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God's Fury, England's Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars by: Michael Braddick List Price: £30.00 City Travel Guides Price: £21.00 You Save: £9.00 (30%)Prices subject to change. |
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Binding: Hardcover EAN: 9780713996326 ISBN: 0713996323 Label: Allen Lane Manufacturer: Allen Lane Number Of Pages: 784 Publication Date: February 28, 2008 Publisher: Allen Lane Studio: Allen Lane Sales Rank: 7233 Related Items:
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Editorial Review: Literary Review: 'By the most skilful interweaving of social with political history, of narrative with analysis, and of bold generalisation with observant detail, he brings a whole afflicted nation to life. It is an outstanding achievement' Times Higher Education: '[Braddick] keeps the narrative moving at a very brisk pace and skilfully blends a huge number of national and local threads and personal experiences and memories of the 1640s conflicts...lively, compelling and up to date' History Today: 'Lucid and utterly professional...Braddick's is a fine and convincing story-line, powerfully argued throughout. We have here a genuinely new history of England's civil wars' FT Magazine: 'A fine and valiant book' Spectator: 'Never before has a history of the civil war been so rooted in the sentiments and behaviour of the whole population' Synopsis: The sequence of civil wars that ripped England apart in the seventeenth century was the single most traumatic event in this country between the medieval Black Death and the two world wars. Indeed, it is likely that a greater percentage of the population were killed in the civil wars than in the First World War. This sense of overwhelming trauma gives this major new history its title: "God's Fury, England's Fire". The name of a pamphlet written after the king's surrender, it sums up the widespread feeling within England that the seemingly endless nightmare that had destroyed families, towns and livelihoods was ordained by a vengeful God - that the people of England had sinned and were now being punished.As with all civil wars, however, "God's Fury" could support or destroy either side in the conflict. Was God angry at Charles I for failing to support the true, protestant, religion and refusing to work with Parliament? Or was God angry with those who had dared challenge His anointed Sovereign?Michael Braddick's remarkable book gives the reader a vivid and enduring sense both of what it was like to live through events of uncontrollable violence and what really animated the different sides.The killing of Charles I and the declaration of a republic - events which even now seem in an English context utterly astounding - were by no means the only outcomes, and Braddick brilliantly describes the twists and turns that led to the most radical solutions of all to the country's political implosion. He also describes very effectively the influence of events in Scotland, Ireland and the European mainland on the conflict in England. "God's Fury, England's Fire" allows readers to understand once more the events that have so fundamentally marked this country and which still resonate centuries after their bloody ending. Excerpted from God's Fury, England's Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars by Michael Braddick. Copyright © 2008. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.: In late April 1646 Charles I, a monarch very jealous of his dignity and personal authority, slipped out of Oxford disguised as a servant. A week later, after some apparently hesitant wanderings in the company of his chaplain and one personal friend, he surrendered to a Scottish army camped at Southwell, Nottinghamshire. Eight years earlier he had set out to crush religious protests in Scotland, never quite able to see the protesters as anything but rebels. But their campaign had set off a political and religious crisis that reverberated through all three of Charles's kingdoms - Scotland, Ireland and then England. Charles had been unable to establish military control in any of them and, following defeat in England, surrender to his original tormentors had come to seem his best option. Customer Reviews
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 Rating: - A war to reach a compromiseI am always a little reluctant to buy books that claim to be a "new history" of events that were well recorded and happened some 370 years ago. English history lacks bite, a dull procession of uninspired monarchs and a frenzy of Empire building. The Civil War seemed more a squabble, relatively small armies and minor engagements. Brought up in the West Country, the ruins of Corfe Castle and siege at Sherborne vaguely linked me to Cromwell, the man with warts, with no more than a hazy school history to call on. I dipped into Michael Braddick's large book and - as they say - found it hard to put down. The issues, sketched from numerous angles were well developed. The politics of the three Kingdoms (although this is not focussed on ... Read More: |
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