HarperPress £25 pp651

In Britain’s stately and generally un-bloody progress from medieval monarchy to modern nation state, the civil wars of the mid-17th century are the great exception. For some 20 traumatic years, the nations of the British Isles set about killing their neighbours and countrymen with a ferocity hitherto unknown. Not until the first world war would the proportion of the population killed and wounded reach similar heights.

The changes wrought were dramatic. Scotland became a de facto aristocratic republic. Irish Catholics revolted against English Protestant rule, setting up a short-lived independent Irish state. And in England, the king was first challenged, and then, in 1649, publicly executed. The House of Lords was abolished. And England was declared a “Commonwealth” — a free state where power flowed upwards from the people, not downwards from a monarch.

It is not hard to see why the period has long been a source of fascination and controversy. Few eras can match it for the complexity of its politics, its larger than life-sized cast list (which includes Charles I, Cromwell, Milton and Hobbes) or the power, perhaps even the grandeur, of the ideas over which men fought.

All of which makes this book’s declared objective so commendable and so welcome. Apart from CV Wedgwood in the 1950s, no English historian since the 1880s has attempted a detailed narrative history of the 1640s. Diane Purkiss — whose background is as a historian of witches, sprites and goblins — may not be the most obvious person for the task, but she has boldly offered a long book covering the entire decade.

Hers is a People’s History in two senses. It is aimed at “the people”: those who may not have encountered this period. But it is also a search after “those most elusive of all historical personages, the ordinary man and woman” whom political histories tend to omit.

In some respects, these goals are realised. Purkiss has an eye for the narrative vignette that can illuminate the age: she tells the story, for example, of the botched execution of a West Country Catholic priest — half hanged and then disembowelled alive — with gruesome and moving directness. And there are brief forays into areas of experience usually ignored in histories of the civil war: children, for instance, get a chapter of their own, while another examines recipe books and food — and includes the striking claim that the Catholic courtier Sir Kenelm Digby was the first to recommend bacon and eggs for breakfast.

It is in “telling the story of the English civil war” — the politics and the military action — that things go wrong. Here her narrative is confused (often doubling back on itself) and eccentrically selective (whole lists of important characters and events fail to rate a mention). It is also creakingly old-fashioned. Seeing the civil war as a conflict of “two protagonists” — Charles I and Oliver Cromwell — was racily cutting-edge in about 1840, but has come to be seen as the absurd over- simplification that it is. Purkiss’s view of parliamentary politics is equally antediluvian. Here, “the man who led the Commons . . . was John Pym” — the puritan lawyer and future Roundhead — an assessment straight from the pages of the Victorian historian, SR Gardiner. Indeed, Purkiss’s claim that in 1641 Pym’s “hour had found him” paraphrases Gardiner’s remark that “Pym saw his time was come”.

What, then, of “the ordinary people”? In fact, they barely figure. The characters who fill these bulky pages are almost all grand, though Purkiss gives them a spuriously demotic feel by simply omitting the titles that would indicate their status as toffs: hence we get plain Robert Harley, Arthur Hesilrige and Lucy Hay, though the first two were knights and the third the daughter of one earl and wife of another. Likewise, Purkiss’s efforts on behalf of the “ ordinary reader” can be jarringly anachronistic: 17th-century anti-Catholicism, we are told, “strongly resembles Nazi anti-semitism”, and Parliamentarians engaging in public fasts were “rather like the IRA hunger strikers of the 1980s”.

In a recent review, Dr Purkiss opined that some of a colleague’s book was “so obvious that ploughing through the thickets of it is close to being a waste of time. And the rest is so unexamined that to assert it seems more an act of personal stubbornness than an intellectual procedure”. It would be interesting to know which of these statements she thought did not apply to her own book.

John Adamson’s The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I will be published later this year. The English Civil War is available at the Books First price of £22.50 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585

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