The Blazing World

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AN ECONOMIST AND NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • 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
 
“[Healy] 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…. Wryly humorous and occasionally bawdy”— The Wall Street Journal

The seventeenth century was a revolutionary age for the English. It started as they suddenly found themselves ruled by a Scotsman, and it ended in the shadow of an invasion by the Dutch. Under James I, England 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 Parliament asserted itself like never before. There were no boundaries to politics. In fiery, plague-ridden London, in coffee shops and alehouses, new ideas were forged that were angry, populist, and almost impossible for monarchs to control.

But the story of this century is less well known than it should be. Myths have grown around key figures. People may know about the Gunpowder Plot and the Great Fire of London, but the Civil War is a half-remembered mystery to many. And yet the seventeenth century has never seemed more relevant. The British constitution is once again being bent and contorted, and there is a clash of ideologies reminiscent of when Roundhead fought Cavalier.

The Blazing World is the story of this strange, twisting, fascinating century. It shows a society in sparkling detail. It was a new world of wealth, creativity, and daring curiosity, but also of greed, pugnacious arrogance, and colonial violence.“The point of Jonathan Healey’s new book, The Blazing World, is to acknowledge all the complexities of the [civil wars] but still to see it as a real revolution of political thought—to recapture a lost moment when a radically democratic commonwealth seemed possible. . . . [Healey] writes with pace and fire and an unusually sharp sense of character and humor. . . . With the eclectic, wide-angle vision of the new social history, Healey shows that ideas and attitudes, rhetoric and revelations, rising from the ground up, can drive social transformation.” —Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker

“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

“Healey’s book is refreshing for its energetic writing, engaging wit and sound foundation in recent historical scholarship. . . .  Rather than advancing a new interpretation, Healey captures the vitality and turbulence of 17th-century England in an effective retelling, with many more players than the typical cast of kings and queens. . . . While narrating this tempestuous past, Healey has an eye on the present. He regards key stages in the political and intellectual history of revolutionary England as ‘steps on a longer journey’ toward modern democracy. . . . This readable and informative overview evokes a lost world which, for better or worse, ‘was blazing a path toward our own.’” —David Cressy, The New York Times

“A sparkling account of a period that is crucial for any understanding of the history of the UK, Europe and the world beyond.” —Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads

“The Blazing World tells the story of that crucible era when Englishmen began to think. About God and government, how to limit the monarchy and how ‘the poorest he’ (if not the poorest she) might share in some kind of democracy. Jonathan Healey explains Revolutionary England with great insight and wit, and an objectivity usually lacking in histories written with an inclination towards one side or the other. The book helps us to understand how and why, 400 years ago, Englishmen came to develop political and religious beliefs for which they were prepared to die and would eventually amalgamate in a way which set Britain (and, ideologically) America on a path to greatness.” —Geoffrey Robertson KC, author of The Tyrannicide Brief

“Healey, a professor of social history at Oxford, offers an ambitious narrative stuffed with engaging detail about the social and political developments that led to the overthrow of the Stuart monarchy, restoration, and shift to a constitutional monarchy following the Glorious Revolution of 1688. . . .  In addition to his keen attention to the lives of ordinary citizens, the author includes portraits of many of the important thinkers and visionaries of the time. . . . ‘The political world we live in today, with regular parliaments and elections, ideologically defined parties [and] a vibrant press . . . was born in the seventeenth century,’ writes Healey. ‘For this . . . the story told here remains fascinating and vital to this day.’ Most readers will agree. An educative history and fresh civics lesson for a new generation.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“A colourful history of the Stuart age. . . . This lively and mischievous book guides us through a dangerous revolutionary century. . . . There’s a reticence about taking on such a complex and turbulent period, but the rewards, as The Blazing World manifestly demonstrates, are very great. . . . This is a wonderful book, exhaustively researched, vigorously argued and teeming with the furious joy of 17th-century life.” —Jessie Childs, The Times
 
“The tempo never slackens in this erudite book.” —The Economist

“The English Civil War that beheaded King Charles I in 1649 and the Glorious Revolution that kicked his son James II out of England in 1688 were epochal events that birthed religious freedom and democratic accountability, according to this sweeping study. . . . Healey’s elegant narrative provides a sure guide through the century’s labyrinthine political intrigues while analyzing deeper social dynamics that he crystallizes in dramatic scenes of hierarchies being suddenly upended. . . .  The result is a bracing history of a time and place that created the modern world.” —Publishers Weekly

“[A] lively, compelling and combative study of the most dramatic and consequential century in English history. . . . The Blazing World offers a thrilling panorama of the period, from perspectives high and low, told with a winning combination of impish wit, sound judgment, and serious scholarship. . . . It will delight those new to its extraordinary age, and fire up its grizzled veterans.” —Paul Lay, Telegraph

“One of the many virtues of Jonathan Healey’s exciting new history of England during its most revolutionary period is the skilful way in which he thoroughly dissects the often obscure points of contention while never losing sight of the need to keep the narrative flowing. A rich and compelling account of one of the most fascinating and turbulent periods in all our history.” —Simon Griffith, Mail on Sunday

“An admirably even-handed account. . . . For those new to the subject, Healey’s retelling is exemplary.” —Jerry Brotton, Financial Times

“[An] engaging narrative of seventeenth-century Britain. The nature of political legitimacy, the threats of populist frenzy, the longing for transparent representative structures and the debates over their limits, the power of media and the manipulation of images in political life: as Healey indicates, these are not remote issues. He enables us to see the deep continuities in the period, and to understand how the arguments that dominated the seventeenth century have had a profound and formative effect on Britain’s democracy today.” —Rowan Williams, New Statesman

“A zesty and gripping account of England’s ‘century of revolution.’” —Edward Vallance, Literary Review

“The Blazing World, offering a new history of revolutionary England in the seventeenth century, illustrates how uneasily any new king settles upon the throne. . . . Healey has done extraordinary work in synthesising those academic books on the subject. . . . Courageous and frequently engrossing. . . . By tackling an enormous range of history with vim and intelligence, Healey has provided all of us with a lot to talk about.” —Diane Purkiss, Prospect

“Jonathan Healey’s book is an impressive achievement. It focuses on the English political crises, setting them in an up-to-date social, intellectual and cultural context. Healey’s spare but engaging narrative is brought to life at every stage with individual experiences. The reader is in safe hands, guided by a historian who is on top of the best work on many areas of seventeenth-century life, and who has made his own distinctive contribution to our understanding of seventeenth-century society.” —Michael Braddick, Times Literary Supplement

“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 Critic

“Teems with details . . . The strength of the narrative is its determination to range nationwide, as metropolitan affairs affected the lives of ordinary folk in the shires; this is history told from the bottom up. Dr Healey deals with the major historical events with assurance and forensic insight . . . A triumph of exposition, illuminating a blazing time of revolution in which was forged a new world order.” —Timothy Mowl, Country Life

“Capturing a century such as this in one breath is not for the faint-hearted. . . . An unapologetic narrative history that draws the focus from the Tudors and onto the fascinating Stuart age can only help to freshen the air of current historical discourse. In this sense, Healey’s book is blazing trails.” —Nadine Akkerman, History Today

“Healey’s prose is precise but colloquial. He presents complex arguments, but delivers them in a laid back, often jocular manner. . . .  He tackles big subjects—religious dissent, the legal system—but hitches them to piquant stories about individuals previously unknown to history. . . . Events were tumultuous, but Healey persuasively shows us that thoughts were as thrilling and sometimes as wild. . . . Compendious and lucid, The Blazing World is an engaging addition to the historical literature on period.” —Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Spectator
 
“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 recognised for its importance and interest. . . . 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. . . . Painstakingly researched and elegantly written, The Blazing World is that rare achievement—a window into the past that is at once profoundly different and yet startlingly familiar.” —Dr Linda Porter, Writing Desk

“Vast 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

“The 17th century was the most dramatic and consequential in British history, the period during which the modern world was formed, and Jonathan Healey is as assured a guide to its twists and turns, its tragedies and triumphs as one could wish for. The Blazing World is a triumph of scholarship and concision.” —Paul Lay, historian, author of Providence Lost
 
“Here a familiar and very important story is told with exceptional clarity and vigour, and plenty of very unfamiliar anecdotes and characters, drawn from all over the nation and all of Stuart society” —Ronald Hutton, author of Pagan Britain and The Making of Oliver Cromwell

“An erudite but readable history of a remarkable century. Contemporary voices, unearthed from the archive, convey the texture of the times and bring events to life.” —Dr. Margarette Lincoln, Visiting Researcher at the University of Portsmouth and Curator Emeritus at the National Maritime MuseumJONATHAN HEALEY is a historian of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and author of The First Century of Welfare: Poverty and Poor Relief in Lancashire, 1620–1730. He is associate professor in social history at Oxford University, where he earned his doctorate in 2008. He lives in Oxford.Part One

1603−29

The Hearts of Thy Subjects

1

St James’s Day

When Hempe is Spun, England’s done.

Late Tudor English Prophecy

Probably the strangest way anyone celebrated the accession of King James I of England was when a gentlewoman in the far north of Lancashire organised a mock wedding in a country church, between two male servants.

The old priory of Cartmel was already, by then, a relic of a lost age. Before the Reformation it had been a monastic foundation, with around a dozen canons, working and praying within the cold stone walls. The nearby villagers welcomed the presence of such a great house, and when Henry VIII closed it down along with the rest of England’s monasteries, several of them joined the great northern rebellion that became known as the Pilgrimage of Grace. At least ten of them, plus four of the canons, were hanged for doing so.

After the rebellion failed, the priory was shut. But the surviving villagers were savvy enough to organise a petition to the Tudor king, arguing that in such a poor corner of England they needed the building. Keeping it standing in the centre of the village would ensure, they hoped, that the light of God would continue to shine there. Henry’s government had assented, and Cartmel Priory became Cartmel parish church, spared the destruction visited on most of England’s old monasteries.

The poverty of the village didn’t go away, though, and gradually the lack of investment was bringing the church to a parlous state. By 1600, much of the roof of the chancel was missing, so services were frequently interrupted by the characteristic local rain. Decay had set in.

Around a mile to the north-east of Cartmel church, along a quiet country lane among pasture farms and crumbling stone buildings, lay the rather mediocre grey house of Hampsfell Hall. Crenelated against the Scottish raiders who still occasionally sallied south and took away cattle and sheep, it was the seat of the old gentry Thornborough family.

Thornboroughs had been in Cartmel for nearly two centuries, making fairly little impact, watching the religious makeup of the country change around them as England became Protestant. Around the time of James I’s accession in 1603, they had welcomed a new daughter-in-law, married to Rowland Thornborough, one of the family’s latest sons. Her name was Jane, and she hailed from another gentry family, the Daltons of Thurnham, near Lancaster. The Thornboroughs and the Daltons were locally influential families, possessed of significant farming estates. But they shared another thing, too. They were Catholics.

The day Jane Thornborough picked for her prank was the feast day of St James, 25 July 1604. It was exactly a year since the coronation of the new king at Westminster Abbey, nearly 300 miles away to the south, and to mark this occasion the villagers at Cartmel had organised a special sermon. They had invited one Mr Francis Fletcher, a travelling preacher, to speak. But as Jane Thornborough knew well, St James’s Day was also an important marker in the parish’s festival calendar. For it was the traditional day for the annual ‘rushbearing’ – a ritual in which youngsters garlanded themselves in greenery and carried rushes to strew across the church floor, followed by games and sports in a local field.

It was an unfortunate clash. The festivities would be boisterous, and hardly compatible with the solemnity of a commemorative sermon. Or, to put it another way, the gravity of the sermon was out of keeping with a traditional day of relaxation and sport. So the parish elders had suggested a compromise. Those wishing to bear rushes, they asked, should wait until Mr Fletcher had finished his sermon. Then they could let themselves loose, and the dancing and football could begin. Everyone would be happy.

When St James’s Day came the villagers had gathered in the cool chancel of the church. With the summer morning light shining through the broken roof, Francis Fletcher began proceedings. He ascended the pulpit, opened his Bible and cleared his throat. His audience looked up at him: farmers in their best woollen coats, their wives in their bonnets, squirming children at their sides. As he spoke, ‘dividing the text’, some of the eager parishioners listened keenly. Others settled back and allowed their thoughts to wander, while Fletcher’s words competed with the sounds of the cattle and sheep from the village pastures.

Then, something astonishing happened. Slowly, imperceptibly at first, a noise could be heard in the distance. Gradually, it grew into a deafening cacophony: the thud of drums, the shriek of fifes and the wail of bagpipes. Then came gunshots: loud cracks of powder followed by the fizzing of musket balls against the old stone walls. It was a procession, and soon it had entered the church.

Fletcher the preacher had stopped speaking. The heads of the congregation had turned away from the pulpit, and towards the company of young men, bedecked in greenery, carrying rushes, with many wearing masks over their faces. They were led by a man called William Dawson, farm steward at the Thornboroughs’ Hampsfell Hall. He was carrying a truncheon, acting a role. He was a ‘Lord of Misrule’.

Next, the men divided themselves up into two companies, then marched on through the church, casting their rushes onto the floor as they went. After this, they assembled again at the front. Now, two young lads emerged from their ranks. Of these, one was dressed in a woman’s gown. His name was Oliver Staines and the gown – as at least one member of the congregation was able to recognise – belonged to Jane Thornborough herself.

Someone pushed to the front, carrying a copy of the Book of Common Prayer, one of the key texts of English Protestantism. With the Book open, he turned to the parishioners in the church and started reading. The tone he took was mocking, scornful, as he read the words of the official wedding ceremony, marrying the two men as if they had been husband and wife. Then he told the two men to sit down, inviting them to take the seats the parishioners normally reserved for newlyweds.

By now the pranksters were beginning to file back out of the church. As they left, they had one last hurrah. Coming out into the churchyard, Dawson the Lord of Misrule leapt up on a wall and called a ‘Solemn Oyez’ (‘O-yay, o-yay, o-yay!’). Then, one of his fellows made a declaration, aping the formality of an official pronouncement, passing out paper copies to those watching. The days of Momus had gone, he announced. Momus would tarry here no more. And, with that, the men left, heading out onto a nearby hill, where they played football for the rest of the morning.

A change of leadership is always disorientating, but a change of ruling dynasty was all the more so. In March 1603, the last Tudor ruler of England, Queen Elizabeth I, died at Richmond Palace, the grand seat built by her grandfather Henry VII, on the winding banks of the Thames in the tree-shaded landscape of northern Surrey. With the country in a state of high alert, and watches placed on the coastal towns, the plan to bring in a peaceful succession was put into play. A messenger was sent north to Holyrood in Edinburgh, to King James VI of the Scots. Within a few days, the wily and coarse James was on his way south, following a grand procession down the eastern side of England as the great and good of his new southern realm flocked to give allegiance.

In Elizabeth’s reign, a prophecy had circulated widely: ‘When Hempe is spun, England’s done.’ ‘Hempe’ was an acronym for the Tudor monarchs since the break with Rome: Henry, Edward, Mary and Philip (II of Spain, Mary’s husband), and Elizabeth. Prophecies were taken seriously, as signs of God’s plan, and the belief was that once Elizabeth died, England would collapse into anarchy. But the peaceful accession of James allowed a more benign conclusion: now England and Scotland were under the same ruler. England was done: long live Britain.

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.

The Cartmel wedding was a joke about the collapse of the universe. It was about the uprooting of the social order and the world turned upside down. Specifically, it was celebrating the fact that the world was about to be set the right way up again. Momus was a character who symbolised disorder; his expulsion brought balance.

Raucous processions like this, in which humour was made out of the world turned topsy-turvy, were part of the culture of the age. The most famous kind of procession was the charivari, what in England was called the ‘riding’, or ‘skimmington’. Here, some poor local folk would have offended the parish, perhaps two were living together unmarried, or perhaps a wife dominated her husband. The skimmington, which took its name from a kind of wooden ladle with which a wife might beat her henpecked spouse, was a way of ritually humiliating such transgressors. A procession of villagers would pass through the streets, banging pots and pans and making horn gestures with their fingers, symbolising cuckoldry, and leading an effigy of the couple seated backwards on an ass. The disorder, the noise and the inversion of the expected order all symbolised the way in which the subject of the skimmington had turned the world upside down. It betokens a world where the fabric of order is seen as fragile, where small deviations from social norms could take on a cosmic significance.

What Jane Thornborough organised at Cartmel was a skimmington against Protestantism. Momus, who was widely known from the bestselling Aesop’s Fables, was the Greek god of satire. He represented a world turned upside down. He, the discordant music and the transgressive wedding were saying something straightforward enough: Protestantism had overturned the natural order, it had turned things topsy-turvy. After the procession had left the church (very symbolic), a mock-proclamation announced the end of Momus’s time. The Protestants were being cast out of Cartmel church, fittingly enough a former priory. Their unnatural religion would reign here no more, and the old order could return. Such were the hopes of Catholics like Jane Thornborough when James I came to the English throne.

It was fashionable among some English churchmen to decry the irreligion of the age. It was said that ordinary English folk knew more about Robin Hood than they did the stories in the Bible.7 In Cartmel, when a thorough-minded minister was appointed to the parish in the 1640s, the unfortunate cleric fell to discussing Jesus Christ with an aged local. ‘Oh, sir,’ the old man informed him, ‘I think I heard of the man you speak of, once in a play at Kendal, called a Corpus Christi play, where there was a man on a tree, and blood ran down.

But clergy always bewail the lack of piety shown by their neighbours, and rural folk like the old man at Cartmel have always found ways of mocking over-earnest outsiders. The reality is that the English under James I were profoundly religious. The church remained the focus of life, the most durable building in most parishes and one which hosted not just baptisms, marriages and funerals, but parish meetings, and – of course – regular services which people were obliged to attend by law. The landscape was dotted with reminders of the Christian faith, from wayside crosses and holy wells to the very many features that were associated with the saints or with the devil. The very idioms with which people spoke were saturated with Scripture.

As the Stuart age began, England was entering a new phase of what was now an old battle. In the sixteenth century, the country had ripped itself away from Roman Catholicism, much to the shock and terror of her own people. Most of the old monasteries had been torn down in the ‘fatal thunderclap’ that followed Henry VIII’s break with centuries of tradition, and despite a temporary swing back to Catholicism under his eldest child, Mary I (r. 1553−8), England had slowly clawed its way towards being a truly Protestant nation. Mary’s younger sister Elizabeth had forged a new Church, backed by conformity enforced by law. In some ways it ploughed a middle path, the famous via media between the Catholicism of Rome and the hardline Protestantism practised in Geneva, but Elizabeth’s Church was firmly Reformed, and although tradition claims she didn’t wish to ‘make windows into men’s souls’, the apparatus of her state was quite happy to do so, fining those who refused to come to Protestant church services and executing Jesuits and the roving Catholic priests who began coming into the country as European powers tried to win England back to Rome.

Within English Protestantism there was still considerable debate about church government, about the liturgy (ritual practice during worship) and about grace (how one got to heaven). The central texts, the English Bible, the Book of Common Prayer and the Thirty-Nine Articles (which stated the doctrine and practice of the Church of England), contained enough ambiguity for a range of viewpoints to have developed. Broadly speaking, most churchmen in 1603 were Calvinist, that is, they subscribed to a form of Protestantism rooted in the works of John Calvin, a Frenchman who had settled in Geneva and turned it into a beacon of the Reformed faith. Calvinism held that man was inherently depraved, but God’s grace had been made available to a small subset of humans, who were thus predestined to heaven, while the remainder of mankind were predestined for hell. Calvinists saw the word of God as especially important, and thus emphasised sermons, private prayer and the reading of Scripture. The elaborate ceremonies of pre-Reformation worship they viewed with suspicion.

Among the English Calvinists some of the trickiest debates were over the organisation of the Church and the faithful. One particularly difficult issue was the role of bishops. Were they sanctioned by divine law, or merely by established custom? Or should they be abolished outright, and churches ruled by elected assemblies of elders.US

Additional information

Weight	31.4 oz
Dimensions	1.4200 × 6.6100 × 9.5400 in
Imprint	Knopf
Format	General Trade
ISBN-13	09780593318355
ISBN-10	0593318358
Author	Jonathan Healey
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	HIS015040, HIS031000
Subjects	historical books, history of england, british empire, english history, European history, HIS031000, history books for adults, history gifts, gifts for history buffs, british history, history buff gifts, history teacher gifts, british gifts, Scottish history, world history book, HIS015040, the blazing world, the blazing world jonathan healey, Sociology, england, british, historical, war, american history, british monarchy, society, military, history, political science, revolution, Scotland, britain, socialism, history books, world history, modernism