The 1600s: England’s century of bloodshed and revolution

Like London’s fabled buses, you wait an age for a good book on England’s 17th century of civil wars, regicide and revolution — and then two, even three, come along almost at once.

Last year Clare Jackson’s award-winning Devil-Land portrayed Tudor and Stuart England in perpetual political, religious and economic crisis, viewed from continental Europe as a failed state racked by dissent and rebellion. Anna Keay’s acclaimed The Restless Republic retold the story of England from its one and — to date — only period of republican rule under Oliver Cromwell, following the civil wars of 1642-51 to the Stuart restoration in 1660.

Now Jonathan Healey’s The Blazing World takes on what he boldly calls “revolutionary England”, arguing that the kingdom experienced at least half a dozen revolutionary moments that transformed the nation, paving the way for today’s modern parliamentary political constitution.

The gulf between this period and the preceding century of Tudor rule was immense. In 1600 England was an agrarian society isolated from the rest of Europe. Despite high infant mortality rates its population had doubled in a century; 90 per cent lived on the land; the majority were illiterate, and contended with famine, unemployment, crime, capital punishment, witchcraft and plague on a daily basis.

By the end of the century, there was a thriving international market economy, an embryonic welfare state and brick-built cities powered by coal; plague and witch trials disappeared, the church embraced toleration, and a constitutional monarchy reigned. In between came a period of almost unimaginable chaos and conflict.

Healey, a professor of history at the University of Oxford, acknowledges that echoes of the 17th century are very much with us today: new social media (for the internet, read print and the explosion of news), culture wars (for Brexit and statues, read religion) and party politics (read dissenting radicals). But is there something else in our post-Brexit political psyche drawing us back 400 years?

As we face disillusionment with party politics, a new monarch nervously minting coinage without a crown, a Northern Ireland Assembly and Good Friday Agreement in the balance, Scottish calls for independence, a tough economic outlook and an obsession over a break with Europe, it seems appropriate to look to lessons from an age when England executed a king, went to war over Scotland and Ireland, and ended the century parachuting in a new ruler from Holland.

Both books, Keay’s and Healey’s, are also part of a broader response within academia to the 17th century following that more recent intellectual upheaval of 1968, when historians couldn’t even agree if a revolution had happened or not, whether the civil war was a singular or a plural phenomenon, and how to describe the republic under Cromwell. Those who called it an unfortunate “interregnum” were on the right, those who saw it as part of a larger revolutionary project were romantic Marxists.

‘Not everyone realises we had a revolution in England long before the French, American or Russian revolutions’

A similar outlook insisted that the upheavals of the 1640s were all about class conflict, as a radical, dissenting popular movement of Ranters, Levellers, Diggers and Fifth Monarchists swept away the old order of absolutist monarchy, only to be thwarted because — unlike in the French Revolution — England lacked a suitably developed bourgeoisie to sustain republicanism.

It was an argument adopted by leftwing politicians such as Tony Benn, who once observed: “Not everyone realises that we had a revolution in England long before the French Revolution, the American Revolution or the Russian Revolution.” The alternative revisionist view denied that a revolution happened at all. Instead, civil war was the result of unforeseen constitutional tensions in Ireland and Scotland as well as England, and that as late as 1642 conflict could have easily been avoided.

Debate was stifled as academic Cavaliers “cancelled” out their Roundhead opponents. Revolutionary politics in the classroom and on the streets diminished; and now that the leading proponents of both views have retired from the field of battle, a more subtle approach has begun to emerge, evident in Healey’s and Keay’s books.

The Blazing World largely sidesteps the dogma by combining descriptions of well-documented high political and constitutional conflict with the “popular voice”. Healey deploys less familiar accounts of the experience of famine, war and death to explain how the gentry and what he calls “the middling sort” were becoming “more engaged with law, politics and government” in a way that would eventually lead to a confrontation between crown and parliament. He captures the unease of failed harvests, land enclosures and economic volatility experienced by working people alongside the politics of King James and then Charles I’s clumsy efforts to raise revenue while increasingly alienating a series of restive parliaments.

Healey provides an admirably even-handed account. Charles I was a “stuffy authoritarian, but never ruthless enough to be a successful tyrant” — as his parliamentary opponents claimed — brought low by “political accidents and unfathomable decisions”. This was especially true for his disastrous attempt to impose a new Book of Common Prayer in Scotland in 1637, which would lead to the Bishops’ wars and ultimately conflict in Ireland too, as the dispute spiralled into the civil wars of the three kingdoms.

Similarly Cromwell is chided for preventing the republic from “being so much more”. His “unattractive Puritanism” and conservative instincts tainted republicanism and opened the door for Charles II. Even before then, the restoration was far from assured. Having refused to be crowned king, Cromwell’s decision to anoint his eldest but naive son Richard over the younger, more capable Henry alienated both parliament and the army. Both knew what they were against, but not what they were for. So when, following Cromwell’s death in 1658, General George Monck backed an increasingly conservative parliament over the army, the inevitable result was a return to monarchy.

Yet the upheavals were still not over. As first Charles II and then his brother James II embraced Catholicism, the old wounds of religion and politics created yet another revolutionary moment. James II fled and William and Mary ushered in a constitutional monarchy, what Healey calls “the last revolution” of 1688-89. 

The republic failed because its protagonists ‘agreed far more on what they did not want than what they sought in its place’

As Healey recounts, so much changed between 1600 and 1700: “monarchs were accountable to the law” and the people; the economy and society were transformed by trade, innovation and greater religious tolerance. That said, the second half of his book tends to drift into retelling a well-established narrative of parliamentary political machinations. The popular voice largely disappears, to be replaced by that of grand men such as Robert Hooke and John Locke, with very few women in sight. There is also a marked reluctance in the conclusion to reflect on what this might help us understand about our current times.

For those new to the subject, Healey’s retelling is exemplary, but others more familiar with it may find little that is new or surprising. Perhaps that is a reflection of our cautious times as much as a failure of nerve or insight.

Where Healey is at times overwhelmed by the sheer weight of events and individuals involved, Anna Keay’s The Restless Republic is more successful in restricting herself to a period of just over a decade of republican commonwealth rule told through several key figures. She avoids uncritical celebration or conservative condemnation of the republican experiment by examining its impact on its winners and losers between the execution of King Charles I in 1649 and the restoration in 1660.

In particular Keay, a historian and director of the Landmark Trust, looks at the personal costs and betrayed ideals of those on different sides of the republic. These range from Charlotte Stanley, Countess of Derby, and her defence of the last royalist stronghold on the Isle of Man, to Anna Trapnell, a radical Protestant prophetess who challenged Cromwell’s assumption of the title of Lord Protector and his apparent betrayal of the more radical aspirations of the Ranters, Diggers and Levellers.

The author acknowledges Cromwell’s political skills, but even he couldn’t reconcile the demands for religious and social reform from parliamentary and army quarters. Like Healey, she identifies popular print and the rise of news as crucial to the circulation of radical ideas. Unlike him, Keay fully addresses the horrors of republic rule in Ireland, and the trade that flowed into London from the exploitation of colonial territories in the Caribbean.

Keay believes the republic failed because its protagonists “agreed far more on what they did not want than what they sought in its place”. Today, we seem to be at a similar juncture, where disillusionment with party politics and the wounds of Brexit suggest that we are again entering a period of deep unease about who we are and what we want as a nation. History may not be repeating itself — it never does completely — but the people are ignored at the peril of politicians and lawmakers, as Charles I and many others described by Healey and Keay found out to their cost.

The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England by Jonathan Healey, Bloomsbury £30, 512 pages 

The Restless Republic: Britain Without a Crown by Anna Keay, William Collins £25 (hardback), 476 pages

Jerry Brotton is professor of renaissance studies at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of ‘The Sale of the Late King’s Goods: Charles I and his Art Collection’ (Macmillan)

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Letter in response to this article:

How the Geneva Bible fired England’s revolution / From Alistair Budd, Caldicot, Monmouthshire, UK