10 Comments
Nov 26, 2023Liked by Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson

I’m just about finished reading Jonathan Healy’s new book “The Blazing World, a new history of revolutionary England, 1603 to 1689.” I don’t have much background with which to fully assess the book but that I can say it is wide-ranging and seems to reflect some serious research and reading. I was really pleased to realize how much this book might serve as good background to Bernard Bailyn’s “the ideological origins of the American revolution”. The that’s a long way of saying I really recommend it to others and would love to hear if anyone has some opinions on it.

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Nov 11, 2023Liked by Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson

Great stuff, many thanks, I know very little about this period.

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Nov 11, 2023Liked by Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson

“four times as Cromwellian” that is an awful lot of Cromwell in one go 😲

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If you ain’t an autodidact you don’t know nothing...

I’m one..

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Nov 10, 2023Liked by Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson

There is a direct line between the Left and Right today and the English Civil War. The totalitarian Puritans are today's Left and the gas-guzzling drunken Right are the Cavaliers. It's not a perfect genealogy but it's close. It was followed by the French Revolution where the Right and Left became more clarified. Royalists and rightist and regicides are leftists. Sort of.

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Nov 11, 2023Liked by Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson

I don't really agree.

Both sides were huge broad church movements. Most of the "progressive" thought at the time was on the Parliamentary side, but there were also much more traditionalist elements as support one way or the other was broadly geographical and Charles I was a poor and untrustworthy king.

You can argue that the seeds of the American civil war come from a similar place - southern land owning Cavaliers and northern Puritan immigrants - but that ignores over simplifies the fact that Scotland, Ireland and Wales were all divided during the ECW.

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Nov 11, 2023Liked by Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson

I still think the Cavaliers (royalists) were on the Right and the Roundheads (republicans) were on the Left and that this division has lasted until this day in all of the anglosaxon countries.

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It's not a civil war that divides towns or families though, support for either side was very much on geographical lines. London, the SE and the midlands was Parliamentarian, the north and the west of England remained Royalist. Your side depended almost wholly on where you were born.

Applying it to later politics also means you need to erase much of the subtlety - Fairfax was perhaps the most important Parliamentarian, but never wished to execute the king or remove the monarchy. There was certainly a large number of people on both sides who simply wanted better rule but in a similar manner to before the war - Charles was not liked. There was also relatively little issue with ideological divides in the peace after the war, the restoration and 1688 revolution both being remarkably peaceful. Puritanism was a small movement, one that briefly had an influence on Cromwell but which quickly disappeared from English politics and life.

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Then maybe I am thinking about the US: the slave-owning Cavaliers of the South and the abolitionist Roundheads of the North.

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The way Harris portrayed Cromwell, I really disliked him, even though the movie was trying to portray him as some kind of hero. Of course, when I found out more about the real man, it turned out I was probably right to dislike him.

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