One scorching summer long ago

It was the brightest of futures; it was the End of Days. Three hundred and fifty years before Brexit, England experienced a series of epochal events which forced subjects to rethink their relationships with each other, their political leaders and their European neighbours. In the space of a tumultuous 12 months England endured the devastation of plague, the most humiliating of naval defeats at the hands of the Dutch, and the catastrophe of a Great Fire which transformed its capital city forever. Where there was a commonly held view, espoused by humble parish clerks and vociferous dissenters like George Fox alike, that the cataclysms revealed God’s wrathful judgment upon a sinful nation, there were others who saw in catastrophe an opportunity to build afresh: Andrew Marvell repurposed satire in his ‘Advice to a Painter’ poems; Christopher Wren reimagined the verybasis of London itself.

Rebecca Rideal and Alexander Larman both offer accessible and entertaining commemorations of this historical moment in their new books.