The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England

Product Information

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.

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. After some missteps, by 1657 a healing England was growing stronger. As Healey concludes, “Cromwell’s rule must be accounted a success, at least in terms of realpolitik .” His premature death, however, enabled the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, for which Cromwell’s conciliatory and conservative style of rule had, ironically, laid the groundwork. 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.The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance. 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 .” 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’. 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. As a result of the breakdown of state mechanisms such as censorship, religious courts and the episcopal hierarchies during the early 1640s, there was an explosion of dissent, of political and religious radicalism, which began to disseminate into mainstream political cultures and receive wider acceptance as the war went on, and as a political settlement failed to be reached. The 1640s was a period of turmoil and dramatic change which caused people to come up with innovative radical solutions to deal with the extraordinary events that faced them. Traditional institutions, systems, beliefs were all up for question and debate.

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 At the beginning of The Blazing World, a lustful merchant kidnaps the young Lady, hoping to make her marry him. As punishment, the gods blow the merchant’s ship toward the North Pole, where the Lady’s world meets “another Pole of another world.” The merchant and his crew freeze to death, but the Lady survives. She finds herself in this other world— the Blazing World—which is full of curious hybrid creatures who have the bodies of animals but walk, talk, and act like human beings. The bear-men, who live near the Blazing World’s icy North Pole, find the merchant’s ship and rescue the Lady. She is as unusual to the Blazing World’s inhabitants as they are to her, so they bring her to their Emperor, who lives in a palace in the gold-and-jewel-studded city of Paradise. The Emperor believes the Lady to be a goddess, and he graciously marries her and gives her “absolute power to rule and govern all that World as she please[s].” A] lively, compelling and combative study of the most dramatic and consequential century in English history . . . 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 . . . It will delight those new to its extraordinary age, and fire up its grizzled veteransUnfortunately, the Stuart kings Charles II and James II’s style of management was drifting towards autocracy, reopening old wounds — now fault lines between the new Whig and Tory parties. Healey recounts the Popish Plot, Exclusion Crisis, Monmouth Rebellion and Glorious Revolution with gusto, revealing the crucial inheritance of the unfinished business of the 1649 revolution for events in 1688 — a view not always fashionable among historians. Even the word “ideology,” favored by Healey, may be a touch anachronistic. The American and the French Revolutions are both recognizably modern: they are built on assumptions that we still debate today, and left and right, as they were established then, are not so different from left and right today. Whatever obeisance might have been made to the Deity, they were already playing secular politics in a post-religious atmosphere. During the English Revolution, by contrast, the most passionate ideologies at stake were fanatic religious beliefs nurtured through two millennia of Christianity. Full Title: The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World. Written By the Thrice Noble, Illustrious, and Excellent Princesse, The Duchess of Newcastle.

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. 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” . 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 ”. 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.A major new history of England's turbulent seventeenth century and how it marked the birth of a new world

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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. 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 Despite the radical changes that transformed England, few today understand the story of this revolutionary age. Leaders like Oliver Cromwell, Charles II, and William of Orange have been reduced to caricatures, while major turning points like the Civil War and the Glorious Revolution have become shrouded in myth and misunderstanding. Yet the seventeenth century has never been more relevant. The British constitution is once again being contested, and we face a culture war reminiscent of when the Roundheads fought the Cavaliers. Genre: Early Modern Prose Fiction, Proto-Novel, Science Fiction, Utopian Literature, Feminist Literature, Philosophical Dialogue, Metafiction 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.”