In comparison with the over-hyped ‘Disneyfication’ of the Tudors, the 17th century has almost slipped from popular consciousness. This is little short of astonishing, given its drama and cast of extraordinary personalities. In most English schools the study of History has been whittled down to Henry VIII and the two World Wars of the twentieth century, as if nothing of any note happened in between. Yet in the seventeenth century the English executed one king for treason, deposed another and lived as a republic for eleven years.
I have sometimes wondered whether, if fifty people were stopped on any English High Street, how many of them would even know about our non-monarchical experiment. I suspect the number would be vanishingly small – and also that readers of the tabloid press might even be offended by the notion, despite the current crisis of the House of Windsor. Yet the seventeenth century is the gateway to the world in which we live, still strange enough to be exotic but also less distant than the sixteenth. As an undergraduate I did my ‘long essay’ (it would now be called a dissertation) on the Civil Wars. I can still remember the thrill of reading the Putney Debates for the first time. To me, there was something recognizably ‘modern’ in these discussions.
I still smile when I remember the judgement passed on the participants in the Civil Wars by ‘1066 And All That’: the Cavaliers were ‘Wrong but Wromantic’ while the Roundheads were ‘Right but Repulsive’. Like most witty epithets, it contains a grain of truth. But there was, of course, more to the seventeenth century than the Civil Wars and in his wide-ranging new history of revolutionary England, Jonathan Healey has given us a masterly account of a period that urgently needs to be reclaimed and recognized for its importance and interest.
We start with James I, the first Stuart king, whose reign tends to be overlooked nowadays. Healey demonstrates the strengths as well as the weaknesses of his rule and, through the judicious and always entertaining use of anecdotes with which the book is liberally supplied, reveals the backdrop to the coming storm.
He is especially good on the economic woes of the Jacobean period, the run of bad harvests that caused so much suffering, James’s visceral dislike of Puritans (possibly an outcome of his harsh, loveless upbringing during his long minority as James VI of Scotland) and the stirrings of disquiet in parliament. He also emphasises the crucial importance of the proliferation of print and its effect on society, which would only grow as the century progressed.
Nor does he overlook the more familiar names of the reign, especially the Duke of Buckingham, whose ambition, he says, ‘soared like a comet, though his talent would stutter like a damp sparkler’. There are many more of these pithy pen-portraits for readers to enjoy throughout the book. To give just one further example, admirers of Prince Rupert, once every schoolgirl’s romantic hero, will be disconcerted to see him dismissed as ‘a thuggish toff.’
The bulk of the book deals, as one would expect, with the Civil Wars. Healey’s narrative of the course of the conflict and especially of that most confusing of years, 1647, when the fighting had halted but the conflict was not over, is clear and well-balanced. He handles the proliferation of ideas, the role of the Army and the tragic inability of Charles I to comprehend the real weakness of his position, which led to renewed bloodshed the following year, with consummate skill.
Again, we see the importance of pamphlets and news-sheets in crystallizing arguments about the very future of England. Men like Ireton and Lambert, almost forgotten figures now, are brought vividly to life. Lambert, in particular, a fine soldier and author of England’s only written constitution, ‘The Instrument of Government’, emerges from these pages as one of the great lost figures of English history. He still awaits a biographer who can do him justice.
Healey is also illuminating on the two most well-known players in the drama. His judgement on Charles I will not comfort Royalist historians but I think it is sound. ‘Charles himself,’ he writes,’ must carry much of the blame: he had been a stuffy authoritarian, but never ruthless enough to be a successful tyrant.’ This encapsulates Charles’s tragedy perfectly. The country, of course, suffered hugely as a result. Yet Healey is no great admirer of Cromwell, either, seeing him as a man of overweening ambition but with too narrow a vision to ensure the success of the republican experiment. The latter, I think, is unarguable.
On Cromwell’s ambition much depends on whether his constant references to God’s providence were merely hypocritical excuses for opportunistic aggrandizement of power. ‘What if a man should take upon himself to be king?’, Oliver is said to have mused to Bulstrode Whitelocke. He did, of course, refuse the title when it was offered to him. But his style of government made the return of monarchy easier. Again, Healey is admirably succinct and clear on the fall of the republic in 1660, when the tensions between the Army and the Rump Parliament, rumbling beneath the surface for years, came disastrously out in the open again.
Charles II’s reign began with widespread rejoicing and a broad base of support. Good will soon dissipated amid the relentless discrimination against Protestant dissenters, notably the Quakers (and, later, Catholics as well), humiliating defeats in war against the Dutch, the horrors of plague and fire, and distaste at the perceived moral depravity of the court.
Healey’s Charles II is a fun-loving party animal who simply could not keep his penis in his breeches. But we are also reminded of the growing interest in science, with the creation of the Royal Society and the many advances of the time in astronomy, cartography, agriculture and social provision. Healey makes the point, perhaps a new one to many people, that the English knew so much more about themselves and their country by the end of the seventeenth century.
On Charles II’s ill-fated younger brother, James II, Healey is, understandably, brief. During the Exclusion Crisis of 1679-81 attempts were made to bar the Catholic Duke of York from ascending the throne. Charles II, had a large tally of illegitimate children, including plenty of sons, but no legitimate male heir. Charles was far from fond of James but believed implicitly in the importance of legitimate succession. Despite James’s Catholicism, he was accepted as king in 1685 and faced down a rebellion by the eldest of his brother’s offspring, the Duke of Monmouth.
However, James’s attempts to combine better treatment for his co-religionists with a palpable drift towards absolutism became much more alarming when his wife, Mary of Modena, produced an apparently healthy male heir in the summer of 1688. As Healey puts it: ‘At the sound of a screaming newborn, the European balance of power was overturned.’ T
he prospect of a pro-French Catholic monarchy in the British Isles was too much for James’s nephew, the Protestant William of Orange, husband of Princess Mary, James’s elder daughter by his first wife, and, until then, his heir. Supported by the Protestant establishment, William invaded and was offered the throne in his own and his wife’s names. James famously fled, dropping the Great Seal in the Thames as he left. This petulant act did little to impede the opposition and, despite the ‘Glorious Revolution’ being much less glorious than it has generally been depicted, especially in Scotland, the Stuarts were still on the throne at the turn of the eighteenth century.
The ideals of those who had supported the ‘Good Old Cause’ of republicanism in England might, at first glance, seem to have been crushed forever. Yet they found root in the American colonies, cherished by those Commonwealthmen who had fled after Charles II’s restoration. It was a small flame but one never entirely extinguished, until it burst forth again a century later. From the American Revolution it leaped across the Atlantic to France and its light shines still, however dimly, on the world in which we live.
Sitting down to write the history of this extraordinarily eventful period of English history is a task not for the faint-hearted. Perhaps the greatest strength of Jonathan Healey’s book is how much it reveals of the lives and interests of those whom their contemporaries were pleased to describe as ‘the middling sort’. During the seventeenth century their voices were being raised – and heard – more vociferously and eloquently as the years went by. He is also very good on the role of women in society. Indeed, his title is taken from a work of science fiction by the eccentric Margaret Cavendish, duchess of Newcastle, who fancied herself something of a polymath.
Painstakingly researched and elegantly written, The Blazing World is that rare achievement – a window into a past that is at once profoundly different and yet startlingly familiar. It deserves every success.
Linda Porter
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Linda Porter has a B.A. and a D.Phil from the University of York. She spent nearly ten years lecturing in New York, at Fordham and City Universities among others, before returning with her American husband and daughter to England, where she embarked on a complete change of career. For more than twenty years she worked as a senior public relations practitioner in BT, introducing a ground-breaking international public relations programme during the years of BT’s international expansion. The attractions of early retirement were too good to miss and she has gone back to historical writing as well as reviewing for the BBC History Magazine, The Literary Review and History Today.. Find out more at Linda’s website http://lindaporter.net/ and follow Linda on Twitter @DrLindaPorter1Linda Porter’s most recent book is Mistresses: sex and scandal at the court of Charles II
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