The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England

Product Information

These political novices had to build a new world upon the ruins of the old. By the end of the Civil Wars, around 6 2,000 soldiers were dead; perhaps 100,000 more had died from war-related disease; 150 towns had been severely damaged and 10,000 homes destroyed. Within a few more years the king had been executed, the monarchy and House of Lords abolished, and Ireland and Scotland brutally conquered. Unfortunately, the Stuart kings Charles II and James II’s style of management was drifting towards autocracy, reopening old wounds — now fault lines between the new Whig and Tory parties. Healey recounts the Popish Plot, Exclusion Crisis, Monmouth Rebellion and Glorious Revolution with gusto, revealing the crucial inheritance of the unfinished business of the 1649 revolution for events in 1688 — a view not always fashionable among historians. What happened in the English Revolution, or civil wars, took an exhaustingly long time to unfold, and its subplots were as numerous as the bits of the Shakespeare history play the wise director cuts. Where the French Revolution proceeds in neat, systematic French parcels—Revolution, Terror, Directorate, Empire, etc.—the English one is a mess, exhausting to untangle and not always edifying once you have done so. There’s a Short Parliament, a Long Parliament, and a Rump Parliament to distinguish, and, just as one begins to make sense of the English squabbles, the dour Scots intervene to further muddy the story. The situation shifted when, in February, 1645, Parliament consolidated the New Model Army, eventually under the double command of the aristocratic Thomas Fairfax, about whom, one woman friend admitted, “there are various opinions about his intellect,” and the grim country Protestant Oliver Cromwell, about whose firm intellect opinions varied not. Ideologically committed, like Napoleon’s armies a century later, and far better disciplined than its Royalist counterparts, at least during battle (they tended to save their atrocities for the after-victory party), the New Model Army was a formidable and modern force. Healey, emphasizing throughout how fluid and unpredictable class lines were, makes it clear that the caste lines of manners were more marked. Though Cromwell was suspicious of the egalitarian democrats within his coalition—the so-called Levellers—he still declared, “I had rather have a plain russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than that which you call a gentleman.”

As a result of the breakdown of state mechanisms such as censorship, religious courts and the episcopal hierarchies during the early 1640s, there was an explosion of dissent, of political and religious radicalism, which began to disseminate into mainstream political cultures and receive wider acceptance as the war went on, and as a political settlement failed to be reached. The 1640s was a period of turmoil and dramatic change which caused people to come up with innovative radical solutions to deal with the extraordinary events that faced them. Traditional institutions, systems, beliefs were all up for question and debate. He identifies the opportunities the wars brought to middling men who would not otherwise have troubled the history books — the ultimate example of course being the fenland farmer Oliver Cromwell, who rose to be head of state. As the soldier William Allen said when considering draft peace terms to be put to the king: “I suppose it is not unknown to you that we are most of us but young Statesmen .” The Empress reconnects with the spirits and asks if one of them can come serve as a scribe to help with her Cabbala. They agree to send a “plain and rational” woman writer, the Duchess of Newcastle—or Margaret Cavendish, who advises the Empress to write her Cabbala as a fictional allegory. The two women become dear Platonic friends, and their souls frequently visit one another’s worlds. On a visit to the Blazing World, the Duchess admits that she wishes she could conquer a world for herself—but the spirits convince her that it’s better to rule a fictional “celestial world” than try to conquer a real one. Later, the Empress visits the Duchess’s world, where they visit a London theater, observe the English monarchy up close, and meet the Duchess Cavendish’s incredibly “wise, honest, witty, complaisant and noble” husband, the Duke of Newcastle, who has lost most of his vast estate in the English Civil War. The Duchess asks for the Empress’s help convincing Fortune to stop disfavoring her husband. Honesty and Prudence speak on the Duke’s behalf, but neither of them manages to convince Fortune, so the Duchess resolves to learn to accept Fortune’s folly. After the trial, the Empress notes that she has created divisions in the Blazing World by introducing a new religion and turning the different groups against one another. She resolves to return to the old system: “one sovereign, one religion, one law, and one language.” Healey’s coverage is vast. He provides a whistlestop tour of various facets of English society: law, print, migration, witchcraft, moral reform, radicalism and so forth. While coverage of Scotland and Ireland is thinner, Healey has ensured this is not merely a straightforward narrative of high politics or events in London. Crucially the individual experiences of ordinary men and women, and the engrossing political affairs at Whitehall and Westminster are properly contextualized within the wider political, social and religious conditions that gripped seventeenth-century society. Crisis under Charles IA continuous thread runs from the accession of England’s first Stuart king, James I, in 1603, to the dynasty’s fall in the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688-89. Yet historians often balk at telling the tumultuous, ideologically charged story in one go. Often it is divided into three chunks. First come increasing resistance to absolutism and religious intolerance, civil war, the parliamentary army’s victory, the execution of Charles I, and the establishment of the 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. W riting 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. The early years of Charles I’s reign would be marked by one crisis after another. Intransigent parliaments were unwilling to provide necessary financial supply, and sought to curtail the monarch’s absolutist tendencies. This was not helped by his embarrassingly disastrous foreign policy, his unpopular favourite, and further religious polarisation as the King’s preference for Arminianism, which to Puritan observers was considered too close to Popish superstition, became increasingly clear. A political showdown would ensue in the Parliament of 1629, where the speaker of the commons was held down in his seat, by MPs opposed to the king, so that three resolutions could be issued against Arminian innovations, and the collection of tonnage and poundage, which had not been agreed by parliament. Charles’ dissolution of parliament in response would lead to his infamous personal rule. This is a wonderful book, exhaustively researched, vigorously argued and teeming with the furious joy of seventeenth-century life' The Times Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

The political arrangements of the reigns of William and Mar y as the c entur y drew to a close would have been “unthinkable” to James I at its start and were a closer approximation to the political system under Elizabeth II than Elizabeth I. Through 100 years of turbulence arose a “remarkable new world, one which — for better or worse — was blazing a path towards our own ”. In 1698 Whitehall Palace caught fire. The vast warren of buildings, which had been central to the monarchy since the 1530s, was destroyed. When the area was eventually rebuilt, it was not kings and queens who returned but prime ministers and their governments. This topographical transformation neatly captures what historian Jonathan Healey argues was the most revolutionary change over the course of the 17th c entur y: that “politics was no longer about monarch s” . Wily and pragmatic as well as louche, Charles II may have been the only Stuart to see that public opinion, fed by the proliferating news-sheets and pamphlets, could confer or deny legitimacy. The clumsy attempt by James II, a Catholic, to restore absolutist rule was always doomed to failure. The ferment of ideas about politics, society and religion led inexorably to his ousting in the Glorious Revolution—and Britain’s emergence as a stable modern state. He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. Jonathan Healey’s The Blazing World gives a vivid and illuminating account of the revolutionary seventeenth century in Britain, finds Waseem AhmedAt the beginning of The Blazing World, a lustful merchant kidnaps the young Lady, hoping to make her marry him. As punishment, the gods blow the merchant’s ship toward the North Pole, where the Lady’s world meets “another Pole of another world.” The merchant and his crew freeze to death, but the Lady survives. She finds herself in this other world— the Blazing World—which is full of curious hybrid creatures who have the bodies of animals but walk, talk, and act like human beings. The bear-men, who live near the Blazing World’s icy North Pole, find the merchant’s ship and rescue the Lady. She is as unusual to the Blazing World’s inhabitants as they are to her, so they bring her to their Emperor, who lives in a palace in the gold-and-jewel-studded city of Paradise. The Emperor believes the Lady to be a goddess, and he graciously marries her and gives her “absolute power to rule and govern all that World as she please[s].” But so are people who do not fit neatly into tales of a rising merchant class and revanchist feudalists. Women, shunted to the side in earlier histories of the era, play an important role in this one. We learn of how neatly monarchy recruited misogyny, with the Royalist propaganda issuing, Rush Limbaugh style, derisive lists of the names of imaginary women radicals, more frightening because so feminine: “Agnes Anabaptist, Kate Catabaptist . . . Penelope Punk, Merald Makebate.” The title of Healey’s book is itself taken from a woman writer, Margaret Cavendish, whose astonishing tale “The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World” was a piece of visionary science fiction that summed up the dreams and disasters of the century. Healey even reports on what might be a same-sex couple among the radicals: the preacher Thomas Webbe took one John Organ for his “man-wife.” The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance. Full Title: The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World. Written By the Thrice Noble, Illustrious, and Excellent Princesse, The Duchess of Newcastle.

Archival issues aside, Healey’s 17th century is one comprised of incidents great and small – it is in some ways less a grand narrative than a patchwork of narratives, each one of which fascinates as it elucidates his primary theme. It is into this patchwork creation of a world turned upside down that Margaret Cavendish’s 1666 utopian fiction – the source of Healey’s title – ought to slide effortlessly. In her Blazing World, the Duchess of Newcastle describes another planet, ESFI, which contemporaries would have recognised as the Stuart kingdoms of England, Scotland, (France) and Ireland. An absolutist monarchy, ESFI remains both attached to, and an integral part of, Earth. Healey’s Blazing World, however, describes the Stuart kingdoms (primarily England) as if they existed in a vacuum until Cromwell’s rise to prominence: so detached, indeed, that Healey describes the pan-European conflict that raged from 1618-48, which was fought by Swedes, Danes, French, Dutch, Spanish, English, Scots and Irish among others, and featured a Stuart princess at its heart, as a ‘German war’. On these terms, this really was a revolutionary age, with at least seven seismic resets between 1640 and 1688. It was also a time of revolution as we conceive of it today, namely, of fundamental alteration to politics or society. Healey’s ambitious book aims to explore these two connected realms, reanimating the lives of ordinary people through the wealth of sources they left behind. Even the word “ideology,” favored by Healey, may be a touch anachronistic. The American and the French Revolutions are both recognizably modern: they are built on assumptions that we still debate today, and left and right, as they were established then, are not so different from left and right today. Whatever obeisance might have been made to the Deity, they were already playing secular politics in a post-religious atmosphere. During the English Revolution, by contrast, the most passionate ideologies at stake were fanatic religious beliefs nurtured through two millennia of Christianity.

Next, the Empress meets the immaterial spirits, who are the Blazing World’s most advanced theoretical philosophers. Since they have no physical bodies, the spirits can travel anywhere in an instant and learn anything they wish. The Empress asks the spirits to explain creation and the universe to her because she wishes to write a Cabbala, or a philosophical treatise about the nature of God, the soul, and the physical world. The spirits explain that the world is made up of self-moving matter, and the soul is really just the rational part of beings’ material bodies. But when the Empress asks about original sin, the spirits suddenly disappear—they get banished to the other side of the planet. The Lady, now the Empress, uses her power to learn everything that she can about the Blazing World. She learns that the world’s inhabitants all speak the same language, follow the same religion, and obey the same all-powerful Emperor. Each species group lives independently and follows a unique profession, but they coexist peacefully, without fighting over power. The gooselike bird-men, the kingdom’s astronomers, tell the Empress about the Blazing World’s sun, moon, and stars. The bear-men, who are experimental philosophers, use telescopes to test the bird-men’s hypotheses and microscopes to show the Empress tiny objects, like a fly’s eyes and a piece of charcoal. The fish-men and worm-men (natural philosophers) teach her about the Blazing World’s animals, and the ape-men (chemists) explain how basic elements make up everything in nature. But other groups (like the lice- and parrot-men) humiliate themselves when they present their shoddy work, and the Empress banishes them from her palace. She blames the Blazing World’s religion for their failures, so she decides to convert its people to her own. She builds two chapels, one out of the Blazing World’s shining star-stone and the other of its burning fire-stone. Yet, in Cromwell’s time, certain moral intuitions and principles appeared that haven’t disappeared; things got said that could never be entirely unsaid. Government of the people resides in their own consent to be governed; representative bodies should be in some way representative; whatever rights kings have are neither divine nor absolute; and, not least, religious differences should be settled by uneasy truces, if not outright toleration. Those beliefs, far from being frosting on a cake of competing interests, were the competing interests. The ability of seventeenth-century people to become enraptured, not to say obsessed, with theological differences that seem to us astonishingly minute is the most startling aspect of the story. Despite all attempts to depict these as the mere cosmetic covering of clan loyalties or class interests, those crazy-seeming sectarian disputes were about what they claimed to be about. Men were more likely to face the threat of being ripped open and having their bowels burned in front of their eyes (as happened eventually to the regicides) on behalf of a passionately articulated creed than they were on behalf of an abstract, retrospectively conjured class.

After some missteps, by 1657 a healing England was growing stronger. As Healey concludes, “Cromwell’s rule must be accounted a success, at least in terms of realpolitik .” His premature death, however, enabled the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, for which Cromwell’s conciliatory and conservative style of rule had, ironically, laid the groundwork.

Genre: Early Modern Prose Fiction, Proto-Novel, Science Fiction, Utopian Literature, Feminist Literature, Philosophical Dialogue, Metafiction