Product Description

The sequence of civil wars that ripped England apart in the seventeenth century was one of the most devastating conflicts in its history. It destroyed families and towns, ravaged the population and led many, both supporters of Charles I and his opponents, to believe that England’s people were being punished by a vengeful God. This masterly new history illuminates what it was like to live through a time of terrifying violence, religious fervour and radical politics. Michael Braddick describes how pamphleteers, armies, iconoclasts, witch-hunters, Levellers, protestors and petitioners were all mobilized in the chaos, as they fought over new ways to imagine their world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3513 in Books
• Published on: 2009-01-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 784 pages

Review
'Its panoptic view includes helpful background on subjects that a more singleminded history might glance over: astrology, sedition in London, military technology, pamphleteering and book-burning.'
--James Purdon, Observer

Times Higher Education
'[Braddick] keeps the narrative moving at a very brisk pace and skilfully blends a huge number of national and local threads and personal experiences and memories of the 1640s conflicts...lively, compelling and up to date'

History Today
'Lucid and utterly professional...Braddick's is a fine and convincing story-line, powerfully argued throughout. We have here a genuinely new history of England's civil wars'

Customer Reviews

A war to reach a compromise
I am always a little reluctant to buy books that claim to be a "new history" of events that were well recorded and happened some 370 years ago. English history lacks bite, a dull procession of uninspired monarchs and a frenzy of Empire building. The Civil War seemed more a squabble, relatively small armies and minor engagements. Brought up in the West Country, the ruins of Corfe Castle and siege at Sherborne vaguely linked me to Cromwell, the man with warts, with no more than a hazy school history to call on.

I dipped into Michael Braddick's large book and - as they say - found it hard to put down. The issues, sketched from numerous angles were well developed. The politics of the three Kingdoms (although this is not focussed on Ireland and Scotland), the personality of Charles vacillating between high principles and sordid double-dealing, the profound religious divisions in a land of deep superstions. The most surprising element was the sophistication of the political debate. Fuelled by pamphlets the people engaged with the issues and considered them on a level far more intelligently than our own age. They had a self-belief, a desire to stand up and be heard. News was circulated, "high politics, the most important matters of state, were now being canvassed quite deliberately on the streets of London and in the counties."

Against this are themes of low politics. The use of black propaganda and generation of fear and unease (Irish atrocities, anti Popery) to attain political cohesion. This has a direct resonance with much of what we endure today; irrational fear rapidly moves people more than reason. The role played by the mob reminds us of Rome. It need not have happened; compromise was always at hand but opportunities missed. The nation(s) stumbled to violent disaster. It could have been easily avoided, it so often nearly was. I liked Braddicks' style; he presents a multi faceted picture of Charles, his strength, his vanity, his dilemmas and his stupidity. He leaves it to the reader to make up their mind, villain or martyr or just a man trapped by circumstance. His execution was self-inflicted. Alternatively, was it the kindest act to stop him fermenting more bloodshed? Cromwell is in this account a relatively minor figure late to arrive but capitalising on a political vacuum to mount a military coup.

This is a fine book; the complexities of the politics, the role of the state, religion, and the military campaign are well woven into a narrative. It provides clarity and demands you should read further. The paradox was once combat got underway "the escalation of warfare was not accompanied as to what, precisely, the fighting was for". The English civil war was about people taking extreme positions to find a compromise.

God's Fury England's Fire
A thorough examination of the social, political and religious threads running through the English Civil Wars. Anyone who wants to understand the conflicts should read this book. Full of interesting facts and revealing comments by the commentators of the time. The shifts of allegiances are surprising - royalist one day parliamentarian the next. The final outcome of the wars rested on a series of tactical gambles. The book only describes the major battles in minimal detail however.

Vigorous history of the civil wars of the 1640s
Michael Braddick, professor of history at Sheffield University, has written a splendid new history of the civil wars in Britain in the 1640s. The book is in three parts: the crisis of the three kingdoms (1637-42), war (1642-46), and revolution (1646-49).

Part 1 describes the Scottish Prayer Book rebellion and the politics of reformation, politics and society in Charles' England, the English and the Bishops' Wars, the Long Parliament, the Irish rising, the struggle for the provinces and the slide into war. Part 2 studies the battle of Edgehill, the English war efforts in 1643, the Irish Cessation and the Solemn League and Covenant, the battle of Marston Moor, death and its meanings, the battle of Naseby and the New Model Army, the costs and benefits of civil war, and the politics of parishes at war. Part 3 describes postwar politics, attempts at settlement, the Putney debates, the Engagement and the vote of No Addresses, Charles' starting of the second civil war, his trial and execution, and England's freedom.

The people opposed the king's party on the issues of royal powers, his religious policies, taxation, his foreign policy, and his Catholic advisers. Charles sought to uphold his supreme power over the people. He refused to work with Parliament or to be subject to its authority. People noted that Charles tried to stay out of war in Europe against Catholics, but was ready to go to war against his own Protestant subjects. Public opinion was such that, as Braddick writes, "Military mobilization by prerogative power in order to enforce Laudian ceremonialism would have plenty of opponents." Yet in 1649, the king was still unrepentant and uncompromising, and still bent on another war: defeated in England and Scotland, he was as yet unbeaten in Ireland.

Braddick recounts the organised, disciplined and popular assertions of traditional common rights - throwing down enclosures in forests and fens, tearing up hedges, and breaking open the Earl of Middlesex's deer park and killing his deer. Tactically astute, people gathered in groups of two, thus evading the legal definition of a riot.

More and more people became active citizens. People fought for the idea that "All power is originally and essentially in the whole body of the people of this Nation."

As Braddick writes, "What was really new and radical ... was that fundamental questions were being debated before a public audience." It was `a decade of intense debate and spectacular intellectual creativity ... the beginnings of a passage from the world of reformation to the world of enlightenment'.