Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century, by Geoffrey Parker, Yale, RRP£29.99/$40, 904 pages
In 1647, at the height of the English civil war, King Charles I fled to the Isle of Wight, where he established a court in exile. Among the local gentry who attended him was Sir John Oglander, local landowner and member of parliament for Yarmouth. The weather was terrible. Oglander wrote in his diary: “This summer of the King’s being here was a very strange year in all His Majesty’s three kingdoms, if we duly consider the heavens, men and earth. I conceive the heavens were offended with us for our offence committed to one another for, from Mayday till the 15th of September, we had scarce three dry days together. His Majesty asked me whether that weather was usual in our Island. I told him that in this 40 years I never knew the like before.”
Oglander was convinced that the relentless rain, and the damage it was causing in terms of failed harvest and widespread flooding, were a mark of God’s displeasure with Englishmen for acts committed against nature: insurrection against their king, and citizens turning against one another in civil war.