I am also glad to see more and more historians drawing attention to what a nasty, repressive, cruel regime the Restoration was. Most of what we were taught in school was essentially Royalist propaganda. I get a sense that Jonathan Healey thinks that the royals can be thankful that Oliver Cromwell made such a hash of running Britain as a republic following victory in the Civil War, thereby allowing for the return of monarchy. This book details many such changes in fortunes and makes clear that most modern aristocrats wouldn’t have managed to hang on to their titles over the last few centuries without the peace and stability of democracy. An irony if ever there was one. It is tempting to use a book such as this to draw parallels with the England and United Kingdom of today, and indeed many of the other reviewers of Healey’s work have sought to do just that. For sure, there are some parallels- both were/are times of great national division and culture wars, times where the nature of the Island nations’ relationship with Europe were questioned. There is also a certain parallel in the questioning of the nature of monarchy today with that of the 1600’s, although it is fair to say that Charles III doesn’t run quite the same risk of losing his crown and his head as his ancestor Charles I (indeed, the ghost of Oliver Cromwell still haunts English republicanism to this day). The 17th century saw an explosion of new ways of disseminating information and spreading news and, also then as now, disinformation. 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. Britain today finds itself in the grip of volatility and division, as it did in the C17th. But trying to draw more comparisons starts to become stretched and forced. The 17th century is, as the author himself concludes, unique and entirely alien to any that came before or after. Jonathan Healey’s The Blazing World makes a convincing argument that the turbulent era qualifies as truly ‘revolutionary,’ not simply because of its cascading political upheavals, but in terms of far-reaching changes within society. The author, a professor at Oxford University, delivers a clearsighted narrative of 17th-century England, deftly integrating original and insightful analysis of underlying social phenomena and expressing his enthusiasm in brisk, wryly humorous and occasionally bawdy prose.” —Stephen Brumwell, The Wall Street Journal

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. Well the book covers the events from King James death in 1604 to the crowning of William of Orange in, the core of the book is focused on the events leading up to and through out the English Civil War. A fascinating time when Parliament deposed King Charles, put him on trial and then executed him. The king's death would usher an almost 10 year of republican rule in England. Many of the most radical factions in Parliament had wanted to bring about universal male sufferage and other political reforms. The civil war also had a strong religious aspect with the King's downfall bringing a very strict strain of Protestantism in the form of Puritanism. The Puritans not only swept away much of the most formal trappings of the Church of England, they also banned or limited more popular religious culture such as Christmas 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 CriticHealey vividly describes all the political and social upheavals of the 1600s: from the Guy Fawkes Gunpowder Plot of 1605, through the chaos of the civil wars, the execution of King Charles I, the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, the Restoration of the monarchy, to the Glorious Revolution of 1688. It was a century of revolutions which set the stage for the modern concept of representative government. Perhaps the most important evolution which the civil war helped to bring about was the end of absolutism and the divine right of kings. Even though the kings, and indeed Cromwell, dismissed Parliament several times, by the end of the century Parliament was in the ascendancy with power in the hands of the people and the monarch's wings clipped. Yet even today at the recent coronation we saw the bizarre spectacle of the Archbishop of Canterbury anointing Charles III as if he really believes, perhaps he does, that God has put Charles on the throne.

Of course I knew about the stunning execution of King Charles in the Banqueting House, which I have had the opportunity to tour in the past decade after a recent restoration, and I knew about Oliver Cromwell's everyman reign. But I wanted to learn more about the drivers behind these great events. And Healey's history open my eyes to a century of much broader and deeper change than I had imagined. "[The] gentry and middling sort were becoming more engaged with law, politics,and government. It meant that any ruler, or administration, that wanted to succeed in governing England would have to work with and through these groups." (p. 39). 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. "There are just over 600 surviving titles per year in the 1630s. . . . In 1641, there are 2,042" (p. 145), driving the "politicisation of the English population" (p. 171) in a "clash of ideologies, as often as not between members of the same class." (p. 182) The seventeenth century began as the English suddenly found themselves ruled by a Scotsman, and ended in the shadow of an invasion by the Dutch. Under James I, the country 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 no boundaries to politics. In the coffee shops and alehouses of plague-ridden London, new ideas were forged that were angry, populist and almost impossible for monarchs to control.Charles I was a disaster. He triggered a civil war. He was captured and beheaded by Parliament. For the next 11 years there was no King. England was ruled by Parliament and then by Oliver Cromwell, acting as a "Protector". Any student of US History would be well served by understanding the British Civil War period. The founders of the US and framers of the constitution and bill of rights were *very* familiar with those decades and it absolutely shaped the US government design and balances of power. The idea that the founders would have had *any* intention of allowing - for example - the vice president of the US to decide which electors were valid, is as absurd as it comes. A fresh, exciting, “readable and informative ” history ( The New York Times ) of seventeenth-century England, a time of revolution when society was on fire and simultaneously forging the modern world . • “Recapture[s] a lost moment when a radically democratic commonwealth seemed possible.”—Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker There were other signs, though, that the older, more apocalyptic prophecy might still be the true one. Intellectuals and commentators of the day pored over cosmic events to assess whether the universe lay unbalanced and whether God’s wrath was imminent. What they saw did not bring comfort. They looked at England and saw a land full of witches:‘They abound in all places,’ fretted the Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, Edmund Anderson. People tried to divine signs of the future in meteorological phenomena like unusual tempests, and strange biological prodigies, such as ‘monstrous’ human births, and saw warnings from God. For, as it was said, ‘God doth premonish before he doth punish.’ There were blazing stars in the heavens, which were sure to be signs of cosmic disturbance. Comets, such as those of 1577 and 1580, foretold trouble, and most worrying of all, there were great new stars that shone bright enough to be seen in the daytime. One had appeared in 1572 and another would shine in 1604. No one remembered anything like this ever before.

Funder reveals how O’Shaughnessy Blair self-effacingly supported Orwell intellectually, emotionally, medically and financially ... why didn’t Orwell do the same for his wife in her equally serious time of need?’ Jonathan Healy does a magnificent job of telling this story. He focuses on trying to explain what it was like. He does not go deeply into the military tactic of the battles or the minutia of Court or Parliamentary wrangling. He does try to explain the mind set of this religion-soaked world where fine points of theology were matters of life and death. The threat of international Catholicism was more powerful than the communist threat of the 1950s or the recent Islamophobia. Their equivalent to 9/11 was Guy Fawkes' almost successful attempt to blow up Parliament and the King. As has been said, “history is just one damn thing after another”, but I begin to understand how true this is for the English Civil War, which forms the central section of this book. Although the events cover many years, with unexpected twists and turns, Healey helped me follow the important changes, and the accidents that create historical turning points, and as importantly, when they do not. If I had a minor criticism of the book, it is that some of the analysis might have benefited from more fleshing out. In some cases, casual links and conclusions are drawn without a great deal of explanation. We are told that the so-called 'middling sort' (i.e., yeomen and lesser gentry) were drawn to Puritanism because its theology of pre-destination fitted with their own experience of worldly success 3. Elsewhere, the idea of Royal absolutism is described as a 'reaction' to the idea that monarchs were accountable to those they ruled. 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. 4 To be fair to the author, they are all interesting ideas worth considering, and there may be a lot of research and thought underlying them. But they are dealt with in a cursory fashion in the book, whilst appearing to justify closer inspection. ConclusionVast yet intimate, scholarly yet accessible, this is narrative history at its best. Jonathan Healey’s The Blazing World blazes indeed: a huge achievement.” —Miranda Malins, novelist, author of The Puritan Princess It was interesting to see the rise and fall of the aristocracy as well. A man could come from relatively humble beginnings and become a Duke in one lifetime. And lose their titles, lands (and heads) even faster.