English Civil Wars

The English Civil Wars enter the narrative not as a dramatized campaign but as the measure of what the Duke of Newcastle has lost. In the Duchess’s account, her husband’s wealth before the wars marks a limit to what she will accept from the Empress: she wants neither riches for herself nor a fortune beyond what he once possessed, even while imagining how wealth might restore his family’s standing. The wars thus connect private loss to the book’s larger questions about riches, desire, and power.

The Wars as a Measure of Loss

During the voyage between worlds, the Duchess asks why the Empress, having discovered a passage to the Duchess’s native world, does not enrich the place where she was born, or at least her own family. The Empress answers that riches can make people mad and drive them to destroy one another. The Duchess challenges this account: perhaps people are so eager for gold because they have too little of it.

The Empress rejects that explanation, arguing that covetousness is boundless and grows with wealth. She nonetheless offers the Duchess as much riches as she might desire. The Duchess declines more than the wealth her husband had before the English Civil Wars, explaining that she would seek it not for herself but for her husband’s posterity. Her request makes the wars legible through their aftermath: the relevant fact is the lost prosperity of her household, not a battle narrative.

Wealth Across Two Worlds

The contrast with the Blazing-World gives that remembered loss material form. There, gold is so abundant that its extent is compared to Arabian sands, and precious stones occur as rocks; yet gold and jewels are restricted by rank, and commerce is conducted by exchanging commodities rather than using coin. Abundance does not erase hierarchy or greed. It is governed, displayed, and made part of political order.

The Emperor’s magnificent stables turn the contrast into architecture. One double stable holds a hundred horses on each side, with a gold main structure, an agate-arched roof, walls lined with cornelian, an amber floor, mother-of-pearl mangers, crystal pillars, and a turquoise entrance. Its adjoining riding-house is lined with sapphires and topazes, with a soft floor of sifted golden sand. The Duchess admires these buildings but measures them against the plainer facilities associated with her husband, saying that he would make his buildings noble if he had the wealth to do so.

The Uncrossable Passage and Its Meaning

The Duchess imagines what a passage between worlds could provide: the Emperor’s horses and building materials, as well as enough gold to answer her husband’s generous gifts. The Duke responds that he is sorry no passage exists between the two worlds, and that he has always found an obstruction to his good fortunes. The hoped-for transfer of wealth therefore remains a counterfactual, not a recovery; the boundary between worlds preserves the distance between the Blazing-World’s abundance and the Duke’s impoverished circumstances.

The episode also complicates the Empress’s claim that wealth chiefly intensifies covetousness. The Duchess does not present her desire as personal accumulation: she distinguishes her own needs from her wish for her husband’s descendants to benefit. Yet the narrative leaves the Empress’s warning in place, setting benevolent generosity beside the risks of riches and making the wars’ remembered economic consequence part of a wider debate about whether wealth can repair loss without feeding further desire.