God's Fury, England's Fire

Nov 2, 2024 4:38 AM

Author:Michael Braddick

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.

Reviews

Wonderful stuff

—— Sunday Times

Fascinating, delightful, illuminating. The diarists soon become like old friends ... and make our wartime past seem no more distant than yesterday

—— Mail on Sunday

It's always easy to imagine people in this period becalmed in a sepia-toned limbo. This book tells the messy, but far more interesting, truth

—— Time Out

Few books have so successfully stepped inside the minds of the British people during wartime

—— Metro

A fascinating account of everyday life in Britain

—— Good Housekeeping

Vibrant, lyrical and engrossing

—— Daily Express

A mesmerising read

—— BBC History

One closes the books with the odd sense of saying farewell to a group of interesting and interestingly different individuals one might have encountered on a long journey

—— Sunday Times

I love these diaries. They have the attraction of being stories, but REAL stories - better than any novel

—— Margaret Forster

In her group biography of three monarchs, Carter has succeeded in painting their personalities in vivid colours...she brings an excellent biographer's eye for the telling detail...the great appeal of this book lies in it narration and comparative analysis of the life and personality of her imperial subjects...well-researched and expertly written...an engaging and remarkably even-handed portrayal

—— The Times Literary Supplement

That these three absurd men could ever have held the fate of Europe in their hands is a fact as hilarious as it is terrifying. I haven't enjoyed a historical biography this much since Lytton Strachey's Victoria

—— Zadie Smith

Miranda Carter writes with lusty humour, has a fresh clarifying intelligence, and a sharp eye for telling details. This is traditional narrative history with a 21st-century zing. A real corker of a book

—— History Today

A highly original way of looking at the years that led up to 1914

—— Antonia Fraser , Sunday Telegraph Books of the Year

Carter deftly interpolates history with psychobiography to provide a damning indictment of monarchy in all its forms

—— Will Self , New Statesmen Books of the Year

A depiction of bloated power and outsize personalities in which Carter picks apart the strutting absurdity of the last emperors on the eve of catastrophe

—— Financial Times Books of the Year

Takes what should have been a daunting subject and through sheer wit and narrative élan turns it into engaging drama. Carter has a notable gift for characterisation

—— Jonathan Coe , Guardian Books of the Year

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