The First Civil War
The first Civil War lasted from 1642 until 1646. It is
impossible to say quite when it began: the country drifted into war. In January
1642 the king left London and began a long journey round the Midlands and the
north. In April he tried to secure an arsenal of military equipment at Hull
(left over from his Scottish campaign). The gates were locked against him and
he retired to York. Between June and August, Charles and the two Houses issued
flatly contradictory instructions to rival groups of commissioners for the
drilling of the militia. This led to some skirmishing and shows of force. By
the end of August both sides were recruiting in earnest and skirmishing
increased. The king's raising of his standard at Nottingham on 20 August was
the formal declaration of war. But the hope on all sides remained either that
negotiations would succeed or else that one battle between the two armies now
in the making would settle the issue. But that first battle, at Edgehill in
South Warwickshire on 23 October, was drawn and settled nothing. Although the
king advanced on London and reached Brentford, he did not have the numbers or
the logistical support to take on the forces blocking his path. He retreated to
Oxford as the winter closed in and the roads became impassable. Only after a
winter of fitful peace and futile negotiation did the real war break out. Those
first armies had been cobbled together and paid on a hand-to-mouth basis. By
the spring, it was clear that the nation had to be mobilized. Armies had to be
raised in every region and the money and administrative apparatus to sustain
those armies created. The country may have stumbled into war; but the logic of
that war and its costs would turn civil disturbance into bloody revolution.
It is probable that at some moments in 1643-5 more than one
in ten of all adult males was in arms. No single army exceeded 20,000 men, and
the largest single battle-Marston Moor near York in June 1644, which saw the
conjunction of several separate armies-involved less than 45,000 men. But there
were usually 120,000 and up to 140,000 men in arms during the campaigning
seasons of 1643, 1644, and 1645. Both sides organized themselves regionally
into 'associations' of counties, each with an army (at least on paper) whose
primary duty was to clear the association of enemies and to protect it from
invasion. Both sides also had a 'marching army' with national responsibilities.
In these circumstances the war was essentially one of skirmishes and sieges
rather than of major battles. Some regions saw little fighting (for example,
East Anglia, the south coast, mid-Wales); others were constantly marched over
and occupied by rival armies (the Severn and Thames valleys were amongst the
worst, but the whole of the Midlands was a constant military zone).
Parliament's heartland was the area in the immediate vicinity of London.
Proximity to the capital and to the peremptory demands of the Houses, and the
rapid deployment of thousands of Londoners in arms (the unemployed and the
religiously inclined joining up in uncertain proportions) ensured that the
lukewarm and the hesitant accepted parliamentary authority. Equally, the king's
initial strength lay in the areas he visited and toured: the North and East
Midlands in a swathe of counties from Lancashire to Oxfordshire. The far north
and the west were initially neutral or confused. Only gradually did royalists
gain the upper hand in those areas.
The King had several initial advantages-the support of
personally wealthy men, a naturally unified command structure emanating from
the royal person, a simpler military objective (to capture London). But
Parliament had greater long-term advantages: the wealth and manpower of London,
crucial for the provision of credit; the control of the navy and of the trade
routes with the result that hard-headed businessmen preferred to deal with them
rather than with the king; a greater compactness of territory less vulnerable
to invasion than the royalist hinterlands; and the limited but important help
afforded by the invasion of 20,000 Scots in 1644 in return for a commitment by
the Houses to introduce a form of Church government similar to the Scottish
one.
It was always likely that the parliamentary side would wear
down the royalists in a long war. So it proved. Purely military factors played
little part in the outcome. Both sides deployed the same tactics and used
similar weapons; both had large numbers of experienced officers who had served
in the armies of the Continental powers in the Thirty Years War. In 1645 both
sides 'new modelled' their military organizations to take account of the
changing military balance, the king setting up separate grand commands on Bristol
and Oxford, Parliament bringing together three separate armies depleted in
recent months: an army too large for its existing task, the defence of East
Anglia, the unsuccessful southern region army of Sir William Waller, and the
'marching army' of the commander-in-chief, the earl of Essex. This New Model
Army was put under the command of an 'outsider', Sir Thomas Fairfax, to avoid
the rival claims of senior officers in the old armies, and all MPs were
recalled from their commands to serve in the Houses; but otherwise commands
were allocated more or less according to existing seniority. The New Model was
not, by origin, designed to radicalize the parliamentary cause and it was not
dominated by radical officers. Professionalization, not radicalization, was the
key; the army's later reputation for religious zeal and for representing a
career open to the talents was not a feature of its creation. The great string
of victories beginning at Naseby in June 1645 was not the product of its zeal,
but of regular pay. In the last eighteen months of the war, the unpaid royalist
armies simply dissolved, while the New Model was well supplied. The Civil War
was won by attrition.
The last twelve months of the war saw a growing popular
revolt against the violence and destruction of war. These neutralist or
'Clubmen' risings of farmers and rural craftsmen throughout west and south-west
England sought to drive one or both sides out of their area and demanded an end
to the war by negotiation. Again, as the discipline of royalist armies
disintegrated they were the principal sufferers. But the hostility of the
populace to both sides made the fruits of victory hard to pick.
To win the war, Parliament had imposed massive taxation on
the people. Direct taxation was itself set at a level of 15-20 per cent of the
income of the rich and of the middling sort. Excise duties were imposed on
basic commodities such as beer (the basic beverage of men, women, and children
in an age just prior to the introduction of hot vegetable drinks such as tea,
coffee, and chocolate) and salt (a necessary preservative in that period).
Several thousand gentry and many thousands of others whose property lay in an
area controlled by their opponents had their estates confiscated and their
incomes employed wholly by the State except for a meagre one-fifth allowed to
those with wives and children. By the end of the war, Parliament was allowing
less active royalists ('delinquents') to regain their estates on payment of a
heavy fine; but the hardliners ('malignants') were allowed no redress and were
later to suffer from the sale of their lands on the open market to the highest
bidder. All those whose estates were not actually confiscated were required to
lend money to king or Parliament; refusal to lend 'voluntarily' led to a
stinging fine. In addition to those burdens, both sides resorted to free
quarter, the billeting of troops on civilians with little prospect of any
recompense for the board and lodging taken. Troops on the move were all too
likely to help themselves and to point their muskets at anyone who protested.
Looting and pillaging were rare; pilfering and trampling down crops were
common. All this occurred in an economy severely disrupted by war. Trade up the
Severn was seriously affected by the royalist occupation of Worcester and
parliamentarian occupation of Gloucester; or up the Thames by royalist Oxford
and parliamentarian Reading. Bad weather added to other problems to make the
harvests of the later 1640s the worst of the century. High taxation and high
food prices depressed the markets for manufactures and led to economic
recession. The plight of the poor and of the not-so-poor was desperate indeed.
The costs of settlement, of the disbandment of armies, and of a return to
'normality' grew.
In order to win the Civil War, Parliament had to grant
extensive powers, even arbitrary powers, to its agents. The war was
administered by a series of committees in London who oversaw the activities of
committees in each county and regional association. Committees at each level
were granted powers quite at variance with the principles of common law: powers
to assess people's wealth and impose their assessments; to search premises and
to distrain goods; to imprison those who obstructed them without trial, cause
shown and without limitation. Those who acted in such roles were granted an
indemnity against any civil or criminal action brought against them, and (after
mid-1647) that indemnity was enforced by another parliamentary committee.
Judgments reached in the highest courts of the land were set aside by committee
decree. Only thus had the resources to win the Civil War been secured. But by
1647 and 1648 Parliament was seen as being more tyrannical in its government
than the king had been in his. The cries for settlement and restoration were
redoubled.
The Second Civil War
But if the great majority, even on the winning side, became
convinced that the Civil War had solved nothing and had only substituted new
and harsher impositions on pocket and conscience for the old royal impositions,
a minority, equally dismayed by the shabby realities of the present, persuaded
themselves that a much more radical transformation of political institutions
was necessary. God could not have subjected his people to such trials and sufferings
without a good purpose. To admit the futility of the struggle, to bring back
the king on terms he would have accepted in 1642, would be a betrayal of God
and of those who had died and suffered in His cause. Once again it was the
religious imperative which drove men on. Such views were to be found in London,
with its concentration of gathered churches and economic distress, and in the
army, with its especially strong memories of suffering and exhilaration, many
soldiers aware of God's presence with them in the heat of battle. Furthermore a
penniless Parliament, bleakly foreseeing the consequences of seeking to squeeze
additional taxes from the people, enraged the army in the spring of 1647 by
trying to disband most of them and to send the rest to reconquer Ireland
without paying off the arrears of pay which had been mounting since the end of
the war. In the summer of 1647 and again in the autumn of 1648 a majority in
the two Houses, unable to see the way forward, resigned themselves to accepting
such terms as the king would accept. His plan since his military defeat, to
keep talking but to keep his options open, looked likely to be vindicated.
On both occasions, however, the army prevented Parliament
from surrender. In August 1647 it marched into London, plucked out the leading
'incendiaries' from the House of Commons, and awed the rest into voting them
the taxation and the other material comforts they believed due to them. In
doing so, they spurned the invitation of the London-based radical group known
as the Levellers to dissolve the Long Parliament, to decree that all existing
government had abused its trust and was null and void, and to establish a new
democratic constitution. The Levellers wanted all free-born Englishmen to sign
a social contract, an Agreement of the People, and to enjoy full rights of
participation in a decentralized, democratic state. All those who held office
would do so for a very short period and were to be accountable to their
constituents. Many rights, above all freedom to believe and practice whatever
form of Christianity one wanted, could not be infringed by any future
Parliament or government. The army, officers and men, were drawn to the
Levellers' commitment to religious freedom and to their condemnation of the
corruption and tyranny of the Long Parliament, and officers and 'agitators'
drawn from the rank and file debated Leveller proposals, above all at the
Putney debates held in and near Putney Church in November 1647. But the great
majority finally decided that the army's bread-andbutter demands were not to be
met by those proposals. Instead the army preferred to put pressure on the
chastened Parliament to use its arbitrary powers to meet their sectional
interests.
The outcome was a second Civil War, a revolt of the
provinces against centralization and military rule. Moderate parliamentarians,
Clubmen, whole county communities rose against the renewed oppressions, and
their outrage was encouraged and focused by ex-royalists. The second Civil War
was fiercest in regions little affected by the first war, insufficiently numbed
by past experience-in Kent, in East Anglia, in South Wales, in the West and
North Ridings. It was complicated by the king's clumsy alliance with the Scots,
who were disgusted by Parliament's failure to honour its agreement to bring in
a Church settlement like their own, and who were willing, despite everything,
to trust in vague assurances from the duplicitous Charles. If the revolts had
been co-ordinated, or at least contemporaneous, they might have succeeded. But
they happened one by one, and one by one the army picked them off. With the
defeat of the Scots at Preston in August, the second Civil War was over.
It had solved nothing. Still the country cried out for peace
and for settlement, still the army had to be paid, still the king prevaricated
and made hollow promises. As in 1647, the Houses had to face the futility of
all their efforts. By early December there were only two alternatives: to
capitulate to the king and to bring him back on his own terms to restore order
and peace; or to remove him, and to launch on a bold adventure into unknown and
uncharted constitutional seas. A clear majority of both Houses, and a massive
majority of the country, wanted the former; a tiny minority, spearheaded by the
leaders of the army, determined on the latter. For a second time the army
purged Parliament. In the so-called Pride's Purge, over half the members of the
Commons were arrested or forcibly prevented from taking their seats. Two-thirds
of the remainder boycotted the violated House. In the revolutionary weeks that
followed, less than one in six of all MPs participated, and many of those in
attendance did so to moderate proceedings. The decision to put the king on
trial was probably approved by less than one in ten of the assembly that had
made war on him in 1642.
King Charles captured
In January 1649, the king was tried for his life. His
dignity and forbearance made it a massive propaganda defeat for his opponents.
His public beheading at Whitehall took place before a stunned but sympathetic
crowd. This most dishonourable and duplicitous of English kings grasped a
martyr's crown, his reputation rescued by that dignity at the end and by the
publication of his self-justification, the Eikon Basilike, a runaway best
seller for decades to come.
Cromwell at Dunbar by Andrew Carrick Gow.
The Third English Civil War
The execution of Charles I did not sit well with the Scottish parliament and, in a direct snub to the newly formed Commonwealth south of the border, they declared the exiled Charles II King of Great Britain and Ireland. There was a condition, however, and this was that he agreed to Presbyterian Church rule across Britain before being allowed to land in Scotland.
Charles tried to improve his bargaining position by encouraging the Royalist champion, the Earl of Montrose, to come out of exile and raise a force once more. This Montrose did, but rather than a ‘threatening’ force he invaded Scotland with a small army and tried to recruit once more amongst the Highland clans. This plan never really got off the ground and his outnumbered army was destroyed at Carbisdale in April 1650. Charles abandoned Montrose to his fate, and the brave Earl was summarily executed in Edinburgh.
Shortly after this sad act had played out, Charles signed the Solemn League and Covenant and gained the support of the Scottish parliament and their covenanter armies. Cromwell now rightly saw Charles II as the major threat to the new Commonwealth and left Ireland in the hands of his subordinates to lead an army north to confront the Scottish.
The armies met at the Battle of Dunbar in September 1650 where the outnumbered Parliamentarian forces were victorious and Cromwell went on to occupy much of southern Scotland.
Early the following year Charles was officially crowned King of Scotland, but by this time was frustrated by the lack of unity in the Scottish Parliament and so looked south for more Royalist support. After another defeat at the hands of Cromwell’s New Model Army at Inverkeithing in July 1651, Charles marched south across the border at the head of a small Scottish force and headed to the west of England. This was a traditionally Royalist area and the hope was that many English troops would flock to his banner. The support failed to materialise in the numbers needed and Cromwell defeated Charles at the Battle of Worcester in September 1651.
Charles was forced once more into exile, spending the weeks after Worcester evading capture in disguise. Moving through different safe houses and famously hiding out in an oak tree, Charles finally made it to the coast and escaped to France. This effectively ended the English Civil Wars.
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