Jonathan Healey rattles through a tumultuous era in “The Blazing World”
. 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 the 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. Tension ensued between his need for cash and Parliament’s traditional control over the royal purse strings.
A far less canny operator than his father, the priggish Charles I was widely seen to be 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 thebegan in 1642, nobody thought it would lead to the decapitation of a king and advent of a republic .
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.
The tempo never slackens in this erudite book. But sometimes the reader feels bombarded by detail . 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.
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