BOOK REVIEW : THE BLAZING WORLD

 

The Blazing World by Jonathan Healey : England's revolutionary century. Heady Times.

Writing An Accessible history of Britain in the turbulent 17th century, as Jonathan Healey sets out to do in '' The Blazing World '', is a noble aim.

Starting with the seeds of one revolution and ending with a second, the period teems with ideas about what it means to be a citizen as opposed to a subject, and about how God should be worshipped.

By the end of it, a modern concept of the state was emerging.Yet even in Britain, it is neglected. 

At the turn of the century nine out of ten people lived in the countryside. A tiny minority were literate, Famine and plague were regular scourges; a rising population and stagnant economy spelt misery. Fear of witchcraft was common, as were executions for petty crimes.

Fornication could land you in court. By 1700 trade had replaced farming as the mainstay of a burgeoning market economy.

Relief from extreme poverty was mandated by the Parliament. Towns were hubs of commerce and culture; religious dissent was accept by a relatively tolerant Anglican elite. Rich Protestant England was a force in Europe.

A continuous thread runs from the accession of England's first Stuart king, James 1, in 1603, to the dynasty's fall in the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688-89. Yet historian often balk at telling the tumultuous, ideologically charged story in one go.

First come increasing resistance to absolutism and religious intolerance, civil war, the parliamentary army's victory, the execution of Charles 1, and the establishment of Protectorate under Oliver Cromwell. 

Next, the monarchy's restoration under Charles Ii; finally the disastrous reign of James II and invitation to William of Orange to take his place and establish a proto-constitutional monarchy.

Mr Healey takes on the whole saga in under 500 pages. It begins when the first James acceded to throne and was struck by England's apparent wealth compared with his native Scotland. But the monarchy itself was chronically broke, a condition made worse by the excesses of his court.

Tensions ensued between his need for cash [ he even sold peerages ] and Parliament's traditional control over the royal purse strings. 

In an era in which absolutism had become the norm across Europe but was relatively newfangled notion in England - such restraints were seen first by James, then by his son Charles, as a direct challenge to the ''divine right of kings''. All the dynasty's calamities sprang from the clash.

A far less canny operator than his father, the priggish Charles 1 was widely seen by trampling over ancient English liberties.

Initially, this was a bigger cause for rebellion than the novel idea of government by and for the people : that developed later, particularly in the ranks of the radicalised parliamentary army.

When the civil war began in 1642, nobody thought it would lead to the decapitation of a king and advent of a republic [albeit a short-lived one].

The tempo never slackens in this erudite book. But sometimes the reader feels bombarded by detail [all those parliaments, the Short, the Long, the Rump......]

Worse, there is too little attempt to flesh out the luminaries of the age, such as the outrageous editor and propagandist Marchamont Nedham, or John Lambert, the brilliant parliamentary general who drafted England's first written constitution, and whom the author thinks would have made a more enlightened Lord Protector than Cromwell.

Mr. Healey's is avowedly a narrative history. A bit more attention to its characters would not have gone amiss.

The World Students Society thanks The Economist.