English Civil War

I

Introduction

English Civil War, military conflicts from 1642 to 1646 in England between the armies of Charles I and those of the English Parliament that were influenced by wars that took place at the same time in Ireland and Scotland. The English Civil War ended in 1646 with the defeat of Charles I, but there were further outbreaks of fighting in 1648, in the so-called Second Civil War. Shortly after that ended, Charles I was brought to trial and executed in January 1649. England was then declared a republic, which was called the Commonwealth.

II

Background to the English Civil War

There is no doubt that events in Scotland and Ireland contributed to the timing of the outbreak of the English Civil War in 1642. But most of the reasons why Charles I faced immense opposition by 1640 are to be found in England. Many of the policies followed by the king after his accession in 1625 caused some English people to be very concerned about the future of Parliament and Protestantism. In order to finance wars against France and Spain in the later 1620s Charles resorted to raising extra-Parliamentary taxation, principally by forced loans, which to some gave credence to fears that Charles was being persuaded to adopt the authoritarian “new counsels” some of those around him were advising him to take.

At the same time Charles’s preference for a form of religion that has been variously called Arminianism, Laudianism (after William Laud, one of the king’s chief advisers on religious matters who was promoted to Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633), and Anti-Calvinism led some to fear that the king was moving towards Catholicism as well as absolutism. To some Charles’s preference for church services that demoted the importance of sermons in favour of ceremony and music, for churches in which the communion table was moved from the nave to the chancel and railed off, and for clergymen like Richard Montagu who had very authoritarian views about monarchical power raised suspicions that there was a Popish Plot at court intent on subverting Parliament and Protestantism.

These fears were made public in two documents that Parliament issued before it was dissolved in March 1629—the Petition of Right and the Protestation of the Commons. In fact, Charles’s attraction to Laudianism probably owed more to his love of order than for Catholicism; nor is it certain that he intended to rule forever without Parliament. But it is likely that very few in England appreciated this, especially when Charles did not call another Parliament for 11 years after 1629 and when during the Personal Rule he continued to raise money by extra-Parliamentary means, including ship money, and by reviving little-used royal feudal rights, at the same time pushing ahead with Laudian Church reforms. His close relations with his French Catholic wife, Henrietta Maria, too, although they were a story of private bliss, proved to be a public relations disaster, since they apparently confirmed that there was indeed a Popish Plot at the heart of the English State. This was also the effect of the authoritarian and Laudian policies followed in Ireland by Sir Thomas Wentworth, lord deputy there since 1632.

However, since no English Parliament met in the 1630s, there was no public forum where these concerns could be expressed. It was events in Scotland that changed this situation. Charles’s decision to impose on his Scottish subjects an English Prayer Book that embodied many of the Laudian ecclesiastical innovations provoked a nationalist and Presbyterian rebellion north of the border. Charles’s refusal to back down only inflamed the situation and by 1638 many Scots had given their support to the Scottish rebels, the Covenanters (named after the National Covenant they drew up in February 1638). By November 1638 a Scottish General Assembly dominated by Covenanters declared episcopacy abolished in Scotland and directly challenged the power of the monarchy.

Charles’s attempt to put down this Scottish Revolution by force of arms in two wars in 1639 and 1640 (the Bishops’ Wars) failed. There is some evidence that some of Charles’s opponents in England collaborated with the Covenanters. The English forces were defeated and by 1640 most of northern England was occupied by the Scots. The immediate impact of these events on England was to force Charles to call an English Parliament in 1640 and thus to allow the grievances of his English subjects to be expressed. One Parliament met for only a few weeks in April 1640 (hence it is known as the Short Parliament). But defeat in the Second Bishops’ War ensured that a second Parliament that met in November 1640 could not be got rid of as easily. This Long Parliament set about sweeping away many of the hated measures introduced by Charles I since 1625. It also took action against the king’s principal ministers, his “evil councillors”, including Laud, who was imprisoned in the Tower of London, and Wentworth (now Earl of Strafford), who was executed after a Parliamentary Act of Attainder had been passed that simply declared (but did not prove) that he was guilty of treason. Parliament also passed an act declaring that it could not be dissolved without its own consent.

Most of these measures in 1640-1641 were carried out with a fair degree of unity among Charles’s English subjects. By this stage, though, it is possible to see divisions appearing in England about what should be done next. Opposition to Laudianism masked major differences about whether or not there was need for further reform of the Church as it had developed by 1625. Moreover, some of the policies of Parliamentary leaders like John Pym, including the radical means they had used to get rid of Strafford and the willingness to use popular demonstrations in support of their policies, caused some to begin to wonder whether events might result in Parliaments becoming far too powerful. Also, as religious groups appeared to challenge the status quo in the Church (in December 1640 a London Root and Branch Petition called for the abolition of bishops) some began to fear that religious liberty might lead to social anarchy.

At this stage, though, a civil war did not seem likely since few people had yet come out in support of the king. However, as in the later 1630s, it was events outside England that played a major part in changing that situation. Charles’s visit to Scotland in the summer of 1641, during which time he plotted fairly openly both with elements in the English army for military support to use against his English opponents, and with conservatives in Scotland to arrest Covenanter leaders, caused the English Parliamentary leaders to make the radical proposal that the king’s ministers should be approved by Parliament. While to some this seemed to be justified by what he had been doing, others saw this as an unacceptable incursion by Parliament into the king’s prerogative powers.

The outbreak of rebellion in Ireland in October 1641 raised even more divisions in England. No one questioned that an army needed to be raised to put an end to what most English Protestants saw as evil massacres by Irish Catholics against innocent English and Scottish Protestant settlers. Yet, as was seen in November 1641 in the debates on the Grand Remonstrance—a long document that put the Parliamentarians’ case—divisions arose over the proposal of the Parliamentary leadership that this army should be controlled by Parliament and not by the king. While to some this was justified as a measure made necessary by Charles’s untrustworthiness, especially after Charles unsuccessfully tried on January 4, 1642, to arrest leading members of the Parliamentary opposition by force, to others this was yet another example of the Parliamentary leaderships’ radical constitutional ambitions.

In these ways and for these reasons support for the king began to match that for the Parliamentarians. Moreover, as these divisions widened in the spring and early summer over the competing claims to appoint the commanders of the army—the Parliamentarians, by right of the Militia Ordinance, passed by Parliament, but lacking the king’s assent, in March 1642, and the royalists, by right of commissions of array, a device not used for over a century—the paper war gradually became a real war. Up and down the country there were clashes between forces of both sides as local commanders sought to capture strongholds and supplies of ammunition. The unsuccessful attempt of the king and his forces to seize control of Hull in April 1642 is only one of a series of skirmishes that took place in many places before the king finally declared war on the Parliamentarians by raising his standard at Nottingham on August 22, 1642.

III

The First English Civil War (1642-1646)

The First English Civil War had a much more extensive impact on people’s lives than was once thought. This is partly because the war was not only fought at major battles between the field armies of both sides, but also in thousands of small skirmishes between local forces and garrisons as both sides sought to secure disputed territories. Many more men fought in the war than was once thought. One reliable estimate is that one in four of the adult male population of England and Wales fought in it. Moreover, it may be that 200,000 people out of a total population of around 5 million died in battles and skirmishes and from diseases carried by armies, a greater death rate than that inflicted on the English population by either of the two world wars of the 20th century. It is also now known, contrary to earlier accounts, that the war was fought with some brutality, if not on the scale of depravity that was reached in contemporary wars in Ireland or in the European Thirty Years’ War. Massacres of civilians were not unknown and garrison commanders often flouted the law in requisitioning men, money, horses, and goods. It is no coincidence that “plunder” entered the English language in the 1640s. Few in the country could have been unaffected by or unaware of the war. Even these people who lived in areas in which control was not disputed (like large parts of southern and eastern England, including London, held by the Parliamentarians, and those parts of the north and west that remained in royalist hands) were severely affected by measures adopted by both sides to win the war.

By 1643-1644 both sides no longer relied on volunteers to fight for them but had introduced conscription; they had also begun to collect new taxes. One, called by the Parliamentarians “assessments” and by the royalists “contributions”, was a direct tax that was more effective in tapping the true wealth of people than any previous tax in English history. Another, the excise, an indirect tax on consumer goods, had never been levied in England before. They also passed measures legalizing the confiscation of the wealth and property of those who fought against them, and set up county committees composed of people loyal to their cause to put these measures into effect. Not surprisingly, during the war some localities tried to insulate themselves from the war’s effects by making neutrality agreements, mainly in the first months of the war, or by forming local armed militias to protect themselves from the armies of both sides, as did the Clubmen groups who appeared in large parts of southern England and South Wales in 1645-1646. Attempts were also made to end the war by negotiation at peace conferences at Oxford in 1643 and at Uxbridge in 1645. But all attempts to secure neutrality or peace by negotiations failed and the war did not end until 1646 when it was won by decisive Parliamentarian victories on the battlefield.

At the start of war, however, few could have forecast that the war would have lasted so long and have ended in this way. Indeed, until the end of 1644 there were many signs that it would be the royalists that would win the war. The first major battle of the war at Edgehill, in Warwickshire, on October 23, 1642, fought between royalist and Parliamentarian field armies of around 13-14,000 men each, led by the king and the Earl of Essex respectively, was inconclusive. After it, the king failed to press home his army’s march on London after his forces were held up by the London-trained bands at Brentford on November 12, 1642, and at Turnham Green on the following day. Also, most military historians are agreed that the king, after falling back on Oxford, which became the royalist headquarters for the rest of the war, made a major strategic blunder in deciding to besiege Gloucester, where one of his major field armies was tied down until September 1643, when the city was relieved by Essex’s army supported by the London-trained bands. Nor were the royalists successful at the First Battle of Newbury (September 20, 1643) in preventing the Parliamentary forces returning to their London headquarters.

But for much of 1643 royalist armies in the south-west under Prince Maurice and Sir Ralph Hopton, and in the north-east under the Earl (later Marquis) of Newcastle, carried all before them. In the south-west the principal royalist victories were at Braddock Down in Cornwall (January 19, 1643), at Stratton (May 16, 1643), Lansdown Hill (July 5, 1643), and Roundway Down (July 13, 1643), the last two against another of the Parliamentarians’ field armies led by Sir William Waller. Prince Rupert’s capture of the major port of Bristol on July 26, 1643, brought most of south-western England under royalist control. These successes were paralleled by victories won by the Earl of Newcastle in the north. In December 1642 his army entered York, and later the royalists won major victories in Yorkshire at Seacroft Moor (March 30, 1643) and Adwalton Moor (June 30, 1643) over the Parliamentarians’ forces there commanded by Ferdinando, Baron Fairfax, and his son, Sir Thomas Fairfax. However, the story of royalist advances in both the south-west and north-east in 1643 was not one of total success. Newcastle’s siege of Hull was a failure and the Parliamentarians won a victory at Winceby in Lincolnshire (October 11, 1643). Elsewhere, the newly formed army of the Eastern Association, led by the Earl of Manchester and his second-in-command, Oliver Cromwell, stemmed the southerly progress of Newcastle’s army. Waller’s Parliamentarian army meanwhile won victories in Sussex and Hampshire at Chichester, Arundel, and Alton in December 1643, and at Cheriton (March 29, 1644).

But by the winter of 1643-1644 there is no doubt that the royalist armies were having the better of the war. They were also, on balance, winning the war in the Thames Valley and the west Midlands, reflected in the abandonment by the Parliamentarians in 1643 of towns like Hereford and Reading that had previously been won from royalist control. So successful were royalist armies at this time that some have seen the way that Newcastle’s army swept southward through Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, Hopton’s army advanced across southern England, and the king’s own field army held its own in the Midlands and upper Thames Valley as part of a masterly drawing board strategy devised by the royalist council of war at Oxford. But, given what we now know of the royalist council, this is not likely. The bitter factional splits among the king’s advisers between moderates like Sir Edward Hyde and extremists like George, Lord Digby, and Henrietta Maria, and Charles’s inability to give consistently clear orders to his field commanders, were not conducive to rational war planning.

Yet, after 12 months or so of fighting, despite the failings of Charles I as a war leader, the royalists were undoubtedly winning the war. What changed that situation? Not for the first time the answer is partly to be found in Ireland and Scotland. The course of the English Civil War is impossible to understand fully unless it is seen as part of a wider War of Three Kingdoms that engulfed the whole of the British Isles. In September 1643 both sides in the English conflict made an alliance with participants in this broader conflict. Charles ordered the commander of his armies in Ireland, the Duke of Ormonde, to make a truce (the Irish Cessation Treaty) with Catholic factions in Ireland, which by this time had joined together as the Confederation of Kilkenny; while the English Parliamentarians made an alliance (the Solemn League and Covenant) with the Scottish Covenanters. These alliances helped to determine the changes in the fortunes of king and Parliamentarians in the English Civil War.

The Cessation Truce did a great deal of damage to the royalist war effort. Not only did very few soldiers come from Ireland to help the royalist cause in England, but also the truce was a propaganda disaster for the royalists. The king’s opponents were able to depict him as someone willing to use Catholic murderers against his English subjects. In contrast the Scottish alliance gave the Parliamentarian military cause a major boost. In January 1644 a 22,000-strong Scottish army crossed the River Tweed and joined up with the Parliamentary forces led by Sir Thomas Fairfax and with the Earl of Manchester’s Parliamentarian Eastern Association army. On July 2, 1644, these combined armies decisively defeated the royalist forces of Newcastle and Prince Rupert at the Battle of Marston Moor, near York. There is no doubt either that the Scottish army made a major contribution to the battle’s outcome, or that it ended the royalist threat from the north. After the battle, Newcastle left the country and took no further part in the war.

But the battle was not the turning point in the war that it is sometimes assumed to have been. The royalists had lost a battle but not the war, as can be seen by the wave of royalist victories that followed Marston Moor. Already, on June 29, 1644, the king’s army had inflicted a major defeat on Waller’s army at Cropredy Bridge in the southern Midlands. On September 2, 1644, another of the Parliamentarians’ major armies led by Essex was even more decisively defeated at Lostwithiel in Cornwall. Essex escaped in a small boat, but his army, stripped of its arms, was forced to suffer a humiliating retreat through Cornwall and Devon. This debacle was followed by the failure of Manchester and Cromwell and the army of Eastern Association, together with Waller’s army, to defeat the king’s army at the Second Battle of Newbury (October 27, 1644). To make matters worse for the Parliamentarian war effort, the Scottish Covenanting army never again repeated the role in England it had played at Marston Moor. The main reason for this is that the Covenanters faced a major threat at home from a royalist army led by the Marquis of Montrose, strengthened from June 1644 by forces sent from Ireland by the Earl of Antrim, led by Alasdair MacColla. Together, Montrose and MacColla won a string of victories in Scotland (climaxing in the major defeat of a Covenanting army by Montrose at Tippermuir on September 1, 1644), which forced the Covenanters to divert resources and supplies from its army in England. The result was to weaken greatly the Scottish contribution to the war against the king in England.

Nor did events off the battlefield in 1644 give any indication that the Parliamentarians would eventually win the war. On the contrary, after Marston Moor huge rifts appeared in the ranks of the king’s opponents. The Parliamentarians had never been united. From the very beginning of the war some (often described as the “war” and “middle” groups) had been keener on pursuing an offensive war strategy than others (the “peace” group) who were anxious to secure a settlement with the king by negotiation. In the winter of 1644 these divisions became much wider and contemporaries coined the labels Presbyterians and Independents to describe them. Presbyterians were those who were not only anxious to end the war quickly, if necessary by allowing the king to return without any significant limitations on his power, but who also were fearful that a continuation of war would lead towards greater religious freedom which they believed would inevitably undermine social order. This is perhaps why the Earl of Manchester lost the enthusiasm he had once had for the war. Whereas in 1643-1644 he had been a dynamic win-the-war leader of the Parliamentarian army of the Eastern Association, after the Second Battle of Newbury he argued for a speedy settlement with the king and began a major quarrel with his second-in-command, Oliver Cromwell.

Cromwell’s views were those of the Independents, who believed that the war must be prosecuted vigorously until the king was defeated and forced both to accept some limitations on his power and a degree of “liberty for tender consciences” in religion. During the winter of 1644 the Manchester-Cromwell quarrel widened into a full-scale political battle at Westminster between Presbyterians and Independents, the outcome of which was the Independents’ success in getting passed in Parliament two measures that were to prove to be crucial in bringing about the military defeat of the king. The Self-Denying Ordinance (April 1645) forced MPs to resign their military commands, thus effecting the removal from the army of the Presbyterian generals, the earls of Essex and Manchester, but not of the Independent Oliver Cromwell, who was exempted from the ordinance and eventually appointed as Lieutenant General of Horse in the New Model Army that had been formed by Parliamentary ordinance in February 1645. This merged the three largest Parliamentarian armies previously commanded by Manchester, Essex, and Waller into one 22,000-strong army. This consisted of 6,600 horses (in 11 cavalry regiments), 14,400 foot soldiers (in 12 infantry regiments), and 1 regiment of 1,000 dragoons (or mounted infantrymen). Sir Thomas Fairfax was appointed as the new army’s commander-in-chief, with Cromwell and Sir Philip Skippon as his senior subordinates.

Much controversy surrounds the nature of the New Model Army and some have argued that, since it was merely an amalgamation of previous Parliamentarian armies, there was little that was new about it. But the preponderance in it of officers who had Independent views suggests that an older view of the New Model Army as “saints in arms” may have a grain of truth in it. Less contentious is the fact that it was a much better paid and more professional army than any that had so far taken to the field. It won a major victory on June 14, 1645, at Naseby, in Northamptonshire, and in the following months Fairfax and the New Model Army took much of south-western England from royalist control. In this campaign the key Parliamentarian successes were at the Battle of Langport (July 10, 1645), and the recapture of Bridgwater (July 23, 1645), Bristol (September 10, 1645), and Exeter (April 9, 1646). Hopton and his army surrendered near Truro on March 10, 1646. Elsewhere, the royalist case collapsed without a fight. The exception was Chester, where royalist resistance lasted until February 1646 and was maintained despite the defeat at the Battle of Rowton Heath (September 24, 1645) of a royalist army sent to relieve the city. Chester, however, surrendered in February 1646, and a short time later Charles I recognized that he had lost the war by leaving Oxford in disguise and travelling to Newark in Nottinghamshire, where he gave himself up to the Scots.

There is much debate about why the king lost the war. Clearly, the formation of the New Model Army had a lot to do with it. But so too did the Parliamentarians’ possession of London and the richest parts of the country whose wealth they tapped very successfully by the innovative taxes noted above. London was also a valuable source of loans as well as of soldiers. The Parliamentarians too controlled the English navy during the war and this ensured that both the damage to London’s overseas trade and wealth, and the threat from foreign aid to the royalist cause, were minimized. It may be also that Charles I himself contributed to its own defeat. His negotiations with Irish Catholics (the details of which became public when his correspondence was captured and published after the Battle of Naseby) did his cause untold harm, as did his failure to capitalize on the one real advantage he had over his opponents—his sole command of the royalist cause. In the last resort the Parliamentarians won the war because they made much better use of the resources at their disposal than did the king.

IV

Between the Civil Wars (1646-1647)

Charles I may have lost the war, but the situation in 1646 suggests that he had every chance of winning the peace by securing a settlement that would allow him to return to power on very favourable terms. Not only were his opponents split by serious divisions, but also opinion in the country was strongly in favour of a speedy settlement that would bring about the demobilization of the armies, the end of high taxation, and the restoration of royal government. Why was no such settlement made? Part of the answer is to be found in what happened after the Scots handed over the king to the Parliamentarians in January 1647. In the first few months of 1647 the Presbyterians in Parliament, headed by Denzil Holles, as the first steps towards a settlement with the king on their terms, pushed through Parliament measures to demobilize the bulk of the New Model Army, paying only a small fraction of its wage arrears. On March 30 the House of Commons even condemned as treasonable a moderate petition from New Model Army soldiers. The reaction of the soldiers was dramatic. Between April 1647, when cavalrymen at the main headquarters of the New Model Army in Essex began to elect “agitators” to represent their views on the army council, and June 1647, when Cornet George Joyce seized the king from his Parliamentary guards at Holdenby House in Northamptonshire and took him to the army headquarters, the New Model Amy became a major political force, thus ending any chances of a settlement with the king on the Presbyterians’ terms.

Yet the politicization of the New Model Army did not end the chances of a monarchical settlement. On the contrary, as the army marched towards London the army council and, especially, Commissary General Henry Ireton, collaborated with their allies in Parliament, the Independents, to produce the Heads of the Proposals to put to the king as the basis of a post-war settlement. These proposals were designed to limit the power of the king and allow some liberty to tender consciences in religion, but they did not include the abolition of bishops and only exempted seven royalists from a general pardon. Early in August 1647 the army occupied London to prevent the Presbyterians securing their control of the City of London militia. But negotiations on the Heads of the Proposals between the army leaders, Independents, and the king continued.

Two explanations for the failure of the army’s negotiations with the king emerge from the complex events of the autumn and winter of 1647. The first is the fact that once in London the influence on the army of the London Levellers became significant for the first time. Their radical scheme for a constitutional and religious settlement set out in The Agreement of the People, and their indictment of the army leaders for negotiating with the king, gained some support among soldiers. When these proposals were discussed at the Putney Debates of the army council in October and November 1647, it became clear that the army was no longer united on wanting a settlement with the king. The army leaders, Fairfax and Cromwell, abandoned the debates, sent the agitators back to their regiments, and ruthlessly crushed an army mutiny at Ware in Hertfordshire. But by this stage a second explanation as to why no settlement was made with the king in 1647 became apparent. This was quite simply the fact that Charles made no serious attempt to conclude a settlement, probably convinced that if he delayed long enough his opponents would fall out among themselves, resulting in his restoration to power on unconditional terms. In November his private intransigence became public when, after escaping from army custody, he fled to the Isle of Wight, rejected one more set of proposals from Parliament for a settlement, the Four Bills, and made an alliance (the Engagement) with the Scots. Rather than concluding a settlement with his English subjects, Charles had made it clear that he was willing to use the military forces of Ireland and Scotland against them. The reaction of the army leaders and their Independent allies was to break off negotiations with the king and support the passage in Parliament early in January 1648 of the Vote of No Addresses, which declared that Parliament would never again negotiate with Charles I.