British civil wars (1638-52). In financial expense, physical devastation, and loss of life, the civil wars were the costliest conflict ever waged on British soil. Their causes were far reaching. Charles I had an exalted conception of his role as monarch, and denied that he was accountable to the people or their elected representatives. He might have been able to realize his pretensions to absolutism had it not been for a rebellion in Scotland against his attempt to impose an Anglican brand of worship on that nation. United under a ‘National Covenant’ in 1638, the Scots resolved to throw out the new service book and restore their native-grown Presbyterian Directory of Worship. The two ‘Bishops’ wars' which resulted depleted Charles's treasury and exposed the unpopularity of his regime in both kingdoms. The first conflict, in the late spring of 1639, ended in a bloodless standoff between the Scots and English armies. A year later the Covenanting army, 14, 000 strong, under Alexander Leslie routed a demoralized English army of only 4, 500 at Newburn and seized the nearby city of Newcastle. Forced to summon parliament, the king found it unsupportive of his war against the Scots, and determined to reform the abuses of prerogative government. Annoyance at unparliamentary taxation and absolutist pretensions was compounded by religious fear that the king and queen were bent on returning England to the Catholic fold. This fear seemed vindicated when a Catholic-led rebellion broke out in Ireland in October 1641. In England it was widely held that Charles could not be entrusted with the army that was to be sent to put down that rebellion. The struggle for control of the sword, together with Charles's refusal to countenance Puritan reform of the Church, led directly to his declaration of war against parliament in August 1642. The difficulty of governing multiple kingdoms had been a root cause of the war. Nevertheless, war would have been impossible had Charles not gained support between 1640 and 1642. The royalist party consisted of those who wished to defend the Established Church and the Book of Common Prayer, resented the Scots presence in England, and feared the disintegration of the social order.
In January 1642, having failed to arrest the ringleaders of the parliamentary opposition, Charles fled London leaving it in the hands of his enemies. Control of the capital with its population approaching 400, 000, its immense financial resources, its administrative importance, its vast arsenal, and its pre-eminence as England's largest port, was a crucial advantage to the parliamentary side throughout the war. London and its region responded quickly to parliament's call for soldiers, money, and weapons, as did the surrounding counties. Many other counties were divided, and tried to keep out of the war, but parliament quickly asserted its control over East Anglia which, with its rich agriculture, was a storehouse of provisions and money at all times. Parliament was also successful in taking control of Hull, the second greatest fortress in the kingdom. Most ports and cloth towns threw their support behind parliament. With the more prosperous and populous part of the kingdom under its control, parliament was from the beginning in a better position to conscript men and pay them. Voluntary contributions were soon replaced by loans from the merchants and financiers of the City. Initially the loans were secured on land promised in Ireland; later, on confiscated church and crown land in England. In 1643 the first ever tax on consumables—the excise—was introduced. Parliament was also able to draw on customs revenue and the income from sequestered royalist estates. By far the largest source of parliamentary revenue was the weekly (later monthly) assessment. Grounded in up-to-date appraisals of people's ability to pay, the assessment tapped the wealth of every county under parliament's control. At its height, in 1649, it generated £120, 000 a month.
For his part the king drew strength from Wales, the west Midlands, Lancashire, Yorkshire, and Cornwall. With intermittent control of only one major port (Bristol) he had very little customs revenue. In the early years of the war aristocratic supporters such as the Earl of Newcastle and the Marquess of Worcester contributed handsomely to the royal coffers. Small amounts dribbled in from France, Holland, and other continental countries. There was also a royalist equivalent of the monthly assessment. But royalist finances were always more fragile than those of parliament, with the consequence that royalist armies resorted more frequently to free quarter and straightforward plunder in order to keep themselves alive.
Through a combination of bad luck and poor judgement Charles lost control of the navy several months before he fought his first battle on land. The consequences of parliament's command of the sea were momentous. The king's prestige was diminished, and European powers became wary of intervening on his behalf.
By October 1642, when the first Civil War effectively began, the king had mustered about 12, 500 men, whereas the main parliamentary army under the Earl of Essex had reached nearly 14, 000. On 28 October the armies of Charles and Essex clashed on a gently sloping field below the village of Edgehill in Warwickshire. At the end of the day Essex remained in possession of the battlefield, but strategically the victory was the king's, since the road to London was now clear. Charles's slowness in approaching the capital gave parliament the time to mobilize an army of some 24, 000 men to bar his way at Turnham Green. The king wisely pulled his men back and returned to Oxford for the winter.
In 1643 Charles consolidated his position around Oxford, while Sir Ralph Hopton recruited a formidable little army in Cornwall. At Roundway Down (13 July) he and Lord Wilmot routed Sir William Waller, leader of the parliamentary forces in the west. This was the low point of the war for parliament. With its grip on the Severn Valley broken, Bristol and Gloucester were imperilled. In the south Essex's army had wasted away to 5, 500, while the Earl of Newcastle dominated the north with his army of 8, 000, 6, 000 of whom were crack infantry. His cavalry were an élite force, led by Sir Marmaduke Langdale and George Goring. The northern parliamentary army, never more than 6, 000 strong under Ferdinando Lord Fairfax and his son Sir Thomas Fairfax, was always dangerous, but after a number of lesser engagements, Newcastle beat it decisively at Adwalton Moor near Bradford (30 June), and drove them back to Hull.
The British Civil war and its repercussions throughout Britain and Ireland: principal battles
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The arrival of the queen in Oxford with 3, 000 troops and supplies at last gave Charles numerical superiority over Essex. This infusion of strength enabled Prince Rupert of the Rhine with 12, 000 men to overrun Bristol, the second port of the kingdom. Instead of pressing home his advantage with an immediate attack on London the king chose to protect his rear by turning and besieging Gloucester. When Essex came to the relief of the city Charles abandoned the siege, and tried to block Essex's way back to London. The two armies, about equal at 14, 000 men each, fought a pitched battle at Newbury, where many royalist cavalry were lost, and Essex's reputation was temporarily restored. Meanwhile, parliament recovered more ground in the north and south. But by the end of 1643 the armies of both sides were nearly at the end of their tether. The following year would see the arrival of outside help.
The Battle of Naseby, 1645 during the British Civil war. Typical deployment during the 17th-century 'military revolution'.
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In the autumn of 1643 the parliamentary leader John Pym managed to persuade his reluctant colleagues to forge an alliance with Scotland. In December the Scots undertook to bring an army to England in exchange for a promise to establish a Presbyterian church on the Scots model. They were prompt in fulfilling their side of the bargain. In January 1644 the Earl of Leven crossed the Tweed with 21, 500 troops. Six months later they would take part in the largest battle of the civil war.
Meanwhile in Ireland the Marquess of Ormonde had concluded a truce or ‘Cessation’ with the Roman Catholic Confederates. This enabled Charles to bring in several thousand troops, mainly infantry, from that kingdom. Whatever military advantage he gained by this access of strength was offset by the propaganda defeat he suffered for his apparent appeasement of Roman Catholicism and Irish nationalism.
In England the next major encounter was near York. At Marston Moor the combined royalist forces of Prince Rupert and the Marquess of Newcastle, numbering 20, 000, met a combined allied force half as large again, consisting of Ferdinando Lord Fairfax's northern army, the Earl of Manchester's army of the Eastern Association, and the Scots army under Lord Leven. The result was the shattering of the royalist infantry, and the end of the war in the north.
On the other hand parliament was in danger of losing the south. While the Earl of Manchester dawdled around Lincoln, Waller failed to come to the help of Essex who was recklessly plunging deep into royalist territory in Cornwall in the hope of finishing off the royalist forces under Prince Maurice and Hopton. Charles had decided to pursue him with his main Oxford army, which at 10, 000 was now equal to Essex's. The forces in the west brought the king's strength up to 16, 000. All through August the royalists skilfully closed the net around the dispirited parliamentarians. At Lostwithiel Essex reached the end of the road. As defeat stared him in the face he ordered his cavalry to cut their way through the enemy lines and escape to Plymouth. The earl slipped away by boat, leaving Major-Gen Skippon to surrender the 6, 000 infantry. It was the most resounding royalist victory of the war.
Discontent with the lacklustre performance of Essex, Manchester, and Waller now boiled over in London. At the beginning of December 1644 the war party in the Commons threw its support behind a Self-Denying Ordinance that excluded all Members of either House from military or civil appointments for the duration of the war. They then amalgamated the three southern armies into a new force under the command of Sir Thomas Fairfax. Oliver Cromwell's last-minute exemption from the terms of the Self-Denying Ordinance permitted him to play a leading role in the battle of Naseby on 14 June 1645. The New Model Army numbered nearly 17, 000, while the king commanded barely 9, 000 troops. Besides this crushing superiority in numbers, the victory of the New Model owed not a little to the better discipline of its cavalry. The cost of victory was relatively cheap: only perhaps 150 men lost, against nearly 1, 000 for the king, in addition to 4, 500 prisoners, mainly infantry, and the capture of the king's file of secret letters. The publication of these letters, with their evidence of his dealings with the Irish rebels, would do irreparable damage to Charles's reputation in England.
The events of the next year were essentially a mopping-up operation for the New Model Army. Royalist strongholds tumbled like ripe fruit into its lap: Bristol, Plymouth, Exeter, and many others. By June 1646 the west was sewn up, and Oxford had surrendered. Before this last humiliation was played out, Charles had slipped away and delivered himself into the hands of the Scots army at Newark. Obstinately rejecting the unmistakable verdict of the battlefield, he would spend the next year-and-a-half negotiating and plotting at various times with the English Presbyterians, their rivals the Independents, the Scots, and hoped-for friends in Rome, France, Holland, Denmark, and Ireland.
Thanks to the king's stubbornness the Second Civil War erupted in the spring of 1648. The New Model had little trouble annihilating the ill-co-ordinated series of uprisings in Kent, south Wales, Yorkshire, and East Anglia. A more serious threat was posed by a section of the Scots nobility, who signed an Engagement with the king, and led an invasion of England in July. Cromwell brilliantly outmanoeuvred and demolished their forces the following month at Preston. When parliament persisted in negotiating with a twice-defeated king, the army determined that he had to be destroyed. After issuing a Remonstrance calling for Charles Stuart, ‘that man of blood’, to be brought to justice, the army occupied London purged parliament of moderates, and oversaw the trial and execution of the king.
Once the republic had been proclaimed the grandees of the army turned to deal with the long-festering rebellion in Ireland. Cromwell was despatched with an invading force of 12, 000, but before his arrival the parliamentary Col Michael Jones had crushed the royalist army under Ormonde at Rathmines, just outside Dublin. This ‘astonishing mercy’, as Cromwell dubbed it, meant that he did not have to fight a single field battle while he was in that country. When Drogheda refused the summons to capitulate he stormed it, and put the entire garrison of 3, 500 including civilians and clergy to the sword. Similar punishment was meted out to Wexford in October. Royalist resistance collapsed by the end of 1650, but the Catholic Confederates continued to wage a bitter guerrilla war. By 1651 it required 33, 000 English parliamentary troops to occupy Ireland and cope with the continuing resistance. However, divisions within Confederate ranks brought them formally to capitulate in the autumn of 1652.
Meanwhile in the spring of 1650 Cromwell had returned to England to prepare for an apprehended invasion from Scotland, where the Kirk had recently proclaimed Charles II monarch of both kingdoms setting the scene for the Third Civil War. Rather than wait for the Scots, Cromwell decided on a pre-emptive strike. Taking an army of 16, 000 across the Tweed in July, he found the Scots general David Leslie (son of Alexander) maddeningly elusive. Having stripped the counties south of Edinburgh of food and fodder, Leslie retreated behind fortified redoubts and declined Cromwell's invitation to a pitched battle. His numbers worn down to barely 10, 000 by desertion and disease, Cromwell decided to return to England, but at Dunbar he found Leslie blocking his way. Thanks to excellent reconnoitring he perceived that the infantry on Leslie's left wing were wedged against a steep ravine and unable to manoeuvre quickly. Under cover of rain and darkness he therefore brought his army across the front of Leslie's regiments and launched a surprise attack on his right wing before dawn on 3 September. The reward for this masterstroke was a devastating English victory against an army twice their size. Charles II, considering it hopeless to continue the war in an impoverished and exhausted land, led a Scots royalist army into England. The royalists knew they were marching to their doom, but, as the Duke of Hamilton put it, ‘we have one stout argument, despair’. Cromwell allowed them to hole up in the stronghold of Worcester, and then unleashed his overwhelming might against them on 3 September 1651.
The descent of the three kingdoms into civil war between 1638 and 1642 had released a torrent of revolutionary energy. During the decade from 1642 to 1652 armies mobilized by the Long Parliament swept away the apparatus of monarchical government and episcopacy, and subdued all opposition in England, Ireland, and Scotland. What then permitted Charles II to return to these kingdoms in 1660 without shedding a drop of blood? It was people's weariness with heavy taxation and constitutional experimentation, together with the self-destruction of the revolution by internal quarrelling.
Bibliography
- Carlton, Charles, Going to the Wars (London, 1992).
- Gentles, Ian, The New Model Army in England, Ireland and Scotland, 1645-1653 (Oxford, 1992).
- Kenyon, John, The Civil Wars of England (London, 1988).
- Young, Peter, and Holmes, Richard, The English Civil War: A Military History of the Three Civil Wars 1641-1651 (London, 1974)
— Ian Gentles
