Kingdoms Crumble

By Stephen Brumwell By Jonathan Healey Knopf, 432 pages, $35 Mr. Brumwell’s books include “Turncoat: Benedict Arnold and the Crisis of American Liberty.”

The Wall Street Journal
Sep 30, 2025
The Blood in Winter

Every year, at the state opening of the United Kingdom’s Parliament in Westminster, a curious ritual is enacted. An official known as Black Rod must knock three times on the closed doors of the House of Commons before finally being admitted to formally summon the members to attend the monarch’s speech.


Symbolizing Parliament’s independence from the crown, the ceremony commemorates an incident, from nearly 400 years ago, that provides a dramatic climax to Jonathan Healey’s “The Blood in Winter,” a taut narrative of the tensions that caused a catastrophic breach between Charles I, the Stuart king of England, Scotland and Ireland, and those who contested his autocratic rule.


On Jan. 4, 1642, King Charles burst into the House of Commons at the head of 80 armed men, intent on arresting five members of parliament on a charge of high treason.


The quintet absconded at the last moment, warned by Lady Lucy Carlisle, who likely heard details of the planned snatch from her mistress, King Charles’s French-born consort, Henrietta Maria.


In Mr. Healey’s assessment, the event paved the way for the bitter civil war that would erupt months later. By playing such a prominent personal role in an attempted coup against his leading critics, the king demonstrated that he simply couldn’t be trusted; it was that failing, Mr. Healey argues, that cost the vacillating sovereign his kingdoms and, finally, in January 1649, his head.


In his previous book, “The Blazing World” (2023), Mr. Healey surveyed the revolutionary political and social developments of 17th-century England with a broad brush. By contrast, “The Blood in Winter” focuses on a far tighter timescale. It explores the period from the spring of 1641 to the early summer of 1642, when the power struggle between the increasingly authoritarian Charles and his defiant Parliament came to a fractious head.


Such detailed coverage, with the chronology whittled down to months, days, hours and, ultimately, minutes, rests upon the wealth of contemporary accounts that Mr. Healey, a professor of social history at Oxford, draws upon. As he emphasizes, some of his richest source materials are themselves a consequence of a growing public appetite for printed news of such momentous developments, which fortuitously coincided with declining censorship. “Certainly, for once,” Mr. Healey observes, “it was a great time to be a writer.”


Propagandist coverage of partisan clashes popularized the epithets that would thenceforth be used to characterize the rival supporters of king and parliament: Zealous royalists were called Cavaliers, from the Italian word cavaliere, or horseman; for Protestant Englishmen this term invoked sinister connotations of Catholicism (“popery”) along with a swaggering arrogance. “Roundheads,” meanwhile, derived from a derisory description of the rowdy, crop-haired, London apprentices who were conspicuous opponents of the king’s enforcers.


Alongside his thoughtful depiction of King Charles—a hesitant, austere and slightly built patron of the arts who was nonetheless determined to exert what he saw as his “divine right” to rule however he saw fit—Mr. Healey offers many other revealing character sketches: John Taylor, the pro-royalist Thames boatman and poet who was “used to living by his oar and his quill”; Thomas Lunsford, the swashbuckling “loyal thug” and lieutenant of the Tower of London; John Bankes, a gifted lawyer who rose from the fells of Cumbria to become lord chief justice and owner of sprawling estates, including Corfe Castle on England’s southern coast; and Henrietta Maria, the king’s consort, shown here as a savvy political operator in her own right.


The queen’s unabashed Catholicism fed suspicion of King Charles by fueling widespread fears of a stealthy return to the elaborate “Romish” ceremonies of England’s preReformation church. But extreme reactions against this backtracking, expressed through the wanton vandalism of venerated religious artifacts, themselves provoked resentment and resistance from conservative-minded parishioners who did not share the strict Calvinism of the Puritans.


Some of the radical sects with which the era also abounded espoused unorthodox notions of salvation. They included the nudist Adamites, and the Bacchanalians, who believed that the path to heaven could be lubricated by copious drafts of wine and ale.


“The Blood in Winter” unfolds against an atmospheric reconstruction of Stuart society. In particular, Mr. Healey succeeds in evoking the sights, sounds and smells of the palaces, taverns and backstreets of London, where so much of the book’s action originates. It was, he writes, a place where “gossip, insults, and bodily effluents were all tossed about.” This vivid backdrop provides context for the streetlevel “out of doors” agitation that sustained the resistance against royal tyranny. Besides the machinations of an elite “Junto” of politicians, Parliament’s cause was bolstered by the mass-support of ordinary Londoners, who turned out in their thousands to thwart the king’s efforts to overawe his capital by force.


The constitutional crisis of 1641-42 provides a warning of how swiftly a war of words and ideas can escalate into all-out conflict. With hostilities imminent, even such havering moderates as John Bankes were forced to choose a side. He followed his king. Ousted from London, Charles established a new court in Oxford. Bankes died there in 1644, when the outcome of the bloody strife between king and Parliament still hung in the balance. His widow, Mary, became celebrated for overseeing the staunch defense of Corfe Castle against a Roundhead siege. When the fortress finally surrendered, in 1646, it was among the last remaining royalist outposts. Today Corfe’s shattered towers still dominate the peaceful Dorset landscape, a reminder of the destruction wrought by civil war.

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