Goodreads asked Charles Cordell:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Charles Cordell Much of God's Vindictive Wrath draws on my own experiences, particularly operational deployments. The writing has been described as brutal. It is realistic. I don’t believe in trivialising violence. The British Civil Wars were the bloodiest in our history – worse than the Great War of 1914-18.

I have also drawn on time spent in overseas posts tackling extremism. The more I studied the 17th Century, the more I realised I was seeing the same issues and situations driving conflict today. Rapid population growth coupled with climate change, the Little Ice Age, led to collapsing living standards and decreasing life expectancy. People searched for answers, turning to more and more extreme political and religious ideas.

Ultimately, the 1640s were the most violent period in history. Conflicts raged across the globe from Japan, through China and Eurasia to the Americas. We now know this period as The General Crisis. It included the British Civil Wars, as well as the Thirty Years War and the European Wars of Religion.

There are so many extraordinary stories from the British Civil Wars. They just need to be told. In the end, I felt I had to tell this story, to do justice to those extraordinary times and to reflect on our own situation today.

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