This is the second volume of Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples, published in 1956. It covers the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries so spans the Tudor and Stewart dynasties including the Civil War and the interregnum of Oliver Cromwell.
The ‘New World’ discoveries of the East Indies and the Americas, including the colonisation of the eastern seaboard of what becomes the USA, get due attention, but the real new world is closer to home with the makeover of European politics. The consequences of the emergence of the Protestant religion and its adoption by Henry VIII echoes down the decades providing the big divide in England, Britain, and Europe. For Churchill, this is politics not religion, and he describes the power struggles with insight and candour.
He explains how the various divides in society (and we are talking peers, landowners, gentry, clergy, and increasingly the merchant classes) develop from Protestant and Catholic, Royalist and Parliamentary, into the party politics (Whigs and Tories) that we still inherit, in one form or another, today.
The prose is a touch verbose to modern eyes, but that is his style, and his voice (if you know it) comes through every sentence. It is a comprehensive work as regards how the country was ruled and/or governed but rarely digs deep into the lot of the common people.
But taken on its own
terms of reference, it is an informative and interesting read.
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