The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England

On July 4 we celebrated the rare revolution that worked. This page focuses on two wonderfully readable books about the mostly unsuccessful 17^th century revolution that preceded America’s 18^th century one, and the partly successful 19^th century revolution that followed.

Jonathan Healey’s The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689 (Knopf, 2023) features vivid, specific detail. Some on the Puritan side who opposed any physical depiction of Jesus “used a statue of Christ for musket practice, cheering when they hit it in the face.” In London, Sir John Clotworthy used his halberd—an ax blade topped with a spike—to rip up a Rubens painting of the crucified Christ.

That’s what happened to objects. Subjects—human beings—often had it worse. In the English Civil War of the 1640s, perhaps 160,000 from a population estimated at six million died. (That’s roughly equivalent to the new scholarly estimate of 800,000 U.S. Civil War deaths in a population of 30 million.) Why did all that sacrifice lead to only temporary political change in England? “The new regime had toppled the monarch,” Healey writes, “but had done so without rooting the new government in actual popular consent.”

Much of the populace was not ready for local magistrates to follow Puritan injunctions and become “a terror to drunkards, swearers, Sabbath profaners, whoremasters, seducers, blasphemers, and all the rabble of Hell.” That rabble was huge and fought back with sarcasm, joking about Puritans “so strict that they tried to impose fines on people for farting.” Soon after the monarchy resumed in 1660, counter-revolutionaries purged many Puritans and Presbyterians. P&P labor was not all in vain: During the 17^th century, England moved from virtually absolute monarchy to Parliament-limited monarchy.

Nevertheless, culture trumped politics, as it always does, and blueprints for a new, manmade Eden faded, as they always do.

Don Doyle’s The Age of Reconstruction (Princeton, 2024) is a terrific reminder of a time when Lincolnian ideals supported by Congressional action made a difference not only in the United States but around the world. Doyle tells well how fear of the Union army prodded France to withdraw from Mexico, Britain to give Canada essential independence, and Spain to end slavery in its colonies. Secretary of State William Seward and Congress rightly passed up opportunities to become an imperialist power in the Caribbean, but wisely purchased Alaska.

And there’s more: From 1868 to 1870, stimulated by abolition’s American success, Spain abolished its monarchy, France abolished Napoleon III’s Second Empire, and Italians abolished Papal control of Rome and created a united Italy. Sadly, in the 1870s white southerners supported by tired northerners and a racist embrace of Social Darwinism began to undo Reconstruction: Doyle is rightly appalled by “the whole nation’s moral surrender to the idea that the freed people were forever ‘unfit’ to participate in government by the people.”

Lincoln at Gettysburg said “the brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.” All three branches of the federal government detracted from the results of that battle until an executive order by Harry Truman integrated the Armed Services in 1948, the Supreme Court decreed in 1954 the integration of schools, and Congress finally responded with the Civil Rights Act in 1964.

Returning to the political present can be depressing these days, but Why Congress? (Oxford, 2023) helps us face reality. Author Philip Wallach shows that both major parties are responsible for the frequent inability of the U.S. Congress to fulfill the literal meaning of the word: coming together so we can have a United States. Wallach notes that in the 1970s and 1980s “the Democratic majority made many rule changes to empower their leaders to limit debate and control the agenda.” In the 1990s Republicans took control, saw that bet on efficiency over discussion, and raised it.

A good chapter on immigration reform leads off a section on “The Costs of a Failing Congress.” We haven’t yet seen the full bill, and Wallach concludes with a plea to legislators: Don’t be satisfied with “flattering your supporters’ assumptions, belaboring your side’s talking points to make the other side look bad, rather than working to get things done.” The same appeal should be laid at the feet of journalists.

Briefly Noted

Colin Elliott’s cleverly-titled Pox Romana: The Plague That Shook the Roman World (Princeton, 2024) describes what could have been history’s first pandemic—but the evidence for it is shaky. The optimistic accounts in Seth Kaplan’s Fragile Neighborhoods (Little, Brown, 2023) are pleasant to read—and are a lot like what I wrote in Compassionate Conservatism (2000), but without the political labeling.