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English civil war,
1642–48, the conflict between King Charles I of England and a large body of his subjects, generally called the “parliamentarians,” that culminated in the defeat and execution of the king and the establishment of a republican commonwealth.
The Nature of the Struggle
The struggle has also been called the Puritan Revolution because the religious complexion of the king's opponents was prevailingly Puritan, and because the defeat of the king was accompanied by the abolition of episcopacy. That name, however, overemphasizes the religious element at the expense of the constitutional issues and the underlying social and economic factors. Most simply stated, the constitutional issue was one between a king who claimed to rule by divine right and a Parliament that professed itself to have rights and privileges independent of the crown and that ultimately, by its actions, claimed real sovereignty.
Parliament in this period did not represent the full body of the English people; it was composed of and represented the nobility, country gentry, and merchants and artisans. The 16th cent. had seen a decline in the influence of the nobility and a striking rise in the numbers, wealth, and influence of the gentry and merchants, the beneficiaries of a tremendous expansion of markets and trade in Tudor times. It was from this middle class of gentry and merchants that the opposition to the crown drew most of its members. Their ambition to do away with financial and commercial restrictions and their desire to have a say in such matters as religious and foreign policies had been severely restrained by the Tudors, but on the accession (1603) of a Scottish king to the English throne the popular party began to organize its strength.
The Rise of the Opposition
Under James I
James I was not long in gaining a personal unpopularity that helped to strengthen Parliament's hand. At the Hampton Court Conference (1604) he resolutely refused to compromise with Puritans on religious questions. The Parliament that met in 1604 soon clashed with the king on questions of finance and supply. James was forced to temporize because of his urgent need of money, but the dissolution of the Parliament in 1610 left feelings of bitterness on both sides.
A new Parliament met in 1614, and the Commons engaged in quarrels not only with the king but also with the House of Lords. Because it passed not a single statute, this was called the Addled Parliament. James had little understanding of the popular unrest and aroused deeper opposition by his continued collection of impositions and benevolences, his dependence on favorites, and his scheme of a Spanish marriage for his son Charles.
Meanwhile a legal battle was being waged in the courts, with Sir Francis Bacon zealously upholding the royal prerogative and Sir Edward Coke defending the supremacy of common law. The king dismissed Coke from the bench in 1616, but the Parliament of 1621 impeached Bacon. The last Parliament (1624) of the reign accompanied its grant of money with specific directions for its use. James's reign had raised certain fundamental questions concerning the privileges of Parliament, claimed by that body as their legal right and regarded by James as a special grant from the crown.
Under Charles I
Charles I, married to a French Roman Catholic princess, Henrietta Maria, proved more intractable and even less acceptable to the Puritan taste than his father, and Parliament became even more uncompromising in the new reign. The leaders of the parliamentary party—Coke, John Pym, Sir John Eliot, and John Selden—sought ways to limit the powers of the king. The Parliament of 1625 granted him the right to collect tonnage and poundage (customs duties) only for a year and not, as was customary, for his entire reign. The Parliament of 1626 went further and impeached the king's favorite, George Villiers, 1st duke of Buckingham. Charles dissolved it in anger.
Failing to raise money without Parliament, he was forced to call a new one in 1628. The new Parliament drew up the Petition of Right, and Charles accepted it in order to get his subsidy. He continued to levy customs duties, an act that the parliamentarians declared illegal under the Petition of Right. Parliament in 1629 vigorously protested Charles's collection of tonnage and poundage and the prosecution of his opponents in the Star Chamber. The religious issue also came up, and Commons resisted the king's order to adjourn by forcing the speaker to remain in his chair while Eliot presented resolutions against “popery” and unauthorized taxation.
In the succeeding 11 years Charles attempted to rule without a Parliament, resorting to such expedients as ship money (a tax levied originally on seaports but extended by Charles to the entire country) to raise revenue. The reprisals against Eliot and the prosecution of William Prynne and John Hampden aroused widespread indignation. Charles's chief advisers, Archbishop William Laud and Thomas Wentworth, later 1st earl of Strafford, were cordially detested.
The ominous peace was broken by troubles in Scotland, where efforts to enforce Anglican episcopal policy led to the violent opposition of the Covenanters and to war in 1639 (see Bishops' Wars) and compelled Charles to seek the financial aid of Parliament. The resulting Short Parliament (1640) once more met the king's request for supply by a demand for redress of grievance. Charles offered to abandon ship money exactions, but the opposition wished to discuss more fundamental issues, and the king dissolved the Parliament in just three weeks.
The Long Parliament
The disasters of the second Scottish war compelled a virtual surrender by the king to the opposition, and the Long Parliament was summoned (Nov., 1640). The parliamentarians quickly enacted a series of measures designed to sweep away what they regarded as the encroachments of despotic monarchy. Those imprisoned by the Star Chamber were freed. A Triennial Act provided that no more than three years should elapse between sessions of Parliament, while another act prohibited the dissolution of Parliament without its own consent. Ship money and tonnage and poundage without parliamentary authorization were abolished. Strafford was impeached, then attainted and executed (1641) for treason; Laud was impeached and imprisoned. Star Chamber and other prerogative and episcopal courts were swept away. However, discussions on church reform along Puritan lines produced considerable disagreement, especially between the Commons and Lords.
Despite the king's compliance to the will of the opposition thus far, he was not trusted by the parliamentary party. This distrust was given sharp focus by the outbreak (Oct., 1641) of a rebellion against English rule in Ireland; an army was needed to suppress the rebellion, but the parliamentarians feared that the king might use it against them. Led by John Pym, Parliament adopted the Grand Remonstrance, reciting the evils of Charles's reign and demanding church reform and parliamentary control over the army and over the appointment of royal ministers. The radicalism of these demands split the parliamentary party and drove many of the moderates to the royalist side. This encouraged Charles to assert himself, and in Jan., 1642, he attempted to arrest in person Pym and four other leaders of the opposition in Commons. His action made civil war inevitable.
In the lull that followed, both Parliament and the king sought to secure fortresses, arsenals, and popular support. In June, 1642, Parliament sent to the king a statement reiterating the demands of the Grand Remonstrance, but since the proposals amounted to a complete surrender of sovereignty by the crown to Parliament, the king did not even consider them as a basis for discussion. Armed forces (including many peers from the House of Lords and a sizable minority of Commons) gathered about him in the north. Parliament organized its own army and appointed Robert Devereux, 3d earl of Essex, to head it. On Aug. 22, 1642, Charles raised his standard at Nottingham.
The First Civil War
The followers of king and Parliament did not represent two absolutely distinct social groups, as the popular conception of the royalist Cavaliers and the parliamentary Roundheads would indicate. However, it is true that the parliamentary, or Puritan, group drew much of its strength from the gentry and from the merchant classes and artisans of London, Norwich, Hull, Plymouth, and Gloucester; it centered in the southeastern counties and had control of the fleet. The majority of the great nobles followed the king, who had the support of most Anglicans and Roman Catholics; geographically the royalist strength centered in the north and west.
The first major engagement of the armies at Edgehill (Oct. 23, 1642) was a drawn battle. Charles then established himself at Oxford. The royalist forces gained ground in the north and west, although repeated attempts by the king to advance on London proved abortive. The indecisive engagements of 1643 were remarkable mainly for the emergence of Oliver Cromwell, an inconspicuous member of the Long Parliament, to military prominence with his own regiment of “godly” men, soon to become famous as the Ironsides.
Futile negotiations for peace had been conducted at Oxford early in 1643, and in Sept., 1643, Parliament took a decisive step by securing the alliance of the Presbyterian Scots in accepting the Solemn League and Covenant. Scottish aid was obtained only by a promise to submit England to Presbyterianism, which was soon to produce a reaction from the Independents and other sectarians (particularly in the army) who opposed the idea of any centralized national church.
The war now entered a new phase. A Scottish army, under Alexander Leslie, 1st earl of Leven, advanced into Yorkshire early in 1644 and gave aid to the parliamentary army in the north. Charles's nephew, the brilliant and dashing Prince Rupert, did something to stem royalist losses by retaking Newark, but his gains were temporary. His campaign to relieve the besieged York led to the battle of Marston Moor (July 2, 1644), in which Cromwell and Leslie inflicted a crushing defeat on the royalists. Charles managed to cut off Essex in the southwest but shortly thereafter met parliamentary troops from the north in an indecisive engagement at Newbury.
To stem the rising dissension among parliamentary leaders, Cromwell sponsored in Parliament the Self-Denying Ordinance, by which all members of Parliament were compelled to resign their commands, and the parliamentary army was reorganized (1644–45) into the New Model Army. Thomas Fairfax (later 3d Baron Fairfax of Cameron) became the commander in chief.
After further futile peace negotiations at Uxbridge, Charles, hoping to join the forces under James Graham, marquess of Montrose, moved north and stormed Leicester. He met Cromwell in a sharp battle at Naseby (June 14, 1645). This battle cost the king a large part of his army and rendered the royalist cause hopeless. Unable to join Montrose (who was defeated by Leslie in Scotland) and thwarted in his attempts to secure aid from Ireland or the Continent, the king was unable to halt the steady losses of his party and finally was compelled to surrender himself to the Scots, who made him reassuring but vague promises. The first civil war came to an end when Oxford surrendered in June, 1646.
The Second Civil War and Its Aftermath
The king was delivered (1647) by the Scots into the hands of Parliament, but the Presbyterian rule in that body had thoroughly alienated the army. The army resisted Parliament's proposal to disband it by capturing the king from the parliamentary party and marching on London. Army discontent gradually became more radical (see Levelers), and the desire grew to dispose of the king altogether.
Refusing to accept the army council's proposals for peace (the Heads of the Proposals), Charles escaped in Nov., 1647, and took refuge on the Isle of Wight, where he negotiated simultaneously with Parliament and the Scots. In Dec., 1647, he concluded an agreement with the Scots known as the Engagement, by which he agreed to accept Presbyterianism in return for military support. In the spring of 1648, the second civil war began. Uprisings in Wales, Kent, and Essex were all suppressed by the parliamentary forces, and Cromwell defeated the Scots at Preston (Aug. 17, 1648). Charles's hopes of aid from France or Ireland proved vain, and the war was quickly over.
Parliament again tried to reach some agreement with the king, but the army, now completely under Cromwell's domination, disposed of its enemies in Parliament by Pride's Purge (Dec., 1648; see under Pride, Thomas). The legislative remnant known as the Rump Parliament erected a high court of justice, which tried the king for treason and found him guilty. Charles was beheaded on Jan. 30, 1649, and the republic known as the Commonwealth was set up, governed by the Rump Parliament (without the House of Lords) and by an executive council of state.
Charles I's son Charles II was recognized as king in parts of Ireland and in Scotland but was forced to flee to the Continent after his defeat at Worcester (1651). The years of the interregnum, under the Commonwealth to 1653 and the Protectorate after that, are largely the story of Oliver Cromwell's personal rule, which was marked by strict military administration and enforcement of the Puritan moral code. After his death and the short-lived rule of his son, Richard Cromwell, the Commonwealth was revived for a brief and chaotic period. It ended in 1660 with the Restoration of Charles II. Although some of the changes brought about by the war were swept away (e.g., in the restoration of Anglicanism as the state church), the settlement of the contest between the king and Parliament was permanently assured in the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
Bibliography
The standard works on the period of the war are by S. R. Gardiner. See also C. V. Wedgwood, The King's Peace, 1637–1641 (1955) and The King's War, 1641–1647 (1958); A. H. Burne and P. Young, The Great Civil War, a Military History (1959); G. Davies, The Early Stuarts (2d ed. 1959); J. E. C. Hill, Puritanism and Revolution (1958) and The Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (1965); I. A. Roots, The Great Rebellion, 1642–1660 (1968).
WordNet:
English Civil War
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The noun has one meaning:
Meaning #1:
English history: war between the Parliamentarians and the Royalists under Charles I; 1644-1648
Wikipedia:
English Civil War
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The English Civil War consisted of a series of armed conflicts and political machinations that took place between Parliamentarians (known as Roundheads) and Royalists (known as Cavaliers) between 1642 and 1651. The first (1642–1646) and second (1648–1649) civil wars pitted the supporters of King Charles I against the supporters of the Long Parliament, while the third war (1649–1651) saw fighting between supporters of King Charles II and supporters of the Rump Parliament. The Civil War ended with the Parliamentary victory at the Battle of Worcester on 3 September 1651.
The Civil War led to the trial and execution of Charles I, the exile of his son Charles II, and the replacement of the English monarchy with first the Commonwealth of England (1649–1653) and then with a Protectorate (1653–1659), under the personal rule of Oliver Cromwell. The monopoly of the Church of England on Christian worship in England came to an end, and the victors consolidated the already-established Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland. Constitutionally, the wars established a precedent that British monarchs could not govern without the consent of Parliament, although this concept became firmly established only with the Glorious Revolution later in the century.
| English Civil War |
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| First – Second – Third |
Terminology
The term English Civil War appears most commonly in the singular form, despite the fact that historians frequently divide the conflict into two or three separate wars. Although the term describes events as impinging on England, from the outset the conflicts involved wars with and civil wars within both Scotland and Ireland; see Wars of the Three Kingdoms for an overview.
Unlike other civil wars in England, which focused on who ruled, this war also concerned itself with the manner of governing the British Isles. Historians also refer to the English Civil War as the English Revolution and works such as the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica call it the Great Rebellion. Marxist historians such as Christopher Hill (1912–2003) have long favoured the term "English Revolution".
Background
The King's aspirations
Contemporaries must have found it unthinkable that a civil war could result from the events taking place. War broke out less than forty years after the death of the popular Elizabeth I in 1603. At the accession of Charles I in 1625, England and Scotland had both experienced relative peace, both internally and in their relations with each other, for as long as anyone could remember. Charles hoped to unite the kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland into a new single kingdom, fulfilling the dream of his father, James I of England (James VI of Scotland). Many English Parliamentarians had suspicions regarding such a move, because they feared that setting up a new kingdom might destroy the old English traditions which had bound the English monarchy. As Charles shared his father's position on the power of the crown (James had described kings as "little Gods on Earth", chosen by God to rule in accordance with the doctrine of the "Divine Right of Kings"), the suspicions of the Parliamentarians had some justification.
Although pious and with little personal ambition, Charles expected outright loyalty in return for "just rule". He considered any questioning of his orders as, at best, insulting. This trait, and a series of events, each seemingly minor on their own, led to a serious break between Charles and his English Parliament, and eventually to war.
Parliament in the English constitutional framework
Before the fighting, the Parliament of England did not have a large permanent role in the English system of government, instead functioning as a temporary advisory committee — summoned by the monarch whenever the Crown required additional tax revenue, and subject to dissolution by the monarch at any time. Because responsibility for collecting taxes lay in the hands of the gentry, the English kings needed the help of that stratum of society in order to ensure the smooth collection of that revenue. If the gentry refused to collect the King's taxes, the Crown would lack any practical means with which to compel them. Parliaments allowed representatives of the gentry to meet, confer and send policy-proposals to the monarch in the form of Bills. These representatives did not, however, have any means of forcing their will upon the king — except by withholding the financial means required to execute his plans.
Parliamentary concerns and the Petition of Right
One of the first events to cause concern about Charles I came with his marriage to a French Roman Catholic princess, Henrietta-Marie de Bourbon. The marriage occurred in 1625, right after Charles came to the throne. Charles' marriage raised the possibility that his children, including the heir to the throne, could grow up as Catholics, a frightening prospect to Protestant England.
Charles also wanted to take part in the conflicts underway in Europe, then immersed in the Thirty Years' War (1618 - 1648). As ever, foreign wars required heavy expenditure, and the Crown could raise the necessary taxes only with Parliamentary consent (as described above). Charles experienced even more financial difficulty when his first Parliament refused to follow the tradition of giving him the right to collect customs duties for his entire reign, deciding instead to grant it for only a year at a time.
Charles, meanwhile, pressed ahead with his European wars, deciding to send an expeditionary force to relieve the French Huguenots whom Royal French forces held besieged in La Rochelle. The royal favourite, George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham, secured the command of the English force. Unfortunately for Charles and Buckingham, the relief expedition proved a fiasco (1627), and Parliament, already hostile to Buckingham for his monopoly on royal patronage, opened impeachment proceedings against him. Charles responded by dissolving Parliament. This move, while saving Buckingham, reinforced the impression that Charles wanted to avoid Parliamentary scrutiny of his ministers.
Having dissolved Parliament, and unable to raise money without it, the king assembled a new one in 1628. (The elected members included Oliver Cromwell.) The new Parliament drew up the Petition of Right, and Charles accepted it as a concession in order to get his subsidy. Amongst other things the Petition referred to Magna Carta.
The Personal Rule and the rebellion in Scotland
Charles I avoided calling a Parliament for the next decade. Depending upon their political affiliation, people referred to this time either as the "Eleven Years' Tyranny" or as "Charles's Personal Rule".
During this period, Charles's lack of finances largely determined his policies. Unable to raise revenue through Parliament –
due to his reluctance to convene it - he resorted to other means of financing his affairs. Thus failure to observe often
long-outdated conventions became in some cases a finable offence (for example, a failure to attend and to receive
knighthood at Charles' coronation), with the fines being paid to the crown. Charles also tried to
raise revenue in the form of
During the "Personal Rule", Charles aroused most antagonism through his religious measures: he believed in a sacramental version of the Church of England, called High Anglicanism, with a theology based upon Arminianism, a belief-system shared by his main political advisor, Archbishop William Laud. Charles appointed Laud as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633 and started a series of reforms in the Church to make it more ceremonial, starting with the replacement of the wooden communion tables with stone altars. Puritans accused Laud of trying to reintroduce Catholicism, and when they complained, Laud had them arrested. In 1637 John Bastwick, Henry Burton and William Prynne had their ears cut off for writing pamphlets attacking Laud's views — a rare penalty for gentlemen to suffer, and one that aroused anger. Moreover, the church authorities revived the statutes passed in the time of Elizabeth I concerning church attendance and fined Puritans around the country for failure to attend Anglican services.
The end of Charles's independent governance came when he attempted to apply the same religious policies in Scotland. The Church of Scotland, although reluctantly Episcopal in structure, had long enjoyed its own independent traditions. Charles, however, wanted one uniform church throughout Britain and introduced a new, High Anglican, version of the English Book of Common Prayer into Scotland in the summer of 1637. This met with a violent reaction. A riot broke out in Edinburgh, allegedly started in a church by one Jenny Geddes; and in February 1638 the Scots formulated their objections to royal policy in the National Covenant. This document took the form of a "loyal protest", rejecting all innovations not first been tested by free parliaments and General Assemblies of the church.
Before long, Charles had to withdraw his Prayer Book and summon a General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, which met in Glasgow in November, 1638. The Assembly, affected by the radical mood of the times, not only rejected the Prayer Book, but went on to take the even more drastic step of declaring the office of bishop as unlawful. Charles demanded the acts of the Assembly be withdrawn; the Scots refused to comply, and both sides began to raise armies.
Charles accompanied his forces to the border in the spring of 1639 to end the rebellion, known as the Bishops War. But after an inconclusive campaign he decided to accept the Scottish offer of a truce; the Pacification of Berwick. The truce proved temporary, and a second war followed in the summer of 1640. This time a Scots army defeated Charles's forces in the north and went on to capture Newcastle. Charles eventually had to agree not only not to interfere with religion in Scotland, but to pay the Scottish war-expenses as well.
Recall of Parliament
Charles needed to suppress the rebellion in his northern realm. He had insufficient funds, however, and had perforce to seek
money from a newly-elected
Without Parliament's support, Charles attacked Scotland again, breaking the truce at Berwick, and suffered a comprehensive defeat. The Scots then seized the opportunity and invaded England, occupying Northumberland and Durham.
Meanwhile, another of Charles' chief advisers, Thomas Wentworth, 1st Viscount Wentworth, had risen to the rôle of Lord Deputy of Ireland in 1632 and brought in much-needed revenue for Charles by persuading the Irish Catholic gentry to pay new taxes in return for promised religious concessions. In 1639 Charles recalled him to England, and in 1640 made him Earl of Strafford, attempting to have him work his magic again in Scotland. This time he proved less successful, and the English forces fled the field in their second encounter with the Scots in 1640. Almost the entirety of Northern England was occupied, and Charles was forced to pay £850 per day to keep the Scots from advancing. If he did not, they would "take" the money by pillaging and burning the cities and towns of Northern England.
All this put Charles in a desperate financial position. As King of Scotland, he had to find money to pay the Scottish army in England; as King of England, to find money to pay and equip an English army to defend England. His means of raising revenue without Parliament fell critically short of achieving this. Against this backdrop, and according to advice from the Magnum Concilium (the House of Lords, but without the Commons, so not a Parliament), Charles finally bowed to pressure and summoned a Parliament in November 1640.
The Long Parliament
The new Parliament proved even more hostile to Charles than its predecessor. It immediately began to discuss grievances against Charles and his Government, and with Pym and Hampden (of Ship Money fame) in the lead, took the opportunity presented by the King's troubles to force various reforming measures upon him. The legislators passed a law which stated that a new Parliament should convene at least once every three years — without the King's summons, if necessary. Other laws passed by the Parliament made it illegal for the king to impose taxes without Parliamentary consent, and later, gave Parliament control over the king's ministers. Finally, the Parliament passed a law forbidding the King to dissolve it without its consent, even if the three years were up. Ever since, this Parliament has been known as the "Long Parliament". However, Parliament did attempt to avert conflict by requiring all adults to sign The Protestation.
In early 1641 Parliament had Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford, arrested and sent to the Tower of London on a charge of treason. John Pym claimed that Wentworth's statements of readiness to campaign against "the kingdom" aimed in fact at England itself. Unable to prove the case in court, the House of Commons, led by Pym and Henry Vane, resorted to a Bill of Attainder. Unlike a guilty finding in a court case, attainder did not require a legal burden of proof, but it did require the king's approval. Charles, still incensed over the Commons' handling of Buckingham, refused. Wentworth himself, hoping to head off the war he saw looming, wrote to the king and asked him to reconsider. Wentworth's execution took place in May, 1641.[1]
Instead of saving the country from war, Wentworth's sacrifice in fact doomed it to one. Within months, the Irish Catholics, fearing a resurgence of Protestant power, struck first, and all Ireland soon descended into chaos. Rumours circulated that the King supported the Irish, and Puritan members of the Commons soon started murmuring that this exemplified the fate that Charles had in store for all of them.
In early January 1642, accompanied by 400 soldiers, Charles attempted to arrest five members of the House of Commons on a charge of treason. This attempt failed. When the troops marched into Parliament, Charles inquired of William Lenthall, the Speaker, as to the whereabouts of the five. Lenthall replied "May it please your Majesty, I have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place but as the House [of Commons] is pleased to direct me, whose servant I am here." In other words, the Speaker proclaimed himself a servant of Parliament, rather than of the King.
Local grievances
In the summer of 1642 these national troubles helped to polarize opinion, ending indecision about which side to support or what action to take. Opposition to Charles also arose owing to many local grievances. For example, the imposition of drainage-schemes in The Fens negatively affected the livelihood of thousands of people after the King awarded a number of drainage-contracts. Many regarded the King as worse than insensitive, and this played a role in bringing a large part of eastern England into Parliament’s camp. This sentiment brought with it people such as the Earl of Manchester and Oliver Cromwell, each a notable wartime adversary of the King. Conversely, one of the leading drainage contractors, the Earl of Lindsey, was to die fighting for the King at the Battle of Edgehill.
The First English Civil War
In early January 1642, a few days after his failure to capture five members of the House of Commons, fearing for his own personal safety and for that of his family and retinue, Charles left the London area. Further negotiations by frequent correspondence between the King and the Long Parliament through to early summer proved fruitless. As the summer progressed, cities and towns declared their sympathies for one faction or the other: for example, the garrison of Portsmouth under the command of Sir George Goring declared for the King, but when Charles tried to acquire arms for his cause from Kingston upon Hull, the depository for the weapons used in the previous Scottish campaigns, Sir John Hotham, the military governor appointed by Parliament in January, initially refused to let Charles enter Hull, and when Charles returned with more men, drove them off. Charles issued a warrant for Hotham to be arrested as a traitor but was powerless to enforce it. Throughout the summer months, tensions rose and there was brawling in a number of places, with the first death of the conflict taking place in Manchester.[2]
At the outset of the conflict, much of the country remained neutral, though the Royal Navy and most English cities favoured Parliament, while the King found considerable support in rural communities. Historians estimate that between them, both sides had only about 15,000 men[citation needed]. However, the war quickly spread and eventually involved every level of society, throughout the British Isles. Many areas attempted to remain neutral, some formed bands of Clubmen to protect their localities against the worst excesses of the armies of both sides, but most found it impossible to withstand both the King and Parliament. On one side, the King and his supporters thought that they fought for traditional government in Church and state. On the other, most supporters of the Parliamentary cause initially took up arms to defend what they thought of as the traditional balance of government in Church and state, which the bad advice the King had received from his advisers had undermined before and during the "Eleven Years' Tyranny". The views of the Members of Parliament ranged from unquestioning support of the King — at one point during the First Civil War, more members of the Commons and Lords gathered in the King's Oxford Parliament than at Westminster — through to radicals, who wanted major reforms in favour of religious independence and the redistribution of power at the national level.
After the debacle at Hull, Charles moved on to Nottingham, where on 22 August 1642, he raised the royal
standard. When he raised his standard, Charles had with him about 2,000 cavalry and a small number of Yorkshire
infantry-men, and using the archaic system of a Commission of Array, Charles'
supporters started to build a larger army around the standard. Charles moved in a south-westerly direction, first to
The Parliamentarians who opposed the King, had not remained passive during this pre-war period. As in the case of Kingston upon Hull they had taken measures to secure strategic towns and cities, by appointing men sympathetic to their cause, and on 9 June they had voted to raise an army of 10,000 volunteers, appointing Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of Essex commander three days later. He received orders "to rescue His Majesty's person, and the persons of the Prince [of Wales] and the Duke of York out of the hands of those desperate persons who were about them". The Lords Lieutenant, whom Parliament appointed, used the Militia Ordinance to order the militia to join Essex's army.[4]
Two weeks after the King had raised his standard at Nottingham, Essex led his army north towards Northampton, picking up support along the way (including a detachment of Cambridgeshire cavalry raised and commanded by Oliver Cromwell). By the middle of September Essex's forces had grown to 21,000 infantry and 4200 cavalry and dragoons. On 14 September he moved his army to Coventry and then to the north of the Cotswolds, a strategy which placed his army between the Royalists and London. With the size of both armies now in the tens of thousands, and only Worcestershire between them, it was inevitable that cavalry reconnaissance units would sooner or later meet. This happened in the first major skirmish of the Civil War, when a cavalry troop of about 1,000 Royalists commanded by Prince Rupert, a German nephew of the King and one of the outstanding cavalry commanders of the war, defeated a Parliamentary cavalry detachment under the command of Colonel John Brown in the Battle of Powick Bridge, at a bridge across the River Teme close to Worcester.[5]
Rupert withdrew to Shrewsbury, where, a council-of-war discussed two courses of action: whether to advance towards Essex's new position near Worcester, or to march along the now opened road towards London. The Council decided to take the London route, but not to avoid a battle, for the Royalist generals wanted to fight Essex before he grew too strong, and the temper of both sides made it impossible to postpone the decision. In the Earl of Clarendon's words: "it was considered more counsellable to march towards London, it being morally sure that Essex would put himself in their way". Accordingly, the army left Shrewsbury on 12 October, gaining two days' start on the enemy, and moved south-east. This had the desired effect, as it forced Essex to move to intercept them.[6]
The first pitched battle of the war, fought at Edgehill on 23 October 1642, proved inconclusive, and both the Royalists and Parliamentarians claimed it as a victory. The second field action of the war, the stand-off at Turnham Green, saw Charles forced to withdraw to Oxford. This city would serve as his base for the remainder of the war.
In 1643 the Royalist forces won at Adwalton Moor, and gained control of most of Yorkshire. In the Midlands, a Parliamentary force under Sir John Gell, 1st Baronet besieged and captured the cathedral city of Lichfield, after the death of the original commander, Lord Brooke. This group subsequently joined forces with Sir John Brereton to fight the inconclusive Battle of Hopton Heath (19 March 1643), where the Royalist commander, the Earl of Northampton, was killed. Subsequent battles in the west of England at Lansdowne and at Roundway Down also went to the Royalists. Prince Rupert could then take Bristol. In the same year, Oliver Cromwell formed his troop of "Ironsides", a disciplined unit that demonstrated his military leadership-ability. With their assistance, he won a victory at the Battle of Gainsborough in July.
In general, the early part of the war went well for the Royalists. The turning-point came in the late summer and early autumn of 1643, when the Earl of Essex's army forced the king to raise the siege of Gloucester and then brushed the Royalist army aside at the First Battle of Newbury (20 September 1643), in order to return triumphantly to London. Other Parliamentarian forces won the Battle of Winceby, giving them control of Lincoln. Political manoeuvering to gain an advantage in numbers led Charles to negotiate a ceasefire in Ireland, freeing up English troops to fight on the Royalist side in England, while Parliament offered concessions to the Scots in return for aid and assistance.
With the help of the Scots, Parliament won at Marston Moor (2 July 1644), gaining York and the north of England. Cromwell's conduct in this battle proved decisive, and demonstrated his potential as both a political and an important military leader. The defeat at the Battle of Lostwithiel in Cornwall, however, marked a serious reverse for Parliament in the south-west of England. Subsequent fighting around Newbury (27 October 1644), though tactically indecisive, strategically gave another check to Parliament.
In 1645 Parliament reaffirmed its determination to fight the war to a finish. It passed the Self-denying Ordinance, by which all members of either House of Parliament laid down their commands, and re-organized its main forces into the New Model Army ("Army"), under the command of Sir Thomas Fairfax, with Cromwell as his second-in-command and Lieutenant-General of Horse. In two decisive engagements — the Battles of Naseby on 14 June and of Langport on 10 July — the Parliamentarians effectively destroyed Charles' armies.
In the remains of his English realm Charles attempted to recover a stable base of support by consolidating the Midlands. He began to form an axis between Oxford and Newark on Trent in Nottinghamshire. Those towns had become fortresses and showed more reliable loyalty to him than to others. He took Leicester, which lies between them, but found his resources exhausted. Having little opportunity to replenish them, in May 1646 he sought shelter with a Scottish army at Southwell in Nottinghamshire. This marked the end of the First English Civil War.
The Second English Civil War
Charles I took advantage of the deflection of attention away from himself to negotiate a new agreement with the Scots, again promising church reform, on 28 December 1647. Although Charles himself remained a prisoner, this agreement led inexorably to the Second Civil War.
A series of Royalist uprisings throughout England and a Scottish invasion occurred in the summer of 1648. Forces loyal to Parliament[7] put down most of the uprisings in England after little more than skirmishes, but uprisings (in Kent, Essex and Cumberland), the rebellion in Wales and the Scottish invasion involved the fighting of pitched battles and prolonged sieges.
In the spring of 1648 unpaid Parliamentarian troops in Wales changed sides. Colonel Thomas Horton defeated the Royalist rebels at the Battle of St. Fagans (8 May) and the rebel leaders surrendered to Cromwell on 11 July after the protracted two-month siege of Pembroke. Sir Thomas Fairfax defeated a Royalist uprising in Kent at the Battle of Maidstone on 24 June. Fairfax, after his success at Maidstone and the pacification of Kent, turned northward to reduce Essex, where, under their ardent, experienced and popular leader Sir Charles Lucas, the Royalists had taken up arms in great numbers. Fairfax soon drove the enemy into Colchester, but his first attack on the town met with a repulse and he had to settle down to a long siege.
In the North of England, Major-General John Lambert fought a very successful campaign against a number of Royalist uprisings — the largest that of Sir Marmaduke Langdale in Cumberland. Thanks to Lambert's successes, the Scottish commander, the Duke of Hamilton, had perforce to take the western route through Carlisle in his pro-Royalist Scottish invasion of England. The Parliamentarians under Cromwell engaged the Scots at the Battle of Preston (17 August – 19 August). The battle took place largely at Walton-le-Dale near Preston in Lancashire, and resulted in a victory by the troops of Cromwell over the Royalists and Scots commanded by Hamilton. This Parliamentarian victory marked the end of the Second English Civil War.
Nearly all the Royalists who had fought in the First Civil War had given their parole not to bear arms against the Parliament, and many honourable Royalists, like Lord Astley, refused to break their word by taking any part in the second war. So the victors in the Second Civil War showed little mercy to those who had brought war into the land again. On the evening of the surrender of Colchester, Parliamentarians had Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George Lisle shot. Parliamentary authorities sentenced the leaders of the Welsh rebels, Major-General Rowland Laugharne, Colonel John Poyer and Colonel Rice Powel to death, but executed Poyer alone (25 April 1649), having selected him by lot. Of five prominent Royalist peers who had fallen into the hands of Parliament, three, the Duke of Hamilton, the Earl of Holland, and Lord Capel, one of the Colchester prisoners and a man of high character, were beheaded at Westminster on 9 March.
Trial of Charles I for treason
The betrayal by Charles caused Parliament to debate whether to return the King to power at all. Those who still supported Charles' place on the throne tried once more to negotiate with him.
Furious that Parliament continued to countenance Charles as a ruler, the Army marched on Parliament and conducted
"Pride's Purge" (named after the commanding officer of the operation,
At the end of the trial the 59 Commissioners (judges) found Charles I guilty of high treason, as a "tyrant, traitor, murderer and public enemy".[8][9] His beheading took place on a scaffold in front of the Banqueting House of the Palace of Whitehall on 30 January 1649. (After the Restoration in 1660, Charles II executed the surviving regicides not living in exile or sentenced them to life imprisonment.)
The Third English Civil War
Ireland
- See also: Cromwellian conquest of Ireland
Ireland had known continuous war since the rebellion of 1641, with most of the island controlled by the Irish Confederates. Increasingly threatened by the armies of the English Parliament after Charles I's arrest in 1648, the Confederates signed a treaty of alliance with the English Royalists. The joint Royalist and Confederate forces under the Duke of Ormonde attempted to eliminate the Parliamentary army holding Dublin, but their opponents routed them at the Battle of Rathmines (2 August 1649). As the former Member of Parliament Admiral Robert Blake blockaded Prince Rupert's fleet in Kinsale, Oliver Cromwell could land at Dublin on 15 August 1649 with an army to quell the Royalist alliance in Ireland.
Cromwell's suppression of the Royalists in Ireland during 1649 still has a strong resonance for many Irish people. After the siege of Drogheda, the massacre of nearly 3,500 people — comprising around 2,700 Royalist soldiers and all the men in the town carrying arms, including civilians, prisoners, and Catholic priests — became one of the historical memories that has driven Irish-English and Catholic-Protestant strife during the last three centuries. However, the massacre has significance mainly as a symbol of the Irish perception of Cromwellian cruelty, as far more people died in the subsequent guerrilla and scorched-earth fighting in the country than at infamous massacres such as Drogheda and Wexford. The Parliamentarian conquest of Ireland ground on for another four years until 1653, when the last Irish Confederate and Royalist troops surrendered. Historians have estimated[citation needed] that up to 30% of Ireland's population either died or had gone into exile by the end of the wars. The victors confiscated almost all Irish Catholic-owned land in the wake of the conquest and distributed it to the Parliament's creditors, to the Parliamentary soldiers who served in Ireland, and to English people who had settled there before the war.
Scotland
- See also: Scotland in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms#Montrose's defeat and death and Scotland in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms#Third Civil War
The execution of Charles I altered the dynamics of the the Civil War in Scotland, which had raged between Royalists and Covenanters since 1644. By 1649, the struggle had left the Royalists there in disarray and their erstwhile leader, the Marquess of Montrose, had gone into exile. At first, Charles II encouraged Montrose to raise a Highland army to fight on the Royalist side. However, when the Scottish Covenanters (who did not agree with the execution of Charles I and who feared for the future of Presbyterianism and Scottish independence under the new Commonwealth) offered him the crown of Scotland, Charles abandoned Montrose to his enemies. However, Montrose, who had raised a mercenary force in Norway, had already landed and could not abandon the fight. He did not succeed in raising many Highland clans and the Covenanters defeated his army at the Battle of Carbisdale in Ross-shire on 27 April 1650. The victors captured Montrose shortly afterwards and took him to Edinburgh. On 20 May the Scottish Parliament sentenced him to death and had him hanged the next day.
Charles II landed in Scotland at Garmouth in Morayshire on 23 June 1650 and signed the 1638 National Covenant and the 1643 Solemn League and Covenant immediately after coming ashore. With his original Scottish Royalist followers and his new Covenanter allies, King Charles II became the greatest threat facing the new English republic. In response to the threat, Cromwell left some of his lieutenants in Ireland to continue the suppression of the Irish Royalists and returned to England.
He arrived in Scotland on 22 July 1650 and proceeded to lay siege to Edinburgh. By the end of August disease and a shortage of supplies had reduced his army, and he had to order a retreat towards his base at Dunbar. A Scottish army, assembled under the command of David Leslie, tried to block the retreat, but Cromwell defeated them at the Battle of Dunbar on September 3. Cromwell's army then took Edinburgh, and by the end of the year his army had occupied much of southern Scotland.
In July 1651, Cromwell's forces crossed the Firth of Forth into Fife and defeated the Scots at the Battle of Inverkeithing (20 July 1651). The New Model Army advanced towards Perth, which allowed Charles, at the head of the Scottish army, to move south into England. Cromwell followed Charles into England, leaving George Monck to finish the campaign in Scotland. Monck took Stirling on 14 August and Dundee on 1 September. The next year, 1652, saw the mopping up of the remnants of Royalist resistance, and under the terms of the "Tender of Union", the Scots received 30 seats in a united Parliament in London, with General Monck appointed as the military governor of Scotland.
England
Although Cromwell's New Model Army had defeated a Scottish army at Dunbar, Cromwell could not prevent Charles II from marching from Scotland deep into England at the head of another Royalist army. The Royalists marched to the west of England because English Royalist sympathies were strongest in that area, but although some English Royalists joined the army, they came in far fewer numbers than Charles and his Scottish supporters had hoped. Cromwell finally engaged the new king at Worcester on 3 September 1651, and defeated him. Charles II escaped, via safe houses and a famous oak tree, to France, ending the civil wars.
Political control
During the course of the Wars the Parliamentarians established a number of successive committees to oversee the war-effort. The first of these, the Committee of Safety, set up in July 1642, comprised 15 Members of Parliament.
Following the Anglo-Scottish alliance against the Royalists, the Committee of Both Kingdoms replaced the Committee of Safety between 1644 and 1648. Parliament dissolved the Committee of Both Kingdoms when the alliance ended, but its English members continued to meet and became known as the Derby House Committee. A second Committee of Safety then replaced that committee.
Casualties
As usual in wars of this era, disease caused more deaths than combat. Matthew White cites a number of sources which give a range for the deaths in the British Isles (IONA) from 1641 to 1652. For England and Wales and Scotland, White uses two sources for the number of deaths resulting from the war, and these range between 100,000 and 150,000. Two sources give a range of battle-deaths, the first source gives 84,830 killed in England and Wales and another 27,895 in Scotland; another source states that a total of 50,500 died in battle. White uses more sources for the Irish conflict, where warfare continued for longer than in England and Wales. The total number of people who died because of warfare in Ireland during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms ranges from less than 300,000 up to 618,000. Only one source gives battle-losses, and these total 5,500 between 1649 and 1652.[10]
Aftermath
The wars left England, Scotland and Ireland amongst the few countries in Europe without a monarch. In the wake of victory, many of the ideals (and many of the idealists) became sidelined. The republican government of the Commonwealth of England ruled England (and later all of Scotland and Ireland) from 1649 to 1653 and from 1659 to 1660. Between the two periods, and due to in-fighting amongst various factions in Parliament, Oliver Cromwell ruled over the Protectorate as Lord Protector (effectively a military dictator) until his death in 1658.
Upon his death, Oliver Cromwell's son Richard became Lord Protector, but the Army had little confidence in him. After seven months the Army removed Richard, and in May 1659 it re-installed the Rump. However, since the Rump Parliament acted as though nothing had changed since 1653 and as if it could treat the Army as it liked, military force shortly afterwards dissolved this too. After the second dissolution of the Rump, in October 1659, the prospect of a total descent into anarchy loomed as the Army's pretence of unity finally dissolved into factions.
Into this atmosphere General George Monck, Governor of Scotland under the Cromwells, marched south with his army from Scotland. On 4 April 1660, in the Dec