In 2023, Britain embarks on the adventure of a new king, one who takes over from a queen who was on the throne for a record-breaking period. With apprehension, with expectation, we await events. To be sure, the new king is already beset by criticism, including from his nearest and dearest. But if Charles III were to look back to the advent of James I, who also succeeded a long-serving Elizabeth, he would likely find the experience discouraging. Jonathan Healey’s book, The Blazing World, offering a new history of revolutionary England in the 17th century, illustrates how uneasily any new king settles upon the throne.

While there have been a few attempts to tell the tale of Britain’s revolutions in a manner accessible to the general reader, Healey takes a new line by covering the post-Restoration restiveness and, ultimately, the so-called Glorious Revolution, as well as the reigns of James I and others, in a single volume. He has done extraordinary work in synthesising those academic books on the subject that he considers salient. It’s one man’s choice, and perhaps all the better for that; what seems to guide Healey is the extent to which he finds particular historians inspirational. John Adamson’s self-limiting idea of a noble revolt keeps jagged company with a narrative of popular unrest and reordered social classes, as well as ideas of both religious war and constitutional crisis.

For some reason, this approach aroused the inner dragon of my Oxford examining-brain. I kept wanting to ask awkward questions about the argument, about terminology, about methodology. Only in the last section of the book, its epilogue, does Healey offer something like an account of what we have read and why it matters, yet it’s profoundly unsatisfactory. The most revolutionary thing, he explains, is that politics “was really no longer about monarchs”. Immediately, he offers a caveat: he tells us that the personalities of kings and queens still mattered, and that the role of the aristocracy remained important, but that “the political story” was now driven by the House of Commons and people holding smaller, local offices. Does this mean that there was really no need, in the 19th century, for Chartism or the Reform Acts?

Healey also wants to argue that the 17th century led to more class mobility, although he doesn’t quite say that, satisfying himself with instances of people who rise from the gentry to the aristocracy. I’m sure he knows that this happened a lot in previous centuries; the same stories could be told about the 16th century: Wolsey, Drake, Raleigh, Thomas More, Elizabeth Cary. Perhaps we should face the possibility that all that bloodshed and heartache didn’t make as much difference as we might have hoped.

What does change—effectively twice across the century—is the gender of the monarch and the way he or she presents him or herself. Hope was attached to James and his accession because he was a king and not a queen. It would be fair to say tha