Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine.

Over the winter of 1641 to 1642, England stood on the precipice of civil war.

In his new book, The Blood in Winter,

Jonathan Healy charts how the relationship between the King and Parliament disintegrated during those months, leading England down the road to a bloody conflict. I spoke to Jonathan

to find out more about why tensions arose between Charles I and the MPs and whether anything could have been done to avoid war.

Jonathan, why don't we start with the title of your book, Blood in Winter, A Nation Descends 1642.

Let's focus in on that winter then of 1641 and 1642.

Why was this such a pivotal time in British and Irish history?

Well, I mean, I started with, I think it was fair to say, one of the most iconic moments. The word iconic gets overused, but this time I think it's right.

In English political history, which was the time when King Charles I first, angry at the sort of dissent that he was getting from Parliament,

marched down into Parliament and tried to arrest five MPs in the House of Commons.

It's one of those moments that most people who know a bit about English history know about.

So I wanted to sort of tell the backstory of that big, big, dramatic, divisive, important moment. But also in the lead up to that, there had been

this incredibly intense period of political strife, popular protest and sort of gradually growing disorder in London, which sort of

fed into this crisis and led to this moment that many of us know about. And then after that,

of course, you know, what happened was that the country then descended into civil war.

And often when we read books about

great revolutions and great political events, we go back and we look at the deep long-term causes,

and that's very, very important. But also, there's a trigger moment. And that trigger moment is

often day-to-day. It's often minute by minute. It's often incredibly difficult to see in that moment where

things will go. So sometimes as a historian, it's really important to immerse yourself in those

moments. So the two things I was trying to do that really was to, a, kind of explain why this

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