Civil war begins with ordinary men – this book is proof

Telegraph

19-06-2025

In November of 1641, King Charles I met with London's delegates just beyond the city walls, in the fenland of Moorfields (near where the Bank of England stands today). The royal party was presented with tokens of loyalty: £20,000 in a 'great cup of gold' for Charles, and £5000 in a golden basin for his wife, Henrietta Maria. The combined value of these gifts was about as much as it would have cost to run the government of Ireland for a year.
It must have felt that the Royalist cause was finally in the ascendant. But as Jonathan Healey makes clear in his energetic and exceptional history, The Blood in Winter: A Nation Descends, 1642, the pageantry of the royal entry disguised a grim political reality for the beleaguered king. Spanning the period between the first session of the Long Parliament in November of 1640 and the moment on August 22 1642, when the English Civil War formally began, The Blood in Winter takes us beyond the disputes in Westminster. The particularly novel parts of Healey's tale show us how common people were well aware of the vicissitudes of royal fortune, and reflect how ideological splintering in the halls of power was felt throughout England long before the battle-lines were drawn.
It was those same common people who showed up in droves to witness Charles's homecoming. He had been in Edinburgh since August of 1641, trying to settle favourable peace terms with the anti-Stuart Scottish Covenanters who had defeated him the previous year. His return to London was hastened by the need to distance himself from a conspiracy to kidnap several Covenanter leaders, foiled in October when one of the plotters lost his nerve and ran to the Covenanter Lord General.
Meanwhile an unruly Parliament had been circulating early drafts of their Grand Remonstrance, taking advantage of the king's absence to compile a list of grievances that they would present, to city-wide uproar, on December 1. Worse still, rumours were flying that a gang of over 100 Catholics intended to break into Westminster Palace and slaughter everyone in attendance.
While Healey's previous book, The Blazing World (2023), offered a panoramic view of the revolutionary century, the narrower focus of The Blood in Winter gives him, a social historian at heart, an opportunity to expand upon the details of everyday life during this uncertain time. The result is a book that bursts with character, a vivid reconstruction of England on the brink. In London we learn about dodgy areas such as Turnmill Street in Clerkenwell, occupied by prostitutes such as 'Pocky-Faced Dall' and frequented by listless military veterans and officers known as 'reformadoes'. Many of these men had returned from fighting the Covenanters and now spent their days drinking and duelling, waiting for the next call to arms.
Beyond the capital, we're told about the appearance of 'mechanical' preachers: common men and women who would smith, sew, or scythe in the morning and preach fiery religious dogma in the afternoon. Across England a great fear of sects was taking hold: taverns thrummed with hearsay about drunken 'Bacchanalians', mystic 'Saturn-worshippers' and nudist 'Adamites'.
While the portrait of Charles is familiar (an indecisive man, spurred to ever-greater escalations by his wife's palpable outrage at breaches to royal prerogative), Healey's narrative is original thanks to a well-chosen cast of supporting characters. Most prominent among these is Sir John Bankes, a lawyer born to a relatively humble background in Keswick in Cumberland who, by 1640, had risen to Chief Justice of the Common Pleas. Soon after Charles fled London for York he summoned Bankes, who was forced to leave his pregnant wife – telling his Parliamentary colleagues that he intended to 'push for peace'.
The story is that of a family man, who leaned towards the Royalist camp but was initially hesitant to commit. As Charles prepared to lay siege to Hull, Bankes wrote to Parliament suggesting that the two parties could still be reconciled. This seems to me to be a better reflection of a prudent arbitrator than the 'breezily optimistic' figure which Healey observes, but it's an excellent example of the view, held by many, that outright conflict could – and should – be avoided at all costs.
In the end, Bankes's family would feel the full brunt of the war. He died in Oxford in 1644, a charge of high treason from his erstwhile Parliamentary colleagues hanging over his head. His castle in Corfe, one of the last Royalist strongholds, held out until 1645 thanks to the leadership of Lady Mary Bankes. After its capture, it was 'slighted' (dismantled) so that it couldn't be put to Royalist use again.
It's a pleasure to read Healey's stylish and fluid prose, and he's fantastic at conveying the importance of 'split-second moments' where the tide of history might have turned. What if Lucy Hay, Countess of Carlisle, had not passed on a warning to the Parliamentarians that Charles intended to arrest the Five Members? Or if Edward Littleton, Lord Keeper of the all-important Great Seal, had refused to abscond from London and join the king in York? Don't be fooled by the book's lugubrious subtitle. This is a rollicking history, packed with fire and excitement.