Review of The Blazing World, by Jonathan Healey, pub. Bloomsbury 2023

‘We sought to satisfy all men, and it was well; but in going to do it we have dissatisfied all men.’ Edward Sexby

The subtitle of this is “A New History of Revolutionary England”; in effect it’s an account of the 17th century and a few years beyond. It runs chronologically through the reigns of James I, Charles I and the Republic; then with the opening of the Charles II section, there’s what feels like an odd hiatus, digressing on chatty sketches of individuals like Margaret Cavendish and John Aubrey, after which we plunge back into the rest of Charles II, James II and the Glorious Revolution.

It so happens I’ve lately been reading a lot of histories covering revolutionary periods – 1525, I789, 1830, 1848 – and certain motifs seem to be common to all of them. The way in which, to quote the present volume, “harsh economic conditions over the winter, stemming ultimately from a poor harvest, were blamed on the government”; the tendency of the populace to expect any change of government to bring about paradise on earth by next week at the latest – as Edward Nedham remarked, the return of Charles II was widely expected to result in “peace and no taxes”. Above all, the central paradox of most revolutions: that they are driven by the “middling sort”, in the phrase of the time, the educated middle classes who want more say in affairs for themselves but who need the working classes to do most of the actual fighting for it. If the revolution succeeds, this inevitably leads to trouble, because the property-owning middle class is generally every bit as averse to government by “the mob” as to autocracy, and while those who did the fighting naturally expect some reward, the instigators of the revolt may prove unwilling to grant anything like a universal franchise

Sure enough, here we find Rainborough advocating universal male suffrage, while Ireton, on the other hand, believed voting rights should be vested in those who owned property: those with what he termed ‘a permanent fixed interest’ in the nation (though not property-owning females, obviously…). The parliamentary commander Essex, meanwhile, worried “that they were replacing ‘the yoke of the king’ with that of ‘the common people’. ‘I am determined,’ he announced, ‘to devote my life to repressing the audacity of the people.’” Charles I, on trial, was no better: “When Charles himself listened to his people testify against him, he was sarcastic and scornful, pulling faces and scoffing”. By the end of the century, perhaps unsurprisingly, what had been achieved was “a democracy of property owners” with, still, a very limited franchise – which was admittedly an improvement on the situation a hundred years before. Nor could Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, arguing that the people were born free, had the right to choose their own governors and therefore also the liberty to depose those rulers if they transgressed the laws, be imagined in print at the start of this period.

If you want a history of events in the entire 17th century, this is probably as good as any. It does a good job of bringing out the counter-productive strife among the Parliamentarians and the remarkable degree of petty spite and vindictiveness of which both Charles I and II were capable; also the limitless deviousness and deceit of Charles I, forever assuring people of one thing while doing or plotting another. It is also good at highlighting the sort of minor incident that sticks in the mind, often because it illustrates something beyond itself – like, for instance, the Marquess of Hamilton’s attempt to land at the Firth of Forth, frustrated by his own mother, who brandished a pistol and threatened to shoot him, illustrating how polarized society had become. And the picture of Charles I at the Revocation, “intervening with a ‘great deal of spleen’ and threatening to write the names of his opponents down on a list” is irresistibly reminiscent of Philip Madoc’s Nazi U-boat captain from Dad’s Army.

However, for the period up to the Restoration, I would still prefer Stevie Davies’s Unbridled Spirits.  Though it especially foregrounds the women of the time, for my money it still gives a more vivid picture of the whole. There is also the matter of prose style; Davies’s English is impeccable, which cannot be said of Healey’s, even if he does teach at Oxford. For one thing, he can’t seem to conjugate, or indeed differentiate, the verbs “to lie” and “to lay”. He has “the bloodshed of the Second Civil War laying heavy on their minds” when it should be “lying”, and we are told that Charles “lay his head down” on the block, rather than “laid”. He also has the annoying modern habit of writing “quite the” when he means “quite a” (“It was quite the statement.”). I will, however, charitably assume that an editor, perhaps relying on a spellcheck and forgetting that it can’t recognise homonyms, was responsible for the awful typo, “While the Gunpowder Plotters were meeting their grizzly fate” – I mean, granted their end was not pleasant, but I never knew they’d been eaten by bears…