English Civil War

• 1. Introduction

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  The English Civil War began not with a single declaration or a lone shot, but with a king raising his standard at Nottingham on the 22nd of August 1642 - and finding he had fewer than 2,000 cavalry and a small band of Yorkshire foot soldiers standing beneath it. What followed over the next nine years would kill a higher proportion of the British and Irish populations than any conflict before or since in the British Isles. It would put a king on trial for treason against his own people, execute him outside his own palace, and then, within a generation, restore his son to the very throne his father had lost. How did England - a kingdom that had known relative peace for decades - descend into civil war? What drove men to choose sides, and what happened when the winning side turned on itself? The answers run through disputed religious ceremonies, a decade without Parliament, and a Scottish riot that may have started in a cathedral.

• 2. The Long Road to War

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  King James VI of Scotland inherited the English throne in 1603, fewer than 40 years after the death of Queen Elizabeth I, and almost immediately encountered a parliament that expected something in return for its taxes. James, who had described kings as "little gods on Earth" and had grown accustomed to Scotland's weak parliamentary tradition since taking control of the Scottish government in 1583, found the English Parliament's expectations an affront. His personal extravagance kept him perpetually short of money, and because inflation was eroding the real value of the subsidies Parliament did grant, he turned repeatedly to extra-parliamentary sources of income.

  His son Charles I, who succeeded him in 1625, shared the belief in the Divine Right of Kings but lacked his father's peaceable temperament. Parliament raised immediate concerns over Charles's marriage that year to Henrietta Maria, a Roman Catholic French princess. When Charles sent an expedition to relieve French Protestants besieged at La Rochelle in 1627 and insisted on placing his unpopular favourite George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, in command, the mission collapsed into fiasco. Parliament opened impeachment proceedings against Buckingham; Charles dissolved Parliament to save him.

  Forced to reconvene in 1628 to raise money, Charles faced a new Parliament that included Oliver Cromwell, John Hampden, and Edward Coke. That Parliament drew up the Petition of Right, which Charles accepted in exchange for his subsidy - but he had already been collecting customs duties without Parliamentary authorization since 1625. When several members were imprisoned for opposing him, one, John Eliot, died in prison and became a martyr to the Parliamentary cause.

  Charles then avoided Parliament entirely for the next eleven years - a stretch his critics called the "Eleven Years' Tyranny". To avoid war and thus the need for Parliamentary funds, he made peace with both France and Spain. For money, he revived obscure feudal fines and, in 1634-1636, extended "ship money" - a tax traditionally levied only on coastal areas - to inland English counties. When John Hampden refused to pay, seven judges found for the King in 1638 and five sided with Hampden, a split that advertised the contested legal ground Charles was standing on.

• 3. Religion and Rebellion

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  Archbishop William Laud, appointed by Charles as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633, became the most hated man in England and Scotland almost by design. Charles believed in High Anglicanism grounded in Arminian theology; Laud moved to make the Church more ceremonial, replacing wooden communion tables with stone altars. Puritans accused him of smuggling Catholicism back into English worship, and when they said so in print, Laud had them arrested.

  In 1637, John Bastwick, Henry Burton, and William Prynne had their ears cut off for writing pamphlets attacking Laud's positions - a punishment rarely applied to gentlemen, and one that produced public fury rather than silence.

  Charles made his most consequential miscalculation when he tried to impose the same High Anglican liturgy on Scotland in the middle of 1637. A riot broke out in Edinburgh, which legend says was started in St Giles' Cathedral by a woman named Jenny Geddes. By February 1638, Scottish opposition had crystallized into the National Covenant, a document rejecting all religious innovations not approved by free Parliaments and General Assemblies. A political movement called the Covenanters had taken control of Scotland by spring 1639.

  Charles marched an army to the Scottish border near Berwick, achieved a truce, then watched as the truce collapsed. Without funds to fight the Scots, he recalled Parliament in February 1640 for the first time in eleven years. The majority faction under John Pym had no interest in paying for a war against Scotland and used the session to press grievances instead. Charles dissolved what became known as the Short Parliament after only a few weeks. A Scottish army then invaded, won a battle at Newburn, and occupied parts of northern England - leaving Charles to agree to pay the Scottish army's own expenses while he negotiated a settlement.

  The second Parliament he summoned, in November 1640, was the Long Parliament: it would outlast the war, the republic, and the Protectorate. One of its first acts was to put Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, on trial for high treason. When the legal case collapsed, Pym pushed through a Bill of Attainder. Charles had promised Strafford he would not sign it. He signed it on the 10th of May 1641. Strafford was beheaded two days later. Laud himself was impeached by bill of attainder in 1645 and executed.

• 4. Pike, Shot, and Cavalry

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  Many of the officers on both sides arrived at the English Civil War already battle-hardened. The Eighty Years' War between Spain and the Dutch had been running since 1568; the Thirty Years' War, begun in 1618, was not yet concluded. The tactics both sides brought to England reflected those continental theatres.

  The signature formation was pike and shot infantry. Musketeers carrying matchlock weapons - inaccurate but lethal at up to 300 yards - assembled three rows deep, the front rank kneeling, the second crouching, the third standing. When one group fired, a second group reloaded. Mixed among them were pike men carrying pikes between 12 and 18 feet long, whose primary job was to stop cavalry charges from reaching the musketeers.

  On each flank of the infantry stood cavalry. The right wing was led by the lieutenant-general, the left by the commissary general. The cavalry's task was to rout the opponent's horse, then wheel inward to overwhelm the enemy foot soldiers. Prince Rupert, a German nephew of Charles I and one of the outstanding cavalry commanders of the war, favoured a tactic he had learned in the Dutch army: charging at full speed and firing pistols just before impact. It produced early Royalist victories, but the Royalist cavalry's tendency to chase individual targets after the initial charge left their forces scattered and exhausted after their successes.

  Oliver Cromwell observed this weakness and built a different force. His cavalry was slower but disciplined enough to operate as a single unit. Trained pike men could stand their ground against a charge, breaking its momentum. When Cromwell created his "Ironsides" in 1643, winning at Gainsborough in July of that year, it demonstrated what disciplined cavalry could do. The New Model Army he helped build under Thomas Fairfax in 1645 carried that discipline across the whole Parliamentary force, and the scale of the conflict was extraordinary: during campaign seasons, between 120,000 and 150,000 soldiers were in the field - a greater share of the population than Germany was fielding in the Thirty Years' War at the same time.

• 5. The War's Turn and Charles's Fall

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  The first pitched battle of the war, at Edgehill on the 23rd of October 1642, ended without a clear winner. Charles fell back to Oxford, which became his base for the remainder of the war. The early campaigns went largely in the Royalists' favour: at Adwalton Moor in 1643 they gained control of most of Yorkshire; in the west, battles at Lansdowne and Roundway Down also fell to them; Prince Rupert took Bristol.

  The pivot came in the late summer of 1643, when the Earl of Essex forced the King to lift the Siege of Gloucester and then pushed the Royalists aside at the First Battle of Newbury on the 20th of September. Parliament's alliance with the Scottish Covenanters then shifted the arithmetic of the war. At Marston Moor on the 2nd of July 1644, Parliamentary and Scottish forces combined to take York and the north of England. Cromwell's conduct was decisive.

  In 1645, the Self-denying Ordinance stripped Members of Parliament of their military commands, and the reformed New Model Army under Fairfax and Cromwell destroyed Charles's armies in two engagements: Naseby on the 14th of June and Langport on the 10th of July. In May 1646, with few options remaining, Charles surrendered to a Scottish Presbyterian army at Southwell in Nottinghamshire. The Scots eventually handed him to Parliament. The First Civil War was over.

  The peace was unstable from the start. Three factions competed for supremacy: Royalists, the Independents of the New Model Army, and the Presbyterians of Parliament, with the Scottish Presbyterians as a fourth variable. Charles - still alive, still a potential partner - played each against the others. On the 28th of December 1647, he concluded a secret treaty with the Scots called the "Engagement", promising church reform in exchange for a Scottish invasion on his behalf. A wave of uprisings followed in the summer of 1648. After Cromwell's forces defeated the Scots at Preston on the 17th-the 19th of August, the Army had had enough. In December 1648, troops under Colonel Thomas Pride arrested 45 members of Parliament and barred 146 more from the chamber - "Pride's Purge" - leaving a Rump Parliament that agreed to try Charles I for treason.

  On the 30th of January 1649, Charles was beheaded on a scaffold outside the Banqueting House of the Palace of Whitehall. At the trial's end, 59 Commissioners had judged him guilty as a "tyrant, traitor, murderer and public enemy". General Fairfax, a constitutional monarchist who had declined to participate in the trial, resigned as head of the army, clearing Cromwell's path to power.

• 6. Ireland, Scotland, and the Final Reckoning

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  Ireland had been at war since 1641, with most of the island controlled by the Irish Confederates. After Charles's arrest in 1648, the Confederates allied with the English Royalists. Their joint forces under James Butler, Duke of Ormonde, laid siege to Dublin in 1649, but Parliament's army routed them at the Battle of Rathmines on the 2nd of August. That cleared the way for Oliver Cromwell to land at Dublin on the 15th of August 1649.

  Cromwell's campaign produced one of its most remembered atrocities at Drogheda, where nearly 3,500 people were killed - around 2,700 Royalist soldiers and roughly 700 others including civilians, prisoners, and Catholic priests, all of whom Cromwell claimed had carried arms. The conquest ground on until 1653. In its wake, Parliament confiscated almost all Irish Catholic-owned land, distributing it to creditors, soldiers, and settlers. William Petty, the father of English demography, estimated that 112,000 Protestants and 504,000 Catholics died through plague, war, and famine - a total of around 616,000 from a pre-war population of roughly one and a half million.

  In Scotland, Charles II accepted the crown in 1650 by signing both the 1638 National Covenant and the 1643 Solemn League and Covenant at Garmouth in Morayshire on the 23rd of June. He then became the most serious threat the English republic faced. Cromwell arrived in Scotland on the 22nd of July and, after disease and supply failures had weakened his army, defeated the Scots under David Leslie at Dunbar on the 3rd of September. Edinburgh fell; much of southern Scotland was occupied by year's end. In July 1651, Cromwell's forces crossed the Firth of Forth and defeated the Scots at Inverkeithing on the 20th of July.

  The campaign ended at Worcester on the 3rd of September 1651, exactly one year after Dunbar. Cromwell defeated Charles II there, forcing the new Scottish king to flee to France via safe houses and, by one account, an oak tree. Both Ireland and Scotland were incorporated into the Commonwealth. Under the terms of the "Tender of Union", Scotland received 30 seats in a united Parliament in London, with General George Monck as military governor. The British Isles had become a unitary state - a condition that proved both unpopular and unworkable, dissolved when the Stuart monarchy was restored in 1660.

• 7. The Human Cost

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  A Shropshire man named Richard Gough, writing around 1701 about his home parish of Myddle near Shrewsbury, counted the men from the townships of Myddle, Marton, and Newton who had gone to war for the King: of no fewer than twenty, thirteen never came back. "And if so many dyed out of these 3 townes," he concluded, "wee may reasonably guess that many thousands dyed in England in that warre."

  The numbers, however unreliable, are staggering. Historical records count 84,830 combat dead in the English wars alone. Adding war-related disease and the two Bishops' Wars brings a conservative estimate to 190,000 dead in England, from a total population of about five million. Deaths equated to roughly 3.7 per cent of England's population and about 6 per cent of Scotland's - from a pre-war population of approximately 6 million across England, Wales, and Scotland combined. An estimated 25 per cent of all adult males in Britain served in the military at some point between 1638 and 1651.

  The warfare was not concentrated in a handful of dramatic pitched battles. Of 645 total engagements across the wars, 588 involved fewer than 250 casualties each; those 588 smaller fights account for nearly half of all combat deaths. Only 9 battles met the threshold of at least 1,000 fatalities, and together they produced just 15 per cent of casualties. Death came mostly in skirmishes, sieges, and the diseases that followed armies.

  Among those who survived the fighting, thousands did not survive captivity. An estimated 8,000 prisoners captured at Worcester were deported to New England, Bermuda, and the West Indies to work as indentured labourers. Many sold to landowners in the West Indies were worked to death. By contrast, many sold to New England landowners eventually prospered. Ireland's losses dwarf every other figure: an estimated 41 per cent of its population died, a scale of destruction that exceeds even the Great Famine of 1845-1852, which killed 16 per cent, or the Holodomor of 1932-1933, which reduced the Soviet Ukrainian population by 14 per cent.

• 8. Restoration and Legacy

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  Oliver Cromwell ruled the Commonwealth as Lord Protector - effectively a military dictator - until his death in 1658. His son Richard inherited the title but not the Army's confidence; after seven months, the Army removed Richard, reinstated the Rump Parliament, then dissolved it again. By October 1659, with the Army's own unity dissolving into factions, the prospect of total anarchy had become real.

  General George Monck, military governor of Scotland under both Cromwells, marched south with his army. On the 4th of April 1660, Charles II issued the Declaration of Breda, setting out his terms for accepting the crown. Monck organised the Convention Parliament, which met for the first time on the 25th of April 1660 and on the 8th of May declared that Charles II had been the lawful monarch since his father's execution in January 1649. Charles returned from exile on the 23rd of May. London's populace acclaimed him on the 29th of May. His coronation at Westminster Abbey followed on the 23rd of April 1661.

  The monarchy came back, but on different terms. It returned with Parliament's consent, and the constitutional architecture that the Long Parliament had forced on Charles I - regular parliaments, taxation requiring parliamentary approval, ministers accountable to Parliament - survived the Restoration. After 1660, nine of the surviving regicides who had not gone into exile were executed, and most others received life imprisonment.

  For ordinary people, the disruption had opened unexpected spaces. The guild democracy movement won its greatest successes among London's transport workers during the 1640s. A democratic element introduced into the Watermen's Company in 1642 survived, with some interruptions, until 1827. Rural communities had seized timber and other resources from sequestrated Royalist and church estates, and some improved their conditions of tenure.

  The Kingdom of Great Britain formed under the Acts of Union in 1707 would carry forward the parliamentary monarchy that the civil wars had forced into existence. When the wave of republican revolutions swept Europe in later centuries, Britain's constitutional settlement - forged in the bloodshed of the 1640s - gave the country a form of representative government that made total abolition of the monarchy unnecessary. The conflict that Walter Scott called "The Great Civil War" left behind, among its ruins, the foundations of that arrangement.