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By July 30 1642, rival supporters of King Charles I and parliament both acknowledged that England had fallen into a “condition of war”. On that date, in the quiet Warwickshire countryside, armed troops from both sides met by chance. The forces stood “just within musket shot” as two aristocratic commanders parleyed, and compromised. No one died that day.
On August 22, the king raised his standard — the formal signal of a military campaign against rebels — at Nottingham. Two months later, the same Warwickshire terrain where Lord Brooke and the Earl of Northampton had struck their gentleman’s agreement not to fight would witness the Battle of Edgehill: first bloodbath of England’s civil wars.
The legacy of the wars of the roses, and savagely suppressed Tudor uprisings, had forged a strong national taboo against lethal civil strife. How did that inhibition break down into conflicts that claimed perhaps 5 per cent of English lives? Questions of law and right aside, we still worry about how, and why, societies may cross the threshold into mass violence. That anxiety has fed a recent spate of studies about England’s revolutionary decades. In Britain, and well beyond, new fears of a polarised society breed a nervous fascination with the tipping points of homegrown war.
Oxford historian Jonathan Healey has already sketched the big picture of 17th-century turmoil in The Blazing World (2023). Now he fills in the fine detail of deepening divisions in this close-focus narrative account of the year when the country slid towards “the edge of a precipice” — then stumbled over it.
Everyone knew, as the Lord Chief Justice (and moderate royalist) John Bankes wrote, that civil wars “would make us a miserable people”. Scrappy conflicts in Scotland and (after October 1641) a Catholic revolt in Ireland brought the miseries of intimate bloodshed to English ears. Virtually every week of Healey’s core period — summer 1641 to summer 1642 — saw conciliatory moves as stubborn king and assertive parliament (both Commons and Lords) clashed repeatedly over mutually disputed powers. All parties abhorred the recourse to arms. Yet by June 2 1642, parliament presented Charles with the “Nineteen Propositions” that would mean “his almost complete annihilation as sovereign”.
Healey deftly joins the dots between several points of no return. He writes briskly and accessibly, even to the point of tabloid snappiness. We learn that the “rich earls” Essex and Warwick “wanted Strafford [Charles’s chief enforcer] dead. To them he was simply too dangerous. Too talented, too driven.”
However, this galloping prose rattles down a solid scholarly path. The Blood in Winter discreetly, and persuasively, merges different currents in civil war history. High politics — driven by the “Junto” of parliament-supporting peers and their Commons allies — often takes centre stage. Healey makes these elite manoeuvres lucid, lively, even suspenseful.
He trains a keen lens on figures such as Lucy Hay, the scheming Countess of Carlisle, who combined “wit and sensuality” with backstage stratagems. It was probably she who (after a leak from Queen Henrietta Maria) alerted parliamentary leaders to Charles’s plan to arrest five troublesome MPs on January 4 1642. Healey accepts historical tradition in finding the king’s thwarted raid on the Commons a pivotal provocation, “the spark to what followed”.
Yet he gives us gripping history from below as well as from above. Preachers and pamphleteers (women among them) defy collapsing censorship to open up a “great conversation” about “the future of the country”. Radicals squirt vitriolic attacks at monarchy and hierarchy. Royalist hacks — such as the boatman-polemicist John Taylor — pay them back in salty, scurrilous kind. Primed by parliament, printer John Thomas issues “the earliest English political newspaper”.
Above all, Healey pays heed to the volatile London crowd — apprentices to the fore — as they gather in the City and Westminster to exert street-level pressure on power. He calls such “out of doors” protest a “decisive backdrop” to the crisis.
In the end, “the trust was gone”. A radicalised parliament extended its writ over church, ministers and militia, with the king “denied access to his own arms and forts”. Vacillating, petulant, Charles and his advisers tried in turn “concession, disruption, and blunt confrontation”. That “bellwether” grandee John Bankes, high-flying son of a Lakeland shopkeeper, found himself torn “between the sow’s ear and the silken purse”. Both camps had lost faith in their counterparts as partners for peace. For ordinary folk, “a choice was being thrust down people’s throats”. Soon that choice would taste of blood.
The Blood in Winter: A Nation Descends, 1642 by Jonathan Healey Bloomsbury, £25, 432 pages
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