The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England

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Given how much there is to cover over the seventeenth century, it is only natural that some periods are favoured more than others. 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. Moreover, he married a Catholic woman, Queen Henrietta Maria, and changed numerous religious norms, which made the Church of England more hierarchical and ritualistic.

After two wars, the Parliamentarians won and Charles was executed in 1649, and after a third war, Charles’s son Charles II was forced into exile. Other neglected figures, such as the slippery journalist Marchamont Nedham, that are usually missing in more general histories of the period, are also brought to light.The author clearly enjoys recounting an amusing/shocking anecdote or quote and his tone throughout is irreverent and breezy.

It was the century, as the historian Kevin Sharpe wrote, summing up the Whig view, ‘in which the champions of law and liberty, property and Protestantism triumphed over absolute monarchy and popery and laid the foundations for parliamentary government’. 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 . 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. For 17th-century England had also seen the rise of a cussed “middling sort” – the milieu of Shakespeare, aided by the expansion of education and literacy.Still, as Cavendish explains in The Blazing World, she and her husband managed to live a relatively comfortable life. 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. Honesty and Prudence speak on the Duke’s behalf, but neither of them manages to convince Fortune, so the Duchess resolves to learn to accept Fortune’s folly. The execution of Charles is, rightly, at the dead centre of The Blazing World, Healey’s lively, compelling and combative study of the most dramatic and consequential century in English history.

He could have accepted General Henry Ireton’s generous proposed settlement, the Heads of Proposals, and “marched into London, garlanded by a grateful New Model Army”, to prosper under a balanced constitution. In fact, the actress Carlson Young has written, directed, and starred in two films entitled The Blazing World and based on Cavendish’s work. An accessible anthology of Cavendish’s work is Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader (2000, edited by Sylvia Bowerbank and Sara Mendelson), and as of the early 2020s, Punctum Books is also compiling a 20-volume edition of The Complete Works of Margaret Cavendish (edited by Liza Blake, Shawn Moore, and Jacob Tootalian).Every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government,” Thomas Rainsborough, one of the radical captains, said. Rather than being mandated by the monarchy as in eras past, religious reformation was coming from the masses. This is an account that puts constitutional debates firmly back into the story of the Civil War and provides some fascinating insights into the economic and social factors which drove conflict and change. Oxford professor Jonathan Healey makes it clear in The Blazing World that the figures discussed within — Oliver Cromwell, William Laud, and the Stuart monarchs from James I to Charles II, among a cast of many more — could only have existed during their unique 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.

What’s heartening is the story’s suggestion that the long arc of history tends to bend, however slowly, toward improvement. Cavendish published The Blazing World on two separate occasions, in 1666 and 1668, and each time, she published both a combined edition (with Observations upon Experimental Philosophy) and a standalone edition for “ladies [who] take no delight in Philosophical Arguments. An unapologetic narrative history that draws the focus from the Tudors and onto the fascinating Stuart age can only help to freshen the air of current historical discourse. He regards key stages in the political and intellectual history of revolutionary England as 'steps on a longer journey' toward modern democracy.In many previous histories of the time, the battles and Cromwell’s subsequent rise to power were the pivotal moments, with the war pushing a newly created “middling class” toward the forefront. Within a few more years the king had been executed, the monarchy and House of Lords abolished, and Ireland and Scotland brutally conquered. As the notable Marxist historian Christopher Hill asserted, this was period of great political and intellectual excitement, a period where the old world could be transformed. 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. The author speculates that post-Civil War England might have taken a different direction under the stewardship of a more constitutionally minded leader such as John Lambert, who he describes as a 'constitutional genius' (an interesting judgment on someone who came up with a constitution which failed).