Reviews for King's Peace

The average rating for King's Peace based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-10-18 00:00:00 David Hager Good intentions often go bad. That is perhaps the great moral of Wedgwood's history of the years when Charles I lost control of his three kingdoms. I'm still reading it in what seems to be part of some bizarre subconscious syllabus of books that Ward Cleaver might have read (if you can imagine him ever reading anything but the newspaper). Nevertheless, below are a few stray thoughts on the work and the author. Wedgwood has wrongly suffered academic scorn as a "popularizer." If anything she was a high-brow popularizer, living in her subjects' worlds, and writing in a style echoing the greatest English historians and that was still very much her own. As to her argument, it is actually somewhat compelling and has found echoes in recent historiography. Charles I, Wedgwood argues, was a well-meaning man but with only the barest grasp on the real situation of his kingdoms. He lived life in a court where he controlled the minutest details of protocol, surrounding him in the illusion of mastery, an illusion he thought applied outside of Whitehall. He understood politics through ideals. Court masques where virtues crushed vices were accurate reflections of how Charles I viewed politics and the kingly office. Despite what Wedgwood describes as his allegorical turn of mind, the king had some decided policies. Charles was a militant for moderation. Wedgwood never uses such a paradoxical or ready term but that is the gist of her analysis. She dwells, for instance, on the king's schemes to reunite Christendom under a reformed Catholicism for which the Church of England would have provided the model. To this end he was in general lenient toward Roman Catholics and punished Calvinists. Of course, Star Chamber often handed down sentences on both but any tolerance of Catholics always received far greater attention in England. He held back from the Thirty Years' War, though his neutrality was paid for in part by Spanish silver from Peru, shipped through England and minted there before heading to the Netherlands to pay Catholic armies. He kept England out of a continental war he lamented as disastrous and unnecessary. Even the plight of his sister, Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, darling of the "Protestant Cause," did not alter his course. What made sense to the king perplexed and outraged his subjects. They doubted his intentions and misinterpreted his policies, says Wedgwood. Moreover, Charles suffered from a dearth of able councilors. Thomas Wentworth and Archbishop Laud come in for surprising praise from Wedgwood--surprising to this reader, anyway. The author, after all, wrote an admiring biography of Strafford. Her attitudes changed over time but in general he and Laud come across in this volume as some of the only people who truly recognized the dangers of the king's situation in the late 1630s. Lastly, Wedgwood has something to say about religious fanaticism. To borrow from another work of English history, it was A Very Bad Thing. For instance, Lord Warriston, a leading Scottish Covenanter, receives a heap of (amusing) scorn for what Wedgwood concludes was his mistaken conviction that he conversed with and enjoyed the approval of God Almighty Himself. In another case, Wedgwood writes dismissively of a "prophetess" who shows up in Edinburgh convulsing and decreeing that God had damned the King's alternative to the Covenant. Elsewhere, Wedgwood sneers at the popular outbursts against the established religion. In general, she asserts that the crowds causing all the ruckus over the Scottish Prayer Book were not acting of their own volition, but by direction from a few at the top--and you may judge the motives of these leading men as you will. One would be tempted to say that Wedgwood's problem with popular activism is that she has no room for it in her "Great Man" theory of history--and a "Great Man" history largely from the royalist perspective to boot. I think this would be a mistake. What really seems to bother he is the abuse of belief. She is convinced that the real passions of the people over religion were being exploited by ambitious men who should have known better. This seems to be about more than her commitment to the individual as the real mover of history. This counts for a great deal, too, but may risk overshadowing a deep skepticism about revealed religion and its place in the politics of the time.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-09-27 00:00:00 Margaret Andrews This was a complex period, with so much going on all over Europe and in the new colonies as well as in Britain, and with so many, many players on the stage. CV Wedgewood is a good writer and storyteller, and makes the events of the time as coherent as any such troubled period could be. Nothing happens in a vacuum and none of the actors are without their flaws. King Charles had this awful knack for saying and doing the wrong thing at the wrong time, which made him look more devious than he actually was. He consistently appointed incompetent and self-serving advisors, and did things to please his temperamental, conspiracy-loving Catholic wife. I kept wanting to shake him and shout, "Wake up!" But he never saw the reality of how his people felt until it was too late, and lived in an imagined England of his own.