The radicals of 17th-century England began to think the unthinkable

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was the century, as the historian Kevin Sharpe wrote, summing up the Whig view, ‘in which the champions of law and liberty, property and Protestantism triumphed over absolute monarchy and popery and laid the foundations for parliamentary government’. It was a century of recurring plagues and fire and bloody civil war. It saw successive waves of witch hunts, the beginnings of the Enlightenment and the founding of the Royal Society. It saw revolution and regicide followed by restoration and revolution again. In its first years, Shakespeare, Webster and Donne were working, contemplating mortality and anatomising passion in the same gorgeous language that gave us the King James Bible, the most ambitious and successful state-funded literary project this nation has ever seen. In its latter half, the literary stars were satirists or foppish comedy writers and the intellectual titans were mathematicians and scientists – Hooke, Harvey, Newton, Wren and Boyle.

It is no wonder that historians have repeatedly been drawn to the British 17th century. Two years ago Clare Jackson gave us, in Devil Land, a vision of Stuart Britain that situated it in its international context. James I, ending the isolationism of Tudor England, sent his diplomats as far afield as Moscow, Constantinople, even Mughal India, and welcomed foreign ambassadors to his court. Jackson drew on their reports, and on those of subsequent travellers, including the royalist exiles of the mid-century, to show us a nation whose repeated upheavals mirrored, and intersected with, those of mainland Europe. Now comes Jonathan Healey, telling a parallel story in a very different book. Where Jackson was cosmopolitan and favoured the overview, Healey’s tendency is to keep low (socially), stay local and dig deep.