The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603–1689

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. Oxford historian Healey (The First Century of Welfare) traces these upheavals to the struggle between kings demanding absolute power and a Parliament determined to assert its supremacy in the name of the people; the culture war pitting the ceremonies and festivals of Anglicanism against the austerity of Puritan revolutionaries, who dourly canceled Christmas; the rising influence of middle-class landowners and businessmen; the eruption of radical movements like the Levellers, who advanced the shocking idea of universal suffrage; and the explosive growth of a partisan press that politicized the increasingly literate masses. 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. (“First they invaded the Lords, then the Commons, where they threw street ordure in the faces of MPs,” he notes of a London mob’s incursion into Parliament.) The result is a bracing history of a time and place that created the modern world. (Mar.)