The Blood in Winter by Jonathan Healey

The Blood in Winter: England on the Brink of Civil War, 1642

By Jonathan Healey

Knopf 2025

Jonathan Healey’s chronicle of the dizzying, destabilising months leading up to the start of the English Civil War in 1642 is a master stroke. Scholarly but absorbing, Healey traces how King Charles I’s multiple-kingdom inheritance collapsed into anarchy and mutual recrimination in the years 1640-1642. True, matters culminated in a civil war by 1642, but there was no inevitability. ‘With the right mix of political skill and determination, he might have been able to fight back and secure his authority.’

Healey is part of a new wave of historical writing that seeks to bring a literary sensibility to the business of assembling a narrative. Take, for instance, the following description of London in the throes of political crisis: ‘It was a Sunday morning, late in March 1641. London was starting to warm again after a deep winter. The trees in St James’ Park were in bud…It was a beautiful time of year.’ This kind of atmospheric scene-setting is repeated in many a chapter.

Healey’s account is unapologetically humorous. Consider, for example, the dry wit of the following sentence in a discussion of Charles’ religious policies: ‘Naturally, Charles warmed further to those like Laud who didn’t consider his wife a follower of the Antichrist.’  Elsewhere he is shamelessly scatological. Political radicals are quoted as describing the king’s bishops as ‘a stink’, whilst William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, was described as an ‘orc’. In the pamphleteering duels between the royalist waterman John Taylor and his opponent Henry Walker, we are told that both men produced in print depictions of his rival with a defecating Devil. Faecal references of this kind, taken from the sources themselves, are scattered throughout the text. Deploying court records, Healey freely quotes the abusive and profane insults that ordinary Londoners loved to deploy against one another in their neighbourly disputes. Healey’s account makes clear that the rancour of the political nation reached right down into the bowels of the ordinary person on the street.

A cast of usually obscure characters are given centre-stage. We are given mini-biographies of men and women such as the king’s loyal privy councillor, Edward Nicholas, the king’s able lawyer, the reluctant royalist Sir John Bankes and the wily and treacherous Lucy Hay, Countess of Carlisle. These provide an engaging human element to the volcanic event that was the War of the Three Kingdoms. Caught up in circumstances not of their making, they all had to make moral and political choices that would affect their futures and those of their loved ones. In the case of the equivocating Countess, Healey pinpoints her as the person who leaked Charles’ plan to arrest the Five Members, giving them time to escape and potentially changing the whole course of English history in so doing. Healey notes that ‘The crisis of 1641-42 is full of split-second moments like this, where several different paths were spread out ahead.’

Eyewitness accounts abound concerning the violence of the London crowds that was continuous over this period. Indeed, conservative constitutionalists complained that the pressure of the parliamentarian mobs meant that the Parliament was not a free one, thus justifying its dissolution at royal hands. Among the most refreshing qualities of Healey’s narrative is the focus on the counter-revolution. Ever since Christopher Hill and his disciples came to prominence, a focus on London crowds and raving sectaries has been pronounced in the historiography of the period, but the royalist reaction is understudied. Yet, by the summer of 1641, we are told, ‘People were getting sick of the sectaries. The conservative backlash was picking up.’ It appeared to a great many people that the radicals in Parliament, having corrected the excesses of the Personal Rule, and sent the king’s loyal servant Lord Strafford to his death, was now going too far in the other direction and attempting to carry through its own unconstitutional agenda. Generous detail is given of the royalist conspiracies that were afoot at this time, and of the personal role of Charles and his strong-willed Queen, Henrietta Maria, in these schemes.

The failure of Charles’ efforts to arrest the Five Members in January 1642 seems to be the moment where the country began its inexorable canter towards civil war. Charles, humiliated by his Parliament and endangered by the mob, fled his rebellious capital and set up a new headquarters of counter-revolution in York. Last-minute attempts to broker a compromise failed. Charles’ kingdoms would never be the same. Healey’s narrative is nuanced and dynamic. His descriptions of the London streets, and his reconstructions of the key moments in the unfolding catastrophe, are full of sensual vigour and moments of high drama. This is not just one more book about England’s ill-fated road to revolution, but a triumph of scholarly empathy and perspectival balance that should not go unread.

Aaron Kyereh-Mireku is a writer and reviewer living in London.