This was not helped by his embarrassingly disastrous foreign policy, his unpopular favourite, and further religious polarisation as the King’s preference for Arminianism, which to Puritan observers was considered too close to Popish superstition, became increasingly clear. A political showdown would ensue in the Parliament of 1629, where the speaker of the commons was held down in his seat, by MPs opposed to the king, so that three resolutions could be issued against Arminian innovations, and the collection of tonnage and poundage, which had not been agreed by parliament. Charles’ dissolution of parliament in response would lead to his infamous personal rule.

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. The 17th century is having its moment, with a harvest of excellent histories, novels and podcasts. Though it will be accused of a certain Whiggishness in its narrative arc from darkness to light, The Blazing World offers a thrilling panorama of the period, from perspectives high and low, told with a winning combination of impish wit, sound judgment, and serious scholarship that distances it from the traditional textbooks. It will delight those new to this extraordinary age, and fire up its grizzled veterans. 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.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. He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.