Prelude to the English Civil War

Not Just the Tudors

History Hit

History

4.8 • 3K Ratings

🗓️ 30 June 2025

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What drives a nation to civil war? Why would a king turn on his own Parliament? Professor Suzannah Lipscomb is joined by Dr. Jonathan Healey to explore the chaotic and combustible months - and the men behind the rebellion - that hurled 17th-century England into one of the bloodiest periods in its history.

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Presented by Professor Susannah Lipscomb. audio editor is Amy Haddow and the producer is Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb.
0:02.6	If you'd like not just the Tudors ad-free to get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit.
0:10.5	With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries,
0:16.0	including my own recent two-part series, A World Torn Apart, The Dissolution of the Monastries, and enjoy a new release every week.
0:25.2	Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com forward slash subscribe.
0:32.0	Hello, I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb and welcome to not just the Tudors from History Hit, the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to Samarise.
0:46.8	Relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not in other words just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors.
1:01.7	London in the 1640s was a place unlike anywhere else in England. It was cacophonous,
1:08.7	filthy and dark. Coal fires filled the air with acrid smoke, and the muddy, dung-strewn streets were busy with animals, carts, and above all, people.
1:21.5	Over the previous 150 years, the population of the city had swollen from 50,000 to 400,000, as people migrated from the countryside.
1:31.4	So it was also a place of clamour and dispute of gossip shared and insults flung,
1:37.0	a place of constant noise, the hum of human voices interrupted by church bells,
1:42.0	the creek of hackney coaches and the sound of public punishment.
1:46.0	And it was a place of high emotion, radical politics, and where a crowd could change the fate of a nation.
1:58.0	It was here in the early 1640s that the stage was set for a schism as deep as it was unprecedented,
2:04.5	the emergence of a gulf between the King, Charles I and Parliament, a gulf that became unbridgeable,
2:12.5	that led on the 22nd of August 1642 to the King declaring war on his own Parliament.
2:24.3	But how and why?
2:27.3	In a close analysis of London from November 1640 through to the summer of 1642,
2:33.3	my guest today offers us a fundamental new understanding
2:37.2	of how the Civil War began. He is Dr. Jonathan Healy, Associate Professor at the University of
2:43.6	Oxford. He's been my guest before on his wonderful previous book The Blazing World,
	...

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