Dr Jonathan Healey

Jonathan Healey is associate professor in social history at the University of Oxford and author of The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England (Bloomsbury, 2023).

by Anthony van Dyck

"Tyrant, traitor, murderer and public enemy": was Charles I really that bad?.

Bishops tumble, with “popish” paraphernalia falling from their pockets, in a woodcut from a 1641 Puritan pamphlet titled 'A Decade of Grievances' (Photo by Bridgeman Images)

How people power fuelled England's century of chaos.

Century of chaos: people & power in the 1600s.

Taxing the rich to feed the poor in the 17th century: the world's first welfare state.

The battle of Marston Moor, the largest clash of the Civil War, depicted in a 19th-century painting. Preventing a slide into chaos required "diplomatic panache, not Charles's fabled stubbornness", writes Jonathan Healey. (Photo by A 16th-century portrait of Bess of Hardwick. Bess's talent, ambition and eye for a well-connected husband elevated her to dizzying levels of wealth and power in Tudor England. (Photo by Bridgeman Art Library)

The LibraryWhat sparked the Civil War?.