The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England

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The nature of political legitimacy, the threats of populist frenzy, the longing for transparent representative structures and the debates over their limits, the power of media and the manipulation of images in political life: as Healey indicates, these are not remote issues.

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. A sparkling account of a period that is crucial for any understanding of the history of the UK, Europe and the world beyond. There's a reticence about taking on such a complex and turbulent period, but the rewards, as The Blazing World manifestly demonstrates, are very great . Unlike Clare Jackson's book, with its focuses on politics and foreign affairs, the Blazing World is broader in its approach: at its core is still a relatively standard narrative history of the key political and military events; but this is interspersed with analysis of English society and economics which gives a good sense of what England was like at the time and how that impacted on politics.

This readable and informative overview evokes a lost world which, for better or worse, 'was blazing a path toward our own. As in so many other factional disputes like enumerated above, officers and fighting men often had different political and religious viewpoints, which may explain why no military coup was attempted through the revolutionary century. There are conspiracies, battles and executions aplenty, plus apocalyptic scourges of pestilence and fire in 1665-66.

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 . In addition to his keen attention to the lives of ordinary citizens, the author includes portraits of many of the important thinkers and visionaries of the time. The end of the reign of Elizabeth I was marked by famine, sky-high crime rates, communal tensions (accusations of witchcraft abounded) and barely sustainable population growth, as well as a succession crisis.The reader is in safe hands, guided by a historian who is on top of the best work on many areas of seventeenth-century life, and who has made his own distinctive contribution to our understanding of seventeenth-century society. What Healey doesn’t show (something common to many chroniclers of the period) is where the radicals that seized the NMA and thus control of the English political agenda came from. 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. The drawback of such a high level survey is that the detailed pieces, particularly in the political realm of shifting alliances and changing titles, can be very confusing when painted with such broad strokes. Another striking finding for me was how, like today, the fulcrum of the battle lines can seem trivial to outsiders and transcendent to those forming them.

England was visited by the plague, London destroyed by the great fire, religious freedoms were granted and restricted, and one more "Glorious" revolution replaced one royal line with another steering through the multi-dimensional clashes of the century. At the beginning of the 1600s, harvests were good, so England experienced a period of increased prosperity. Although the "age of revolution" in America and France was a century in the future, the ferment was rising in England now, driven in part by rising literacy and an explosion in the publishing of pamphlets for popular consumption. I did enjoy the fact the Puritans got quite so hot under the collar about the Book of Sports (declarations by James I and Charles I that people were allowed to have fun on Sundays) – it's satisfying when people from the past live up to stereotypes, and I couldn't help feeling that the Puritans didn't do a lot to help their eventual reputations. The interactions among religious dissenters and the rumblings over the proper roles of Parliament and the Crown were so subtle and complex that even the slightest change — what if Charles I had accepted political reforms?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.

Its hard to believe that one century in England saw religious strife, plague, a devastating London fire, and three coups. With the levying of taxes to pay for a war to enforce religious conformities already under debate, the stage was set for conflict. The 1600's gave us so much else entertainingly and so interestingly written about by John Healey in The Blazing World.

Religious extremism and movements such as Puritanism were bumping up against modernism and free thinking, superstition was clashing with science. The 17th century is, as the For perhaps the first time, those beneath the gentry engaged with new ideas and had the confidence to take their debates out of the taverns and into Parliament. A] lively, compelling and combative study of the most dramatic and consequential century in English history. In contrast, Jonathan Healey's specialism is social and economic history, and, in my opinion, his book provides the more rounded assessment of not only happened, but what things were like at the time.