The English Killed Their King. Was It Because of Fish?

“In “The Blood in Winter,” Jonathan Healey explores the many causes of the English Civil War.

 

THE BLOOD IN WINTER: England on the Brink of Civil War, 1642, by Jonathan Healey

 

On Jan. 3, 1642, King Charles summoned his Privy Council for what seems to have been an urgent meeting. On the agenda was a request from the lamprey fishermen of the city of Hull for a reduction in the royal tax rate from 20 shillings per 1,000 fish to 10. Seven years later, the monarchy was abolished and the king was dead.

 

Fish taxes had little, on the surface, to do with the furious fight over royal authority and parliamentary privilege that roiled England in the 1640s — and that would lead, within months of the meeting, to civil war and, in 1649, to the beheading of Charles and the establishment of an English republic. But it’s typical of the Oxford historian Jonathan Healey’s capacious and chatty approach to “The Blood in Winter,” a chronicle of the months and days before the outbreak of battle,that he tells readers about it anyway.

 

In fact, the meeting was probably a blind — an attempt on Charles’s part to occupy government officials while he launched an audacious effort to decapitate the parliamentary insurgency against his autocratic rule. While the members of the Privy Council fine-tuned the tax on fish, royal officers raided the homes of suspect members of Parliament, gathering evidence. The following afternoon an armed guard headed by Charles himself entered Parliament’s Westminster Palace, seeking to arrest five members on charges of high treason.

 

The plot failed. Someone got word to the accused, who disappeared into the warren of London’s streets. When the king demanded their whereabouts, he was met with a startling refusal. “May it please your Majesty,” Speaker of the House of Commons William Lenthall replied, “I have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place but as the House is pleased to direct me, whose servant I am here.” Lenthall was no radical, but he articulated the defining principle of the revolution to come: The king was not the sole representative of the state. Parliament — and the people for whom its members stood — possessed a constitutional authority all its own.

 

In this wider political context, the debate over a provincial fishery tax, even if meant as a distraction, was hardly an irrelevancy. On the contrary, Healey suggests, it was Charles himself who repeatedly missed the point in the lead-up to civil war, by treating as a rebellion against his personal authority what was in fact a contest over the foundations of government, in matters great and small. What the historian Conrad Russell once called “that hall of distorting mirrors, the search for the causes of the English Civil War,” is, in Healey’s minutely particular account, a usefully refractory lens. Nothing, and no one, was altogether irrelevant.

 

To longstanding questions about the underlying character of the war — was it a broad-based struggle for popular sovereignty or a power struggle among elites? The last of the Reformation wars of religion or the first modern secular revolution? A reaction against Stuart absolutism or the expression of deeper social and economic forces? — Healey answers: Yes, all of the above.

 

But if the conflict was about one thing more than another, he suggests,it was about governance. The questions that inflamed Parliament against the king, and vice versa, were often technical and procedural, though one needn’t squint to see the violent implications. Under whose authority, for instance, were the leaders of regional militias? Who controlled the armaments in the Tower of London? Who could declare a state of civic or national emergency? Who could levy the taxes to support an army, vote in the House of Lords, convene or dismiss a session of Parliament, or appoint and depose key government officials?

 

Healey peoples these debates with a vast and vividly drawn cast of characters, from the king and queen, whose mutual devotion did not preclude window-smashing arguments, to the members of the parliamentary resistance, including a then obscure Cambridge member of Parliament named Oliver Cromwell. He also gives room to a snarling lot of lesser-known figures like the poet and ferryman John Taylor, the “feared thug” Thomas Lunsford and the royalist bishop of Ely, Matthew Wren, known to his enemies as the “Norwich Beast.”

 

In addition to political principle, religious division, colonial upheaval, popular unrest and financial crises, the causes of the English Civil War in this telling include an exceptionally rainy winter, bad roads between London and the provinces, a palace clock that ran slow, Mary Bankes’s pregnancy, a pamphlet by an ironmonger named Henry Walker and an incendiary sermon preached by a leather merchant known as Praisegod Barebone.

 

In such a teeming mix, it can be hard to gauge the significance of any single event as it unfolds; there are a lot of red herrings and near misses in Healey’s bustling narrative. But the author wisely escapes the deadening simplifications of hindsight, which turn accidents into inevitabilities and potential futures into obvious dead ends.

 

Healey’s own previous book “The Blazing World,” a history that expanded the scope of this revolutionary period to the whole century, claimed the 1600s as the font of modernity, “a remarkable new world” of ideas and actions “blazing a path toward our own.” “The Blazing World” appeared in 2023. Just two years later, on this side of the Atlantic at least, the outcome of the battle for divided and democratic government, due process and constitutional protection hardly seems inevitable — indeed, doesn’t feel like history at all.

 

What lesson can we take? Perhaps it is that, in the undetermined flux of the present, the commitments and loyalties of low-level actors can matter a great deal. In the spring of 1642, Charles made Hull — a smallish town with an abundance of fish, a well-placed port and an unusually large arsenal — the target of a campaign to develop royalist strongholds outside London. On April 23 he rode to city gates with a force of 300 men and demanded access. Having given his word to Parliament that he would not yield the town, the governor refused. The drawbridges were hauled up, and the king retreated. It was four months before the Great Rebellion was openly declared, but Charles — for once — had no illusions about the significance of what had just happened: “Actual war is levied upon us.”

 

THE BLOOD IN WINTER: England on the Brink of Civil War, 1642 | By Jonathan Healey | Knopf | 408 pp. | $35” [1]

 

1. The English Killed Their King. Was It Because of Fish? Nonfiction. Nicholson, Catherine.  New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Sep 10, 2025.