Everything about The English Civil War totally explained
The
English Civil War consisted of a series of armed conflicts and political machinations that took place between
Parliamentarians and
Royalists 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 replacement of English monarchy with first, the
Commonwealth of England (1649–1653), and then with a
Protectorate (1653–1659), under
Oliver Cromwell's personal rule. The monopoly of the
Church of England on Christian worship in England ended with the victors consolidating the established
Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland. Constitutionally, the wars established the precedent that a British monarch can not govern without Parliament's consent, although this concept was established only with the
Glorious Revolution later in the century.
Terminology
The term
English Civil War appears most commonly in the singular form, although historians often 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
Britain and Ireland. Historians sometimes 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
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 didn't have a large permanent role in the English system of government, instead 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 the
Magna Carta.
The Personal Rule and the rebellion in Scotland
Charles I avoided calling a Parliament for the next decade, known as the "
Eleven Years' Tyranny" or "Charles's Personal Rule".
During this period, Charles's lack of money determined policies. Unable to raise revenue through Parliament — reluctant to convene it — he resorted to other means. Thus, not observing often long-outdated conventions became, in some cases, a finable offence (for example, a failure to attend and to receive
knighthood at Charles's coronation), with the fine paid to the Crown. He tried to raise revenue through the
ship money tax, by exploiting a naval war-scare in 1635, demanding that the inland English counties pay the tax for the
Royal Navy. Established law supported this policy, but authorities had ignored it for centuries, many regarded it as yet another extra-Parliamentary (and therefore illegal) tax. Some prominent men refused to pay ship money arguing that the tax was illegal, but they lost in court and the fines imposed on them for refusing to pay ship money and for standing against the tax's legality) aroused widespread indignation.
During the "Personal Rule," Charles aroused most antagonism through his religious measures: he believed in
High Anglicanism, a sacramental version of the
Church of England, theologically based upon
Arminianism, a creed shared with his main political advisor, Archbishop
William Laud. In 1633, Charles appointed Laud as
Archbishop of Canterbury and started making the Church more ceremonial, replacing the wooden
communion tables with stone altars. Puritans accused Laud of reintroducing
Catholicism; when they complained, he'd 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, and one that aroused anger. Moreover, the Church authorities revived the statutes passed in time of
Elizabeth I about church attendance, and fined Puritans for not attending Anglican church services.
The end of Charles's independent governance came when he attempted to apply the same religious policies in Scotland. The
Church of Scotland, reluctantly Episcopal in structure, had independent traditions. Charles, however, wanted one, uniform Church throughout Britain, and introduced a new, High Anglican, version of the English
Book of Common Prayer to Scotland in summer of 1637. This was violently resisted, a riot broke out in Edinburgh, It may have been started in a church by
Jenny Geddes; and, in February of 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 having been tested by free parliaments and General Assemblies of the Church.
Before long, King Charles withdrew his prayer book, and summoned a General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, in Glasgow, in November of 1638. The General Assembly, affected by the contemporary radical mood, rejected the Prayer Book, then drastically declared unlawful the office of bishop. Charles demanded the acts of the Assembly be withdrawn; the Scots refused; both sides began raising armies.
In spring of 1639, King Charles I accompanied his forces to the Scottish border, to end the rebellion known as the
Bishops War, but, after an inconclusive military campaign, he accepted the offered Scottish truce — the
Pacification of Berwick. The truce proved temporary; a second war followed in summer of 1640. This time, a Scots army defeated Charles's forces in the north, then captured
Newcastle. Charles eventually agreed not to interfere with Scotland's religion, and paid the Scots war-expenses.
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
Parliament in 1640. The majority faction in the new Parliament, led by
John Pym, took this appeal for money as an opportunity to discuss grievances against the Crown, and opposed the idea of an English invasion of Scotland. Charles took exception to this
lèse-majesté (offence against the ruler) and dissolved Parliament after only a few weeks; hence the name "the
Short Parliament".
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'd "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'd 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, an oath of allegiance to Charles.
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 didn't 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.
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've neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place but as the House is pleased to direct me, whose servant I'm 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.
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. However, the war quickly spread and eventually involved every level of society. 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
Stafford, and then on to
Shrewsbury, because the support for his cause seemed particularly strong in the
Severn valley area and in
North Wales. While passing through
Wellington, in what became known as the "
Wellington Declaration", he declared that he'd uphold the "Protestant religion, the laws of England, and the liberty of Parliament".
The Parliamentarians who opposed the King hadn't remained passive during this pre-war period. As in the case of Kingston upon Hull they'd taken measures to secure strategic towns and cities, by appointing men sympathetic to their cause, and on
9 June they'd 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 [ofWales] 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.
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.
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. 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'd 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,
Thomas Pride) in December 1648. Troops arrested 45 Members of Parliament (MPs) and kept 146 out of the chamber. They allowed only 75 Members in, and then only at the Army's bidding. This
Rump Parliament received orders to set up, in the name of the people of England, a
High Court of Justice for the trial of Charles I for treason.
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". 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
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 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
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 didn't 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 couldn't abandon the fight. He didn't 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'd 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 couldn't 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. There are no accurate figures for these periods, and it isn't possible to give a precise overall figure for those killed in battle, from those who died from disease, or even from a natural decline in population.
Figures for casualties during this period are unreliable, but some attempt has been made to provide rough estimates.
In England, a conservative estimate is that roughly 100,000 people died from war-related disease during the three civil wars. Historic records count 84,830 casualties of the wars themselves. Counting in accidents and the two Bisops' wars, an estimate of 190,000 people is achieved.
Figures for Scotland are more unreliable and should be treated with greater caution. Casualties include the deaths of prisoners of war in conditions that accelerated their deaths, with estimates of 10,000 prisoners not surviving or not returning home. There are no figures to calculate how many dies from war-related diseases, but if the same ration of disease to battle deaths from English figures is applied to the Scottish figures, a not unreasonable estimate of 60,000 people is achieved.
Figures for Ireland are described as "miracles of conjecture". Certainly the devastation inflicted on Ireland was unbelievable, with the best estimate provided by Sir William Petty, the father of English demography. Although Petty's figures are the best available, they're still acknowledged as being tentative. The don't include the estimate of 40,000 driven into exile, or those sold as indentured servents, or sold as slave to the West Indies where most were worked to death. Petty estimates that 112,000 protestants were killed through plague, war, and famine, and that 504,000 catholics were killed, giving an estimated total of 618,000.
These estimate indicate that England suffered a 3.7% loss of population, Scotland a loss of 6%, while Ireland suffered a loss of 41% of its population. Putting these numbers into the context of other catastrophes helps to understand the devastation to Ireland in particular. The
Great Hunger of 1845-1852 resulted in a loss of 16% of the population, while during the second world war, the population of the Soviet Union fell by 16%.
Popular gains
Ordinary people took advantage of the dislocation of civil society during the 1640s to derive advantages for themselves. The contemporary guild democracy movement won its greatest successes among London's transport workers, notably the Thames
watermen.
Rural communities seized timber and other resources on the sequestrated estates of royalists and catholics, and on the estates of the royal family and the church hierarchy. Some communities improved their conditions of tenure on such estates.
The old
status quo began a retrenchment after the end of the main civil war in 1646, and more especially after the restoration of monarchy in 1660. But some gains were long-term. The democratic element introduced in the watermen's company in 1642, for example, survived, with vicissitudes, until 1827.
Aftermath
The wars left England, Scotland, and Ireland among 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 though it could treat the Army as it liked, military force shortly afterwards dissolved this, as well. 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
Declaration of Breda,
Charles II made known the conditions of his acceptance of the Crown of England. Monck organised the
Convention Parliament, which met for the first time on
25 April 1660. On
8 May 1660, it declared that King Charles II had reigned as the lawful monarch since the execution of Charles I in
January 1649. Charles returned from exile on
23 May 1660. On
29 May 1660, the populace in London acclaimed him as king. His coronation took place at
Westminster Abbey on
23 April 1661. These events became known as the
English Restoration.
Although the monarchy was restored, it was still only with the consent of Parliament; therefore, the civil wars effectively set England and Scotland on course to adopt a
parliamentary monarchy form of government. This system would result in the outcome that the future
Kingdom of Great Britain, formed in 1707 under the
Acts of Union, would manage to forestall the kind of often-bloody revolution, typical of European republican movements that followed the
Jacobin revolution in 18th century France and the later success of
Napoleon, which generally resulted in the total abolition of monarchy. Specifically, future monarchs became wary of pushing Parliament too hard, and Parliament effectively chose the line of royal succession in 1688 with the
Glorious Revolution and in the 1701
Act of Settlement. After the
Restoration, Parliament's factions became
political parties (later becoming the
Tories and
Whigs) with competing views and varying abilities to influence the decisions of their monarchs.
Theories relating to the English Civil War
In the early decades of the 20th century the Whig school was the dominant theoretical view. They explained the Civil War as resulting from a centuries-long struggle between Parliament (especially the House of Commons) and the Monarchy, with Parliament defending the traditional rights of Englishmen, while the Stuart monarchy continually attempted to expand its right to arbitrarily dictate law. The most important Whig historian,
S.R. Gardiner, popularized the English Civil War as a 'Puritan Revolution': challenging the repressive Stuart Church, and preparing the way for
religious toleration in the Restoration. Thus, Puritanism was the natural ally of a people preserving their traditional rights against arbitrary monarchical power.
The Whig view was challenged and largely superseded by the
Marxist school, which became popular in the
1940s, and which interpreted the English Civil War as a
bourgeois revolution. According to Marxist historian
Christopher Hill:
"The Civil War was a class war, wherein on the side of reaction stood the landed aristocracy and its ally, the established Church, and on the other side stood the trading and industrial classes in town and countryside . . . the yeomen and progressive gentry, and . . . wider masses of the population whenever they were able by free discussion to understand what the struggle was really about . . . In English history, the Civil War occurred when the wealthy middle class, already socially powerful, had eliminated the outmoded medieval system of English government. Moreover, like the Whigs, the Marxists found a role for religion: as a moral system, Puritanism ideally suited the bourgeois class, so Marxists identified Puritans as inherently bourgeois."
In the
1970s, a new generation of historians, who would become known as
Revisionists challenged both the Whig and the Marxist theories. In
1973, a group of revisionist historians published the anthology
The Origins of the English Civil War (
Conrad Russell ed.). These historians disliked both Whig and Marxist explanations of the Civil War as long-term socio-economic trends in English society, producing work focused on the minutiae of the years immediately preceding the civil war, thereby returning to the contingency-based historiography of
Clarendon's famous contemporary history
History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, which demonstrated that factional war-allegiance patterns didn't fit either Whig or Marxist history. Puritans, for example, didn't necessarily ally themselves with Parliamentarians, nor did they identify as bourgeois. On the other hand, many bourgeois fought for the King, whereas many landed aristocrats supported Parliament.
Revisionist historians have discredited much of Whig and Marxist English Civil War interpretation. For example,
Jane Ohlmeyer discarded and replaced the historical title "English Civil War" with the titles the "Wars of the Three Kingdoms" and the "British Civil Wars", positing that the civil war in England can't be understood isolated from events in other parts of Great Britain and Ireland; King Charles I remains crucial, not just as King of England, but also because of his relationship with the peoples of his other realms. For example, the wars began when King Charles I tried imposing an Anglican Prayer Book upon Scotland, and when this was met with resistance from the
Covenanters, he needed an army to impose his will. However, this forced him to call an English Parliament to raise new taxes to pay for the army. The English Parliaments were not willing to grant Charles the revenue he needed to pay for the Scottish expeditionary army unless he addressed their grievances. By the early
1640s, Charles was left in a state of near permanent crisis management; often he wasn't willing to concede enough ground to any one faction to neutralise the threat, and in some circumstances to do so would only antagonise another faction. For example, Charles finally agreed upon terms with the Covenanters in August 1641, but although this might have weakened the position of the English Parliament, the
Irish Rebellion of 1641 broke out in
October 1641, largely negating the political advantage he'd obtained by relieving himself of the cost of the Scottish invasion.
Re-enactments
Two large historical societies exist,
The Sealed Knot and
The English Civil War Society, which regularly
re-enact events and battles of the Civil War in full period costume.
Further Information
Get more info on 'English Civil War'.
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