The Civil Wars 1637-1653

by Martyn Bennett

In 16 momentous years of the 17th century, civil war raged throughout Britain and Ireland. The characteristic features of government and society were swept away in wars, rebellions and revolutions. The monarchy was abolished and the King executed, and Britain and Ireland were united in a republic for the only time in modern history. In this book, Martyn Bennett traces rebellion and conflict in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and goes on to describe the culmination of the parliamentarian effort in the creation of the Protectorate under Oliver Cromwell in 1653.

Genres: History

128 pages, Paperback

First published September 25, 1998

Reviews

[Leslie]

If you want a quick, serviceable overview of the English Civil War, this is a good choice. Briggs provides a general account of the the political, economic, and religious pressures that tore the country apart in these years (largely due to Charles' mishandling of them) and then moves on to a summary of the military engagements that ended with Cromwell's supremacy in the new republic. It's not the most exciting work of history I've ever read--Christopher Hill's work gives a far richer, more exciting account of the sheer weirdness and cultural richness of this period, but that isn't a fair comparison because Hill is doing something different and serving different purposes than Briggs is here. It's a useful starting place if you want to know the context for what's going on in the 1640s and 1650s.

[Ian Kemp]

Pitched at exactly the right level for me - wanting to find out just the facts and the big picture without too much analysis. In fact in this 100-page book Bennett manages to pack so much into each paragraph the experience is like getting a series of compressed knowledge parcels - which expand inside the head releasing the info. Or like having a whole 16 year chunk of history downloaded a la matrix.

The period covered sounds like an exciting time when orthodoxies are up for challenge and being fervently and violently disputed right across the spectrum of thought from ultra-conservative to ultra-radical. As usual the victorious ideas are not those that give the best outcome for the largest number of people, but those that can muster the most military resources.

An old marxist like myself would say that the exclusion of the levellers (and the liquidation of the diggers) doomed the whole English revolution, because at that point it resolved into a bourgeois revolution where the victors were simply a new privileged class supplanting the old.

Or is that too presumptuous an analysis? After all I've only read 100 pages on the whole subject.

[Tim Sully]

Good history if you already have a background knowledge of it all. If not the discussion and overview will confuse you.

[teleri]

i read this for a book challenge. wouldn’t have touched it otherwise.