The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England

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Through 100 years of turbulence arose a “remarkable new world, one which — for better or worse — was blazing a path towards our own ”. As he puts it at the end of this impressive history: “The people who lived in the seventeenth c entur y were their own . Waseem Ahmed is a third year History PhD student at University College London working on a thesis entitled Everyday Politics in Revolutionary England, 1649-1660. It is true, as Healey suggests, that the republic was brought about by a minority, but its ability to govern was reliant on obtaining the co-operation of the wider populace.

In January, 1642, the King entered Parliament and tried to arrest a handful of its more obnoxious members; tensions escalated, and Parliament passed the Militia Ordinance, awarding itself the right to raise its own fighting force, which—a significant part of the story—it was able to do with what must have seemed to the Royalists frightening ease, drawing as it could on the foundation of the London civic militia. By the end of the period, government was said to have resembled a situation closer to Elizabeth II than Elizabeth I. Wearing shining star-stone clothes and standing on the fish-men’s backs, so that she appears to be walking on water, the Empress gives an impassioned speech in defense of her country. This, in the end, is perhaps the greatest aspect of his approach to this blazing world: not to judge or patronise it, nor force its figures to fit the preoccupations or assumptions of the present, but instead to respect and seek to understand it.Healey provides extensive coverage of the period, but he too characterises the period as one of a gradual trek back towards a monarchical restoration. 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. If people argue over religion, it is because religion is an extension of power; the squabbles about pulpits are really squabbles about politics.

The bear-men, who live near the Blazing World’s icy North Pole, find the merchant’s ship and rescue the Lady. On these terms, this really was a revolutionary age, with at least seven seismic resets between 1640 and 1688. First, there was the fundamentalist Nominated Assembly, or Barebone’s Parliament, which Cromwell disbanded in favour of the settlement devised by the soldier and intellectual John Lambert – for whom Healey, a fellow Yorkshireman, cannot disguise his admiration. With the levying of taxes to pay for a war to enforce religious conformities already under debate, the stage was set for conflict.And so we spend time thinking about the differences, say, between George Steinbrenner and his son Hal, and what that means for the fate of the Yankees, with the same nervous equanimity that seventeenth-century people had when thinking about the traits and limitations of an obviously dim-witted Royal Family. Instead, he was tried for treason, the first time in human memory that this had happened to a monarch, and, in 1649, he was beheaded.