What got into them? For two decades in the middle of the 17th century, English- men transformed their world, overthrowing and eventually executing their king, abolishing bishops and the House of Lords, and incidentally slaughtering each other — and from time to time their Scottish and Irish neighbours — on a scale that approached the carnage of the first world war.
Explaining these ‘English civil wars’ — the term Blair Worden gives to the sequence of conflicts that afflicted the country between 1640 and the Restoration in 1660 — has always been tricky. How does one make sense of the multifarious possible causes, or the bewildering, Russian-novel-like profusion of characters; or do justice to the conflict’s great moments of drama (the show trials in Westminster Hall, the battlefield confrontations, the public execution of King Charles I, the offer of the crown to Oliver Cromwell)? How, too, to account for the civil wars’ anticlimactic end: after all the blood and idealism spent in the quest to create a godly ‘New Jerusalem’ in England, the return of the Stuart monarchy and the libidinous and cynical Charles II?
Not surprisingly, professional historians have been only partially successful in explaining all this to themselves; still less effective in explaining it to the general public. Most people still think that the war was between ‘King Charles I and Oliver Cromwell’, notwithstanding that Cromwell, a nonentity at the start of hostilities, did not even have command of an army by the time the king was defeated in 1646.
Now none of us has any excuse. For in this brief new study, Blair Worden has achieved the seemingly impossible: in 165 gloriously lucid, immediately comprehensible pages, he offers a coherent yet subtly argued account of the whole crisis — from its origins in religious and constitutional tensions which went back to the Tudors; to the outbreak and course of the wars; the various attempts to come up with a viable government that could replace the defeated monarchy; the rise and fall of the House of Cromwell; and on to the Restoration and the conflict’s subsequent, much contested, place in the nation’s collective memory.
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