This is classic history--Wedgwood's erudition is obvious, but this very readable narrative is enlivened with vivid details of characters, events, and physical settings. Her assessments of the duplicitous and vacillating Charles and the narrow but undeniably brilliant soldier Cromwell are both shrewd and sympathetic. The book, her third on the life of Charles I of England, deals with the ten weeks which comprise the trial and execution of the first European reigning monarch to be publicly tried for treason and put to death by his subjects. The story opens in November 1648, with Charles a prisoner, separated from his wife and children. The English Civil War, begun in 1642, has brought the deaths of thousands of his subjects, political anarchy, widespread destruction, catastrophic harvests, and economic depression. Charles has failed to reach agreement with Parliament on its demands for reform, knowing that when Cromwell returns from campaigning, he and the Army will take the law into their own hands. Cromwell and the Army duly return, take Charles prisoner, exclude the Presbyterian opposition from Parliament, and vote to bring the King to justice for plotting to enslave the English nation and commit treason by levying war on his subjects. A somewhat undistinguished group of men is chosen to prosecute and try the King, the country's experienced and influential judges and lawyers having refused to participate. The King, never a good speaker, rises to the occasion with a forceful defense denying the legal authority of the court and arguing, cleverly, that he is protecting not himself but the freedom and liberty of the English people by resisting the court's violation of centuries of English common law. The inevitable death sentence is pronounced and the death warrant is signed. Weirdly enough, Charles and Cromwell never confronted each other during the trial, and Charles was unacquainted with the men who prosecuted him and signed his death warrant. Wedgwood describes the startling denunciation of the court by a masked Lady Fairfax, wife of the commander of Cromwell's army, the King's poignant farewell to the only two of his children in England--a 13 year old daughter and an 8 year old son-- and his calm acceptance of a death which he considered martyrdom. The execution was delayed for several hours while the Commons rushed through an act making it illegal for anyone to proclaim a new king, and the headsman wore a mask and false hair and beard. Eleven years later, Charles' 30-year old son was restored to the throne as Charles II. Cromwell was dead, but 41 of the 59 signers of the death warrant were still alive; ultimately, only nine of them were executed for treason by Charles II. The regicides died believing that theirs had been an act of conscience.

This is by far the best book ever written on the Thirty Years war and this judgement is unlikely to change very soon. Wedgewood is one of the 20th century's distiguished historians. This book was written and published during WWII and as such this gives the works a sense of dramatic urgency. Wedgewood saw clear parallels between what happened in the 17th century and what was happening to Europe in the 1940s. The Jesuits for example are referred to as "the storm troopers of the counter-Reformation.

Wedgewood's sympathies are clearly with the Protestants and there is no doubt who the hero of the book is, Gustavus Adolphus, who is in nearly every way portrayed positively. That is not to say that this is a flaw with the book, rather it is a strength. In these days of sprin doctors, it sometimes seems difficult to realize that good press was sometimes earned and deserved.

It would be too difficult to try and summarize the book in the space provided. In a nutshell, the Thirty Years war evolved into a general European conflict (with the English sitting this one out) due to many of the unresolved issues of the previous century. The Hapsburgs of Austria wanted to dominate the Holy Roman Empire, France wanted to contain the Spainish and Austrian branches, and Sweden was on its way to becoming a world power (for at least the next 100 years). The reason the war went on for so long was that no one really had the strength to land a decisive blow. Oddly enough whenever a power did come close some disaster would over take the army and the powers would have to start over again. Supplying, paying and feeding armies in the field was probably the most problematical undertaking of the entire conflict, along with finding the funds to continue the war for yet another year.

Wedgewood masterfully is able to describe a number of personalities, political situations and religious conflicts to give a real sense of both the era and the people who made it.

The Thirty Years war, like the Florida Recount, arose out of an near deadlock in electoral college votes. The power to create the Holy Roman Emperor was shared amongst seven "Electors" - the Electors the of Mainz, Cologne, Treves, Palatine, Bohemia, Saxony and Brandenburg . When the Bohemian Crown became vacant, the local burghers elected a Protestant, Frederick of Palatine, as King, whose potential double vote threatened to shift the balance of power from the Catholic League (pro-Hapsburg) to the Protestant Union. Frederick was deposed and driven west of the Rhine; his lands were confiscated and the ensuing hostilities lasted three-decades. Wedgwood is marvelous at drawing pen-portraits of the major players - Frederick, his wife Elizabeth Stuart (the "Winter Queen"), mercenary generals Mansfeld and Wallenstein, monk general Tilly, Imperialist partisans Ferdinand, Maximilian and the Cardinal-Infant, Scandinavian interlopers Christian IV, Gustavus Adolphus and Oxenstierna, scheming outsiders such as Cardinal Richelieu and Pope Urban. As most of the "players" tended to make an initial splash and then fade into the general carnage, most histories will get awfully confused, but Wedgwood's 1930s classic will endure because of its lucidity. Another virtue is that she never lets up: some of her most powerful imagery concerns the Westphalia peace conference of the late 1640s.

This is quite simply one of the finest works of history produced by an English or American historian during the twentieth century. It occupies a place of honor on my bookshelf alongside the works of Steven Runciman, Peter Green, and C. Vann Woodward.

Wedgwood's book has three great virtues: (1) the clarity and directness of her analysis; (2) her extensive research in a wide variety of incredibly obscure sources in many different languages; and (3) her remarkable gifts as a literary stylist. She writes beautiful, classic English prose and has a genius for portraiture. Moreover, she has visited many of the sites of the events in question and her feel for the physical background of the story is a particularly engaging part of the book.

To most history lovers, the Thirty Years' War is an obscure and impenetrable thicket considered too much trouble to explore. But Wedgwood recognized that it was one of the decisive episodes in early modern European history. It delayed the unification of Germany by two centuries; began the slow relative decline of Austrian power; paved the way for France's superpower status under Louis XIV; and accelerated Spain's decay into the sick man of eighteenth-century Europe.

One of the other reviewers suggested that Wedgwood's account was marked at times by debatable interpretations influenced by 1930's pacifism. I can see where that idea might come from, but I disagree with it. Certainly, one of Wedgwood's concerns is why the statesmen of the time were repeatedly unable to bring an end to this horribly destructive war, which took on a life of its own that defeated the original intentions of just about all of the participants (much like the Great War of Wedgwood's youth). But in contrast to a lot of other people in England in mid-1930's England, Wedgwood recognized the Nazi regime as the unmitigated evil that it was. Her book seems to have been written in part to explore how it was that Germany's past history had produced the country's monstrous new regime.

I also have a slight disagreement with the suggestion by another reviewer that Wedgwood skimps on military history. The major battles -- particularly Breitenfeld, Nordlingen and Rocroi -- are discussed here in vivid and memorable terms. But Wedgwood doesn't make dramatic battle descriptions an end in themselves. To Wedgwood, the outcome of battles is important insofar as it affected the balance of political forces and thereby made it impossible at a series of critical points to bring the war to an end.

Finally, I have to quote some representative passages to show Wedgwood's gift for language and deft portraits of the major participants. This is perhaps my favorite of the latter:

"General and private opinion flattered the archduke [Ferdinand II]'s virtues, but not his ability. Kindly contemptuous, the greater number of his contemporaries wrote him off as a good-natured simpleton wholly under the control of his chief minister Ulrich von Eggenburg. Yet Ferdinand's apparent lack of personal initiative may have been a pose . . . . He does not appear to have taken political advice from his confessors, and his subjection to the Church did not prevent him from laying violent hands on a Cardinal and defying the Pope in pursuit of what he himself felt to be right. Repeatedly in the course of his life he twisted disaster into advantage, wrenched unexpected safety out of overwhelming danger, snatched victory from defeat. His contemporaries, unimpressed, commented on his astonishing luck. If it was luck, it was indeed astonishing."

Here is her elegy for the power of imperial Spain following the disastrous battle of Rocroi:

"It was the end of the Spanish army. The cavalry survived, but they were so broken in discipline and morale as to be useless without that splendid infantry which had been the strength of the army. They had not lost their reputation at Rocroy, as the Swedes had done at Nordlingen, but they had died to keep it. . . . In the centre of their position on the fields before Rocroy there stands today a little modern monument, an unassuming grey monolith, the gravestone of the Spanish army; almost, one might say, the gravestone of Spanish greatness."